The Man of Steel is back on his feet, and I’ve begun therapy for my hand. Here are a few final reflections on the double whammy of gimpocity we recently experienced.
10. Having no one in the house who can drive is a problem.
9. Having one driver, who is also a nursing mom, in the house with 1 baby and 2 gimpy adults is not a problem. However, it is a challenge that requires creativity and determination.
8. A back that moves without pain should never be taken for granted.
7. Ditto for having 2 opposable thumbs.
6. Hand therapists spend their evenings thinking ways to inflict pain on people careless enough to sever the tendon to a thumb with a kitchen knife.
5. The painful exercises hand therapists inflict upon people careless enough to sever the tendon to a thumb with a kitchen knife also engender healing at lightning speed.
4. Thumb therapy exercises every 2 hours pretty much consume a person’s day.
3. Pie makes gimpocity tolerable.
2. So does good coffee.
1. Babies make everything more tolerable.
What makes hard times tolerable for you? Leave a comment.
Home. I’m finally home after several weeks of travel. All to see family. All of it good. But I’m glad to be home and in one place again, with time to think and reflect and process the experiences.
And to do laundry.
Because our very precocious and gifted almost 4-month-old grandson proved to be very adept at peeing on my lap. By the end of 6 days of snuggles, the little rascal had soaked through his diapers and every pair of pants in my suitcase.
And that’s saying something.
Because I’m one of those people who throws in an extra of everything. Just in case. And then an extra extra of everything. Just in case the just in case extra of everything might not be enough.
And it wasn’t enough.
Which means I now need to pack an extra extra extra of everything. Just in case. Or–paradigm shift–I could do laundry at the grandson’s house. Why didn’t I think of that before?
I know why.
Because I’m too busy thinking about that sweet little boy who found his fists this week, learned to put them in his mouth, who grasped his rattle for the first time, who cooed and smiled at his grammy, and stole her heart.
And her mind.
So she paid scant attention to the time or the gleam in his little eye that means, “I’m going to pee now.” Which is why every pair of my pants came home pee-soaked and pee-stained.
And I came home happy, exhausted, and utterly content.
Grandparenthood makes a person go a little baby crazy. A mind consumed with baby thoughts. Sentences reduced to baby talk. Conversation reduced to discussions about what baby gifts to purchase for Christmas. And today, a top ten list of the greatest baby inventions of all time.
10. The microwave. The man of steel’s mom gave us an Amana Radar Range (that’s what microwaves were called in the olden days when our firstborn came along) for a baby present. It was a godsend for thawing frozen breast milk and/or heating bottles.
9. The baby gates. Our second born would have been in the emergency room constantly without a baby gate to keep the stairs off limits to her.
8. Cardboard boxes, wooden spoons, and pan lids. The best baby toys ever.
7. The snaps. Can you imagine how long it took to fasten teeny-tiny baby buttons before snaps came along?
6. The wheel. We should all be eternally grateful to the prehistoric inventor who got the wheel rolling. How would parents calm fussy babies if they couldn’t take them for rides in strollers or cars?
5. The baby swing. How did parents get through the first three months of a baby’s life without one?
4. The car seat. How many lives have they saved?
3. The modern breast pump. The pump pictured above–yes the one that resembles an instrument of torture–belonged to my grandmother. (Are you writhing in pain yet?) One look at that thing and every woman who uses a modern breast pump will write a letter of thanks to its manufacturer.
2. Diaper pins. My head hurts when I try to picture how moms kept diapers on their babies before these over-sized safety pins came along.
1. Rubber pants. When my sister and I used disposable diapers on our boys, Mom scoffed and called us namby-pambies. Until my sister replied, “So did your mom call you a namby-pamby because you used rubber pants because they weren’t around when you were a baby?” My admiration for Grandma increased tenfold that day, and my gratitude for the invention of rubber pants is undying.
How about you? What’s your favorite invention for babies and their parents? Leave a comment.
O God, Thou art my God; I shall seek Thee earnestly;
My soul thirsts for Thee, my flesh yearns for Thee,
In a dry and weary land where there is no water.
Psalm 63:1
The drought of 2012 is a doozy, no doubt about it. The hot, dry weather has our family reminiscing about other droughts we’ve endured. Mom remembers how hot their old farmhouse near Pipestone, Minnesota was during the summer of 1936. “The upstairs was so hot,” she says, “we dragged our blankets and pillows outside to sleep in the yard.” Then she adds, “The next drought came in 1956. The summer I was pregnant with you.” She nods in my direction. “I was miserable until you put in an appearance in July.”
I pretty much know how miserable Mom was because our daughter Anne was also born in late July during the drought of 1988. Anne, of course, doesn’t remember that toasty, dry summer but our son Allen, who was six that year, does. “The grass was brown and crispy,” he says, “and the yellow jackets built hives in the cracks in the ground.”
And now Allen’s wife knows how miserable Mom and I were during the droughts of ’56 and ’88. Only more so because she’s pregnant during the worst drought since ’36 and isn’t due until September. Please, keep her in your prayers!
Our family tradition of anticipating new life during drought years has warped my perception of them. When reading biblical accounts of droughts, or when listening to current weather reports I see circumstances, both past and present, as pregnant with opportunity. God used ancient droughts to bring his wandering people back to him. Men and women who trusted him in times of need became part of the Christ’s lineage. Over and over, God blessed bone-dry believers with the promise of a future Messiah, and the faithful clung to that hope.
This rain-starved summer, as every other drought year in my lifetime and yours, is an opportunity for us to cling to faith as our spiritual forefathers did. We can pray for people to turn to God as their illusion of human control evaporates in a cloudless sky. We can trust God to prove himself faithful in the midst of spiritual and physical want. We can share Christ’s living water with lost and parched wanderers and expect God to bring forth new life in many.
When we trust God in lean times, we are like the psalmist David, who sought God earnestly in the desert. Like David, we look beyond the burned fields and wilting trees and see God in his sanctuary, watering our souls with his completed promises and grace. We learn to be satisfied in him as we’ve never been satisfied before. When we gaze upon the God who waters our lives through the saving grace of a baby in a manger, our Father assures us that his fountain of life never runs dry.
