These Days of Littles

Picture this - 7:58 pm Saturday night. Joe is away at a basketball tournament, the children are snoozing peacefully, and I sit on the couch cozy as can be with a glass of red wine and bowl of popcorn. This is bliss! 

I was browsing an instagram account this week, one that was about healthy pregnancy/natural birth/breastfeeding. A ways down I saw a post that caught my eye. On it she raved about finally getting her IUD out, and that her husband gave her the greatest gift of their married life by getting a vasectomy. She continued to rave that she could live out the remainder of her cycling years in peace and unity with her body's natural rhythm. 

It never ceases to amaze me when natural minded people speak like this. Believe me, I write this with no condemnation but I read the post with such sadness, because there is an incredibly natural way to track your fertility that doesn't involve harm to one or both members of the relationship. 

Truly, the post struck me to the core so deeply and I realized how grateful I am for these days, in all of their weariness and wonderful-ness, and so I share a little bit of my heart here.

I will miss these days of little children everywhere. I have them, my friends have them, my sister has one. If one of us is not pregnant another is. There is always a reason to be making a meal, saying a prayer, going through boxes to share maternity and baby clothes, gripe over breastfeeding struggles or sex after baby questions. There is always talk of hopes and dreams for future children. There is always someone who is frazzled, overwhelmed, lonely, ecstatic, suffering, rejoicing. These are the days!

I know undoubtedly, melancholic as I am, I will be tempted to mourn deeply on the day that I know pregnancy is no longer an option for us. I think that even my friends who have had several babies in a few years would say this also. It is invigorating in every way, this knowledge that we, my husband and I, could create a new life when we are intimate. It is invigorating to have to sacrifice and abstain when we have discerned that a baby is not right for our family at the moment. It is also invigorating to know that, despite what we have discerned, we could be blessed anyhow and we would always praise God for that surprise gift!

Pregnant in Australia with our Liliana

I am excited for many more years of Joe excited over baby news :)

I simply could never hasten the end of these fertile years, in all of their exhausting and glorious aspects. I want to be in these days, truly in them, even in the moments where I have to deliberately find something to whisper thanksgiving over so as to change my bad mood, justified or not.

I mean, seriously, how precious is this? A brand new daddy with his firstborn daughter. 

I will miss these days. I whisper a prayer of thanks that I know this now as opposed to realizing it too late.

May the rest of your weekend be blessed and joyfilled!

Update - Emily and a New Year's Journey

I have a blessed blessed life.

Every post in this blog is evidence of this.

There is one aspect of my life I've not shared too much of on this blog, and truth be told it is one of my greatest struggles.

Body image and a struggle against self-loathing. In other words, I have a hard time with proper self-love and care.

This struggle goes way back to when I was 14 years old and away at boarding school (and probably subconsciously from way before then). As most aspects of control in my life were taken away I started severely restricting my eating. My parents, proactive and intuitive, brought me home before a huge issue developed, however this set a pattern for disordered eating that 16 years later I still struggle with.

I love exercise, I've always been naturally athletic and build muscle strength easily! A few life circumstances contributed, however, to exercise being more about punishment than love. First would be that when I was restricting my calories, it took monumental effort to put in the hours in the gym that I did. I motivated myself by self ridicule. I was also in an abusive relationship as a young adult and this person used the word "pathetic" to describe me many times. It is the word that always pops into my head when I try to motivate myself.

Pregnancy and nursing were kind to me in that I gained within the recommended weight and lost it very quickly breastfeeding. Nursing my children I was typically skinnier than other times in my life and I didn't ever exercise except for running after toddlers and holding my babies who LOVE to be held. Perhaps unfortunate is that I had the sort of skinny body that I had held as ideal through years of hating my slender but muscular frame.

Now that my 2.5 year old is weaned, my body wants to go back to its more natural shape. I am tired of fighting who I am created to be, as I am. My husband loves my body, skinny, pregnant, postpartum but most especially he loves it strong. My daughter is now aware of different body shapes and is a sponge of everything that comes out of my mouth. My son will soon also.

And so I embark on a new journey towards loving myself so that I can love others better and more authentically. In other words, I am on a journey towards thriving.

 I have some reasons and goals to share with you.

1. I am going to become fit and strong. I am using Kayla Itsines' Bikini Body Guides and so far they are wonderful! The goal is that I will be healthier and more confident, especially as we would love to be blessed with at least a couple more children, and relatively soon. This is in no way about what I look like, instead it is about being healthy, strong, confident, and energized.

2. My last pregnancy was more difficult than the first, with many more of the cliche but very bothersome symptoms and terrible baby blues postpartum. The goal is that my next pregnancy will be a fit one, and I can be proactive about avoiding these symptoms and PPD.

3. I am going to retrain myself to eat intuitively. There were two times in my life I remember eating intuitively. These were when I was rowing, and when I was engaged and newly married. I never thought about something being right/wrong/too much/too little, I just fed myself what I needed when I was hungry. Looking back I can see that these also stand out as times in my life when I was most happy and my body easily settled at a stable weight! I would love if my appetite increases. I think years of calorie restricting (not severely but always) have actually made my metabolism sluggish. I have a bird-like appetite and would love to dive into a healthy meal with gusto!

19 years old and rowing. I actually lost this race but look at my strong muscles!

On our honeymoon in Italy. At this point (probably a span of about 3 years) in my life I didn't obsess at all about my body, I just lived with gusto! 

4. I am going to exemplify healthy and affirming behavior for my children - prioritizing self care such as work outs and recreation, feeding myself balanced healthy meals, and indulging in treats once in a while. I want my daughter to grow up understanding that she is fearfully and wonderfully made and that her beautiful self is worthy of her own respect, love and care. I want my son to witness what womanhood looks like, so that he is always inspired to respect and chivalry.

5. I will not be reporting inches lost/gained, pounds lost/gained etc. I actually have not been on a scale in 10 years. I will take progress photos and report on how things are going, though!

6. I am going to keep this real. I am a busy mama and wife and most days when I workout it is with toddlers at my ankles and the lunch dishes undone because it was one or the other. I don't have time to make fitness my life, I don't have the $$ to buy sophisticated gear, and I don't have perfectly white walls for progress photos (too many handprints on them even if I did!). This is about a real life and sustainable fitness. This is about thriving.

Thanks for reading and joining me on this journey. I have been hesitant to share it, but I read something from Matthew Kelly last week that helped me decide to.

"I have traveled the world more than most people, and the amount of self-loathing that we seem to have for ourselves as Christians never ceases to break my heart. Our inability to love ourselves may be one of the biggest problems in the Church today. For until we learn to love ourselves as God wants us to, our ability to love others will be limited and deformed. God wants you to be very clear that you are as important as anyone else. Any thought that you don’t matter, that others are more important than you, that your thoughts or feelings are not valid, or that people will not like you unless you please them, are not from God. These are not thoughts that come from the mind of God. Learn to love yourself. That’s radical. Your ability to love yourself will have a direct impact on your ability to love God and to love your neighbor."

I share so that I hold myself accountable to this journey, as it won't be easy and it won't be quick but I'm sure it will be worthwhile. As well, if my story and journey can in any way be of help to someone else, then it is worth sharing!

May your day be filled with joy!

The Whole-Hearted Parenting Manifesto

Joe and I have been so moved by Brene Brown's Whole Hearted Parenting Manifesto, I wanted to put it down here. We have found it incredibly helpful to refer back upon as we form our children to be honest, vulnerable, accountable, virtuous, empathetic, courageous individuals (and the list goes on and on). We wish we had a wall big enough to put it on! Maybe in our dream house....

I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

The Wholehearted Parenting Manifesto

Above all else, I want you to know that you are loved and lovable. You will learn this from my words and actions--the lessons on love are in how I treat you and how I treat myself.

I want you to engage with the world from a place of worthiness. You will learn that you are worthy of love, belonging, and joy every time you see me practice self-compassion and embrace my own imperfections.

We will practice courage in our family by showing up, letting ourselves be seen, and honoring vulnerability. We will share our stories of struggle and strength. There will always be room in our home for both.

We will teach you compassion by practicing compassion with ourselves first; then with each other. We will set and respect boundaries; we will honor hard work, hope, and perseverance. Rest and play will be family values, as well as family practices.

You will learn accountability and respect by watching me make mistakes and make amends, and by watching how I ask for what I need and talk about how I feel.

I want you to know joy, so together we will practice gratitude.

I want you to feel joy, so together we will learn how to be vulnerable.

When uncertainty and scarcity visit, you will be able to draw from the spirit that is a part of our everyday life.

Together we will cry and face fear and grief. I will want to take away your pain, but instead I will sit with you and teach you how to feel it.

We will laugh and sing and dance and create. We will always have permission to be ourselves with each other. No matter what, you will always belong here.

As you begin your Wholehearted journey, the greatest gift that I can give to you is to live and love with my whole heart and to dare greatly.

I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me, and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you. Truly, deeply, seeing you.

The Trenches

This morning was such a happy one. The sun is shining, country music is playing, and we even saw a little bird outside our window. This Sunday in Lent we had honey in our tea and on our biscuits, and are still all in our pyjamas as we do very day-of-rest type things. 

There are so many instagram mommies and blogger mommies whose beautiful feeds and stories sometimes make me feel as though every day should be like our Sunday morning was today. However, the truth is that most days feel more like the trenches than the glory days, and I am quite sure it is this way for most. 

In the past few months we have had several bouts with the flu, work stress for Joe, financial realities for our family, and family stress on both sides. These are on top of the day to day realities of a toddler and preschooler whose needs are mundane and immediate, bills, chores, jobs, and the always pervasive questions about meaning and fulfillment that are in each human heart.

The last five years have been glorious years, and they have also been made up of days that are mostly in-the-trenches sort of days. Something has become quite clear to me....there is no one that I would rather be in the trenches with than my Joseph.

I think sometimes we have the tendency to fight wildly to get out of the trenches, without acknowledging that truly this is the human condition. We are always trying to escape the suffering that is so natural to this condition we all have - that of being alive.

Some days, weeks, months or years we have to be OK sitting in the trenches and fighting the muddy battles. Perhaps this needs to be the question everyone asks when they are considering marriage. "Will this person be content sitting in the trenches with me? When I am muddy, tired, broken and afraid will they sit quietly with me and fight the good, unglamorous, hugely important fight?" In other words, "can we suffer together and emerge united and with a deeper, stronger love?"

Perhaps this post makes it seem as though the days have been very difficult. No, on the contrary, they have been full of joy! However, we are in a stage where our days are plodding days, and sometimes they all melt into one another with more of the same. 

Yet, our children are happy, healthy, and learning to love others and God before themselves which is a difficult lesson to teach little cave men! Our marriage is strong and we love each other more than we could have ever imagined. Our dreams are being refined and reformed and our hearts detached from the things that truly don't matter. 

And so, perhaps I should not contrast the days in the trenches with the glory days. Perhaps these days in the trenches ARE the glory days.

I am grateful.

Judah - An Update

There are few words to describe just how delightful Judah is. After almost 1.5  years of baby blues (I hesitate to say PPD because I am unsure if that’s what it was), I emerged from the haze to find that I am undeniably irrevocably head over heels in love with this little boy. It sounds odd to say, because prior to feeling like myself I LOVED Judah, he was such a source of happiness for our family and for me, and I treasured every aspect of his little self, but the spontaneous feelings of in-love-ness weren’t as present. I was suffering. I mourned the loss of Liliana as my baby. I just wasn’t myself.

Oh but now I understand entirely how each subsequent baby will somehow mysteriously expand my heart and make it capable of love beyond what I knew I was capable of, because somehow I love each of my children so much that when I think about it, it’s hard to breath for how much I love them. (And don’t even get me started on how each baby makes me even MORE in love with my husband!).

I mean, seriously, how adorable is he? Of course I forgot his suit when
we were headed to a symphony after basketball, so he got to wear his favorite clothes to the Christmas symphony

Judah is SUCH a joy! I spend so many nights watching him sleep with his angelic blond hair and long eyelashes. He is tender, articulate, and passionate. Of course he has a penchant for the odd tantrum and he finds it hard to share his favorite toys, but I chalk that up to normal behavior. What really gets me about him is his empathy and sensitivity. If he is disobeying me I tell him that he is making my heart hurt and he RUNS to me, covering my face with kisses and saying “sorry mommy, sorry mommy.” It makes it frighteningly easy to discipline him because his sense of guilt is very strong if he is informed that he is hurting someone he loves. Almost every night I hear the pitter-patter of his feet as he comes to crawl in our bed, but we always let him. I’ll wake up to him stroking my arms or with his little around Joe’s neck. These are the days!

So thrilled with his Christmas tool set from St. Nick

Modelling the gloves for Daddy on fight night

A beautiful thing about our boy is his sensitivity to and love for his great-grandfather, "Papa", who has Alzheimer's disease. He is very protective of Papa and always concerned about something he is doing. At night he prayers for "Papa's broken brain feel better." It is so sweet.

A valentine's day snuggle

He has had quite the year. Since being 18 months old he has learned to talk in sentences, use the toilet, shoot basketballs/pucks/soccer balls, play pass, jump, feed himself, dress himself, do somersaults, and even pray. These early years of major development always astound me.

He gave up naps incredibly early....the odd day though he just can't fight it

Judah certainly has his quirks. He is obsessed with basketball and will only wear his basketball shorts and shirt when we are home. He also must sleep in them, and so we put them over his pyjamas. He knows that he is not allowed to wear them out in the cold and so he carries them with him. Recently I have started putting them in a little backpack because they were getting very dirty getting dragged around everywhere. It is a hugely dramatic moment when I inform him that we must wash his shorts and shirt. He stands there with his head against the glass door of the washing machine watching his shorts go around and around on speed cycle. The odd time I can lure him away with a show or snack.

Forced to wear a snow suit in -20, so his basketball shorts were in his pocket

He is also incredibly sensitive to scary things and if something is dark he is afraid of bad guys or ghosts. This is new territory for us as Liliana didn’t have a phase like this. We have to work hard at being patient when it makes the bedtime routine longer than it needs to be or he won’t play alone because he scared of “bad guys down there.”

I never want to forget how Judah adores his older sister. He is always concerned for her well-being and we often hear him say, “you be cawful weeanna!”He follows her around like a little puppy dog wanting to play with her. The odd time he’ll be rewarded with a character to participate in her game. He just lights up. I’ve stumbled across them snuggling, and he’ll be stroking her face or she’ll be “reading” him a book. Those are the little moments that make my heart sing.

I am treasuring these moments of having him with me all day every day. The other night as Joe and I were falling asleep I whispered that I don’t ever want Judah to grow up. He is just so darling and dear. Thank you, our dear son, for being such a delightful 2 year old. We are so grateful for the gift you are to our family!

(A little video of Judah's new counting talent)

Liliana - An Update

Liliana: An Update

This has been quite the year for our sweet, determined, imaginative girl! She started pre-school in the fall at a little school close to our house. She had quite a period of adjustment but now goes happily 3 mornings a week. Her biggest problem is that all the boys want to marry her, and that she is far more interested in playing than learning letters. Her teachers, thanks be to God, recognize that she is only 4 years old and it is OK that she is uninterested in letters. So, she plays and on the side learns a little bit. Exactly as a 4 year old should.

1 of 10,000 costume changes in a day for our imaginative girl

Pink day at school....she rocked it!

She is alternatively and simultaneously maddening and delightful. She is so eager to be helpful, she is inquisitive and adventurous, and incredibly athletic. She asks questions out of the blue like, “daddy, if God made Adam and Eve, who made God?” or “mommy if bad guys say s**t than are you a bad guy because I’ve heard you say it?” or “mommy this was a really good episode of my little pony, it taught me that I must forgive myself because the past is the past.” All of these questions lead to the current moment’s preoccupation being set down and a lesson in life and love being taught with a little prayer to the Holy Spirit.

Christmas gifts, a pony and a cat. It's the simple things in life when you are 4 years old

Along with these delightful qualities she is also in a phase of defiance, attitude, and a good amount of sass.

Little miss Sassy herself at the Christmas symphony

Regardless of the day we’ve had, nighttime comes and she emerges in her fuzzy pj's, dragging her soft blanket, asking for snuggles or to be held. What an age! As I see glimpses of the “big girl” she is becoming I snuggle her even tighter dreading the day when she outgrows her “fuzzies,” in every way.

 

Butterfly bandaids on her chin from a wild flying gymanstics leap into a window,
a pretty dress, and her daddy's lap....a perfect image of our girl

I don’t want to forget little things about this year with our Lyla Bug, such as the way she sped through every level of preschool swimming, like a little fish. She becomes something else when she enters the water - the joy just oozes out of her. I always need to remember the way she loves chicken wings, and so when we take our family out for wing night she sits there, pigtails and dirty face, as the wings pile up on her plate. She has no sense of how dirty her face is, yet she uses a wet wipe for her hands every 2 wings. I watch in amazement. She believes unquestionably in God, Jesus, Mary, and the Angels. I don’t want to forget how easy it was to teach her about these heavenly things because, as a child, her faith is so simple. It is just obvious to her!  I never want to forget what it is like to peek around the corner and secretly watch her imaginative play, relishing in her utter immersion in the game she has created for herself.

Wing night, her favorite are honey garlic

Liliana is such a tender and devoted big sister. She cares for Judah in a detailed and aware manner. The odd time he drives her crazy but we coach her through navigating those moments and I thrill to think of the friendship they could have as they grow.

A bittersweet memory, but I don’t want to forget how she clung to me as I dropped her at school, crying and crying. I had to pass her to her teachers and run to the car, where I too cried and cried and couldn’t drive. I wondered what we had gotten ourselves into.

I could go on and on, and yet this is only supposed to be an update.  Liliana Joy, it is such a pleasure to be your mommy. There have been nights, after you are asleep, that I turn to your daddy and wonder how it is that I am not ruining you because as our eldest I am learning as you are growing. Some days I am so quick tempered or my expectations are too high. You are so forgiving and quick to forget, you just LOVE us and continue to trust us unquestionably. Thank you, our darling. We praise our good God for the gift of you!