It’s just been one of those days.  The kind of day where you need to look at the old man crossed eyed the minute he walks in the front door and say,  “Hello. I am not winning today. This day has completely overtaken me and it is only this thin layer of skin keeping me from disintegrating into one more mess in this house that will eventually need to be cleaned up before it turns into another one of those darkened “juice stain” areas on the kitchen floor. I’m only forming this sentence because of the mason jar of coffee I pounded like vitamin water just moments ago. Here is the baton (baby, rather). Beam me down when dinner is ready.” (Hover exits room)

Chris is at class. Maxwell is crying. The kids are in the yard. The neighbor twins are out and there is unbridled volume coming from their general direction. Owen falls from the wood pile as I instruct children to clean up shards of broken plastic…in an effort to keep the yard some what safe. (Ironic?) I go to him, assess the damage. Scraped knees. I help him out of the wood pile and we walk toward the house to clean and kiss boo-boos. While holding Max in the sling and wetting a paper towel for Owen’s scrapes I hear the unmistakable “pain cry” from Micah, just outside the back porch. I immediately leave the recently wounded yet stable child to assess new injuries to a second child. Micah’s eyes are overflowing as he tries to tell me that he hit his head on the side walk. Sensing my confusion, he tearfully continues to reenact the running…the golf club straight out in front of him…the edge of the sidewalk that catches the golf club…the catapulting action that flipped him over the golf club, landing him on his head on the sidewalk. He is seated on the back porch now, applying Ice to his head while I make sure his pupils are dilating. Owen approaches, clearly jaded at how easily distracted I have become. I return to the former task of caring for his scuffed knees. Meanwhile the kitchen counters and table are covered with the days grocery booty…waiting for someone (whoever you are) to put it all where it belongs. Per the consistent request of the children, I had also previously started making a batch of powerballs or as the kids call it “bird food” (an oat, seed, peanut butter, honey, chocolate chip, ball shaped snack). Within minutes all the children have congregated around the bowl to help add ingredients. Micah sitting to my right, still applying ice to his head. Owen sitting on top of the table among some grocery bags and a banana peel. Iris holding a measuring cup, waiting for instruction. Flynn, casually distancing himself at the end of the table. A day of touring the county’s finest discount grocery stores for camping snacks for the upcoming weekend has left him exhausted and uninterested in sous chef duties. Sensing an opportunity to put all our energy in an organized and positive direction, I give orders from the handicapped paradise that is swaying back and forth with an arm load of 3 week old baby love. As we read the recipe, I alert the kids that we are doubling the quantity and ask them to tell me how much of each ingredient we will need accordingly. We are half way thru the recipe. Everyone taking turns. Scooping. Pouring. Measuring. I ask, “Micah, can you tell me how much honey the recipe says to use?” Micah is propping/icing his head with one hand, he is staring down at the recipe. Unenthusiastically he responds, “I can’t read it. It’s in Chinese.” It is actually hand written in my slanted print. With such ease he has quenched our worn spirits with a moment of much needed laughter. I am once again reminded that for every ten horrific parenting moments in a day, thankfully there is usually one that takes your breath away…or allows you to start breathing again. (Cause maybe you’re like me and you’ve been holding your breath in anticipation for the next “running with golf club” incident) And those moments help dissolve the prickly, threatening words exchanged in a grocery store bathroom while you tried to scare your kids into behaving. They disintegrate the inadequacy you feel when you’ve lost track of how long your 4 year old has been playing gameboy. These moments span the chasm that is full of all your failures and overwhelmed, ill advised parenting catastrophes. It is in these precious, candid, spiritual snippets of life that we need to remain. Lingering in the reality that we DONT want to escape, believing that these are what are flavoring this cooking experiment and the rest is just to keep us appreciative and grasping at the flavorful entree that awaits. Like when healthy food tastes good and the kids are surprised. Yeah, there are lentils and kale and whole wheat pasta involved, but they aren’t making up the savory undertones of the stew. Understanding that when things taste bad, it’s only because they are waiting to get good. Really, REALLY, good. But maybe one ingredient is missing, like timing or a right attitude or a soft heart. And being brave enough to taste it all, even while the recipe is still in its infancy and there are lessons to be learned about what flavors to never combine and what ones work well together. And also keeping the sobering understanding that at any moment a child helper could over salt the whole pot or add an eggs worth of shells and you’re still going to pretend it’s delicious…cause it’s what’s for dinner.  It’s reality.

Chris is doing his marathon evening of classes (5:00-9:30) while the kids and I do bath night and laundry and nothing too especially spectacular, but this being our third one of these Tuesday nights this semester, I realize I’m beginning to really enjoy them. The kids are all a little easier on me in this the 8th month of what feels like a perpetual pregnancy…sensing that with dad away in the evening, I might be a bit more fragile than usual. Iris runs a bath for Owen and reads him a book. Micah brushes his teeth and puts himself to bed. Flynn comes in my room while I hang up laundry and chats with me…keeping me company. After retelling me what he most recently read in his Calvin and Hobbes comics, he asks if I want to see the injury he sustained earlier today while whittling a small block of cedar wood. “Yeah. Lemme see that”…realizing that when he told me about it earlier, he had already cleaned and bandaged it and therefore I never actually saw how bad the wound was. He holds out his finger. I said “You cleaned it? Right?” Both of us observing the dried blood around the small wound, he says “I did. But maybe I should clean it again.”
“Yeah. Go wash it. It’s gonna be fine.” Not immediately acting on my advice, Flynn drifts onto the next topic. “Mom, have you ever had a huge blister?”
“I can’t recall one lately, but I’m sure I have.”
“Like, did you ever have a blister from a burn.”
“Oh. Definitely.”
He stops bouncing on my bed long enough to reminisce…
“I remember once I had a big blister on my hand from the wood stove and this kinda weird kid in my first grade class said to me ‘Hey, could I get a little peek at your infection?'”
We both start laughing…mostly because of the weird, small voice that Flynn used to impersonate the boy…but also because at the ripe young age of a first grader, there is no awkwardness yet in expressing a compulsive interest in someone else’s “infection”. May he take that compulsion into some medical profession and be the very best in his field!

After finishing the lunch buffet at Taj Mahal Indian restaurant in Lancaster, ALL children needed to use the bathroom. Upon entering the hallway to the bathroom, they became enamoured with the beaded curtain separating the dining room from the bathroom corridor, adding several minutes to the already laborious bathroom routine that sweeps thru their small, overly efficient digestive systems after a meal. By the time everyone returned, the table had been cleared and the restaurant was almost empty (it had been completely full when we arrived). I asked a waiter if we needed to pay at the register or if the check would be brought to the table. She walked away to get our check and stayed away for another 5-7 minutes (which feels like forever when you’re keeping your kids from running their customary post lunch laps) She returned and told us in broken english that our bill had been paid. Surprised, Chris asked by whom? She motioned to the only other table of people left in the restaurant…a family of seven…with teenaged children…a set of twin girls in there. After the redness in our faces subsided (as the kids kept loudly asking “Who paid our bill!?”) we approached their table to thank them. The mother and father (of 8 kids total, their married children weren’t present) told us we reminded them of themselves not that many years ago. They said what a delight all their children have been to them and they expressed understanding that a large family isn’t always something people have positive opinions about, but that it’s such a special gift, and so worth it. While it was delightful to leave with our 60ish bucks, it was even more delightful to leave with their kind, encouraging words…especially in my 8 month pregnant “here we go again” condition. In a world with four person max capacity hotel rooms and food products featuring the words “family sized” that feed only half of the people you’re trying to sustain through another meal…and yes, most people with an opinion about “all those kids”, it’s nice to know that there are other crazies out there who have made it to the other side of raising a big, occasionally unmanageable family and can look back with enough fondness on the years that we are currently in to want to bless and encourage us in a profound way. Their actions spoke volumes to the kids, and I can’t wait to do the same to some overwhelmed, unsuspecting family someday. In the words of Michael Scott, “When I grow up, I wanna have a hundred kids…that way I’ll have at least a hundred friends.”

It is early.  Saturday morning.  Only Owen and I are downstairs.  Surprisingly, we have had a fluid morning of getting dressed and shoed…unlike most other mornings, riddled with argument and bribery, that I’ve endured to get the clothes on the boy child. It simply isn’t natural for him quite yet.  But today, as I sit on the sofa sipping my coffee, waiting for the house to come alive, he is approaching with coat in hand…something on the agenda it would seem.  He convinces me to let him cross the alley and search our parked van for his “Karate Sticks”.  “I’ll look both ways, Mom!”, he excitedly announces.  We’ve worked up to this and the kids know they don’t walk out the front door without a parental heads up…not in this hood…not with the county probation office just down the alley and folks all stormin past the front of our house after a rough visit to the P.O. (I’ve overheard a lot of post P.O. visit phone converstaions…to some enabling family member or maybe a “used to being belittled significant other.” It’s not pretty.)  So I watch him out the front window while he searches the van.  He emerges back thru the front door moments later, clearly disappointed in the search results but holding a fresh, ice cold bottle of water from the floor of the van.  “They weren’t there.” His face having told the story long before words got involved.  I’m still fresh with the days beginnings and feeling my first cup of coffee doing its job, so I put my best foot forward.  “Bummer.  You want a drink of that nice, cold water?”

“No.”

“Well, I do.  Can I have a sip?” Im trying to seem excited about what he did return from his cold, friutless trip out the front door possessing.  I hold out my hand while he helpfully twists the cap off with his teeth, grasping the bottle in his two small hands.  He’s a little bit proud of this trick.  He holds the bottle out to me, eager for the exchange.  I enjoy a refreshing sip of the ice cold water.  He is pleased.  Until he has enough time (really only a moment) to remember his original disappointment at the disappearance of the Karate Sticks. Earlier in his search around the home I heard him lament “Now how am I gonna learn KARATE!” Please note: his Karate Sticks consist of a lone drum stick and the long side of a rectangle mini chalk board frame…both found on the floor of the storage unit.)  He chooses to take this disappointment out on me while I am cooling my insides with the icy liquid.  His shoulders slump.  His face turns down.  “Now it has your germs on it.”  He doesnt like watching me enjoy this sip of cool water while he remains so dissatisfied with recent events.  I have no choice but to laugh.  Im looking at his weather crusted, snot moistened, upper lip…despite the tissue we used not 15 minutes ago.  I look at the brown dirt across the front of his fall jacket…the one I keep throwing on the perpetual laundry pile to be washed, but then it is needed again before I get the chance to wash it.  I cant help myself.

Smiling with every ounce of my face I inform him, “It looks like you might have more germs than me right about now.”

Sensing his inability to get under my skin by alerting me to my “germiness” or motivate me to be more concerned about his cause, he turns to go wallow and interrogate siblings as to the whereabouts of his Karate Sticks.  Just another loving and itty bit dysfunctional interaction with my 4 year old.  Thank you Owen, for keeping me on my emotional toes.