Inside Voices

Inside voice please.

Inside voice please!

Inside voice please!!

INSIDE voice please!!!

INSIDE  VOICE  PLEASE!!!

Emme:  Mommy, how come we have to use inside voices but you don't?

There are days, many days, when I feel like I have said the same five phrases at least a thousand times.  Sometimes, it feels closer to a hundred thousand.  And while I'd love to be able to admit that I always ask nicely, always keep my cool, the brutal truth is, I don't.  Sometimes, I have to take a small ear and bring it really, really close to my face and use the very best "scary whisper" I can muster to get my point across.  Sometimes, I give up and do it myself.  Sometimes, I simply sink to their level and yell louder than they do in order just to be heard.  When did I become Charlie Brown's mother?  Wah wha-wah-waahh wah wha???

I honestly don't know how mothers survived before the internet.  Before the mommy-blogging people who posted encouraging things and various ways to keep a toddler occupied so you can do something productive... like the dishes, or take a shower, or just use the toilet alone.  I often have days when, just after bedtime, I head to my little dark corner of the house where the computer is and get on to a blog just so I can be reminded that I'm not a total failure.  I haven't irreparably damaged my children from what happened today.  One of my favorites is this youtube video.

This last week, I felt like I was just a sounding gong or a noiseless cymbal to my children.  I tell them to clean up, so they get more out.  I ask them to wash up for dinner, so they rip the trampoline net down.  I tell them to get clothes on and Todd is late for getting them to school because, low and behold, it wasn't done.  Then we stopped at a traffic light.  There was a hawker and once he realized he wasn't going to get a sale from me, he moved on to the kiddos in the back.  He was enticing them to start begging poor, tired mommy for whatever it was he was selling and Cooper (I promise I'm not making this up) from the far back row of the mini van says, "No thank you.  We don't need that."

This is one small step for Cooper, one giant leap for his mamma!  I could not have been more proud.  I could not have been more shocked.  That's when I remembered the video and the mommy-talk.  I don't tell them a hundred times we don't "need" whatever for me.  I'm not seemingly-endlessly spinning my wheels for me.  I'm not really even doing it for them.  I know my days when they aren't sulking at me, hating me, or punishing me for not letting them...oh... eat junk food, hang out with that friend, go to this party, whatever, are numbered.  I do what I do because I serve a God who SEES what I do.  I serve a God who SEES every ketchup stain I conquer, every ice cube of baby food puree I make, every single time I suck it up and read that book one.  more.  time.

Just as He sees the carved bird in the rafters that no one else will, He sees me, day in and day out, mundanely, tediously and monotonously guiding this zoo of mine through life.