My Daring, Adventurous, Adorable Boys

I really do mean to blog a little less, even if I don’t take a complete break, so I can get some work done around here, but Jules is having a book give-away contest over on her site, and it’s a book I very much want to read and have for my boys! So, the rules say that to be entered in the contest I need to write about my daring, adventurous, outrageous, adorable boys (okay, I added the outrageous part). Shouldn’t be too very hard to do! Just a note, too, I have finished organizing the former dump station that is now recognizable as the playroom. In a fit of desperation yesterday when I tried to stumble through the disaster area that M had created in there, I started this project. It was interesting to do while watching Boo with one eye at all times to make sure she didn’t get anything small into her mouth. So, after two days, my efforts have earned me two full bags of trash and a very large bin of toys and some clothes to go to the yard sale fund-raiser the church is holding to offset the cost of a mission trip the pastor is taking with some of the members and a room that no longer makes my head explode when I open the door. Now I get to tackle their bedroom. Boy, am I telling on myself with this post – I freely admit that the housekeeping in the “boy domain” gets beyond me in record time, but I’ve instituted some new, strict rules that they will think I am Evil Mom-Lady (I miss the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon!) about enforcing so that their domain does not get into this state again.

A short note about my boys’ mom (that’s me!) first: While I wasn’t a super-duper girly girl growing up in that I had a few Barbies, but they weren’t really my favorite thing, and I wasn’t all that intrigued with the color pink, frilly things, nail polish and shopping (still not), I was most definitely not a tomboy, either. I guess I was just a run-of-the-mill-boys-have-cooties kind of girl.

Nowadays, I’ve outgrown the fear of cooties, but boys do still have an uncomfortable love of squishy things. All kinds of squishy things. Mud and lots of it. Playdoh (I can handle that one, I even made some homemade the other day with their requested colors). Food in its various stages of being chewed and viewed. And the worst, worst, worst for me: lizards, frogs and snakes. I have an almost pathological fear of living squishy things, and that is a really, really difficult fear to have when you live on an island surrounded by marsh. We see all kinds of squishy things around here. And my boys love to scare me with them. Let me back up and say that they do not use live critters to scare me with. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone to turn down the bed and had some kind of plastic floppy critter jump off the sheet at me or go to turn on my lamp and have a large, squishy plastic tarantula land on my hand. It’s amazing my heart hasn’t stopped yet. My husband thinks it’s hysterical. I’ve threatened them with grave seriousness not to ever put a live frog, snake, lizard or anything else in my bed. I think I would have to move. Seriously.

I’ve blogged about the ongoing debate over whether Curious George is a monkey or a “chipmanzee.” It continues to this day. And I’ve also blogged about the many things I do not know, but which a certain 8-year-old boy just needs to know. Speaking of needing to know, we’ve had to hide the screwdrivers around our house. That same 8-year-old is immensely fascinated with how things work, and if given half a chance, he’ll take anything apart just to see what’s inside. Both boys get to go to Camp Invention next week. This is right up their alley. It is sponsored by the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation and one of the things they get to do is take an old, unusable appliance and take it apart and make something with it.

Another interesting thing about boys that shouldn’t surprise me but does make being their mom an interesting exercise in judicious refereeing is that everything is a competition. I mean everything! Who got their teeth brushed fastest without mom sending them back to do it again, who gets in the car first, who passes who on their way up the stairs, who can make Boo laugh the loudest, who can burp the loudest, who smells the worst (don’t ask), and just about anything else becomes a World War III level competition around here if we aren’t paying close enough attention to how quick the “happy noises” become “I’m going to kill my brother” noises and step in to referee.

I do think that little boys do not have a “clean-up gene” anywhere in their body. It isn’t that they particularly want to defy me by not helping keep the clutter picked up. I really believe they just do not see it. I will sort, wash and fold the laundry and put the basket suggestively next to the stairs. They have been asked countless times to take their clothes upstairs and put them in the dresser (we have to be specific) when they see this arrangement, but that basket will sit there in their path for days – until I’m ready to do laundry again if I don’t let Evil Mom-Lady come out and use that tone of voice with them. The typical response? “There are clothes in the basket?”

They also don’t seem to know what a trash can is for. I watched M drop a candy wrapper on the floor and said, “M, where does that go?” He gave me this totally incredulous look like he had no idea how that had happened and said, “Oh!” and took it to the trash can as if I’d just told him something he’d never even thought of before. This is almost a daily occurrence with one or both boys.

The scariest thing about being a boy’s mom, though, is that they seem to have a switch that turns off their common sense thinking. Of course, that’s assuming they have common sense thinking at this age. I’m not so sure some days. They tore up my only remaining decent laundry basket by sitting in it and sledding down the stairs. To be fair, Daddy was right there cheering them on with that one. It’s alarming to look out the window and see one of the boys with a gleam in his eyes sitting at the top of the swing set slide perched on a tricycle that is too small for him anyway that he’s somehow managed to get up there. If I run to the door and yell out there, “Don’t ride down the slide!” the answer would be, “I wasn’t!” Not yet, anyway, being the unstated subtext here. We were more than alarmed once when we were out back and M called, “Mommy, Daddy, look!” He had a jump rope tied to his foot and the other end tied to the roof of the treehouse and, before we could say a word, he jumped. Of course he fell right on his head. We went running to him, he was fine, my heart kept racing for a while, and we told him never, never, never to try that or anything remotely like it again.

But, while being mom to two rowdy boys is exhausting, it’s so very rewarding, too. They are both so incredibly funny, sometimes the funniest when they don't even mean to be. I never know what crazy costume they'll be wearing or what story they'll make up or write about to entertain us all. Our middle son is the sweetest, most loving child and he melts our hearts all the time with his crazy, wacky sense of humor and his sweet hugs and smiles. Our oldest son is our thinker, and you can just see the wheels turning up there when he’s puzzling out some new thought. I love it when the light goes on and he joyfully shares some new discovery with us. Though he’s not the snuggler his little brother is, when he opens up and shares his joys, fears and dreams, that, too, melts my heart.

And the hardest thing in the world is to fight back my first response to smother them with protectiveness so that I can step back when there are times one of these tough little boys needs me to let him try to brave it out when he feels scared or broken-hearted, and I know what he wants most in the world is to let those tears that are welling up out and run to Mom, but he knows he’s got to go on and he squares his shoulders and does what he has to do anyway and takes one more step toward growing from being a real boy to becoming a real man. Oh, how I pray we will be faithful to teach them the things that really matter and train them up in the Lord, because I know, too, that as they grow, those days of stepping back are going to come more and more often, and I’ll have to let them go, and do, and grow while I encourage them to step out with confidence, and pray they will stand firm in the truth they’ve been taught as they go on to live their lives while I treasure in my heart the little boys they used to be and grow to respect the men I hope they’ll become.