The Week I Was Going To Have It All Together

Saturday: With the husband and the oldest two at camp, the girl at the grandparents' house, and the littlest entertaining himself with Lego and lightsabers, I spend the day cleaning and rearranging. Papers are filed or discarded and homeschool books are sorted into crates for each child. The floors are vacuumed and mopped, and I go to bed feeling ready to embrace a new week with joyous, focused energy.

Sunday: I wake to find our sweet boxer sleeping in a lake of her own urine. Her continence and hips have been failing for a couple months now. When our campers return, I notice the pile of laundry they dump in the hallway only long enough to schedule it for Monday morning's first load of launch.

Monday: Again, I wake to a dog in a puddle, and it feels like the proverbial last straw. I just can't bear to wash the dog's blanket and the floor every morning or so. I tell Geoff, rather firmly, that it is time for him to take the dog to the vet. I've already taken her twice, to no avail. She's old, and despite medication and special diet, she's not improving. When he agrees to take her the next morning, I fall apart. She's our dog. I don't want this to be the end. I don't want to have to make this decision. But her health is unmistakeably failing... and as I watch her sleep that night, I see her tensing in her sleep and know that she is ready to rest.

Tuesday: We say goodbye to Sara, the dog who has been so perfect for our family for almost seven years. As on Monday, we work through our school lessons in a jagged sort of way - a little of this, a bit of that, with breaks now and then when the tears won't stay where they belong. I don't think I can look at another boxer again.

Wednesday: Geoff sends me a link to a boxer mix at the Humane Society of Charlotte. He's cute. And when I call, they tell me he's sweet.

Thursday: With a prayer for wisdom, I lead my four children into the humane society shelter and ask to see Simba. They send me out to the kennel. I walk between rows of cages, cold air nipping at my cheeks while dogs jump and bark on either side of me. I'm a little nervous that one of the kids will get too close to the wrong dog and lose a finger. And then we see him, sitting in his kennel, quietly looking at us. One of the kennel workers leads us to an interaction pen while another brings Simba. He walks around, sniffing along the edge of the fence, then stops to investigate us. He's beautiful. He's sweet. He's big. He's gentle. Geoff and I are texting back and forth. He suggests sleeping on it. I'm terrified someone else will adopt this dog. He comes home with us.

He tries to look out the windshield. He steps on a kid or two, trying to look out a side window. When we arrive home, he chases the cats. He strains to get to the guinea pigs. I keep him on the leash until Geoff gets home and sets up the crate we'd used for the Great Dane we had many, many years ago. When we put him in the crate, he whines every time we leave the room. He even escapes the crate once.

I can't sleep. There's a knot in my stomach. I'm sure I've done the wrong thing, and I wish I could go back and undo the whole crazy day. I miss Sara. This new dog... He's going to be a lot more work than I had expected. If only I'd listened to Geoff... If only I'd listened to that tiny voice telling me to wait... I hadn't realized how unready I was for a new dog. All the things that had swayed me into adopting him - his beauty, his gentleness, his sweetness - none of them seem to matter much anymore.

Friday: I wake up tired, with that knot still in my stomach. I apologize to Geoff, and I ask him if we need to take the dog back before the mistake gets any bigger. My husband - the man I love so very much - tells me to give it time. It's not so bad. We've had plenty of emotionally driven decisions turn out for good. We dub the dog Bane, because emotional decisions seem to be the bane of our life, and we might as well embrace that fact, and because the dog never responded to the name he'd come with.

I take Bane for a short walk while Geoff moves the guinea pigs upstairs. When our pastor stops by to welcome Bane to the neighborhood, I try not to cry. I don't want to admit how awfully selfish I've been to bring him home...and then to wonder if we ought to take him back, because I am just not ready for a new dog, no matter how sweet, gentle, and gorgeous he is. And then, as we go about a new day of school and cleaning and letting Bane get comfortable, I kind of, sort of fall in love with this big boxer mix whose daddy, I begin to suspect, may have been a Dane. By evening, when the youth group comes over for a bonfire, I introduce Bane to each visitor with hopefully not too obvious pride. Something has happened, and I think the simplest way to put it is that Bane became mine. He loves his people, and he tries so hard to please us.

And please us he does.

I could write more - about how wisdom isn't always logical, about persevering when one would rather give up, about life's detours not always being nearly as bad as we think they are, about finding grace, amazing grace, in the midst of one's foolishness. Maybe someday I will, but it's late now, and we'll soon have a new Monday to live. I doubt I'll ever have it all together, but that's okay.

I sign off with heartfelt gratitude to all who helped welcome Bane home. He is, without doubt, a keeper.

A Simple Philosophy of Family Size

I've read a lot of blog posts on family size lately. Rather, I've seen a lot of blog posts on family size. Some of them are just too long to read while waiting for the toast to pop up. Anyhow, since talking about family size is so in vogue, on this cold Friday morning, with Jake and the Neverland Pirates playing in the background and an adorable girl leaning against me with her hair in every bit as much disarray as my own, I offer my own simple philosophy of family size.

1. You get what you get, whether you plan it or not, and it's really no one's business why you have the number of children you have. More importantly...
2. You love what you get. No matter what, you love your children. Every single one of them.
3. You do what you have to do. With each additional child, some things get easier, some things get harder. Sometimes you hang your head in shame (Jake is a huge step up from some of the shows we watch around here), but sometimes you amaze yourself. But whatever your situation, you do what must be done to keep your family alive and well.
4. It's hard. Whether you have one or twenty, raising children is a daunting journey, with unforeseen challenges at every turn.
5. It's worth it. That part about loving what you get... It's true, and it's what makes you unable to imagine life without any one of your children.

That's it. My simple philosophy. No pros and cons of any particular number because I don't attach virtue to the number of times a woman has pushed a baby out of her body. This is not to say that I've never noted a difference between myself and mothers with fewer or more children than I have, or that I've never appreciated posts about largish families. But we speak of mothers coming together and supporting one another, and while I think we can honestly lay out the joys and challenges of life with what society considers "a large number" of children, it's far more important simply to recognize and celebrate the joys and challenges of motherhood and fatherhood, without regard for family size.

Because there's another point I might add, and that's that, as parents, however many children we have, we're all in this together.