That’s What I Said . . .

It’s hard to believe that the summer is nearly half over.  I remember when they seemed to stretch on into eternity with the new school year just peeking over a distant horizon. Now, it’s just months of heat, vacations and swimming pools, oh and enormous electric bills, but thank ya Jesus for the A/C!

It seems crazy to me that just 2 weeks ago we were taking Lyla to the hospital, that my heart seemed about to break and then God just scooped us right up and carried us through it.  I have to tell you the change in our little girl is almost staggering. It brings me joy and brings on an inevitable wave of guilt every time she flashes her toothless grin.  I just wonder how long she was hungry for?  If I could have realized sooner than I did that she wasn’t getting what she needed.  And I still feel sad that for some odd reason, what I had just wasn’t enough. But there she goes smiling like crazy again and all that guilt gets washed away.

I told a friend tonight that it is absolutely wonderful to hear other people comment on what a happy baby Lyla is. The girl smiles at anyone and everyone, especially other kids.  I suspect she thinks that other children are here solely for her entertainment since Jonah is a constant sideshow.

I walked into their bedroom tonight and just watched them sleep.  Watching a young child sleep is just about the sweetest thing in the world.  They sleep so peacefully without worries, without anxiety, just pure rest. I just look at the two of them and I am filled to the brim with joy.

 I never really had aspirations to be a mom when I was little.  When I got to be a teenager and then in college, I wanted to get married but kids never really crossed my mind. People always ask if my kids were planned or not.  Sure, they were planned . . .  just not by me!

So I am off to bed now to get a little rest before baby girl wakes up for her midnight meal. As groggy as I am sure to be, I want to cherish these moments because I look at Jonah who is almost 5 now and I know all too well how quickly time goes by.

I’m not an avid Oprah watcher. I’ve got my reasons – she’s just not my cup of tea anymore, yet here I am on a Monday afternoon fixated while I feed Lyla her umpteenth bottle for the day. (One a side note, my girl has a serious appetite, and I’m lovin’ it.)

Oprah’s sitting, talking to the camera alone. She says, “I cannot believe I am here still talking about my weight. I cannot believe it.” Yeah, I get that. I feel that way too. She talks about her anger with herself, her embarrassment, her excuses . . . I sigh. Yeah, I feel her there too. She talks about abusing food, something I am ALL too familiar with and about overeating often meaning that you are hungry for something else. She says she’s hungry for balance. It got me thinking. What am I hungry for?

For one, I am hungry for more balance too. My life feels so fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants lately. Yeah, yeah I just had a baby . . . no, I had a baby 3 months ago. Yes, we’ve had some issues with her eating which was quite stressful, but. . . BUT – it’s an excuse. I just don’t want to excuse my lack of motivation to exercise my tired, out of shape self. I know what to do; I just don’t seem to have the energy to do it.

I’m going to be in my baby sister’s wedding in January. She emailed me a picture of the dress, and I wanted to crawl under a rock. It’s not fat girl friendly. All the other bridesmaids including my other younger sister are thin. They’ll look great, and then there will be me. I just don’t know that I’ll be there by January. Lord, help me!

Which brings me to what I think . . . no, what I know I’m hungry for if I’m being real. I’m hungry for a more satisfying relationship with God, the sustainer, the all sufficient One. It’s not His fault things are the way they are between us. I know it’s mine. I want more than just Sunday mornings where my heart seems to want to jump out of my chest when I hear God’ word. Thanks to ladies like Kay Arthur and Beth Moore, I got hooked on the mystery and majesty of His Word some time ago. That’s not something you can just let go and forget about. I got spoiled. It’s like when you taste real macaroni and cheese (I know, I know – a food analogy, bear with me!) and then the box stuff. The box stuff is just plain gross compared to the real thing. It’s like that for me when I try to fill my God-shaped hole with other stuff – namely food. It’s just gross.

So here I am, Oprah, still talking about my weight too. I’ve got a long way to go still – balance to find, roads to run and grace to fall back on. Steady on.

 I’ve been a fan of Michael Jackson’s music as long as I can remember. His songs were a large part of the soundtrack of my childhood.  I enjoyed having pretty young parents who listened to popular music all the time.  Whether in the car or in the house, a radio was always on.  My mom loves to tell stories of me, at age 4, standing on the seat of an old organ we had singing “Walking on Sunshine” while it played on MTV or me singing “Super Fweak” in the car (yeah, nice choice on that one! lol) Inevitably, at the ripe old age of 5, my favorites were Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper. I still have my Thriller t-shirt!

So, I was really saddened to hear of his passing last week. It was very surreal.  I admit, I haven’t paid much attention to MJ these past few years.  We got his last album (Invincible) and it was okay. But I was and always will be a fan of his earlier music.  He really was a genius and a pioneer with an incredible gift. And of course he was also a wounded soul whose pain was lived out in front of the entire world.  I imagine that had to have contributed to his untimely passing.

I got to thinking of my favorite Michael Jackson memory, and I immediately thought of my 11th birthday. My sister, Heather and I both have June birthdays, only 3 days apart.  We usually always shared birthday parties, and the year I turned 11 and she turned 8, mom and dad were crazy enough to allos us to have a joint slumber party.

I sort of cringe imagining the slumber parties in my future as they always seems to go down the same path.  Sure it always starts out fun, but inevitably ends in someone crying, someone begging to go home, someone tattling, or an angry, tired parent bellowing at the gaggle of giggling girls to be quiet! Yeah, that’s pretty much how it went that night too.  But it was still the coolest slumber party because mom got the new Moonwalker video for us to watch.  For those who don’t remember, Moonwalker was as Michael Jackson film with concert footage and a series of mini-movies, including a kids version of Bad. And to us, it was Bad!  We loved it!  I wonder how dorky I would think it was if I watched it now. Still, it made my 11th one of the best birthdays ever.

So, goodbye Mr. Jackson.  I truly hope you do rest in peace. After all of the hullabaloo dies down, I hope you’ll be remembered and celebrated not for your eccentricities, spending habits or legal drama but for your music and charity work.

It’s Wednesday afternoon. Baby girl is sleeping. In the bouncy seat. Alone.  What have I done to deserve such a gift?!  I was beginning to get desperate, you see.  Baby girl’s relationship with sleep has been a bit rocky lately, and I was starting to look as rotten as I felt.  No amount of fancy-schmancy eye and face serums (thank you, Savanah!) can erase that level of tired. 

Our vacation was a mixture of fabulous and tiring. The fabulous was all the quality time spent with my parents, sisters, grandmother and Jason’s Aunt Samye and Uncle Jim. The tiring was Lyla’s almost incessant screaming. That girl had us hopping, trying just about anything short of standing on our heads to get her to settle.  Turns out all she needed was a good poop.  I think it was Samye who wisely said, “A good poop and a good sleep will make anyone happy.”

So, this vacation was our first in 5 years.  Pre-kids, we took a road trip to North Carolina to visit the Reimers.  That was a fabulous vacation too.  Sure we’ve dreamed of Disney or chillin’ in a big ole swanky resort, but who knows if and then that will ever happen?   I think we have discovered the secret to a fun vacation – people.  While the goal of the trip was to get away and relax with no agendas or pressures, the bigger goal was to invest some time into our loved ones that we don’t see very often.

We spent the first 4 days at the lake with my parents.  The first night it stormed. If you live in Oklahoma you know that what I mean is that we watched the weather for four hours and had the kids at the ready to run to the cellar if necessary. Craziness. Those four days also included ribs, brisket and wild blackberries. Ah, that is smell of summer ya’ll. Jason and Jonah trekked off with my dad to discover little islands on Waurika Lake and returned with “special rocks” and ticks. Ew. My parents also got their Internet service installed while we were there.  In the boonies you get Internet by satellite.  No joke.  I kept teasing my mom that they live so far out in the country that they have to get internet access from outer space.  She didn’t think my joke was a funny as I did.

On Tuesday evening we packed up our belongings, which had grown somehow – they always do when we visit the parentals. Lyla screamed all the way to Texas. We stopped to eat – ah, silence.  Then she screamed some more until we got lost in Ft. Worth and she went to sleep.  We finally made it to Savanah’s apartment that night and attempted to watch the The Tale of Benjamin Button.  I like the 30 minutes I saw before I passed out.  Jason says it was about an hour too long anyway.  Ft. Worth was H-O-T.  I grew up in Texas and remember the oppressive heat, but Lawd!  I felt like I was going to melt.  We enjoyed swimming, the movies, awesome Tex-Mex and seeing downtown Ft. Worth with Savanah.  I finally got to visit the Sephora store she helps to manage in Hurst, TX.  I made sure to tell them that if it wasn’t for Savanah, I’d be a mess.  Wait, I am still a mess, but a decent looking one thanks to her. 

On Friday morning we made our way to Colleyville for the last leg of our trip visiting Jason’s Aunt Samye and Uncle Jim. Samye and I have become quite the Facebook buddies, and I was eager to get to chatting with her live and in person.  Jason, as he mentioned in his blog, was a little hesitant because he hasn’t been the greatest about visiting family over the years.  It’s hard to sum up those last few days.  They were the icing on the cake and the cherry too.  Sure they were gracious, the food was amazing, the bed comfy and the pool wonderful (ya’ll really could have an awesome B&B) but the conversations were priceless and deep.  They have such a deep love for God and one another. They very much remind me of a very special couple is Tennessee that also took time to pour their lives into us. 

I guess that’s what this vacation was all about – taking time to connect with family and other believers.  We desparately needed it with so much craziness going on in our lives, and we needed for someone to reach out a reassure us that while the journey (metaphorically and literally) is long and sometimes hard, it’s worth it to keep going.

. . . or in my case, a baby sling. Remember how in an earlier post I said I did not want to “wear” my baby 24/7? Oh how naïve I was! As it turns out, wearing Lyla in the sling pretty much all the time is the key not only to our collective happiness as a family, but to our sanity as well.

As mentioned in my last post about parenting, Lyla is what you might call a “high need” baby. She likes to be held – a lot and can wail like a banshee (and will) for prolonged periods of time for no apparent reason. I’ve been reading The Attachment Parenting Book by Dr. Sears, and there’s a big fat section on baby wearing. Now I am the first to admit that the term sounded very “tree huggerish” at first. Jason and I scoffed and laughed, thinking, “We never had to do that with Jonah!” Why is it that we assume that two babies from the same parents will be anything alike?

Again, like I said in my last post, Lyla is clearly not Jonah, and that is okay. So, growing tired of the nightly 5 o’clock crying jag – we decided to wear her and see what would happen. Miracle of all miracles – there’s a very content baby hanging out in the sling. She even took naps on Monday and Tuesday – for more than an hour! We got to eat dinner as a family again, rather than in rounds. I worked at the preschool yesterday, and actually got some work done. And here I am this morning as Jonah watches Sesame Street, blogging as Lyla peacefully snoozes at my side.

Yeah, THIS is how Crystal gets her groove back.

The past few days have been sort of a blur.  My life seems to revolve around three things right now: 1) getting Lyla to sleep, 2) feeding Lyla and 3) attempting to calm Lyla down. Yup. That’s it.

She seems to have developed “Mommy is trying to do something productive so let’s put a stop to that” radar. And man, is she good!  The Bible says that pride comes before a fall, and I am positive that all my bragging about how Jonah was “such a good baby” and “slept through the night by 10 weeks” is coming back to haunt me.

It doesn’t help that there is this huge social stigma about having a “good baby.”  When someone asks, “So, is she a good baby?” What they really mean is, “So, is she compliant?  Does she cry all the time?  Does she sleep when you want her to?” The answer to those questions is my case is, “No, no and no.”

Is she a good baby, though?  Of course she is!  I find myself having to overcome some things that I used to generally accept about babies that really aren’t true. Really, what I find myself overcoming is my own utter and complete selfishness.

I’ve been told, though not by my own mother, by many other women that if I hold the baby too much I’ll spoil her, that she’ll manipulate us if we respond too readily to her cries, that we MUST get her on a predictable schedule or else . . . and the mother of them all – let em’ cry it out.

We never worried about any of this with Jonah because he was so incredibly easygoing. He loved a schedule, slept through the night early on and wasn’t a big fusser.  We never tried to let him cry it out because he didn’t present an opportunity for it. Lyla is a different story – some might call her colicky, fussy, high need.  I hate to place baby girl in any category because she is so unpredictable.  She has her good days and her not so good days – we just never know.  Gasp! She’s human!

I am realizing that Jonah’s more easygoing nature gave me this false sense of pride and assurance in myself as a parent. Now that I have a higher need child, I am realizing that being a mother really does mean laying yourself aside . . . dying to self. 

While she is very different from Jonah as an infant, the goal is still the same – to build a foundation of love and trust with my baby that she can count on for her whole life.  For Lyla this includes having a less than predictable schedule, enduring the long evenings of crying and continuing to work to find ways to comfort her, to take a deep breath and ignore unhelpful advice and comments.  It means loving this child just the way she is because she is wonderful – crying or smiling.

Just the other day Jason mentioned to me that despite how crazy the world seems, when looking at history and statistics, we live in some of the safest times ever recorded. Which gets me thinking that other than the weather reports, I am about to give up on watching the news altogether. I have respect for the news media and what they do (Okay- to a point, anyway.) But I am afraid that the constant barrage of news has people living in fear. I’m just now down with that.

And lately, the news just makes me angry, but nothing like this week! It’s funny how I can complacently be-bop along when something jars me out of my state of apathy.  This week it was a news story here in OKC of a pharmacist, an older gentleman and war veteran who shot and killed a robbery suspect. Two teenage kids attempt to rob a local pharmacy – one is armed, one is not.  As they enter the store, the one waves a gun while the other struggles to put on a ski mask. The pharmacist aims at the unarmed kid, shooting him in the head, knocking him unconscious – but still alive. The other runs out, chased by the pharmacist. At this point, he acted in self defense, totally within the law. Then things take an awful turn.

The pharmacist reenters the store, walks past the suspect lying on the floor and unlocks a drawer nearby. He retrieves another gun and proceeds to shoot the suspect 5 times at close range in the abdomen, killing him. This was all on tape – showed over and over on the news. The pharmacist has been arrested and charged with first degree murder, and it seems that many Oklahomans are outraged . . . that the pharmacist is in jail at all.

When I saw this story I was shocked, saddened – the kid was only 16, the pharmacist a victim of a crime.  Just a mess. Then the news began to report the comments flowing into the station of how “wrong” it was that the pharmacist was being charged at all, that the kid “deserved what he got”, that the pharmacist was just defending himself – using his right to protect himself and his employees.  That just went all over me in a bad, bad way. In fact, a pollon kfor.com shows that a majority think what he was completely justified. 

My take: Yes, he had a right to defend himself and did so, the first time he shot him. But, how is anyone justified in taking someones life once you are no longer in imminent danger? 

I was not there, and I don’t know what was going on in this man’s head and heart. Wahtever his reason(s) were for what he did, I am troubled by people’s attitudes towards the ordeal, and the overwhelming and total lack of compassion for the family of the child who died. I’ve heard it said several times that this situation will “teach punks a lesson” or make “them think a second time.”  It should make us all think a second time . . . are we justified to punish someone however we see fit, to throw the judicial system out the window, to place such little value on human life?

While I hesitate to even mention that people’s attitudes towards the ordeal are tinged with racism, I think it’s true. He was a young black kid from a less than desirable neighborhood, and he tried to rob an older white man, a veteran. Would attitudes be different if the tables were turned?  I wonder.

When I haven’t blogged in awhile, I feel guilty – like I’ve been purposefully avoiding my blogging duty or something. Maybe I have been ducking out of blogging since my brain is so unreliable these days. And since my thoughts mainly seem to stray towards all things baby, it’s been difficult to piece together a coherent post that isn’t all about motherhood.

Not wanting to alienate any of my 5 or 6 readers – I’ll share some of my recent observations and thoughts. 

*A new Panera Bread just opened down the street from me.  After visiting the other day I came to two conclusions – 1) This could be very detrimental to my weight loss goals.  It is not a good idea to have cinnamon crunch bagels within a five mile radius of me. and 2) Panera seems to be a white people magnet.  No, a preppy white people magnet. What is it about bagels, organic apple juice and broccoli cheese soup that beckons the whitey population?  I need to see if Panera is on the list for Stuff White People Like.

*I use my semi-newborn child to try and get out of stuff.  Wow, did I really just admit that to the whole web world? Yep, caught myself doing it today at the tag agency. “Um, I just had a baby at the end of March – so that’s why I am a month late in renewing my tag . . . Oh, no penalties?  Thanks!”  So very wrong.  Don’t judge me!

*I’ll be 30 in 2 weeks, and I’m not freaking out about it. I feel like I’ve been in my 20s forever, so I look forward to my fourth decade on earth. I think my husband’s planning something, and I am SO tempted to snoop, but I love to be surprised so I’m keeping it cool. 

*I have a new friend at work (Learning Center).  She’s actually my new boss/co-worker, and she’s hilarious. It’s been awhile since I’ve hung out with someone who makes me laugh so hard I cry. So far we’ve discovered that we have a tendency to randomly quote movie lines and/or break out in song.  I think it’s the beginning of something wonderful.

*I went with Jason to a reunion for 91FM- KOKF. For those of you in Oklahoma who remember (or don’t) it was one of the first radio stations of its kind, an alternative Christian station.  It was the best.  They literally played everything.  The station itself played a significant role in Jason and I meeting and marrying.  It was neat to finally meet DJs that I listened to in college.  I miss you 91!

*Four friends are having babies in the next two months including my sister in law and best friend.  Three are girls, one is a surprise. What is with all the baby girls? Lyla will not be in short supply of playmates!

*Lyla had her 2 month checkup today.  Like Jonah, she is long, lean and strong as an ox!  When the doc flipped her on her tummy she started to try and scoot away!  I’m a little scared.  I have a feeling I will be chasing this child.  Good thing Jonah is a fast runner

*I think I am going to get Skype soon.  My best friend is about to move with her family to Africa as missionaries with the IMB.  This will be a great way to stay in touch – AND just in case Oprah ever calls, I’ll be ready to chat via Skype.

Okay, that’s all for now.  Ciao!

Seriously.  I think Jonah and Lyla have two different moms, and I feel a little guilty about it. I always laughed when my mom said that I was the Guinea pig, the oldest child, but now I see what she means. Having a second child is also like a second chance at parenting an infant.  While the first child did get what I like to call the “star treatment” – you know what I mean, all new clothes, an actual changing table, pacifiers that are washed off with soap & water when accidentally dropped on the ground – the second child seems to get the calmer, more confident parent.

So I’m having a bit, and only a bit, of mommy guilt lately.  It really struck me as I was perusing the parenting section of the non-fiction books at the local library today.  As I readily scooped up two more books by Dr. Sears (The Baby Sleep Book and The Attachment Parenting Book) along with a Better Baby Food book, I thought, “Ah, man.  All I read for Jonah were the What to Expect books.” 

I was just so freaked out with Jonah. I’d never had a baby before even though I’d been around plenty of them.  Having your own is not anything like taking care of other people’s kids.  With Jonah, I was always second guessing myself.  I was also five years younger and really unsure even of who I was as a person. With Lyla, it’s like she has a whole different mom.

This mom is definitely more chilled out, more patient and better read.  This mom doesn’t freak out when the baby cries, spits up or keeps her up all night. This mom enjoys being a mom more.

Then again, I can thank Jonah for helping to shape thismom.  While we are instrumental in shaping our kids,they shape us too.  For all Jason and I did wrong with Jonah, we did a lot right too.  Surely a sensitive, loving, smart kid couldn’t have happened by total accident, right?

So be enouraged moms – first time, second time . . . fifth time.  Moms are like good cheese or a good wine – we just keep getting better!