Children and cleaning.... a lesson I've learned

I learned something.  Right now it is 12:33am and a bit ago I got back up out of bed because I couldn't sleep.  I was upset about something and well I decided that since I wasn't sleeping anyway I should tackle the disaster that is currently my kitchen while everyone else was asleep and the house was peaceful.  To tell you the truth though it felt creepy more than peaceful at this time of night. lol  Anyway while bustling about the kitchen unloading the dishwasher and re-loading it I was thinking about how frustrated and burnt out I felt tonight when KOJ got home.

I've spent the last three days cleaning and organizing.  On Sunday I started a giant re-organization project that touched EVERY room of the house but the bathroom.  So by the time we went to bed Sunday night the house was in shambles.  I've spent the last two days working diligently at putting everything back together only better.  No worries a post with pics to come later this week... maybe next week.  Soon. 

In my cleaning frenzy I've been trying to get the kids to occupy themselves, using the tv as a babysitter more than I like, and just getting really annoyed at having to go back and re-do something I just did because there's a 16 mo old in the house.

See:

She's totally cute (see her first pig tails!) but she's a trouble maker by nature.

Anyway I was pondering in the kitchen about WHY I've been so burnt out.  And I realized that I hadn't been feeling burnt out the last week or two because I'd gotten into a routine of sharing the burden with the kids.  We had gotten into a rhythm of the kids helping.  It isn't always consistent.  It's not always the same task or the same time of day but when things needed to get done I would have the kids help.  They are learning responsibility and it's leaving ME less burnt out.  Only I hadn't realized that yet.  Until tonight.  Now I know.

I know that it is more important for me to spend my time with my children and include them in these things.  Even though it will take longer, not be done as perfectly, and there will often be whining.  I need to let go of the ideal I have in my head of the perfectly clean and organized home.  I need to continue to do the best I can but not lose sight of the fact that it's the kids that are my main priority.  Having an orderly home is for their benefit.  Not the benefit of others.  And if there are cheerios on the floor even though I just swept the dining room for the third time today, oh well.  And if the living room only gets vacuumed once a week we'll live.  I don't want to be a lazy slob anymore but I also don't want to be neurotic about how clean the house is either.  As with just about every area of life and parenting the key is balance.  If someone finds the key let me know, I'd love a copy!

Feeling inadequate

So often in my life I have felt inadequate.  I have felt undeserving of any compliment of my mothering, wifing, housekeeping.  I have felt like the biggest sham on the face of the planet.

I think that this was two fold.  On the one hand I felt like I was able to put on a decent front in front of other people and so they believed me to be something that I was not behind closed doors.  And on the other hand I made assumptions about the other person's idea of this or that.  For example if someone told me that I had such well behaved kids in public then I felt like a sham because let's face it behind closed doors they are no angels.  I made an assumption that the person has this idea that my children are always well behaved.  But perhaps this person has had children or been around children and knows that sometimes them not whacking each other over the smallest thing (usually a toy car) is great behavior.  Perhaps their comment is TRUE.  Perhaps they don't care what my children act like outside of the grocery store.

I have felt similarly about my home.  I try my best and I've made huge strides this year.  Strides that I'm proud of.  As I glance around my home right now and see toys all over the living room floor, laundry needing to be put all the way away, and knowing that there are dishes on the counter and the floors need swept.  I also know that I worked hard today and that this is just the result of living with four small children.  I didn't used to know that.  I didn't used to feel that it was ok for the house to not always be lived in and it's ok to accept, graciously, compliments given to me by others who happen upon my house on a good day.  I mean really, the house didn't clean itself.  I know because I've tried to let it in the past and it just doesn't cooperate.

All that to say that I feel free.  On this issue of housekeeping and the pressures I once felt, I feel free.  On the issue of parenting my children and the pressures I once felt, I feel free.  I feel free to ignore the assumed pressures from other sources and focus on what KOJ and I believe is important to teach our children.  I feel free to go to bed without washing that last dish and with a laundry hamper still flowing with laundry.  There's always tomorrow.  And really as long as I've loved my children well TODAY and put them to bed with lots of love.  And as long as I've loved KOJ well today and go to bed at peace with him then well, that's all the housekeeping I need to concern myself with at the end of a long day.  There's always tomorrow to wash that dish, put away that laundry, and have that little argument over something that will be completely meaningless within a few hours.

I think that the biggest changes in me over this last year have had little to do with housekeeping and EVERYTHING to do with finding some contentment and fulfillment in God.  A recent verse in my bible study on contentment was from Psalm 139.  I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  God knew my heart before I was ever born and He knows all the days of my life.  He created me especially to be me.  Finding a peace with that has just been amazing.  It is what has lead to the sense of freedom I feel.

It also lead to being more on top of an issue I've long struggled with.  My weight.  I'm not perfect.  Some days are better than others.  But I'm trying and taking it one day at a time.  If I screw up today, there's no reason in the world I can't pick myself up and do better tomorrow and in that mind set I'm very happy to say that I'm currently at a 14lb weight loss.  It's just a small dent in the long term goal but it makes me able to face myself in the mirror everyday.  Just knowing that I'm doing something about it makes me feel better about myself.  My clothes are starting to fit better too.  I can't wait for the day that I can move down a size.  Eek, so exciting.

The feelings of inadequacy still sometimes try to settle in and I try my hardest to pray and remember who I am in God.  It really helps a lot.  But I do still have my struggles.  Life isn't completely perfect, after all we're still here in this fallen world.

Once upon a time: Prayer and happily ever after

Once upon a time there was a young girl.  She loved God with all of her heart.  She knew that what she wanted to be when she grew up was a teacher, wife, and mommy  .  She wanted to save the best gift in the world for her future husband.  In the innocence that is child-like faith she began praying for her future husband.  That he would wait for her.  That God would be with him and call her future husband to Himself.  She prayed many a prayer.  She felt very strongly about this habit.  She didn't know who he was or where he was just that he was someone somewhere and God could be with him at this time when she couldn't.

Meanwhile halfway across the country there was a boy.  He was in his pre-teen years when a young girl a few years older than him began praying for him.  He lived with loving parents and a sister.  He had been exposed to church but didn't have a loving relationship with God, his creator.

Throughout his high school years God gave him friends that invited him to church and witnessed to him about God's love.  At about this same time the young girl wasn't as young anymore and she hit a somewhat rebellious phase.  She still attended church and believed in and loved God but she had reached a point of wanting to do her own thing, her own way.  One night while on the internet she began chatting with a guy in a chat room.  They chatted about a lot of things and she just really felt a click.  There was something about this guy that drew her to him.  She was bummed to learn that he wasn't a Christian, but it wasn't enough to stop her from getting to know him further.

They spent hours chatting online and on the phone.  They wrote actual letters to each other too.  It was all very romantic.  She had also been chatting with another gentleman online who was a fellow believer but she didn't feel as much chemistry with him.  She knew that HE was the one she should be drawn to but he wasn't.

One crazy day she just knew she had to meet them.  She knew she needed to meet the Christian guy before the other one because logically he should be her first choice.  So she took time off work, hopped in her car and drove 20hrs or so to meet this guy.  She drove all night.  She met this man and while he was a great guy the chemistry was no more there in person than it was online and on the phone (despite his awesome southern accent).  She drove home though knowing that she had at least given him the chance he deserved.  She knew she needed to go meet the other guy now.  So she planned a weeks vacation, picked up her 12yr old sister along the way and they headed off to meet this guy she felt so drawn to.

Ironically they met at church (it was a public place!) a church that several of his high school friends attended.  She was completely smitten.

Two months later she packed up everything she owned and moved East to be near him while he attended college.  Five months later he began a personal relationship with the loving God she had been praying to all of her life.  He grew, he changed, she grew and changed.  She loved him.

In an intimate (and most perfect!) ceremony, in his parent's backyard, they got married.  Ten months later they welcomed their first child.  A few more children, job changes, home changes, and heart changes later they still love each other.

The girl has often pondered over the years how God could bless her when she was for all intents and purposes being rebellious when she met this man.  But she remembered recently the prayers of her youth.  The prayers for her beloved future husband.  Those prayers did not return void.  Those prayers were answered.  Even in her rebellion the Lord answered her faith filled prayers.  He had his hand on her husband even all those years.  He called her husband's heart to his as she had always prayed.

Now as a mother she will purpose to pray for her own children's future spouses because she has seen that even though it will take a long while to see the results of those prayers, those prayers work.  God is faithful.  So pray not only for your children, pray for their spouses.  You have no idea what kind of difference it might make in the spouse they become for your beloved child.

Make no mistake.  This girl doesn't look at her life, at her husband and children, and think to herself  "Wow I'm good, I got it all figured out and it was ME that got my life so right."  She looks at her life and says in a prayer "Despite me, my flaws, my rebellions, my own issues, God has been faithful to weave things together in exactly the right way to bless my life and answer my prayers."

Circumcision: why we stopped doing it

I frequent message boards here on the wonderful internet.  It's great to have a place to go to vent or ask questions and get answers from other moms who have likely been there and done that.  Inevitably though topics like vaccinating, car seat safety, cloth vs sposies, and circumcision come up.  I try to stay out of the circumcision discussions aside from stating what we did with our boys and why.  Then I leave and don't go back because it's a topic I feel very passionate about.  There are topics I have opinions about and there are topics that I feel super passionate about and this is one of the latter.  I don't get a terrible amount of readers here at my little blog but it's an outlet for me anyway.  And because this is my blog and this post is about MY views on circumscision I'm going to disable comments.  Not to offend those that are actual friends/relatives but this is the internet and with a word like circumcision in it this post will be easier to find for strangers who may just like to go around spouting off about things like this.  And so disable the comments I will do.

It all started almost 6yrs ago.  We were pregnant with our first child and I just KNEW I'd have a daughter first.  After all I was the oldest and I was a girl and my husband's sister was the oldest in their family.  Yeah well he wasn't a girl. lol  We were thrilled (though shocked) to be having a boy but because we found out rather late in pregnancy that he was a boy we had things to discuss and not a lot of time.  What will we name him?  Catherine just didn't seem right.  I remember having a very short conversation with my husband after we knew he was a boy.  It went something like this:

Me: What about circumcision?  Should we do it or not?

KOJ:  Sure, why not.

Me: Ok, yeah, I mean it's what you do.

We were so lacking some serious consideration and research on the topic and so when my baby boy was born after a long and arduous labor ended c-section they took him away the day before we went home and circumcised him.  He didn't have any adhesion or other issues from this circumcision and it went as well as I suppose it could.  I do wonder in hindsight after further research if the trauma from it isn't what caused some of our breastfeeding issues.

So round two.  When we were pregnant with baby number 2 we were aiming for a home birth with a midwife, it was, statistically, the best chance I had at getting a VBAC.  The thing was that home birth midwives don't circumcise.  So we would have to pay a mohel OOP to do it.  So I started researching to see if the research could convince me that it wasn't worth the money to circumcise bebe deux.  Even though we didn't know via ultrasound what we were having, I knew in my heart of hearts he was a boy.  Not a single doubt in my mind.  So I sat down at my handy dandy computer and searched out reasons to not circumcise.  WOW.  It change my whole view of it.  When KOJ came home from work I was sobbing as I told him that we just couldn't do that to another child.  I was appalled to read that the anesthetic - when they even bother to use it (which isn't often) doesn't even begin to touch the pain.  That babies who come back to their mothers "sleeping" are actually sleeping because they are in a state of shock from the pain.  That the foreskin on a boy has half of the nerve endings of the penis.  That the reduction in risk of UTI's is so negligible I can't even believe that anyone touted it as a reason to vaccinate.  I was more than convinced.  I would NEVER do that to another son again.  I spent days bursting into tears when I would think about what I had done to Squirrel monkey. 

All of that definitely convinced me not to vaccinate any longer but what really got me was this:  This is HIS penis.  Who am *I* to decide that it is best to chop a very important half of it off??  I mean people would be appalled if I got my daughter breast implants as a baby.  It's her body.  That is for her to decide at a later time.  I have the same belief about circumcising.  It is HIS body.  If for some reason down the road they want to get circumcised then they can do it with a trained professional while under proper anesthesia.  This topic is always discussed as a parenting issue but I don't believe that it should be.  It is a human rights issue.  It is my son's human right to say whether or not he wants part of his body cut off.  My younger two sons are happily intact.  I still regret circumcising Squirrel monkey but I don't spend my days beating myself up about it.  There isn't anything I can do now.  And really his birth was the catalyst in my researching it out with #2.

Questions commonly asked:
How do you keep it clean?  This question cracks me up.  I don't understand why it would be harder to clean an intact penis than a circ'd one.  Having both in the house I can say that it isn't harder.  Actually my intact boys are more likely to play with their penis' in the shower because of the extra nerve endings there.

What about your oldest noticing that he's different? Well he's 6 and he hasn't noticed yet.  He might notice one day and I will explain to him why he looks a bit different.  The explanation actually came to my middle son.  My youngest had been retracting his foreskin to expose the part of the penis you see in a circ'd boy and my middle wanted to know why he didn't have one of those and so I had to tell him that his foreskin retracted too and he did have one in there.  Otherwise there has never been a mention of differences before (or since) and this was just a couple of weeks ago.


Won't your intact sons feel insecure/get made fun of for being different? No, because the rates of intact vs circ'd nationally are something like 30% circ'd and 70% intact.  If any of my children will feel that way it would end up being my oldest.  But aside from the national rates is the fact that I don't buy into the locker room bullying issue.  Any boy who says he was looking at someone else's penis is a lot more likely to get made fun of himself.  Plus my kids are home-schooled as we all know well so the only people they see in the "locker room" is each other.

But the bible says.... the bible tells the Isrealites - God's chosen people - to circumcise their men so they will be set apart from other people.  We are not Isrealites.  There is a verse in the new testament that says that it doesn't matter if you're circ'd or not.  Also from what I've read in my research the circumcision of the old testament times was VERY different and less invasive than the circumcision of our day.  My family and I are saved by grace, not by deeds.  Praise God.

Don't take my views or opinion or word for it.  Research it for yourself.  Research it WITH your husbands.  I hear it all the time "My husband prefers we circumcise and since he has one I defer to him."  That doesn't make any sense to me.  I understand biblical submission if an agreement on the subject can't be reached but to defer to him over an issue that in my very strong opinion shouldn't even be something that parents have the right to decide over just seems silly.  Especially if the husband refuses to even research it and just wants it done because he is.  Again how often are your grown sons going to be comparing their penis to your husbands?  I hope never.  But maybe I'm naive.