Tag: parenting

Posted in family life

how we celebrated palm sunday

Posted on by kristinabean

We started with leftover pancakes and stories from the Jesus Storybook Bible. The boys got so excited by the stories that we built Jericho from couch cushions, marched around it seven times, yelled as loud as we could, and watched the walls fall down! We all took turns being inside Jericho and being the Israelites marching outside. (The Jesus Storybook Bible, oddly enough, omits the story of Palm Sunday, as does the Children of God Storybook Bible, so we read other stories this morning instead – most of Holy Week and several from the OT).

I really wanted to take the kids to church but we were all exhausted and slightly sick so that didn’t happen. We did sing together though! From somewhere in the far reaches of my brain I recalled some simple, happy praise songs and in the spirit of the day we sang Ho-ho-ho-hosanna and Praise Ye the Lord several times each.

For the same reasons that church didn’t happen, I knew that naps had to happen, so I told the boys that if they stayed in bed for quiet time until their lullaby CD was finished, we would make Palm Sunday cookies together (the CD is long enough that they usually fall asleep before it’s over). Rondel is extremely bribable these days, especially by sugar… I don’t want to make it part of our regular routine, but I needed them to rest so I could help the sick baby be comfortable and rest as well.

And then we made the promised cookies!

I’m not sure if the boys had used cookie cutters before, but they got the hang of it fairly quickly and only had a few mishaps even with the crumbly shortbread dough! Rondel helped me roll it out once also, and did a pretty good job considering how young he is and how infrequently he’s used a rolling pin. And whenever something didn’t work perfectly I just said, we can fix it! or, we can roll it out another time and try again! So we were able to get all the cookies made with minimal stress on anyone’s part, although I did have to strictly enforce access to the unrolled dough to prevent them from eating it all as fast as humanly possible.

During dinner I found our Bible Animal Stories book and read the Palm Sunday story from the perspective of a donkey (we have a lot of kids’ Bibles floating around our house…). It captured the excitement of the event really well, how everyone would have been so caught up in the enthusiasm and carried away in the emotion. It always amazes me how just a few days later those same people would be caught up in the storm of accusation against him.

I hope you all had a wonderful Palm Sunday! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!

Posted in family life, musings

parenting a preschooler

Posted on by kristinabean

caterpillar_preschooler

When he is so upset about a broken cup that he can’t enjoy one of his favorite playgrounds…

When he asks “why?” in endless loops that don’t even make sense half the time and doesn’t even seem to listen to the answer…

When he wants to have long and challenging books read to him but gets distracted on every page by something different – and then cries if you stop reading…

When he wants help building his Duplos but gets frustrated if he isn’t doing it all by himself…

When he deliberately pushes the limits and disobeys in the “one finger across the line” sort of way…

When he is so big and sweetly thoughtful and fiercely independent…

When he is tired and whiny and just wants to snuggle…

When he is angry and unreasonable and tells me he’s going to break things and hit people…

When he laughs that crazy laugh that just about knocks him over…

When his mouth turns down in the frown that’s melted my heart since his infancy…

…then, it is up to me to remember that he is being three and a half years old, dealing with so much internal transition and growth, and adjusting to a new baby and my return to work, learning more about himself and the world every day. He is not an adult yet; he isn’t going to act like one, and it isn’t fair to expect it of him. What he needs is for me to love and accept him for who he is right now, and gently guide him as he grows into the fullness of who he will be.

Posted in family life, quotes

different

Posted on by kristinabean

Learning to love ourselves, to be humble enough to admit our limitations, to truly appreciate the gifts our differences bring while also being willing to accept help and healing for the most painful ones, gives us greater mental, emotional, and spiritual health. […]

We are so often encouraged to fit into the boxes of academic achievement, intellectual prowess, recognizable achievements, personality profiles, status, money, power, external significance—to perform, to fit in the box, to be acceptable. Yet our wonderful God loves us unconditionally, now and forever. We do not have to work to please Him. He values us for what is inside our hearts—our character and integrity, our ability to love, to be faithful, to help others, and to show compassion. Our individual personalities are a gift of His design so that we might add color and variety to the world. And He can use our unique combination of circumstances—even the painful ones like mental illness—for our good and His glory.

Sally Clarkson, Different

One of the most romantic and wonderful things about my husband is that from the very beginning of our relationship he has valued me for my character and heart more than for my intelligence and knowledge. I’ve always been smart and been perceived as smart, and while it wasn’t a difficult appearance to maintain (because, at least when it comes to academics, I am quite smart), it always left me feeling somewhat empty when that was all people would see. Intelligence was a gift, a talent, but not me. So when I found this man who loved me for who I was, who saw all the other aspects of my character and personality and delighted in them, I was profoundly and deeply touched. It helped me understand God’s unconditional love; it helped me begin to love and accept myself as God made me; it is helping me now learn to love my children with that kind of acceptance and delight in all their uniqueness – even when those unique traits are difficult to understand or tame.

Different is a book written by a mother and son together, telling the story of a different and difficult childhood and the love and acceptance that carried their family through their struggles. After reading the first chapter (available here) and listening to an interview with both authors on the Read Aloud Revival podcast (available here), I’ve decided that I need to get my hands on the whole book and read the rest of it! I want to learn how to love my children as they are, while still guiding them towards maturity; I want to learn how to help them flourish best without coddling or overprotecting them. I want to stop listening to the critiques and judgments of the ignorant world and start listening to the needs and dreams of my children’s hearts: it was God who made them with those needs, God who gave them their deepest longings and most beautiful dreams, and I am only His steward, raising these children for a time, so who am I to ignore their truest selves or demand that they be other than He created them to be?

Posted in family life

Welcome baby!

Posted on by kristinabean

Birth stories are a love it/hate it kind of thing and I’m not that good at writing them anyway, so I’ll spare you the details and just announce the arrival of Aubade, the newest member of our family!

(As with the boys, this isn’t her real name. It is instead the name of a type of poem, in this case one which celebrates the dawn – quite fitting for this little girl who waited at 9.5cm all night long just to be born as the sun rose in the morning.)


I’m honestly not sure how to express all my thoughts about the pregnancy, the labor, the birth, or even baby Aubade herself. It was intense and overwhelming, full of unexpected twists and turns, punctuated by great pain, and only endured through much prayer and the support of people who love me. But there is something exquisitely precious in holding a newborn, sticky and screaming, to your chest and feeling her tension subside; there is something inexpressibly beautiful about watching your sons shower their sister with kisses and giggle over her tiny toes; there is even an undefinable sweetness in the sleep-deprived snuggle a new mother offers to her infant.


And so our lives unfold and deepen and begin to change in unknown and unforeseable ways, through this new life entering into ours, and we are so grateful for this gift of love in our hearts and our home.

Posted in family life

brothers and friends

Posted on by kristinabean

Rondel and I were playing outside during Limerick’s nap, with his dinosaur figurines. One of them had put another one down to bed, only to wake him back up a few minutes later.

“Why isn’t he just letting him sleep?” I asked. We never intentionally wake the boys up so I was wondering why his toys were modeling that.

Rondel had his dinosaur grumpily explain that he wanted to play. That gave me a suspicion.

“Do you wish Limerick would wake up to play with you?” I asked. “Do you miss him?”

“I do” Rondel answered sadly.

Even one-on-one playtime with Mommy is lacking without his little sidekick and accomplice, these days – and it makes me so happy to see their friendship deepening.

Posted in family life

park remodels and random thoughts about playgrounds

Posted on by kristinabean

Our hometown recently updated one of the city parks in a more disability-friendly way (if you’re local, check out this article for more details!), and since it had been one of our favorite cool-weather parks last year we were excited to see how it had been transformed over the few months it was out of commission. Of course the ducks and the library were still there, so it’s hard to go very far wrong…

While none of my kids have physical disabilities right now, several of my friends have siblings or children who do, so accessibility is something I try to be aware of (although I obviously don’t have the personal experience to really evaluate whether or not something is truly accessible). It’s also something I want to encourage and seek out, so that my kids don’t grow up feeling uncomfortable and awkward around people who are physically different than them. If they grow up playing at the park with people with disabilities, it’s just going to be another permutation of normal in their minds, which is exactly how I think it should be.

(One of my favorite moments with Rondel at a park was about six months ago, at the big splash pad near our home, on a Friday morning when a group from a facility for severely disabled individuals came to enjoy the water as well. One older teenager was just sitting in the water, under the spray, splashing with his arms and laughing and laughing, a look of pure happiness on his face. Rondel watched him for a few minutes, then sat down in the water a few feet away and started doing the exact same thing. To him, there was nothing strange about seeing a “big person” acting like that – it was just another way to enjoy the park, and one he could enter into and enjoy also.)

Anyway, the new playground has a few attractions specifically geared toward children with physical issues – a zip-line that has a seat and harness instead of just a pole to hang onto, ramp accessibility on the play structure, a two-person swing, and rubber matting over a large part of the playground so wheels don’t get stuck – but it also has a lot of generally fun things for any kid to engage with: slides, ropes, ladders, a sand table/digging area, and so on. We’ve been there twice in the past couple weeks and had a great time on both occasions.

Rondel particularly appreciates the seated zip-line – he hasn’t mastered holding on to the more traditional seat, but he loves zooming back and forth:

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Seriously, the kid just can’t contain his laughter every time he soars backwards on that seat!

Limerick was a bit more apprehensive of the zip line (he liked it, but at a slower pace), but he loved the sand and the ladders:

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There is only one small sand area at the park (so it can easily be avoided if you don’t like the mess or if your child has sensory issues with the sand), and it only has one digging shovel – both times we went, we brought our buckets and shovels, and they were much appreciated by the other kids at the park. The other non-rubber areas have wood chips.

They also have a neat piece of equipment I hadn’t seen before: basically a series of rolling plastic tubes underneath a sort of tunnel of railings. The little kids were scooting and crawling over the rollers underneath the railings, and some of the bigger kids were holding onto the railings and “running” on the rollers with a sort of treadmill effect. Limerick went though that one over and over again:

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I like the random playground equipment that, unlike ladders and slides, doesn’t have an obvious “right way” to be used; I think it facilitates open-ended play and experimentation, and it cuts down on all the parental rules for play that I notice every time I go to the park (at least at parks with attentive, hovering/engaged, middle-class white parents… the parks by our home, in much poorer neighborhoods, are far less parentally supervised).

Anyway, I think the changes at this park were for the better, and we’ll be coming back to play, feed the ducks, and maybe even do story time at the library! If any of you are local, it’d be a great place to meet up and spend a morning getting to know each other.

Posted in musings

thoughts for the week of rejoicing and the candle of joy

Posted on by kristinabean

“Our rejoicing should not be something superficial and frivolous. It is not just a giddy laughter or a silly emotion. We rejoice rather because of our profound conviction that Jesus is the Lord and in Him is our salvation. We rejoice because of the gift of His eternal love for us. We rejoice by responding with love to the love He has shown us. We rejoice in the Truth and we seek to live in holiness of life, “preserved blameless for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.”” – Fr. Thomas Bennett

The two Christmas cards we received so far, just in time for Gaudete Sunday, adorning our messy piano

Every night the Advent candles are almost like a slap in the face, a reminder of all the ways I’ve failed to model Christ to the boys – convicting me of my impatience, selfishness, harsh tongue, and lack of compassion. But they somehow do this much more gently, with far less accompanying guilt, than my own inner drive for perfection, and I believe it is because of the One to whom they point. With every failure comes the opportunity for forgiveness; with every weary night the promise of another chance tomorrow; with every sorrow and broken moment the hope of healing, redemption, and joy. And amidst our struggles to love each other well as parent and child, husband and wife, or brother and sister, our days are suffused with the wonder and joy of Christmas, the anticipation of something great about to happen, and it helps us to pick up the pieces and go about building and rebuilding our love.

Posted in family life

on the first day of Advent…

Posted on by kristinabean

Thanksgiving pictures will be up a little late because I forgot my camera at my in-laws’ house and will have to wait a few days for it to be returned (my FIL fortunately works fairly close to our house, despite living rather far away – I don’t envy his daily commute).

However, life in our house has moved on from Thanksgiving to Advent with what feels like incredible speed. The downtown area where we live is fully decked out for Christmas, with a whole street blocked off for a three-story Christmas tree, photo ops, and continuously-playing holiday music. Even our church this morning (to my disappointment) was fully decorated and singing Christmas carols all service long, and I honestly felt overwhelmed by it all. I love Christmas – don’t get me wrong! – but I love Advent even more, and the abrupt switch from ordinary time to Christmas, without the slow build-up and growing anticipation of Advent in between, made me feel like Christmas was just being dumped on me at the expense of the specialness and wonder of it all. I can’t remember feeling like this in the past; for some reason I am just not ready for Christmas this year, and I’m hardly even ready for Advent. I need time to live the lamentation and longing of Advent, to prepare my heart for the unbelievable joy and promise of Christmas… maybe I just need to spend time alone in the daily readings for these next few weeks, immersing myself in the pattern and calling of the Church.

For now, though, I did bring out a few decorations and the Advent wreath (and discovered that I only had two whole candles, one purple and one rose, along with five or six candle stumps… ah well, our Advent may be interrupted by the baby anyway!). I had hoped to do the Jesse Tree this year with the boys, but I didn’t find/make a set of ornaments I liked in time, so we’ll just be reading the stories without the visible accompaniment. I did find a great children’s Bible with beautiful, well-written stories that are still short enough to easily add to dinner and the Advent candles, so we’ll be using that for our Advent readings as a family and keeping the Jesus Storybook Bible in regular circulation with our picture books – Rondel has been choosing it for his bedtime story for a few weeks now, and I don’t want that to stop! Anyway, this is our new one:

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The illustrations are done by different artists from around the world, and represent different artistic styles as well as different ethnicities and cultures – and they are all absolutely beautiful. I’ve read quite a few of the short (two to three page) stories on my own, and read the first one tonight at dinner; I’m looking forward to the rest! I’m especially excited that Ruth and Esther are both included here, as they are not in the Jesus Storybook Bible.

One thing that gave me hope for the season in the face of my own lackluster feelings so far was Rondel’s reaction to helping me pull out some preliminary Christmas decorations, and finding our nativity set amongst them. My plan was to introduce the characters slowly throughout Advent, like I did last year… but Rondel spent the whole afternoon playing with the people (pretending they were random Bible characters like King Darius and Daniel because we haven’t read the Christmas story for a while!) and chose the baby Jesus for his bedtime snuggle toy tonight. So that was significantly sweeter than my well-laid plans would have likely been, and a gift for me to see his delight in the season even if it isn’t rolling out perfectly and liturgically correctly. My goal is to meet him in that joy, and make the most of the Advent time we have before our baby comes, instead of morphing into my inner curmudgeon…

I hope your Thanksgiving went well and that you are entering Advent with a more Christ-centered and joyful heart than I have had so far!

Posted in family life, Uncategorized

oobleck!

Posted on by kristinabean

After discovering Bartholomew and the Oobleck, by Dr. Seuss, by sheer random luck at the library last week, and enjoying it on the basis of its story alone for several days, I told Rondel that oobleck was actually something we could make at home. I wasn’t sure if he would want to, but he spent the whole next day (while I was at work) telling my husband how he was going to get to make oobleck with Mommy, so at that point it was going to have to happen!

And happen it did:

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Oobleck is, in its simplest form, a mixture of cornstarch and water. We added some food coloring to try to make it green like it is in the Dr. Seuss book, but we obviously should have added more! The proportions of the two ingredients have to be just right (approximately a 1:2 water:cornstarch ratio), but when they are, the mixture stops behaving like a liquid or a solid and becomes a non-Newtonian fluid. In other words, the way it responds is based on the force you apply. Let your hand sink down slowly into the bowl and it feels like water; try to pull your hand back out quickly and the substance instantly hardens around you. (For a good overview of the science, check out this article from Cornell).

I spent a lot of time just playing around with it on my own before I could convince the boys to touch it, but after they got over the initial weirdness of it they didn’t want to stop. Rondel in particular enjoyed the odd sensation of it and kept immersing his hands in and pulling them out again over and over and over. In fact, because our air is so dry, I had to keep adding water to the oobleck so he could keep playing with it as long as his interest held – which ended up being about an hour and a half, and would have been longer if we hadn’t desperately needed to put Limerick down for a nap.

Oobleck is definitely a messy activity. Because of the way it sticks to your skin, it’s not going to stay nicely contained in a mixing bowl! However, since it’s just cornstarch, it does hose off of everything fairly easily (much to my neighbors’ relief… the newly returned snowbirds aren’t used to the kids playing in the common area and were worried about the mess). It will also dry out your skin, so it might be good to have lotion on hand for after the clean-up. This was my first time playing with it as well, although I’ve read about it before, and I highly recommend it (and the book!) for both you and your kids!

Posted in family life

learning character from Dr. Seuss on a hard day

Posted on by kristinabean

When your morning is characterized by yelling (from everyone), tears (from everyone), apologies (from everyone), toddler aggression (from both boys), strict boundary enforcement (from me), and overwhelming fatigue (probably from everyone but definitely from me), a blissful three hours at the library is a gift and an answer to prayer. Surely it wasn’t coincidence that we stumbled upon a Dr. Seuss book I’d never seen before, Bartholomew and the Oobleck, in which crisis is only averted by the remorse and sincere apology of the culpable character…

I am forever grateful for the forgiving love of my little children, even as they drive me up the wall, and I will forever try to pick up the pieces, start over, and love them as best I can in each moment. And when I lose it and they lose it and we’re all a wreck and the day feels ruined before it’s scarcely begun, we can remember King Derwin of Didd and admit our fault, say we’re sorry, and begin to rebuild together.