Wheelchair project

My baby sister, Eva (not really a baby anymore—she’s 17!  Yikes!), is working on her Gold Award, the highest achievement in Girl Scouting, equivalent to the Boy Scout’s Eagle Award.  For her project, she is raising money to buy wheelchairs for disabled people in developing countries.  When she told me she was doing this, I almost choked up, I was so touched.  

$59.20 pays for the cost of one wheelchair (I feel almost criminal thinking of how many wheelchairs my TiLite could have paid for).  100% of the money goes to the organization distributing the wheelchairs (Free Wheelchair Mission).  My sister has a goal of being able to pay for 50 wheelchairs.  This is one of the best of causes, and one that I feel passionately about.  I ask anyone reading this to donate, even just a little.

I remember very well the first time I used a wheelchair.  It was during my worst flare-up back in November of ’07.  Every day, it seemed, I would wake up and another part of my body would have stopped working.  By the end of the month, just before my hospitalization and stint in rehab, I couldn’t walk at all.  I couldn't even move my toes.  A friend brought over a wheelchair her elderly mother was no longer using, and the relief I felt at being able to move again was really indescribable.  It’s hard to explain how it feels to lose mobility.  The distance from the couch to the kitchen, a matter of 20 feet or so, stretches into what may as well be miles.  It is terrible to be helpless and totally dependent upon others for what most people take for granted—two moving, functional legs.  

Without the ability to move, it’s easy to start feeling like a wallflower in the dance of life.  Everyone else is out there moving and dancing, while I’m sitting here, left out, left behind.  Every person needs to feel useful and productive in order to find satisfaction and joy in life—it’s innate to being human.  But without mobility, it is hard to feel useful for much of anything.

I wouldn’t be able to do any of the things that bring me joy and a feeling of worth on a daily basis without my wheelchair.  It is my lifeline to feeling like I belong to the human race.

Knowing how difficult I would find my life without my wheelchair, it is nearly impossible to imagine the despair and difficulty of people living in impoverished areas of the world where one’s very survival is much more dependent upon physical abilities than it is in my privileged upper-middle-class American life.  If you belong to a family in which every person is needed to work just to put food on the table, loss of mobility is not only personally devastating, but may actually put your entire family in jeopardy.  

Providing a means of mobility for these people means everything.  It means unlocking the jail cell that their lives have become.  It means being able to feel like there is some purpose to your life, some reason to keep on trying.  Mobility allows mothers to be able to do all the work of motherhood again, fathers to be able to help provide for their family, children to be able to go to school, to be able to see some hope for their future.  It means being able to re-enter the human race. 

recurring self-doubt

Today was a very frustrating day. 
I woke up and the house was a mess.  The normal pick-up last night didn't happen because I went to bed early and when the cat's away, the mice will play.
A certain boy refused to do nearly everything I asked him to do.  "Or else what?" was the common response, to which I have no good reply.  "Or else I will beat your bum!" is not a good reply, I had to keep telling myself.
The conflicts were very exhausting.  They involved refusing to sit at the table for scripture study (rule is you sit at the table even if you don't want to eat), refusing to do his morning chore, refusing to do piano practicing, refusing to do his math, refusing to do his laundry (Monday is his laundry day), running away after refusing to finish his spelling, and generally being a pill.
These are the days when I am filled with self-doubt and self-recriminations.  What did I do to elicit each of these refusals?  I know I'm not giving him enough positive attention on days like today, but how do I do it when literally every interaction I have with him involves him resisting me in some fashion?  I must not be giving him enough positive attention during other times.  What kind of cold mother am I?  How can I turn this around?  How can I help him? 
I know what it's like to have a knee-jerk, instinctively oppositional response to certain things.  Even when you want to comply, it's like there's something stopping you from doing so.  It's terrible.  I want to help him, but I don't know what to do.  I worry that there is something about me that is triggering this response in him.  What is it?
Then I start thinking about what kind of a mother I've been thus far, and think back on what I might have done earlier to avoid the problems we're having now.  One of our very, very biggest problems (probably the biggest problem) with him is something that I actually most certainly could have prevented about 7 years ago if I had only known what evil fruits would be borne from my innocent (lazy, but innocent) decision then.  And now he has to pay the consequences.  He bears a lot of responsibility, but none of it would have happened if I had done one thing differently.
I wish I would have been more diligent in encouraging more physical affection with him.  He is my prickly boy and resists any obvious show of physical affection.  You have to be really sneaky with him (I was able to hold his hand a little bit during church yesterday).  But I see him some days and I just know he needs comfort and love from his mother.  I know it's what he needs, but he won't let me give it.  When he was little, he wasn't nearly this resistant to hugs and kisses and head-ruffles and whatnot.  At some point he started to pull away, and I should have noticed and picked up on it then.  I probably could have done something about it then, but now I'm worried it's too late.  I need to be more creative in finding ways to show him physical affection that he won't resist, but I'm kind of coming up empty.
Is this homeschooling working with him?  That's a recurring question.  I had such high hopes of having a wonderful home school in which my kids would love learning and would joyfully complete their assignments because they were all so relevant and interesting and I was tapping in so perfectly to their innate curiosity and zeal for life.  Ha.  We do have moments of this, but there are lots of other moments when I feel like a complete failure.  But for several reasons, not the least of which is his own very vocal opposition to it, I don't feel like sending him back to public school is the answer.  Not at all.
Maybe I should go back to the drawing board and come up with a completely different way of schooling my boys.  So I sent away from some catalogs from other companies, and maybe I'll be inspired, but I'm not hopeful.  Maybe my expectations were unreasonable from the get-go.  Is there any way to channel a child's zeal for life into enthusiasm for finding least common denominators and memorizing dictation passages?
I'm guessing tomorrow will be a better day, that's the usual pattern for this child.  My goal for tomorrow is to lavish him with as much love as I possibly can.
Some days being a mother is like staring into a giant mirror that shows nothing but my own faults.  I start feeling pretty ugly.

Brigham the perfectionist

Brigham and I have been having an "issue" regarding his piano practicing recently.  He is a perfectionist.  No small surprise, given that I am one, too.  But over the past few months, he's become really upset whenever I mark his music (you know, dynamics, fingering, reminders about pacing, etc.).  I am a BIG music marker.  My music is always written on all over.  But Brigham has started getting mad at me when I mark his music.  I finally figured out that he sees markings on his music as great big red X'es scrawled all over, marking where he has made mistakes.  The more marking on his music, the more evidence of his mistakes, as he sees it. 
We've talked about it a lot, I've tried to tell him that all musicians marks their music.  I've told him how, as  an orchestra student, I'd be in big trouble if I forgot to bring a pencil to rehearsals.  But, it has all fallen on deaf ears.  He said, "It's like if you have a really pretty house, and then you ruin it by cluttering it up with all these posters!"  Sigh.  I tried to tell him that it wasn't like that at all.  The written music is simply a set of instructions for *making* a really pretty house (the music itself), and the more detailed the instructions, the more beautiful the music he will produce!
Still, he cried and pouted whenever I marked on his music.
So I wrote a note in his piano notebook (where his teacher writes down his lesson instructions) to his teacher, explaining the situation, and today she brought him over to her shelf of music and pulled out a book of Mozart that she used while working on her degree in college.  And wow, I thought *I* was a music-marker!  She puts me to shame.  Brigham's eyes got wide.  Suddenly his mom just got a whole lot more credible.  :-)
So, his assignment for the week is to do all his own music marking.  I'm not going to even pick up a pencil or highlighter!  He will do it all.  I have high hopes!

Just Mosey

Mosey likes tuna salad with ketchup.  He always asks me to leave one piece of bread to make a ketchup face.

Note to my missionary brother in the MTC

Hi Elder Frandsen!
This is just a note on a Wednesday morning as I'm trying to get the boys to wake up and come downstairs by blasting "The Imperial March" from the stereo.  Think it'll work?  :-)  Mama and Daddy used to wake us up when we were little by singing the Cougar fight song ("Wake up! The Cougars are out!).  I found a Youtube video of the song and tried that, but The Imperial March works better.  We're not big enough BYU sports fans around here, I guess.
I hope you are doing well.  Our home teacher came last night and gave us the presidency message from this month's Ensign, which was on missionary work.  We talked about you in the MTC, and how you basically grew up with a sibling on a mission almost continuously from the time you were 4 years old.  That's awesome.  You are that example for my boys!
OK, I've got 2 out of 3 downstairs now, that's a start!
I love you and hope you have a great day!

Love,
Gabrielle

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Today was a holiday, but I made the boys do a few lesson anyway.  I'm so mean. 
For history, we jumped forward in our book and read the chapter on the Civil Rights act, and then watched Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.  It's very moving. 
It was very interesting to me to listen to the comments the boys made as we read of Rosa Parks and the Jim Crow Laws and  Elizabeth Eckford (the black high school student who tried to enter a white high school and was turned away by National Guardsmen under orders of Arkansas Governor Faubus).
I'm so grateful to live in a country at a time in which my kids have no experience with racism and have absolutely no reference point for understanding how people ever could have treated other human beings as less than themselves.
I know there are vestiges of racism left in this country, but the very idea of it is utterly foreign to my boys, and for that I am very grateful to Martin Luther King Jr.

Circus!

We went to the circus today!
On Friday we picked up some free spanish-language newspapers to use for our volcanoes.  Joseph was looking at one of them today at lunchtime, and found an ad for a free ticket to the Ben Hur Shriner's Circus.  We saw that today was the very last day, and 3:30 PM was the last showing.   So, on the (very) spur-of-the-moment, we decided to go!
I didn't really have any expectations, but what little I had were blown away.  It was a fantastic show, and with 2 free tickets (one free with each adult ticket, which was the same price as the kid's ticket, go figure), it cost us only $39 for a totally awesome 3 hour circus.
I am NOT an event photographer-- I don't have the lenses or skills, but I did take a few shots.  And then I realized that more than half of the pictures I took were of the elephants.  LOL!  I love elephants, but they were actually only a minor part of the show.  Oh well.  I'm not even showing all the pictures I took of the elephants here.

The first act was a tiger act--6 great big humongous tigers jumping over each other and over hurdles and up and down off giant stools and walking on their hind legs and looking like giant squishy (and very dangerous) house cats.

This one is jumping on his (her?) hind legs to get a piece of meat the trainer has on a stick.

Sitting on a rotating disco-ball platform.  I love cats, and tigers are the most majestic of cats (sorry, lions, but it's true).  Look at that face!

And a giant African elephant, The Mighty Bo, who did all kinds of cool tricks.

More of Mighty Bo

And more of the elephant-- look how cute!

A trick bicycle rider-- he did amazing tricks on the bike, and then rode up and down huge ramps doing flips.  I'm hoping the boys weren't getting too many ideas.


During intermission we went down to the floor to look at... the elephants, of course! 

They were selling tickets for rides, but at $10 a pop, we decided just to look.  Mosey was very grumpy at getting his picture taken.  He only did it because I told him he couldn't have his cotton candy unless he would be in the picture.  So this is what I got.  :-)

But, as soon as we got back to our seats and he broke open the cotton candy, he was happy again.

Lovely, Mosey.  Really lovely.  :-)

This was actually one of the most impressive acts, believe it or not.  There were about 7 or 8 performers in the 3 rings, some doing juggling, others doing hula-hooping.  This girl was amazing.  This is not a good picture-- I was too busy watching to get pictures of her best tricks.  A person just off the ring kept tossing them in one after another, landing them perfectly over her head where it would join all the others spinning around.  At one point she was swinging 20 hula hoops all around her body, from her ankles to her uplifted arms.  She looked like a human slinky.  It was so cool!

And more elephants. 

Yep, more elephants.

I really, really like elephants, ok?!

So, besides elephants there were arialists who did amazing and terrifying acrobatics on ropes 50 feet up in the air, a pair of trapeze artists, a motorcycle daredevil who did flips and whatnot, an amazing, incredible, hilarious clown, a human cannonball, a dog show (dogs trained to do all kinds of cool tricks), and... I'm sure a couple of other things I'm forgetting.  But it was really awesome.  The boys were transfixed, as was I!  Ben brought his laptop, thinking he might do some work during the show, but I don't think he even looked at it except for during intermission.

Afterward we went to pick up a dog house we bought from someone off Craigslist (long story, but Mister now has to sleep outside...  He's getting to be an old dog, and Ben can't take much more of letting him outside 3+ times during the night), and then out to eat at Steak and Shake.  The boys and Ben had a weird face contest.  Who do you think won?

I'm way too dignified to participate in weird-face contests.  :-)  Actually, I think I might have cracked the lens of the camera if I had tried! 
We didn't get home until almost 9:30 PM, with kids completely wired from cotton candy, cookie dough shakes, and enough stimulation to last a month.  I told them to get ready for bed and then GO TO SLEEP!  Yeah, right.  It's 10:50 PM and I'm still hearing the pitter-patter of little feet upstairs.  Tomorrow is going to be fun...
Ah, well, it's worth it for the memories, right?  :-)

Florida trip day 1: Butterfly World

I want to write about our Florida trip before I forget the details.  I already wrote about how we surprised the boys-- they knew nothing about the trip until we actually got on the plane.
The first day there, we drove down the turnpike from Orlando to Ft. Lauderdale.  It was drizzly and cloudy, but the rain stopped by the time we got to Coconut Creek and our first destination-- Butterfly World!  This was one of our favorite places to go when we lived in Florida.  The boys and I went a bunch of times, and they all remembered it.  It was so funny remembering the first time we went, and comparing it to now, 6 years later.  I have some "before and after" pictures.
I didn't get exactly the same angle, but it is the same place in the aviary:

 Mosey has a lot more hair now than he did then!  :-)

 Mosey was NOT a fan of the Lorikeets the first time we went to Butterfly World when he was 11 months old.  I was holding him, and a couple of them came and landed on my head (they were obsessed with my long hair), and he totally freaked out. 
6 years later, however, he couldn't get enough of them.  And they couldn't get enough of him!!

Happy face!

Very, very sad face.  :-)

 Here are a couple of before and afters of Brigham and Joseph (and Moses).

Brigham and Joseph still look like those cute little 3 year olds, don't they?  Joseph was a fearless animal lover even then.  Here they are now (plus an added brother, who wasn't walking let alone holding lorikeets before!):

Here are the rest of the Lorikeet pictures.

No, it didn't poop on my head, but I was worried about it.

Here is a "before" of me, 6 years ago.  I am just about too vain to post this picture.  Here I am looking quite postpartum, I think literally 2 days after I started Weight Watchers, with 50 lbs to lose and no makeup on.  Do I look frazzled?  Well, with 3 kids 3 and under, I pretty much was frazzled all the time.  Still, I'd love to go back in time and relive some of it.

Cool looking birds, eh?  They're not at all native to Florida, but, what the heck!

Here are another set of before and after photos-- in the mist tunnel in the butterfly aviary:

Before.  They thought this mist tunnel was the funnest thing EVER.

And after.  They still thought it was cool, but they were a little more subdued about it.  :-)

And here are a couple of before and afters of Brigham.  OK, so I guess he doesn't look *exactly* the same as when he was 3.  :-)

I don't have an "after" picture of Joseph in the butterfly aviary, but here's one outside, looking at the macaws.  I have no idea what that expression means.  :-)

And my final "before and after" pictures.  Not on the same bench, darn it, and only 1 of the boys is actually in both pictures, but you get the idea.  Mostly I just like looking at those old pictures when the twins were itty bitty.  :-)

What else did we do there?

We walked across the swinging bridge (in case you can't tell, this is "before." :-)  Joseph and Brigham had already run across it before I could get them to stop and take an "after" picture).

We walked through the passion flower vine pathway.

We walked through the bug museum and goggled at the emperor scorpions and black widow spiders and brown recluses and giant millipedes and hissing cockroaches and the black and yellow orb-weaver that was still in the corner, uncaged, sitting on the huge web that it spun across a couple of dead branches set up against the wall.

We saw lots of butterflies.  My absolute favorite are brown and kind of drab with their wings closed, but when they open them, they are a bright, iridescent, peacock blue.  I tried to get a picture of one with the wings open, but they mostly only have them open when they're flying.  I did get picture of this one, clinging to the screen of the enclosure.  But the light streaming through its wings made the blue nearly transparent.  Still pretty, though.

This one came and sat on my hand looking at me for quite a while.  Hello, there!

And of course lots of birds.  This macaw area was new since we were here last.  They had a veritable conversation with Joseph who stood there for 5 minutes or so squawking back and forth with them.  :-)

 

And silly boys:

We stayed until closing, and of course had to go through the gift shop (the boys love gift shops), but they restrained themselves and didn't actually buy anything there!  Ben and I did, though.  It's a great place to buy presents.

We drove on down through Ft. Lauderdale, and to Plantation where we stayed in the EXACT same hotel we stayed at for 6 weeks or so when we first moved to Florida, before we closed on our house.  The Staybridge Suites on Pine Island Rd., just north of Broward Blvd.  Talk about deja vu!  We didn't stay in the same room, though.  Actually we got a great deal because hotels.com messed up and booked a room they didn't have, so they upgraded us to a really nice 2 bedroom 2 bathroom suite for no extra charge.  They still have "sun downers" and served a light dinner in the lobby.  It sure was easier to wrangle 2 nine year olds and a 6 year old than it was 2 two year olds and a 6 month old!!