What Little Boys Don't Understand

It is the 4th birthday of my first born child and also the end to 2013. I feel like I have grown so much this year and watched my babies grow even more but I am leaving this year in hopes of more. One thing I need more of is patience and understanding of BOYS. Believe me, two boys entering my life in less than 13 months, I got a crash course in them but the more they grow, the more I think "why do they do what they do??!?!?!". Which made me realize today that there is so much on the opposite end of that. Here are a few things little boys don't understand about us mamas... 1. Your destructiveness will never make sense to us. While we accept that anything nice we own will probably end up in pieces, we will never understand the need to throw, stomp and destroy whatever you can get your hands on. Not out of anger but out of sheer joy in watching things "come undone". I know, I have watched your faces light up as you shatter flower pots, throw rolls of toilet paper in the toilet water and pee on my new couch. 2. No girl will ever be good enough for our babies but we really fear those girls that have mothers making them so high maintenance by 3 years old that their wardrobe costs more than our family vehicle and a constant pout is plastered to their spoiled faces. Our prayers for you have many versions of "please Lord bring them humble, down to earth wives" in them. When you do finally decide to date at 30 years old, I have fantasies of earthy, talkative girls who come from families of 10 or more children that know what it was like to share rooms with multiple siblings and cooked and cleaned for their parents throughout their lives. Lord please! 3. Looking at you makes us fall more in love with daddy. My boys look just like me. When I look at their faces I see me through and through. But their mannerisms, their expressions, the way they breathe is so much my husband. And is it possible to watch these perfect beings doing what they do as children and not love their dad more because he made them half of who they are? 4. Your small acts of kindness fill us with such hope and pride. Opening a door, picking a flower for us, kissing our cheeks... Nothing swells our hearts or gives us hope that chivalry will continue in the future quite like these things. 5. Your bodily functions are just as bad as anyone else's. I remember the days when it didn't bother me because they were my sweet babies and it was just poop. But suddenly something changed and now I have as much fear sometimes of wiping your butt as I do of letting you do it on your own and the mess that entails. In other words, this is only going to get worse so please don't try to increase the gross-out factor on your mom the older you get. 6. Being a mom to multiple sons is a whole different world and we secretly hope you get this payback plus some someday. As my boys whipped circles around me at the grocery store today, one fell hard and hit his face on the dirty floor and the other was busy bunching up a loaf of bread on the shelf. I in no way downplay what being a mother to daughters is like... that is something I do not and may not ever know with the tears and drama that come along with it. But being a mother to more than one son is absolute insanity sometimes. I regret ever looking at moms in this position before I had my own and thinking "why are you letting them do that?!?!?!" because boy oh boy am I getting my payback. 7. No matter what you do or how hard the day is, you have taught me a love that exceeds any other type of love I know. I could stare at you forever. Every time I hear one of my friends is pregnant, I secretly hope it's a boy because there is nothing quite like the bond of a mother and her sons. Being a mother to you boys is such a blessing and what I have realized is that you get out what you put into it just like anything else in life. This is the most important job I have been given and I treat it as that and cringe when I see others treating it like a burden or a joke. I know my boys have no clue what it takes to be a parent but what I do hope is that someday they do and not for selfish reasons but so their children can be raised right.

Home is wherever we are together

It seems the perfect answer to us for wanting more is simply... less. I'm surrounded by a world of more: more square footage, more cosmetic beauty, more money, more travel, the list goes on and on. We pretend that we're not idolizing it, putting it above God, but at the end of the day sometimes I know my pinterest app was open a lot more than my Bible as I search for more things to want and desire.  When I put down the phone and snap into reality this is truth: we are rich.  We have more love, more fun and are making more memories daily than some do in a lifetime.  I am not that girl.. the shopper, the one who lets my belongings define me and spends more time in a mall than in the woods BUT I have found myself being influenced into it.

 

Another truth: Debt, in the form of student loans, is holding us back.  We have acquired a hefty old lump of them and they've caused more arguments, bitterness and low-down feelings in this marriage than I ever want to admit.  We tried to pretend they weren't going to pop up on us soon as we strived for the "American dream" and here we are a house, 2 kids and 2 cars in the drive later and those loans continue to haunt. 

 

Our dreams are simple when we don't let the world view of what's normal impact them.  A farm, a very self-sufficient life aka living off our land, homeschooling our children and basically living on love with the wonderful people we are surrounded with.  We recently found ourselves looking to buy this piece of land and new home and through our prayer and search we kept ending up in similar places.  Apartment parking lots and the like.  Once we opened our ears and realized what God was leading us towards it brought us to our current state and we had big decisions to make.

 

Living in this debt is not only uncomfortable, I believe it is sinful.  Don't get me wrong, WE ARE NOT SPENDERS! This is simply student loans we have acquired as we continue to live an anti-credit card life and we live far within our budget.  After much praying we have decided to not only sell our home like we had planned, but instead of that farm we want now, we are choosing to put it off for three years as we live renting someplace very small, simple and cheap.  We have a goal of 3 years maximum as we will take every extra bit of money we save through this process and watch our debt eliminate into nothing. Oh, the feeling that the final zero dollar fee will bring us is unimagineable.

 

Now, I know this post sounds completely positive but don't get me wrong... I love my house, I love my yard, I love my stuff.  I want nothing less than to see it all go into boxes or be sold as I move into a place where a hide-a-bed sofa may be my sleeping arrangements.  But isn't that the problem with us people?!?! We want want want more and we love our stuff so much that it places a higher priority on us than Jesus, than living life, than so much more???

 

So, here we go, sign is in the front yard and if what we are doing is honoring God's plan for us, hopefully we'll see our home turn into someone else's quickly.  We plan to keep everyone up to date on this because we want this to be inspiring to people who feel theyre swimming in a sea of money issues that they can't escape.  We ask for prayers and support for us and hope that we can exemplify what Jesus wants us to and that's loving people and using our lives in a way that is not evolving around belongings but instead around the beauty of people and this Earth God has given us.