By all accounts, today marks the end of our last week of the summer. Although my daughter’s first day of school was on Monday, we pulled her out of school on Friday and snuck away for a quick family adventure. But that was our final hoorah of the season, and the rest of our kids start school on August 24th, so it really feels like the end of our mini vacation also marked the end of summer.
It’s equal parts bittersweet and a relief. On the one hand, I am so over the heat. The older I get, the more I’m starting to prefer fall over summer, which my husband says is just part of aging. He’s over ten years older than me, so I’ll just have to take his word for it, but it makes sense. In many ways, it feels like summer has lost some of its magic now that I’m an adult.
But it’s still bittersweet because even though summer isn’t the same for me now that I’m not a kid, I’m lucky enough to be the one to try and make it magical for my kids. I won’t claim that I’ve done a perfect job — some days, I worry if I’ve even done a good job — but I have loved filling my kids’ summer days with ice cream sandwiches, afternoons at Mimi’s pool, adventures outside, and staying up past bedtime to watch movies.
I know that by time next summer rolls around, all of the kids will be a little bit older, a little harder to please, and a little less mine. Eventually, my kids will start to prefer hanging out with friends over their family, and while that’s developmentally normal, it will still be an adjustment. The end of this summer means we are one step closer to our little kids becoming big kids, and I just can’t believe that our kids have gotten so old!
This Week in Review
As I’ve already mentioned, it was a busy week! On Monday, Eloisa started her first day of first grade! She is pretty indifferent about school — she enjoys it, but doesn’t thrive off of it the way her stepsister does, but also doesn’t hate it — so it felt like just another morning, only that we got up earlier.
This made it all the more surprising that after I dropped her off, I cried! It just hit me out of nowhere that Dang, my daughter is really growing up. I think it’s a mix of postpartum hormones and having babies in the house again, but I am just constantly acutely aware of how quickly time is flying by. I have such vivid memories from my own days in first grade, and now, my daughter is in first grade.
With one kid back in school, our family had to adjust everybody’s schedules just a tad. All three kids had to be woken up earlier, which meant that Kevin and I had to get up earlier, especially if we wanted any individual time to run, shower, write, or read. Getting my daughter to school also takes a big chunk of my time in the morning, so I had to make sure that I was still arriving to work on time. We also had to figure out a way to get my daughter home from school and my husband to work on time, both of which occur right around the same time. Add in the twins and the dog… and yeah, it started to feel like a really complicated jigsaw puzzle. But with the help of my mom and some friends, we made it work!
On Tuesday, right around 6:30pm, my mom texted me in a panic — we had forgotten that it was my Grandpa Eldredge’s birthday!
My grandpa passed away in 2015, and it is hard to believe that it’s been over ten years. My memories of him have faded over time (sidetone: I really need to write down as many memories as I can recall, and soon), but one thing that’s impossible to forget is his love for ice cream! Every year since his passing, every member of the Eldredge family has gone out for ice cream on his birthday in his memory.
My dad was out of town, though, and by the time my mom called me, it was pouring — and I mean pouring — rain outside, with the occasional rumble of thunder in the distance. We concluded that it was just probably not going to happen this year.
However, throughout the next hour, it was all I could think about. The idea of loading up all five kids into my car, by myself, to journey out in bad weather to get ice cream after 7:00pm on a school night seemed kind of crazy. Finally, though, I decided to chance it, and I piled all the kids in my car, pajamas and all.
The whole drive to the closest Chick-fil-a, I told the kids all about my grandpa. I explained his love for ice cream and all things sweet, and Thomas was very excited to learn that Kevin’s favorite flavor of ice cream is the same as my grandpa’s. Once home, all the kids were delighted to enjoy their treat, and we even let Emersyn and Evelyn try ice cream for the first time. I reasoned that if my grandpa were still here, he would have snuck them a taste of ice cream long ago!
With Eloisa in school, Kennedy and Thomas were a little more bored during the days, and the kids were all extra excited to be reunited once Eloisa came home. I think Ginger enjoyed the extra peace and quiet, though, because as you can see below, she got a little too comfortable napping around the house!
Emersyn and Evelyn are still so close to crawling, but not quite there yet! We’ve been having them sit in their highchairs while we eat dinner, just so they can get used to it and be more prepared to start solids in only a few weeks. Evelyn is also becoming more and more smiley by the day, which has been a real treat! Both twins light up every time they see me, Kevin, the kids, and even the dog, and it’s been so fun to watch their relationships with the rest of the family grow over time.
Thursday night was a blur as I raced around the house to pack, trying to make sure that the three older kids, the twins, the dog, and I would all have what we needed for camping. Kevin was responsible only for himself, by my choice, simply because I’m a control freak I enjoy taking care of my family. The plan was to leave as soon as we could Friday morning and then return home Sunday afternoon.
I’m writing up a whole separate recap on our camping trip, so I won’t spoil too much here, but it was fun! Yes, we may have gotten there and realized that I accidentally booked a one-room cabin with… no air-conditioning… but it just added to the adventure! The campground had a playground, petting zoo, gem mining, foam axe throwing, corn hole, a camp store with everything you could possibly need, and more. Knowing that the campground had all of these amazing amenities is part of the reason why I even signed up to take five kids and a puppy camping in the first place!
Saturday night, though, Emersyn started crying insolubly right around 6:00pm, and Kevin and I looked at each other and simultaneously agreed, Yeah, we’re not doing this another night. It’s not even that the twins cried too much or nobody slept. It’s that everybody slept except Kevin and I, because we were so stinking hot! We packed up the cabin last-minute and drove home as fast as we could, arriving just before 9:00pm. We still had to give all three older kids a bath, put the twins to bed, and take showers ourselves, but at least we got to sleep in air-conditioning!
Even though it was more of a “learning” experience this year, we all still had lots of fun, and are looking forward to going back next year. Except next time, we’ll try one of the air-conditioned cabins!
“I Keep Losing Jesus!”
Last week, after our church cancelled its meetings last minute, we wound up at a local playground. While we were there, one of the kids found a mini Jesus figurine, and since then, they have been obsessed with it, moving it around the house and keeping track of it daily. If the mini Jesus went missing, they would pause everything they were doing and search for it until it was found. Eventually, mostly for my own sanity, the tiny Jesus took up permanent residence on my nightstand so that the kids wouldn’t keep losing it.
When we arrive at the campgrounds for our annual family camping trip on Friday, the kids were thrilled to discover that right there by the check-in desk was a basket of tons of tiny Jesus figurines. The campground manager happily let each kid pick out their own, and then every few hours for the next two days, one of the kids would run up to me sobbing, sad that they lost their Jesus. To be fair, these figurines are approximately 2.5 cm tall, so they are very easy to lose.
This meant that every few hours, in an effort to console whichever child was crying about their lost Jesus, I would march us back to the check-in desk, apologize profusely to the nice lady who insisted it wasn’t a problem, and let my kid pick out another tiny Jesus. And then a few hours later, I would hear the cry again: “I keep losing my Jesus!”
We probably went through half a dozen tiny Jesus figurines while at camp. Every time one of the kids would get a new one, it seemed that they would lose it within the hour, and then we would get another one. Then another one. Then another one. Even on the way home from camping, all three kids were constantly reporting the latest status update of their Jesus, just in case. “I’m putting my Jesus in the cupholder!” or “Jesus is taking a nap in my backpack!”
As a mom, and from a practical standpoint, this was slightly frustrating. But then, it got me thinking… isn’t this exactly what we do as adults, but in a different way?
The tiny Jesus figurines my kids became obsessed with made the cycle of losing Jesus and then finding Him again very tangible. However, that cycle exists in many of our day-to-day lives, too, even though it might not be readily apparent at first glance.
Try as I might, I am not perfect. I wish I could say that I, without fail, prayed twice every day, read my scriptures daily, and was a perfect example of love and patience to my kids, but that’s just not the case. You could say that I “lose my Jesus” in one way or another on a daily basis.
The lyrics to one of my favorite hymns come to mind when I reflect on my kids’ innocent exclamations of, “I keep losing my Jesus!” :
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love.
Here’s my heart, oh, take and seal it,
Seal it for thy courts above.
I’m sure many of us are “prone to wander,” “prone to leave the God [we] love,” and, as my five-year-olds put it, “keep losing Jesus.”
But just like no matter how many times my kids lost their tiny Jesus figurines, I took them back to get another one, so too can we return to Him and start over, again and again and again.
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