Two Under 2: Road Trip Edition

My sister got married on Christmas Eve.

She and the rest of my family live about 1,000 miles north of us.

We have an almost 2-year-old and an almost 3-month-old.

And the rest is history…

On the way up, we drove through the night. It took us 13 hours. We stopped three times for a total of 30 minutes. Eliza slept most of the time, although she would wake up, fuss, and go back to sleep constantly. Christian slept for about 4 hours, cried for about 2, and played quietly the rest of the time (!).

On the way back, we split the trip up into three parts. The first day we drove 3 hours and stopped at our friends’ house overnight. The second day was 7 hours with an overnight hotel stop, and the third day was 6 hours. Eliza was an angel. She napped, cooed, and looked out the window. She only got upset when it was dark outside and she couldn’t see, but that was for a short amount of time.

Christian was most vehemently not a fan of the daytime drive. Toddlers are just not meant to be strapped into a carseat for hours on end when they’re used to running around in freedom.

So from a now veteran two-under-2-road-tripper, here are a few tips if you find yourself in a similar situation:

1. Bring electronic toys. As annoying as they may be to listen to, they’re less stressful than a screaming toddler. (Of course, a portable DVD player would be even better.)

2. Make room to sit in the back with the kids. This made a big difference for Eliza; she loved being able to see me.

3. Pack lots of snacks. The hungrier Christian was, the crankier he was.

4. Pack an individual diaper bag for each child. This really helped so we could double-team at stops without having to pass the bag back and forth.

5. Sing and do lots of finger-plays.

6. Pray for patience… and bring earplugs.

Any road trip experience with very young children? What got you through?

Simply Going on in Peace

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt

I love revisiting Elisabeth Elliot’s writings. Her ideas can seem quaint now, but look a little closer and they have a lot of wisdom.

These particular quotes are from Keep a Quiet Heart and The Music of His Promises. They encouraged me, since lately I’ve been struggling with being stressed over all I have to do.

The first quote reminds me of how important this “little” work is, all these endless details that make up my days, cleaning food off the floor and folding laundry and reading stories and naming colors.

And the other two quotes help me remember the importance of trusting God’s sovereignty over the details of my life, instead of trying to carry the burden of all that must be accomplished.

In other news, I’m so excited that this is the week of Christmas. We’re packing for a road trip, my sister’s wedding, and a family Christmas… so much excitement!

I hope you all have a very blessed Christmas!

I Read About Myself Today

In a picture book:

All day long, various animals ask Squirrel to join them in activities such as resting on a branch or playing in the water.

And each time, the response is, “But Squirrel couldn’t – he was too busy!”

I’m not comparing my children’s requests to the animals’ requests, because a large portion of my busyness is spent doing things with them. But I do feel quite a bit like Squirrel.

The very last request comes from a family of owls, who ask Squirrel to watch the moon with them. The story ends with, “But Squirrel couldn’t – he was fast asleep.”

I can’t think of a better summary of my life right now!

Imperfectly Perfect

It’s easy to make one’s life sound either picturesquely ideal or perpetually chaotic, especially on a blog. My last post emphasized the chaotic… so today I’m sharing some happy bits of life. They always go hand in hand, don’t they?

I’m growing to love cooking. I’m trying to keep it wholesome and simple… which sometimes translates to boring, but I’m working on it.

Supper tonight:

{photo & recipe: black bean pumpkin soup}

I sneaked a few tastes and it’s quite promising.

I’m experimenting with making healthy homemade bread. Buying it is so expensive. A loaf of this is cooling on the table right now:

{photo & recipe: honey whole wheat sandwich bread}

Eliza, dear child, is on her second 2-hour nap of the day. (Yesterday she took about seven 20-minute naps.) I’m not really sure what to do with myself.

I wish I could show you pictures of my pretty Christmas decorations (I love Grace’s), but we won’t be here for Christmas and we haven’t done anything but hang up some Christmas lights in unusual places around our living room. It still makes for a festive atmosphere in the evenings.

[Side note: My next area of life to research and grow in is going to be decorating (frugally). And I can’t wait to start some simple, meaningful Christmas traditions next year; we’ll have a 1-year-old and an almost-3-year-old!]

We’ve been taking tentative steps into a basic routine, and it’s given us a more peaceful few days recently.

Lastly, have any of you seen the ESVBible.org website? You can create a free account, go through a variety of devotional plans, highlight and underline, etc. I like using it in the early mornings when I’m up with Eliza.

I hope you all are having a good Tuesday! I can’t believe Christmas is only 12 days away!

Two Under 2: Confessions

~Sometimes often it takes all morning just to wash the breakfast dishes and get the three of us dressed and ready.

~I’m never quite sure if I’m spending enough quality time with either child.

~I still let Eliza sleep in her glider for most of her naps. It’s just too hard to teach “drowsy but awake” when I have a toddler running around.

~I really wish we had a better routine right now, but I’m not quite sure how to get there.

~I really really wish I had family living nearby.

~I should use any tandem naptimes to nap or get things done, but a lot of times I take a nice quiet coffee break instead.

~We’ve gone over my 30 minutes of TV per day rule a little more than I’d like recently.

~Every day I have countdowns to naptime and A.J. coming home.

~I’m discouraged right now because it seems like I can barely keep up on the basics, much less anything else.

~For example: I haven’t cleaned my showers in an embarrassingly long time.

~I worry too much about Eliza. Babies are so little and vulnerable and I sometimes don’t want to go to sleep at night because I’d rather be keeping an eye on her as she sleeps.

~I can’t wait until Christian learns how to play nicely with his sister so I can actually leave them on the floor together.

~I’m not sure how I can both dislike and cherish this season at the same time, but I do.

What are your mommy confessions?

This Is My Esther Moment

Just now, in her post, I read the words: “This is our Esther moment.”

“For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14)

I can’t see what God may be doing in each circumstance I encounter. I’m often tempted to choose the easy way out instead of walking the hard road of obedience – kindness, sacrifice, patience, and selflessness.

Esther chose to risk her life. She defied fear and walked into the presence of the most powerful person she knew, because God had sent her for that very purpose.

I don’t want to miss my moments. I don’t want fear to stop me from obedience, from laying my life down for others. I am called to die to myself daily.

And who knows if I have not been called for such a time as this?

[photo]

Long Days and Short Years

I have to admit one of the reasons I don’t blog much anymore is because I’m afraid to start a post for fear I’ll be interrupted and unable to finish. But here I go anyway!

Christian and Eliza have been sleeping at the same time for about an hour now. I’m sitting on the couch sweltering… in December. It’s probably almost 80 in the house right now and it just feels so warm. But I refuse to turn on the air conditioning, because I’m not pregnant anymore and A/C in December is ridiculous. And expensive.

I finally uploaded a bunch of pictures from our camera. The memory card is full now so I have to figure out how to get them all off the camera (I didn’t automatically delete them when I uploaded them). I hadn’t uploaded pictures for a year. Unbelievable.

So, in my mind there is a scale of tiredness:

Well-Rested
Mildly Sleepy
Quite Tired
Can’t Keep My Eyes Open
Mind-Numbingly Exhausted

Miss Eliza has been sleeping till 6 am lately, so I’ve been only Mildly Sleepy. But I had trouble sleeping last night, and then she woke up around 5:45 this morning, for the day, so I’m feeling Quite Tired. I hope that second cup of coffee is kicking in right now. (Why am I not napping, you ask? Umm… I’m not sure. Because I have a bumper sticker that says “I’d rather be blogging.” [Not really.])

She’s such a sweet baby.

Christian is getting so old. I’m looking forward to his language skills developing enough that I can have conversations with him. He’s saying new words daily. He thinks school buses are amazing. Whenever we see one while we’re driving, I hear his little high-pitched voice from the backseat: “BUS?!” I found a library book that has 32 lined up on one page (we count everything right now). His eyes got huge the first time we read it.

I was just listening to an online radio interview with Rachel Jankovic, and something she said struck me. Paraphrasing, she said as mothers we have to learn to have a sense of humor about what we’re doing, yet we also have to take very seriously our responsibility and the daily impact we have on our children.

Yet another area of balance in life… sometimes all I can do is laugh at certain situations that arise, but this whole calling of motherhood is nothing to be taken lightly. I have two little eternal souls in my home and it’s my responsibility to preach Christ to them through our interactions, even long before they can understand my words.

Being a parent sure does reveal my own sinfulness to me. I’m glad God gives grace through Christ for the otherwise hopeless sinner. Sometimes (okay, often) I’m desperately in need of an attitude adjustment, and I realize how much I need to grow at the same time as I’m instructing my toddler on right and wrong.

I have so much more I could write, but time is ticking and I hear Christian coughing, which may or may not mean he’s awake. Time to get geared up for the second half of the day!

Living Epistles

Each time I manage to write a blog post, it should begin with an ode to naptime, because that’s usually the only way I’m writing. It would be something like:

Naptime…
when littles peacefully slumber
and there is again space to breathe
and think.

Ahem. Clearly I won’t be winning any poetry awards anytime soon.

I used to love to write. I wanted to become really good at it. And now? I still love it, but I’m so rusty and haven’t honed it much. But it reminds me of an excerpt from Anne of Ingleside:

“And you’ve quite given it [writing] up?” asked Christine.

“Not altogether… but I’m writing living epistles now,” said Anne, thinking of Jem and Co.

[takes a break as Eliza has woken and wants to eat]

Where was I?

Naptime… writing… nowhere, really.

Last night I was spending some time on Sally Clarkson’s blog, I Take Joy. It’s not a regular read of mine but I think it’s going to be. Here’s an excerpt from today’s post:

A sweet young mom in my ministry was telling a story recently. She has a new baby and her mom has encouraged her to nurse her sweet baby when she cries, to cuddle and sing to her, to hold her, to comfort her and to enjoy her. My friend is surprised at how responsive her new infant is, even at three months, and how easily she comforts.

A friend of hers who had her baby at the same time, read baby-wise. She does not hold her baby often. She will not feed her baby until 4 hours exactly, as she does not want to train her babe to be selfish and break the baby-wise law and need her, and so on. When the two were together, the babywise mom, whose baby was fussy and cried a lot, proclaimed. “Look at my baby. Even at 3 months you can see that she is strong willed and defiant–just look how she cries when I don’t pick her up. But what she didn’t know was that her baby was saying,  ”Hey, mom, I need you. I am hungry and insecure–would you please hold me?”

To be honest, this brought back some painful memories. I wrote about Babywise last year when Christian was a few months old. I was overly influenced by the desire to get him started on good habits and a routine. It stressed me out and I am sad that I didn’t just relax and focus on nurturing him. I thought he was so fussy. I do have to say that part of the problem wasn’t Babywise, it was just that I had no idea how to get him to sleep.

Now with Eliza, she seems so easy because I just go with the flow and do whatever she wants. And you know what? She rarely fusses (except in the evening, although that’s gotten better).

I do find our days go more smoothly when I encourage some structure (watching for sleepy cues, helping her extend naps, etc.), but I’m such a big softie now – maybe a little to the extreme.

I get sad and stressed if I can’t hold her or play with her the whole time she’s awake, which I do most of the time, but it isn’t always possible with my “four-limbed wrecking ball” (stole that phrase from Emily) running around.

Anyway, that was kind of a tangent, but my point was that I love Sally Clarkson’s emphasis on compassion and grace in raising children, although not to the exclusion of rules and discipline.

I was going to write more, but I think this post is long enough and I want to enjoy a little non-blogging free time before my littles wake back up. Happy first day of Advent!

Two Under 2: Guest Post by LeAnna

Ironically, I’ve been so busy with having two children under 2 that I’ve hardly had time to post about it. Even as I write, I’m trying to get Eliza to sleep (if it sounds complicated, it is). I’ve been meaning to publish this post from LeAnna for a few weeks now. I think you are really going to enjoy it. I’ve reread it a few times and it’s blessed me so much!

I’ve been reading LeAnna’s blog at least since Christian was born. She is so funny and real, and also one of the most encouraging bloggers I know. (And extremely thoughtful – she sent Eliza an adorable, personalized outfit.) Her blog’s definitely worth a regular read!

When I became a mother I realized just why God breathed inspiration into man in regards to writing the Word.

Had a woman been given the task…

Well, just let me tell you.

That Proverbs 31 passage we women hold dear would have started out somewhat different. I can see it now, “A diligent Mother, who can find? She spends her days keeping her children from causing one another bodily harm…” and that’s where it would have been left, because no doubt, in the two seconds that it took for the Holy Spirit to inspire that Hebrew Mama, her little 2 year old Samuel would have been busy trying to poke challah down baby Miriam’s throat. Soon after preventing impending doom, said Mama would have remembered she left a basket of wash at the well in town. Packing up both children, she journeys back to retrieve the garments. No sooner do they leave their tent and Samuel declares he has gone poo in his britches…and baby Miriam suddenly becomes ravenously hungry.

Proverbs what, Lord?

I have two children, twenty one months apart, and I spend my days in perpetual motion.

Mostly wiping little bottoms and batting at the parenting fog that likes to fall in front of my face like freshly cut bangs. Other noted skills are preventing falls and the ingestion of foreign objects and promoting peace and goodwill between brother and sister. Occasionally breaking down into the puddle of imperfect and overwhelmed. Okay, more than occasionally. I might live there for days on end, but never fear, I have rain boots and I’m not afraid to stomp while puddle jumping.

Having several small children is challenging. Tiring. Overwhelming. Busy.

When my daughter was born, and I was transitioning to having two under two for a short while, I thought surely I would never survive. I vividly remember our first outing, just the three of us. I was dazed and confused, walked into the store, made it down a few aisles and found myself headed back to the car. Some stores have small carts, I’ve found. They don’t fit the car seat and the young toddler. Must plan accordingly.

“Planning accordingly” turned into me not going anywhere if I could help it. I harnessed all my energy into getting my two Littles to nap simultaneously. That is no small feat, you see. The pinnacle of mothering thus far. I rejoiced the day it happened and may have lightly fist bumped myself in the mirror because (shhhh) there was no one else around.

Then, I blinked a few times and wouldn’t you know, we’re quickly approaching 3rd and 1st birthdays. I’ve survived two under two so far. We go places now, on a regular basis and sometimes I even brave the small-cart stores and let my oldest walk with his own two legs. I do, however, still fist bump the mirror and talk to myself. To top it all off, I’ve even got two new pieces of luggage to prove my sojourn into the land of two under two (the bags under my eyes) but I still find my Husband to be quite attractive. Come to think of it, that’s how we ended up here.

So, when I hear of a friend who is soon to be a Mom of two (or more!) small tykes, I smile.

I tell her she can do it.
That she’ll make it.
That she’ll be the most tired she’s ever been, but that it’s possible.

Because it is. In an act of total mercy, God transforms you into something you never knew you could be. Even though some days you feel like you’re in survival mode, and some days you wonder if your head is actually attached to your body. When we look past the here and now, it will find us empty nesting, wishing for some of those days again. As I struggle through the impossible manifested as possible, I try to keep this
fresh in my tired mind. These are the years we will miss, my fellow (weary) Mothers. Repeat after me: These are the years we will miss.

All of that to say, I’m thankful that God did not inspire the written Word through me, but also thankful that He calls iron to sharpen iron. Now, please pass the cup of perpetual hot coffee. Love. Love. Love. Love your husband, love your children, love your fellow Mom-kind. Rest in Christ when there is no rest to be found. In doing so, compare nothing to no one, freely giving grace as it has been given to you. Perhaps equally as important, keep the bright pink play dough that your 2 1/2 year old loves, out of reach of your 9 month old’s chubby hands…

*No children were harmed during the 1 week writing process of this sage piece of wisdom. The end.

*Not really the end, I would also like to remind Anna to soak up that newborn smell for as long as she possibly can. Dear friend, if you find yourself in the midst of one of those days, stop everything you’re doing and sit down. Pull sweet Eliza up to your face and breathe in her newborn smell. Even if Christian is beating the hair right off of your legs that haven’t been shaved in six days…breathe it in deep, Mama. It won’t get the dishes done, or make the baby stop crying, but you’ll be glad you did.

*Now, The End.

Where We Are Today

Little ones with colds… thankful for saline drops, the bulb syringe, DVDs to watch, and extra snuggles.

Fatigue… thankful for coffee.

Hunger… thankful for healthy, nourishing food.

Dirty clothes… thankful for a functioning washer and dryer.

A wakeful, catnapping baby… thankful for a pacifier and a glider.

Overwhelmed… by the constant gifts heaped upon me so undeservingly.

Behind on blogging… but blessedly busy.

Gospel. Grace. The fragrance of Christ. Life to those being saved… words on my heart.

Savior… most blessed gift of all.