Friday, November 16, 2012

I have so many thoughts running around in my head right now, I just had to sit down and write.

We had an eventful day today, the morning was fortunately fairly slow, just the basic routine of a shower, juicing, breakfast, getting everyone dressed and teeth brushed, which all takes until about 10am anyway! Then I was trying to get a few little homeschooling things in, mainly helping Samuel with his image writing for letters, a whole new adventure we are embarking on of helping him overcome his struggle with symbol imagery to help reading become a reality for him. In the midst of this I am trying to do things like get dressed, brush my hair, make a few dishes to bring to our potluck, get the house picked up, have the kids practice their skit they wanted to perform at the Thanksgiving Feast, and have them all get fully ready to go. So we finally managed to escape the house at about 11:50, only a few minutes before the feast began!

Off we went to our annual Santa Barbara Christian Homesteaders Thanksgiving Feast, a potluck dream, complete with a special time for any children who want to perform able to get up in front of everyone and do anything from recite a memory verse to sing a song or in our family's case, perform a little skit.

So I somehow managed to get all of the children, jackets (it had been raining that morning), food and skit paraphanalia out of the parking lot, up the stairs, down the long path, and into the building. Fortunately Samuel has been becoming an amazing helper and Joanna is old enough now to not have to be handled so carefully, so he was able to carry her all that way.

We grab some seats at a table and I pull out our dishes to add to the buffet, but not before I first grab 5 plates and fill them with one of our dishes I brought (the line was way too long at that point to do the kosher thing). I staved off Hope's incessant "I want this, I want that... Can I have some of this?" for a little while, and got most of the children successfully fed lunch, with Joanna sitting on my lap. Then it was time for the performances to begin.

The Lomelino children were towards the end (fortunately they were all pretty captivated watching everyone else perform, even Joanna was at least most of the time). Hope said Philippians 4:13 "I can do all things through Him who strengthens me." Then they performed their skit. They did a really great job and it was pretty hilarious. The boys had a bunch of cute cowboy gear on and Hope was the announcer for their rodeo. She said, "Next up, Jeremiah Lomelino in the cow roping contest." Then Jeremiah rode out on our stick horse and Samuel ran out on all fours as the cow. Jeremiah swung the rope around and around trying to laso Samuel, and all of a sudden ended up lasoing himself accidently! Everyone laughed so hard! Then they switched, Hope announced, "Next up, Samuel Lomelino in the cow roping contest," and Samuel rode out on the horse while Jeremiah crawled around as a cow. It was awesome and super funny and cute.

And I learned something watching my little brood up on stage today. Especially watching Hope say her verse and then speak during the skit. When she was up there I realized that she is still so little and so young. I saw her as the tiny little girl she is, still in need of so much help and guidance. But when I am with her, especially in her home, I so easily forget this. Of course, she does try to act like a teenager or even sometimes a forty year old, stuck in a little 5 year old's body. But the truth is, sometimes it is just that I forget. And in my forgetting, I expect things of her that are so beyond her capacity, thinking she is 10 or 15 years old, instead of the little girl she still is.

I really want to try to start remembering this. I think it will help me so much in how easily I get frustrated with her. Its not to say she isn't difficult, because she really is a very difficult child to mother. She tests me a 1,000 times a day in a 100 different ways, and it is no small task to try to manage her. But I think it will help me so much if I start to realize that so much of it is that she really is just still so young. I think in some ways, I need to realize that just as it is so hard for me to handle her sometimes, it is that much harder for her to handle herself. It is so hard for her to have self-control in situations. She always needs to be moving, touching things, asking things, trying to get into things and somehow accomplish what she wants. She doesn't know how to handle not getting what she wants. She struggles to manage her emotions, and to know what to do with herself when she gets upset.

And not only to I forget these things so much of the time, I also forget that she is still only 5. These last 3 (almost 4) years of dealing with so much with her (I'm estimating it started getting really hard when she was about 2) have felt like a lifetime already. Almost every day is so long with Hope in my life. I am exhausted at the end of the day, even if I barely did anything (not that that really ever happens, but theoretically speaking), simply because of the mental and emotional toll Hope takes on me. It is hard to really explain what it is like and why it is so hard, it is kind of something you just have to experience. But the point isn't really about how hard it is to be Hope's mom. The point is that I still need a lot of new perspectives on things. And I think God wanted to show me an important one today. It doesn't matter if these 3, almost 4 years have felt long and like a lifetime. The truth is, she is still only 5 (though I should be saying 6 since she is one week away from turning 6). And I need to stop expecting her to have the maturity of an adult. I need to learn to be okay with the fact that she is young, and needs to be given time and space and a lot of encouragement to be able to grow into who God desires her to be. And I really, really need to exercise A LOT of patience as I bear with her in this process.

So, there is my lesson for the day. I want to also quickly finish recording the events of the day as well. I have realized lately that these days and seasons really are going by quickly, and I want to have some records of what it was like. I already have forgotten so much of what my life was like a few years ago, much less five or six years ago. I know a few years from now these days will be faint memories. I would like to have a few days written down just so I can look back and see how far we've come.

So, we got home eventually from the Thanksgiving Feast (both arriving somewhere and departing both seem to take an excrutiating amount of time these days!). Everyone was tired but it really was too late to take naps, so I opted for an early dinner and early bedtime. We had some food left over from the potluck items I had taken, so I figured I would use that and just add a few simple ingredients to it to spruce it up a bit, and dinner would be easy to throw together. So I sat on the couch and read a book to the kids for a little bit (in the midst of wiping someone's bottom, dealing with the baby that I HAD put down for a nap but that she wasn't agreeing to, and trying to get Hope to sit down and stay sitting with us). People were also coming in and out, some to hang out, some to ask questions, and some to help me out around the house.

Eventually it was very obviously time for me to get up and focus on dinner, of course about 30 minutes later than I should have. So instead of eating at 5 like I had planned, it was finally ready by 5:30, though the baby had already been fussing for food for about 10 minutes. We ate, got up, and I wanted to do a quick getting ready for bed routine for the night. And I forget that when I have an agenda, it is already a recipe for disaster, because I will inevitably end up frustrated and angry when my plan is thwarted by life (which is almost always is).

So I take Joanna up to put her to bed, and she is so tired that she falls asleep while I am nursing her and it takes about twice as long as it normally does. I FINALLY come back downstairs and target Jeremiah to get him ready for bed, but not after glancing at the living room and bedroom and seeing they are in complete disarray. After asking Hope and Samuel to start cleaning up, I notice an Advil on the ground in our bedroom, where the kids have been playing throughout the evening. I ask Hope is she had eaten any, and though I am not sure if I can trust her answer because she has been lying so much lately, she denies it and seems fairly sincere. But I am not sure about Jeremiah. So I ask him, and he answers, "Yes" (which right now sounds more like "Wes!"). I can't tell if he is telling the truth or not, and I ask him how many and he holds up his hand and several fingers in a totally noncommital way. I am scared now, wondering if he really did, and continue to question him. He begins vacillating back and forth between yes and no, and I have no idea what the truth is. I know he is definitely lying on one of these answers, and I am getting so frustrated that I have no way of knowing the truth, that I am about to loose it. Plus, the bottle reads to keep away from children and to seek medical help immediately if they ingest them. Great! For all I know he has eaten 5 or 10 Advils and needs his stomach pumped, but I can't even get a straight answer as to if he ate any at all. I give him the childproof bottle and see if he can open it (he can't), and get frustrated yet again thinking about why we even have these in our house, and why they would ever be in a place any child could reach them, and perhaps he really didn't get into them but my husband left two out somewhere and they got knocked on the ground. Basically, I am just scared and upset and feel out of control of the situation and unsure of what to do. After calling Jason (who wasn't home, another reason I was frustrated about the whole thing), and ask if he left some Advil out and had him talk to Jeremiah on the phone to try to get him to tell him the truth or at least discern if he was lying (Jason is much more discerning on this than me), we conclude that he didn't eat any afterall. This was half a relief but also half more angering, because I could not understand why in the world my child would lie to me like that. Maybe I should understand this more, but being born with the gene that always made lying feel like the worst thing ever, I have never been able to lie or had a desire to, nor been able to understand how anyone ever could lie, especially so outright like that.

In order to keep this already really long post from turning into an entire book, I will try to sum up the rest of the evening a little more quickly. I forgot to add that before I even found the Advil and we embarked on that whole crazy episode, I had had to give Hope spankings for not listening when I was upstairs feeding Joanna and I had pointed for her to go downstairs and not talk while I was feeding her (it is a rule that they cannot come up there when I am nursing Joanna because she always gets distracted and stops nursing). Hope of course didn't pay any attention to my pointing finger and instead kept coming up closer to me and started whispering to me whatever question or comment she had. So I told her that she had to get spankings when I got downstairs. She of course was totally hysterical when I gave them to her (partially just because she is so emotional and almost always gets that way and partially because she was so tired from skipping her nap). And it was in the midst of her hysterical crying that I found the Advil on the ground and had to start dealing with that mess. Somewhere in the midst of this Samuel opened up a box of jam that I specifically told him not too, so he had to have some consequences as well (which was just no more play time and having to clean the rest of the time before bed). Also there was a ton of stuff all over that mostly Hope had gotten out, which I had to micromanage getting put away.

And I also had to have some reconciliation with Jeremiah before I took him to bed, because I was so hurt about his lying, and I knew I also had gotten too upset with him. I knew there were hurt feelings on both of our ends. I brought him over to me and just let him know that it hurt me when he lied and that I didn't really understand it either. I was still upset, and knew I just needed to forgive him and let it go. I know it is unrealistic to expect a 4-yr-old to be able to explain why he lied to me. So, I had him say he was sorry for lying and I told him I forgave him. I told him I was sorry for getting upset with him, and he said he forgave me. We hugged for quite awhile, and then I finally took him to bed.

SOOO, so much for that early bedtime. By the time they each were in bed, it was just as late as normal. Another source of great frustration for me.

And then I came down and decided I better write down some things while they were all fresh in my memory. A day in the life of the Lomelinos in 2012, with a 7 1/2 year old, almost 6 year old, just turned 4 year old, and 18 month old. It is crazy, it is hectic, it has moments of sanity, only to be followed by crazy hysterics. And somehow in the midst of it all, God is here. And He is wanting to teach me and grow me... 1,000 lessons in 100 different ways.

I think every day there are many lessons for me to learn. That was one of the reasons I wanted to write tonight. Not only did I somehow realize in the midst of this crazy day that these seasons really ARE going to pass so quickly, I also realized that I need to capture the lessons and not let them pass me by.

So just to recap, here are the lessons from the day:

-My children are still so young and I need to be patient with them and not expect too much from them.
-I need to not procrastinate on getting dinner ready, ever really if possible.
-I need to always allow about 45 minutes to get in the car and to a destination, as well to leave and get home.
-I need to stay calm and trust Jesus when things that feel scary happen (like a child eating medicine).
-I need to be careful about the plans I make and the expectations I put into a situation, especially when it includes the amount of time something should happen in (it usually just leads to frustration)
-I really need to learn how to forgive my children and not hold things against them, even when they do things I can't understand or that I feel are so bad

Thank You Jesus, that in the midst of