Virginia’s Blog

Note: Katharine says I often make multiple posts at once…I’m living up to it today!

Ginna asked yesterday to get a notebook. She sees me journaling (albeit much less than in the past…I probably have 15-20 full journals dating back to the mid-1980’s…) and she wanted to have her own. So we have started doing it together. My journals are prayers and notes I take on things I am reading. (This used to happen much more before kids. In fact I just finished rereading a journal I wrote while dating Stan….how much time I had to ponder things like Francis Schaeffer’s What Happened to the Human Race?! I consider my current phase one of application….and one day hope to again have the time to read and reflect that I once had.) Anyway, she is enjoying her journal and is making note of people she wants to pray for and things she is praying about. It is very sweet.

The differences in yesterday and today have caused me to think about parenting styles and what is most effective for my children, Ginna in particular. Here’s the story:

Yesterday, I had implant surgery. I asked the oral surgeon’s secretary if I would be able to care for my children afterwards. She responded affirmatively. Clearly, there must be a breach in understanding about what parenting a three year old and one year old entails. After the surgery, I was given orders to rest quietly for the remainder of the day and to take vicodin for pain. Umm….not so possible. Instead, I came home to two napping children (the easy part). But they both awoke in full swing. Ginna’s last swimming lesson was yesterday afternoon, and I felt compelled that she should be there. So I took her. On the way home, I stopped at the bank to make a deposit. The ATM machine was not accepting deposits…and I had to go inside. I got an incompetent teller who took much longer than he should have, and my children were not obeying. I think I carried Jamey out sideways like a sack of potatoes screaming. Ginna was refusing to do her car seat buckle…saying she couldn’t do it….which she can…and I was losing it. I was in major pain and had not yet taken anything but Tylenol. Then we arrived home only to realize that I had not replaced the key on my keychain that I had given the babysitter during the surgery. So we were locked out. It was 5:20. Stan would not be home until 7. My patience was wearing thin. I decided to take the kids to Carl’s Jr. at the end of the street to eat and pass time. They were not so interested in eating. Jamey wanted to climb on tables and try to spill salt shakers. Ginna wanted to stare people down, climb on the back of the booth we were sitting in, and basically do whatever I asked her not to do. I put Jamey back in the stroller and left. I stopped at Starbucks thinking I could get a smoothie for some nourishment since I couldn’t eat. They were out of bananas and couldn’t make one. So I went home. Ginna’s “feet were tired.” I think I must have turned into a monster. All I could manage to do was threaten, talk not very nicely, and be heavy handed. It was truly one of my worst parenting moments. I am not sure how much of the kid’s behavior resulted from the authoritarian, threatening and heavy-handed parenting I delivered yesterday afternoon.

Today we woke up with a chance to try again. Ginna was still the challenging child that she regularly is. But it was a much better day. In fact, tonight I praised her for doing a wonderful job being respectful, playing well with her brother, etc. We still had moments…but I managed to handle them more creatively..thanks, God. For example, this afternoon, I told Ginna I had to go to the bathroom. (Many of her actions lately are blatant attempts to contradict me.) So, she ran to the bathroom, put the toilet seat down, and sat on top of it. Rather than threaten, I said, “Thank you very much for helping me by lifting the seat.” Then I talked to her about helping rather than hindering. And in this house we help rather than hinder. I think she responded with something like, “I want to hinder.” I told her if she wanted to hinder, she could go to her room and hinder there, because hindering isn’t allowed among any of our family members. And that was it. She got over her poor attitude. I’ve tried other ways to handle this sort of behavior, but I am finding that a more heavy handed approach feeds it rather than decreasing it.

Honestly, it is often embarrassing to have a child act like this. I mean, I had the child who in swimming classes this month licked the child next to her and purposefully splashed her classmates and teacher. And in this case, I did run to tell her that if I saw that behavior again, she would be getting out. It is dealing with the verbal stuff for which I have had to develop a new level of creativity and patience.

We visited Stan’s family last and had a fabulous time. Again, we were reminded of how children at 3 years old and 1 1/2 years old are so much easier to travel with than 2 years old and 6 months old!! They were great travelers (considering we had a 5 hour flight…one hour layover…one hour flight…and then one hour drive to get to Tuscaloosa). We have done lots of air travel with kids, and this was by far the best trip with two! We actually ended up flying separately to get there…Stan took Ginna and I took Jamey. Stan said Ginna just sat with her seatbelt on and was very compliant. Jamey was hysterical….we had a little time to kill before getting on the plane, and I told him we could walk around a little before getting on the plane. He pulled his suitcase around and stayed near me very well. I remember flying alone with Ginna at this age and thinking it was so hard….after flying with two, though, flying with one in the “difficult air travel age range (which for me is between 1 and 3)” was easy!! When we deplaned in Atlanta and met back up with Stan and Ginna, the kids started chasing each other up and down the terminal (which we allowed because it was 10pm EST, the terminal was rather empty, the kids had been sitting on a plane for 5 hours). The dynamic of two was very different than one plus one. This is the subject of a post I’ve been meaning to write…which is that one child plus one child is more than two!!

Here are some photos:

This was actually a few days before the trip..Jamey was sick and fell asleep in Ginna’s beloved rocking chair. How many hours of sleep has this chair seen?? (Ginna slept in it for about a year after Jamey was born because she did not want to sleep in her bed!!)

Some of the bounty we picked before heading out of town…

We took a day trip to Starkville to visit friends and family. We stopped by the architecture school. I thought this might be one of the only times they would see a card catalog..so i had to take a picture.

We drove by our (unchanged) old house….there are many great memories here.

We got to spend a little time with Melissa’s children (my cousin).

Austin and Ginna were best buddies most of the trip…though they had their moments. This was one of them…after spending almost 2 hours having photos taken of the 4 cousins…they were worn out!

When we arrived at the Gray’s house, one of the first things Ginna noticed was the “girl bed,” as she called it.

On our last day, we made a trip to visit the “country.” Stan’s grandmother grew up on this 300 acre farm…the land is beautiful. We piled into the truck and rode through the farmland in search of PawPaw on a tractor. At one point, we came close to getting stuck in some mud. Ginna said, “Mom, how are we going to get out of this mess?”

We met Grandmother at the farm. Ginna had met so many Granny’s and Grandma’s ….on the way to the farm, she asked “What is this person’s name we are going to see?” I told her it was Grandmother. She asked what her other name was. I told her Bettye Lee. She said, “I think I’d like to call her Bettye Lee.”

Ginna and Jamey love to walk in a train!

Ginna loves her Uncle Joey!

Joey, PawPaw (Stan’s dad), Big Paw (Stan’s granddad), and Stan

Jamey loves to eat! One night on the trip, Stan and I went out to dinner..and Jamey ate 2 1/2 bananas and 3 pieces of pizza!

Jamey loved his new cousin!

One thing Ginna asked to do during her trip was to roast marshmallows and make s’mores. We did it on the last night.

Jamey loved this car…the more bumps, the better!

Ginna was very concerned about her brother’s well-being. She insisted on running next to the car as much as she could to protect him!

Joey finally convinced Ginna to ride…after having Joey walk alongside the car, she finally decided she could do it!

We miss seeing everyone!

I really enjoyed Tim Keller’s commentary on the meaning of the Sabbath in his study on Genesis (What were we put in the world to do?) It reminds me that Sundays are not only a resting from.. but even more a resting in the finished work of Christ on our behalf. Here is an excerpt from the lesson:

 “This is what the Hebrew’s passage shows us so clearly. God’s redemptive work is “finished” (Jn. 19:30). When we realize that God has saved us solely by grace through Christ’s merits, then we “rest from our work” (Heb. 4:10). The gospel of free justification—that we are saved not by our continuing striving and good works, but by Christ’s finished work on our behalf—is an image of God’s Sabbath rest. This is why worship must be part of our Sabbath! In every worship service, we enter into “rest” when we re-remember the finished work of Christ for us. Then we take our worship off of false gods (Ps. 95:3) through which we seek to save ourselves, and we give our heart’s worship to him alone.

 Ironically, it is only as we enjoy the ‘rest’ of the work of redemption that we will able to truly enter into ‘rest’ of caring for creative. That is why Jesus said that we cannot get true rest simply through Sabbath regulations, but only through him (Mark 2: 27-28). Why? Over-work in general comes because we are not truly resting in Christ. As we saw above, we are using work to get an identity, instead of Christ. When we use work to earn a sense of self-worth, then the work (ironically) is not about the work itself, or others—but it is about us. We are doing it for ourselves—for the money or status we need to shore up our identity. But if we ‘rest’ from our work by trusting in the finished work of Christ, we will be able to truly enter into the rhythm of work and rest that God calls us to.”

 I love this quote Keller included:

“But Hebrew’s 4:1-13 argues that the psalm still offers us, but its emphatic ‘TODAY’ (v. 7:c) a rest beyond anything that Joshua won, namely a share in God’s own Sabbath rest: the enjoyment of His finished work not merely of creation but of redemption. The quitters who turned back to the wilderness may be but pale shadows of ourselves, if we draw back from our great inheritance.” – Derek Kidner

I’ve had some requests for follow-up on some of my earlier posts… I have actually written several posts in my head lately and not had the chance to get them on the screen! So here are two items.

1. Regarding the race to lower cholesterol, I got my results….Stan says he “won” because his total was one point lower than mine. I think I won because my LDL was lower and my HDL was higher.
2. Regarding my post on “intentionality”: My menu planning has taken a turn towards even more (potential for) pre-planning. I have made a spreadsheet with the items I regularly prepare (and those that I don’t prepare as often). I’ve given each a category (based on when I would choose to prepare it). I’ve included a column with the recipe source. This is really important for me, because I use recipes from so many different cookbooks and sources and I sometimes forget from which source a particular one came. Many of mine are torn out from magazines (Gourmet and Cooking Light primarily). I have them in a binder. My hope is to eventually number them and include the number in my spreadsheet….
Regarding family worship/discipleship planning, I am realizing (more cognitively now that I am analyzing what we do and what works, etc.) that worship-training in this house is highly integrated with everyday life. For instance, since “Noah” was our character of the month last month, we pretended to build arks on several days…we acted out the scene, we talked about what would have happened if Noah had not heeded God’s admonition to build the ark (which is now possible since Ginna is beginning to be able to think in the hypothetical sense…),etc. The teaching of new hymns is more difficult….Ginna is stuck on her few favorite songs…so I just have to keep singing the new song…she does pick up words here and there. Although we do read Bible stories together and pray together….I also find that teaching children to worship God all day long by the way they talk to their parents and others, by obeying, by having kind hearts, by sharing God’s love (reminding them that He’s given them so much and they are called to share it)….and telling them that this is worship… is living out the truth that there is no sacred/secular dichotomy.

For the past two years, we have gone to Palm Springs for vacation. We stay at a resort with many pools…and pretty much spend our time swimming and resting. Reflecting on the trip last year has shown me how much has changed since last year. Last summer, it was Ginna accidentally calling people from hotel phones….this year it was Jamey….we finally unplugged it. I was amazed at the relative ease of this year’s vacation….taking a 3 year old and a 1 1/2 year old was SO MUCH more relaxing that taking a 2 year old and a 8 month old!! I had three goals for the trip…to spend lots of fun time playing as a family, to do some reading (which was great…I started a Tim Keller study on Genesis that is wonderful…lots of interesting comments on gender in the first few chapters, which is fodder for a later post), and to get lots of sleep. I succeed on all three! Hence another big difference from last year…it was major work getting the kids to nap and sleep in a hotel last year..this year that was a breeze. So, we’ve returned refreshed. Here are some photos.

Ginna got her own suitcase for this trip last year…so we thought it was fitting for Jamey to get one this year. He LOVED pulling it around!

These ice cream cones were HUGE!

Ginna loved having her bike on the trip. Did I mention the highs were in the 110s?!? She could only ride for a few minutes. We often checked the temp at home versus at Palm Springs….and there was a 40 degree difference..like 64 in Torrance and 104 in Palm Springs.

This is the view sitting on the porch in front of our room.

I love it when they hold hands!!

They shared an ice cream sundae on the last night.

Jamey looks like a sumo wrestler in this suit…but he is really learning to swim in it!!

Pulling the suitcases to the car…

It is so beautiful!!

We took this same shot last year.

He didn’t even make it to the freeway on the way home….