Lost Phones

I know I usually tell stories about my little boy, Aidan, when I blog.  Don't worry.  That'll still happen.  The kid is a gold mine of sound bytes.  The thing is, his little sister, Ainsley has been moving up in the ranks.  She's past that "I'm a cute blob with big brown eyes" stage and now has become a force to reckon with.  Actually, that seems like an understatement.  I'm not sure there are enough words in the dictionary to aptly describe her personality.  But I shall try to paint a picture of who she is with the eloquent brush strokes that are my stellar writing skills. 

Okay, I'm currently on percocet so please bear with me and ignore my overestimations of how talented and funny a writer I am.

For some reason in our household the babies have a serious aversion to phones.  Okay, that's not necessarily true.  Ainsley can successfully distinguish the difference between an iPad and iPhone and asks for them on a current basis.  She's actually taught me some tricks on the iPad.  It also took me a week to figure out how to turn the annoying voice over off.  I was too stubborn to Google it.

So I guess you can say they just hate home phones.

When Aidan was about nine months old, we were sitting at home and I heard a faint beeping in the distance. 

It wasn't one of those nice, soft beeps.  No tinkling of wind chimes.  Not even a distant car alarm. 

Nay, it was that horrible, horror movie, makes you want to punch someone in the face beeping that comes from a phone being off the hook.

I can just imagine back in the eighties- you know, the decade God turned his back on the world, back when you wanted to make a call you rotary dialed that number and were attached to the phone terminal by a leash- a really curly bouncy leash that just cried out to you to use it for a jump rope while your mom was on the phone with your Auntie.... and then it'd get all tangled in a big curly knot and you'd spend three hours slowly twisting the ringlet back in order like the phone was going to the prom or something.  Why the curly cord?  Was that to make it safer?  Less strangleable or something?  Anyway, I digress.

So I assume it was in the eighties when they decided to have the phones make that noise when it was left off the hook.  Someone was like "Hey guys, we've got a problem!  All of a sudden there's been a rash of people using their phones for jump ropes and forgetting to hang them up when they're done! Maybe we should come up with the most annoying noise known to man and have the phone start emitting that noise like it's demon possessed so they know to hang up their phones!" 

Done.

So Aidan and I are hanging out and I hear faint demon beeping.  I stalk around the house searching for this evil noise.  No where to be found.  Finally I make my way to a heater vent in the floor.  Hmm..   It's mysteriously askew. 

Ah yes.  Sure enough the phone and some other trinkets had been shoved down the heater vent by my angelic nine month old.

So when Ainsley tried the same thing I stopped her with a smug grin on my face.  Not this time.  I'm an experienced mom now. 

So she broke the heater vent cover.  It became her personal storage unit.

Okay.

Then she decided to start using the garbage to hold all of our valuables.

Keys, money, wallets, and of course, the phone.

I can't even tell you how many times I've barely rescued household items from the eternal banishment of the garbage truck.  We've had some close calls.   

Really, in my heart I knew it was only a matter of time before I would be defeated.

One day I had to make a really important phone call. 

I searched everywhere.  I looked in all of Ainsley's hiding spots.  I looked in all the places that I leave things (hey, I never said Ainsley didn't come by it honestly).  I hit the search button that's supposed to make the phone beep so you can find it.

No beeping. 

I went to look in the trash.

Empty.

It was Wednesday morning. 

Trash day.

I ran to the front to look in the garbage cans and saw the garbage truck driving away from our house.

Dang.

Meh, I wasn't a huge fan of our home phone anyway.

So Trevor and I did the logical thing.  No, we didn't ge a new phone; we cancelled our phone line all together.

A couple months later we were spring cleaning and moving our couch.  As Trevor pulled out the cushions, deep in the recesses I saw a glimmer of fake metal. 

Our phone.

We laughed and realized how useless it was then since we had gotten rid of the base for the phone.

The silly thing is (that I don't want to admit) is God really got a hold of me when I saw that phone. 

I realized how easily I give up on things and think they're gone forever when I'm actually sitting on them, stifling them myself and blaming someone else for it.

And I think we all do that.  We get discouraged, we get distracted.  We think we've failed before we've barely begun. 

So we give up.

God speaks to me through everyday things.  Sometimes it's embarassing.  It's almost always funny.  And it's something that I don't want to shut out.

So here I am.  Because this blog is my phone.  It hasn't been lost.  It's been sitting here the whole time, waiting for me to get off my bum and see it.

Thesaurus

Getting back into blogging is not as easy as I thought it would be.

It's gone kind of like this:

Elizabeth sits down with a McDouble and cold glass of Dr. Pepper and gleefully types out a mediocre blog post.

"Hey," she thinks to herself, "this isn't half bad."

Feeling nostalgic, she goes back to read some of her older blog posts. 


"Dang." she mutters under her breath, "I used to be way more clever than I am now. I'll just have to write about something even better. Let's see. 

I've already covered MacGuyver. 

And Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

And kids lighting couches on fire in my driveway.

Hmm. I don't know if I can top that.

Unless a gang of hooligans uses a molotov cocktail to light fire to a whole bedroom set on my front porch. 

No, that sounds pretty dangerous.

I'm out."

Then Elizabeth closes her browser window and stares blankly while scrolling through pinterest for three hours, planning which scarf she's going to make out of old t-shirts next.

The end.

No, this road back to blogging hasn't been easy. I have a few tricks up my sleeve to come up with ideas.

1. I think of my childhood memories.  There's enough material there to last years.

2.  I think of the ridiculous things my kids have done lately.  I actually have a list of them on my computer in a Word document.  I'm such a great mom.

3.  I go to thesaurus.com   They usually have some crazy words that sometimes will trigger a thought process in my weirdo brain.  A lot of times I go there when I'm stuck and can't find the right word to finish my thought.

Today I went to thesaurus.com because I couldn't think of the word "nostalgic."  I actually didn't find it on the website because I got distracted. What did I get distracted by, you ask?  This.

Thesaurus.com challenged me to a duel of perspicacity. (I looked that up on thesaurus.com)  A showdown of the ages.  They asked me "How Many Words Do You Know? Take our test!" Challenge accepted.

You can't slap me in the face with your leather glove and expect me to walk away. Okay. Most of the time you can.  But if it's a challenge to take an online quiz that determines the size and skill level of my vocabulary, I'm in.

You know what?  I did pretty well.  I'm not going to say how well, because I don't want to be a braggart, but I'm pretty impressed with myself.

I think I'm on par with a college professor or something. Astronaut. Neurosurgeon. Linguist. Something like that.

You know me.... the Bible College drop out. The girl who told people she wanted to be Amy Grant when she grew up.

The truth is I'm kind of past my prime. I was one of those really smart kids in school.  You know, one of those "Gifted and Talented" students.  I remember when I was in first grade, the school counselor pulled me out of class for an evaluation.

Of course they didn't tell me what the evaluation was for.  I thought they were checking for learning disabilities. Or because I talked funny.

She started asking me to choose definitions for words she would give me.  They started out easy. Cat. Shoe. Stuff like that.

Soon the words got harder and harder.  They turned into contiguous and perpendicular. Splendorific. (I made that one up. Just want to make sure you're paying attention.)

I faintly remember feeling like crying and thinking they were going to kick me out of the school for being dumb. 

I hadn't felt this stupid since the day my kindergarten teacher took us outside to show us that the blue sky goes all the way to the ground because she was sick of us coloring our pictures with the sky being a thin ribbon of blue at the top of our papers.

The thing is they weren't being mean.

I had to be tested to see how far I could go. 

I had to be stretched so I had room to grow. (bam. That rhymed. I should be a slam poet.)

Even today I get in those situations that feel ridiculously impossible that make me want to cry and think about how dumb I am and how I'm failing everyone, especially God.

But really I'm just being stretched.

Because those words that stumped me as a child are a part of my vocabulary now.

Okay, maybe not contiguous.

But most of them. Which mean the impossible was attainable. Once I grew.

So, don't give up or be too hard on yourself when you fail.  Don't feel like God abandoned you if you are in the midst of an impossible situation.

He may just be preparing you for something bigger.

Because He loves you.

And He knows your potential.  Better than you know yourself.

Teenagers

When I started substitute teaching I refused to do high school.  As in, I put on my application that I would be willing to teach grades k-8.  After teaching one kindergarten class for a couple of days, that immediately changed to grades 1-8. But I digress.

High schoolers freaked me out a little.  They're kind of, well, they're kind of punks sometimes.  And not so lovable. The cuteness has worn off by that point.  They're just a big ball of hormones and B.O.  And they read Twilight.  And I was pretty sure that I wasn't cool enough for them anyway.

It's just like how Trevor and I knew that we were not called to be youth pastors.  Funny, most people assumed that as young people in ministry that we should be youth pastors.  But I would surely let people know that we did not have an affinity for teenagers.

Then my little boy started kindergarten.  I got involved with the goings on of his school (which goes from K-12 grade).  Soon I found myself volunteering to help with the Christmas program.  Of all things, what did I end up doing?  Working with a bunch of high school kids.

A choir of high school kids.

High school kids who had never been in a choir before.

Yeah.

I was handed a list of 11 songs for us to sing for a performance that was 4 weeks away.

Eleven songs. Four weeks.

And I was informed that most of the choir members were voluntold to join the choir.

Right.

I walked into the practice room that first day with apprehension.  I had that feeling of foreboding that usually means a disaster is headed my way.

And I was met by the greatest group of kids that wanted to sing. At least they were nice enough to pretend like they wanted to sing in front of me.  God bless them.

They worked their butts off.

They skipped lunches.

They came in to practice on school vacation days.

And when the day of the performance came, they brought down the house.

No one expected this little group of high schoolers to show up with so much heart.

The audience cheered, clapped, and sang along.

There wasn't a dry eye in the house.

These teenagers surprised everyone.

Especially me.

Because they got to me, and now I can't shake them.

They're my kids now.

(Plus, one of the guys noticed I dyed my hair today. Seriously!)

Have you ever been surprised by someone that you didn't really give a fair chance to begin with?  Makes me think I should try to be friends with people who are Michigan fans.

Nah.

Baby steps.

Lost Phones

My mom is in the hospital tonight.

When she sees that I wrote something about it on my blog (and facebook) she'll probably be embarrassed.

But you see, my mom's been bugging me about blogging again.  She's told me a few times "You know, I keep clicking on that blog of yours to see if you've written anything lately, and I'm always disappointed to see you haven't."

It's been very encouraging to hear that my mom cares about such a little thing as my blog.

I can't be with her tonight.  So, I figured the least I could do is write a post for her.

So, here goes.

I haven't written in a while.  During that time my little girl who was just a few months old when I started this blog has blossomed into a very entertaining 18 month old. 

She charms everyone who meets her and puts on quite the show.  I think Trevor hits the nail on the head when he says "She has a personality only God himself could have come up with."

Ainsley also has an affinity with putting things away (praise the Lord someone in our family has finally inherited my mom's genes when it comes to cleaning up).  If she can't figure out where the item in her possession belongs (which is almost always), it ends up in the garbage can. 

I have found so many things in the garbage can that shouldn't have been there.  Makes me wonder what I didn't catch before it got thrown out for good.

I've caught her trying to dispose of our phone three times.  I don't know what her personal vendetta is against telephones, but it gets violent at times.  Once I found the phone dismantled and shoved inside a McDonald's bag in the trash can.  One of these days I'm going to find it at the bottom of a bathtub full of water with a brick tied to it.

So when the phone turned up missing a month or so ago I figured it made its weekly pilgrimage to visit the soiled diapers and banana peels. 

I looked in the can. Not there. I realized that yesterday was garbage day. And this was a new bag.

Uh oh.

We held out hope that the phone would turn up somewhere around the house.  After a couple of days of looking, we assumed the worst and threw out the charging stations and cords. 

It was a lost cause. 

We even went as far as to cancel our home phone completely.  We don't use it much anymore, so we figured we wouldn't miss it.

A couple of weeks later I was digging in our couch, looking for a pair of keys (that ironically were later found in the trash can) when I pulled out our phone.

The phone I had completely given up on.  It was right under my bum this whole time.

You know what I've been sitting on all this time?

Lots of stuff.

You know how you find something you really love, and then you go through a bad patch, get discouraged and give up? 

Then you fall behind on your expectations and think it's a lost cause.

I do that with pretty much everything. 

I did that with writing.

But the lost phone's meaning was not lost on me. 

Most of our dreams that we think are long gone are within arms reach.

We're just sitting on them.

What are you sitting on?

Drive Thru

Every time Trevor and I decide to eat healthier we receive a McDonald's coupon book in the mail. 

It's just not right.

The most recent one even had the word CRAVE plastered across the front of it.  We have a hard enough time keeping ourselves from eating at McDonald's.  Slap on a discount and it's officially a lost cause.

The only time we were able to stop eating at McDonald's was when they tore it down and rebuilt it.  Yes, there's a McDonald's in Wal-Mart, but then you have to get out of your car and walk through Wal-Mart to get to it.  And the food tastes differently there.  I think a little Wal-Mart rubs off on it. 

Anywho, when the new McDonald's opened, we were ecstatic.  We went inside to check out the digs.  Pleather couches, fake fireplace, new playland, the works.  I even sat and watched Monday Night Football on a flat screen. Awesome.

One of my greatest joys came when I ventured over to the drive thru.

Two. Lanes.

Our little McDonald's is growing up!

But for some reason, the sweet, unassuming people in our town can't seem to adjust to the change of having two drive thru lanes. Which means extra bonus for me.

I get no greater joy than passing four or five cars up in line just by using the neglected extra lane. 

I should feel guilty.

But I don't.

They could use those lanes just as easily as I have.

But they won't.

So I get my sausage breakfast biscuit faster (thank you McDonald's for finally bringing biscuits to Canada).

Booyah.

But you're smart, right?  You wouldn't be the guy who has to wait ten extra minutes for his mcgriddle because he didn't want to change his habits.  Of course not.

Why are we so resistant to change? Maybe I'm rogue enough to use the new line at McDonald's.  But that doesn't mean I've got this down pat.

Sometimes we're set in our ways even when we know that it's not working for us. 

Why? 

Sometimes I wonder what God could accomplish if we allowed him to do a new thing in us.  In our church.  In our relationships.

"But forget all that— it is nothing compared to what I am going to do.

For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland."

  Isaiah 43:18-19

It's time to break out of our comforts and embrace the new.

What newness, what change is God drawing you to in your life?

Easy Off

I'm not one to normally be swayed by advertising.  Okay, I like to think that I'm not swayed by advertising.  Maybe it's the rebel deep inside me that wants to do the opposite of what someone is telling me I should do.

But every once in a while there comes a product so intriguing, so genius, that I have to give it a try.

A few months back I saw an ad for Huggies Slip On diapers. In all honesty, it didn't take a whole lot of ingenuity to come up with this one (why hello Pull Ups for smaller babies). But when you are the parent of a fifteen month old who kicks and screams like you're performing an exorcism at each diaper change, you're open to other options.

My thought process went a little like this:

"Hey, cool! Now I don't have to wrestle Ainsley to the ground and hold her there like I'm waiting for the tap out in a WWE match just to affix the sticky tabs to the front of her diaper! And she won't have the inevitable saggy bum syndrome due to the malpositioning of aforementioned sticky tabs that are dangling precariously after the smackdown diaper change. This is going to make my life so much easier! Gasp! They're ON SALE!"

Something like that. Yes, I always talk to myself using words like "aforementioned" and"malpositioning."

So, I bought them. Which would typically be a Trevor thing to do. Usually I do my own personal marketplace analysis when buying diapers to make sure I get the best deal.  But now that I have freedom (aka Driver's license- but that's another post)  I get this rush of adrenaline when walking in a store alone and I do stupid things. In my defense, they were out of the normal diapers that were on sale.

First we experienced the honeymoon phase of slip-on diaperdom. The "hey, these work pretty well!" phase.

That phase didn't last very long. Survival of the fittest is taking place in our house and I'm pretty sure Ainsley is the fittest. She soon learned to kick with abandon to fight off my feeble attempts to wrangle a clean diaper on her.

Now I feel like I'm taking part in a calf scramble. I've got her legs up in the air all wrapped around each other while I try to shimmy her diaper on.  Seriously. I broke a sweat today. Changing a diaper. I think I may have pulled a muscle.

But that's not the worst of it. Apparently "slip-on" diapers are also incredibly easy to "slip off."  Oh, has Ainsley mastered this one.  Her new favorite hobby is nudity.  She's running around the house naked as the day she was born.  Jaybirds have nothing on her.

On Sunday we were having a cutesy family cuddle sesh in our bed.  It was so sweet and post card-ish.  It was the stuff those people who write cutesy family blogs would write about.  Using heartfelt, emotion-wrecking prose that makes you tear up even when they talk about things like taking out the garbage.

Ainsley is trawling around the room in search of old food particles and other non-digestible items to gnaw on and Aidan's in bed with us reading a book.  Ainsley climbs up on the bed and we catch a distinct whiff of a number two wafting on the breeze.

Trevor, being the amazing husband and father he is, says "somebody needs their bum changed!"

He goes to grab her and realizes there's nothing to change out of. Ainsley is diaperless. And there is poo located somewhere in our room.

Not to mention the smear on our bed. Classy.

I'll save you the rest of the details, but it involves wipes, a bath, and carpet cleaner.

Is there something you're compromising on because it's easier? Seems to make perfect sense?  Be wary of shortcuts and easy roads.

Sometimes the way that seems easy leads to a bunch of crap. Literal crap.

There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.

Proverbs 15:12 NIV

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.

Matthew 7:13 NIV

Grown Ups

Aidan crawled under the covers with me early this morning before Ainsley was awake.  That in itself was quite the feat.  We tiptoe by Ainsley's room like you would a shallow cave harboring a sleeping monster that would be featured in an Ancient Greek saga.  She sleeps lightly and is quite the grumpaloo if awakened before her body's clock tells her it's time to get up. I have no idea where she gets that from.

Aidan stealthily makes his way to my room and asks for a cuddle.  My little boy is quite the big boy nowadays.  He is a full fledged kindergartener and can take care of himself, thankyouverymuch. But, he still likes to cuddle. And I love it!

He knows the edict of cuddling in the Birak household: talking is allowed during day cuddles, but not night cuddles.  I know that sounds harsh, but he would NEVER go to sleep if he got to lay in bed and shoot the breeze with us every night.

He jumps under the fluffy covers, lays his head next to mine on my pillow, curls up in a ball and starts talking. We discuss school; how he's learning his letters and the days of creation.  He tells me that he can't wait until day five, because "we're going to learn about the birds and fish, and all things that live in the water and sky."  Since when did my kid sound like a walking New International Version? 

Then, being quite the philosopher he busts out this big one:"Mommy, why does it take so long to grow up?" See, after he completed a few days of Kindergarten, Aidan decided he was fully ready to move up to grade one.  I informed him that it would be a whole year before he was in grade one.

He desperately wants to be in a grade that is associated with a number, so we started calling Kindergarten "grade zero" in our house. 


I thought of when I was a little kid and was desperate to grow up.  Now as an adult, I desperately want my children not to.

Often I find myself looking inward and realizing that I'm taking too long to grow up.   There's a frustration that wells up in my heart when I see myself and how little I've grown in some areas.   As a pastor, I have that same frustration when I see those who I try to minister to struggle as well.

Where is our hunger for growth? Why are we content to weakly swallow the milk when we should be digging into the solid food?  We blithely waste our days entertaining ourselves instead of straining for knowledge and maturity in the Spirit.

You have been believers so long now that you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things about God's word. You are like babies who need milk and cannot eat solid food.

For someone who lives on milk is still an infant and doesn't know how to do what is right.


Solid food is for those who are mature, who through training have the skill to recognize the difference between right and wrong.

Hebrews 5:12-14

The writer of Hebrews says in verse eleven: "There's so much more I want to explain, but you are too spiritually dumb and don't care enough to listen!" (Elizabeth's paraphrase)  How much are we missing out on because we aren't eager to listen and understand?  Because we are not ready to grow?

I do believe that there's something in us, though, that is drawing us to more.  The embers of desire lay dormant in us begging to be rekindled.  I can feel the dissatisfaction that calls me out of my slumber to search for more.