The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

She had been scared about it for quite some time.

She mentioned on several occasions that she didn't want to go; she wanted to learn at home like her friend Addy.

To ease Sunny into the idea of starting kindergarten, I checked out several books from the library about "My First Day of School." It gave us the opportunity to talk through the new experiences she would have. In most of the books, the main character rides the bus to school. I happened to mention that she would not ride the bus. I would drive her to school, where she would line up on the playground and walk inside with her class.

She declared immediately, "NO! I won't go! I'll grab onto you and scream!"

Honestly, that was exactly what I expected. We had visited a new church over the summer, and when I took her to her class, she clung to me and cried. They had to pry her off of me and bear hug her while I dashed out of the room. I pictured that very scene repeated at school, with a hundred other kids and their parents watching.

As the day of reckoning drew painfully close, we focused on how to seek God in the midst of fear. Naturally, the famous Joshua 1:9 was at the forefront:

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous.
Do not be afraid, do not be discouraged,
for the Lord Your God will be with you wherever you go.

I asked family members to write her letters of encouragement. She received a couple of letters, which she kept hidden under her bed with her personal treasures. The letter from my dad talked about—if you can believe it—Joshua and courage. We read it each night at bedtime.

At last the fateful day arrived and moved from the realm of hypothetical to reality. We were, shockingly (haha), running late. We rushed out the door and sped the 4 minutes to school. We arrived at the playground and located line #2. She got in line, where we hugged and did our standard Bye Words. Then more children started assembling and her anxiety mounted. She said, with an undertone of panic to her voice, "I don't want to go! Please let me stay with you."

I knelt down and took both her hands. I told her to remember the words from Granddaddy's letter: You can do this! I told her about Joshua having courage when he was afraid. We repeated several times, "You can do this!"

And by some miracle, she believed it. She remained fixed on her yellow line while I moved off to the side. She didn't cling to me or follow after me. There were kids everywhere now and it was very loud. There was a paparazzi of parents snapping pictures on their smartphones. I don't have a smartphone, but I had brought the camera. I yelled to her above the din, "Can I take your picture?" She meekly nodded yes. I reached for my purse but it wasn't there. It was at home, sitting on the kitchen counter. Without any technology or devices taking up our focus, we were left with nothing but old fashioned human experience. I have no digital image to preserve the moment, only the memory etched forever in my mind.

Separated by a throng of boisterous elementary schoolers, we maintained eye contact across the distance. We couldn't hear each other to yell words of encouragement, so we communicated with our hearts and our faces. It looked exactly like the dramatic train-station goodbyes you see in movies.

Her teacher wisely knew that she needed some extra care. She came and took Sunny's hand to escort her along the way. And then my precious girl marched off to school, brave and strong. I was so, so proud of her.

The visual of the back of her auburn head and favorite purple dress as she walked away from me hit me hard. There she goes, off into the world, and things will never be the same again.

I exhaled slowly and thought, "Wow. That was a fast five years."

Except no. No it wasn't.

Those five years were HARD EARNED. But now that I am placing my most valuable possession in the care of another, every moment that she was under my wing became precious. As Jessie sings in Toy Story 2, "Every hour we spent together is within my heart."

Her little years, intense as they may have been, are officially over. She's a school girl now. It was one small step to get on line #2, but a giant leap for her to voluntarily walk forth into the unknown. Kindly, mild-mannered Mrs. Porter didn't know that as she held Sunny's hand, she was leading her into the future.

With a heart full of hopes, dreams, longings, and expectation, I used all my energy not to sob openly in front of all the smartphone strangers. My baby just walked away and I can't follow. Get to the van, get to the van, I thought. When in the van, there were kids to buckle into their car seats and other tasks such that I never did get the emotional release of a good cry.

We arrived back at home again, where the walls were singing this song:

Bright Eyes and Dimples couldn't figure out why their goofy mama wouldn't quit smothering them with hugs. One day their turn will come to walk away from me too and I have to soak up all the time until then. I set about to staring at the clock until 1:25pm. I couldn't get there fast enough to hear how it went and guys! Guess what:

SHE DID IT.

Something Went Horribly Wrong

From March 2015

As I mentioned in my last post, we have a new baby around here! New babies are sweet, snuggly, and MASSIVELY TIME CONSUMING.

The factory settings for a standard-issue baby take up quite a lot of time, and then when you throw in add-ons like personality, medical issues, sleep regressions, growth spurts, etc, it can really drive up the total pretty fast. We were given the Super Deluxe Primo Edition baby when it comes to how much time her care requires.

When she was about eight weeks old, Dimples started doing this thing of 30 minute naps. She will only sleep for 30 minutes. When it's time to transition from one sleep phase to the next, she wakes up and can't put herself back to sleep. Therefore she calls for Mama to come do it for her. The phase of sleep that she is transitioning into is an active, twitchy phase. Once she gets back to sleep, she can't stay that way for more than a few minutes before she jerks herself awake again.

As it turns out, problem-solving baby sleep troubles is somewhat of a hobby of mine. It's fairly pathetic that I actually enjoy the diagnosis and treatment of sleep issues. When this 30 minute business first popped up, I rolled up my sleeves and got ready for action. I tried this. I tried that. I tried the other thing.

All of those solutions failed.

I pulled out my collection of baby sleep books. I googled. I googled some more.

We went back for round two of problem-solving with a whole new list of hypotheses.

Round two failed.

So here we are, TWO MONTHS LATER, with a baby who will only nap for 30 minutes. Because none of my solutions have worked and because she absolutely has to get more sleep to avoid being an overtired mess, I now go into her room at the 30 minute mark. I jostle and jiggle her back to sleep and then hold her in the darkness for the remaining hour of her nap so that she will sleep.

This eats up an exorbitant amount of time.

To give you an idea of what my life is like, let me describe my schedule:

7:00am - 7:30am   Feed Dimples
7:30am - 8:00am   Shove breakfast into Sunny and Bright Eyes as fast as possible
8:00am - 8:30am   Put Dimples to sleep
8:30am - 9:00am   Dimples sleeps, aka my only free time
9:00am- 10:00am  Hold Dimples in her room in the dark
10:00am                Start the whole cycle over again

I spend two out of every three hours tied up in Dimples' room. This would be one thing if Dimples were a first-born or an only child, but alas, she is a third child. What do Sunny and Bright Eyes do while unsupervised for two out of every three hours, you ask?

Good question.

The answer is: WHATEVER THE HECK THEY WANT.

It is a testament to the ingenuity and creativity of young children that Sunny and Bright Eyes are able to invent new mischief day after day after day. As this 30 Minute Nap issue has perpetuated, all their Christmas toys have become old news. Even watching a movie, previously a rare treat, has lost its appeal. They went down the list of all the areas of the house they aren't allowed to play in and STILL had time left to spare.

One particular day, Dimples was having an ugly reflux flair-up. She was miserable and cried a lot. It was very difficult to get her down for a nap and took a lot longer than usual. I came out of her room after an athletic event of bouncing, jostling, rocking, and jiggling. I was supposed to go check on Sunny and Bright Eyes since i'd been gone for longer than I had promised, but I JUST WANTED TO BRUSH MY TEETH. There were several things that needed my attention immediately before I became sequestered in Dimples' room for an hour, but I was desperate for two minutes to brush my teeth.

I decided to go for it, and knew that I was taking a huge risk, but little did I know how huge of a risk it would be.

Right after I got started, I heard Bright Eyes come bumbling upstairs. She stomped towards the bathroom and I felt her presence in the doorway. As I was leaning over the bathroom sink brushing my teeth, I heard her softly call my name.

I turned my head slightly to the side and was about to do my best to communicate, with a mouthful of foamy toothpaste, that she needed to keep quiet and not disturb Dimples. But as my peripheral vision landed on her I could instantly sense that something was amiss. Everything went into slow motion as my hand holding the toothbrush dropped down from my mouth. I turned to look her head-on and felt my stomach drop.

This is the Bright Eyes that I was expecting to see:

But this was the Bright Eyes standing before me:

I hoped against hope that it wasn't true, and refused to believe it until I got a closer look. With toothpaste dribbling out of my mouth, I knelt down in front of her to assess the damage. The examination confirmed my worst fears. All of Bright Eyes' luxurious soft curls were gone. Her hair was as short as a boy's.

In that moment it was too much for me to take in, and I burst into tears. I cannot describe to you how much I LOVED that hair. Just a few weeks before, we were at church when Bright Eyes was having a particularly fabulous hair day. A couple of church ladies came over to me and asked, "Do you curl her hair? It's so gorgeous!" I answered, "Are you kidding me??? I barely have time to brush my teeth in a given day. Anything her hair does, it does all by itself." Now one of the precious few things of beauty in my life of toil was abruptly and haphazardly taken from me, and I sobbed bitterly.

Bright Eyes was completely taken aback by my reaction. She had a guilty conscience and she was expecting to get in majorly big trouble. She had counted on yelling, fuming, and probably a spanking. She did not plan on a crying Mama, and was weirded out by it.

Throughout all of this, I noticed that she kept both of her hands firmly behind her back. It was a minor detail that my brain picked up on but didn't have time to process right then, given my extreme state of shock.

After I released some emotion, I needed answers. I pleaded with her, "Bright Eyes, what happened?!?" She was still uncomfortable with the situation and wasn't going to talk. I tried to hug her but it was awkward with her hands behind her back. Since I was getting nowhere with her, I raced downstairs to interrogate Sunny.

Sunny was around the corner in the back section of the basement, sitting in the middle of what looked like an Edward Scissorhands crime scene. There were beautiful light brown curls strewn all over the place. A small purple wastebasket was half-filled with hair. The sight of it all renewed my state of shock. I was still crying when I demanded that Sunny give me an account.

She stammered and sputtered and failed to form complete sentences. She knew she was guilty and that anything she said would be held against her. She was determined to give me as little information as possible.

As I continued trying to extract the details from the two of them, it struck me that something was a bit off with Sunny. She was positioned with her right side pointing away from me, so I didn't have a head-on view but there was something suspicious about it.

I happened to have plopped down on the floor right in front of the murder weapon. A pair of cheap dollar store scissors were laying in front of me, and I fiddled with them while we talked. It occurred to me that they were sticky, with a layer of hair clinging to them. Then I noticed that the table was also sticky. Then I noticed the half-empty bottle of wood glue sitting on the floor.

With this new information, the plot thickened. Scissors and wood glue are the kinds of things that you don't want your resourceful and unsupervised young children to have access to, so we kept them on the high shelf. These items that they misused so abominably were stored six feet off the ground. In order to obtain them, Sunny climbed onto The Professor's desk and stood on top of the printer.

As their list of wrongdoings was growing by the minute, I finally erupted into the angry outburst that they were waiting for. I pulled Bright Eyes towards me to sit her in my lap in order to outline her offenses and issue her punishment. It's hard to make someone sit in your lap with their hands behind their back. As I reached for her hands to move them out of the way, I discovered the hidden secret. Her hands were COVERED in glue. And then the glue was covered in hair. Instead of being tarred and feathered, she was glued and haired.

She had used the wood glue like hand lotion. Then she also rubbed it through her hair like hair gel. Things didn't go according to plan, however, when it didn't rub off of her hands like lotion would. The glue stayed there plain as day, a testament to her guilt.

If only it had been your basic Elmer's school glue. School glue is washable. Wood glue is most definitely not.

I paraded them upstairs to start the process of de-gluing them. We had made it as far as the kitchen when I got my first good glimpse of Sunny.

For the purpose of comparison, here is what she looked like before:

It was now time for Dimples' 30 minute wakeup, and I still hadn't managed to brush my teeth.

Their hair needed some serious fixing due to the uneven and choppy nature of their new styles. My haircutting skills are seriously lacking. What little skill I do have is with long hair. Therefore when The Professor got home from work, we packed everyone up and hauled them in for their first professional haircuts. The haircut ladies did a great job of taking a big fat mess and turning into something halfway cute!

They got oodles and oodles of compliments everywhere we went that week. So now here we are, a short-hair family. It took a long time for me to adjust to their new looks, and I relived some of the sorrow all over again when they woke up the next morning after I had forgotten about their short hair.

For old time's sake, let's look back at a few pictures of their former glory:

Something Went Right For a Change!

I have been fighting the Battle of the Bathroom Sink for a couple of months now. Bright Eyes developed a fascination with the bathroom sink and an affinity for playing with water. At every possible opportunity, she makes a beeline for that sink. Sometimes she takes her tea set in there; sometimes she gets out her bath toys to play with; sometimes she just uses whatever happens to be on the bathroom counter.

One time, while i was tied up in another room, she pulled the stopper to fill up the sink and decided to "take a bath." She sat on the counter and put her feet in the sink. After washing her feet, she plunged her head into the water to wash her hair. The trouble is that she left the facet running full speed for all of this. The water just kept pouring into that sink until it overflowed. It ran over the edge of the counter and onto the floor. After a few inches of standing water collected in the floor, it seeped through the ceiling of the room below and rained water into that room as well.

After what had previously been an annoyance turned into a major flooding episode, we laid down the law on the sink. She was forbidden to enter the bathroom without express written consent. It worked for a little while, until like many things that parents take an extreme stance on, life moved on and other misbehaviors required our attention. We got distracted from enforcing the sink rules and she slowly eased back into her old ways.

Another of her favorite things to do is "clean the bathroom" by getting a wad of toilet paper and wetting it to wipe the counter/mirror. She can't reach the paper towels in the kitchen, which we typically use for cleaning, so she substituted the next best paper product that she had access to. Unfortunately, toilet paper doesn't hold up to water in the same way that paper towels do. As a result, lots of little wads of wet toilet paper washed down the sink. After one particular episode, the sink was never the same. It started draining very slowly. I tried a couple of different remedies, ranging from vinegar (my go-to solution for all life's problems) to Drain-O. Nothing helped. 

We lived with a slow-draining bathroom sink for a while. I was too swamped with life to do anything not related to basic survival. It always bugged me, but i simply didn't have time to fool with it.

But then Bright Eyes got into trouble with the sink AGAIN, and it quit draining altogether. Once the problem escalated from Moderate Inconvenience to Urgently Needs Intervention Now, i cleared my schedule and sprung into action. 

I needed to remove the stopper from the drain. I am extremely unskilled in the household repairs department, so i did not have the know-how to tackle the project. Thank goodness we live in the age of Youtube; a quick seven minute video made me an instant expert! Youtube told me that i had to lie on my back and stick my head inside the bathroom cabinet. At first i thought, "Oh my this is more than i bargained for!" Thankfully it turned out to be very simple. I felt like a professional plumber lying there under that sink. It was so easy to unhook the thingamajig that holds the stopper in place. 

I started removing the stopper from the drain and HOLY COW IT WAS DISGUSTING. There was gunk dating back to 1975 inside that drain. I was unprepared for the huge glob of nastiness that came out. After the nasty part was over, the sink was like new! It drained faster than it had in a year. 

I was SO pleased with myself, i was practically giddy. Although it was an extremely gross task, it was the quickest & easiest solution to a problem that i'd experienced in a long, long time. It was so endlessly satisfying to take on something i didn't know how to do and conquer it so completely.

Having something go right is extremely atypical of my life the past few months, because of this:

Allow me to introduce Dimples.

Dimples joined us on November 13, 2014 with quite a bit of fanfare. How she entered the world is a story for another day. She's a beautiful little critter with a huge smile. Despite how sweet she is, life with her has been pretty difficult.

The trouble with new babies is that there's so much gosh-darn uncertainty. Even when you've already had a couple and you think it should be old hat, they have a way of taking any confidence you feel and throwing it out the window. Those early weeks are the worst. You haven't yet collected enough data to be able to predict what the baby is up to. Every cry is a lengthy decision tree. Is she hungry? Is she sleepy? Does she need a diaper change? Is she gassy? Does her tummy hurt? Is she reacting to something I ate? Is she too cold? Did the pacifier fall out?

It goes on and on and on.

Because of my background in Emergency Medicine and Intensive Care, I do actually enjoy diagnosing things. It's satisfying to isolate the variables and figure out the cause of a problem. But newborns push the limits of even the most accomplished diagnostician.

Therefore, those first few months make you batty. It's too much insecurity to tackle with too little sleep. Unlike the problem of the bathroom sink, issues with a newborn aren't resolved so quickly. There is no seven minute Youtube video that makes you an instant expert on getting your baby to do life perfectly. You can remedy the source of the crying right now, and at 3am there will be an entirely new problem to fix. And at 6am. And 10.

Its exhausting.

So praise the Lord for that sink! It was nice to know that I can in fact do something right every now and then. Getting my baby to sleep is a loosing battle, but at least my sink drains like a champ.


Thanks for reading! Tune in next time for "Something Went Horribly, Horribly Wrong."