The Road Goes Ever On and On...: Blessings

Sometimes my kids drive me nuts. I mean, more nuts than I already am. Today has been one of those days. Lots of mess (playdough is an evil substance) and lots of corraling (teen and pre-teen boys love to wrestle anytime anywhere). It's on these kinds of days that I have to remind myself about all the blessings God has given to us. Some of them are big things like family

This is a picture of our clan with the Froisland originals (to the right) and Uncle Joel and Aunt Alice in the center (visiting from North Carolina).

Other times the blessings are moments. Like when my 13 year old gives me a big bear hug for making baked donuts. A tremendous blessing for me is that all six of my kids like to do things together as a group. You'd think that with an age span of 13 years to 3 years, it'd be difficult to find activities that they would all enjoy. With them it's easy, they don't find things to do, they just do them.

On Saturday, they decided to have another one of their dance parties.

Big D was the "D-jay" using his mini-speakers attached to his MP3 player

There's Bob before he starts busting out the moves

Here's the "Dancing Queen"

Here's the Dancing Queen in motion

Here's the Jr. Dancing Queen

How's that for an action shot? Hair and tongue in motion.

Even LB got into it with his "unique" moves for a while...

...and then was done.

We take our dancing very seriously! (On a side note, MB came running into the kitchen the other day saying, "Mom, you have to be serious! LB is bledding on his knee! Here, come on, I'm not kidding!" It was a small scrape, not requiring hospitalization.)

Everyone wanted to wear shades..perhaps LB's are a bit too big...

After the dancing, they tried their hand at singing (except Kimi, she's too busy posing)

After they had finished their dancing/singing party, they all went into the backyard to play...together. Pretty cool.

Okay, so why is the following picture a blessing? I haven't posted one of these in a while.

This expression is almost always accompanied by the oft whined phrase, "I can DO it." Now, before you think I'm complaining about him being an overachiever, the translation of that phrase is, "I cannot, no way no how even attempt to do what you want me to do, so I will give up before I even try." With this expression is also copious amounts of your standard tearless crying/whining/and overall belly aching.

Here he is basically trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Even though I am coaching him to turn it on its side, he is making the face, saying the phrase, and doing the bellyaching. We get this A LOT.

So what do I do? I continue to tell him he can do it (using the phrase correctly, and yes, he does understand what it means) and continue to be a mean mom by not interfering. When this happens in public, I am sure people think I am being mean. Here is this cute little child crying needing help and this cruel mother is just watching him struggle. Uh huh. Live my life for a while and you will see that victory does not come cheap. Yet here is the reward when he does it himself:

Do you really want me to take that away from him? Or from me for that matter? Like I said, victory is not cheap so we savor each one. For example, for the last three weeks we have been trying to get him to put his pull-up in the correct place. If it's wet, it goes in the diaper genie. If it's dry, he can put it back on. It took a few weeks to finally get him to understand that if the pull-up still has a picture on it, it's dry. If the picture is gone, it's wet. Seriously, that took about two weeks, going over it multiple times a day to establish that. Now that he has that down, he has to figure out where it goes. The typical conversation goes like this: Me: "Okay, is the picture there?" LB "Yeah, picture there." "Okay, if the picture is there, your pull-up is....." LB:"Wet" Me: "No, remember if the picture is there, it's not wet. It is...." LB: "Wet." Me: "No, the picture is there, we can see the picture. Look (I then show him one by one the pull-ups in the drawer, show him the picture and say that it's dry). See, all of these have the pictures on. Yours has the picture on, so it is...." LB: "Wet." Me: "NO!!!" LB: "It dry." Me: "YES!!!! If it's dry like the ones in the drawer, you should put it where?" LB: "In the diaper genie." Me: "No, only wet ones go in the diaper genie. Yours is dry. When they are dry, you can put them back on. So....since yours is dry, you will put it...." LB: "In a diaper genie." Then my head explodes. I have confidence that he will finally master this, but the road to mastering it is a long bumpy one.

I had to save these pictures for the end of my discussion on blessings:

I may just treasure this one the rest of my life. When I look at this, I flashforward years from now when they are both adults and still very close.

Quite a far cry from this time in our lives.... (enjoy without comment, except to say that these pictures were taken in 2011...a lifetime ago it seems)