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.