I Miss Summer...

Let's get one thing straight. I hate summer.

I do. I hate it. The oppressive heat, the blinding sun, the sweating. No, thanks. I live in upstate New York, and our summers could hardly be categorized as sweltering, but I still hate them. 

I love autumn. And winter. The crispness of the air, the beautiful foliage that blankets our hillsides and distant mountaintops, the excitement of first snow, the creation of a new world over and over again as snow storms bring a fresh cover to brown trees, the austerity of the landscape that reveals pieces of the world that are invisible under the cover of thick green leaves. October. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Visits to the orchard, multiple family gatherings, visiting Santa Claus, having a big breakfast after watching my children open presents. I love the snow, the cold, having to wear fleece pajama pants and snuggle in blankets, smelling wood smoke from neighboring chimneys, filling the kitchen with warmth and fragrance from a freshly baked batch of cookies. These seasons are magical. When it gives way to the inevitable mud and mess of spring, I am saddened. 

So when I say that I miss summer, it shows just how difficult this winter has been. We come to expect a few storms of close to (or over) a foot of snow, as well as a week's worth of below freezing temperatures in January, and none of this causes any consternation. We throw a few more pellets in the stove, zip up the hooded sweatshirts, add slippers over our thick socks and hunker down for a bit. Then, the temperatures return to normal - in the 20s - for the rest of January, usually with a slow uptick in February (low to mid-30s) and then, by March, we're pretty steadily climbing into the 40s on a regular basis. 

Not this year. 

This year was unbearably cold for a painful amount of time. Weeks stretched by with temperatures barely reaching 20 degrees - or even ten degrees, for many days. The oppressive early darkness made it seem even colder, and so many evenings were spent looking longingly out the window, wishing for light at 5:00 pm. 

Now, spring has arrived, but only on the calendar. This morning's temperature was 6 degrees. 6. 

So, now, despite my usual distaste toward spring, I am anxious for green trees, green grass, green flower buds. I can't wait to be able to spend more than two minutes outside. I want to hang flowering baskets from my porch posts and plant flowers in my window boxes. I am excited to be able to release my children from the stale air of the house to the fresh, clean air of the outdoors. I am excited. I am ready. It's about time. 

Heart-Shaped Pancakes

This year, our Valentine's Day doubled as a snow day, which meant that I was given an extra day to spend with my wonderful husband and beautiful children. Shawn gave Allie a little gift (Minnie Mouse bath set - she loves Minnie) and we were feeling all sorts of lovey and celebration-y. Definitely caught up in this current, my husband says to me, 

"You should make Allie heart-shaped pancakes for breakfast." 

"Yes! I totally should!" I replied immediately and set out to make create the most wonderful breakfast spread any child could ever imagine. 

I had already imagined it as a took the pancake mix from the pantry. A warm pile of chocolate chip pancakes, shaped in perfect hearts. I could see Allie's bright blue eyes widen in delight, could see her picky-ness vanish as she took big bites of the soft treats, our hearts warm as the lovely snow continued to fall softly outside. It was going to be awesome. 

However, almost never are my imaginings able to jump that wide chasm into reality. 

The first problem that arose was construction. My initial idea was to use a cookie cutter and fill it with batter, but I quickly saw that I did not have a heart-shaped cookie cutter (or if I do have one, I couldn't find it). So I decided that I would put the batter in a large storage bag, cut off the tip, and - voila!!! - easily pipe out the pancake batter in perfect heart shapes. 

This was a veritable disaster. 

I don't know why. I really don't. But as soon as I started to try to make the heart shapes, all I got were uneven circles or oddly-shaped ovals. No hearts. Nothing even close to a heart. After about six of these, I started crying. Hard. 

Poor Shawn did not understand. He tried to assure me that it was no big deal, that Allie didn't know, that they would still taste great. I informed him that none of that mattered. I had set out to make heart-shaped pancakes, and I had failed. "If my mother had wanted to make us heart-shaped pancakes when we were kids," I told him, "we would have had heart-shaped pancakes!" Then I ended my argument for my utter failure as a mother with: "Some women have the touch and some women don't. And I don't." 

Shawn still didn't get it, but he comforted me anyway, which I appreciated. And I felt bad for quite awhile afterward, until something struck me: it's okay for me to fail. God loves me anyway. He knows I will fail. He expects it because I am a fallen creature. And He loves me anyway. Always. Unquestioningly. Because He's God and He says in His Word that He loves me. 

The thing that I find most astounding is that God will never love me MORE. He doesn't love me more when I read my Bible than when I don't, or when I am speaking sweetly than speaking harshly. He doesn't love me less because I can't make heart-shaped pancakes or because I have never made an apple pie from scratch or because my floor has crumbs on it. Or because sometimes I'm mean or cranky or cynical or frustrated or angry. He just loves me. Period. 

This means that no matter what I can or cannot do, I am enough just as I am. Not because of me - but because of Him. Because He loves me. Just the way I am. 

The results of our snowstorm 

Cry It Out

After seven months of life, my beautiful son finally sleeps through the night. Now, some mothers out there may be reading this and immediately feel one (or many) of a variety of emotional responses: jealousy, sadness, failure, discouragement. I used to feel that way when I heard that another person's baby was giving his or her parents seven or eight blissful hours of straight sleep every night while I was still getting up two, three, four times a night for no apparent reason. My stomach would clench as this parent (or parents) gleefully, and with rested face, recounted how his or her cherub went down peacefully at night and slept until 6:30 or 7:00 the next morning. I would immediately feel shamefully jealous, then quickly descend into despair (He will never sleep all night! He will be ten years old and I will still be getting up at 2 am to feed him!), discouragement (What am I doing wrong? I have read so many articles and tried so many things. Why do none of them work on my son?), failure (I must be a bad mother. That's all there is to it. My poor child can't sleep and it must be my fault.). 

Then, a most beautiful story was casually recounted, and hope was restored to our world. 

"[My son] was getting up every two hours. I just couldn't take it anymore. Finally, we just let him cry it out. The first night, he cried for two and a half hours. I slept with a pillow over my head. But after a few nights, he was sleeping all night." 

I felt a glimmer of hope. I had heard about Cry It Out - read about it, analyzed it, debated it, agonized over it. It seemed wrong - to leave a tiny, helpless baby in his crib to face a dark, terrifying room alone, to cry with no comfort or refuge, to let this baby possibly feel tiny hunger pangs and not relieve them immediately. In the past, I could not ever feel comfortable with the concept. And then Allie was born, and by ten weeks old, she was sleeping all night, and has slept all night since that point. 

Mac was a different story. 

He was immediately less of a sleeper than Allie at night, but nothing insane. He would wake up, I would feed him, he would go back to sleep, and the cycle would continue throughout the night. By the time he was two months old, he was down to about once a night, with an early morning feeding around 5:30. And I thought, Okay. I can do this. He's getting into a pattern. 

Then he started teething. At two and a half months old. And all sleeping hell broke loose. All routines that had been established during the night were broken as he was desperate for the comfort that nursing provides. Suddenly, the one feeding a night was up to three or four, every hour, or hour and a half, or two hours. I would sit and feed him and cry at 3 am, as I was up for the fourth time with absolutely no idea how to rectify the problem. When his bottom two teeth came in at four months old, I hoped for a reprieve and got one. For a week. Then the top two started and it was exhaustion all over again. 

By the time he was seven months old, we had had enough. My husband and I discussed it. He's too old to get up so many times in the night. He can't be that hungry. He's same weight as the average thirteen-month-old. He can last all night. But the question remained: what do we do? 

Once we heard the Cry It Out story, everything seemed to come into focus. All of the articles I had read, all of the advice I had heard, all of the strategies I had tried boiled down to one fact: he has to learn to get back to sleep on his own. We could do sleep training or any number of things, but he had to learn. And for us, Cry It Out just made sense. We could do it that night, immediately, with no reading necessary. We knew it would be difficult, knew we would have to fight our parental instincts to run in, comfort him, make it better. But we also knew, we had to do it - for our good and for his. 

The first night was petrifying. We waited, dreading the inevitable cries and the purposeful negligence that was about to ensue. The first wave came at 11:30. Mac began to cry and my husband and I sat on the edge of our bed, just listening, try to gauge how bad it was going to be. After a few minutes, the cries dissipated as he went back to sleep. That wasn't so bad, I thought. 

Then came 2 am. He began to cry, and it escalated as his cries went unanswered and he waited in the darkness for me to respond, to put him back to sleep. It was torture. Time was endless. Time dragged on, an assault on all senses as I clutched the pillow and my husband and I waited with open eyes for him to stop. And, a mere twenty minutes later, he did. 

The next night, he cried around the same time for between 5-10 minutes. Much less time, much less torture. The next night, only a couple of minutes. And by the fourth night, he was sleeping almost twelve hours straight. And he has continued to sleep like this ever since. 

I wonder if we are like this with God sometimes. We cry out for Him, cry out for His help or healing or comfort, and sometimes it seems like we get no response. We need something, or lots of things, and we are imploring our Heavenly Father to rescue us from where we are flailing in the darkness. We wonder where He is, wonder why He is not with us, why He has not picked us up and made everything better. We feel lost, forgotten, abandoned. 

But what we don't realize is that He's right in the next room. He hears us. He knows we need Him, even more than we know it. He knows our heart pangs, our fear, our sense of not knowing where we are or what is next. He knows we feel completely overwhelmed because we can't see what's in front of us. 

But what we also don't realize is that, sometimes, we need to cry. We need to cry because, in crying, we learn to trust. We learn to say, "Even though I can't see You, even though I can't feel you, I believe that it's going to be okay. I believe that You care for me and love me. And even if I know nothing else, I know that. And that's all I need to know." 

So we don't need to fear if God seems to be ignoring our cries. He is not. He hears. He is just giving us an opportunity to trust. And for that, I am so thankful. 

Mac, 8 months old