The November Birthday Club

It’s been a marathon, but not the kind I had to run with my feet, just my heart. From 1 to 97, we covered them all, starting with Bethany’s 1st birthday, then Grandpa’s 97th, Daddy’s on Veteran’s Day, Zac 2 days later, and last but not least Nathan’s. Five family birthdays in 12 days, not to mention at least half a dozen friends who also celebrate birthdays between 1 November and Thanksgiving. One birthday cake, two dozen cupcakes, and countless feet of wrapping paper and ribbon later…all the presents have been opened and every candle has been blown out with all the wishes made. The Church family November Birthday Club!

Sleep Baby Sleep

It’s amazing how the amount of sleep one has can dramatically affect one’s day. As a parent, we know that our sleep is often determined by our children, and the more children we have, the more interruptions we can count on. I’ve read that for babies, pediatricians consider a full night sleep to be 6 hours. Hooey!

How two people who love to sleep bred three insomniacs, I’ll never know. For the last 6 months we’ve been playing musical beds. It started with Zac sleeping in his own bed in his basement room, Nathan in the crib, and Bethany tucked in safely between Mommy and Daddy. The first move happened when Mommy said enough of baby in the bed. A month and a lot of determination later, Bethany was in her cradle most of the night…when Mommy wasn’t sitting up in a chair nursing her. Then Bethany quickly outgrew the cradle, so the second move was a two parter 1) put the toddler bed in Nathan’s room and have him nap in it instead of the crib, and 2) put a portable crib in our room for Bethany until we could move Nathan out of the crib for good. Sometimes Nathan in the toddler bed worked, and sometimes he was more interested in running around the room, which makes for long afternoons and a crabby 2 year old. Bethany was safer in the portable crib, but she was really too big for it too. Third move…toddler bed back in the basement with no toddler in it. Then last week Kristy stayed with us. Nathan decided she was his new best friend, so he wanted to sleep in his toddler bed in the basement with Zac and Auntie Kristy. It worked! He hasn’t been back to his crib since, but it has taken Daddy sleeping in the basement in the wee small hours of the morning. Finally, we moved Bethany to the crib. After some jump starting…magic happened. Last night (Wednesday night) Zac and Nathan slept all night, by themselves in their basement room, and Bethany slept ALL NIGHT in her crib. I’m not talking about the 6 hours “all night.” I’m talking 11.5 hours! The next thing Alan and I knew, it was 5:00 a.m., and nobody had stirred. I checked on sleeping beauty, but she was deeply asleep on her belly, and she had obviously rolled all over the crib. Thank you to all the angels that helped us through the night. Here is hoping for many more nights of peace.

Summer Start

Summer has started in South Dakota…sort of. It’s 49 degrees here and raining, but we really have had some warmer days. Even if one is not a farmer, here so much of what people do is dictated by the weather. Since the sun rises just before 5:30 a.m. and doesn’t set until 10:00 p.m., there is plenty of time for projects and play. This is the time of year when people do home fix-up and repair, put in their gardens, go fishing and boating, walk and ride their bicycles with their family, and generally play outside. This is probably one of the few places left where a child may leave his house right after breakfast to go play with friends, and probably not return home until dinner time, and the parents don’t have to worry. Oh, the freedom of childhood is here again!

We have had our share of projects this year. The only room in our house that was not the right color when we bought it was Zac’s bathroom. Now that we have had days warm and dry enough to leave the windows open, Zac has a “new” bathroom. We also had a portion of our yard that was overgrown and a good harbor for mosquitoes, mice, and garter snakes last year. Alan and I decided to clear it out and create a play area/shade garden. Thanks to the loan of a tractor and box tiller from a neighbor, Alan was able to quickly clear out the trash trees and bushes and prepare the area for planting. Only here does it not raise more than a little curiosity to see a tractor parked in the neighbor’s yard. This summer the boys will be able to use the sandbox that Daddy built in that area of the yard.

The kids have had a great start to the summer too. Zac went fishing for the first time a couple of weekends ago. The local lake is stocked with fish every year. Not only did he have fun learning how to fish with Daddy, he had success and brought home three fish. Zac also started T-ball this year. He has been such a baseball fan for a long time, and he is very good at hitting and throwing the ball. He has had fun in his first week learning how to catch and play with a team.

Nathan recently acquired his own T-ball bat to add to his first glove. He wants so much to be just like his big brother, but he is not old enough for the T-ball team, so he’ll have to settle for playing ball in the yard. He loves falling asleep at night listening to baseball games on his radio. Nathan’s favorite phrase now is “It’s behind you…over there.” It doesn’t matter if what he is referencing is right in front of you; he says “It’s behind you.” Maybe we should work on his direction this summer.

Bethany has started to bloom. She is a baby who loves life! She smiles and coos and giggles and laughs. She says “Momma” and Dadda” when she wants our attention. “Baba” is still practice sounds, but “NaeNae” is clearly her version of “no no” when she is not happy. She sits in her highchair to eat meals with the family, but she still prefers to nurse and cuddle with Mommy. Bethany is also sitting up on her own for short periods, but she really likes to play while sitting in somebody’s lap. It won’t be long before she is crawling and chasing her brothers through the house. She also loves to be outside. The weekend we cleared out the shade garden area it was warm and breezy and our apple tree was in full bloom. Bethany played on the picnic blanket until she was tired and fussy, and then she and I lay on the blanket together under the apple tree with the blossoms softly drifting down on us until she nursed herself to sleep. I can’t think of a better way to start our first summer with our boys and new addition.

The Catskills in Spring

Marry me and your life will be full of adventure, Alan said. He wasn’t kidding. Our latest adventure was a cross-country trip to the Catskills, by car. What would posses us to make such a trip with three preschoolers?...the final clean out of my father-in-laws place. Alan’s family has owned 16 acres near Boiceville, NY for 47 years. Originally the property consisted of only a sculpture’s studio, but when his parents retired, they moved there to live fulltime and in the process they constructed a house and a four car garage. Up to the time of Paul and Marie’s retirement, the family spent weekends and summers living at the studio, playing in the spring-fed mountain brook and nearby Esopus Creek, hunting, fishing, swimming, skiing, and growing up. Marie died 3 years ago, and for a 90+ year old, the property was too much for Paul to keep up, so the time has come to sell it and move on. Last spring Alan discovered that a pipe had broken in the house during the winter and the house and contents were ruined, so he spent a lot of his time away from us while he was salvaging what he could and supervising the gutting and clean out of the house and other buildings. On this the final trip, Alan didn’t want to leave his family behind, so we packed up the Suburban and took the children on an adventure.

During the 3-day drive over and back we saw wind farms in the plains, drove through the inside of a mountain and up into the clouds, and watched oxen graze on a mountainside, and stopped to admire the Peekamoose Falls. We arrived in the Catskills expecting cool temperatures, but soon we had the boys stripped down to overalls and no shirts and were cooling the baby off in the brook because of temperature in the high 90’s. The warm weather awakened the mountains a little everyday as they slowly turned from winter brown to spring green starting in the valleys and stretching to the peaks, and the forsythia, dogwood, and other flowering trees burst into bloom. By the end of our stay, Zac and I had started a wildflower collection. Of course his favorite was the dandelion, and he picked new ones everyday to add to our pressing book.

The wildlife was everywhere (including our constantly on-the-move little boys). We saw woodchucks, a beaver lodge, deer, wild turkey, owls, hawks, nesting Canadian geese, and a golden eagle. We have golden and bald eagles here in South Dakota, but no matter where I see them, I am struck by the majesty of these magnificent birds. The cabin where we stayed had a dumpster that had to be chained at night because of the bear that liked to visit after dark, and yes, we could see the evidence of its visit by the huge claw marks on the lid. We also discovered some robins’ eggs on our porch steps one afternoon. When we sat on the steps and looked waaayyy up in the tree, we spotted the perfectly made nest right over our heads.

The boys had two favorite places to play. One was on a train caboose near Mt. Pleasant (between Phoenicia and Boiceville). The other was near the water, either the brook at Grandpa’s place or in the Esopus near the cabin. Zac was fascinated watching the fly fisherman and with building rock sculptures on the banks, and both boys spent hours throwing pebbles and small rocks into the water. I should qualify “small” rocks as any rock that they could pick up that would make a satisfying “kerplunk” when it hit the water. Sometimes they didn’t qualify as small and the boys almost fell in the water for the effort. When Alan was a boy, there was a crawfish that used to live in the brook near a bridge at the house in Boiceville. Alan took the boys to the brook to show them where he and this crawfish had played and wouldn’t you know it, there sat a fat and happy crawfish! We joked that it must have been a great grandson of Alan’s former playmate.

One of the major attributes of the Catskills is that it is the water source for the City of New York. Much of the land has been purchased by the City, and reservoirs have been created. The day we left, Alan drove us out around one such reservoir deep in the mountains. I was struck by the solitude. The only boats that could be seen were row boats, and we passed just a couple of cars in an hour. There were also only a very few home sites. It was just water, trees, wildlife, and quiet. Alan said that the City not only owned the reservoir, but most of the land surrounding it, and only non-motorized vehicles were allowed on the water. To live in such a nurturing environment! At least we were able to visit for a little while.

Oh, and the reason for which we went…well, Alan finished the clean up and closed the chapter on Boiceville with a For Sale sign, and we headed for home. A few days after we returned, a late afternoon rain shower ended with a spectacular rainbow that we watched develop from our front porch. Even with our adventures, there is still no place like home.

Reflections in the Ornament (Christmas 2008)

I’ve always believed that Christmas is more than what happens on the 25th of December. Christmas is truly a season. A season that begins with Thanksgiving and ends with the transition into a new year, and along the way we have a birthday party for Jesus. Seems to me like a good way to end the year.

Alan and I have talked a lot this year about family traditions. What our families did when we were growing up and what we want to do with our children. It seems that every year we change things up a little, so this year I asked him why 10 years into our marriage we are still trying to establish our traditions. Alan chuckled and said probably because we keep adding children to our family.

There are some things to me that define Christmas like decorating the house, the smell of fresh pine (even if it’s from a candle), Christmas cookies, pecan pie, finding that special gift for each person on your list, and discovering the secrets buried deep in a stuffed stocking. I have favorite growing-up memories of Christmas like hanging ornaments on the tree, making cookies with Mom, the lighting of candles at a Christmas Eve church service, caroling with my friends, a visit with Santa, and driving through neighborhoods to see Christmas lights.

Living in small town South Dakota during Christmas is fun. Not only can we walk down the street and hear Christmas music playing on the outside speakers of the local hardware store, we can do so on a snowy evening on our way to the grocery store where we put Zac and Nathan’s letter to Santa in the collection box. The boys received a response from Santa in our mailbox a few weeks before Christmas. This was the first year Zac was brave enough to sit on Santa’s lap, and he did so the night of our town’s Christmas celebration. Santa arrived at the end of the light parade and made his way to City Hall where he happily and patiently listened to every child who would talk to him. Of course because Zac was willing to talk to Santa, Nathan wasn’t about to be left out, so he climbed right up on Santa’s knee. Between the two of them, I think they talked Santa’s ear off. After visiting with the jolly old elf, Zac really got into the swing of Christmas. He wanted to know why we had not decorated yet, so Alan put up a string of lights on our patio railing, and I dug out what decorations I could find quickly and easily. One evening Alan bundled the boys in their snowsuits and took them out on their toboggans to look at the Christmas lights. This year we adopted an elf. He was named Occo, and he reported the boy’s behavior to Santa each night. Every morning the boys scouted around until they found where Occo was perched for the day. On Christmas Eve Occo hitched a ride to the North Pole with Santa where he will stay until the Christmas season starts again. During a few snowy afternoons, Zac and I made Christmas cookies. It’s not an easy task to pull off with a infant that wants to stay attached to me all the time, but at least we made enough cookies to put some out for Santa Christmas Eve. Zac had fun wearing his apron while he helped mix the ingredients, and the boys and I danced to Christmas music in the warm kitchen while the cookies baked.

Alan and I have some traditions of our own. I have a great recipe for egg nog (the real thing with eggs, cream, and brandy topped off with a sprinkle of nutmeg). A few cold December evenings, after the children went to bed, Alan and I sat in the glow of the Christmas lights in the living room with holiday glasses of egg nog and tried to reconnect with each other. Christmas Eve we did what so many parents do, we stayed up late and helped Santa with toy assembly. On Christmas day we unwrapped our presents and the baby’s while the boys napped.

Christmas Day was filled with giggles and laughter over the discovery of toys, plenty of good food, and Christmas music playing on the stereo all day. What I will remember most about this Christmas is the glow of Christmas lights reflecting on my children’s faces, silly boys dancing to “cowboy” Christmas music (as Zac put it) in the kitchen, and a newborn baby in my arms who served as a reminder to everyone in our family of what we celebrate this time of year, the birth of our Savior. Only time will tell what our children will remember most about Christmas. What I hope they keep in their hearts is the joy, peace, and love of the season.