Quarterly Update

Oh dear, it's April. My blog didn't even remember me and I had to sign in. We're deep in the throes of another soccer season. Our league grew from 81 players in the fall to 137 this spring! We're having a great time but are also crazy busy! Also this week, winter finally ended. I'm pretty sure this winter was approximately 7 months long. Time to move, maybe? It nearly killed me. This week the sun came out, the windows are open, and I mopped the dried mud from all the soccer cleats tracks from my floors. (I also reinstated the "no soccer cleats or shoes of any kind in the house upon penalty of death" rule.) I've joined a 30-day challenge this week that is dominating my life and kicking my butt! I basically work out for an hour and a half every day until I lose half my weight in sweat, and then eat it back in spinach and protein. I'm dying. But hopefully I'll feel better in a month?

Milestones I've missed: I turned 35, and Travis threw me an EPIC party, Brooklyn turned 10, Travis turned 40, and I threw HIM a slightly less epic party but with incredible food, Kate got braces, we went skiing in Colorado, and I ran my third half marathon with my friend Meagan. Sheesh has it only been 4 months? No wonder I'm tired! I'll catch up on the details later! Pictures in reverse chronological order.

DECEMBER!

  

Our girls participated in the annual live Nativity done by our friends, which took place this year on their farm! Brooklyn sang in the angel choir, and Kate recited the part of Anna, who met the baby Jesus at the temple. She did fantastic! Tomorrow is the last night, and will hopefully be the best weather yet! The first two weeks were so windy some of the kids nearly blew away!

After a long and grueling saga, we put Christmas lights on our house for the first time ever! I've wanted to do this pretty much forever, but the logistics of the sheer height and steep pitch of the roof were daunting. I had this vision of a framework built on the ground, with lights attached, which we could raise up to the face of the house. I was going places with this idea. The Lundell fortune was going to be built on Christmas light hanging. Alas, the gods of physics did not agree with me, and while I still think my idea has potential, we tabled it for another year. Meantime, Travis borrowed our neighbor's super high ladder and pulled up his big boy shorts and put those lights up there like a man. Stay tuned for next year's exploits!

Kate's ballet studio held a Christmas performance this year, with excerpts from the Nutcracker.

You can't really see her in this video. She's in the back. But just take my word for it that she's doing what everyone else is doing.

  

I couldn't leave this one out.

Travis and his buds singing Christmas carols at our church's Christmas party:

We make a goal to fill December with 25 days of service, in correlation with our church's Light the World campaign.

Admittedly, this can be a challenge with what is already the busiest month of the year, so sometimes we sneak in little acts of service like holding a door for someone! But I think this year we've filled our list pretty well. I know this is basically brag-blogging, which no one likes, but I need to catalog this for ideas for future years. We rang the Salvation Army bell, filled orders at the food pantry, donated blood, made dinner for families of patients at the children's hospital where Travis works, cleaned the church and the temple, babysat for friends, and made baskets of cookie-baking kits for struggling families.

This year our Christmas recital for my piano students was a "Victorian Caroling Party" theme.

The students all learned vintage Christmas carols, many of which they didn't know, and those who were confident enough in their playing accompanied the audience while we sang.

We wore scarves for festive-ness (well, some of us) and drank hot wassail and ate cookies.

Troy has really taken off with piano lessons. I only teach Kate and Troy - Brooklyn takes lessons from a friend (whose boys I teach) because that's just how it works for us! But Troy has decided that he really loves piano and practices literally every day (sometimes more than once a day!) Hopefully this will be a lifelong love and not just a passing phase! This video is awesome and accurately depicts his [over] confidence in his playing ability!

And speaking of my enthusiasm for music ad nauseam, particularly around the Christmas season, this year Travis surprised me with tickets to see the KC Symphony perform Handel's Messiah. It was a gift for the 15th anniversary of the day we met, which, embarrassingly, I did not know.

Nolan got to host his play group at our house a couple weeks ago, and we baked and decorated Christmas cookies!

Then he passed out on the couch during Kate's piano lesson.

This is still probably my favorite picture ever and has nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas.

 Even Superman kneels in prayer.

The Entitlement Solution

So I've been battling THIS for years and years and years. Pretty much for as long as my girls could walk.

I even thought we had it under control this last time, until the seasons changed and I asked them to go clear out their closet of clothes that didn't fit or they didn't like or were out of season. The clothes spilled onto the floor, the job was never completed, and as we know, clutter begets clutter and the rest is history. Plus Brooklyn, dear little Brooklyn, bless her heart, has this crazy fun gene in her that makes her behave like a bull in a china shop. She's really fun and spontaneous, but somehow everything she touches spirals out of control in a cataclysmic eruption of entropy. And that apparently results in her bedroom floor being covered in literal garbage. Seriously, I don't know where the garbage comes from.

Well lately in my desperate attacks of my bookshelf, where I hopelessly swim through all the parenting books I've amassed over the years, I've been reading The Entitlement Trap by Linda and Richard Eyre. AMAZING. And oh so true. Okay so by "I've been reading" of course I mean "I made it through the first chapter," but I do plan to finish it all. In the meantime, I completely agree that our belongings have more value when we've worked hard to earn them, and perhaps the trick to getting my kids to take care of their belongings is to make sure they have value, or allow them to keep only the ones they will really value. So today, I went in their room with boxes and bags like the Grinch and I took everything.

Well, it is my parental duty to provide for their basic needs, so I did leave them each three shirts, two pairs of pants, three pairs of socks and underwear, and a pair of shoes. I'm not totally heartless. I also left the books on their bookcase because I burned out FAST, man! But other than that, I took virtually everything else out of their room. Then I moved it to the guest room. (Prospective guests: there is no room for you for at least the next week or so.)

When the girls came home from school, I took them upstairs and proudly showed them what I'd done. I tried to keep it positive and exciting. The guest room full of stuff is now the "STORE". In order to get anything from it to put in their room, they have to do a chore to EARN it. Once they've acquired a new belonging, they must immediately find a permanent place for it (approved by me!) and must always put it away, or they risk having it reclaimed by the Store. At the same time, I'll be sorting through the Store and getting rid of all the excess, so it will be a race to see how much they can earn before it goes away forever! They were wary at first, but when I explained my plan they were super excited! And then they spent the rest of the afternoon playing in their empty room, because it was so CLEAN! You seriously couldn't walk in there before.

  

The other spot I didn't touch - and this is the incredible phenomenon - is the little under-the-bed hiding place, which is a little home they've set up for their American Girl dolls and all their furniture. That place, when Travis and I dove in to clean it out, looked like Martha Stewart lived there. We were so amazed we didn't touch a thing. If they can keep it that pristine, they deserve to keep it all! We discussed this amazing surprise with them and concluded that it's because they really value their favorite possessions, and we tried to explain that everything in their room should be that way!

We still have a long road ahead as we weed through the ridiculous amount of excess junk we've accumulated, but for now I'm pretty proud of myself for emptying that room in one afternoon. I'm feeling pretty invincible right now! Now to be consistent with all of the things, and keep my girls fired up about taking stewardship over their belongings and being grateful for them.

Lucky 7

My very first little boy turned 7 today! It sounds so cliche, but I can't even believe it. That is all I have to say about that.

He is a thinker, precise and logical, polite and goofy, affectionate and artistic, methodical and organized, considerate and kind, loves piano like me and soccer like Dad and wants to be an artist when he grows up. I love this little boy to pieces and wish him the very happiest of birthdays!

Being a Martyr, I mean a Mother

THIS article hit me like a freight train this week.

Seriously.

Go read it.

Then come back.

This is ME. 

Well, as my empathetic husband pointed out later when I made him read it, it's probably a lot of people. It's a weird obsession we have with spreading ourselves so thin and being "stressed out" so it looks like we are so productive and accomplished and hardworking because why else would we be so desperately busy? Here are some key phrases from the article that hit me hard:
“Typically, martyrs don’t know how to validate and love themselves very well.”
Yep! True.
“They feel that their value is in serving others—so if they stop doing that, they will have no value.”

Um. I would have told you that this is exactly my value! What else am I here for?
And THIS ONE sounded like an advertisement for martyrdom! -
“As a martyr, you don’t have to take personal responsibility. You can project your unhappiness and blame outward.”
Yes! My M.O. exactly!
And maybe most telling:
"You may be trying to cover up the fact that you have no clue how to get from where you are to where you want to be.”
That's the one.
That's exactly my problem.
The apparent "busy-ness" is totally a front. I'm a fraud. I'm not actually accomplishing anything, ever. I'm just mulling around wondering what to try to do next because I really don't know.
Anyway, this one reminded me of C.S. Lewis's "Mrs. Fidget" and some reflections I wrote about her over four years ago. I was sad to realize I haven't made much progress since then. I don't want to be the overbearing martyr mother who never gets anything but instead projects her frustration and blame on everyone around her.

I read this article before taking my kids to school for one of the last few days of the school year.

I don't have it all together right now and I'm kind of over it. My kids teachers are about at the same point, so I'm sure they totally get it when I send my kids to school wearing yesterday's hairstyle, or, in Troy's case, his favorite orange pumpkin Halloween shirt... for the second time in a week...

At least I hope they do.

Anyway, on this particular morning, we were all rather sluggish and weren't ready to go by the time our "Leave for bus" alarm went off. I had errands to run anyway (I had planned an elaborate piano recital for that evening and needed supplies), so I figured I'd drop them off at school on my way.

I pulled up in front of their school in the line of other cars dispersing elementary school children of various ages. I was suddenly acutely aware of how I looked to the other moms in their cars, as my many children climbed out as if out of a clown car. For just a moment I saw them like a stranger would. The tallest one leading the group, already looking too old to belong in an elementary school. The smallest boy running behind to catch up, looking too tall to be a kindergartner anymore.
And the middle one with a pair of golden braids that flipped over her shoulder as she tossed her head back to give me a wide grin just before she disappeared into the school.
And the toddler behind me, strapped into his car seat, still in his Thomas the Train pajamas (which I changed in the parking lot before we went into the store).
Instantly my eyes welled up, and maybe it's just end-of-the-school-year nostalgia, but I had that desperate slipping-through-my-fingers feeling, like why don't I spend every waking second with these people? Why don't we just hang out and play all day long, and why do I ever let them out of my sight, because each time I do they come home a little bit older?
And why in heaven's name am I obsessing about how clean my kitchen sink is, or building bookshelves, or organizing the Halloween costumes in the basement?
Now mind you, I get that those kinds of things still have to be done or life gets desperately crazy really fast! But I think part of my weakness is letting my little control-freak lists take over 100% of my attention. Balance, right???
We'll see how it goes, launching into summer. Maybe I will relish the break and we as a team will start to get stuff done and I'll enjoy not being a slave to the dreaded School Year Schedule. Or maybe it will just be the death of me. Time will tell.

But I'm getting all sappy and sentimental.
Let's recap some events, like Mother's Day, and Kate's school music program, and the piano recital I told you about.
Maybe not the piano recital.
Travis took all the photos and videos there, so I'll get them later.

First, Nolan is an artist.

The piano recital was held in a dear friend's farmhouse, so while Nolan and I were visiting to make plans, we also got to visit and feed the animals in her barn! Chickens, bunnies, donkeys, horses... He was in heaven.

She's the one in the middle. In pink, of course.

I got a lot of pretty great Mother's Day cards this year, but this one might be my favorite

Travis smoked ribs for dinner!

And Brooklyn took pictures of us getting ready for church.

Troy's kindergarten class had a "Muffins with Mom" celebration before Mother's Day, where we all eat muffins (and obviously powdered-sugar doughnuts) and watch a student-produced performance of Peter Pan.

"A mother, a real mother, is the most wonderful person in the world."

Nolan found a game that troubled him.
"Why is Lightning McQueen all dirty?"