I started a new tradition this year during advent. On each sunday we have a special dinner, typically including the neighbors(Jax and Dan), and use our fine china and crystal, even the kids. We eat in the formal dining room and light the advent wreath. The kids have so much fun helping me set the table. With each klink of the silverware falling on plates or bumping into glasses my heart stops for a minute and then I breathe. I have always used my china far more than anyone I know but still not enough. This year I was blessed to inheirit one of my closest aunt's china and crystal. She died many years ago and her husband is getting very sick with parkinson's and told me he wanted to see it to its "rightful owner" before he died and brought it to me this summer. I was lucky enough to live right around the corner from my aunt and uncle when Scott and I got married and I was thankful to be able to take her to radiation treatments and be with her in her dying days. I just sent my uncle a Christmas card letting him know that He and Joan are thought of and prayed for every time i use and clean those special dishes. To me they are like that story of the woman who had bought very expensive, fancy lingerie and was saving it for a special occasion and her sister ended up putting it on her for the first time under her dress in her coffin and it still had the tags. Lord knows I don't want to be buried with dishes, so by golly I am going to use them as much as I can. If I am surrounded by dishes when I die, I'll know I'm in hell.
Another nice thing I learned this Advent is something Emily's school does. The have advent angels and are randomly assigned a person in another grade for couple weeks before Christmas. They make cards and crafts and do special things with this person. I love how they intergrate things between different grades. When i was in school every class was against the other. There wasn't much friendliness or mingling. Well, I thought about it and Scott has been my advent angel this year. I have been so plagued with sinus infections and feeling drained and he has really picked up the slack. Last thurs. night I started throwing up with diarrhea all over the bathroom and he kept coming in to help me and get me trash bags and towels and new clothes. He went to work and as soon as he got there, I called him and told him I just couldn't take care of the kids. Without hesitation he packed up his laptop and hurried home to be the domestic goddess of the day. He got me chicken noodle soup and sprite and kept the kids away so I could rest. It was really thoughtful. After 13 years together sometimes we seem to communicate as an automated voice teller machine with little variation in the things we say but his actions spoke volumes.
Tomorrow will mark the 12 anniversary of our engagement. It seems like decades. I will never forget that special night and can't imagine how much work he put in to pulling that off. What is also funny about that same christmas is that I really wanted a kitchenaid stand mixer. I assured him there was nothing demeaning to me as a woman to buy that for me. When I came home from college I was totally snooping at his house when I found it. It had to be the mixer. But no, I couldn't wait a whole week. I opened it and I tore the paper. I totally panicked and took it back to Famous and had it rewrapped. Yes, it was the best Christmas ever---a kitchenaid mixer...oh yeah... and getting engaged to the greatest guy on earth!!!
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Friday, December 5, 2008
Advent
I am so glad this year that I made a plan and was able to get my Christmas decorating and shopping done before Thanksgiving. I have been much more peaceful and am enjoying myself more. I also cut back on how much I spend on gifts and was not too much concerned with whether or not the people I was buying for liked the gift. Given the economic times and uncertainty in our future I decided people should be glad they are getting anything. So help me if one of my kids ever acts disappointed about a gift it could very well be their last. We rehearse often before family events what to do if they don't like something or they already have that. And often we talk about the families who have nothing to eat much less toys and presents. My kids are so excited about the giving tree at church. While I was in the back of church last sunday with Ben doing hot laps, I was able to search out ornaments with the same ages of my kids and a mom for me to buy for. Emily made a list of what she wants to get the child and keeps bugging me to take her shopping. She doesn't understand payday is not till next week. She is even more excited to help me pick out pots and pans as requested on the ornament. She said "mom, we have to pick out some real fancy ones so she can cook for her kids." To that I replied, "mommy just bought some real fancy ones for jackies wedding that haven't been used yet, maybe we could just take hers." (Just kidding Jax-making sure you are reading this!) I am so happy about their enthusiasm to help others.
Which leads me to the next problem I encountered this week. I have caught emily in two lies. The first was her kissing a boy and making him cry and his friends making fun of him. She told me it was not her and i happened to be at dinner with his mom and when introduced to her she said "Oh, your Emily's mom who kissed my son and made him cry." Yeah that was real comfortable. Anyway she continued to lie to my face until I broke her. No waterboarding or anything like that, but I did get it out of her. Then I came into the kitchen to find a drawer broken. She lied and said it wasn't her. Then I said I was going to give the person who did it gum because I was glad Dad could fix it then she fessed up. So she sat in time out in the corner chewing gum. Well, I received a call from her teacher thursday and she said two boys said Emily called them bad names, one of which being the A- word. I was totally dumbfounded. She asked me if I had noticed her Tourettes getting worse at home and actually she hardly has any ticks at the moment and has not shown any aggression. It was the worst feeling I have had in a long time. Total failure as a parent. Luckily jackie was there to convince me I was not the first parent that teacher has had to call. When she came home we sat down and she was facing me on my lap and at first she lied but then big old alligator tears started falling one by one down her face. She said the boy who sits next to her has been teasing and making fun of her for a while and it keeps hurting her feelings but she wants to be tough and ignore him and not say things back. I asked her to think about how she feels when someone says mean things to her and there might be a little boy crying at home because she hurt his feelings. She said she didn't mean to and cried in my arms for 20 minutes. She was so full of pain it was pouring out into her behavior. I still don't believe it about the a-word. The teacher never witnessed any of it.
She went upstairs and read Lauren her first chapter book and they did christmas crafts for a long time.
So I told Emily that she had to make 5 Christmas cards for nursing home residents and we were going to sing to them with girl scouts. That went into a long explanation about what a nursing home is and how lonely they are without family. She could not wrap her mind around the fact that people wouldn't have family to care for them. Since the minute she has come into this world she has been a first eyewitness of how I take care of my mom. Three different surgeries, mom has come to live with us for anywhere from one to three months. We are frequently taking grandma to the various doctor appointments, running errands, doing gift shopping and going to clean her house. She once asked me why grandpa doesn't do it and I just told her he wasn't a nurse. Many evenings they have given me up so I can clean their house more easily and they have seen me take care of dad and have him move in after his heart attack and hernia surgeries. When Greg didn't have someone to take him to the hosptial for gallbladder surgery, I did happily. The thing is most of what i do does not involve nursing. I used to work in a nursing home and there were so many able bodied people living there that were in better shap than my mom. It made me sad to think that with a little help they could have stayed in their homes longer. I love the eastern cultures who without exception take on the responsibility of aging parents. After all they have given us. I think if families turned to each other more for help then our country would not be in such a welfare state that it is.
Anyway, Emily was upset that people had to live without their families and she worked so hard on those cards. She put "i love you" and "may God bless you". I am so looking forward to seeing her pass out those cards and bringing joy to others. I also want to teach her not to be afraid of the handicapped and aged. It was my mom bringing me to the nursing home every single day of my childhood to feed grandma lunch that fostered in me the need to care for others in my vocation as a nurse. I have such a clear memory of seeing my grandma sitting in her wheelchair barely able to hold her head up and my mom spoonfeeding her pureed, babyfood looking stuff. What a turn of roles that was. I have never driven to her house and wished I didn't have to go to do that work. Tomorrow the girls and I will go and do Christmas cleaning and decorating there and I can't wait!
Which leads me to the next problem I encountered this week. I have caught emily in two lies. The first was her kissing a boy and making him cry and his friends making fun of him. She told me it was not her and i happened to be at dinner with his mom and when introduced to her she said "Oh, your Emily's mom who kissed my son and made him cry." Yeah that was real comfortable. Anyway she continued to lie to my face until I broke her. No waterboarding or anything like that, but I did get it out of her. Then I came into the kitchen to find a drawer broken. She lied and said it wasn't her. Then I said I was going to give the person who did it gum because I was glad Dad could fix it then she fessed up. So she sat in time out in the corner chewing gum. Well, I received a call from her teacher thursday and she said two boys said Emily called them bad names, one of which being the A- word. I was totally dumbfounded. She asked me if I had noticed her Tourettes getting worse at home and actually she hardly has any ticks at the moment and has not shown any aggression. It was the worst feeling I have had in a long time. Total failure as a parent. Luckily jackie was there to convince me I was not the first parent that teacher has had to call. When she came home we sat down and she was facing me on my lap and at first she lied but then big old alligator tears started falling one by one down her face. She said the boy who sits next to her has been teasing and making fun of her for a while and it keeps hurting her feelings but she wants to be tough and ignore him and not say things back. I asked her to think about how she feels when someone says mean things to her and there might be a little boy crying at home because she hurt his feelings. She said she didn't mean to and cried in my arms for 20 minutes. She was so full of pain it was pouring out into her behavior. I still don't believe it about the a-word. The teacher never witnessed any of it.
She went upstairs and read Lauren her first chapter book and they did christmas crafts for a long time.
So I told Emily that she had to make 5 Christmas cards for nursing home residents and we were going to sing to them with girl scouts. That went into a long explanation about what a nursing home is and how lonely they are without family. She could not wrap her mind around the fact that people wouldn't have family to care for them. Since the minute she has come into this world she has been a first eyewitness of how I take care of my mom. Three different surgeries, mom has come to live with us for anywhere from one to three months. We are frequently taking grandma to the various doctor appointments, running errands, doing gift shopping and going to clean her house. She once asked me why grandpa doesn't do it and I just told her he wasn't a nurse. Many evenings they have given me up so I can clean their house more easily and they have seen me take care of dad and have him move in after his heart attack and hernia surgeries. When Greg didn't have someone to take him to the hosptial for gallbladder surgery, I did happily. The thing is most of what i do does not involve nursing. I used to work in a nursing home and there were so many able bodied people living there that were in better shap than my mom. It made me sad to think that with a little help they could have stayed in their homes longer. I love the eastern cultures who without exception take on the responsibility of aging parents. After all they have given us. I think if families turned to each other more for help then our country would not be in such a welfare state that it is.
Anyway, Emily was upset that people had to live without their families and she worked so hard on those cards. She put "i love you" and "may God bless you". I am so looking forward to seeing her pass out those cards and bringing joy to others. I also want to teach her not to be afraid of the handicapped and aged. It was my mom bringing me to the nursing home every single day of my childhood to feed grandma lunch that fostered in me the need to care for others in my vocation as a nurse. I have such a clear memory of seeing my grandma sitting in her wheelchair barely able to hold her head up and my mom spoonfeeding her pureed, babyfood looking stuff. What a turn of roles that was. I have never driven to her house and wished I didn't have to go to do that work. Tomorrow the girls and I will go and do Christmas cleaning and decorating there and I can't wait!
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