turning two!

Dearest Karsten,

My sweet baby boy is turning two! Happy Birthday to my most mechanically-minded, outdoor oriented, stealthily determined and quietest child. I really can't believe you are two.

Oh sweet boy, may you always keep your tender heart and gentle spirit. You have a rough and tumble side that wants to poke things with sticks and break things. But you also have an innate compassionate understanding that I pray is revealed in greater capacity with each year of your life. You love your Momma, and find the taste of her hair strangely comforting. We hope you find new ways to show your love with each passing year. I hear it isn't very popular in high school to rub a clump of your mother's hair over your face before saying goodbye.

You are still chubby in the most delicious way. We get to admire your chunky legs often because apparently it is a genetic trait of our children to not want to wear clothes. You'd better learn to keep your pants on by the time you hit puberty, however. Good thing we have a few years left.

You love your sisters dearly, shown by your frequent unannounced kisses and hugs, and unprompted "I la loo" (I love you). They love you back, as shown by their patience and kindness in sharing with you and forgiveness of you destroying their hard work, beautiful pictures, and creations of all sorts. You want to be like them and have taken to wearing their dress up clothes and accessories. You have a particular fetish for shoes and socks of all color and style. It is definitely hard being the only boy amongst sisters. Take heart, I am told that boys with older sisters make the best husbands.

For a child that doesn't talk much, you sure manage to communicate. A shortage of words is not a shortage of opinion. If the gestures don't work, then a good breath-holding spell seems to get your point across. Breath-holding is when you get angry enough that you forget to breath and your face gets stuck in a silent scream for a minute, or more, until you turn purple and pass out. The doctor has assured me that you will outgrow this... but I am still waiting.

It also needs to go in the record here that you beat both of your sisters by many months to the first stage of potty training. On your second birthday you went pee pee in the toilet four times in one day - a young record in our house. Surely this means you are destined for brilliance!

Since I was given free reign on your cake, I went with a favorite theme of yours: tractors! Unfortunately, you were quite upset to see one of your toys on top of the cake. Perhaps you thought we were going to eat it? At least I got some photos before returning the tractor to you.

You didn't understand the birthday thing because it seemed to you like we were singing "Happy Birthday" all week long to various different people. Finally, someone started handing you some presents to open too.

It has become a fun family tradition to give our 2-year-old his or her first backpack. You were proudly excited to wear your new fox backpack all day long... as long as you didn't have to wear anything else, of course.

"I'm TWO", you say holding up all of your fingers.

And... the many silly faces made by your and your precious little personality...

We love you little boy! You make our family much better rounded. We can't imagine life without you. Keep growing into the little man God has destined you to be.

turning four!

Dearest Sommer,

Happy birthday to my spunky middle child who keeps us in giggles all day long!  As a good friend puts it, you are the perfect combination of sugar and spice.

Three was a fun age, and your imagination has grown to be much bigger than you are. There are days when you never stop talking, or singing, or sing-talking. You still have have a lisp, pronouncing your Rs and Ls like Ws, and your Ss like a TH. I want to always remember the way you sound right now with all of the musical inflection of a girl who is enthusiastically enamored with the world. 

You have the perfect middle position between your siblings, with a friend on both sides. Well designed for our most social child. You are growing into an excellent older sister, being sure to teach younger brother all of the rules, while enforcing a few of your own at times (we are working on that.) You and your older sister have become the best of friends this year and each other's preferred playmate. Together you are learning to get along most of the time, and are practicing fair fighting strategies the rest. 

Four is truly a magical birthday. You are excited to finally be a big 4-year-old, and now insist on taking four more bites of dinner instead of three before being excused. Of course, you are well beyond your years in many ways. You have memorized the names and calls of hundreds of birds from your bird song book, identifying more than I can. You are the youngest child in your pre-school class, but the teachers assure me that you are well placed (meaning if you were in the younger class you would be bossing everyone else around.) You learned to swim this year, which I believe was possible because you have no fear. Your independence and strong opinions can feel like an overwhelming job to parent, but I have to remember this is our opportunity to help shape those personality extremes into future greatness.

We celebrated all four years of you with your very first birthday party of your own. Like Annike's, it was a last minute affair with no extra frills. A cake and plenty of tutus and tiaras to share from the dress up bin is all a group of 4-year-old girls really needs to make it a party! You appropriately convinced the other girls to pretend that you were the queen while they were your daughters. Because it was your birthday, everyone seemed to think this was just fine.

Oh yes, and you gave up the idea of an osprey cake in favor of a much more colorful peacock cake. The inside was flavored like pink lemonade, just one step tastier than bubblegum. We may be giving the rest of this cake away to the neighbors, but at least it looked pretty.

We love you Sommer Sunshine! Happy 4th year of life!

turning seven!

Dearest Annike,

Happy SEVENTH Birthday to my sweet-natured, animal-loving, serious but silly girl!

You are a kind friend and a fabulous big sister - and there is nothing I would rather be able to say about my daughter than that. You love God and are always asking me to tell you a Bible story that you haven't heard yet (which is challenging me in new and good ways!) Your artistic talents have continued to blossom through detailed drawings and your beautiful handwriting. You enjoy learning about almost everything, but have recently been particularly engaged in ancient Egypt, insect life, and birds of all types. You, of course, still want to be a scientist when you grow up.

This year you have grown into a new kind of helpful member in our household, faithfully taking on chores like organizing your room, setting and clearing the table at dinner, responsibly watching your siblings, and helping with odds and ends jobs like window cleaning and car washing. The best part is that you do it all with a cheerful heart - and that make me SO PROUD. What a gift you are to our family!

We celebrated your birthday with a last minute invitation to the girls in your second grade class to come over for pizza, cake, and a "play date". I was afraid to call it a birthday party because I didn't have any decorations or party favors or any planned activities. The absence of fancy decorations didn't matter at all because the fun was in being together. I heard one of your friends tell you she was sorry that she didn't bring you a birthday present... and then I had a proud mother moment when you responded, "That's okay! You didn't need to bring me a present. I am just glad you came!"

As it turns out, you changed your mind about wanting a fox cake (which is good because I wasn't sure how to get the fox-flavoring to come out right). Instead you got a chocolate flavored hummingbird cake, which I feel represented you perfectly this year.

I want to remember this group of seven-year-olds as having big teeth, big feet, big imaginations, and really dirty faces. For all of the ways they are getting bigger, they are still quite little girls in many ways. Don't grow up too quickly, my child!

birthday month

It's September, and around here we know what that means: it's birthday month.

Don't ask me what we were thinking when we decided to have all three of our kids within 9 days of each other on the calendar. December is a great month... but we do end up paying the price in September. My own birthday is a few days later at the beginning of October. By the time we make it that far I am so exhausted that I usually don't mind when my birthday is completely overlooked. The greatest birthdays are the ones preceded by low expectations.

We try to make each child's individual birthday special... which means that each child gets a cake of their own. Of course, we end up with a ridiculous amount of cake, and no one wants it again until next September.

Traditions are started in a moment of perceived brilliance... that later may feel as far from brilliance as possible. In the spirit of tradition I asked each of my 3 kids the same questions:

Annike (turning 7) answered:
What kind of cake would you like?
    --- A fox cake!
What flavor should it be?
     --- Fox flavored.
Hmmm... Fox flavored cake? Are you sure?   

Sommer (turning 4) answered:
What kind of cake would you like?
   --- An osprey cake!
What flavor should it be?
   --- Bubble-gum flavor!
Well, daddy will definitely not be helping us eat that cake.

Karsten (turning 2) answered:
What kind of cake would you like?
   --- Doot!
What flavor should it be?
   --- Choo!
Good. I think I can handle that one.

Wish me luck. I am off to creative caking. Cake-creativity. Cre-cake-tive baketivity.
Oh dear. Bad start.

a trip to nantucket

Travelling is not something that typically gives me anxiety.  This particular trip, however, gave me knots in my stomach for weeks beforehand. I sat up at night jotting lists of things that needed doing and schedules that needed booking. I was very nervous.

It was a 6 day trip with just Karsten and me. I had 5 items to carry in and out of the airport by myself, which involved some complicated strapping systems. In fact, the above picture is me "practicing" in my driveway for my dreaded trek through the airports. We flew on 4 different airplanes flown by 4 different airlines, hopping through 3 different places coast to coast (from San Francisco to Chicago to Nantucket). Fortunately Karsten still flies for free as he is just a few weeks shy of 2 years old, but he is pushing the weight limit for my lap so I wouldn't recommend this. All to be a part of 1 very important wedding on the island of Nantucket.

It had been over three years since I'd seen my paternal grandma, now well into her eighties. She had never met my little boy. On the way to Nantucket we made a 36 hour stop in the outskirts of Chicago to visit her.

When I was in the midst of chest-clenching anxiety over the details and realities of the trip I had scheduled, a friend reminded me, "You might feel stressed at times, but you will never regret making this trip." She was absolutely right.

  

One result of my extra stop was that 3 days out of my 6-day trip were spent in airports. I should mention here that for as long as I can remember I have burst into uncontrollable tears at the sight of strangers running through an airport. I believe it dates back to the time I was nine years old and my mother and I were stranded in Dallas because of a hurricane and had to do some running of our own. Whatever the reason, seeing people make that run with anxious faces and all their luggage makes me cry every time as I imagine the heartache of a missed flight and loved ones waiting at the other end.

We had a couple of close calls in the airport, but it was the connecting flight to Nantucket that was a near miss. It was also the most important piece, since there are not exactly a lot of flights to Nantucket running in a day. Getting stuck overnight in Washington D.C. was not on the itinerary.

I raced through the airport with an obscene amount of stuff and a small boy (or giant baby, however you want to look at it) strapped to my chest in a Bjorn carrier he outgrew a year ago. At some point my backpack had come unzipped and strangers were chasing after me with things like wet wipes and trail mix that had fallen out. I'd packed enough food to feed every passenger on the plane, so we fared okay despite some minor losses. If I'd been a bystander seeing myself run through the airport, I would have been reaching for tissue by now.

I held it together until we collapsed into our seat on the Nantucket flight, only minutes before they shut the airplane door. It was enough. I had spent the previous five hours worrying that we wouldn't make it... worrying about something I had absolutely no control over. Tears were welcome now. Hopefully the stewardess just thought I had allergies. Deep breaths. God provides, sometimes only by the very skin of our teeth.

Actually, God provided quite a lot for me in ways that I still can't fully see. Washington D.C. was just a layover location for me, not an actual destination. But oddly, on this same day of my near miss in the airport, a number of my extended family members were gathering for a funeral right there in D.C. While I fretted and waited on a delayed plane, there was an underlying peace knowing that I had family in this foreign city that would come and get me if I needed them to. It felt like a specific answer to my anxious prayers. I didn't end up needing help, but I did need peace, and I did need to know that God was taking care of me.

Karsten and I made it to the Nantucket wedding with time to spare. We watched my brother wed his lovely bride, now my sister-in-law, under a historic lighthouse. The setting pushed the anxieties of travel far behind us.

  

Karsten found a special joy in photo-bombing wedding pictures. He is used to being the cutest and most exciting subject for the camera, so I believe he was miffed that more photos were being taken of the lovely couple than him.
... No, he wasn't the ring-bearer. He was cupid-in-training.

Don't let the hassles of my story fool you. I wouldn't have missed this wedding if all of the airports shut down and I had to run my way to Cape Cod!

To the lovely couple: I wish you years of love and joy and friendship. May God bring a peace that will overshadow all of your anxieties in the way that He alone can. The wedding was beautiful, but the best is yet to come...

XOXO, Ashley