pieces and ponderings

I went through a patriotic stage as a child.  I don’t think this is a typical childhood stage that most pass through, but I could be wrong.  I have  never heard other moms talking about their children being the in “patriotic stage,” where they only wear red, white and blue clothing, and put posters of presidents and national monuments on their walls, but this is what my mom had to deal with.  My own children haven’t followed suit, though there have been replicas of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution on a bedroom wall at one time.  (I just went and looked and the Constitution replica is still on the wall.)

Anyway, sometime between the ages of 9 and 10, I was very patriotic.  I wore a lot of red, white and blue.  It was the ‘70’s, so I even had striped red, white and blue pants AND red, white and blue suede shoes.  Oh, I almost forgot, I also had a red, white and blue bowling ball as well.  Yes, it was extreme…possibly obsessive.  (My kids are going to tell me that I was weird.)

I visited our nation’s capitol twice as a child and there are pictures somewhere of me standing in front of national monuments, decked out in my patriotic everyday wear.

I loved reading biographies of U.S. presidents and other historical figures…I found them interesting and inspiring.  (My kids are going to call me a “nerd” also.)

I don’t know where this love of country came from that grew in me, but it was there…and I’ve always loved the Fourth of July…Independence Day…the birthday of  the United States of America.

I was reminded of all this the other night, when my family and I attended the Freedom Fest celebration at Fort Rucker, near our south Alabama home.  The Lieutenant Dan Band, with Gary Sinise, performed a good concert and there were fireworks that my family enjoyed, along with a few thousand other folks.

As the band played their closing song, Lee Greenwood’s “I’m Proud to be an American,” the crowd rose to their feet and sang along.  I felt a little awkward at first and then  I looked at my husband standing beside me singing…and the crowd of servicemen and women and their families that surrounded me…and I thought about my husband’s military service and that of his brothers and our nephews…and I sang a bit louder.

Then the fireworks began with oohs and aahhs from the spectators.  I was sharing a chair with child number 5 and we commented on the size and colors of the bursts of light at first…then we just sat in silence, as we drank in the beauty of the display.

I was thankful to be sitting close to my family, celebrating our country together.  I am proud to be an American, though I don’t wear red, white and blue very often any more.  I am thankful for the nation in which I live and the freedoms we enjoy here.  We are a blessed nation!

  Happy Birthday, United States of America!

My children, numbers 3-5, helped me with grocery shopping at our local Sam’s Club this morning.  I bribed, or rather, enticed them by offering to stop first for breakfast at Chick-fil-a…this usually works.  As the four of us munched on breakfast food, the older two began a tongue-in-cheek conversation about being the middle children of our family.

Child number 3 claims that he is the “true” middle child, having two older siblings and two younger siblings.  They decided that child number 4 is really the “lower middle,” not quite as “middle” as number 3.

They went on and on about how tough life is as middle children (they’ve had it ohh so rough…yeah, right).  They spoke of all the privileges of the oldest child, not understanding of course that child number 1 is the test pilot of the children in a family.  Firstborns are the ones that parents begin learning about parenting with…and they often carry more responsibility when the younger children come along.

Then there is child number 2 in our family.  The two middles say she doesn’t even count, because she is the only girl in a family with 4 boys…she’s like an only child, they say (yeah, right again).

They continued to joke about their older siblings’ advantages and their suffering.  Then they turned their diatribe on their little brother, child number 5…the baby of the family…poor guy.  Of course, just my saying, “Poor guy,” in reference to their little brother, would in their eyes back up their argument of the youngest receiving special treatment.

It would seem that no matter how hard we try as parents, there will always be times when a child sees their place in life as unfair and wonder if the grass is actually greener on the other side, or sides, of the birth order fence.

As my “true” middle and I were waiting at the check-out line for little brothers to return with ice cream (see, I told you they suffer), child number 3 looked down at me from his 6’4’’ point of view and said, “Mom, I finally know what the 2.5 children per family means in all of those statistics you hear about.”

“Really,” I replied, because I’ve always wanted to know how you can have 2.5 children.  “Please, tell me,” I asked.

“The 2.5 is really 3 children, but the .5 is the middle child because they only count half as much,” he said with a smirk on his face.  I laughed at his clever thinking and wry sense of humor.

“Yeah…right,” I said.

This is the scene that greeted me this morning at 6:15 when I opened our front door to let out our dog, Ellie.

A four foot purple flower just happened to grow in our flower bed overnight.  It was a good morning surprise planted by an unknown, but highly suspected, prankster some time in the night.

It made me smile…I love it!  The flower’s usual home is in a stand in the room of child number 2.  I sort of figure she must have had something to do with it having been transplanted into the front flower bed.  I’ll just leave it there for others to see.

Opening my door and my eyes to such a funny sight was a great way to start the day.  Good morning, world!

I knew it would happen…eventually.  I have a husband and five children, who aren’t all children any more, but are right now living in this house and so that makes them fall into the category of “children” for blog writing purposes.  All that to say, I have a lot of laundry in my life.  As I was folding a load of whites while the washing machine and dryer were humming in the background, I thought that maybe I should write down the thoughts gently floating into my head as I try to figure out whether or not the man’s medium-sized t-shirt belongs to child number 1 or child number 4.  Yes, I resorted to sniffing the shirt and I think I figured it out.  (Child number 4 just told me that I got it wrong.  Shirts have been switched to proper owners.)

So here are some random thoughts about laundry.

Way back when there wasn’t near as much laundry to do…but I thought there was a lot because I had younger children and didn’t understand that younger children grow up to be teenagers who have work-outs and laundry increases exponentially…back when ignorance was bliss.

In those days, the laundry room in the house we lived in had a soft light green color of paint on the walls and a bright white trim…soothing colors for a room where I spent a lot of time.  I used to separate the laundry into piles and sing “Climb Every Mountain” as I tackled the mountains of clothes to be washed.  It was inspiring.

Recently…that means in the past few months…I was playing the game “Whoonu” with a few of my children.  This is a game where players choose what they think might be another player’s favorites among the item cards they are dealt.  I love this game.  Anyway, while playing a round of “Whoonu,” it was my turn to be the “Whoozit,” the player for whom the others players guess your favorite things.  When I looked at the cards that were chosen for me to rank, “Laundry” was one of the things chosen.  It made me giggle when I saw the card…it made me laugh out loud.  Once I had ranked my cards as to my favorites, I asked the child who had given me the “Laundry” card why he picked that as a possible favorite.

“I thought you must really like ‘Laundry’ because you do it all the time,” he responded.  He was incredibly sincere in his answer…he was serious.  He truly thought that I just hang out in our laundry room for large portions of my days because “Laundry” is like a hobby for me…something I really like and am trying to improve my skills at doing.

His sincerity warmed my heart…at that moment I could have eaten him up (something moms may say when they are totally moved by their children’s cuteness and sweetness and possible innocence…even when the children are now taller than the moms).

The mountains of dirty clothes have only gotten bigger in recent years…but really I don’t mind.  Like shoes in my living room floor (see earlier post), dirty clothes are a sign of life…and I like the signs of the lives of the family that I love.