Changes in the New Year!

Posted on January 4, 2015 by middleofthemadness

The moment my sister carried out her son’s small vault, the tears welled. I didn’t expect to be crying. But it had been four very long and stressful weeks – eldest son “let go” from his school, looking for a new school for the 3 boys, looking for new house in the right neighborhood to get to the “right” school that can handle “behavioral” problems. The stress gave way. I had visions of the boys not seeing each other anymore. Of Mr. Ornery never becoming a great gymnast because he doesn’t have The Flipper to keep encouraging him (I know – insane). It felt like the beginning of the end – such a huge change in the status quo, years in the making.

It wasn’t about the gymnastics – it was about a change in the boys’ relationships. It was about a change in the adult relationships. In the true sense of the phrase, I am a “single mom.” But I rarely think about it that way – because I have such a beautiful family. In essence, it has been more like two parents with five boys…..and incredibly supportive grandparents (incredibly supportive)! We have been one big (and mostly) happy family.

But suddenly, the “singleness” hit and I was afraid and so sad. It was the day after Christmas. My sister was making good use of “vacation” time to get the move done. Friends came over to carry out the couch. My father spent countless hours putting together a dining room table and chairs. My mother flitted around doing everything and anything. I, however, was frozen in denial, dipping into sadness, punctuated by jealously (why do you get to move into the sparkling clean cute townhome with a master bedroom and your own private bathroom that likely won’t have “tinkles” on the toilet seat and gobs of kids’’Sparkle Fun’ toothpaste lining the sink?!?), sprinkled with shock at all the rapid changes.

Verklempt.

“It will be good to have some quiet,” she said. I nodded. It’s impossible to explain to anyone the mind-numbing, energy-zapping level of NOISE and motion that exists within the walls of this house with 5 boys ages 3 to 8. Super Tall Guy likes to poke at kids to get a response. The Flipper and Mr. Ornery either swing from the pull-up bar or set up gymnastics floor routines through the living room/parlour area. Mr. Trouble exists as a constant threat to everyone approaching his Ninja Warrior Nunchucks or swinging light saber. The Little Guy doesn’t know he’s little as he excitedly tackles Super Tall Guy to the ground and wrestled around while the dog squeals and hides when moving bodies collide into hers. It’s nonstop. It’s pandemonium. In an effort to survive, I proclaimed the Holidays to be unlimited “screen time” (or there’d be no sense in calling it a “holiday” for anyone!).

A little bit of quiet. The truth is – it’s probably what we all need. A chance to let the boys develop a little bit of themselves as an individual instead of constantly in relationship to or in reaction to another child. A chance for my sister and I to figure out a little bit more about how we can parent our own children without all the clutter and chaos of who hit who? Who’s tattling on whom? Who’s fault is it really? Who’s toy was it first? (Like you even cared about that Nerf gun anyway…. until The Little Guy picked it up!)

It’s likely a really good thing for everyone to have a little more space. And, as my sister reminded me, it will just be a temporary time until we can figure out the next step. And, I still have the Thai house guest here at “the Big House” for another month, so I still have back-up help and am not completely “single” :).

It’s just been some crazy stressful few weeks. I’m super proud of my sister for just jumping in and getting everything together to create a new home for herself and the boys. And we’ve tried not to visit too much as those walls are too flimsy for my boisterous boys (but come summer….when she can walk to the community’s swimming pool….she might need to adopt a few more little men!).

The schedule is going to be a lot to juggle as the three older boys begin in a new school in the morning. And there are going to be a great many kinks and glitches to iron out. But I have a terrific family and much hope in this New Year of New Beginnings!

“I am perfect with everyone”

Posted on December 29, 2013 by middleofthemadness

I don’t even know where to begin tonight….except to be incredibly thankful to be sitting in a warm living room, with a twinkling Christmas tree, toys still scattered over the floor, my favorite Christmas song (Trans-Siberian Orchestra Christmas Canon) just on, and the house otherwise completely QUIET!! (A crackling fireplace sure would be nice….but I won’t be too picky tonight…).

It has been anything but quiet for the past few days. As you might imagine with 5 boys under age 8 in the house….Christmas day was a zoo:

Boys clamoring over

Presents strewn across the room

Looking for their names

Wrapping paper shredded

Grandma trying to gather it up

Toys inspected and passed aside

Where is the next one?

Are there any more for me?

Open this, please and put it together.

It needs batteries….

Mom, he knocked it over

Will there be more presents tomorrow morning?

Christmas day….

Such joy and excitement, that

We ALL were asleep by 8:30!

The day after Christmas, my three cousins arrived and spent the next 3 days with us. We thought about “going places”….doing something more structured….but it seemed just easier and nice to stay home and spend time together. The boys loved their older relatives because they had “energy” – they carried them on their backs, they chased them around the loop, they played tickle monster, they engaged them nonstop….and the kids really appreciate that. It’s amazing how they sense who is “kid-friendly” and how much they love the physical nature of play. It’s so important for them to have these other adults show their love and affection.

To top off all this excitement, we also hosted our “first” foster child for the weekend ….now age 9 and living with his adoptive family (who called to ask the day before). The boys love it when the Older “Brother” comes to stay. He doesn’t really have to do anything – he’s in the “cool” category just by virtue of being alive 2 years longer than Super Tall Guy and The Flipper. He’s very easy-going and engaged each of the boys despite the ongoing jealousy issues of wanting more time alone with him.

I worried about how all the excitement of Christmas and schedule changes and the chaos of 15 people within the house at times would affect Super Tall Guy. He tends to be pretty sensitive to changes. As he got ready for bed tonight, he said, “Now I’m lonely with everyone gone,” and a couple seconds later he added, “I am perfect when they are all here.” Huh – I suppose I didn’t need to worry – he seemed to cope pretty well (and likely better than introvert me). So as I tucked him in, I told him how proud I was of his ability to handle all of the intensity without throwing any (major) fits. He smiled and said “Slam me, Good Job”….Body slam! Good Job!!

Yes….”I am perfect with everyone here.” We all need each other. Family. Friends. Neighbors. We are more perfect when in relation with others. Good Job, Super Tall Guy. Good job.

Peace and (very little) quiet!

Posted on December 8, 2013 by middleofthemadness

There was a morning this week that I came into consciousness during the wee hours when it was still dark. I sighed when I realized that at least the entire right side of my pajamas felt drenched any time I moved in bed. There was a large boy on my right, a middle troll (I mean, boy) on my left, and a wee one bumbling around trying to figure out how to squeeze in somewhere. The “fluid,” I can only surmise, was the result of boy #2 who had decided his jammies were wet, left them and the pull-up in a pile beside the bed and climbed naked into my bed sometime in the very, very wee hours of the morning (apparently I am tired enough not to notice additions to my slumbering anymore). Deep down inside, I groaned, “I am miserable….”

….for a second. Then I said to myself, “I am blessed.” For if you desire peace, you create peace within yourself first. You lay amidst the chaos and say, “I am blessed.” You take ten deep breaths as Super Tall Guy works to escalate a battle and say, “I am jello…your emotions will not stick to me.” You watch a football soar from the arms of Super Tall Guy, sail over the hands of The Flipper and bounce off the head of the Little Guy who is in the midst of tackling The Rascal while Mr. Ornery races around the indoor home loop. And you say, “this is pretty good – all is well. There is peace here.”

The center of peace is in the way that I perceive what is happening and can negotiate the environment and interactions around me. This is a work in progress (every single minute). Super Tall Guy and I had a very miserable year when he was about three. He was struggling with independence issues (very normal) and a quick temper. I was struggling with unhappiness in my adult life at the time, a quick temper as well (that part hasn’t necessarily gone away), and having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that I could not “control” this little human being. We were an explosive combination with intense negativity at times and a general lack of peace. There was very little “tranquility” and not much “harmony” in our relationship. It has taken quite awhile to grow together and get to the point where we are today with random flares disrupting a much calmer sea.

And most of the time now…more honestly…some of the time, I can handle the chaos and the noise of 5 active boys running around, pushing, shoving, sticking their tongues out, biting, kicking….pretty much invading each other’s personal space in order to meet a personal desire for an object or invoke a whine or cry from the other. Sometimes I have had enough sleep. I am feeling “okay” in my professional life. I am not (too) stressed and can tolerate the chaos.

But sometimes I just want quiet. I want peace. I want a moment to myself that is not between the hours of 10:00 pm and 1:00 am. I’m wondering what was that insane moment when I decided to become a parent and why.

Sometimes, the words of an Amy Grant holiday song run through my head:

“Look at us now, rushing around
Trying to buy Christmas peace…

I need a silent night, a holy night
To hear an angel voice through the chaos and the noise
I need a midnight clear, a little peace right here
To end this crazy day with a silent night.”

It helps me to know that my crazy days end with a “silent night” even if sometimes that night is really short by the time the last one stops waking up to be re-tucked in and the first one hasn’t yet proclaimed “it’s morning time!” It helps me to try to keep a bigger picture in mind. To understand that the occasional chaos is a temporary and very small aspect of the larger task of raising up three wonderful men and wanting our relationship to continue in peace for years and years to come.

So, this Advent week, I’m going to reflect on peace a bit more, model it more in myself, and encourage it more in the boys. I’m also going to pray that night-time pull-ups will be a bit more super-absorbent, and that we will all work towards peace at home, at work and in the world.

What to do when you’re out of “kid joules”

Posted on November 10, 2013 by middleofthemadness

So….I’m on empty. It happens pretty frequently, especially on the weekends.

Think of it. You wake up with energy (unless you’ve just lived through the nightmare week called “Post-Daylight-Savings-Time-Messes-With-Every-Child-Under-The-Age-Of-Seven!!”). Let’s give that morning energy a number, such as 1000 kJ or “kid joules” (where a joule is defined as the energy expended to move one kid through the distance of one day under absolute pristine perfect conditions…which never exist).

So, on a good day, like yesterday morning, you wake up with 1000 kJ….or you expected to, but since The Little Guy was up 3 times in the 45 minutes prior to you groaning out of bed, you leave the warm comforter with 972 kJ. Knowing that it’s going to be a long day, you bribe your sister to run for mochas while you make pancakes (caffeine + chocolate = + 500 kJ for sure!).

The boys bounce around the house for an hour, tackling each other, fighting over who has which fire truck (which doesn’t really matter when you’re just racing the inside track of the house screaming at the top of your lungs anyway), and tossing a football towards the ceiling and pretending that they weren’t “trying” to hit the chandelier, really. – 478 kJ

You text a few friends with kids to let them know that you’ve about lost it already and are heading to Chuck e Cheese. Yes, this seems counter-intuitive, but at least the boys are less likely to be trying to strangle each other or break household items when you’re in someone else’s enclosed space. One friend shows up so you have a bit of interrupted adult conversation + 135 kJ, and yet the presence of 38 other screaming monsters leaves you just barely ahead. – 112 kJ

You return home to let The Little Guy nap while you drug the older ones with rapidly-flashing animated scenes (“The Croods”) and sit down yourself for a minute, drawn into the drama of a caveman father who risks his life for his family (sniff, sniff…oh, he lives). + 289 kJ

If you’ve been keeping track, you’re at 1206 kJ at 1:30pm and you’re feeling pretty good about the day. Unfortunately, the next item on the agenda is the Circus!

– 25 kJ – getting 4 boys to go to the bathroom before leaving the house

– 55 kJ – finding 7 complete pairs of shoes

– 60 kJ – buckling in 2 boys and nagging 3 to buckle up

– 285 kJ – managing 5 boys in one mini-van for a 10 minute ride …. when they are sitting close enough to actually TOUCH each other!!

– 111 kJ – corralling all 5 yippy loose dogs in a line to enter the arena

– 2897 kJ – lights, sounds, explosions, acrobatic tensions, tigers, elephants, hungry whiners, spilled popcorn, packed seats, potty breaks, toy grabbers, occasional punches, tired moans, “why didn’t I get a whirly flashing light thingy like The Rascal did?”….back in the car – PLEASE turn the video on, I say, so we can have some quiet (no positive joules, just the absence of further depletion).

Right, we’re home… It’s 6:00pm, I’m at -2227 and the boys need some dinner. Cereal sounds really good and it seems like it’s just about bed-time in this household too.

Pause on this photo for a second…can you feel the energy?!?

The problem is, when I’m running in the negative….like on the day after the circus, I am naturally much less patient and much more demanding on the boys. They are likewise in a negative energy state and trying to make up for that by being particularly rambunctious and pesty. We spiral ever downwards, dragging mother and child through the maelstrom. Feeble attempts to bump the energy level are short-lived for both mother (bite of chocolate, escape to the basement to change the laundry…slowly….) and child (banishment to the isolation chambers of the upstairs toy room = worst thing in the world!). Nothing, nothing helps this situation except night-fall and the glorious sounds of snoring boys. It is then that the countdown begins… “just two more hours and it will be bedtime”…. “just 1 more hour”….. “just 45 minutes”…. “just 31 minutes”…. “just 28 minutes”…. “just 25….oh geez – get up to bed already!!” A little longer story time can soothe us all.

In these moments I remind myself that the days are long, but that we survive them.

I remind myself that I love each and every one of these crazy kids, even though my exploding face isn’t always showing it. I take some deep breaths and back away, then hand out hugs to everyone.

I remind myself that we’re all in this mess together and when we create more mess, we have to clean it up together. And we do.

I remind myself that they will sleep, tomorrow will come, and it will give us all a new start. Each day we strive to be a little better and rest in the knowledge that love smoothes the bumps along the way.

Bouncing balls

Posted on October 28, 2013 by middleofthemadness

I sat on the couch the other day….taking in the perspective of the house….watching the boys bounce around in an active game of football. (Super Tall Guy throws it to Flipper who tries to make it around the inside track of the house one or two times before his flags are ripped off. The “less-essential” members of the team pretty much just run and jump and pick up a toy and play with it for a few minutes then rejoin the team – pretty much, they are less than essential to the scoring capabilities of the team.) The image of little rubber bouncing balls came to my mind – that’s what my household is almost continuously – a set of bouncing balls.

Naturally a set of balls bouncing about in a finite space lends towards occasional collisions. When you have a particularly large ball like Super Tall Guy who also thinks it’s fun to bounce into and off other balls….it’s quite a bit less fun. And when he’s in one of his pesty moods, like he was last Monday before school, it’s really not fun at all.

After he careened into multiple children and finally sent a shooting ball into my mother’s abdomen, I had had enough and chased him at top speed upstairs. He knew he was in trouble. I knew I was in trouble as I wondered how to wrestle him to the ground and wait for my anger to subside so that I wouldn’t actually harm the poor kid. Practically sitting on him, I looked him in the eye and informed him that he was grounded from all fun this week – including the parent-child last practice soccer game, the Halloween party at the gym, and the party with his favorite friends just outside of Cleveland. That got his attention.

Now I had a good week. Having him in the position of not getting his fun activities, we came up with a star system to earn them back. Then, if he wouldn’t listen to me this week, I could threaten to take away a virtual star that existed mostly in my head, but sometimes on the dry erase board hanging on the refrigerator. Of course, he worked hard to get 5 stars to go to the soccer game….and it got rained out. And then worked for another 10 stars to get the day of activities and parties on Saturday.

Now I had to do that oft-recommended parenting technique = catch them at doing something good. You can imagine the challenge of singly out a bouncing ball and informing it that it’s on the right track and doing well. So, a star for brushing your teeth in the morning when you hate doing that. A star for getting dressed without me reminding you. One day, I realized I was pretty desperate when before the bath, I said, “Wow, Super Tall Guy, you actually wore underwear today – you get a star for that!”

I’m liking this system….so then I realized I need another big carrot to dangle. Fortunately, my sister bought tickets to the circus – of dragons! – now, that’s a great item to have in the back pocket!

My crazy slippers

Posted on November 25, 2012 by middleofthemadness

For the past week, I have walked around the house with mismatched slippers. My left foot wearing a brown slipper – one half of the pair that my mom just purchased and left at our house to keep her feet warm – and my right foot sporting a mauve fleece slipper from a pair I purchased several years ago. I haven’t really thought about my mismatched slippers, despite the visiting foster caseworker pointing them out last week to the two other caseworkers (we like to schedule them all at one time and pretend to clean up for them). But tonight, once the house grew quiet, I moved myself downstairs to the couch to admire the newly constructed and lit Christmas tree and kicked off the slippers to tuck my feet up under me. I looked down at the odd pair and smiled.

Now, I could just say that wearing this particular pair is a sign of true laziness on my part. I haven’t bothered to bend over and look for the matching sets under any of the couches or chairs or even bothered to look for them at all. Strangely, for the entire week, the missing slippers have not magically appeared themselves like I keep thinking they will.

Or I could admit that my comfort and ease in slipping on two completely different slippers now shows just how completely I have given over to CHAOS and don’t even notice it anymore. I only worry about the missing slippers when my mom does come to visit and I reluctantly give up my crazy pair so that her feet are warm (but since she was on a cruise for the past ten days, my feet have been so nice and toasty).

It’s hard to tell if this surrender is the sign of strength or just a survival mechanism. I mean, I look around this room and see the towels on the floor (awaiting the return of the hamper which hasn’t climbed out of the basement yet with its latest load of laundry), the red Christmas Santa hats and stockings scattered at the base of the tree where the boys discarded them after our torture photo session in front of the tree, the books leaning off the shelves in a “pick me, pick me” stance waiting the joy of page-turning, the orange Matchbox tracks angularly sticking out from under the furniture (although I just noticed the loop and a couple tracks are up on top of the wall railing 6 feet up and in time out after a frustrated little boy threw them when the car didn’t loop as expected)….and I could go on and on ….but won’t, for instance, even mention the fireplace mantel where you’d be hard-pressed to find the beta fish in among the trophies, Lego airplane, digital camera, box set of DVDs, lotion bottles, a red 3-pound hand weight, and numerous other “off limit” or “too small and highly-chokeable” items.

Chaos reigns well enough in my life that yesterday when we pulled away to head down to my late-grandmother’s farm to have Thanksgiving dinner with the family, I wasn’t fazed at all to drive around the block, discover my tire pressure of the front tire read 6 instead of 35 (ie, FLAT), park the car, transfer 3 children into my sister’s car, climb in and head on out. I wasn’t struck by the commotion of 13 children (my brother has 8) bouncing around the small dining room/living room of the farmhouse, wielding light-sabers which occasionally injured innocent bystanders. And I wasn’t (too) fazed by sitting in the back of the new John Deere Gator and bouncing around the brush as my brother provided rides for all the kids. In fact, it just felt really good to be surrounded by family and to watch the kids chase each other, “capture” each other into “tickle jail,” and slam Draw Four cards down in heated games of Crazy Uno. It was delightful to have my grandmother’s farm welcome us all again.

My two cousins spent the night with us afterwards and this morning it seemed like the perfect opportunity to bring up the Christmas tree and start the festivities. We balanced tree-arranging and some football playing, with Micah wrestling a cousin in the other room to get the ball and me defending the mantel knick-knacks (and fish!) from the on-coming missile. The “babies” (we’ll eventually have to stop referring to the youngest two as “the babies”…someday) repeatedly approached the sparkling lights of the tree and timidly reached out hands to marvel at the brightness of bulbs before yielding to the expected reprimands of “Don’t TOUCH!” Noah was the best, though – every time he walked into the living room today, he’d exclaim “oh my gosh,” or “that’s amazing,” or “we have an awesome tree.” The chance to share in this joy and amazement and love of family is what makes the chaos worth it….the clutter worth it….the exhaustion worth it….

It’s what keeps my toes warm in mismatched slippers without a care.

middleofthemadness

Mothering – in the middle of the madness of boys!

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