sleep is for the weak

I am tired. Exhausted, actually. I think I get less sleep now than when I had a newborn in the house.

When the kids were babies I was always looking forward to the future, when the kids would be just a little older, and would go to bed nicely, sleep all night in their own beds, and wake up well-rested at an acceptable time in the morning. Now I know better. When you're a parent, sleep is a unicorn. A magical, mystical, beautiful creature that you will never actually see or touch because it does not exist.

But I am learning that I need to come to terms with this stage of our lives. Slowly, and with a lot of coffee.

When I was new at parenting, I was under the impression that by the time babies had turned into toddlers, they should be going to bed at 7pm and sleeping all night on their own, giving their parents plenty of time to watch movies and read books at night. Ella was fairly easy to train into this sleep schedule when she moved from a crib to a toddler bed. We would put her in bed, she would cry a bit and sometimes come and sit by her door, but she would always go back to bed fairly quickly and go to sleep. Liam was even easier. He would fall asleep quickly and rarely made a fuss at bedtime.

And then along came Gavin. He is as different as humanly possible from his brother and sister, in every way imaginable. When it comes to sleeping, he does what he wants. And what he wants these days is to hang out with us until 10:30pm, sleep fitfully in our bed with his head on one parent and his feet kicking the other parent, and then wake us all up at 5am. Try as we might, we cannot get him to sleep unless he is good and ready. If we put him in his room at night, he will wander around, play with his stuffed giraffe, wake up his sleeping brother, empty his dresser, and when he gets bored of all that, he will show up in our bedroom (opening doors is his newest accomplishment).

The old me would have been SO frustrated at this turn of events. But even as tired as I am, and as much as I wish I could get a whole night of uninterrupted sleep, I find myself happy to snuggle with my boy when he finally decides to go to sleep. I watch him sleeping and realize that he is never going to be this little ever again. So as I lay beside him, his curls tickling my nose as I inhale his beautiful baby scent, I am thankful for one more night with him.

As we navigate this journey of gentle parenting, we are learning to be more respectful of our kids, their needs, and their desires. So if Gavin isn't ready to go to sleep at 7pm, we try to respect that. We have also learned that Ella isn't ready to go to sleep early, either. She is more of a night owl, much like I used to be. She likes to stay up until 8:30, and then read in her bed for a while before falling asleep. And in a perfect world, she would sleep in until 8:30am, but her little brothers don't always make that a possibility. Liam, on the other hand, is ready for bed by 7:30, and he needs lots of snuggling time before he can fall asleep. We are learning to respect each of their individual internal clocks and allow them the freedom to do what works best for their bodies.

So if that means that I don't get as much sleep as I'd like right now, I try to be ok with it. I try to remind myself in those moments of frustration that the kids won't be this small for long, and I'll miss these little people when they're grown.

And, who knows, maybe one day I will get to ride that mystical Unicorn of Sleep through magical fields of rainbows. You know, when the kids are just a little older.

my kids play air hockey with God

On the iPad, when they are playing one player air hockey, my kids believe that God is playing with them. Liam is especially excited when he wins a game against God, because, as he puts it, "God is SO big but I beat him!" When they are having races around the house, they believe that God is racing with them. God usually wins. When they are jumping on the trampoline, I frequently hear them talking about how God wants to play this game or that game, or about how high God can jump. My kids love to play with God.

It is not uncommon for me to poke my head into Ella's room and find her reading the Bible. Sometimes it's the picture book version and she is reading stories to her younger brothers. Sometimes it is the "real" version and she is reading to herself about creation, or Noah, or some story she heard at church. I helped her figure out how to use the table of contents and the index so she could more easily find the stories she wanted to read. My kids love to read about God.

We have many conversations about God, what He's like, where He hangs out, what He wears, what He does, and what His preferences might be. Some of the conversations are about things like what His favourite colour might be, or what foods He likes best. But some of the conversations are so deep that I am left awestruck that a child so young can have such an understanding. One Easter, when Ella was 5 years old, we came home from church and started talking about the service (she had sat in the adult service instead of going to her class). At one point during the conversation, she told me that God was like an oven. I had no idea what she was talking about, until she explained that the oven has the stove on top and the oven underneath and the drawer at the bottom, just like God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. All three sections are different, but they are all part of the same appliance. I couldn't believe that a 5-year-old came up with that analogy on her own! My kids love to talk about God.

The relationship my kids have with God is real. It is their own. It is childlike.

In Matthew 19:14, Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." In Matthew 18:3, Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

I do not force the kids to read the Bible. I do not make them pray if they don't want to. We do not have a specific time every day when we all have to sit around the table and do a Bible study. I do not send them to Christian School or Wee College or Awanas or Sparks or any other program in hopes that they will learn the "basics" of Christianity. (Disclaimer: I went to most of those programs myself as a child and they are great. They work. I still remember many of the verses I memorized when I was 4 years old. Our kids might do these or other programs at some point in the future.)

What we have chosen to do, however, is include God in our everyday lives. We show the kids how to pray by doing it ourselves. We read the Bible with them whenever they ask. We answer their questions. And when we don't have the answers, we look them up together. We pray with them before bed, about the things that are important in their lives. We belong to an awesome church, and the kids are excited to go each week. We talk with them about how God wants us to live our lives. We talk about love, kindness, generosity, forgiveness, peace, joy, and all those good things. We try our best to live a life that is in line with the Word of God and that glorifies Him.

I love that my kids play with God. I don't want them to think that a relationship with God is just about church on Sunday, saying grace before dinner, and being forced to read the Bible every day. I want them to read the Bible, of course, but I want them to do it because they love to do it, not because I told them to. I want them to pray and talk to God because they have something to say to Him, and because they love Him, not because they have to do it before they get to eat. I don't want to hinder them from coming to Jesus in their own way. And many times I think that my own relationship with God would be much deeper if I could treat Him in the same way the kids do - as a close friend.

an eyeball dissection

It has been months since my last post. Terrible! I kept thinking to myself, "I should really write something," but then life got in the way. For any of you who have kids at home, whether they are big or small, you know what I mean. If I get 10 minutes to myself, I am usually in the bathroom (although it's rare to be alone in there), sleeping (actually, there are usually kids there too), or trying to read one of the many books in my "to-read" pile (which are mostly about raising kids). Hmmm...

Since I last posted, we have done a million fun and interesting things, and there is no way I could write about all of them. But because I mentioned Ella's fascination with the eyeball in my last post, I thought I'd share a little about our eyeball dissection!

When Ella first told me she wanted to look inside an eye, I checked the internet to see if I could get an eyeball from somewhere. Educational supply website? Butcher? I didn't really know where to start. I mentioned my quest to a friend of mine who teaches at a public school, in the hopes that she might know where her school gets their eyeballs from. She did even better than that, though; she brought us two eyeballs from her school! When I showed them to the kids, they were so excited to cut into them.

We put on some gloves (which were kind of big for the kids, as I don't think they make "little kid" sized latex gloves), spread out some cardboard on the kitchen table (sorry to those of you who have eaten at my table since then), and got to work. At first the kids were reluctant to touch the eyeballs, but they soon got into it. We used the iPad to look up the names for all the parts of the eye, and how to cut into it. I had done this dissection when I was 13 or 14, but I don't even want to tell you how many years it's been since then, so needless to say, I had no idea what I was doing. But we figured it out, we learned together, and we had so much fun. Ella loved seeing and holding the lens, but asked that next time we cut something up, that it be something "less slimy."

I love unschooling!