Say It Enough, You'll Start to Believe It
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No words from me today. I’ll let the kids do the talking. I’d love for you to come back tomorrow when I talk about why I think Short Term Mission trips are a GOOD idea. Short term missions have gotten a lot of flak lately, but there are good things happening all over the world as a result of short term mission groups.
But first…today. The kids have shared their thoughts on what they learned and what stood out to them on our trip last week. Prepare yourselves for a little bit of heart melting.
The boys handing out bags to the kids coming to the fun day we had planned for them. From crafts to snacks to music and dentistry, these kids had the opportunity to receive trinkets that will likely become treasured possessions.
Kids lined up to receive their food. They are fed a hot, solid meal three times a week inside this dirt floored church – the Body in action meeting needs.
We lost count at how many teeth were pulled this day. A combination of poor nutrition, lack of hygiene and zero flouride means most of these children had a mouth full of painful, rotting teeth. Education and prevention are some of the things Servant’s Heart is working to provide for these precious kids.
My son talked the pastor of the local church into taking him on a motorcycle ride. Huge highlight of the trip for this boy.
Kyna – our rock star dentist.
Gorgeous countryside.
Who found Dominican Nutella? THIS GIRL!!!
My 5-year-old painting flouride on teeth. Who says good things can’t come in small packages?
We are exhausted and my head is a jumbled mess as I try to process everything we saw and experienced this past week. There were so many beautiful things that happened and so many difficult things to see. The impact of this week will settle on all of us in different ways.
Today however, instead of trying to articulate some of the scrambled pictures in my head, I just wanted to share some of the real pictures. I have thoughts to mull over and ideas to share, but today I want to say thanks for the emails and the tweets and the Facebook messages that so many of you sent. It is good to know you’re covered in prayer and it’s a wonderful feeling to know you’re loved so much. You guys are the best.
We drove through gorgeous countryside today. Looming mountains painted against vibrant blue sky, palm trees swaying in the breeze as rows and rows of banana trees buzzed by our windows. The landscape was marred only by the absolute poverty that dotted each hillside.
Tin houses stand testament to the fact that Dominican Republic, though beautiful, is very much in need.
We did what little we could today to help meet the most basic of needs. We fed children a hot meal. We sang songs and played games and taught them the very basic importance of taking care of their teeth. We showed them how to brush and floss and through an interpreter explained the reasons why we need to take care of our teeth.
Then the dentist in our midst calmly looked in each child’s mouth and, with the permission of their parents, pulled teeth that were so rotten they caused intense pain.
There is nothing magical about what we’re doing, nor is it really all that inspirational. We’re just meeting a need – an easy need. Food, hygiene, love, laughter and at the end we told them why.
If you know of anyone who needs to see love today, don’t hesitate to act. Don’t wait or think about it or even “pray” about it. Just do it. Look for the needs, the ones near and the ones far, and do something. I’m saying this to you, but I’m also saying it to myself.
And when you do it, take your kids. They’ll surprise the heck out of you.
Blessings.
To read more about the people at Servant’s Heart Ministry who are leading this trip, and who are meeting the basic needs of hundreds of children in Dominican Republic, click here.
This quiche from the quaint little downtown area was lick the plate good.
Me. Honored and inspired and wearing my sassy hat.
It’s a horse with a fascinator!
Four women teeming with creativity, bravery and wicked humor.
Hope brimming
Yesterday I sat in a cheery room looking up at the long watercolor of a beach hanging on the wall. Elevator music played gently from the overhead speakers as I waited rather nervously for the orthodontist to walk in and tell me just how much it was going to cost to iron out the mouths of my babes – the children who, sadly, inherited their mom’s regular (slightly larger than normal?) teeth and their father’s much smaller than normal mouth.
It dawned on me as he explained what we were looking at (thankfully a little further down the road…like starting next year and beyond until forever) for their teeth that I have one more coming up behind them who’s going to need as much, if not more, orthodontia than they do.
I tried to calculate the cost in my mind, allowing for the overlap in treatments from one child to the next, and then smoke came out my ears and instead of finishing my sums, I envisioned swimming in a pool of Nutella because the math was too much and Nutella is my happy place.
Once I settled down a bit, I had a second revelation – I am going to go straight from pull ups to orthodontia without so much as a week off and I suddenly wondered why on Earth we didn’t space these kids out more so we could have a little breathing room?!
Then I remembered that we intended to space them out more, but God has a sense of humor and was all Oh you want to wait awhile? Here, have a third before the second can walk a straight line.
Then I thought about the day I found out I was pregnant with Landon and I thought for sure I’d forever ruined Sloan and Tia’s lives by forcing them to accept a new baby when neither could really speak in complete sentences. This, of course, led me to remember Lee’s reaction to finding out we were pregnant a third time. Shock, a small measure of horror and an accusatory stare that somehow placed all the blame on me for apparently thinking a child into my womb.
There followed a rather significant amount of time when I had one child in pull ups and two in diapers. We finally, mercifully, got it down to one in pull ups and one in diapers and then two in pull ups and we’ve finally chipped and whittled away to where we are only buying pull ups for one child.
Nighttime potty training is my nemesis.
My oldest will be 10 next month, which means I have been investing in Huggies and Pampers products for a decade and when I finally surrender the last pull up to the landfills (you’re welcome environment), I will walk straight to the orthodontist’s office and give him my right arm for straight teeth and with three so close together, treatments will overlap, I’ll have to surrender the other arm and six-seven years later we will pay off the orthodontia just in time to start paying for college.
I’m starting to wonder if there is some validity to choosing your favorite child and investing in only that kid for the duration of eighteen years.
All the books on raising children lead me to believe that would be a poor course of action to take in child rearing, but really how much can those crazy child psychologists know anyway, right?
Wrong?
I know, of course, that having children close together is, in the long run, really the way to go. They will be the best of friends (We hope. Judging by how many arguments I’ve broken up since school let out I’m not sure when exactly that friendship thing will kick in, but I have high hopes. High, high hopes. Hiiiiiiiigh hopes), they will experience much of life together and in relatively similar circles. They will be able to create so many memories together, which will hopefully make converstaions around the Thanksgiving table in twenty years a lot more fun and they will have the benefit of knowing that there’s always someone nearby who has your back.
Those are the pros and I’d say, for the most part, the pros outweigh the cons.
And there’s always the hope that the final child will graduate pull ups at least a week before the expanders/braces begin. Seven whole days.
A girl can dream.
Between end of the year craziness (Yes, we’re still in school because apparently Florida hates children) and a tropical depression that has settled on top of us (it’s like a cruel joke to have to get up and out to school on a day when it’s dark and steadily raining – I think Mother Nature is mad at Florida…probably for hating kids), I just don’t have any decent blog posts in me.
But I have pictures and I have an old blog post that still makes me laugh…and cringe. Pictures first:
Remember when Landon looked like this?
Yesterday I went to his end of the year preschool program where they had those babies in caps and gowns and I almost died from the cute. This is my Landon now:
At one point the preschool director got up and started talking about how we only have 13 years left with these kids at home and how quickly that time will go and I briefly envisioned throwing a shoe at her, but I refrained because that would be inappropriate.
But for real.
To make this post just a little more random and to not tie it together at all, I’m going to leave you with a post that I originally published in October 2010. I wrote this after a rather unfortunate incident that occurred upon cleaning out my minivan.
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Saturday night found Lee and I in the minivan, kids in tow, heading out to the mattress store to purchase two new mattresses. Never mind that the kids desperately needed them. Never mind that Tia’s mattress was so cheap that is was literally falling apart and becoming a potential hazard. Never mind that both mattresses had been peed on so many times they could be deemed a health code violation. Never mind any of those things. The fact is simply this:
I went out on Saturday evening to buy mattresses and thought it was fun.
Hi, my name is Kelli and I am a bona fide minivan mom.
Ah, but we haven’t even got to the best part of the story. What? Surely you know there would be more to this story than the fact that I had a hoot buying twin mattresses on a Saturday night, right? A hoot!
It was the incident that occurred when we returned home that sent my world aspinnin’. It started simple. We came home so Lee could drop the kids and I off and return to the mattress store to pick up our most exciting purchases. We had to remove the car seats and fold down the back seats and clean up a bit. And it was during this event that I began to question my entire identity.
The title of my blog is Minivans Are Hot. With the operative word being Hot. I know, I know…Minivan and Hot together in a sentence is an oxymoron. And most days I would beg to differ and would launch into a diatribe about how it’s sexy to be a mom and how minivan moms have it goin’ on and I would work my hardest to convince you that I was right. Until Saturday night…
What I found in the back seat of my minivan was anything but Hot. Let’s start with what I found under the seat, shall we? It was sticky…it was brown…it had flecks of leaves and dirt stuck to it. What was that?!
From there I removed the kids car seats to find enough dried, crumbled food to feed a small pack of wild baboons. It was sealed into the lining of the seat fabric and had to be scraped out with my fingernail. *heave* Don’t even get me started on what I found in their seats.
But the piece de resitance came when I crawled into the way back and looked inside the cup holder. It is here that I gasped, looked at my husband and exclaimed, “Gross! This is why minivans are NOT. HOT.” Then I clutched my chest with the gravity of my statement and fell in dramatic Disney Princess fashion onto the seat, the back of my hand against my forehead…
No I didn’t. That last part didn’t happen – mostly because I wouldn’t want to lay on those seats for $100. Maybe for $1000, though.
In the cup holder sat dried, crusted, molded bread. It appears my children are stock piling food in the back seat of our minivan in the event that a giant meteor should come crashing down to earth and we need to seek shelter inside the car for a significant amount of time. It also appears that they have eaten portions of a sandwich and then shoved the remaining portion in the cup holder and have, every day for who knows how long, been looking at this rotting sandwich and ignoring it.
It’s like I’m raising little cave people!
I promptly dug out the rot and marched to the trash can. My husband, sensing my impending melt down went dashing for the Shop Vac in the basement. Being the super hero that he is, he spent the next half hour sucking the muck out of our minivan while I went inside and lectured my children on the importance of throwing away rotten food. I also tried to talk myself out of changing my blog title from Minivans Are Hot to Minivans Are A Place Where Horrors grow Beneathe the Seats and in the Cupholders While You Yourself Obliviously Drive From Here to There Thinking You Are Looking Fine When Really You Are Controlling a Moving Science Experiment.
But in typical Hero fashion, my man came inside just as I was certain that my entire online identity was going to have to be realtered and yelled “Ta-Da!” I walked outside to see the seats clean (hey look! The fabric’s grey…) The cup holders clean…er. They still have a sticky substance that I can only assume will need to be chisled out at some point (probably just before we decide to sell the car). And it smelled much more pleasant too. It was actually quite nice in there.
I smiled at him and jumped into his arms. Small birds flitted about our heads as he spun me around and when we kissed little animated hearts floated up into the dusky sky.
Alright…that last part didn’t happen either. Sometimes I wish I lived in a cartoon.
Despite the cleanliness of my car, however, I couldn’t shake the fact that I had outwardly acknowledged the un-hotness of my minivan. And so I’m here to retrain my mind. And if any of you are having a hard time believeing that Minivans Are Hot like I am, then why don’t you join in with me as we repeat the mantra over and over.
Minivans are hot, minivans are hot, minivans are hot, minivans are not, minivans are not…
NONONONONO!!!!
Let’s try again.
Minivans are hot, minivans are hot, minivans are hot…
Do you believe it?
It’s my 35th birthday and the day couldn’t be more crazy or indicative of what my life is these days. I have end of school awards, play dates, kindergarten registration (SOB!), laundry, dirty dishes and somewhere in there I think I’ll be allowed to breathe. It’s hectic and crazy and a skooch stressful, but altogether awesome because my life is bustling and full and rich. I wouldn’t change anything about it.
As I sat and thought about turning 35 and remembered back to the day when I thought that was SO OLD, I realized something. 35 and 21 are almost exactly alike! I mean, stand them up side by side and you can hardly tell the difference. To prove my point, I give you:
1. You are up at all hours of the night, only at, 35 you’re up involuntarily changing sheets, or doling out medicine or looking for lost lovies and on and on and SWEET MERCY I’M TIRED!
2. You eat Mac and Cheese for lunch. When you were 21 you did it because you were broke. Now you do it because making lunch for yourself takes effort and sooooo tiiiiirrrreeeeddddd…
3. An alcoholic beverage incites a bizarre amount of excitement, again for different reasons.
4. You look at a book and think of all the other fun things you could be doing instead of reading. Only when you were 21 the fun things you thought of involved less sleep, not more sleep.
5. You live in a pigsty and you don’t really care.
6. You have to clean up vomit periodically.
7. When you’re in the car, you crank the tunes. Of course, when you’re 35 the tunes are usually sung by Disney Channel teeny boppers and you turn it just loud enough to drown out the sound of arguing children….
8. You run outside to play in the rain just for the fun of it, only when you come in you now have an entire mountain of laundry to clean instead of just your own soggy clothing.
9. You enjoy a laid back movie night now and again, but instead of that creepy horror movie that allowed you to hide your face in the shoulder of the cute guy next to you, you’re watching a Disney movie with a scary bear in it while small people hide their faces in your shoulder.
10. You have high and lofty dreams of the future, but this time those dreams don’t center around you, but rather around those small people that you helped create….and you dream of a vacation where you’re allowed to do nothing but sleep.
At 21, life was all about me – my future, my goals, my dreams, my accomplishments. Today I sat on the most uncomfortable chairs known to mankind in a room full of other thirty-five(ish) year olds and I watched my third grader walk up on stage to receive a school accomplishment award and I thought, “Huh. So this is what thirty-five year olds do.”
Afterward I walked out the the courtyard and he ran to me, throwing his long, lanky arms over my shoulders and leaning his head on my shoulder. I kissed the top of his head (because it won’t be long before I won’t be able to reach the top of his head anymore) and I decided 35 is kind of awesome. It’s awesome because of them:
The 21 year old me would have been shocked at this picture.
Heck, the 35 year old me still does a double take when I look at them.
Thanks for all the birthday wishes everyone! It’s proving to be a good one.
(And if you can think of other ways that 35 is just like 21, share them in the comments. I dare you…)
I’m learning a lot right now about what it means to say yes. By nature, my first response is not generally yes. I’m more of a “maybe, let me think about it, I’ll get back to you,” kind of a girl. Saying yes is scary because saying yes usually comes with some sort of responsibility attached.
(Unless, of course, someone asks me if I’d like some Nutella, at which point saying yes is non-negotiable and always rewarding…)
Last year Lee and I said “Yes” together to adoption and as most of you know – that didn’t work out so well. But we said yes. We agreed because saying “No” didn’t feel right. If you talk to Lee and I individually about our motives to adopt, you’ll hear two different stories. Mine is the longer one.
Naturally.
Lee’s story is quite simple and I love the purity of his answer. When he was asked last summer why he decided to step forward with the adoption he said, “Because God didn’t give me the freedom to say no.”
He couldn’t say no because he didn’t feel like GOD (not me – I had given him full permission to say no) had given him the freedom to say no. So he said yes.
I will confess that I still struggle with some bitterness and disappointment that God didn’t lay “No” on Lee’s heart. I still don’t understand why He brought us to this point in the adoption process. But obviously there were lessons of faith and trust and dependence that I needed to learn and so even though I’m disappointed in the circumstance and sometimes even in God Himself, I can still say He is good.
I still have faith, even though my faith feels much shakier than it did before. It’s being tested and burned and molded – it will come out stronger, but I have to wrestle through this.
As we prayed and sought and searched and looked at what our next step should be after the adoption was terminated, Lee felt a deep desire to go as a family on a mission trip this summer, and this time it was my turn to be reluctant. I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to spend the money. I knew that money could be spent on transferring our adoption to a different country. But Lee felt really strongly that we should take the kids on a mission trip.
And I didn’t have the freedom to say no, so yes was the only other option.
We began to search different missions opportunities that we could take with the kids. We needed to find something that fit into Lee’s hectic work schedule and after a lot of thought, we decided to join forces with Servant’s Heart Ministry on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic.
One month from today we will board a plane with our children to meet and serve the children of the Dominican Republic. I will confess that my heart is still unsure, not of the trip – I have no doubt the trip will be amazing. But I am still unsure about where we stand with the adoption and I still struggle daily with this idea of saying yes to God.
But what is faith if we don’t say yes to the things that don’t make sense – even those things that may not go as planned? And how will we ever teach our children how to serve those in desperate need if we don’t go and do? Even if it costs money? Even if it sets us back in the adoption?
God has been terribly silent through all this adoption stuff, but I have this sense of peace that as we continue to say yes to the things in front of us, He will slowly reveal His plan for our family. As I said earlier, saying yes is scary because the outcome is not always certain, but if there is one thing I have been able to cling to in these months of questioning and doubt it’s that God is good and His plan is perfect, even when I don’t understand it.
So we are saying yes to the things that are scary, the things that are good, the things that could go wrong or right. We’re saying yes because when presented with an opportunity to bless another person, is saying “No” really an option at all?
(And as a PS to those who gave money toward our adoption – please know that we have those donations set aside and we will not touch them until we decide what we are going to do. Should we ultimately decide not to proceed with another adoption, those funds will be returned. I just wanted to offer that explanation in an effort to be fully transparent. We don’t yet feel that God has shut the door on adoption so we continue to save in anticipation of adopting. We are walking in faith making each decision with an enormous sense of trust.)
“Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. “For me, the evenings are for the parents,” one Parisian mother told me. “My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.” French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.
I’m hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. This problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. Nobody seems to like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all parents themselves.”
“Could it be that teaching children how to delay gratification—as middle-class French parents do—actually makes them calmer and more resilient? Might this partly explain why middle-class American kids, who are in general more used to getting what they want right away, so often fall apart under stress?”
“American parents want their kids to be patient, of course. We encourage our kids to share, to wait their turn, to set the table and to practice the piano. But patience isn’t a skill that we hone quite as assiduously as French parents do. We tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don’t.”
“In the United States, at least 9% of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5%. How come the epidemic of ADHD—which has become firmly established in the United States—has almost completely passed over children in France?
Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the United States. In the United States, child psychiatrists consider ADHD to be a biological disorder with biological causes. The preferred treatment is also biological–psycho stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.
French child psychiatrists, on the other hand, view ADHD as a medical condition that has psycho-social and situational causes. Instead of treating children’s focusing and behavioral problems withdrugs, French doctors prefer to look for the underlying issue that is causing the child distress—not in the child’s brain but in the child’s social context. They then choose to treat the underlying social context problem with psychotherapy or family counseling. This is a very different way of seeing things from the American tendency to attribute all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in the child’s brain.”
I considered writing a whole post on these articles about how I would tend to agree with the parenting philosophy of the French. They have a lot of things right and I would even argue that children with stricter and more well defined boundaries are probably more enjoyable to be around. But more than me talking too much, I thought it might be more productive for us to have a conversation. So let me know your thoughts! Have you read these articles? What do you think about French parenting vs. American parenting?
(I’ll go ahead and get the conversation started in the comments.)
We had a family movie night last night. When I announced it, the kids were all, “Really?! But it’s a school night!” I know, kids. I know. Why don’t we just play hooky? Let’s just call it a day and finish school now, whatcha think?
I didn’t say that, but I cannot deny thinking it.
My children don’t get out of school until June 7th, which seems like a conspiracy of torture to me. I’m over everything about school and it shows. When the kids get home in the afternoon, our normal routine is a quick snack, then dive straight into homework before any playing.
Our current routine is come home, jump in the pool, play all afternoon and if you get to your homework and reading, yay! Bonus.
We are crawling to the finish line over here.
Every single morning, as I wake Tia up, she rolls over and blinks hard through sleepy, crusty eyes. “Mommy, can’t I skip school just this once?” she cries (sometimes sobs). Friends, I feel like I deserve a medal for not saying YES! Skip it. Let’s stay in bed in our jammies and watch movies all day. Screw school! POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!!
I don’t say any of those things. I put on my Motivating Mom Hat and say super inspiring things like, “Finish strong, honey!” And “Can you taste the victory of your accomplishment?” And “12 More Days – Isn’t It EXCITING?!”
Then I drag her out of bed and force her into clothing. There is some hand clapping involved most mornings. Nature of the beast and all.
This morning the power tripped at 5:00 am, which means our alarm went off, which is honestly the rudest way one could possible be woken up.
(Actually, if you were to talk with my brother, you’d probably find that he has a story of an even ruder awakening. I may, or may not, have woken him up several times as a teenager by standing over his bed and letting loose a blood curdling scream. The memory of the look on his face as he thrashed around on his bed in utter terror gives me unending and eternal glee.)
Anyway, the alarm went off this morning at 5. Mercifully it did not wake up the kids and I was able to doze in and out of sleep. But when 6:30 rolled around, I could not get my brain to communicate to my extremities that it was time to get up. My brain kept sending them messages and my body was like, “Can’t we skip school just this once?”
Then I told myself to shut up…
12 more days until I can burn the agendas and the reading logs and…well, I probably shouldn’t burn the uniforms since we’ll need them again, but everything else is fair game! I have plans for the summer to keep the kids reading (plans that include paying them – incentive? bribery? Either way, I’m hoping it will motivate) and I have workbooks lined up for math and writing and Russian. But there will be no set agenda.
And there will be strictly enforced rules not to wake me up before 7:00 on any given morning lest they should face the wrath of schedule-free, summertime Mommy. Amen?
So show of hands – how many of you are already finished with school?
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