Tag Archive | God

Adventures in Mother’s Day

Ah, Mother’s Day – the day when mothers around the world (or at least North America) are celebrated with heel of bread sandwiches, fact sheets about themselves, and the opportunity to sleep in as long as they like. (“IS SHE AWAKE YET?” “SHHHHH!!” “I’M JUST GOING TO CHECK IF SHE’S AWAKE YET!” “OKAY BUT BE QUIET!” “MOMMY? MOMMY? ARE YOU AWAKE YET? NO? OKAY!!” *CRASH* “OH NO! QUICK! GET A TOWEL! NO, A TOWEL! A TOWEL! YES, A TOWEL! I DON’T CARE WHICH ONE! JUST BRING ME A…” “SHHHH! YOU’LL WAKE HER UP!”).

Adventures in Mother’s Day www.picklesink.com

~~All~~ Most joking aside, my Mother’s Day was lovely. Molly’s school’s Mother’s Day Tea was as lovely and entertaining as always.

Molly delivering my tea cup

Ben’s fact sheet was reasonably accurate (“Uh, mommy? Do you read before you go to sleep to relax? Okay, good, because that’s what I wrote.”)

Ben’s “My mommy is special” fact sheet (in French)

We gave out flowers to all of the ladies at church to celebrate all forms of motherhood – and I had to break the news to the choir that we couldn’t have any because we were RUNNING OUT (which, in a small town United Church is a pretty big deal).

My cherub choir did their best rendition ever of “God Bless Families,” enthusiastically supported by Molly on percussion and interpretive dance.

My gourmet chef hubby created a delicious cinnamon-maple-walnut pancake breakfast which was served to me in bed on only the second try (the first having been drenched with water from a top-heavy vase of flowers).

Molly survived the dishwasher’s attempt to eat her with only a bump on the head, and we learned a valuable lesson about leaving kitchen renovations half-finished. FYI – A heavy slow-cooker as a counterweight (pun not intended, but actually quite clever – go subconscious!!) is not an adequate replacement for an actual built-in dishwasher cabinet. We should probably get on that.

The evil child-eating dishwasher of doom.

And I got a pretty necklace!

~ karyn

How do you celebrate Mother’s Day? How successful was your day this year?

More of a grown-up than a kid?

May1

This has come around WAY too soon for me. It’s May first AGAIN. Another year has passed, and it’s time for me to remember that day that I lay prostrate in a hospital bed, doped up on Morphine, and listened to a high-risk OB/GYN explain with remarkable calmness that 33 weeks or not, this baby was coming today.

Why’s mommy freaking out anyway? It’s only a birthday!

Ben-Magoo, I simply refuse to believe that you are now SEVEN. YEARS. OLD. It simply isn’t possible. I forbid it. You must stay my baby forever. I know, I know…you SAY that you’ll always be my teeny baby, and you’ll ALWAYS want mommy cuddles, and you’ll ALWAYS be my same silly Ben-Magoo, but SEVEN? You’re practically a teenager. I mean, just look at your hair! Teenager hair, that is.

See? Totally teenager hair.

And listen to you talk – teenager talk, that…no, scratch that. You talk like a grown-up with a post-graduate degree. Ben-Magoo, you asked me some questions this morning, and I think I did a pretty good job of answering them, so I’m going to write down what I can remember here to make sure you can re-read it any time you want to.

We started out talking about your birthday presents – You got a few presents this morning that I picked up yesterday at the Royal Botanical Gardens – some pretty cool bug books, one from the grown-up section, because most of the kids books were just way too, as Molly put it, “kiddy” for you. You were a little disappointed that you didn’t get any ocean books, but I explained that right now you seem really focused on your Bug Clinic.

Just in case you’re reading this years from now and can’t remember, let me remind you about your Bug Clinic. Last year at daycamp, you and your friends noticed that there were a lot of caterpillars around and you wanted to do something for them, so you created a bug hospital at the base of a tree. You carefully brought any injured caterpillars you found there, and you collected a stockpile of carefully peeled maple seeds for caterpillar food.

I figured the end of the summer would mean the end of the Bug Clinic, but it turned out that friend from daycamp was in your class at your new school and you revived the Bug Clinic at school in the fall. You now have an army of “doctors” on your roster and you run a pretty tight ship, assigning them jobs, scheduling shifts, and of course protecting the clinic from the other team, the Bug Clinic Destroyers. You have quite a lot on your to-do list – literally – but you’re fully committed to it. In fact, when I said that you sure had a lot to do, you explained patiently, “I know, mommy. But that’s what you have to when you’re the boss.”

To-do list reads: Make the day off cards; draw picture of bc tree fort; Make pillow + blanket; Make bug clinic dead or live list; Make spar bussnis cards for bug clinic”

What’s even cooler, Magoo, and I don’t think you realize that you do this, is how huge your heart is. You don’t just accept everyone who comes along – you find ways to bring people together.

When some of your friends were more interested in playing Minecraft than Bug Clinic, you invited them to make a Minecraft tower on the top floor. When we had that incident a couple of weeks ago where another student made a poor choice and deliberately threw away the special piece of coral you brought to school, and later offered to work at your Bug Clinic to make up for it, you not only accepted her offer, you named her the “First Prize Winner” at your latest Bug Clinic Award Ceremony.

I mean, there’s forgiveness, and then there’s what you did. You have so much goodness in you that you respond to a deliberate injury by simply loving MORE. I think there’s a lesson in there for all of us.

You’ve been telling me that the Bug Clinic is a secret, but this morning you changed your mind and said it was okay for me to talk about it, and I’m really glad because I want to share it with the world. If more six…no, SEVEN year-olds were as dedicated as you are to caring for the very tiniest of creatures on this earth, how amazing would your generation become?

Tinfoil Bug Beds

Getting back to the bit about the birthday presents – you loved your bug books, but you did mention in the car, “I wish I had a whole LIBRARY of ocean books!” And then you paused thoughtfully for a minute, and then you asked me, “Mommy? Why am I so different from other kids? Why am I into things like biology and stuff, and not just superheros and toys?”

Magoo, every once in a while you and me have these really profound talks, and this was one of them.

I said that there are a lot of reasons. There’s the ordinary reasons: We tried to expose you to lots of different playthings and experiences, not just superhero toys and sports. Honestly, you never had much interest in any of the sports we tried (“Except skiing! I really like skiing!” you point out), so we weren’t going to force it, as long as you’re active and healthy. And whatever toys you played with, you created your own worlds with them instead of being stuck “in the box” playing with them exactly the way they were intended. Just think about Brio Peak – Your track-building adventures rose (again, literally) to new heights, and led to your first published book!

Ben reading his book, “Your Favourite Brio Peak Story Collection” to his friends

Likewise, you don’t watch the typical TV shows for your age and gender, and I’m actually pretty happy about that. We’ve talked about this before, but with your innate kindness, and your tendency to be a bit anxious, you don’t like shows or movies with shooting and meanness, even if they do have happy endings. You just don’t enjoy watching them, and that’s okay. You get a little frustrated with your friends sometimes when they tell you the shows you like to watch are babyish, but you never fail to remind them “That’s a STEREOTYPE.” I do get a little sad because I know you censor yourself and don’t talk about those shows at school so you don’t get teased, but that of course is not a problem with you but with the world, and it’s not your job to fix it!

And I think daddy and I are doing an okay job at this parenting gig, because we try pretty hard to encourage you and Molly when you find something that you are interested in, like when you started to be interested in ocean creatures…

You interrupted me here to say, “It was when we were watching the life cycle DVD about the dolphin and the shark and you got the Eugenie Clark book and read it to me! THAT’S when I started loving ocean creatures!” and I’m pretty sure you just wrote the first sentence in your autobiography.

Well, that got me thinking and talking about the not-so-ordinary reasons. Eugenie Clark started being interested in natural science and ichthyology when she was very young, just like you, and I think you’ll find that the same is true of many scientists and leaders in their fields. People who have a passion for something often came to that passion very early in life, and many of them were lucky enough to be encouraged in that passion from early on. So you might be different from the other kids because God has a plan for you to do something really special – like to become a marine biologist or entomologist – or even something else.

One of the things that is really, really cool about you, Magoo, is that you don’t just get excited about things yourself – you have an incredible gift for getting other people excited too. Just look at your Bug Clinic – even though most of your friends are more interested in the usual stuff, you have somehow managed to get them totally excited about the Bug Clinic. When you started drawing ocean creatures, all of your friends did the same thing and for weeks you came home with your backpack stuffed with drawings of sea life – “To Ben, From _____.” Maybe you’re going to wind up using that gift to make a difference by getting people excited about learning or about conservation.

That, of course, led to a conversation about conservation (say that 5 times fast!) and a decision to write a letter to your principal outlining ideas for improving your school’s Enviro Club (“All we ever do is collect the recycling bags from the classrooms and dump them in the bins!”). Oh, and you remembered that you’d better get started with your letter-writing campaign to Marineland. And I promised to tell you about Craig Kielberger later. I guess Free The Children will be next on our reading list.

As we walked from the parking lot into your school, Magoo, you pointed at yourself, grinned at me, and said, “This kid is more like a grown-up than a kid,” and then ran inside to show off your birthday cupcakes.

I’ll have to meet you halfway on that, my baby Ben Magoo.

~ karyn

Love Hurts

Feb12

I broke my toe making Valentines cards.

No, wait…I can’t really start there. You need more context than that. I broke my toe because of my ovarian cyst, which is not complex, just misunderstood, like me in high school.

Actually, I’d better go back a bit further. Really, it all started because Ian bought those damn Valentines treat bags at the Liquidation World closing sale, so when it comes down to it, I blame the economy. I broke my toe because of the economy. Damn you, Stephen Harper!

Love Hurts
or; that time I broke my toe making Valentine cards

I’m feeling a little bit pulled in all directions lately, mostly because of things that I have taken on myself and therefore for which I have only myself to blame…the new job*…the old job**…the old chair position***…the new chair position****… For the most part I’ve been managing to keep my head above water, and this Sunday I finally got through the stressfullest bit, which was chairing the church’s Annual Meeting. By the grace of…well…chocolate (true story!) I made it through and it was pretty successful, if I do say so myself.

Between my own work and extracurriculars, and Ian’s work craziness (transitioning to new ownership by a much bigger company with very different corporate style, meaning even longer hours and more travel than before)…and the fact that my beloved first car Spunky (RIP) bit the big one last week, necessitating a day of car shopping…&tc…&tc…suffice it to say, my house is a disaster, we are subsisting on the leftover party-sized pizza we brought home from church on Sunday, and Ian is away yet again.

On top of that, Ben’s moods and behaviour have been a complete nightmare lately, Molly’s behaviour hasn’t been much better, and I’ve also been having this fun crippling abdominal pain which turned out to be my not-so-complex bloody ovarian cyst (literally bloody; ‘haemorrhagic,’ technically).

So this morning, when I really should have been working my little medical transcriptionist heart out, I confessed to my wonderful support group of invisible interweb blogging friends that when I learned I had this (originally wrongly described) complex cyst, a small part of me couldn’t help but wish that it was just a little more on the complex side. Nothing terminal of course; just maybe serious enough to put me out of commission just long enough for it to be socially acceptable to expect people to come in, clean my house, look after my kids, and cook me a couple of nice dinners.

Well, there went the morning – we laughed, cried, commiserated, laid the groundwork for a proposed tropical paradise sister-blogger-wives commune, and I’m pretty sure conspired to transport questionable substances across state lines. It was just what I needed. My friend Lizzie over at Considerings calls these sorts of people her ‘lifeboats’ and that’s exactly what I needed and exactly what I got (Mel, Jenn, and David, that includes you too).

Thus refreshed, I looked at the clock and realized that it was well beyond when I needed it to be and I still had to get to Ben’s school to pick him up for his doctor’s appointment to talk about stopping the medication that was hopefully the source of the drastic mood swings and anxiety that had made him particularly difficult to parent lately.

And it was at that very moment that I thought to myself, “This is the perfect time to make Valentines!”

A few weeks ago, Ian took Molly to Liquidation World to check out the store-closing sale and impulse-bought thoughtfully purchased several items, including very reasonably priced cellophane Valentine treat bags. Now under normal circumstances, this would have been perfectly fine – welcome, even – but given my fragile mental state in the context of the tornado of crazy that is my life right now, these GOD-DAMN TREAT BAGS have become the apex of my stress mountain – the one thing in my life that should be so absolutely simple (Use them. Don’t use them. Toss in a lollipop and call it a day. Pretend I can’t remember where I put them. So many nice, easy possibilities!) but instead has become the thing on which I have fixated ALL of my stress because I simply cannot allow said stress to affect the delicate balance of all the other balls I am just barely managing to keep in the air.

Saturday night, at Walmart: I need chocolate for the Annual Meeting (put chocolate hearts in cart). I should pick up Valentines for the kids (start looking at Valentines). Princess Valentines that come with bracelets – check! (put in cart) Angry Birds? No, Ben did Angry Birds last year. Bugs with sticky bug cling things – that works (put them in basket). Wait, then I have to get stuff to put in the treat bags. Okay…heart stampers (into basket). Pencils (into basket). I should get candies. More chocolate heart candies? But I don’t know if they’re peanut-free (look through all Valentine candies for peanut-free symbols, then reject them all on the basis of price anyway). But if I’m getting stuff to put in the treat bags, I shouldn’t just get the Valentines that come with useless crap that’s going to get thrown out anyway. I could get the cheaper Valentines that don’t come with things (put away other Valentines). Okay, so Princesses without bracelets for Molly. Jake and the Neverland Pirates for Ben? (put in basket). I don’t know though…he likes Jake, but I don’t know if he likes it enough for Valentines (put them back). Maybe I should let them choose their own cards (put the Princess ones back too). I really wanted to do that Pinterest thing with the fish candies. I wonder if they have them in the regular candy section (go all the way back through Walmart. Don’t find fish candies). I could check the dollar store. Actually, I could get stuff for the treat bags there too (put it all back and just buy the chocolates).

Monday afternoon: Take kids to the dollar store and pick out candies to put in treat bags. Foolishly mention to Ben that I had wanted to find banana or fish candies to do a Despicable Me or undersea-themed Valentine. Ben decides to hand draw all of his Valentines with minions and sea creatures. Molly wants hers to have princesses and rocks.

Monday evening: Second guess doing treat bags at all. Do I really want to be THAT mom?

Tuesday morning: Decide to go to the bulk food store after Ben’s appointment to look for banana or fish candies. Resolve (again) to be THAT mom.

Tuesday lunchtime: Decide that NOW is the appropriate moment to make a test-run of Despicable Me Valentine cards, on the off chance that we do find banana candies at the bulk store (but they won’t be individually wrapped. I would let my kids eat them, but I don’t know about all the other parents. Is this just a waste of time and effort? Are half of them just going to wind up in the garbage? Do I really want to be THAT mom?)

And that is how, as I ran back to the craft corner to get the black marker I had forgotten when I brought the rest of the craft supplies to my desk to make a test batch of Valentines before I raced to pick Ben up in time for his doctor’s appointment, I came to catch my foot on the leg of the couch and collapse in a writhing, gasping, broken-toe-gripping heap on the floor.

The Valentines turned out well though!

Minion Valentines

*In December I started working as a copywriter for a communications company. It sort of fell into my lap in the form of an offer I couldn’t refuse; Just as I had started to wrap my head around the fact that I was enjoying this whole writing gig and could maybe potentially see myself entertaining the possibility of vaguely dreaming about doing it professionally, the husband of an old friend called and said, “Hey, any chance you want a job as a copywriter?”

**I work from home doing medical transcription, which basically means I can type really fast and my spell-checker knows a lot of words you’ve never heard of.

***A year ago I unwittingly became chair of the Worship Committee at my church. Easy-peasy.

****And then I became chair of the whole shebang. Less easy-peasy.

The Rainbow Connection

Apr3

I picked up a really lovely book a while back at the Grand River Book Store at the Five Oaks Retreat Centre outside of Paris, Ontario: God’s Dream, by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Douglas Carlton Abrams.

God’s Dream
Cover art by LeUyen Pham

It’s fitting that I picked it up at the beginning of February, Black History Month, as telling Ben and Molly about Archbishop Tutu sparked a conversation about apartheid and racism. Ben was shocked at the idea that anyone would think that people should be treated differently because of what they look like, citing examples of his friends at school who had different-coloured skin but were just the same as him. We also talked about Archbishop Tutu’s own experience of growing up in South Africa during apartheid and witnessing and experiencing the mistreatment of black people by white people, but always advocating for both change and forgiveness.

God’s Dream comes in both a large hardcover edition with a dustjacket or a smaller board edition; I chose the board book in the interests of durability. The language is simple and the pictures bright and appealing, making the book suitable for children from infancy to school-age. In 28 sentences and 15 illustrations, the book covers love, racism, ageism, diversity, apology, reparation, forgiveness, theism, and universality, delivering as its core message that we are all God’s children, worthy of love and respect, and called to love and respect one another.

The engaging illustrations depict cultural and religious diversity (sadly, as with so many children’s books, it is missing pictures of children with disabilities) and the universal message makes the book relevant to and suitable for families with any theistic worldview not specifically Christianity (or organized religion at all): You could read the story to a group of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish children, for example, and they could each recognize their faith’s core message.

God’s Dream ends with the message that when people fulfill God’s dream by loving one another, “God smiles like a rainbow,” and ends with a picture of a rainbow made up of children’s handprints.

Final page of God’s Dream
Art by LeUyen Pham

Ben and Molly immediately asked if we could do a craft like that, and I suggested that in the interests of size we try fingerprints instead. We started with rainbow-coloured paints in an egg carton…

Rainbow-coloured paints in an egg carton
©PicklesINK 2013

..then took turns painting each others’ fingers with cotton swabs…

…and stamped the painted fingers on the canvas to make the rainbow.

The finished product was a complete team effort and is now proudly displayed on the playroom wall.

~ karyn

Have you read any particularly meaningful children’s books lately? What would you recommend?

Grinning from ear to ear – Part 3

Nov29

and finally…

THE VOTE.

Credit: “Stained-glass Rainbow Flag with Cross (Baner enfys gwydr lliw gyda Chroes)” by Andrew Craig Williams

We won.

The knot that has been in my stomach for weeks has finally disappeared and has been replaced by a whole-body glowing sense of relief. Not only did we win, but we won by a landslide – for every person who voted to keep the status quo, 4 people voted for change, and the atmosphere in the room when it was announced was alive and joyous.

I explained it to Ben and Molly thus:

We had a really important meeting at church yesterday, and I was really worried about it because we were having a vote about something that I think is really important. Our church had a rule that not everyone could get married at our church. That meant that for some people, even if they came to the church and said, “We really love this church, and we really want to have our wedding here!” we would say, “No,” and I didn’t think that was fair, because God loves everyone equally. I thought that anyone who loved God and loved the church and wanted to have their wedding there should be able to do that, and so did a lot of other people, so we had some meetings, and we arranged some times that when anyone could come and talk about how they felt about it, and when that was all finished, we had a vote.

Everyone wrote on a piece of paper if they thought we should keep the rule the same, or change it so that everyone could get married at the church if they wanted to. And I was really, really worried that more people would want to keep it the same, but it turned out that lots more people wanted to change the rule and so we did, and now EVERYONE who comes and says, “We really love this church and we would like to have our wedding here!” will get a, “YES!”

~ karyn

Jesus with Rainbow Sheep, http://www.othersheep.org/

I am a Christian, so I support same-sex marriage.

Sep7

I am a Christian.

To me that means 2 things. First, it means that I believe in God. That doesn’t mean that I think there’s some old white man who looks like Santa sitting on a cloud shaking his finger at us. When I think of God, I always think back to The Secret Garden and Mrs. Sowerby’s description of “the big good thing,” something or someone that encourages goodness and gives us strength through troubled times. Second, it means that I try to live my live the way that Jesus taught, and that also boils down to 2 things (I don’t know; is there something about the number 2?): Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and mind, and soul, and love your neighbour as yourself (Luke 10: 27).

A very wise man, now gone from us, once preached a powerful sermon on the topic of the former commandment that has stuck with me. He spoke first about loving God with all your heart and soul, and said that that’s fairly self-explanatory. You let that love show in all that you do. You revel in that love, and you see God in everything and everyone around you and love them too.

He then spoke about loving God with all your mind, saying that that is the part that people often have trouble with. Using the example of evolution, he said that he had heard people talk about how believing in the concept of evolution is totally at odds with what the Bible says and is the “greatest danger the church has ever faced.” He paused for a moment and then said, essentially, that that was hogwash. If you love God with all your mind, you honour the mind that God has given you and you think with it. And if science, or society, has made new discoveries and come to new understandings about topics that the Bible, in its historical and geographical context, once described differently, you think about those concepts in relation to those new discoveries and understandings using your God-given brains, and you maybe realize that what the Bible says, outside of that historical and geographical context, doesn’t make sense. So in order to love God with all your mind, you recognize that God wants you to come to realization, that the times, they are a-changin’, and that your beliefs need to change along with them.

An extremely thoughtful and articulate young man, Matthew Vines, gave a sermon recently that has been now been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people and has been changing minds all over the world.

Watch the video here – it is an hour long, but well worth the time.

Read the transcript here, but a lot of the power is in Matthew’s presentation.

He makes a compelling argument that if you look at what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, taking into account historical and geographical context and nuances of language and translations, not only should the Bible not be seen as condemning same-sex relationships, but in fact that 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul says, “It is better to marry than to burn with passion,” should be interpreted as encouraging marriage between two people of any gender who love each other. He also points out that Jesus himself has given us a litmus test to weed out false teachers and false teachings: In Matthew 7 Jesus tells us that a good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit – therefore, good teachings will have good consequences and should certainly not lead to the destruction of human dignity and tearing down of self-esteem.

Very soon, my church will be embarking on a journey that I really hope will lead to a new understanding of how to love our neighbours. We will be making a decision about whether or not to change our marriage policy, which currently prohibits marriages between same-sex couples in our church building. The people at my church who wish to keep the policy as it stands do not consider themselves homophobic. Their understanding of the Bible is that it prohibits same-sex marriage, and they feel that they can accept and welcome gay people as neighbours and church members while still being true to their belief that the Bible dictates that marriage is between a man and a woman. I disagree — strongly — but I also have to acknowledge that for many of them, even coming to that point has been a journey in a positive direction. I just hope that over the next few months, with thoughtful discussion, they will come even farther on that journey and we will become a truly accepting and welcoming community.

To me this situation epitomizes the question of “What Would Jesus Do?” If two consenting adults are in love and wish to have God be a part of their marriage, would the Jesus who told his disciples to “Let the children come unto me,” really say, “Nope, not on my watch!”? I believe that my church could be a good tree, but right now the fruit we are bearing is a little hard and underripe. I hope that in the next few months we will plant some seeds that will flourish and grow and soon come to bear plump, juicy, satisfying and life-sustaining fruit.

~ karyn