Joel's Facebook Poem

Joel emailed me the following excerpt a couple of weeks ago. One of his current missions in life is to obtain my facebook password.

a poem:
it was a beautiful day for your facebook
but you did'nt learn your lesson
give me the password
i am so mad
give it to me now
love,joel


He cracks me up and I LOVE him to PIECES.

Eli-isms

Eli today, "Mommy sometimes you don't know the way to go. That's why Jesus gave us a Tom-Tom.

Eli yesterday, "Mommy I wanna be the Little Mermaid for Halloween, then we can have three girls and two boys in our family."

The Winter of my Discontent

Snow. Snow. More snow. Joel and Eli only went to school Tuesday and Thursday last week. School was cancelled today (Monday), and is tomorrow and Wednesday as well. Kelly and the kids left the house today for the first time since the storm hit us. Three feet, way too much.

Unexpected breaks are hard for me. I feed off of the structure of regular days. The structure of the school rhythm is good for Joel too. He can't spend too much time in his own head obsessing about the five seasons of contestants' scores on Fetch with Ruff Ruffman -- one of his recent obsessions. I feel guilty that I can't spend a lot of one on one time with him keeping him from his all too frequent perseveration. Eli and Cara too. All my kids watch way TOO MUCH TV. And I do use it as a babysitter so I can get stuff done.

I would rather they just play with toys so they can be creative and let their brains expand and learn. But that doesn't happen nearly as often as I'd like. For Joel with his limited ability to play symbolically toys have never held much magic. Even the stuff he got for Christmas this past year, he tells me "I don't want to play with it. I just want to love it." And Eli is a difficult child to play with. He wants it his way all the time and he yells and screams a lot which is nerve racking. Of course Cara is young and two and her favorite words are "mine" and "no." So those are my justifications for keeping the TV on way too much of the time.

Some days I do concentrate a lot of my time orchestrating art/cooking/reading activities for them and then my house is a total wreck and the laundry piles up like crazy and I feel like a loser in my role as a homemaker. Of course I also feel like a failure when I spend most of my time doing housework and my kids are mostly entertained by the TV. It really is a rock and a hard place.

Guilt, guilt, guilt. The mother's constant companion.

That's why all these days out of school are so difficult for me. I lose the balance that the school schedule affords me. Kelly is always good about taking the kids off my hands for a bit, but I'm still out of whack. The snow makes it harder too because it's been impossible to get outta here.