Sherwood Family 2011
In back we have Steve and Linda (me). In the front row, the children are arranged in birth order (L to R): Autumn (17), Amanda (16), Maxine (14) and Justin (12). Also pictured are two of our three dogs: Lily (the black minipin) and Zeus (the giant chocolate lab). Not pictured: Spike (the beagle) because he would have run away, and we didn’t want to lose him. 
This weekend, the husband woke everyone up fairly early, fed them breakfast and then made them trek into the woods.
There he operated a chainsaw. When he was done cutting up wood-stove size pieces, it was the job of the rest of us to pick it up and put it into the truck.
This happened two days in a row. On the second day, I was not moving as fast as I had been on the first day. The squatting and the lifting and the squatting and the lifting had taken its toll on my body, and I was stiff and sore. It didn’t help that I had also done a workout that targeted these exact areas.
On the way back home the second day, we were listening to a song about fishing. My son commented about what he thought the song was about, and he got it.
JT: This is about a dad making memories with his kid.
Linda: Yep. Just like what your dad and I are doing with you guys right now. You think you are just hauling wood, but we are making memories and connecting with you guys.
JT: No, we’re just your child labor.
This weekend was absolutely gorgeous. The temps were in the 80s, and the fall colors are brilliant. It was a gorgeous time to be out in the woods. I really want to go back to that area and get a family photo of all of us posing on some giant beech trees that were cut down. The way they are currently lying on the ground is a makeshift grandstand, and the colors behind them are fantastic.
Memories.
There was recently this post going around facebook about teaching daughters to tell the difference between a good man and a bad boy.
The catchy little picture makes it sound so easy, but it is anything but. I have three teenaged daughters, and I have worked hard to make them self confident and smart and confident, but bad boys have means of persuasion that parents find hard to battle and unless I send my girls to an all-female school, they have to learn to deal with boys: the good and the bad.
This past weekend was the high school’s homecoming. All three of my girls were going, but only the oldest had a date. The other two were going with friends. Around 11 p.m., I received a phone call from the oldest. The youngest child was mad at her and crying, and it all had to do with a bad boy.
A quick back story: Last spring/summer, the youngest liked a boy that lived somewhere else but came to the area when staying with his dad. The daughter met him, liked him and they started “going out.” Keep in mind that “going out” meant one movie that his dad went with them to. The rest was texting and facebook and not really seeing each other.
At the beginning of the summer, I read a text the boy had sent my daughter. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t good either. He basically asked her what age she thought she’d be when she lost her virginity and who it would be with. We made some changes including preventing my daughter from going to a friend’s house that lived near the boy (the only place she saw him). By the end of the summer, he had been blocked from my daughter’s facebook profile and his number removed from her cell phone.
Fast forward to this weekend. For a week or two before homecoming, I was hearing rumors about the boy. My daughter was talking to him although she wasn’t supposed to. At homecoming, my oldest daughter intervened and told the boy to leave her little sister alone. The boy reportedly became upset and punched a wall (possibly breaking his fist). FYI: the wall always wins.
My youngest daughter was staying at a friend’s house, but when she came home I talked to her about it. She denied some things including things that she knew to be true. In other words, she was caught in more than one lie. The first one: his number was back on her phone under a false name. She pretended she didn’t know and had no idea how it was there.
Then I checked out her facebook account, and I realized the boy was no longer blocked from her account. He wasn’t a friend yet, but he wasn’t blocked. He should have been blocked. When I went to reblock him, facebook warned me that I couldn’t block someone I had just unblocked in the last 48 hours. When I asked my daughter why she unblocked him, she claimed she didn’t and that she doesn’t know how to unblock him. She claimed that she didn’t know he’d been unblocked. I called her a liar. It’s her facebook account, and she is responsible for it. The unblocking had just happened, so she either did it or knew about it. The unblocking happened when she was at the friend’s house, which just happens to be the friend that lives by the boy.
Now she is without a cell phone, without a facebook or a laptop, and she won’t be going anywhere for a while.
I hate when my children lie to me. I hate bad boys. And I am so disappointed that my daughter hasn’t figured out that lying isn’t a trait they should cultivate in themselves or their friends. It’s a huge warning sign to stay away.
It is incredibly frustrating for me, but I won’t be punching any walls anytime soon. Brains not brawn will resolve this one.
Several years ago, I interviewed a parenting expert about sibling rivalry and how to deal with the “you like her more” syndrome.
Dr. Carol Maxym, author of Teens in Turmoil, suggested that a parent tells the children “I love you each most.” It isn’t grammatically correct, but it rang true with me. There are things that I love about each of my children. There are things that aggravate me about each of my children. But they are MY children, and I love each of them most. I love them because they are four very different children, but they each delight me with their sense of humor and unique way of looking at the world.
Now Time magazine is claiming that ALL parents have a favorite child, and I am going to proclaim loud and clear that I do NOT. I have not been able to decide a favorite color, film, book, song, or any other category, so why would I have a favorite child? There are too many things to like about each that it is impossible to rate them.
It all reminds me of that supposedly ethical conundrum: if your car caught on fire with your family inside, who would you rescue first? The answer is supposed to give insight into who you love most. It didn’t work for me. If my car was on fire with my family inside, the first person I would rescue would be the easiest to rescue and then I’d move to the next easiest. My idea would mean I could save as many as possible (and hopefully ALL), which is what I would want faced with that sort of situation. Who wouldn’t?
The truth is that there are days where I could easily throttle my child (and feel free to insert any one of four names here) and there are days (sometimes the very same day) when my child (again any of the four) delights me so much that I am tickled pink and couldn’t be prouder to be that child’s mom.
Sometimes those periods last longer. I have struggled with parenting my oldest child in the last few years. She has made some bad choices, and she tends to tell lies. I tend to catch her in those lies and then evoke punishment that she doesn’t feel fits the crime. It causes friction. But this same child has done so many things to make me proud and happy.
And I’m singling her out because I’ve written about her a lot on this blog, but the same can be said of all my kids. There are things each of them do that just drive me nuts, but they also do things that make my heart swell with pride. On any given day, my relationship with one may be a little shaky or a little more solid than my relationship with another, but it is the nature of relationships and doesn’t have anything to do with how I feel about my children for the long haul.
I like what Lisa Belkin says in her column in the New York Times. In part, she writes: What’s hard is accepting that relationships are fluid, determined by the ever-changing variables that make a child (and a parent) who they are at any given moment. Those ups and downs, imbalances and inequities, are not something to overcome, but rather realities to be accepted. We treat them differently because they ARE different. Navigating that reality is the key to being a parent.
And in case you missed the link above, here is the link to the article I wrote many years ago called Mom loves ME More.
I don’t do yard sales or garage sales. I don’t mean to say that I don’t stop at them. I mean I do not have them. I would rather donate my things and get rid of them immediately then wait and have to store them until I have enough for a sale.
The day after I had surgery, I had to see my dentist. Since I was going into town already, I had the kids put all of the things we had gathered into the back of the truck, so we could donate them. I also put a couple of my winter coats in the back seat, so I could drop those off at the dry cleaners.
I was feeling OK, but I was being careful. I was still struggling to consume 64 ounces in a single day, and my focus was mostly on sipping almost constantly. I had just finished seeing my dentist, and it had been over an hour since I had been able to drink anything. I was thinking about my fluid intake when I had Amanda drive to the donation doors at Goodwill.
The kids got out and quickly grabbed everything I had in the back of the truck to donate. I couldn’t lift anything, so I just watched. I was worried Goodwill wouldn’t accept the computer monitor that I wanted to get rid of, but they did. Relieved, I got back in the truck and the kids soon followed. At this point, I wasn’t yet able to drive, so my daughter Amanda was driving.
We went home, and it was time for me to have some protein. I had forgotten all about the coats that I wanted to drop off at the dry cleaners.
The next day, I was going somewhere with my husband, and he was grabbing some things from the back seat. Remembering my coats, I asked him to grab those.
“What coats?” he asked.
The coats were gone. They had been donated as well. Whoops. So, others might want to learn from my mistake and not take things to Goodwill when still recovering from surgery. 
