Ethan (Monthly Update)

Ethan was 23-months-old yesterday. The last couple of weeks with Ethan have been very challenging. He is totally immersed in a hitting-everyone-and-throwing-everything stage, and I am running the gammit of consequences trying to find something that makes a difference. He hits for two reasons: first, when he feels wronged or frustrated, he lashes out physically. The other reason that he hits is to instigate (in other words, he does it for fun). Caleb will be building a block castle, and, lightning-quick, without provocation, Ethan will pick up a block and hurl it at Caleb. Tears, anger, time-outs and apologies always ensue, but when it is all said and done, Ethan is pretty pleased with the chaos he created. I'm coming down much harder on the power-trip, instigative aggressiveness than on the retaliatory kind, but both are a problem.

On a more positive note, Ethan is such a cooperative, personable little guy on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, when Caleb is at school and Ethan has me all to himself. When it is just the two of us, whether we are out and about with other people or just getting stuff done at home, Ethan is the sweetest, most charming little guy. Friends who have seen Ethan in his terrorist mode with other kids and then later been around him all by himself wonder if it is the same child. I often joke with friends and family that Ethan should have been an only child, or at the very least a firstborn. He just loves to be the center of attention, particularly the center of Mommy's attention.

In the potty-training arena, it's been a little over four weeks since I put him in big boy underwear, and he is still doing really well. Most days, he has one pee-pee accident, and some days he has none (like yesterday). If he has an accident, it is ALWAYS when we are out-and-about. At home, if he has to go, he either tells me or he just goes up to his potty seat in the kitchen and takes care of things himself. But if we are out, it is hit-or-miss on whether he will tell me, so I just have to take him to the potty pre-emptively. Even with these extra efforts, I sometimes miss the mark, so I always carry an extra pair of pants and underwear.

Consistently landing #2 in the potty has not been as smooth of a transition. He still poops in his underwear about half the time, though this week has been our best week yet, with four days of the last six being poopie-accident free. Regardless of long it takes him to master this part of the gig, I am very excited that I haven't used a diaper in over a month!

Confessions

The last video in the Beth Moore Esther study we are doing at church addresses facing our fears. The video started me thinking about what my greatest fear really is, and what I came up with kind of surprised me. My greatest fear, at least right now, is not that one of my children will get a serious illness, or that my husband will leave me, or that I will die a slow and painful death. I have feared all of these things before, but right now, what I fear most is this: I'm afraid that the best of my life is behind me. Marcus has been joking for the past few months that I'm going through my midlife crisis at 30 instead of 40. (And as much as I like to get things done early, I can't deny the possible validity of this scenario :) I have spent a lot of time lately questioning many things about my past and my future, as well as struggling with some doubts about my faith. And laced through all these musings has been this fear:

What if I am never again as at peace as I was ______? What if I never again feel as beautiful and loved as I did ______? What if I never face the day with as much energy, excitement and confidence as I did ______? What if I am never again as happy as I was ________?

Now, I realize cognitively that there are no answers to these questions, and that dwelling on them does absolutely no good, but I really am not dwelling on them...they just keep popping up their heads. Their persisence perturbs me at best and often outright enrages me. Most of my life, I have held the term "happiness" somewhat in contempt, preferring the more individually-controlled term "contentment". I've always seen happiness as a wet fish: impossible to hold on to and by its very nature, certain to slip away into oblivion. Because of this, I've lived most of my life not really thinking about whether I was happy or not. Thoughts about my own happiness always seemed a little too selfish, and therefore distasteful to me. I've also always believed that happiness has more to do with attitude than with circumstances, but lately I've been questioning the absoluteness of that belief as well. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of circumstances that even the most positive person would find permanently detrimental to his or her happiness.

I just can't shake this feeling that I'm on the verge of missing something. Missing a door I was supposed to walk through. Missing an opportunity I was supposed to grab hold of. Missing a chance to fulfill a dream that I didn't even realize was there.

If Dr. M is right, and this is my midlife crisis, then it will all pass soon enough and I will go back to putting the idea of happiness on the back shelf where I've always thought it belonged. I will go back to being content living in service to the people around me, and this unwelcome selfishness that has reared its head in my heart will go back to whereever it came from. Until then, sorry for the altered tone of my deep thoughts posts :)

Farmers' Co-op

Over a year ago, I chatted with another mom at a play group about a local farmers' co-op. She told me that her family has a box of locally-grown, seasonal produce delivered to them every week. She was excited about how fresh and delicious the fruit and vegetables were compared to grocery store produce. I also remember her sharing that she and her husband felt very good about supporting local farmers, both for economic and environmental reasons. I liked and agreed with everything she said, but it took an additional push to get me into action :)

A few weeks ago, a friend told me that I needed to watch this documentary called Food, Inc. After that, another friend blogged about the same video, so I took the double hint and watched it. It was very, very informative, and seriously made me want to become a vegetarian. Unfortunately, my husband likes meat too much for me to bring vegetarianism to the whole family, but I resolved to further reduce the meat and processed foods that we eat, in favor of more fresh produce and whole grain foods. And this is about the time that I remembered my conversation from a year ago and started checking out farmers' co-ops.

The one I settled on for now is called Grow Alabama. This co-op does weekly deliveries, and they allow customers to customize what they get from the produce that is available that week. For example, if Grow Alabama offers 10 specific fruits and veggies next week, I can decline the ones that I don't want and get double orders of the ones my family prefers. I signed us up for the biggest weekly produce plan, and we got our first box this afternoon. In case you don't already know this, I am really just a little girl in a grown-up body, and I was giddy with excitement as I sorted through all my fresh veggies. Here's what I found: two grapefruit, eight tangerines, six carrots, two turnips, two huge zucchini, four bulb onions, a bunch of asparagus, a head of broccoli, 20+ mushrooms, and ten sweet potatoes. The price for all of this was $35.15. I haven't added it all up, but just eyeballing it, I think that is a bit less than I would pay at the grocery store for the same fresh produce. But even if it is not less, the quality of the produce is definitely superior, and I wouldn't mind paying a little more for the economic and ecological benefits, either.

And on top of everything else, getting so many fruits and vegetables automatically each week will help motivate me to keep us eating healthier. If this produce thing keeps going well, I may start buying my eggs and milk from a co-op as well. And if we ever get a deep freezer in the garage, I would love to occasionally buy free range, organic meat (which is advertised sometimes on the Grow Alabama site), when money allows.

So the moral of this post is, don't watch Food, Inc., unless you are ready to change the way your family eats!

Implicit vs. Explicit

I've been thinking a lot lately about what my boys will be taking with them when they grow up and leave our home. The more I turn it over in my mind, the more convinced I am that they will learn almost everything they learn from me implicitly rather than explicitly. They will take more from what they observe, from what they know about my choices, from the ways they see me spend my time, from the way I speak to others, than they will learn from what I tell them or explain to them. I think back to what I learned from my parents, and I think I absorbed much more from the way my parents lived their lives than from what they overtly taught me. Growing up, I received an exceptional amount of Godly teaching, through Christian school, a strong, active youth group, and a home where Bible-reading and discussions about faith were frequent. I have no doubt that all of that was a blessing, but when it comes right down to it, it is the individual choices or my parents (and other influential adults), and the outcomes of those choices, that have had the greatest impact on who I want to be and how I want to live my life. In some ways, the realization that my implicit teaching carries so much more weight is very freeing. So, I'm not sure that a lot of the things I worry about in regards to parenting make a lot of difference. Maybe there aren't too many right or wrong choices I can make for my kids. I guess the best thing I can do for them is to honestly model what I believe matters most in life, and leave the rest up to God.

Getting Behind

Since I have been feeling cruddy and quite under-the-weather for the past ten days, I am SO BEHIND on all of my daily responsibilities. I have a system for keeping the house clean and for pretty much everything related to running the household. My system works very well, but it all falls apart after just a few days of not getting my daily list done. Right now, my house is in terrible shape, many errands are not getting done, and I have really slacked off on some outside-the-home responsibilities. I am usually such an energetic person, and it is so hard for me to get up day after day with no energy. I mostly just want to sit in my chair and stare straight ahead, or even better, recline my chair and close my eyes, but my boys are not going to let that happen. I know that I have been very blessed in that I have rarely been sick for more than a couple of days, but it does make it VERY hard for me to slow down and let things go. I know that the kitchen floor and the bathrooms will be clean again one day soon, and the errands will get run eventually, and the other things I'm committed to will not fall apart from a couple of weeks of slacking, but getting so far behind is definitely putting me in a mental funk.