Simplicity

I am engaged in a war with you, top-lists.  Whether you are "Top 39 World Destinations" or "Top 7 Ways to Make Lunchbox Art" I work hard and consistently fail at my efforts to not read you.  And I work hard to not write you.  Because you are overly simplistic and don't capture the complexity of real life on this planet.

But you are so so fun.  Like the quiz I don't mean to take, sometimes I read your simple listings with attractive bolds and italics.  And like the quiz that is sometimes so accurate, your simple lists are sometimes kind of true and once in a blue moon - enlightening.  

So maybe it's a love-hate kind of thing.  I hate you because I realize, when I secretly sneak a peek at you, that you raise up a little snag of irritation in me.  Because I have  believe with childlike innocence that a simple path always exists.  Until lately that is, when the simple top-ten-able path got lost among the forest of life drama. And you little lists remind me of that loss.  But I love you, lists, because you come with a little drop of hope - hope that perhaps my life can someday again be distilled into some brief, pithy, witty mini-compendium.  

One fateful rainy day I decided to swallow my list-disdain and give it a try.  I started with a title.  I called it "27 Tricks to a Mellow Life, Happy Marriage, Close Knit Family with Special Needs Kids on a Shoestring!"  That was the working title of course.  But the title perhaps should have indicated the future of my awesome top-list. I knew of course that my topic should be a smaller more bite sized nugget-of-a-topic but believe it or not, I don't have one.  Life is so interwoven, such a complex web that most of the simpler top-lists I could dream up just contained ideas that were boring and flat. 

Marriage, kids, schools, cars, money... It's the sticky stuff that being a grown-up is made of and finding the simple beauty in it all is the trick of all tricks.  But I know that it's there, around every next corner, that sneaky trick to simplicity dwells.  The simplicity is in not allowing ourselves to descend into the rote slogging that our days could be.  The simplicity is doing our best to make meaningful lives. The simplicity is finding the happy moments to celebrate.  

Well, I guess there's my whopping top 3 list. I bolded it in case you missed it and I still love/hate the top lists, that's why I didn't put any numbers on this list. I just can't quite believe that among the urgent and demanding cacophony of cars honking, technology beeping and kids poking, "Top 103 Ways To Calm A Child Screaming In Target" will help me sort it all out, but I'm not giving up on true simplicity or a meaningfully pithy path to enlightenment...  just yet.  

Gifting in a Time of Plenty

8 happy nights of Hanukkah. To spare your busy holiday brains I'll hit you with the math. That's 32 gifts if you are into that kind of gifting and if you have four kids. Which I am and which I do.

To be clear I am into giving kids gifts 8 nights in a row. The kids, however, don't really care that much. No kid can ever come up with a list or any kind of things that they really want. A nice to have here and there and an occasional oo-ah over something in a catalogue is the kind of help I have in selecting thirty two items.

So either my kids have no imagination or their desires are completely sated. I like to think, since they still play swords in the yard, that their imaginations are in tact and they just happen to be satisfied with what they have. They don't have all of the newest and fanciest stuff either, they just seem to have enough. Which means that, in theory, I should count myself lucky and should't get all wound up about “what to get them for Hanukkah”- am I right here? But I DO.

Because, and here's the crazy - I really want them to want something, anything. I wanted a winter coat for hanukkah once so much that I hid in the racks snuggling it. In like 7th grade. I want them to want something so that I can delight them if it's within our means but also so that they know the anticipation and hope of wanting something and a tinge of disappointment if its not within our means. But alas I can't make them want something - no matter how many glossy magazines I shove under their noses with color coded pens for circling their fondest desires.

So, in the end, we do weird themes like "fancy chocolate bar night" or "name plate for your door night" or the ever thrilling "I donated to your favorite charity night" or "toys I hate but you love night". We do a family swap night. Before you know it eight nights of fun have passed and we are at Target for warm hoodie when a small voice comes over to me holding an adorable toy item and says “can I get this”?

And it is in that very moment that I annually realize (and annually forget) that the fun of surprises and gifts and wanting and disappointing aren't just about the holidays.  They are about the every single day - and the vast abundance of lessons that we have to impart through gift giving - hope and delight and disappointment and respect for others who have less - those lessons are for the whole year, not just for holidays and birthdays.   And then I always realize that maybe I should stick with the lesson the kids are trying so so hard to teach me - we have enough, it's plenty.

Since this years largely unrequested gifts are already here and ready though, please remind me that I am committed to the "we have enough" theme night... next year.

Dressing Them Up

Holidays.  And plane flights.  And dances.  All used to be occasions to dress up fancy style.  Right?  Don't you remember that?  Well those days are gone.  Popcorn is now allowed in regular non-movie theaters and that signals to me, the end of the uncomfortable children's clothing requirement.

So we don't have dress up clothes.  Like in the house.  On top of that we have a bevy of sensory issues meaning that crocs are literally the only shoes that will grace 4 of 8 feet in our house.  This should be fine in the year 2014 and for the most part it is.  OK in the winter we add socks and happen to live in a warm climate.  Otherwise crocs work.  But for most legitimately fancy occasions we are the ones showing up with boys in mortifying arrays of t-shirts and athletic bottoms.

So a bat mitzvah of ours happened last year and the athletic gear (by the way they don't do sports, just look like it) came to a screeching halt.  We sat each young sir down and had a long discussion about what clothes might possibly be acceptable.  They weren't just resistant, they refused.  Shoes without holes, shirts with sleeves, pants with zippers.  These foreign items were rejected again and again.  So, desperate, I went online and the items magically appeared at our front door where we had to all take deep breaths and face them.

Our boys are not toddlers, mind you - they are tweens.  They understand logic and the idea of dress clothes and occasions requiring showers shouldn't be a mind bender for them.  They tried the clothes on grudgingly and miserably. The looked like a million bucks from the neck down and like they needed to be admitted to the ER from neck up. Day after day these clothes hung, looming like a threat in the distance.  And their coordinating compromise of a shoe, chucks, sat nearby.  Eventually they wore them and tore them off as soon as possible.  But if you see the pictures you can easily note the discomfort in their sweet little boy eyes.

And all of this drama really made me wonder what kind of massive disservice I had done my boys by not shoehorning them into stiff and uncomfortable clothes prior to this date.  If I had put them in toddler suits with bowties they may have been both adorable and more accepting of formal fashion.  Even if I had forced a khaki or a jean they could still be successful in a business casual future.  Yet, zippers and buttons are a true annoyance and I still can't make myself force it - even knowing as I do that this lackadaisical slice of parenthood will likely limit their careers prospects.

The responsibilities of parenthood are plentiful and substantial - penny loafers I didn't think would rank as high as, it turns out, they and their formal comrades do.  Apparently I have fated my boys to become entrepreneurial internet millionaires working from a coffee shop or scrub sporting doctors.  Dangit - well, at least they are happy and comfie.