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.

Job Experience

Fifteen years ago today at this time, I was packed and getting ready to go to the hospital to have my labor induced to have my daughter. She wasn't due for yet another three weeks, but because my body has this thing about having babies at least three weeks before they are due, this time the doctor wanted to be more in control. She is child number five of seven, and the one born before her had decided not only to come early like the rest, he even decided to skip the hospital bit and be born at home. I had these weird labors where you start off normal and then skip a lot of the middle stuff and go right to the last stage and have the baby. Anyway, there we were preparing to go and let the medical world be in charge this time.

I grew up in what we call the Brady Bunch era, where the family tv sitcoms had these perfect children, and the worse things they ever did wrong were leave bicycles in the driveway, they never slammed doors, yelled at parents, or made a mess. Their bad grades consited of a B shame on them, their rooms were always clean, they ate everything on their plate. The perfect children, in the perfectly manicured home, with the perfect parents, and of course Alice the perfect housekeeper who kept the world perfectly balanced.

Shortly after my daughters birth I took a child development class, taught by a psychologist and though it was 20 years or more past the Brady Bunch sitcom, the children portrayed in the books and movies shown at class were exact examples of that type of child. I wondered then with two teens,two toddlers, and a two month old, in my life where I could order a set of children like them! In the course of this class, which was filled with parents, we were asked to add up the ages of our children at that time, and the result was that was how many years of parenting experience we had under our own belt.

This morning, I did that exercise again for myself, and my grand total years of experience based on that instructors particular theory is 133 years to date. Wow, 133 years!! You would think with 133 years experience I would surely have this job perfected and should actually be able to perform the job of parent with such skill and knowledge, and expertise that I too would by now have children that reflect the Brady Bunch era. WRONG!!

Even with all this experience I still have children who argue with me, still have to be reminded to clean their rooms,still won't eat everything put in front of them, despite the fact that I have told them what my mother told me about the starving people in the world. When they are presented with a food they don't want to eat they they offer to send it to the starving people I told them about.

In my 133 years of experience I have not figured out how to get them all to do what is asked of them the first time, or even the second time. Never mind getting them all to, I would be glad if just one did! I would settle for now and then. You would think with 133 years under my belt I would know by now that when a child no matter what age tells you they will do all the work involved in having a pet, that I would have learned that means for a maximum of one week, and then 99% of that pet care is mine, and if I even mention not keeping it they suddenly have a love for it beyond anything a mere parent could possibly understand. Of course that love is nowhere to be found if it needs a bath, or has an accident of the floor. Oh gross I'll puke is the normal response I hear.How do you know it was mine, did you actually see it do that? Forget the fact it is the only one in the house at the time, unless you have time for forensics to prove it, you might as well clean it and get it over with.

In my 133 years of parenting, there has never been a vacation, or even a day off. Sick days consist of you being so ill you can't move and when you do begin to feel better, you can't believe that you haven't been relocated to another house during your illness as you can no longer recognize the one you are in, because your sick day translated to your children as free for all! And the phrase are you really my child comes to mind frequently.

However, in that 133 years experience I have been privilged to learn a lot. I have learned that your house doesn't have to be perfect at all times, it's okay to take a day too goof off. Your laundry will never be all done so why half kill, yourself trying to accompolish the unaccomplishable. There will always be dirty dishes in your kitchen, and the bathrooms, well all you can do is do your best, and if all else fails go to the nearest gas station and use theirs. If you owned and lived in the grocery store there would still be nothing to eat, and having the pets actually does teach them things you don't see until they are grown.

While accumulating this experience I have been blessed to be part of many first steps, many first days, many hugs, millions of beautiful pictures colored just for me. Drawings of stick people with heads as big as Asia,yellow hair, and huge eyes, because a child drew a picture of mommy. I have been given thousands of bouquets of flowers,okay some of them were weeds, but they were hand picked by a child. And smiles and giggles by the dozens.

All in all I think the 133 years experience has taught me that even my kids are a product of the Brady Bunch era, and maybe just maybe if we readjust our version of what we think a perfect kid is, and really look at the good qualities each and every one has, they are all perfectly themself and that is even better.

Downsizing Our Life From The High Tech World

Imagine living in a house that has no television, no microwave, no WII game system, and basically no quick, convienent meals in a minute. A house where dinner time is about 4:30 in the afternoon, instead of 9 or 10 at night, fresh outof the microwave and onto your lap so you can watch the newest CSI whereever!

Imagine a place where clothes shopping doesn't mean the mall, watching a movie means a DVD, board games get played and books are read rather instead of part of the home decor sitting on a shelf, and library cards are actually used. Imagine a world where solitare is played the old fashioned way with a deck of cards instead of a click of the mouse.

Remember the days when a box of 64 Crayola crayons opened your eyes to an entirely different world, and now they have an even bigger box that has 96! The days where coloring books were a treat and we drew pictures to color, rather than print them out of the cool web site we found.

Imagine not going to McDonalds every week, even though Happy Meals are a mere $1.99, not ordering pizza every week, and not having a never ending supply of soda in the house daily.

Imagine a world that had stay home mothers, dinners eaten at a table that were cooked, not ordered in or premade hot and ready to put on the table fresh out of the box or bag, a world where kids had to clean their rooms and not get an allowance for it. A world where children played outside, instead of video games all day long. A world where commericals didn't infuence every toy, piece of clothing or what brand of cleaners we bought.

I remember that world fondly. And in our effort to live more simply in a high tech world, we are incorporating a lot of back to basics into our lives.

Our house has television, but no cable and oddly enough we don't even have an antennae and that craazy box to get local channels from. No satellite with Dish Network or Direct TV. We do have DVD players and movies and once in the while we rent the $1.00 movies from the Blockbuster Box at Publix, but more often we borrow them with our library cards instead.

Our house has book shelves and we actually take the books off the shelf and read them, and again we use those library cards to have access to other books we don't have.We don't have the newest game system, and though we do play some games on the computer we play Scrabble, Monopoly, Life and a huge array of other board games at the dining room table. We have jigsaw puzzles, paper, crayons, and a variety of craft items.

We have no idea what we can Shout out of our laundry anymore, or what laundry soap the tv tells us has the best scent, or what shampoo can make our hair look like the models. Over 18 months ago we got rid of cable in our home and that eliminated all the product hype, all the newest toys, movies, fashions, from our daily view. Imagine this we have five children in this house and they have all survived the lack of television.

In our world we have a 15 year old girl who has decorated the walls of her room with her own colorful drawings, not posters of the hottest celebrity, or the most recent movie star heart throb. We have a 17 year old who does jigsaw puzzles and glues them with puzzle glue to hang on the walls of his room. We have a seven year old who wants a story read each night and goes to sleep without Spongbob or whatever the newest cartoon craze is blaring obnoxiously in the back ground.

I have some children that not only read for pleasure, but have actually put books on reserve at the public library. I have children that volunteer their time for free to a variety of places. My kids no longer remember what an allowance is, it has been so long since they have gotten one, and yet for the most part they keep those rooms clean for free, because it is their room, and thereby not my job to clean them.

We don't have a microwave, it quit working nearly a year and a half ago, and oddly enough it just hasn't been a priority to replace it, even though we could for less than $50.00 these days. Seems to me we have gone this long without it, so we obviously don't need it. Of course that means popcorn cooked on the stove in our stove top popcorn maker, and my 13 year old makes the best popcorn. It also means no meals in a minute, but guess what we have that solved to, by actually cooking and eating dinner at 4:30 at the dining room table. Our meals are not interuppted by televison or telephones.

We do have a box of 64 Crayola Crayons, and I am thinking for Christmas maybe we should get one of the 96 count, if for no other reason to figure out how we have that many colors! And we have some coloring books and a variety of other craft items for pleasure. We do have a couple of the older game systems, but oddly enough we still have kids who play outside. They have bicycles, but no go carts, no 4 wheelers, and again they have survived, and I probably have a few less gray hairs from not having those particular worries.

They are all active in sports, thereby helping get them to the dinner table at 4:30, as we eat before we got to the 6 o'clock practices rather than after them. We do not have soda in the house very often at all, and though we bake something nearly every day, we have not got the endless supply of chips, Oreos, Doritos, snack cakes etc., that the store is full of. Imagine that no Hot Pockets, no pizza rolls, no Pop Tarts! And somehow on regular home cooked meals, fruits and veggies as snacks, peanut butter crackers made at home with saltines rather than the ready to open orange cracker ones, everyone is healthy. Soda is a rarity in our house, and yet they don't seem to mind having koolaid, or gatorade mix, or water instead. They have adapted well to our desire to downsize to a more simple life, less high tech and less convienence oriented.

Are they perfect absolutely not! Is this kind of life for everyone, probably not. But for us, it helps cut the bills some, giving us a little more help in me being a stay home mother. And it teaches valuable lessons in finding what your true needs are, and how to put priority in order. I know when we got rid of the cable, my kids thought the world would end. It didn't and they adjusted very well. When ordering pizza and going through drive thrus became a rarity, maybe 3 or 4 times a year, they actually began to appreciate it as an extra, looking at it as something special not something that was a part of daily life.

I am looking for even more ways to downsize our lives, and steer us more into the simple world and out of the high tech, give me, selfish world that surrounds us all. I'll keep you posted on what we try in our efforts to live simple in this chaotic high tech world.

A New Year

When I was a kid the start of the school year was the beginning of the new year to me. It didn't matter that the year officially begins on Jan. 1, to me the year consisted of the months we were in school, it ended in June with the start of summer, and it began the Wednesday after Labor Day with the first day of school. Even all these years later, though the year still officially begins on Jan.1, I still look at the start of school as the beginning of the year. I am not sure what part of the year I thought summer was, probably just a nothingness and in many ways summer is still pretty much that. I still tend to look at the beginning of school as the beginning of a new year.

We are quickly approaching the new year here. In Florida where we live, school begins in August, and I am learning in many parts of the country that is now the norm. We are down to seven week days and four weekend days and it will be the first day of school.

This new year will bring many lasts with it for our house. This football season is the last season two of my boys will be eligible by age to play for the league they have played on for four seasons. We are nearly a month into practices already, and our Jamboree games are this Saturday. These will be the official start of this years season, and also the last Jamboree my boys will attend as football players. The official beginning and the official end all at one time. Football is tiring for old mom here, yet we begin this season with the bittersweet knowledge that this is the end of an era in their lives and mine.

This school year also marks my one sons Senior year. And at its end another one will have only one year left before he too will be done with high school. A stage of my parenting will be completed, and that little baby I held will turn 18. My hopes and dreams at his birth will take second place to his own. Yes I am kidding myself, they probably did that in his eyes at about age 12.

My grandson and my nephew, and my niece are all beginning the school careers as they begin kindergarten this year. Another niece begins her college career as she prepares to leave home and attend a university that is a few hour trip from home.

My 16 year old will complete his Eagle Project with the Boy Scouts of Amercia and that will close yet another chapter in the story of our lives. And the youngest if he chooses would now be eligible to begin Cub Scouts.

That is a lot of changes in one year! As we embark on the start of this new year, we do so with the dreams, hopes, and faith that we do every year, yet this time it feels different. This time of year this year is an ending to so many things, and marks the beginning of so very many more.

Over the many years of first days of school, there have always been new changes, and yet this year they seem to be different somehow with it being the ending of so many of the stages of growing up happening in our house. As with every year we will face the challenges, climb the mountains, and come to terms with the new phases we will be embarking on.

I look forward to the adventures the new year will bring, and I will no doubt feel many twinges of sadness as well, as I prepare myself for the ending of one childhood and the beginning of that same childs adulthood. I will continue to have dreams for that child and the others as well. I will continue to pray for all of them, and as I watch these last football games, and this last year of high school I will hold close to my heart the memories we are going to take with us from this year. I will engrave those memories into my heart, and I will promise myself now that amongst the tears I will surley cry as we work our way to the end of the year, I will also smile for this year and all the ones that brought us to it.

I Live In The Food Processor

Living in a house with five children aged 7-17, and two adults is much like living in a food processor. Our combined personality traits, all in one house is similar to putting all the vegetables into the food processor at one time, turning it on high speed, and letting it whir away. The result often being that mess you have when it is time to take the food processor apart and clean it. Shreds of this and that stuck on the blades, reminding you every time why it is you really don't like digging it out of the cabinet and using it at all!





Seven people, seven personalities, all in one place, with some strange idea that we will live together in this wonderfully harmonious enviroment! Well okay, it was a thought, even if it wasn't a realistic thought.

Want to know all about different tastes in music, sports, foods, movies, you name it and we can quickly give you seven different opinions, and seven different reasons for each opinon. Though one may briefly tolerate someone elses likes, it should never be mistaken as being in agreement. Somehow it seems like I am the one tossed into the food processor of our united lives the most often. I wonder at times is it because I am the mom? It seems that without fail we will get into my car and the button to change the radio station of my choice is immediately the first thing touched and music that isn't my choice is then blaring at me. Okay, so you say well teenagers tend to like different music and tend to think they are in charge of our musical entertainment for car rides. I disagree with this, and feel people riding in my car with me should listen to whatever music I happen to choose playing. However as we have blended families and personalities, it is not just the teens who make it the choice to do this, but my husband as well will change the dial to suit his tastes. Most of the time I just endure, but if we have the kids with us, it then proceeds to be a battle of wills. Step father versus kids, both sides insisting on getting in the last word, both sides equally determined to win, and where does that leave me? Stuck in the middle, caught between the man I married and the kids that I inherited sole custody of when their father died. Not a good place to be. I'd rather have a side than be caught in the middle, ah yes there goes the chopping blade yet once again. Score at end is a tie for zero, but mom is now fried.

Another are of aggravation.......Dishes! Dishes are a neverending cause of stress and strife in our household. We seem to have a never ending supply that need to be washed or loaded into the dishwasher. If I didn't live in this house with all these people I love, I would never have believed that dishes can be the battleground for a major war. However they are! It doesn't seem to matter that when I leave the house there are no dishes to be dealt with, nor does it make any difference if I am gone for a long time or a short time, the dishes seem to jump out of the cabinets all by themself at times, but I will none the less come home to a massive supply of dishes needing to be washed or loaded into said dishwasher. Uh oh, in come children and step dad...put your gloves on battle begins. Now my offspring have a stubborn streak, and if you ask them to do something in a way that they get the impression they have a choice ( notice I say impression, because really they have no choice), they will usually, not always, but usually somehow see it your way and do what it is you want. Mission accompolished..mom-1 kids-0. But, like I said they are stubborn and if you come out into the ring telling and heaven forbid making it appear demanding they do, well there again..WAR has begun. And again I am tossed into the food processor, caught between enemy lines, and anything I say is going to be against one side or the other, so I am again in a no win scenario.

Then we have the chair episode. I bought a wicker chair at a yard sale and my first words that day are probably the only words I have ever spoken that seem to have been commited to the memory of others. I told everyone that day to stay out of my chair, as I did not want it torn up from horsing around like so many of my belongings tend to be. Well recently that chair has been a huge issue! In comes the seven year old, leaning on the chair daily to look out the window and see if his friend is outside. Second enters the grown-up with the demand he get off his mamas chair, thus the lines are drawn, and the battle begins, and mom is again tossed into the food processor. This particualr chair has become such a topic of disagreement that I myself am ready to destroy it, just so I don't have to hear near daily battles over it. And again when I open my mouth, I am in a no win situation over my own stupid chair, that I have learned to regret ever having bought!

These are just a couple of the daily issues we have in our blended household, and they are just tiny parts of the reasons why I often wonder, just why exactly we thought this was such a brilliant idea.

My days are spent trying to keep peace, fairness, objectiveness, hope, love, and every other kind of good emotion strong and stable in my life. Yet many days I find myself sticking to the eggshells I find myself walking on, pushing back deep inside me the things I believe in to suit others and keep peace, and what happens in the process, is I get chopped up living in the food processor to the point sometimes I am not even sure who I am anymore.

Now we all know teenagers have this tremendous power in which they can push a parents buttons and create so much chaos that you'd give almost anything to jump into a food processor just to get away from the noise and drama. Being the " parent" doesn't work, I know I have tried. However if you are lucky enough to be the step parent in the situation it works wonderfully. I have seen this first hand, my husband has an incredible talent in being able to become the invisible person. If the teens in particular are giving me a difficult time, he has the uncanny ability to just walk right by, completely deaf to the noise around him, totally blind to their existence or mine and can just tune out the fact that he cohabitates with any of us at all. My kids are very tuned into this, and as most kids will do, they see this as an advantage on their part. I have learned how to do the same thing in regards to issues with his kids as well, and if there is one thing he and I should agree on, ignorance is truly bliss as they say. If we just stay out of the other factors of each others lives, all kids are happy.

So as we endure our daily struggles to live in harmony, and blend the seven personalities in the same house, we also must blend the remaining personalities that are part of the unit, though they don't live in the same house. However we continue to hope for a balance to miraculously make itself visible to all, and our intent is to try and stick it out long enough to finally one day become somewhat blended happily all the way around.