Kudos to you, Mom!

Today, I've been at the Epilepsy Association's fundraiser, Crop Because You Care. Originally I signed up to just come and scrapbook all day long... but then I remembered my friend who has a surplus of scrapbooking stuff and likes to contribute to good causes. So she donated a bunch of it to be sold, with 60% of the proceeds going towards a summer camp for youth with epilepsy!

And I'm now sitting here selling items for the lowest price ever of 25 cents! WOW!!

Anyways... there are other vendors, of course, and I'm writing to sing the praises of the one right next to me. She brought her nine-year-old daughter as her assistant, and so I've had the opportunity to watch them interact. It has been beautiful!

They are selling bling -- fancy necklaces that have extra hooks so you can change how they hang. I am selling a different sort of bling -- stickers. As could be expected, the daughter is attracted to the items on my table, and asks how much they cost.

I tell her that because she is a good neighbor, she can have something for free!

Her mother graciously prompted her to show gratitude, and then as they start picking out a prize, their conversation goes something like this:

"Oh, that would go nicely in your room."

"I want this, I think."

"Okay. What would you do with that?"

"Umm, I don't know, I just like it."

"This is in that same style, and it could go on your bulletin board!"

"Yeah! Good idea! And this one sort of matches it."

"Well, Regan is giving us one free item. If you'd like more than one, you'll need to earn some money to pay for it. I have some lollipops that you can be in charge of selling so you can earn the money."

And then the sweet girl proceeded to sell the lollipops!

What did this wise mother teach in this transaction??

• Choosing carefully, so as to avoid the acquisition of useless clutter.
• Respecting someone's style preference
• Earning money before spending it
• Patience! Gratitude! Salesmanship!

But it doesn't stop there...

This event is taking place on the second floor of a movie theater, and there are a couple of handicap-accessible doors into the theaters. A few minutes ago, several teenagers appeared at the top of the stairs and, trying to act nonchalant, entered the theaters.

We fairly assumed that they were sneaking in.

And the mother commented with sadness in her voice to her daughter, "That's dishonest."

The daughter nodded, mirroring her mother's disappointment. Powerful.

Wow. Wow again! Hooray for this mom. Even though my blog won't win her any fame (since my blog doesn't get millions of readers), I am honoring her here -- and that seems to follow the pattern of motherhood. Doing it well won't make you famous, but it will impact the next generation in powerful ways.

My oldest child still isn't very old!

I am prone to guilty feelings, like many mothers. Maybe there is a chemical similarity between estrogen and guilt so our brains confuse them.

If I could go back and talk to my younger self about ways to avoid some of the memories I now regret, this is probably one if the most valuable tidbits of advice I could give her.

"Regan, remember, no matter how old your oldest child is, he still isn't very old."

My husband and I were chatting about how, when our oldest was four and our second child was two, our twins were born. We had two infants to compare to a toddler and his bigger brother. It seemed like Mr. Four Year Old could do just about everything, particularly when side-by-side with two babies who couldn't hold their own heads up!

So of course we treated him that way. We held him to very high expectations, and -- as should have been expected -- he didn't always live up to them. But I hadn't figured out how to handle failure yet, and spent far more time scowling at him, showing disappointment, even shaming that sweet, precious boy instead of helping him up when he fell.

If I could go back and do it over again, I would still expect him to be older and more mature. But in those times when he was just acting normal for his age and mental development, or even less-than...
I would hug him anyways.
I would encourage him to improve rather than punish him.
I would use a kinder voice while explaining the consequences of his actions.
I would tell him that I'd made similar mistakes too.
I would hold his hands while we worked together to clean up the mess or say sorry or whatever needed doing.

I know God let him come first because God knew he was a strong, resilient spirit who could overcome the failures of his parents. I take comfort in that. And sure enough, he's turning into a strapping young man -- taller than me and working to build his muscles so he'll be stronger than me.

And that's how it should be. I'm hoping he'll also be wiser than me. But I realize that he'll never be older than me, so I must always allow for that age gap... and show him mercy where I hope to have mercy shown to me.

I hope he knows how much I love him!

Part of Getting Older

Part of getting older includes getting more gray hair, and it also includes getting more grateful.

I think gratitude is a skill that must be honed. I suppose some people have a talent for it, and it comes naturally for them. For most of us, though, it is something that we first have to experience the beauty of, then acknowledge the fleeting essence of, and then put conscientious effort into so that its power to enrich our lives can take full effect.

Today, I would like to say how grateful I am for the people who blessed my life as a young mother. People who recognized that this time frame can be so demanding, and who offered what they could to make my days a little brighter.

There was my elderly neighbor at the old house who gave me her bike trailer that she had used to carry her dogs around like a stroller. I vacuumed it out and shined it up and was able to put my two boys in it.

There was the lady from church who invited me to her house to exercise a few times a week for a year or so (until my pregnancy with the twins interfered).

Another church friend offered the use of some of her expensive kitchen gear (like a wheat grinder) because she recognized that her budget was bigger than mine, simply based on the different era of life she was in.

Gratitude goes out to my mom, who moved all the way across the United States, giving up her established life in Indiana to join me in Utah when my twins were born. WOW! She still lives with me and still blessed me, day-in-and-day-out.

I want to be like these people, selfless and giving. I want to look for ways to bless the lives of those around me -- not waiting to be asked, but being open to inspiration and alert to observations. I want to give people the excuse to grow in gratitude! That's the real blessing that's been given to me as I've been the recipient of the goodness of others.

More techno-musings

In the post about losing my brain, I thought out loud about how I am trying to bridge the technological gap, appreciate the modern-day devices, and not lose my sanity in the meantime.

This post is just a few additional thoughts on the same subject.

I have often asked myself, "Why bother with all of the gizmos? Why trust the digital doo-dads?"

Here are a couple reasons which keep popping up on the browser of my brain.

First and foremost, my children are growing up with microchips embedded in every area of their existence! They seem to know inherently how to type, text, scroll, swipe, and surf.

I need to keep up with my kiddos! I need to feel comfortable in this terrain, treacherous as it may seem. Even if I don't qualify to be a tour guide, I can at least go along for the ride. It really is the future, and I can foresee problems for people who insist on driving their horse-drawn carriages on the highways of today.

Convenience is key, and part of the miracle of modern technology is the fact that what would, in the past, require a library can now be held in the palm of my hand. My piles of notebooks are now neatly in my back pocket! And I have to admit that all those notebooks can get lost, too, just like my digital things disappeared. Same level of frustration regardless of format.

Finally, when I consider the awesome and amazing advancements mankind is making in this realm of information science, it builds my faith in God! If we mere mortals can manage to create such incredible items as computers, it helps me see how God can be so omniscient and omnipotent... He just might use a big mainframe!!! I don't really know, of course, and have no desire to blaspheme by pondering on it too long, but in my case, my faith grows as I realize that God really is capable of far more than I am, and I don't have to worry about the "how" -- I can see little hints about the possible ways as I see how mankind is figuring out bits and pieces of it, one step at a time.

An example to illustrate this last thought is the Urim and Thummim, the means by which Joseph Smith Jr. translated the Book of Mormon. People of his era could not conceive of such a device, and even now, when we read descriptions of it, we might not be able to see how it could have been a gadget-of-the-eternal-dimension. However, considering that the people of the early 1800s would not be able to use comparison words, "It is like a little iPod" because, of course, they had never been exposed to anything even vaguely similar to an iPod.

Anyway, overall, my conversion to using technology is slow. It is not always steady. I suffer setbacks. Yet, I am consistently aware of the need to overcome those hurdles, buckle up, and keep my pedal on the metal as I try to merge with the traffic on the information super-highway!

A Nose By Any Other Name

With Valentine's day still in the air, I've been reflecting on the love of my life and how I almost didn't marry him because of his nose.

My handsome husband has a Roman nose, as the drama world would call it. Pronounced. It was one of the first things I noticed about him when I saw him in class.

My nose, on the other hand, is not so disproportionate with the other features of my face. I have big eyes! I have a big smile! And so it goes, I also have a big nose... and it's crooked.

I figured if I married this man with whom I shared so much in common (besides the size of our schnozes) that I would be genetically dooming our future children.

I am SOOOOO glad I married him anyways! And a mere-though-sincere apology will have to do if (when) our children's noses reach their full potential... because it has been SOOOO worth the risk!

Dear children, I hereby promise not to spend your college tuition getting my nose surgically reduced and straightened. I encourage you also to embrace your nose as it grows because it just might be your ticket to finding your soul mate!

Sure, sometimes when I look in the mirror, I think back to the story I heard about Daddy's grandma and how she decided to go ahead and get under the knife. That was before she was married, though, and who knows how that affected her later first encounters with Daddy's grandpa and how Daddy may not have ever come to be without that surgery. (Funny, huh, that he still got the pre-knife nose).

As I stared in the mirror and pondered these things and how, even if I had the money, I would not choose to spend it in this way, it occurred to me that our respective noses just might be what helped us find our true love!

I dated quite a bit back in my young adult days. I don't particularly recall any of those young men having particularly large noses. They also didn't have the whole package of phenomenal qualities that my husband has... Maybe he was aware that his nose could deter a future bride, and so he had to make up for it by being the most romantic, most selfless, most trustworthy, most responsible, most faithful....

I simply blamed my nose on my Jewish ancestry and hoped the boys would focus on my eyes and smile instead. Somehow, even after verbalizing my fears of big-nosed-offspring, Ted still decided to marry me, nose and all. Whew!

This song really fits our family... Enjoy!

The Loss of my Brain

I like the feeling of typing. It's fun!

I am sometimes amazed at my fingers and their connection to my brain. When a word -- or even a stream of words -- form in my brain, I barely have to process which letters will combine to make the word/phrase/sentence, and like little tentacles, my fingers flit about wildly until my brain is splattered on the computer screen.

Lately, I've become rather reliant on the screen to take good care of the brain parts I share with it.

I tell myself, "Whew! Good! Got that out of my head and onto the technological device... don't have to think about it anymore!"

But then... {JAWS Music starts playing}

I GO AND LOSE MY OUTER BRAIN!!!

To try to put things in perspective for myself during these stressful moments, I try to focus on how grateful I am that my skull is still intact and I have not actually lost the grey matter within.

This tends to backfire a little, though, because really and truly, the grey matter let all that important stuff leak out because it figured that it was contained on the ol' iPod/iPhone/iCloud and there was no need to take up synapses and brain cells and what-not keeping track of things that had been transferred through these amazing typing fingers to a digital brain!

Tonight, I choose to post this to my blog in gratitude for the eight-out-of-eleven calendars that miraculously reappeared in my iPhone a few hours ago. The various Apple Support Guys (who are awesome, by the way) had spent well over two hours total trying to help me find these facets of my brain. They had mysteriously disappeared, even from iCloud.

No luck.

Then, bada-bing-bada-boom, there they were -- and I started to cry!!!

I want to be a responsible mama. Sure, sure, I blog under the name Clueless Mama, and yet I don't really want that to apply to me, particularly in terms of when to take which child to what activity and better yet, when to pick up which child from where ever!!!

Now that I have the majority of my brain back (the final three calendars are still floating around in cyberspace somewhere), I can be a little more responsible... and I am fighting the urge to return to paper and pen... relishing in the fascination of fast-typing fingers helps.

The Mark of a Responsible Boy

Normally, if I came into the kitchen and saw these marks on my countertop, I wouldn't smile.

But today, I did smile. 

These are the marks of a thirteen-year-old boy who is being responsible.

He didn't ask for the job of handing out the neighborhood newsletter. When he was asked, he didn't particularly want to accept the "opportunity" (in quotes because, well, there are more fitting words for the kind of slave labor he views it to be).

Despite this, he did, in fact, nod in agreement, and then proceeded to carry out the duty. 

First, he made a couple copies of the map of the neighborhood. 

Next, he used black permanent marker to notch out a few routes (see photos above -- maybe you can find your way around our neighborhood, too).

Then took a few piles to his friends' homes with a map so they could relieve him of his burden. Not entirely, though -- he kept a pile and a map for himself, too.

He's a good boy... so I won't bother him about the countertop. Most likely, it will wear off after a few months of wiping.

In the meantime, if anyone asks, I'll proudly reply that those are the marks of a leader-in-the-making.

Doing the Right Things for the Wrong Reason

I think I reek...

The sad, sour smell of a girl abandoned by her daddy.

It catches the attention of other little girls, disguised as women, and it causes us to sniff each other out and open up and talk about losing that first love of our lives.

Sharing such tragedy is like febreze -- somehow, it neutralizes each others' odors, and we feel fresher for all the airing of our dirty laundry.

Some of the precious women I've been blessed to discuss our daddy-drama with actually had the physical man in their home their whole lives, but he failed to fill the role of father. Other girls have had to deal with the death of their father. In my case, when I was five, Dad just up and left, rarely to be seen or heard from again.

In all of these situations, we got a hole torn in our hearts that we tried to mend in other ways.

THANK GOD IN HEAVEN (and I mean that literally, as a reverent prayer, not a vain catch-phrase) that *most* of the time, I tried to fill that void with positive, happy, enriching, constructive hobbies, events, people, and pursuits.

I loved my teen years!! I remember when I realized that I would be turning twenty and losing that term "teen" off my age. I mourned a little, and promised myself to keep marching forward in victory, never looking back with longing at the glory days.

I've kept that promise, I think, pretty valiantly. I love to look at my present life and consider its awesomeness, what with my phenomenal husband, my beautiful children, my loving extended family, my loyal friends, my comfy home...

But sometimes, a thought, a word, a whisper -- something causes me to glance back for a second... And, well, those teen years actually were glory days of their own kind.

When I'm among my fellow fatherless friends and we're in the midst of sorting out our losses, we can recognize together how our lives have been influenced by the impact of our injuries. That's when I realized that I wasn't really interested in being the drum major or getting the highest grades or being voted most likely to succeed or win a spot on the homecoming court or be awarded the most scholarships.

I was just trying to attract my daddy back into my life.

I have come to see consciously how my subconscious was conniving to be so amazing that he could no longer ignore his bright-shining-star of a daughter.

And I had so much fun! I'm so glad that I did all those things and exerted all those efforts and enjoyed life to the fullest and kept striving for the best within me!

It didn't work.

Even now, after years of pleading in my own way -- sending him pictures of his gorgeous grandchildren, offering to buy him a plane ticket, asking him questions about his life so I could get to know him better -- his pitiful efforts to stay in touch could be viewed as a slap in the face.

But I choose not to let those slaps cause too much pain. I choose to let my husband's abiding and near-perfect love soften the blow. I grasp the hand as it sweeps toward my cheek, and I turn the smack into an arm-wrestle. I hug my children extra tight with arms that have been strengthened this way.

My lemons really have been turned into lemonade. Sure -- the squeezing sometimes hurts... but God saw fit to add plentiful sugar, and the results are sweeter than I could have imagined.

Wanna sip?

Confession Time

Well, I have something to confess. It is very hard to admit, because I don't want you to think that this admission to a lack of honesty overflows into other areas of my life.

Honestly, believe me, I tell the truth 99.9999% of the time!!!

But, sometimes...

Actually, I can safely say EVERY time...

... when I have to say that I have read the terms and conditions of an end-user license agreement before I can continue installing software...

Well...

Truthfully, honestly... I always check the "Agree" button even though I just scrolled as quickly as I could past the legal jargon.

For all I know, someday Apple will show up at my door, demanding that my children go work in the cotton fields as slave labor because that was part of what I agreed to in the fine print of the terms and conditions.

Every time after that, when I want to download some new techno-product, and it requires that I give the equivalent of my electronic signature by clicking "I Agree," I will have a tear form in my eye, fondly remembering what lovely children they were...

But I will keep on downloading stuff, carelessly and recklessly claiming to have read the paragraphs and sub-paragraphs and indented, capitalized portions. It is just not in my nature to take the time and mental effort to even pretend that any of it makes sense to me.

Once, when guilt persuaded me to at least TRY to read it, I noted that Apple strictly prohibits the use of iCloud to build or distribute weapons of mass destruction, including but not limited to nuclear weaponry and chemical warfare.

I'm glad they took the time to think that over thoroughly and get me to agree to give up that old hobby of dabbling in murderous ways to take over the tri-state area.

Really, though, if the bad guys are bad enough to do those things, they certainly aren't going to be virtuous enough to read that sentence stuck among the millions of stone-cold boring sentences.

They will lie their ammunition-laden belts off, just like I do.