My Men Last Christmas

I have Christmas on the brain. Thanksgiving just gets the short end of the stick this year. I’m WAY too excited about Jeremy coming in to town not to think of Christmas. But thinking of Christmas makes me think of presents…

I don’t consider myself the best gift-giver. Every once in a while I get it right, but it usually takes me about 7-8 wrongs before I’m there. Gift giving is so important to me though. I always want to do better than I often end up doing. (Hmm….I’m sensing a trend here…)

Part of the problem is that it is really, REALLY tough to shop for guys. Dude. Seriously. When shopping for a female, there just seem to be SO many more options. I mean even if you totally bomb there are still fall back options like Bath and Body Works for example. What woman doesn’t like SOMETHING from that place? But with guys, it’s never as fun. In fact, it’s really like torture to me. I know of no such place that is as good of a fall back option for guys. (And ok, Best Buy doesn’t count because you need to read my next point…please continue.)

Here is what I mean: I have a budget to stick to. I can’t spend more than between $30 and $50 on one person (and sometimes not even that much). That’s just the reality of where life has us these days! And guys always like expensive things. Electronics are expensive! Frankly, there isn’t a lot of gift options out there that fit my budget and make the A-A+ grade for guy gifts. To me a gift card is so cold. I relish the response of a much appreciated or well liked gift. I would really prefer not to do gift cards.

Incidentally, at my house growing up, we did Christmas like this: my Dad played Santa. He went around the tree and picked up the presents and brought them to you so that you had a stack o’ presents. Then, when all the gift boxes were handed out, we started around the circle and everyone opened one gift one at a time while everyone else watched and commented etc. Gift cards makes the morning  and this kind of experience so much less fun.

So, men who read this blog, I need some input here. I’ll start off a list so that it will get your brain cranks rolling. If I have something on the list that stinks, do tell me. The men in my life will thank you for it. (For those of you ladies who read this and who ROCK the manly gift-giving or have some sort of other worldly perspective, do share.)

Manly List of Gift Ideas:

• wine (I DO live in Washington)
• movie tickets
• shop vac?
• movies/dvds
• books
• clothing/shoes

Help me finish the list guys!

Yesterday afternoon I turned on my Christmas music. It was such a fun feeling to listen to it in the back ground as I went about my day. It made me giddy with anticipation of all that is to come very soon. But it also got me thinking about the “holiday season” and how busy we all are.

Ugh…it just makes my lip curl a tad. Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again all the while expecting different results? We do that, right? Every new year we say “it’ll be better next year” for this, that or the other reasons. But it’s always busy and people are always stretched financially, emotionally, spiritually and physically. Sure we head into the season with huge amounts of joy and anticipation. But when it’s all over all we want is a nap!

These days I find myself in full swing in a place like that;  I call it my  “Busy Mom Land”. I knew that this day would come (and I whined about it all summer) as my first born entered school.  I also know that it will get even more busy and chaotic as our boys continue to grow up and as more kids are tentatively added to the picture.

But as I wiggle around in some new responsibilities and try to find my footing, I’m learning a lot.  I’m learning about myself; what I like and dislike, what I can do well and what I really don’t do well, as well as what I need if I am going to do ANYTHING well, i.e. sleep and coffee (in that order).

What it all boils down to for me is availability. I love being available to people! I want to be available too.  Not just emotionally available but physically, spiritually and financially available. I like to have some space in my life and my day to do the unexpected just because I’m available!

Today at church, one of our ministers told us that there is a family whose children go to the school where our church meets on Sundays and they are living out of their car. They have six children and they are homeless. I believe there are something like 48 families in need just that this school is aware of and Renovo (our church) is doing what we can to help. I love this and I don’t say this to toot my church’s proverbial horn, I just say it because I love that we are making ourselves available to others. To me, that is speaking Jesus to people, that is what breathes life into a dark world.

In my “Busy Mom Land” and in the holiday season, I find that what I really need is some space. Some space so that I can be available to have my neighbor over for a cup of coffee just on the fly without notice or prearrangement (or makeup), some space in my wallet to buy a turkey for a family who wouldn’t be able to do that for themselves, some space to take a nap and give myself an emotional breather from all this running around I feel like I do and some time to pray and be at peace and at rest.

I’m learning so much right now in this season of life. I want to be available to others and I want to be available to my kids. I’m the only one who can guard my time and put the necessary space in the places it can go so that I can live in the talents God has given to me. There are a lot of things I stink at (and that stinkin’ list is growing), but there are a lot of things I’m good at too. I hope I can say that one of the things I’m good at is being available. I want Cooper and Chase to say of me and of Jeremy that we always made ourselves available to them for any reason and at any time.

Last night was a late night for the kiddos. We had an FRG (Family Readiness Group) meeting, so they didn’t get to bed till  quite a bit after their usual bed times. About an hour after Chase had gone down, he was crying pretty hard. I went in to check on him and he was sitting up! While he has been sitting up quite confidently for a while now, he hasn’t been able to put HIMSELF into that position. This morning when I went into his room to get him, he was showing off his new trick again. I think he’s pretty excited about it!

Huggy Brothers

Also in firsts, it dawned on me yesterday after talking to some other mommies that I should really start introducing some different textures and soft finger foods to Chase. So, I tried scrambled eggs out on him. No dice.  He spit them out and made a funny face. In retrospect, it would have been fun to have that face here….so here’s the next best thing since I didn’t capture the moment.

Ewwwww Mom!

Now I need to start thinking about giving him avocados and mashed potatoes and what else is soft? If you have good ideas post a comment for me would ya? My brain is feeling scrambled these days and ideas don’t come as readily!

I leave soon for STL and I am running around like a chicken with my head cut off! At least, that’s how I feel. I need to calm down…my BF said that my to do list stresses her out…he he he he. I bet if I went through my blog and read my posts right before I went on a trip, they would all sound exactly like this.

I am trying to be calm and have some fun with the kiddos as well as get my “stuff” done. But I’ve got myself into a bad habit. I’m tired in the mornings (really tired-and I’m no morning person to begin with) so I kinda drag myself and the kiddos out to whatever the day harkens us. Then we rush home for lunch, rush into naps and then I finally have some energy. I use that energy to make phone calls and go through that viscious to-do list, and then it’s dinner time. The hours of 5-7 are C-R-A-Z-Y in my house so I rush through that and then, by the time I get Coop in bed, I’m ready for a breather for me. I breathe, and then I get to doing something. Which means I keep doing that something and get to bed WAY too late…and thus start the cycle again for the next day.

This is no good! My goal is to be out of the CRAZY CYCLE by the weekend. I know I can do it!

In other news, I love, love, love, LOVE my Wednesday night Bible study group. My “LMNOP”. It is the best EVER. I leave encouraged and strengthened weekly and I simply don’t know what I would do without it. Last week, our friend John made an interesting comment. We were talking about spiritual break through moments that we’ve always remembered; moments where you realized something new about God or saw Him in a new way. John mentioned the time he realized as he was reading through Job that God was the one who suggested His servant Job to Satan. I know this may sound funny-but I always thought that it was Satan who had asked about Job. I was so intrigued by this that I went back through and started reading Job. WOW! I am just reminded that the Word of God is living and active. It has been a wonderful book of the Bible to rediscover!

That’s about it in the Nevil household these days. Jeremy is doing well. He managed to get away unscathed on his 31st birthday and I think he feels like that was a good accomplishment. (Army guys are viscous when they find out it is your birthday! Pink bellies all around….)

Today, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where all Chase’s binkies had gone. I had 4 of them in the crib not too long ago….hhmmmmmm…where COULD they be?

And then the binkies were found....

They are even nicely spaced out....

This isn’t the first time we’ve lost binkies…the day Jeremy was deployed, Chase slyly tossed a binkie straight out of his stroller and I didn’t figure it out till they were both SCREAMING and we were on our way home.

You just can’t strap it to the kid ALL the time. I do however recall being greatly amused when the instructor for my birthing class told us all quite seriously that we CANNOT tape the binkie to the child’s mouth….

I had the distinct privilege on Sunday of buying new jeans in a smaller size! HOORAY! In fact, I took all my jeans that are too big out of my closet today so I won’t be tempted to wear them. (Because they seriously fall off me…YAY!)

As I was pulling out the jeans I realized I now have 3 pairs of jeans that fit me. And really, I only like 2 of the three.  Considering that I took about 6 pairs out and put them away, this didn’t seem like very many jeans!

So my question is, how many pairs of jeans do you have? (And this means that you wear them…not that they just live in the abyss of your closet!)

I’ve never been super “in” to Halloween. It’s just not my thing. Take it or leave it, whatever. But I AM into my kids and I know kids like the opportunity to dress up, act silly and get a free pass for a day on a little sweetness. So, you know…

Sporty Boys!

Cooper was a baseball player and Chase was a basketball player. I had in mind a couple little extra things for their costumes, but it didn’t quite work out! (Bad planning on my part!) So, this is what we got. Chase was much happier than he looks in this picture….it’s just hard to get both of them to smile AND look at me at the same time. By the way, the shirt that Chase is wearing was worn by both Cooper and Jeremy! I love that shirt!

A Happier Chase

So the morning of Halloween we really just did our normal Saturday gig. The boys went down for naps a tad early and then once they woke up, we headed out to Puyallup to hang out downtown.

The Puyallup Mainstreet Association hosts this super fun thing every year where the kiddos can trick-or-treat around to all the local businesses. For all you STL peeps who have no idea what Puyallup is (say it like Pew-Al-IP), it’s kinda like main street old St. Charles, but smaller and square.

There were a TON of people there! It was so fun! And even more fun was the success of my church, Renovo, and our outreach event. Renovo hosted a carnival-style gig complete with Jake’s band The Reaching playing a few sets, a bounce house, a cup cake walk and vaious other carnival elements. There were A LOT of people there and it was so awesome to see our church having the most popular thing down there! How great to let people know that we are IN the community and A PART of the community -to let them know we care about them and want to play too!

Krista with some funny sounding gilatto

My friend, Krista, was in town so she hung with me and the boys. After hanging at the carnival and a little trick-or-treating, we stopped at Forza for some hot chocolate, gilatto and coffee! It was good times. Krista and I laughed about the prevalence of coffee shops in Washington and how much we always miss that when we go back home. Seriously, in the 1 block radius of the coffee shop we were in, there were at least 4 other coffee shops. And we’re talkin’ cute coffee shops-not just chains.

So after that fun it was a little after 5 pm. I wanted to get back home with the kids so that we could hand candy out to the trick-or-treaters who would be ravishing my house. Guys, if you ever in your life live near an Army base or military installation of any kind-go trick or treating there! WHEW! TONS of kids came to the house. We stopped and grabbed a pizza on our way out of Puyallup (gotta love Take N Bake!) and then headed home to meet our kiddos.

On the way home, I explained to Cooper what was about to go down. He was SO excited to help me give candy out to the kids. I had 7 bags of candy and I told him that once it was gone, that was it! The deal was that he could give 2 pieces of candy to each kiddo and he couldn’t let the kids just grab their own candy (cause holy cow kids are greedy!).

Cooper was so excited that he waited at the front door with his nose pressed against the glass door. He kept opening the door, popping his head out and yelling back at me, “MOM! THERE’S NOBODY COM’IN!”. It was so funny. Finally, a little after 6 pm, we started to get some kids. Cooper just got more and more excited. He could hardly stand it and he was so adorable. He DID NOT want me to help, “I got it Mom, I got it, I can do it myself”. The poor trick or treaters crowded up my front steps and eagerly waited as Cooper SLOWLY counted 2 pieces of candy out to each kid.

While he did this, he was so sweet; he said to various kids, “Oh hi, I like your costume!” and “here ya go!” and “happy halloween!”. It was slaying me. Finally, after about a half hour of candy giving, he was so excited that he put his shoes on and just kept going outside with the candy bowl and cheering people to come to our house. He was outside YELLING “Hey kids! Come over here, we’ve dot TANDY!”

I must have told him a dozen times to stop calling people over, that they would get to our house eventually because they were working their way down the rows of houses, but it was no use. Too many kids would just barrel past their parents when they heard Cooper’s call…it was like the call of the Sirens or something!

After only one-hour of an open house, I was out of candy. And I don’t keep candy in the house…so I didn’t even have like a back up stash. That was it! We closed our door and turned off our light and dreamed of years to come. It was quite an exciting night for all of us.

I told Jeremy this story already and afterwords, we talked about years to come. I told him that when we move home I want a fire pit so we can roast hot dogs in the front yard, set up big jugs of hot chocolate and sit in lawn chairs outside and let our kids dress up and hand candy out to people instead of go trick-or-treating. It was so fun to see Cooper so excited to give to other kids…even if it was something that wasn’t great for them. He even got his candy out when we ran out and started giving his candy away because he was so sad we ran out! What a precious boy!

Here’s a few parting pictures.

Sleepy baby all bundled up, ready to do a quick pass!

Ooooh! A picture of Mommy!

Cooper and his BF, Braydon at the Carnival

Krista and I

Hey gang, here is an excellent article about what happened to the 7 guys that 1-17 lost last week.  This article gives you a glimpse into what life is like for our Battalion. Jeremy and I were actually on the computer im’ing when this happened. I’m so grateful he wasn’t out there.

This is scary stuff; I’m not going to sugar coat it. I know so many of you are praying and I want you to know that I believe with all that I am that God hears your prayers and is protecting Jeremy. Thank you so much for the time that you take out of your busy life to pray for him and for us. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.

After reading this article, my brain and my heart were trying so hard to process what life is like for Jeremy and his friends out there. I hate that we are in this – that’s all I feel when I read this. All the politics and the philosophical ideologies just fly away and that is all that is left- I hate it.

This is probably one of the most well-written articles I’ve read. I’m grateful for writers like this who can help us back home to get a glimpse into life for our husbands, sons and friends.

Still haven’t heard anything…

Here’s the scene: Dinner time.  The evening in our house runs on a tight schedule because frankly, Chase is a crabby patty. He goes to bed at 7:00 pm…and when I say he goes to bed at 7:00 pm, I mean he is bathed, changed, fed and IN bed at 7:00 pm. Therefore, come 6:00 pm, he starts to get very fussy.

In the best-case scenario, Cooper and I are eating dinner between 5 and 5:30 pm (Chase eats around 4:00 pm) so that we have time to eat and then get cleaned up BEFORE Chase starts to get too crabby. If I miss the mark on this then I’ve got trouble.

The problem: Cooper. Yes, Cooper is killing me with his slow eating. Last night, I was a little late getting dinner on the table. (Totally my fault.) It was 5:55 pm when we sat down. At 7:19 pm I was ready to send the child to China and he was still eating (and crying) and I was attempting to put Chase to bed because the evening was so off kilter. Cooper didn’t want me to take his food away because “he was hungry”, but he wouldn’t be quiet and eat. (There is lots more to this story but that is the short version of what happened.) This is getting to be a regular evening issue here in the Nevil household and I’m pretty perturbed by it.

Additionally, the problem is that he won’t just shut up and eat! I love him and he’s a fun kiddo, but really, REALLY?

Therefore, my question to you all is this: What is a reasonable amount of time that I should/you give to your children to finish their dinner?

I am a firm believer in kids sitting at the dinner table with their parents.  I don’t do the getting up and walking around thing either. Dinner is dinner and you don’t get your bootie out of that chair until I say. But I also understand that I eat way faster than a 4-year-old, so I try to add a little extra time in there for him to finish his food.  I enjoy talking with him because that is another fun part of dinner; conversation around the table is what families do!

I feel like 30 minutes is plenty of time to eat. I don’t want him to rush, but I also don’t want him to eat slower than mollasses pouring out of a glass bottle on a cold day. You know?

If he can’t do it in that alloted time, I feel like it is perfectly ok to take his plate away from him and tell him that dinner time is over and so sorry you didn’t finish. Especially if he is clearly not making an effort to finish his dinner in a timely manner.

So that’s my issue. How does dinner time conversation and allotted time to eat work in your house at night?

It all started last Saturday morning when I awoke to the sounds of a barking dog…and realized it was my baby.  Well, it has now been 8 days of sickness in the Nevil house. Seriously? I’m kinda done now.

I was really hoping that me and the kids would all be better on Friday actually. Cooper had some testing for school after being home all week (just making sure he is on trek for school readiness and doesn’t have any delays, etc.), then I went to my friend Crystal’s for lunch and then…we went to the Tacoma Holiday Food and Gift Festival at the Tacoma Dome! It was SO much fun. And then I lost my voice that night. That was not fun. Ooohh but we did watch a great movie-”Gifted Hands” with Cuba Gooding Jr.-it’s a must see!

I’m still mustering through the no voice thing. Julie Seward cracked me up when she wrote on my FB page that I’d better practice my mommy scowl! HA! Actually, Cooper has been pretty understanding and empathetic. He keeps telling me he is sorry that I’m sick and that he thinks I’m pretty.  I’ll take it.

Today was a day o’ naps and just lots of rest. I count that as a good day!  I’ve had a song in my head ever since I went to bed last night. It’s by Martin Smith:

“Lord, You have my heart, and I will search for Yours; Jesus take my life and lead me on. Lord, You have my heart, and I will search for Yours; Let me be to You a sacrifice. And I will praise You, Lord, And I will sing of love come down. And as You show Your face, We’ll see Your glory here.”

It’s a really beautiful song and every time I think of it I hear it with the guys taking a strong lead and the girls echoing the chorus. So pretty….

Anyway, I’m getting over it! I’ve gotten to speak with Jeremy almost every day starting last week I think. It’s been pretty wonderful! My friend Krista comes in town late on Thursday from Iowa. I’m super excited to hang with her and I know Cooper will be too. (I think he has  little crush on her!)