Best Yes: Week Five

I know the bible study is over, but I wanted to write six blogs but didn't have ideas for the last two weeks, so I decided to wait until ideas came to me.  Today, one did.

My toddler is many things (curious, mischevous, adorable, loving) but "helpful" is not one of them. It's not that he doesn't "want" to be helpful, he sincerely does! However, in truth, he just does not know enough to be helpful and when he tries to do things himself, particularly when it comes to cleaning up his own messes, he often makes them worse.

Case in point, I discovered at lunch today he had thrown a small cardboard book into his diaper pail and when I washed it the cardboard disentregated into brown pellets all over everything in the load.  To try to clean it, I got all the diapers out, set the washer to rinse and drain to try to clean it out a bit (it seriously looked like a cardboard masher had thrown up in there), and went outside to shake out the diapers, liners, wipes, etc. and put them on the line in the hopes the wind and drying process would get rid of the smaller cardboard particles I couldn't shake out. Of course, my five year old and almost twenty month old wanted to come out with me so I first had to bundle them up, then hustle everyone out to get the mess cleaned up.  Outside, it was chaos.  I knew how I wanted to get the mess cleaned up, but my sons both had their own ideas about how best to "help."  My eldest son thought he could be most "helpful" by giving me a running commentary on everything his brother was doing.  My youngest thought he could be most "helpful" by throwing diapers off the deck and trying to turn it into a game.  Knowing my youngest is too young to understand my plan of how to correct his innocent (but incredibly messy) mistake, I concentrated my efforts on trying to shape my eldest son into a helper for me.  Being older, and more used to my ways and the way my mind works, my eldest actually was pretty helpful once I got him to stop his commentary and yelling at his brother.  I'm not saying he was perfect, but he was certainly helpful.  He didn't always do things the way I wanted him to do them, but I was there to help and we got the job done.  Meanwhile, my youngest (whose poor decision to throw the book into the wash to begin with) caught on to what I was trying to do, but he was so intent on cleaning up the mess "himself" that he often caused even more little messes as his brother and I were trying really hard to help him out of the original mess he created.

As I looked at the diapers finally all hanging on the line with as much of the pieces of cardboard shaken off them as we could manage, I couldn't help but wonder how many times God has watched me act just like my toddler.  How often has God watched my clumsy attempts to ckean up my messes by "myself" only to make them worse?  How often have I, like my five year old, attempted to help him clean up someone else's messes without getting his help and instructions first?

Lord, help me to know you and to listen for your directions! Don't let me be the toddler making things worse or the young child slowing things down!

Epic Date Night

My husband and I, like many parents of small children, don't really get out much.  We were homebodies even before we had kids, so a weekly date night was never really in the cards.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those who get out more; we just don't.  But this year, we've been making an effort to put more "romance" into our lives and that has included a few date nights.  Okay, date afternoons. . .like four or five. . .counting today.  Anyway, originally, I thought a blockbuster movie we both wanted to watch was coming out this weekend, so I arranged a babysitter for this afternoon so we could see our first movie together since my water broke and I went into labor with our eldest son over five years ago. (See my earlier statement about the fact we don't go out much. . .we've  been to movies, just movies with the kids.)  However, it turns out the movie doesn't come out until next month, but we decided to go out to a campus art museum near us where some friends of ours had a fun date a while back.  It was a good idea in theory. . .but, we didn't check what the installations were.

We arrived dressed up for us and excited to spend a few hours doing "grown up" stuff without a single raisin or sibling squabble in sight.  We began wandering around the small museum and saw such "unique" exhibits as pictures of a performance artist who decided to face his fear of the dark by sealing himself inside a concrete column for 24 hours naked with only his cell phone for company.  Okay, so many of the exhibits weren't really "our" thing, but we used to love art museums when we first met, so it was a fun throw back to our more earnest collegiate selves. Around the corner from the pictures of the performance art was an exhibit with a warning that it included graphic images of violence and animals.  We gave that corner a wide berth and traveled to a lower floor where we found an exhibit on the horrible, awful, heartbreaking things our oil companies (like Exxon and Texaco) have been doing to native people and their lands in the Amazon.  Not exactly what we were expecting on our first date away from the boys in months, but we took in the information and tried not to let the sobering statistics ruin our afternoon.  On the way out, I asked if we could see a film exhibit that features duel screens streaming different scenes.  (I had peeked in on it on the way in and saw that this exhibit showed two different films and the one I had peeked at had shown a boat pulling into port and a mother and her young children dressed as if they were in the '40s or so and looked like immigrants.  The children were obviously nervous to go down the ramp from the boat to land, so the mother was butt scooting down with them to help them feel safe.  As the mother of a 19 month old who butt scoots down stairs, it was a moment that resonated with me.  I thought it might be interesting to see something about immigrant experiences when I had connected with the brief snippet I had seen so much.  

Unfortunately, they were on the other film exhibit that alternates with the one I saw.  It was an interesting experience in story telling about the '60s in the US, race, the UN, and mass murder. It featured no narration, but seemed to show scenes of Kennedy, the United Nations, and the Cuban missle crisis, alternating with scenes of murder in Africa (I think it was Africa. . . It was hard to tell which nations specifically when they were edited, had no narration and were cross cut with Kennedy). It was a unique narrative experience. That is it WAS interesting until it had a close up of a murdered five year old. The child looked nothing like my eldest son who is around the same age, but my reaction to seeing him dead was eviscerating. I just could not sit anymore and had to leave the exhibit, my eyes welling with tears. My husband missed the scene because he was focused on the other scene,but understood   that the last two exhibits had been a little too sobering for a rare parents' afternoon out.

To cheer me up, we walked to my favorite little shop which happens to be across from the museum. There we were greeted by a Beyonce dance song popular when we were first dating and covered as some sort of love ballad by a male singer. ("Smarmy" might be an adjective that comes to mind for this rendition.) The ludicrous juxtoposition between the strangeness of the song choice in the little shop that features knitted goods, scarves, earrings, and small trinkets was enough to make us giggle a bit which led us to real laughs when we discovered in the middle of my beloved little shop was a table which now featured handcarved bottle openers, hand painted with bright designs such as flowers and geometric patterns and were made to represent male genatalia. Why in the world they are selling that in a shop full of imported woolen knit accessories and other feminine trinkets is a mystery I will never solve. They've never been there when we've been there. The surprise of finding them there made us burst out laughing! What a gambit of emotions this date had brought us through in less than 90 minutes and none of them quite what we had envisioned! Unfazed (or at least not fazed too much), we spent the rest of the date giving THAT table a wide berth and bought some fun knitted hats for our family at five dollars each.

You know, marriage, parenting, life in general is rarely what we plan ourselves. God and our own choices (or lack of research in our choices) can throw a lot of unexpected heartbreak, fear, and just random ridiculousness our way, but if your partner is someone who can laugh along in the journey with you and just keep going along with the flow, I think you and your family are going to be all right.