Sign up for your child

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Title: Sign up for your child Author: Andrea Cyrus, Msc.D., Rev., Mht. E-mail: mailto:andrea@truechanges.com Copyright: © 2005 by Andrea Cyrus URL: http://joyfulparenting.truechanges.com/ URL: http://www.truechanges.com

Word Count: 675 Category: Parenting

When you have your first baby, you may soon also get your first reality check. You may not really have expected to deal with so much work, crying, burping, poop, pee-pee, and stress. You notice you are constantly tired, yearning for some undisturbed rest. Wave your old days bye-bye, and Sign Up For It. What no-one ever really told you is that babies like to pee when you change them, diapers can leak and burping can become a full time job. Infants love to be up at night and sleep during day time; they can cry for apparently no reason and need you exactly at time, when it is most inconvenient for you. As these little angels grow older things do not always become easier, toddlers may still regularly wake up at night even when they are 2 years old, they will touch and chew on anything within their reach, and you have to be on consistent alert, knowing that your lovely baby follows his/her inner drive to restlessly investigate new world. There are an infinite number of expected and unexpected things your little ones will come up with, and my number 1 concept for Joyful Parenting is to Sign up for it: I ________________ , hereby declare that I am fully aware of what to expect of my □ newborn, □ toddler □ 3-5 year old, □ school kid, □ teenager, and that I will consciously sign up for whole package. I sign up for extended burping, less sleep, more noise, extensive dirt, broken stuff, dirty clothes, pee, poop, vomit, tantrums, obvious and not so obvious lies, broken items, stickers on furniture, scribble scrabble on walls, destroyed furniture, dead frogs, toys everywhere, posters, muddy shoes and broken windows. I sign up for having a 1.2 year old telling me NO and a 13 year old going through my drawers, I sign up for debates, arguments and very strange excuses. I sign up for tons of why-questions and discussions that are so confusing and disturbing, that I will consider hiring a professional. I sign up for holes in my yard and a stone collection neatly lined up next to my bed, for holes in brand new pants, in walls, in pillows, carpets and curtains. I sign up for pages ripped out of my favorite books, chewed up magazines and third set of blinds torn. I sign up for nightly-emergency-room-visits, sleep-overs, and smelly strangers being invited for dinner. I sign up for spaghetti sauce in face, hair, ears, nose, neck, chest, tummy, legs and between toes. I sign up for being rudely interrupted during conversations, sleep, telephone sessions, work, sex, leisure and meditation. I sign up for runny noses, buggers and tears, scratching, biting and pushing. I sign up for all of above and all other expected unexpected things my creative child/ren will present.

Dying: A Family Rite of Passage

Dying: A Family Rite of Passage by Maggie Vlazny, MSW When my mother lost her father it was sad, but not unexpected. He was 80 years old, had had that lingering kind of cancer that old men often get, and there was plenty of time to prepare for his death. Not that any of us ever acknowledged his demise or named dread disease he lived with for so long. Until day he died he spoke of getting well, would not reveal his feelings or let us tell him ours, and we all aided and abetted his fantasy. He hid behind wall of an impossible dream because he needed to, but that wall troubled my mother long after he was gone. It's not just that I miss him, she would say. It's not that I haven't accepted his death. But it feels like there was unfinished business. Something left undone. How well I remember false gaiety of those last visits with him, strain of false smiles and tears held in check. It seemed so unnatural not to acknowledge obvious. The natural. But what else could we do? In a society in which every other bodily function is treated as a group rite of passage, from christening to wedding to baby showers and on again, last one of all is oddly ignored, considering its inevitability. We are taught to live well and love well, to birth well and parent well. No one teaches us to die well, or help another person to do it. When death finally comes we are poorly prepared. Two years after my grandfather died, my own father was struck with a lethal, untreatable form of cancer. The doctors could offer us no type of therapy, no extra time, no hope at all. Here was inevitable. Here was shock. But here also was tragedy. My father was only 53 years old. At first I wished it could be any other way. Why not a heart attack, an accident, something sudden? What could be worse than horror of having to just sit there and watch him die? We had so many questions. Should we tell him, and if so, when? Might it not be kinder to protect him until last possible moment from anguish we already suffered? And how would we handle him? We worried less over his imminent death than over helplessness which must precede it. How would such a bull of a man, who hated hospitals and even aspirin all his life, handle such an indignity? He was not kind of person who would allow you to feel sorry for him. He was a giver all his life who didn't know how to take. Gifts embarrassed him and so did thank you's. What would become of our family without our hub, our rock, our peacemaker who held us all together? It was he we turned to with all our problems.