Catching Up, What Might Have Been, and a Shout Out to Mom and Dad

For those of you who have been wondering just what happened to our family, we have simply been on vacation. Although "simply" is not quite the best word to describe it:

All of this for four people, for ten days, and you can't even see me, with another diaper bag, camera, and Ellie strapped to my back! Yeah. Ridiculous.

We have just spent the last couple weeks in Colorado visiting friends and family. Many of you know that I lived there when I was little; my dad taught at the Aspen School of Music and so we lived there every summer until I was eight or nine. It always feels like home to me when we go back. It even smells strangely familiar. We had a great time and I will soon (well maybe not soon... Someday?) post pictures from our trip and give riveting accounts of all our travels and travails. First I have to trudge through all eight hundred pictures that I took (I'm not kidding) and find the ones where my kids are smiling and are not just blurred images streaking across the frame. Stay tuned.

I know it's been awhile since I have written or posted anything on our blog--almost a month, I think. Even though you haven't seen anything, I have been compiling long lists in my head of posts that I would like to write. Now, no fair poking fun as I know other bloggers have been known to do this as well (Katie, Emily). But as my list grew and grew I faced reality that I would not ever possibly be able to post them all, let alone write them all. So instead I thought I would just share my ideas, just for my own sanity, and then if you are terribly curious about any one potential post, drop me a comment...

Posts I Wanted to Write, in no particular order:

--Parenting 101: To Spank or Not to Spank? (Because Jack had his first spanking this week, and the worst part was that after wavering back and forth for almost an hour and crying about the prospect--us, not Jack--when it finally came down to taking off his diaper for the swat...he had a poop. They don't give advice about that in the books.)

--Updates on Jack and Ellie at 2 years and 8 months

--All the things I've learned to do one-handed since I've become a mom (It would surprise you!)

--General Mommyhood (I always can think of posts to write about mom-things, as I'm sure you're all aware, but there are just days...days when I things happen and I think to myself, "Now this, this, is so unbelievable that it surely deserves its own blog entry!" And then somehow, whatever momentous event garnered such thoughts is topped by something else the next day (or later in the same day) and I somehow end up forgetting about so many of the wild things that happen to me as a mom. Maybe it's just as well...I'm not sure I would have any more kids if I remembered every single hard parenting moment!)

--Why in the world we needed THAT MUCH luggage on our trip

--My favorite smells (motivated by our time in the mountains, and all the smells of the outdoors...campfires, musty tents and sleeping bags, the flowers and forests, the ground after it rains, my grandmother's vegetable soup cooking in the crock pot, my babies' heads after their baths, fresh flowers in my dining room...well, I could go on and on but that would defeat the purpose of this list!)

--What am I going to do with so many pictures of my kids? (I think I have more pictures of Ellie in her short eight months than my parents have of me in my twenty-seven years of life. I had originally thought that if I could just make one album per year for each child, I'd be satisfied. But you tell me: what eighteen-year-old college-bound kid wants to be handed eighteen picture albums?? I think I have a problem. I am a self-confessed picture pack-rat.)

--How much I love NBC's "The Office" and why

--All the things I would talk about with Katie, Kim, Julie, and SK (my friends who live so far away...) if we were able to go out for coffee together. If we got through all of my topic ideas we'd be there for at least five hours. But wouldn't it be such a good conversation? Someday.

--How I feel about the fact that this fall will be my five year college reunion.

--How I feel about the fact that next fall will be my ten year high school reunion. (What!?!!)

--Church, and things related. (Am feeling a bit ambivalent about church things these days, as our pastor just left and things are in a bit of upheaval. It's a hard time.)

--Airport security (we've got quite a story from our return trip from the Denver Airport...)

--All the other blogs I've thought about starting, focusing on issues that are of interest/are important in my life that I think might be of interest/be important to other people.

I know there are more blog-worthy-ideas that I've had floating around in my head but for now that's all I can remember.

In closing, I debated whether or not to share this with you, Blogland, in full length feature or just to add it to the list, as it's not exactly a topic that my dad would think "classy" or "dignified" to talk about openly. So bear with me...I think it will be redeeming in the end...

Our vacation began and ended with illness. The night before we left for the Rockies, Jack came down with a 104-degree fever. He was burning up on the plane, and we spent the first few days with a very cranky, very hot little boy. No one slept well, as the kids took turns waking each other up, and we all struggled a bit with the difference in altitude (causing very dry throats, noses, and chapped lips). Jack finally recovered just in time for our large family camping trip, thank goodness!

The day after we returned back home, however, his temperature soared back up and he came down with a stomach virus. The doctor said it was "highly contagious" and we'd better brace ourselves for the worst. (Thankfully, no one else has gotten it yet!) So I spent the first few days after our return from vacation scrubbing vomit out of the carpet, the couch cushions, Jack's clothes, my clothes, Eric's clothes, the bathmats, bedsheets, toys, Jack's blankie, and on and on. Don't get me wrong--I felt horrible for poor little Jack--he was just miserable.

The thing is, vacations are supposed to be refreshing. They are supposed to be a break from your work, a time to relax, a time to do something that you enjoy, a time to see the world, to be in a different environment and try new foods, a time for adventure or just pure leisure. You are, generally speaking, supposed to return from "vacation" feeling refreshed, reenergized, ready to take on the world, gas tank on "full," ready to return to work with pizazz, enthusiasm, and a nice tan.

However. When you have two little children under the age of two...you return from "vacation" worn out, depleted of energy, running on "empty," in desperate need of a "break" from your kids and family...I felt like going for a day at the spa when I got home last week! (Okay. The alternate personality of Annika who is rich and famous felt like going for a spa day. It never occurred to the real me, as I have never even been to a spa so I don't even really know what that means. But I digress.)

I don't mean to complain about the vacation, either, because as you will soon (someday?) find out I loved being in Colorado and I had such a great time with my friend Becca (from high school) and Laura (from Wheaton) and seeing all my cousins and aunts and uncles, and hanging out with my parents and Marika (and my nephew-to-be), Jonathan, and Mikaila ...and the mountains...just drinking in the beauty and the nature and the memories, and did I mention the smells? The sounds of the rushing rivers and the excitement of neighborhood streets that were hilly and watching my kids run through the very same fountains in Aspen that I played in as a child... It was fabulous.

But it was also exhausting. Dragging portable cribs and booster seats and four diaper bags and large Nikon camera bags and jars of baby food and trying to keep bibs and spoons clean and accounted for at the campsite and keeping sun lotion and bug spray on my little buggers (Eric too) and figuring out naps and bedtime and nursing in public and on the road...it was not easy, friends. It was hard.

On the plane trip home, in between changing Jack's diaper on the seat (because there were no baby-changing stations on the entire plane) and trying to keep them from kicking the seat of the woman in front of us, who repeatedly asked us if we could keep our babies from kicking her seat...I sat there dreaming of being home, of being in a place that was familiar to my little family unit, of getting our laundry done and put in drawers, of enjoying our new apartment, of sleeping in my own bed, of putting my kids in the same bed for every nap and bedtime...ahhh, coming home was going to be refreshing and relaxing for me!

Not so, not so! Instead, the mountainous piles of laundry doubled, the icky smells of worn-for-three-days-without-showering-while-camping clothing were mixed with I've-been-barfed-on-three-times-today shirts and pants. And sleeping in my own bed? Well, I laid in my own bed; I haven't gotten much sleep.

Finally by Saturday the vomiting episodes had passed, and Jack seemed to be doing better. He has been a bit lethargic, still, and seems feverish every now and then. But it seemed the worst was over. How very wrong I was. Jack's pediatrician had warned us of another side effect of the stomach virus that I mistakenly thought we had escaped...the big D.

But here brings my debate: which would I prefer less? The sight, smell, and feel of vomit as I hand-pick it off the floor or the sight, smell, and feel of (sorry Dad) diarrhea as I scrub if off Jack's pants?? I don't think I have ever in my life felt so sorry for myself. I don't think I have ever been so grossed out. People. Remembering back to my blog about the Clients...how many of you have hand-washed your client's diarrhea out of their pants multiple times a day? COME. ON.

I know, I know this is bordering on inappropriate--but stay with me here...

So as I am standing there, scrubbing, trying hard not to gag and fighting back tears of self-pity and reminding myself what a thankless job motherhood can be...it suddenly hits me that life has come full circle. I KNOW that my mom and dad probably did the same for me. I am sure that they also were disgusted and grossed out, and felt unappreciated and unnoticed. I actually have one memory from when I was quite little when I woke up in the middle of the night with a mess in my bed; I called out for my parents and they rushed in, cleaned me up and voila, I had clean sheets and new pajamas and not another word was spoken about the incident.

I tell you, there are some very definite times in my life when I have been overcome with thankfulness and an acute realization of all my parents have done for me. The first time was when I went off to college and actually noticed their lack of presence in my life; I also remember thinking way too many times, "Oh. Wow. I guess my parents were right about that after all." But I cannot even begin to count the times I have experienced this since I have become a mom.

Before we left for our vacation I worked frantically to get my house perfectly clean so that we would return from our trip to a nice, clean home...and in doing so I suddenly understood my mom, who would stay up all night if she had to in order to get our house perfectly clean before we took off for the mountains. I've also developed a bit of rough skin on my finger tips from scrubbing stains out of my kids clothes so often; many times, mid-scrub, I've been struck with a vision of my mom doing the exact same thing with my clothes, and then in that moment I understand the roughness that her fingers often displayed. When we went through our recent spanking quandary, I found myself finally fully understanding my parents' cry of, "I'm doing this because I love you!" before I received my swats as a child. I also somehow knew, without even asking, that it must have pained them that first time they spanked me, and I felt this odd, grown-up-but-still-a-child compassion and thankfulness, all rolled into one.

I love my parents. I know they worked hard to raise me and my sister, and that they fought hard battles against the societal norms of popular parenting, against pig-headed peers of ours who thought they knew better than any parents, against other parents who were much more permissive (and in my opinion, walked-all-over) and who taunted them for being so strict.

I've recently been reading books on discipline and spanking and toddlers and the terrible twos...and the one theme that keeps coming back is disciplining with love. That is, loving your child until it hurts, but also standing firm and demanding respect as the parent and disciplining them for outright disrespect and disobedience because you love your child so much and because you know it's best for them. The book I'm currently reading talks about how children test boundaries because they want to know that you have earned your place as the authority, that you are worthy of being their leader, that you have what it takes to protect them, to provide a safe and stable environment for them, that you are trustworthy. That in the end children with parents who discipline well (who find that seemingly impossible balance between authoritarian and permissive parenting) feel very secure and loved and have great respect for their parents.

I know my parents weren't perfect, but I think they did a pretty darn-good job. Thanks for all you put up with, Mom and Dad, and for sticking it out, for standing your ground, for spanking me when I deserved it, for smacking me the time I sassed Mom at the dinner table, for scrubbing all my clothes until your hands were raw, for all the diapers that I never said, "Thank you" for changing, for grounding me when I lied to you, for making me pay you a quarter every time I forgot to put my seat belt on in the car, for saying, "No" to so many movies that I now know you were right about, for saying "No" to immodest prom dresses -- Dad (you made me feel so cherished and full of worth), for staying up into the wee hours of the morning just to make sure all your chicks were back in the nest -- Mom (you made me feel so loved), and for so many more things that I'm sure I don't remember but I know required an ultimate test of patience, will, sacrifice, blood, sweat, and tears.

Is there any way to possibly do justice by saying thank you for all you have done? Does it help you to know that I am beginning to understand what you did for me? That these diarrhea- and vomit-laden experiences are making me realize how hard you worked, how much you sacrificed, how much you loved? Well, I hope so.

What an odd post this been. I have spent two days attacking it, so I fear it lacks cohesiveness. This sleep-deprived mind is too exhausted to do a good editing job so I apologize in advance. I look forward to sharing our trip stories and pictures with you all as soon as I have time. If you are of the praying type, please keep little Jack in your prayers for full recovery, and perhaps you could say a prayer for me and Eric as well, for some rejuvenation? We're pretty worn down these days. Thank you, praying friends...