Extra Photos

I was talking to a lady in my ward awhile ago. She is about my age and has nine kids. We were commiserating about some of the difficulties of the utterly ceaseless needs and demands, and chucklingly shaking our heads over the idea so many seem to have that because we have so many kids, we must be particularly capable (when, in fact, we are barely keeping our heads above water pretty nearly all of the time). 

She said, "Every time someone says how amazing I am or what a good mom I am I truly feel like, 'Well, I've successfully pulled the wool over another person's eyes'!" "Yes!" I exclaimed! "That's exactly how I feel!" And it is. Don't get me wrong. I do appreciate the sincere compliments and votes of confidence. But I feel like a great deceiver every time I hear them!  

My friend Marilyn (who, not only has children named Abe, Daisy and Goldie [and all of our separate Abes, Daisys and Goldies already named long before we even knew of one another's existence!], but who also has ten children [!!! what are the odds we would both exist in this world? and that we would discover one another?] wrote this several months ago about expecting her tenth child:

"[S]uch a blessing, ten babies, who could have ever imagined such a thing! But it was a difficult year as well. I told a similarly-situated friend that I could hardly remember a single day in months where I hadn't shut myself in the bathroom so I could cry unobserved. 'Is this what we have to look forward to for the next twenty years?' I asked her. 'Is this just what it means to have ten children?'

"Don't misunderstand: I don't think that the exclamations of other parents, the I-don't-know-how-you-do-it's and the You-must-be-a-saint's, have any weight to them. Of course parents of any number of children know love and confusion and heartache! But being the mother of a large family just carries a lot of…magnitude. Life starts to feel like a tightrope you might fall off of any minute. Perhaps the forceful independence of your young adults makes the innocence of your babies and the sweetness of your toddlers more precious through contrast, but the constant necessity of holding so many emotions at the same time—happiness for one child, fear for another, sympathy for another—is exhausting. It all swirls around in your heart at once: the helplessness of watching teenagers make dumb choices and wondering which ones sprouted from sins of your own omission or commission. The engulfing minutia of keeping the younger children alive, mingled with constant looming uneasiness about the suddenly-imminent futures of the older children. The tension between knowing a child doesn't mean to hurt you, and being hurt all the same. Add all this and pregnancy to a year full of change and uncertainty in our family's little world and the world at large—and I found that 'I contain multitudes' described me rather accurately."

All of the above reflections are, I suppose, one of the occasional disclaimers I feel I must put in this space--lest all the recorded images of happiness, and family, and funny kid sayings belie the full truth of this situation. It is hard. So hard. But, of course, there are many of these moments! And failing to see them because of the exhaustion and tears and whelmed-ness of it all would be an enormous shame. So. ...

 

Penny just finished up her junior high's The Elf production. A fun and cute little performance.

Mike took all (save Starling who I brought home to bed) of the kids to a movie Thanksgiving night.

A pretty view from the farm one day when Mike and I went up there to dream about the future a bit.

And there was this as we drove into Logan which seemed promising. (Though I should add, in keeping with my paragraphs at the first of this post, that behind these images were two little kids who got themselves covered in mud and cried and sobbed and demanded to be held the entire time we were there.)

And here are some pictures that are neither here nor there. (Starling flies into a rage if anyone else ever dares to wear that orange snow hat. Jesse sometimes forgets. And we all pay.)

Some readers and some movie watchers.

A beater licker.

A few extra photos I found from the night we decorated the tree. I don't know who took them. And everything is a bit cluttered, but they make me happy.

Some cousins making gum-drop turkeys on Thanksgiving.

Some Sunday game playing.

Abe excited about his first snow in three years. And Abe, who is teaching at the MTC, with his cousin Eli, who was a student at the MTC for a short spell before heading to his mission in CA. 

Daisy was tending Starling one night and texted me this to reassure me that the sobbing Starling began as I left did not last long.

And a few last misc. photos. (Starling is holding one of our Playmobil wise men on Anders' head. She insists the poor wise man is ... "pink mommy'.)

The End.

Misc. and Two Birthdays

Starling just padded up to me--an unzipped, pink sleeping bag draped over her head and wrapped tightly about her small arms. Unperturbed by the toy-cleaning-up task I was engaged in, she sidled herself, sleeping bag and all, around my working arms and cozily into my lap then stretched her legs out straight--revealing a small set of pink-painted toenails that she wiggled absently at the bin I was collecting blocks in. Having never had bright pink toenails before, at least in her two-and-a-half-year-old memory, she has pointed them out to us often in the week since Goldie painted them (though we've likely pointed them out oftener to her what with all our exclamations of "I like your pink toes!", "Look at your cute toenails!" and "Star! Do you have pink toenails?"). There has been some confusion, on her part, between the words "toenails" and "ponytails", which often results in her drawing attention to her tonynails. Darling.

Mike has been working a tremendous amount the past few weeks. (And will be for some time to come.) In fact, this afternoon Hans, who is needing some new snow boots, said to me, "Next time dad comes to visit us, can he take me to get some boots?" His uncertainty on whether or not Mike even lives here is a sad, but at least humorous, commentary on our current life. 

We've had our mid-December birthdays. Jesse has always looked askance at teenagers. He disapprovingly calls them punkards (a word used often enough by him that most of us forget that it is not, in fact, a word, nor have we known for certain whether it applies to Daisy, Goldie and Penny). But what remains to be seen now is how Jesse will fair having now become a punkard himself.

Punkards, as we all know, have to begin shaving. 

During his birthday dinner, while we were going around taking turns asking Jesse questions, Hans asked, "What's your favorite movie between Over the Garden Wall and one where LOTS of dinosaurs die?"

I was glad Abe's birthday fell on a Sunday so that he and Daisy were able to come home from BYU for the weekend. Two years of mission birthdays (and Christmases) have shown me that it just does not do trying to make those significant days feel special for a faraway child. Even Provo felt too far after those absences. So having them here was happy. Though, as usual, the contrast between having them here and then ... not here again, struck poor Anders hard. As I tucked him in bed the night before Abe and Daisy were going to be leaving again, he exclaimed, "Who ever invented missions and college and marriage!" and bitterly wiped a few tears from his eyes. Dear boy. And he isn't even a parent yet! Heaven knows how he'll manage those things when his own children fall to those awful "inventions".

Daisy and Goldie bought Abe this mini pool table. He assured them it would make his room the most popular in the dorms.

I played a game with the older four kids on the night of Abe's birthday. Penny got out fairly quickly, so it was down to me, Abe, Daisy and Goldie when Daisy played a card that forced Goldie out of the game. She could just as easily have forced me or Abe out, and Goldie knew it. When she exclaimed over the betrayal, Daisy frantically defended herself with an apologetic, "Sorry Goldie! But it's Abe's birthday, and mom's ... mom." I do have that going for me when we play cutthroat games. Who can, with clear conscience, purposely place their own mother in a losing situation?

The other day, while I was driving somewhere with the two little kids, Hans asked me, "Do you just ... say how many kids you want? And then you just get that many?"

I was a bit distracted and it didn't seem the time for a serious discussion, so I simply said, "Well, it's a little bit trickier than that. Did you know some people really want kids and can't have any? And some people don't even want kids at all!"

Hans thought for a minute and then said speculatively, "Maybe you should've just had one kid. You could've just said a prayer and said you just wanted one kid." 

The idea of going back in time and claiming just such a thing is half tempting ... haha, nevertheless, I replied, "But then we'd only have Abe! I wouldn't have my Hansie or Daisy or Goldie ..."

"No," he interrupted. "I would've just been your first kid."

"Ohhh," I replied, understanding. "So we would've just had you? But wouldn't you miss Jesse and Penny and ..."

He dismissed that with an impatient wave of his hand, "I wouldn't even know their names. Why'd you have ten kids anyway?"

I suppose I have my reasons. Little stinker.

The End.