The Forgotten Birthday Gift

This week I have spent my mornings digging out and pulling up huge clumps of weeds that have spread all over our back yard and side yards. It has been a hot, dirty, sticky task, digging them out by the roots and it seems as if they are spreading around faster than I can remove them. My fingers are cut, my nails are ragged and filthy.The eaisest way would be to mow over them, but then they just keep spreading and taking over. Since we have four pigs and three goats, they have been totally enjoying the fruits of my labor as I toss armful after armful of these green clumps of weeds into their respective pens. This gives them the opportunity to munch on all the crunchy, green clumps they want and yet not give them the freedom to also munch on what is left of my wanted flowers and the few fruit trees they haven't already devoured!





As I watched the tiny little flower buds opening up on a patch of these weeds, in the early morning sunlight this morning, I suddenly recalled how it is that so many of them are spread out all over this particular acre and a half!





The first summer we moved up here, there were a lot of pretty wildflowers aka weeds on the sides of the roads and in the empty fielded lots around our newly found home. Wildflowers and particularly fields of them have always been among my very favorite things. I remember picking armloads of wildflowers as a child and proudly presenting them to my mother and grandmother every summer, and they always treated these bouquets like they were expensive roses! They always promptly displayed them in jars and vases filled with water. To this day I love to display flowers in mason jars filled with water rather than the crystal vases that I also own.





Our first spring and summer here, five of my children were still quite young, with the older four being11, 1o, 8, and 7 that summer. We had moved here from subdivison life where there were sidewalks for them to ride their bikes on , and here there were no sidewalks and the blocks were much bigger than your typical city suburbs block. There is a huge difference between a city block and a country block. The kids loved the new found freedom of riding their bikes on a road that barely had any traffic, and now and then if they stayed together I would allow them to ride once around the block.





The Saturday of my birthday, they spent the entire day nagging for one more trip around the block, and their dad kept granting them permision. They had two friends playing here that day, and all six of them spent the better part of that hot July day going around the block, coming back and running out to the back of the yard, then asking to go around the block yet again. It seemed to me their trips were not only becoming ridiculously frequent, but each one seemd to take longer and longer for them to go and get back from. I brought this up to their dad and his response was their kids, they just want to have fun, leave it alone.





As the day dragged on and late afternoon arrived, I was called outside by the group of young children and they dragged me off to the very back yard. I was stunned by what I saw. My kids had grown up hearing me talk about wild daisy's, buttercups, dandelions, tiger lilies, and wild violets growing in fields. They knew the stories of summers spent picking these and bringing them home by the armloads. They even had witnessed good old mom stopping along side a road and picking wildflowers to bring home. Knowing how very much I love wildflowers and the meaning they have to me, they enlisted their friends help as well as their fathers for my birthday gift from them that year. And all those trips around the block they were pulling up and shoveling up clumps of the wildflowers along the sides of the road and in the empty fields of their bike ride travels. They would then toss them over the back fence, hence why when they would return from their ride they would run around back. They shoveled dirt into empty plastic flower pots I had saved and planted each cherished weed. By the time they were done I had nearly 60 1-3 gallon pots filled with dirt, sand and flowering weeds, aka wildflowers. There were tiny purple ones, yellow, white, pink, some that made you sneeze, and some that just plain smelled stinky! But they were beyond excited and proud to present me with my very own wildflower garden, that I could plant in our yard and they would return year after year for me.





We watered them and eventually they pretty much all died in the confines of a container, so we dumped them into an area in the back yard and left them to do their thing and return as they chose. They did come back the next spring and summer. The second summer here their dad passed away and we pretty much forgot about the wildflower patch in the back yard as we took over the mowing and yard work ourselves. We must have mowed it down before they ever really sprouted up that year, and we must have pretty much kept doing that until this summer.





Now with our mower broken we are behind in the back yard mowing, we pay a neighbor to keep the front in good shape, and thus we have been over run with clump after clump of these flowering weeds. I have spent four days removing these from our yard and feeding them to the animals when suddenly this morning I realized and remembered how it is that we have so many of these all over the yard. I still have a couple good size clumps of them left, that I was going to dig out and feed the pigs, but as my birthday rolls around again in a couple of days, and these weeds were the most thoughtful and heart felt gift I have ever received, I am going to allow the rest to remain here and I am going to cherish every weedy bloom in remembrance of a birthday long since forgotten.

How Do the Kids See It

I don't know how it is everywhere, but I know in my house with my kids, and in my sisters house, the telephone is a microphone to LOUD noise. It can be perfectly quiet, the kids occupied with their own thing, but once you pick up that phone, quiet time is over, forgotten.





It amazes me the number of things kids want that you only hear about when you ae engaged in a telephone conversation. You may be talking to your sister, your friend, your husband, your boss, a doctor, salesman, it could be the President, but those kids DON'T care who, they just know you are on the phone and that means Open Season to loud in the house! Seriously how many times have we all gone ahead and said yes to something they asked for without realizing what we just agreed to, because they got to us while we were on the phone? I am quilty of that. The biggest problem that I have found from that is the things I apparently have said yes to are things I didn't even realize I said yes to ! I have discovered there are times when the yes word was actually being said to who ever was on the other side of my phone conversation but one of the kids had asked me something at the moment I was concentrating on said conversation and that kid being a kid decided the yes word was in response to them, and it usually wasn't, but they knew that!





I have turned into an acrobat while on the phone, as I have walked from room to room trying to get away from the noise so I can carry on the conversation in realitive quietness only to have the noise follow me. I have hidden in closets, squeezed into places humans can't fit into under any other circumstance except to try and carry on an important business call.





Kids will also use those times to say things to you that you can't believe you just heard come out of their mouth! How many times does a child say something that makes you just stop dead in your tracks, while you are on the phone with someone? Usually this happens when it is a business type call. Somehow they assume every phone converstation you have is with s friend or family member, it never crosses their minds that you might be doing the phone interview part of a job! Or maybe you are handling a bill. And usually they know you are not going to respond and bring forth a full blown war of wills, because you are "stuck" on the phone at the moment. They count on the fact the 99% of the time you are much calmer when dealing with it after the phone conversation, because the politeness you demonstrate to the other caller, has that calming affect on you. And depending on the call you may well forget the entire situation, which does happen.





In a recent phone conversation with my sister she was experiencing this type of problem with one of her sons, and granted he is only 6 years old, but I have learned with the number of children I have and the varying ages that they have been and are, age has no limit in the phone war. My teens are often more offensive and louder than they were as toddlers and still take complete advantage of my disadvantage from being invovled in the phone call.





In my sisters case this day, she was trying to keep the 6 year old and his 3 year old brother quietly occupied while the baby napped and she had a few minutes to talk to me. Mr. 6 year old was not wanting to cooperate with her request of picking up, and the more she tried to reason with him, the more determined to be disagreeable he became. He did the typical kid thing and got louder with his dissatisfaction, and the more words she used to try and get him to see her point, the more frustrated he became. Now being the oldest of three boys, his little brothers being 3 and not quite six months, you can picture his frustratiin at having to take a quiet rest time, and you can almost understand what he is thinking, mom wants quiet, so the baby can nap, she wants us to rest which translates into nap, if the baby is woken up that nap goes out the window! Hmmmm..... At the point I am getting to though he amongst his tearful pleas, and his reminding her she in unfair, he announces that she treats him like he is another.........ah ha you thought baby, right! Well that is not what he said, he very defiantlely wanted to know why she treats him like his another adult! There was a moment of silence on both her end of the phone and mine. I totally didn't expect that statement, and somehow I get the impression she didn't either.





That brings me to the title of this blog, how do the kids see it? Always different than the way we do we can be sure of that.

Visions for Children

When my first child was born, or maybe even before that while we were expecting her, I had visions in my mind of the life she would have. All those things I dreamed of and hoped for her. How I would help ensure them coming to be. There were big plans of her having all those things I never had, not sure anymore what exactly those were, as the things I thought I never had seemed to change with my birthdays, and the list of them seemed to shrink as well.

With each of my seven though there were lists in my mind and dreams I had for each and every one. We always dream that whatever our life was we somehow give them the footing for a better life than we had. Now that by no means is a declaration that we didn't have a good life ourself. I wanted them to be better academically, have more confidence, have musical talents,and more of all the numerous talents I saw in my friends and didn't have.They would be more fun, more attractive, more of everything I felt I wasn't, and I somehow declared myself as the one who would guarantee this happened. They would never have to do without, I would raise them so they didn't. They would not struggle as much as me, things would be so much easier for them. This was as set in my brain as anything.

The trouble with that though was these were my hopes for them. These were things I couldn't control. I maybe could force music lessons, but if they didn't enjoy them, they wouldn't show that talent. And some of them, well they just truly aren't musically talented, and all the lessons in the world or all the hopes from mom won't chnage that.

Now I have three grown, all raised by the same mother, all with the same kinds of rules, all with similar advantages, and all completley different than my idea when they were born. I have four more still not "grown" and even they aren't what my brain thought they would be as I looked at them as infants and decided what they would be.

Somewhere in our parental desires for our kids to have the best, be the best, and want the best, we lose sight of the fact they are their own person. We do not get a life redo through our children. They need to have their own goals, decide their own talents, and struggle and do without to achieve those very same dreams they have.

I have learned and not always easily either, that my job in all this is to give them the tools to discover their own dreams. My job is to love them even when their dreams and their ways are things that I never dreamed I see my kids do or hear them say. My job is to remember not to worry so much about molding them in to the person of my great hopes for their life, but to teach them how to be their own person and live their life to the fullest.

I hope to teach my children that as they look at their brand new child one day and they begin to weave all the dreams and desires of a new parent in their brain, that they stop, take a minute, look at that sweet innocent face, and set their goals for them the parents to teach them that we can't have everything, be everything,but that through hard work, struggles, and dreams for ourselves, we can be the best of what we choose.