Skip to main content

Our Boy


The child who made me a mother, is also most often the child who makes me not want to be a mother.  We go rounds.  I love him hard, but boy oh boy.  There are moments when I don't like either one of us.  

We recently had a camping high, followed by a hard post-camping crash.  If it takes three days to recover from a two night camping trip, we are going to either have to camp longer or not at all.  It's been ugly around here.  And it's also been precious.  How do they do that?! 

Between bouts of me carrying a screaming fifty-five pounder to his room and depositing him on the carpet, I've also witnessed what will surely be a sweet relationship between him and his baby sisters.  They loooooove him.  Nobody makes them laugh like he does.  They mimic his every move.  This week they all played race cars together.  I'm not sure who had more fun.  I'm going to pull the Mom-card, and say it was me.  Watching them filled my cup.  It was promptly emptied the next morning by more screaming timeouts...and then filled again by the sweetest smiles and words between the two boys.  

I am officially a yo-yo.  

I don't bounce back nearly as quickly as he does, but I'm working on it.  

Parenting continually makes me appreciate my parents more and those who are in much harder situations than myself - the single parent, the parents of a special needs child, the parents of a child with an illness.  How do they do it?! Superheroes.  

On an unrelated note, is anyone else way more emotional now that they have kids?  Or is it just me? The kid's books are just killing me.  I don't ever remember choking up over The Pokey Little Puppy's Christmas as a kid. And every time Blue Truck teaches the big dump truck a lesson or Red Truck rescues the poor stuck school bus, I have to distract the kids while I pull myself together.  "It's okay, boys. Mama just needs a drink of water.  It's just that Blue Truck is just so nice to everyone.... *sniff*"  It's pathetic.  I'm turning into my dad.  Shout out to Larry Wright and his Hallmark commercial problem... Maybe it's genetic.    

Perhaps our boy and his huge emotions don't fall that far from the tree.  He drives me crazy and he drives me to my knees.  He frustrates me and makes me proud.  He surprises me and makes me laugh.  He is goofy, hardworking, hard playing, and sweet.  He is exactly what we prayed for.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sheltering in Place

In the past three months Corona Virus has more or less turned the world on its head.  I feel almost guilty for not being more stressed or put out by the whole thing.  We have been extremely fortunate. What we thought was a most impractical move on our part, wound up being a huge blessing.  With our two boys and our two newborns, we moved out of our house with no yard in the city limits and into my parents' house in the country while waiting for our new house to be completed.  The weekend we moved "quarantine," "social distancing," and "shelter in place" became the new mantra of our state.   Moving in with my parents meant ten plus acres of play space and two extra able bodied adults to help even out the score with the four kids.  Win for the St. Clair's!  Unfortunately, my parents are beginning to realize they may have made an error in judgement.   Yesterday, Sawyer gave their cat swimming lessons.   Last week th...
1 comment
Read more

Bump in the Road

 If your kids aren't annoying you at least occasionally, then they probably aren't doing childhood right.  Ours are winning at childhood.  Actually, we came to the conclusion the other day that if they are annoying you all the time, then you probably aren't doing parenting right.  And when I say "you," I mean "we."   We weren't enjoying our kids recently, and we wondered if that meant other people were also finding them unenjoyable.  It made us finally pause and take a long hard look at what was bugging us about our kids.  We felt like we were in a perpetual state of irritation.  Once we made our list, and it was lengthy, we noticed a theme: attention.  Our kids were begging for our attention with every behavior.  It was annoying, but it was our fault, and it was fixable.   We started putting down phones and brooms and laundry and giving undivided and intentional focus to our kids throughout the day.  It wasn't a huge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Advanced Placement

 Not to brag or anything, but I think we are raising some very advanced children.  At two-years-of-age, our girls have already worked out the art of manipulation and deflection.  It's the antithesis of endearing.   They went missing the other day - the girls did.  That's never a good situation.  They were in the house, and I knew they were in the house, but I couldn't see or hear them.  Silence is the loudest alarm system.  Fischer took action and found them both in my bathroom.   "MOM!" I met them in the hall.  Carter was covered in clumps and blobs of hand cream. "Emi did it," was her unsolicited response.   "No," I told her.  "I think you  did it." That night I got ready for bed and pulled out my one "self-care" splurge - my face cream .  It was in my drawer where I always keep it.  The lid was screwed on.  And it was empty, wiped clean.  "EmmmeerrrrrSON!" Guilty.  They were both ...
2 comments
Read more