Easterz.

I decided at some point today that there were quite a few things that I would like to remember about this Easter.  The first being the look on our children’s faces when they found their Easter baskets…just kidding…we didn’t do Easter baskets this year.  It just didn’t happen.  This was one of those holidays that ended up being time slotted right down to the last seconds of each day.  We enjoyed two egg hunts and the kids are rarely experiencing a candy shortage and aside from being exhausted and spread really thin, the kids are hip to the jive and they all know that there’s no Santa or Easter Bunny or tooth fairy or any of that.  And for the record, kids don’t like liars.  No one does. So at the end of this whole parenting adventure, if someone decides to tell me that I did a bad job fibbing to my kids about make believe crap…I’ll still be able to sleep at night.

What will be memorable is the feeling of waking up and not really wanting to go to church.  I don’t know what’s wrong with me at this stage of my “Christian Game”, but my social anxiety tends to really flare up at church and I’m pretty sure that we’re going thru the motions for the kids…because while we are both feeling a little stale in our “relationships with God”…church is a nice place to meet people with decent values and its a good place for kids to make friends and hopefully stay out of trouble.  I had no such upbringing…so these are all just assumptions.  Chris and I are big on doing what we think is right to do…wether we feel warm and fuzzy or not.  Unfortunately, the kids are all pissed about going to church, mostly because they are supposed to sing in front of everyone and if I’m honest, I can’t blame them.  Iris usually has a great attitude, but the boys are another story.  The more they revolted about going to church the more Chris asserted that they were helping to solidify his decision that we were going.  At one point he referred to the boys as “Bullies”…trying to bend Chris’ will to match their own.

One thing no one really mentions when you are pregnant is what it will potentially be like when 1 or 2 or 5 of the humans you make start having ideas and preferences and voices of their own.  Like when you realize that your five year olds favorite pants don’t become any less “favorite” just because there is a hole in each knee.  Or when your 7 year old likes to circle and label the scars on his legs…leaving him looking like someone’s abandoned science project…and a grodey kid.  Maybe 3 kids want eggs and grits and 2 want pancakes and you ultimately have to come to terms with the fact that you can never please 100% of the people 100% of the time.  And most likely, if 100% of the people are pleased, than mom is probably holding back some of her own grievances.

Of late I have been challenging myself to stop micro-managing the masses.  I decided to take on this challenge after I started noticing my oldest, the twins, beginning to do it to their younger siblings.  I found myself saying “Geez guys! Let people live!”  Upon completing a little self reflection, LOW AND BEHOLD, I too had been over managing the group.  It mostly looked like a flustered woman trying to wipe faces and scrub pen off body parts and keep play dough colors from mixing.  Its a battle that is being lost all over the planet by every mother thats ever had breath in her lungs.  And so, while I would not be allowing the children to stay home from church, I wasn’t going to micro manage their Easter attire.

Chris and I stood on the balcony at church holding Max and watching below while Owen refused to participate in the kindergartener’s little song.  Whatever.  No big deal.  He stayed in the back, stood quietly.  Then we got to enjoy watching Iris sing her little heart out next to Flynn, who half heartedly participated (with his baseball cap in place) next to Micah who was basically there to ruin other peoples video footage of their lovely singing child on Easter Sunday.  No joke.  Micah not only DID NOT sing, but he sat on the edge of the stage with his back to the congregation like they did not even exist.  Occasionally he would glance up at us and we tried with every facial expression possible to convey how perturbed we were that he couldn’t show some respect at least to the kids who actually were singing…just stand there Micah!  He was pretty non responsive.  Thankfully we had a whole hour before we would see Micah, to breath it out and basically re accept the strong willed, obnoxious, disinterested young man that is our son.  He is sneaky.  He is selfish.  He is rammy. He is loud and inconsiderate.  And he is all ours.  Most days it seems like Micahs strengths barely outweigh his weaknesses, but I have to believe it is only because he is still growing and maturing and developing.  An hour later, I could really care less how he acted on that stage.  He didn’t want to perform in front of a bunch of people he didn’t know and for that I can not blame him.  Micah just doesn’t have that thing that the rest of us develop along the way that makes us pretend we like doing stuff that we actually hate so that we will be viewed a certain way.  “No nonsense Mike”.  That’s my new nickname for him.  Even though his name is Micah we always shorten it to Mike for nicknames.  We’ve called him “White Hot Mike”, “Iron Mike”, “Rebel Mike”, “100% Mike” (when he brings home a 100% on a spelling test)…just to name a few.  I wish I could say “what you see is what you get”, but that is not the case…he has proven to be one of our most intuitive and thoughtful (as in always thinking, but not necessarily in the caring for others kind of way) children.  There was some part of me that watched that child, refusing to perform for church ladies and gentlemen that reminded me of the verse in Galatians that says that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.  Micah was acting out his freedom and doing a fine job at that.  May we all remember that our freedom of choice is precisely the gift God wished to give us in sending His Son.

As we loaded into the van after church I simply mentioned how much I enjoyed hearing all their little voices singing.  No-one seemed to care either way.  We headed off to our favorite Indian food restaurant in Lancaster…we get a hankering about once a month.  We had some late afternoon plans with friends but were pleased to have enough time to set off for some chicken tikka masala!  We kept it a secret till we arrived and the kids erupted with gladness upon turning into the parking lot.  After a 20 minute wait we were seated in the middle of the dining room.  Chris remained at the table with sleeping Max in his carseat while I accompanied the other children to the buffet.  Owen, fully jumping the gun, proceeds to dump one spoonful of rice right onto the floor.  I was right there, and so I took over for him immediately.  While finishing serving him I over heard a woman telling her husband that she watched Owen let the handle from a set of tongs fall into a pan of food.  I pretended not to hear…just be aware people, sometimes you could very well be eating the germs from every persons hands in the entire restaurant.  Frankly, I think its comical that any of us think that we aren’t.  Hand sanitize all you want…it counts for nothing when a group of reckless kids finds their way to an open buffet of food.  Lets all build our immunities together!!

Once seated and eating, everyone is happy and quiet and considerably well behaved…aside from rice EVERYWHERE…but short of bringing along my own travel vacuum and tipping really well, there isn’t much I can do about that.  Max is now awake and is enjoying nibbling Naan.  At one point Flynn mentions to me that he keeps slipping his Crocs off his feet.  I don’t think anything of this.  It’s not that uncommon for a kid (or a grown person) to slip their shoes off under the table.  “Huh.” I believe was my unenthusiastic response.  I stand up in the crowded dining room to go get a plate of food for Max.  Out of the corner of my eye I see on the floor a set of bare, hobbit-esque feet…standing on the plastic runner beside me.  I am astonished.  My head jolts directly to my left.  It is Flynn.  My oldest, (10 years old) most mature and responsible child is standing barefoot beside me in an extremely crowded restaurant dining room.  In partial disbelief I yell whisper to him, “Is this a joke Flynn!?”  He looks confused.  “You CANNOT walk around barefoot in a restaurant dude!”  He immediately scurries back to the table and slips his Crocs on.  In Flynn’s defense, Crocs are basically a more acceptable version of bare footedness…and considering that we had already contaminated this buffet…whats the difference…but like I said, the micromanager in me dies hard!  Apparently Flynn was not present the day we went over all the things that are absolutely forbidden in American eating establishments.  Come to think of it, he definitely missed it…because it never happened…because for some reason I assumed that we are all born with a common understanding that in restaurants, especially buffet style restaurants where perhaps several trips around the dining room are necessary…you shall remain SHOED! Its hard not to imagine the things people say about a family like ours once we finally get up and leave.  You leave hoping that everyone seated around you at least only got one angle.  No-one could have seen the hurricane of rice around Micah’s chair AND the tong handle submersion AND the bare feet…most people were only catching one or two…but hopefully not all three angles.  Meanwhile Iris has chosen this as a good time to ask,

“Mom, how does a woman know that she is going to have a baby?”

Knowing that I could clearly hear conversations taking place at tables all around us, I believed that they too could hear ours…I lean towards her…

“I could tell you another time Iris…it isn’t really a lunch conversation.”

“Well, is it because she goes to the doctor?”

“Yea.  The doctor tells her.” (Just trying to end the probing.)

“So, does she go to the doctor every year?” her head is tilted, puzzled look on her face.

“Yep.  Yearly visits.”  (Its over…right!?)

Her food steals back her attention.

Naturally, when the meal is over Chris is the first to get up and leave…acting as if the baby NEEDS him to exit the restaurant immediately.  I’m left with a few stragglers, slowly chewing and a destroyed table and surrounding area.  In an effort to seem like an OK human being, I begin scooting rice around with a napkin…as if cleaning up this rice were even a possibility.  Its all about appearances…right?  Once we are all in agreement that no more damage could be done, we stand up and head for the door.  I mouth an apology to the host as we leave the place…to whisper whatever it is that people whisper when a side show like ours pulls out.

With a little bit of time to kill before meeting our friends, we attempt to go play some ski-ball at the mall.  Apparently malls are closed on Easter.  Thats no fun.  What is fun though, is sending your four older kids up to “check the door” and then speeding away.  Chris would have left them there for a much longer amount of time, but I reminded him of the damage that our children (mostly the boys) can do when left to their own devices too long.  Someone would have quickly assumed the winterized fountain as base camp and we would not have been able to coax them back into the van for any amount of anything…it becomes a principal thing with these guys.  Just the fact that we playfully pretended to abandon them would have ignited a rebellious fire that wouldn’t be easily quenched.  We load up and head north to our friend’s piece of camp land for an egg hunt.

Our friends have this funny habit of inviting us out to camp for a “campfire” and when we arrive there are 10 other cars there and 50 other people.  We assumed this would be more of the same.  However, when we arrived we saw only their van and their five children running about frantically, hiding eggs.  Our friend Kevin approached our vehicle.  The window goes down.  I have to ask.

“Are your kids hiding eggs for our kids?”

“Yeh.  They already found like 250 at my moms…they didn’t need to hunt for anymore.”

What a special, exclusive event.  The best part is that when our kids got out and started hunting for eggs, their kids helped them find every single one…cause they knew exactly where they were!  It was really a fun time.  We ended the night back at our friends house for dinner and a movie.  On our drive home that evening, Chris and I agreed that the holidays can be quite exhausting with all these kids.  From Thursday afternoon when the kids got home from school right up to Sunday night it felt like we didn’t stop going and doing.  Someday these days will be far behind us and Chris and I will finally live in a little camper that we park wherever we feel like seeing the sun rise the next day and hopefully our children will be begging us to come to Easter at their house.  Until then, may they know how very difficult it is for their father and I to respect their free wills (but we’re desperately trying here!) and may they go easy on us…so we live to see the previously mentioned camper.