Word To The Ys

Hello, (friend) (acquaintence) (internet stranger) (family member) !

Congratulations are in order, because you have just learned you’re expecting a little Y of your very own!  This is truly both an exciting and daunting time.  No doubt you’ve seen these little creatures called Boys running about in the world, and find yourself wondering now: just what have we gotten ourselves into?!?  But fear not!  Mama Courtney is here, like a bridge over troubled water, to ease your mind.

First of all, I really do mean it when I say congratulations.  I may be a bit biased, but I find boys to be extraordinary fun.  Please understand that, of course, I speak in generalities.  I have three Ys myself, and they are all very different from one another.  There are some common characteristics I’ve observed among them, though, and also in other boys in this wonderful world.  In my early childhood class, I learned a valuable technique called “re-framing”.  In laymen’s terms: when you’re responding negatively to some aspect of your child, try to come at it from a slightly different perspective: one that will ultimately be positive.  Here are some qualities I’ve observed in many boys, followed by a re-framing of those characteristics:

1. Boys are insensitive/ignorant of the feelings they invoke in others.

Reframe!

Boys are resilient.  I don’t think that, physically speaking, they are tougher than girls.  My boys cry just as much as the next kid when they fall down and scrape their palms.  What I mean when I say this is that they are emotionally buoyant.  When my Ys get into it, they really go at it with gusto.  Limbs flail about, words errupt forcefully, tears stream…but in one minute it is over, and the Ys are happily engaged in the business of being merry once again.  They are punching one another one minute, and fraternally hooking their arms over one another’s shoulders the next.  No hard feelings linger; no grudges are held.  They treat their parents to the same quick forgiveness.  It makes the mistakes of parenthood so much less stressful, knowing that “forgive AND forget” is the order of the day, every day.

2. Boys are loud.

Reframe!

Boys come with sound effects.  My Ys provide themselves with a running soundtrack as they move about in life, and after many years of adjusting myself (I have learned I am very sensitive to lots of noise and chaos) I have come to see the advantages to parenting these walking cacophonies.  For one, you can find them pretty quickly and easily when you’ve lost sight of them.  Just follow the airplane sounds!  The dinosaur growls!  The monotone robot incantations!  Bonus: when you CAN’T hear noise, something is really, really wrong, and you know to go find them as soon as possible, because something is bound to be up.  Which leads me to:

3. Boys are gross.

Reframe!

Boys are less bothered by imperfection.  Okay, as the mother of a son who routinely spread his feces around every surface to make a point, this was a hard sell.  I want to be clear when I warn you that you will be doing a lot of cleaning with boys around the house.  But the beauty of it is: the cleaning you do isn’t on their behalf, because they could care less whether or not there’s dirt in their bedsheets or a permanent stain on their Sunday shirt or a spray of pee all over the 3 foot radius surrounding the toilet.  Their standards are really, really low by our own standards, which you will find adjust over time in a defensive mode preventing your mental incapacitation.

4. Boys never, ever stop moving and will wear you the heck out.

Reframe!

Boys are physical and live life to the fullest, and they bring your lazy butt along for the ride.  Again, I do not suggest that there are no girls in this world that possess this quality, but we happen to have lots of little girl friends and I can’t help but notice the way they sit so nicely and play a board game, or read a book, or attend to small manipulative toys in a calm manner.  If my boys sit to build with Legos for anything more than 2 minutes, it’s surprising.  And then, in their minds, the only real reason to build with Legos in the first place is to knock the structure down in the most spectacular fashion possible.  Coloring?  Forget it.  Unless throwing the crayons at your brothers counts as coloring.  They are the living definition of Newton’s First Law…an object in motion stays in motion.  As parents, whether or not you prefer to be active yourself, you will be running and climbing and leaping to action to prevent the untimely demise of your boy(s).  But the nice thing is that second clause in Newton’s First Law…a body at rest tends to stay at rest.  You will all sleep very, very well at night! (Well, most of the time, anyway.)

And if all these words of wisdom don’t help to assuage some of your anxieties about raising your future son, or you find yourselves jealous of the relative ease with which your friends with little girls seem to be doing their job,  just remember: for all your hard work in these early years, you will be rewarded when they are teenagers.

Posted in Max, Ollie, Other Ys of Note, Seth | 4 Comments »

What do a banjo troubadour, running races in water, buffet dining, a triangular fold of stars and stripes, Midwestern Irish pubs, ice cream, and the smell of 400 farts have in common?

All these, and so much more, are pixels in the impressionistic experience of my Grand Pierre’s Big Send-Off.  Exactly a week ago we gathered to pay homage to a man that loved well and was well-loved in return.   People have been asking me how it was, our “funeral” trip.  And my answer is weird to many people but it’s the truth: it was fun.  It was joyous.  It was the perfect way to celebrate the life of a guy who loved humor, and family, and corned beef and cabbage. (Psst…stick with me ’til the end of this long post and you’ll be rewarded with paparazzi footage of a certain mom/Nana demonstrating skills with a washboard and shotgun shells that you’d only dreamed possible.)

Our little family of five rolled into booming Freeport, IL at about 11:00 PM on Wednesday night.  Most of our people were already there, and some were already asleep.  We tried to transfer the kids from the car to the hotel room as gently as possible, to facilitate continued sleeping, which worked for 2 out of 3.  Seth would not go back to sleep.  Would. Not.  Maybe it had something to do with the smell of 400 farts.  Which is what our room greeted us with when we entered it.  It was sort of hilarious, because it was this incredibly nice, plush hotel room and it smelled like the whole staff and all their friends had come by for a Bean Cook-Off and left us a little surprise.  We later learned that it was originating from the floor drain in the bathroom, and we shut the door for the night.  Which was fine, until you had to get up and use that bathroom in the middle of the night and just about passed out walking into the fumes.  But the fine people of Hampton Inn fixed it up right good for us in the morning, and even comped the night for us.  For this and many other reasons, I will love Hampton Inn forever and ever, Amen.

Anyway, after Joe and Seth and I enjoyed a whopping 6 hours of sleep (the older boys, thankfully, got a few more z’s) we went downstairs for the complimentary breakfast.  And of course, we found the whole darn crew (minus my lazy brother and his lovely wife) down there already.  Hugs!  Kisses!  So glad to see yous!  I got to see my…um, step-cousin?…for the first time in 23 years.  TWENTY THREE.  That’s just plain crazy.  She looked just the same as I remembered her, but less soaking wet as she didn’t need to run out into a flash-flood downpour to retrieve a van this time around.  Also…hair and clothes are just better now than they were in 1987.  After Ollie poured hot water and coffee for the whole free world, we finished up and took the boys for a swim.  We were joined by Crazy Aunt Linda, who was under the impression that the basement pool of the renovated turn-of-the-century building was the Caribbean Sea.  I know she was happy to find that, though she was not at home, her water aerobics regimen would not be interrupted.  My boys had her running water races with them back and forth across the length of the universally shallow pool.  After swimming and cleaning up, a little movie/naptime was in order before heading to the funeral home.

Don’t be mislead.  This was not much like a funeral at all.  It was more a gathering of people who loved my Grandpa and who wanted to tell or hear stories and remember him communally.  It was really, really lovely.  I had brought some big band music to play before and after the talking part, and those that spoke did so with grace and love abounding.  I was waiting to feel less teary to see if I could sing something, but that time never came because people kept going up and saying such lovely things.  Then some men in uniform, on hand to honor Grand Pierre’s service during WWII, did a little flag ceremony, played “Taps”, and it was a wrap.  One awesome thing is that this brought together people who hadn’t seen one another in YEARS.  My great aunt Ann, who was the sister of my long-departed grandmother, came with one of her daughters.  This cousin to my dad and his sisters told some really great stories about “Uncle Bob” and I know my dad and aunts were happy to see Ann and Pam again.  Pam was the only one in this weird family tree that lived in MN when we were growing up, so we used to see her and her 4 kids regularly back in the day.  It was so nice to make contact again.  And at lunch I got to sit across from my great aunt Ann and mine her for stories about my grandma.  Turns out she also was a voracious reader (big surprise) with an affinity for Agatha Christie (me, too!) and mysteries in particular.  And she was shy, and kind and thoughtful, and pretty much just as I’d imagined her in my head all these years.

After the luncheon, we went by to see my Great Aunt Betty, aka The Big Sister to the Man of the Hour.  That gal is…what, 96?  And she is sharp as a tack.  She still lives at home, though she can’t leave her totally handicap-inaccessible house so she didn’t make it to the celebration.  She did, however, find a way to stick it to Gramps by paying for everyone’s lunch at the buffet.  They used to tussle over the bill on a regular basis, so I’m sure he was shaking his head and chuckling Somewhere Up There.  So we thanked her for our delicious lunch, and stayed until our kids showed signs of imminent meltdown or destruction, which was about 25 minutes.  It’s just not long enough.  I love Aunt Betty and would prefer to sit at her side and talk for hours.  She still does the crossword and reads whichever 10 books the library brings her each week.  She’s just spunky and smart and terrific.

Back to the hotel, for a bit more chill-out time for restless children.  At dinner we all (and I do mean ALL) convened in the Irish Pub onsite.

This was more than a little fortuitous, as my grandpa had reportedly wished for an “Irish Wake”.  Well, in this funny way, he got one.  We all drank beer or whiskey, ate Corned beef (in sandwich form or on a bed of cabbage) and laughed much.  Just our luck, that evening a regular local musician was there to perform.  On a banjo.  Yeah, I don’t know.  But it was fun anyway.  We danced.

And were serenaded.

And finally, what you’ve all been waiting for…we played questionable musical instruments with great skill.

And just before we departed for home the next morning, we all enjoyed a stop at the Union Dairy, which is conveniently located next to the most historical site in Freeport: the park where Lincoln and Douglas debated during their Senate campaign in 1858.  But we’ll save the history lesson for another day…but rest assured, it’s a Word to the Ys-brand history lesson, so don’t skip class!  It’ll be fun!

In the end, I think it’s exactly what the Big Guy would have liked.  My Linda made an excellent point in an email, which was that saying goodbye is just a little bit easier when you’ve done your hugs and kisses and “I love yous” as often as we did with Grandpa.  Then it becomes a little more possible to remember him in a spirit of fun, and to feel peaceful, and as a family to feel more whole.

Posted in Mostly Me, Other Ys of Note | 2 Comments »