Our Journey to this Life – Part 1

How Did We Get Here?
I am not sure who I am writing this for. This started as my nostalgic focus as my baby boy turns 4 years old and proclaims he is not a baby any more. I digressed into the memory of all of my children as babies… then thoughts of life before babies… then life before we were married. How does life move this fast? I guess I am really writing for myself and my sanity. I was never very good about keeping a journal, and I failed at scrapbooking miserably, though I still have some fantasies of catching up quickly with digital scrapbooking.
Anyway… Our Journey…It seems like we somehow just snapped our fingers and… Poof… we were in this chaos of a family of six. John and I started dating about 20 years ago, and we have never stopped running on the treadmill of life. I have always thought " after this next phase… things will slow down, and we stop and enjoy life". All of the sudden, twenty years later, that first phase seems so slow and peaceful, though at the time we thought we were soooo… busy. What I thought was busy then was not so busy at all, looking back.
I thought I had surely paid my dues when I was all of 26 years old. I thought that the hardest work I would ever do was behind me. Man, how stupid I must have sounded! I remember a cousin of my dad's who is a prominent attorney calling me on it. He is a very successful attorney with his own firm in Houston. He speaks Russian, and has done business internationally. He has 3 kids, including twins, who are grown, and still works very hard. I was newly married, about 5 years out of college, and was working as a restaurant manager at la Madeleine, where I believed I was very important. I naively commented that I had paid my dues (in the first couple of years after college), and he laughed – how stupid this must have sounded to someone who had been working hard for some 40 years! My life was only beginning. I had worked a lot of grueling hours and had done some very hard work, and I thought I was done! This would surely be the toughest part of my life. Ha!

Back to our Journey…John and I…We met in college at a Steve Miller Band concert in Oklahoma City. I was with my girlfriends, and he was with a group of guys that one of the girls I was with knew from high school. It was a very brief meeting, pretty uneventful for both of us. We were invited to meet this group later, but for a reason I cannot recall, we never went to the meeting location. That was it. It was just a blip in a fun summer of parties and fun. As the fall semester started at OSU (Oklahoma State University), somehow it came up in a conversation with my roommate, Amy, that I had met this person John. She knew him from Student Government, which I had no interest in, and that was the end of the conversation. She asked me a few questions about it, and that was it. She was like that… she always asked a lot of questions. She was just a thinker… always thinking…because that is what thinkers do!

About Amy (she was a key player in this journey):
My friend Amy was (and still is) a very smart, very motivated individual. She is one of the smartest people I know. She took Chinese classes at OSU (which was very unusual). She speaks Chinese, and went to school in China for a semester in college, just because she is smart and she had this vision of Chinese being an asset in her future. I remember that my goal in life at the time was to major in Hotel and Restaurant Management, with a minor in Spanish, because I thought it would be fun to work in Barcelona at the Olympics. Never mind that the Olympics was only one summer, and that I had no goals beyond that. I am not sure why I chose the Olympics, as I was not even really a big sports fan. I met a girl from my sorority at a school in Kansas (K-State) who was also majoring in Hospitality, and I think we cooked up this goal to go to Barcelona. She got married after college though, and I needed a "real" job, so my dad told me, so the dream of the Olympics went to the wayside. I thought the fact that I had a goal was commendable – it is a little laughable to me now.

Amy came to OSU from University of North Carolina, and had gone to a private girl's school in high school. I had also gone to a private girl's school – though mine was a boarding school - Hockaday, and there were some behavior issues that landed me there, plus, my parents divorced when I was in 8^th grade, and I couldn't really find my happy place after that. Boarding school was actually the best thing I ever did. I didn't really acknowledge any of this in college, because the sorority might not have wanted me if they knew I had spent a night in the juvi in Pawhuska for stealing signs with my friends (funny story I will elaborate on later). Anyway, Amy and I connected through this common thread of perceived intellect and prominence of girl's school graduates. We were not quite as peppy as a lot of the girls in our sorority, and we just clicked. The difference was that Amy was really an intellectual, and I was not at all. She was also very interested in politics, and I really had no concept of this. I was in awe of her intelligence.

I think she must have thought I was as smart as she was when we met. Actually, I was reasonably smart, but just not very motivated or mature at the time. She must have been so disappointed when she realized that I was in college for fun, and was not terribly driven as a student. Anyway, Amy tried to motivate me academically, and she also tried to drag me along in her effort to network. I was not mature and didn't really understand networking. I just sort of wandered where the action lead me, with no real plan in mind. You could say I was a follower. I was not a crazy partier at all, but I enjoyed being social, certainly much more than I enjoyed studying.
So how was Amy involved in this journey of mine? Amy was my roommate at the time. We had different circles of friends, but we really clicked for some reason. I don't even remember who I was dating or interested in at the time, but I recall that Amy did not necessarily approve. All of the sudden, Amy started coming home, telling me of this guy in her student government office that was asking about me. She talked about this a lot. In another world – John's world, there was this friend of John's, Chris telling him that I was asking about John a lot. The truth is that our meeting during the summer had been very brief and not that memorable. I remember that he was sunburned, and with a guy named Graydon that I knew through a home town connection, and that is about it. I am sure his memory of me was about the same. We really knew nothing of each other. For some reason though, Amy and Chris decided to become matchmakers, and continued this plot.
On October 10, 1989, the night of my 22^nd birthday, just after I returned to the sorority house from going out to dinner with my dad, I received a call from a guy named John. It started a little awkward. We didn't really know each other, and I was not expecting his call. Then, he asked what I was doing and I said it was my birthday, and all of the sudden he felt like he had missed my day, but really we didn't know each other so how would he have known it was my birthday. We talked for a while, and made plans for a date on October 12.

On October 12, we had our first date. There were a few coincidences that were chilling. First, over dinner, I learned that John grew up in Pawnee, Oklahoma, a town only about 40 miles from my home town. Next, John went away to a military school in Indiana for high school. In small town Oklahoma, this is a pretty rare coincidence. We grew up only a few miles from each other, then we both went away to boarding school, then we both end up at a college which is an agriculture school in the middle of Oklahoma, where the population of people who went to boarding school was very small. I never met anyone else in college who had this experience. It was an amazing coincidence – gave me chills! After dinner, we went to a movie at our college town theatre, which at the time likely only had 2 movies playing at the same time. We selected a movie by the name of Dead Poets Society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Poets_Society) because Robin Williams was in it. I don't think either of us knew much about the movie… then as luck would have it, the movie was about a boarding school. What are the chances of that? Though this was a first date, and we barely knew each other, I felt incredibly connected to this guy -- This unknown guy who I had been set up with, though at the moment, we had not figured out the scheme of Amy and Chris.

John and I started dating at that point, and spending a lot of time together. In fact, this would be the semester in which I made the lowest grades ever. I would watch John Wayne movies or football games with him until late at night at his fraternity house, even though I had no interest in these things and I had a 7:30 am class the next day. I was in lala land for sure. Life was a blur from October until Christmas that year, and when my grades arrived during the Christmas break, I was in so much trouble.

We continued to date through the next couple of years of college, with no clear plans for a future together, but we had a great time, and just took it day by day. Neither of us was into planning at that point. I graduated a semester before him, and he had no clue what his plans were, so to proove that I didn't need a man, I accepted a job which lead me to St. Louis, Missouri, where I would be far away from this man... and I hated it! Subsequently, John graduated and went to graduate school in Houston, Texas. We were now over 20 hours away from each other and it was no fun.

He started sending me the classified ads for jobs in Houston --remember when we had to cut ads from the newspaper, and send our resumes through the mail? I accepted a job in Houston and started to make plans to move less than a year after moving to St. Louis. I still told myself that I was moving because of a fabulous job, and not because of a boy / man! I fooled nobody! While he was attending school, I was working very hard as a manager for a new restaurant group -- la Madeleine. He finished school, started working, and we were engaged a little while after that. By that time we had been dating close to 5 years. We were married in 1994, and I started my graduate school after a year. When I was almost finished, John announced that he was applying to law school. Yeah... we would be paying for college forever!

Help Me Help Me… My Baby is Turning 4

Ben is turning FOUR on Monday. He is our 4^th child – the 4^th in a 5 year span of pregnancies. The twins were a wild ride, then Alexander was born when the twins were only 3 ½, then Ben was a unplanned blessing, born when Alexander was only 20 months old. As a parent, we are not supposed to, and we really don't love one child more than another, but at different times, they capture our hearts in different ways. When they have birthdays, I seem to reflect on their entire lives from birth in some nostalgic way. Ben will be four on Monday, and I am settled into this state… only this is the last baby, so I may need more help snap out of it.

Also, he is my snuggliest one (I know snuggliest is not a word, but it should be). Ben keeps agreeing when we ask him to stay little. When school started in August, and Alexander went to kindergarten, I realized that this time I have with Ben on the 2 days a week he is not in preschool, is the first time I have ever had just one child. I have been savoring Tuesdays and Thursdays for the past month, realizing that this is what my friends with one baby had that I missed. I know I probably benefitted from a lot of moments that moms of singleton babies didn't, but this one on one time is amazing to me right now. I have never had it.

It is cold and rainy too, so we have had 'lots of snuggles this week. I am in real trouble. I am really having emotional issues. I am not just reflecting on the four glorious years of Ben's life, but on the entire 10 year journey that lead us to where we are now. I guess, because he is my last baby, I am realizing this is it… finale...end of the road… no more babies. I don't have any regrets about this. I know that I am stretched beyond my capabilities, and I can't even remember my name at the end of many days. For this reason, , and the fact that I do have a lot of work to do with these four to make them fit for society, it is a good thing that this baby factory is closed. But, I really will miss the babies in my life. I have had a baby for the past 9 ½ years, and now all of the sudden, no more babies.

I cannot imagine what life would be like without Ben. He is the master charmer of my crew. It seems it is always this one… the one that was not in our grand plan (not that we had a grand plan)… the one that my mom almost disowned me for conceiving… the one that caused me to cry when I realized I had conceived him – my 4^th baby in 5 years…. It is this one that absolutely wraps himself around your heart in a way that changes everything about you. For that matter, he wraps himself around the hearts of almost anyone who meets him. He doesn't have a bad day. He is happy when he wakes, and happy when he goes to bed. He is busy, but always smiling. He tells strangers about his day.

Ben… sweet Ben… he is so "go with the flow". He love trucks and tractors, and is happy to go anywhere. He is busy, but he is so happy. He hasn't gotten the attention that many of his friends get from their mom, not because I don't want to, but because he spent the first year in the baby bjorn, the second in a car seat and stroller, and the last two years have been a blur. He finds ways to entertain himself though. Whether he is bathing our white lab in Hershey's syrup, squeezing green Play dough through my garlic press in the middle of my cooking (before all of the garlic was pressed), or mixing red Kool Aid in his giant dump truck, he is happy. Just this morning, I was cleaning up the splattered blackberry yogurt in the kitchen from when Ben fed his yogurt to the dog yesterday. As I was on the floor, I looked in his dirty dump truck and there I saw one of my earrings. I don't have many pieces of expensive jewelry, but this pair was my Christmas gift from my mom last year and I know they were nice. I had taken them off one night in exhaustion and placed them in my bed side table, rather than my jewelry box, and for some unknown reason, Ben thought one of these earrings would fit nicely in his Tonka Truck this morning. These things happen every moment of every day. It is so hard to get mad at him because he is honestly not trying to cause destruction. He is just exploring. Sometimes I do have to discipline him, but I try to keep my perspective that he is so happy and innocent and did not intentionally cause the mess. I am so grateful for that happiness. I think I have more funny Ben stories than the total of all of my children. He is just such a character. I could write an entire book on this kid. He recently said to me "Mommy, when I get bigger, I will still be Ben." Innocence at it's best!

I am really not sure who I am writing this for, but over the next few days, I will re-live the past 10 years, focusing on the birth of all four children, and the stages of chaos our family has been through, and how Ben came to be Ben. I sometimes complain about the craziness, exhaustion, and many other things I can't even describe. This week, I am reflecting on the blessings that I have been given in this life. Ben is one of my blessings, and because his birthday is in four days, he is getting a lot of focus. All of my children are all blessings in their own right. The journey of the past 10 years has lead to this last baby growing up.

School Days - Our 3rd off to Kindergarten

Alexander is off to Kindergarten... Just another day in his life! He is the most even tempered of our children. He is the middle child. He was born when the twins were 3 1/2 and he slept all the time. Our house was a busy one with 3 yr old twins. I would see him start to open his eyes, then he would close them quickly again. To me, he was saying "I don't want to be here right now" and he would drift off for another 2 hours. I would say "I don't blame ya buddy... I wish I could escape sometime too." He was a great sleeper -- I mean really over the top. He would sleep 12 hours at night, take 4 hour naps. He could wake up from a nap at 6pm, and still would go to bed at 8pm like clockwork. He never woke in the night. He was a easy baby. We really didn't even know he was here until he started walking. He was only 18 months old when the twins started Kindergarten, then Ben was born a month later. He was still a baby, but he had to be a big brother, poor guy. He sort of got lost in the chaos. I feel guilty sometimes because I never had that much time for him. He was so loveable. He still wants snuggles, hugs, kisses as much as we can get them in. Hopefully, the benefits of having a lot of siblings will out weigh the disadvantage of getting lost in this crazy mix of ours. He is really a special child. Though he has always been easy going, I have noticed him acting out for attention a bit in the past year. He sort of gets stuck between wanting to be a big kid with the twins, and wanting to get the attention that Ben gets as the baby. He has been pushed around a little by older brother Anthony, and now he starts to do this to Ben. I know he needs attention, and I hope to make his transition to Kindergarten a BIG deal.

He started kindergarten this year, and he was so ready. He was not anxious one bit. He also wasn't super excited. It was just like another day for him. He walked right into his class and never looked back. He seems to really love school. He is learning to read, and spell color names. He comes home singing songs about colors, teaching Ben (almost 4 yrs old) what he has learned. The other day, I heard them playing upstairs, and he was trying to teach Ben the "SH" sound. Though he sometimes struggles to wake up in the morning, he is happy in school.





Then... there is little brother, Ben -- 4th child, totally spoiled, and master charmer
Ben will be four in late September. Ben is very big (almost the same size as Alexander), and Ben really doesn't have a bad day. He is busy busy, but always happy, from morning to night. He is a charmer deluxe. I feel like I could put Ben on the school bus too. He is only in the 3 year old preschool class, so we still have 2 more years before Kindergarten. He is ready though. He can't wait to ride the bus!

He comes into my bed in the morning and says "Mommy, do you need snuggles?"... Then he tells us how many snuggles we get for that day -- it could be 2, 5, 100... but he really always wants "snuggles". This summer, he said to Papa, "Do you want snuggles?" Papa asked "What are snuggles?" Ben had to explain that it is a BIG hug and sometimes kisses, and everyone wants them. Of course, Papa was wrapped around his finger -- and that isn't easy to do.

John and I have said over the last year, "Ben, can you just stay little?" and he of course agrees. One day we were talking about his feet (he has enormous feet- same size as Alexander). He asked if his feet would get bigger like Daddy's. I said that when he gets big like Daddy, his feet would likely be big too. He said "Wait... I am not supposed to get bigger!" I then replied that as much as we would love to keep you little, god has a plan to make you get bigger and that is just out of our control. Ben then said "Well... my daddy is just going to have to get God because I am not going to get bigger". Ben thinks his daddy can do anything -- just like most boys. I then had to dig ourselves out of this hole that we created with the desire to keep him little so that Ben would not wish for Daddy to beat up God. I hope he doesn't bring these conversations to sunday school, or they might ask us to join a different church. I can see the teacher's face as Ben tells the class that his daddy is going to beat up God! Oh Mercy!

Ben started a new preschool this year too. He goes 3 days per week, from 8 to 3, and he loves it. They serve him a hot lunch, and my little eater tells me of his meal when he first gets into the car. He feels like he is a big boy too... and he is. I guess the 4th child in any family grow up a little quicker.

And Mommy... well, this is the first time EVER that I have had days at home with only one child, and I am in HEAVEN! We started with twins, and the past 9 years has been crazy. Finally, we have 3 in school, and it is just Ben and I. I teach college part time, so the days he is in school are a little busy. I try to be productive on those days so that I can enjoy the days with Ben. We go for a walk or bike ride, pick up the house, do a few chores, and sometime errands, then we head for our SNUGGLES! I have never known the day with one child, and I love it. I am not as productive as I might otherwise be, but he is the best medicine for this over stretched mommy right now.

Why Do They Grow Up?

TWINS WERE A WILD RIDE...
I am not sure why I had these babies in sunglasses in this picture. I was always so frazzled that I hardly ever put shoes on them. We would be out in public, around people in my mom's circle (proper ladies) and someone would ask where their shoes were and I would be a little embarrassed. Also, we live in Houston, where it is summer weather all year, and I love looking at little baby toes, so maybe that had a little something to do with it. Anyway, for some reason, on this day, I had them in socks, shoes, hats, sunglasses. Geez... it likely took me hours to get out of the house, and the chance that I returned home with all of these items is very slim. I did love these days though. Life was simple before we entered the world of school and activities. We walked, played, ate, slept. We were on our own schedule. We didn't need to go many places. I love newborns. I love their joy at experiencing everything. I love that I was their world then. We were so busy with twins, but looking back, it was so simple. Diapers didn't bother me a bit! With every phase, I have said that I wish they would stop there, then something else wonderful happens and it seems even better, but looking back, I am definitely a fan of the newborn stage. I feel like I really lost control and priority in their life when they started to elementary school, and I know this is not the end of this. I liked that control and order in our life.

Fast Forward...Now Look What Happened...

So why does this happen? They went to camp and did not look back. The tired part of me was glad to be freeee... but then I realized that this also means that I am no longer their world!

It passes so quickly. Our doorbell rings every 15 minutes most days for one or the other child. It is grand central station around here. I thought life with newborn twins was hectic, but it was a different kind of busy! I know social development is good for children, but I would be fine if we were isolated somehow.

I am good with the diapers... they don't bother me one bit!