Sunday, October 28, 2007

break time

Ryan and I are tired. Our weekends go like this. There are moments when the boys are sitting next to one another, and Ben is petting Elliott's thin head of hair and Elliott is smiling at his brother and we think we couldn't be any happier than we are. And then we are fighting with a screaming Ben for hours because he won't take the nap he needs. Elliott coughs so hard he throws up on Ryan. My dresser breaks and I start crying and Ryan trips over a giant bin of toys. Our tempers grow short with one another and we look up our bank account and we see those dreaded parentheses, the ones that indicate that we wrote a check that we forgot about and someone has decided to cash it the last week of the month, and now we have negative amount of dollars for the next three days, and oh yeah we are out of gas and formula. We feed and entertain the kids. We grade papers in the spaces in between. We wonder if our family is sick of us or if they are just too busy. We feel lucky to have finished the laundry. We regret going out the night before because we are so damn tired now. We collapse on the couch at 9pm and watch a television show and go to bed. We get up the next day and begin the week that we haven't prepared for. We lie awake in the dark and try not to become overwhelmed.

Last weekend, some old Australian friends came into town and they told us of their travel and missionary work. Sarah is amazing and lovely and Nathan, her husband, is too. He is the kind of a guy who gets genuinely happy over something as small as a slice of pizza and this happiness radiates on all who surround him and this makes you happy as well. And I thought, I need to be more like that guy. And I wish that I was.

God, do I wish that.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

en espanol

I ask Ben to count the balloons in the book, and he says, "one, two, three, four, five, six." I ask him to count them in Spanish, and he says, "uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis." They may not like him in school, but they do teach him things. Actually, things are going much better there. Ben's been sharing and painting and singing and generally happy. But when Ben's teacher tells us that she and her husband hunt bears and listen to Rascal Flatts and Garth Brooks, that is when Ryan and I realize that there will always be a certain amount of distance between her and us. There's nothing wrong with having differences, but in this case the chasm is simply too wide.