Regulating Our Voices

Bonus Reading: "The Important Thing About Yelling" by blogger Rachel Macy Stafford

I have greatly reduced how often I outright yell at my children. I remember years ago--when I probably had only one baby--hearing a friend tell me, "I am a reformed yeller." She didn't yell anymore and I was rather shocked sometimes to watch her not yell even when her children misbehaved. I thought it was weird because that behavior was "worth" yelling over--because I mistakenly thought raising one's voice was disciplining.

Then I had more and more children and found that, if you think things are worth yelling over, you are always yelling (and not disciplining). There is always something to yell about, if yelling is okay. And is yelling okay? For me, having put a lot of thought into it and spoken to priests, I think the answer is almost always 'no.' Obviously, we yell "fire!" and we yell when a child is running into the street, and sometimes I find I still have to yell because all my children are talking loudly at once and they simply aren't hearing me (but I'm trying to find a solution to that problem).

But yelling because I lack the self-discipline to control my emotions and behavior? Do I yell at a teacher? No. A police officer? No. A stranger being super annoying at the grocery store or a driver who cuts me off? No. My priest? No way. My husband? No, not ever. I realize that children hold a different place in the hierarchy of people, but yelling represents my failure to exercise self discipline, not their failure at being normal children.

I noticed that I was way more lax in my discipline when I yelled more, and now I am increasing the discipline and formation of my children while I am yelling so much less often. That might seem odd, but it's not: when I lacked the strength to discipline my rowdy children, I also lacked the strength to discipline myself. Now I am increasing my moral strength, I hope day by day, and disciplining both them and myself more.

One trick I have used is asking myself if the children's behavior in those very trying moments is worthy my sinning--and I have come to think that yelling and screaming at children is sinful, something to be taken to Confession. There are times when I feel like I will "lose it," but I hang on to a shred of self control because I keep saying in my mind, "This isn't worthy my sin! They can't make me sin! I am a grown adult and I am stronger than them!"

I make particular note in Stafford's article above that she noticed that it was her many distractions from mothering that were the problem, not the mothering. She cleared the decks so that there was enough time, enough "padding" of moments, in her days to properly parent, meeting the basic needs of her children, family, and home, without being continually irritable, short on time, ready to snap. I made the exact same discovery and have been working on the same solution for a long time now. I have found this change in priorities to be very fruitful and I hope it is for any other mothers who struggle in this area.

Having lowered the volume of my voice, what I have been trying to figure out for months and months is when an appropriately stern and authoritative tone of voice (used toward children) is instead an inappropriately ugly, rude tone of voice--and what is the difference in quality? This remains a question for me!

Carolinas Aviation Museum

On Tuesday I took the children to the newly renovated Carolinas Aviation Museum. 

To my local friends, I'll note that it is arranged beautifully now but I think it is of most interest to older children than ours. John at six was quite interested, but would have had an even better time going alone with a father or grandfather instead of with me when I had to spend most of my time shepherding younger children who couldn't observe much more than that such-and-so plane was really big. At least the ticket cost was for children ages five and above, so I bought only two tickets.

Snack time on the active flight strip

The "Miracle on the Hudson" airplane! 
John can now tell you many details, down to the minutes, height in feet, and airport names about this event.

Mary as warrior girl

Sitting in a real airplane as we were given a tour

A humorous moment with the apparently Catholic tour guide:

Guide: "And what is your name?"

"Mary."

Guide: "Mary was my mother's name! And what is your brother's name?"

"John."

Guide: "John was my father's name!"

"And her name is Margaret."

Guide: "Margaret was my aunt's name!"

"And his name is Joseph."

Guide: "Joseph was my uncle's name!"

I was in stitches by then and I remarked that they were all good and common Catholic names.

The lounge area in this airplane from the 1950s

Miscellaneous Monday

I am loving the new aspects of having three children older than the baby: I made breakfast at leisure while the children cared for the baby in the adjoining den: Mary said she made Joseph as "palace" and was reading to him.

Older sister gives a "flower hat" to the baby boy

At four months old, Joseph graduated to the bouncy seat!

Before formally homeschooling, I used to read and read and read to John and Mary. However, I have noticed since John began Kindergarten that my reading of literature dropped off because I was using all my focus-on-the-children time to do Official Schooling. In order to remedy this problem, I began picking a selection of books on Sunday when I do my school planning, placing them in a basket, and reading one or two of them to the children each day. This has been working well.

Mary often copies words within her field of vision, so she will hand me pictures like this one, which is of a castle labelled:
"GRACO Pack Play."

As I was teaching school on Monday, I glanced over at Margaret, who had obtained paper and the bag of crayons all by herself. She had settled herself in a desk and was diligently working on something--I thought drawing a picture--for at least 15 minutes. The concentration on her face! I thought to myself, 'Ah, little Margaret is increasing her attention span! She's turning a corner! Think of what preschool activities she'll be able to do next school year!' Of course, I saw the reality when I approached the desk and saw she hadn't been drawing but assiduously shredding all the paper off the crayons. At least she was working on fine motor skills, right?

Speaking of Margaret (26 months), she has recently written a little ditty that she sings throughout the house, which I think epitomizes her age:

"I want my own,
I want my own,
not Mary's . . ."


Bonus Reading: "Four Things We Should Never Say"

Memorial Day 2013

I am all about simplicity these days, so I was very pleased with how we celebrated Memorial Day this year. After finishing school time, the children and I spent 20 minutes packing up a brown bag lunch of PBJs. I obtained the address of what was probably the nearest cemetery to our home, grabbed our book of prayers for the dead, and our whole family jumped in the car.

All the grave sites of servicemen and women were festooned with fluttering flags. We spent a good amount of time simply walking around, the children exclaiming about details on the stones, our reading to them the names and in which wars they fought.

A large war memorial at the cemetery

We were tickled to arrive and discover that the cemetery was hosting a Memorial Day event. Patriotic music was playing and under a canopy were tables set with all manner of American picnic fare with which we supplemented our brown bag lunches: lemonade, watermelon, chicken nuggets, biscuits, chips, and cookies.

I brought a picnic blanket but was pleased to find a picnic bench under the shade of a tree.

Our idyllic outing ended with some drama when Margaret walked straight into a red ant pile and got about ten bites before Daddy was able to brush all the ants off of her (and it was so fortunate that he was right there with her, or she'd have received many more bites before we could run over to where she was).

While I cooked dinner, I had the children color free printables of the American flag
--simplicity is the name of the game in arts and crafts for me these days!

Dessert was my own "easy sneezy" invention when I noticed that Klondike bars were on sale this week for less than $2 per 6: Klondike bar covered in whipped cream with strawberries and blueberries to make little American flags!

Munchkins Cleaning the Van

As much as the mock video "Mom My Ride" always puts me into stitches, I really don't like my van to be a disaster. Chris can vouch that, unless it's the middle of the night (but maybe even then!), the first thing I like to do upon arriving home from a road trip is completely unload the van and then clean it as soon as possible thereafter.

Many hands make light work! Chris carries big luggage for me, but tiny little children scurry in to all the cracks and crevices of the van in search of all travel bottles, trash, toys, and the myriad things that get left in a mom's van. The children "get" to take turns using the DustBuster to vacuum all the floors, then I pass out baby wipes to wash down all the slick surfaces of dust and spills.

Ahhhhh, I feel so much better!

I'll take a moment to confess that I seriously "mommed" our new ride recently. Within weeks of Chris buying me a new-to-us minivan, I was backing out of our driveway and hit his car with my car, which means double payments and all responsibility on us. No other driver to blame. I have such a calm husband, he didn't express any distress or upset at me--neither at the day of the accident or when we got the repair estimate back from the mechanic.

Since I "mommed" my ride so quickly and so badly, the least I can do is keep the interior clean, right?

Friday in Atlanta

On Friday, we headed home after what I happily report was five days of happy self-occupation without watching television! This inspires me (yet again!) to try to cut down on the children's television consumption, which has risen to about an hour daily.

We stopped by a Chik-Fil-A Dwarf House for lunch with the children's godparents.

Godmother!

Godfather!

We had a heart-stinging moment on the ride home. At Chik-Fil-A, the children had been given silly little comic books of the Chik-Fil-A cow as super hero. I thought they were exceedingly dippy but the children were immediately entranced and John declared, "These are my favorite books." (Yeah, it bothers me, literary snob that I am how children are inevitably attracted to what Charlotte Mason calls 'twaddle.')

When we later stopped for dinner on the road, the children took their comic books in to the restaurant to read them while we waited. They forgot them at the table when we left. Even though I walked back in from the parking lot, those two minutes' absence meant the table had been cleared, items thrown in the trash.

The children were crushed. Joseph was screaming because he's a baby. Margaret was throwing a huge tantrum because Daddy buckled her in when she wanted to work on it for the 20 minutes it might have taken her. Mary was screaming and wailing about her lost book, thrashing around so we couldn't buckle her in. And John was trying so very hard to be brave about his lost book, Daddy having given him an encouraging talk about how despair is a trick of the devil and we should try very hard not to succumb to it. So John donned his sun glasses and I saw tears trickling down his cheeks as he sat very still.

My mama heart was broken for them. I wanted so much to fix it for them. I wanted to do the very easy solution: race to the nearest Chik-Fil-A and buy new books for them just to stop their pain (and make us parents heroes). And, in fact, they asked me if we would. And then I had to decide whether or not to be honest. So, with a kind voice--no harshness--I told them that this was one of those hard lessons about learning how to keep close track of things we treasure. It's oh-so painful to learn this lesson, but it's the only way that a person learns how to take care of things he values. Better to learn this lesson on an inexpensive comic book that we got to enjoy for a few hours. I said it's not that I would never take them to Chik-Fil-A again but that, no, Mama and Daddy did not intend to take them back to the restaurant any time soon to buy kid meals so that they could have replacement comic books.

Mary's tantrum was easier for me to ignore but John's valiant efforts while he continued to cry quietly was harder.

Parenting is really, really hard.

I am grateful that my mom transmitted a lot of these lessons to me (and grateful to Chris' parents for doing the same). I thought about my mom's dinner table rants about starving children in Ethiopia just last night when one child was complaining to me about how the pillow at Grandmom's house was "too fluffy"--and could we check all the other pillows in the house to obtain a better one? I told the child (again, with kind tone) that I hoped a way could be found to be comfortable with the pillow because most of the world's population sleeps on the equivalent of thin grass mats on the hard ground with no pillow whatsoever and that if complaints continued about the pillow, I'd take it away so the child could get a fraction of the experience that most of the world's children have each night.

The complaints ceased.

Parenting even in the seemingly small matters is hard. But good. Full of blessings.

Thursday in Atlanta

On Wednesday I overexerted myself with two outings, children in tow, and battling the fact that everything is an exceedingly far-away drive when one is in Atlanta. It's like driving in the Los Angeles of the South. So on Thursday we stayed home, hung out, and relaxed.

The girls had a joyful time baking apple crisp with Grandmom while John was napping.

We enjoyed a super picnic-style cookout on the deck: steak, potato salad, eggplant, rolls. The weather was lovely.

One of the most thoughtful gifts my husband ever gave me was a spelunker's headlamp so I could read in bed every night without turning on lights that would disturb little ones who are inevitably sleeping nearby. Tonight I found Mary borrowing my headlamp to read her own books in bed!

Wednesday in Atlanta

On Wednesday morning, we visited the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, GA.

The many geese on the property excited the children.

"Don't fall into the fountain, girls!"

We were unable to tour the monastery museum because it turns out that the cafeteria was temporarily closed: we had planned to tour the grounds, eat lunch, and tour the museum. Without food to fuel my little ones, we had to leave to find a restaurant. Another trip will have to be made in the future!

Joseph fell asleep holding his big brother's hand

In the late afternoon, we went to visit Chris' brother, sister-in-law, and our children's three cousins.

Joseph with Aunt Holly

Pop-Pops with three grandchildren

Joseph's tummy time

Boys vs. Girls: For at least an hour, the girls sat quietly on the floor pairing mommy stuffed animals with baby ones, then giving them "all the baby things they need" (read: dollhouse furniture). Meanwhile, for about two hours straight, John rode a red riding toy in wild circles throughout the house: you can see him careening around the corner in the background of the above photo.

I think the humor of babies in adult glasses never gets old.

So happy, even with her many wounds!

Mary trying to juggle with one ball: note the bandages on her forearms.

John really enjoyed walking the dog around the yard.

Juggling gone awry

As I watched Chris give Mary a ride on the riding lawn mower for entertainment,
I realized that we really have become Southerners.

Grandmom with Joseph

Cousin Annie with Joseph:
Hard to believe she was an itty bitty flower girl in my wedding and now she is an elegant young lady.

Tuesday in Atlanta

Before our arrival, Grandmom and Pop-Pops (temporarily) converted their garage to a play and school room! They even laid down new carpet. So generous a gift to us!

The play and school room

I planned and packed up our school for the week and placed it in a bin with all the items to be loaded in the van. But the movers arrived Monday morning and efficiently moved away all the furniture for refinishing the floors. They also moved all my items to be loaded in the car. Some I noticed right away and retrieved--like the bin of road snacks--but some I didn't notice till it was too late and we were in Atlanta--like the school bin!

I thought of Bl. Mother Theresa of Calcutta teaching her first students in the ghetto using a stick in the dirt: Surely I could come up with school on the fly! I did my best, but the week got busy and school ended up mostly being reading them literature and letting them do some great Preschool and Kindergarten workbooks Grandmom had bought.

Four sweeties

Our drama of the day was the latest injury of who do you ask? Mary, good guess!

Earlier in the day, I had supervised the children riding bicycles on the parking pad and driveway. I noticed that John was skilled enough to manage his bike down the long and very steep driveway, but not Mary so I instructed her that she wasn't allowed to ride her bike down the driveway. Later in the afternoon, the children went back outside to ride bikes in the cul-de-sac with two neighborhood children. There were four adults supervising, two of whom stood guard at the top of the driveway, which descends very steeply and at length to the parking pad below. But accidents can happen even in the best of circumstances.

Little Mary was riding in circles around the cul-de-sac when she busted through the safety guards and began peddling with all her might down the driveway (as if she weren't going fast enough already from her momentum around the cul-de-sac). Chris was quite shaken up to watch his sweet girl start to wobble on her bike and he knew disaster was imminent but there was no way he could rush to save her. We thanked her guardian angel that she didn't crash into one of the cars parked at the bottom.

Mary ditched her bike (wearing her helmet) and got fairly deep scrapes on both knees and swaths of road rash on her two forearms, one ankle, one shoulder, and one palm of her hand. I got my first lesson in serious bandaging, having never before needed more than a simple Band-Aid.

Atlanta in May

Our old floors are being refinished, so we had to clear out!

The floors may not have been refinished in 30 years.

Picking the stain color

From their perch, watching the woodworkers arrive

One normally 3.5-hour drive 

+ 4 children 

= 5 stops + 6 accidents from newly potty training toddler + 6.25 hours in the car

Everyone napped but no one at the same time, so the volume was high.

Most of the ride, John was perky and awake, chatting at us continually about all the subjects he knows.

But at the end of the ride, he finally finally fell asleep!