~ Grease Monkeys ~

I rarely take all of my children on more than an errand or two in town. I usually just wait till my love gets home around 4:00 PM and do my running around after that. I think stores that stay open late promote tranquility and sanity for moms. I have often found myself - during later evening hours - dancing down grocery store aisles (they have the best music) all alone with nobody saying, "Mom, you're embarrassing me." Who is trying to crawl beneath the cart or standing on the sides of it? Nobody. Nobody is standing to the right and left of my elbows either, resulting in what I think of as the Millater Battering Ram... 3 people and a shopping cart wide - plus two whirlwind toddlers in, on, or hanging off of the sides of the cart. People see us coming down the bakery aisle and decide they didn't really need bread after all. That's what I would do in that situation. I'd think, "We have tortillas anyway... never had PB&J on tortillas."

Sometimes, when it seems like it's been a long time since I've taken all the children on errands with me I start to think, "It really wasn't that bad last time. I think I can manage it." For the record... that's just stupidity talking. I tend to forget certain things too easily... like the time I was putting groceries in my boxes at Aldi when the giant Aldi cart fell over on top of Claire (who had been standing on the side of the cart). She was not even quite 3 at the time, and I had no idea that was even possible! I must have pulled enough weight out of the inside of the cart, because as I was putting things in the boxes, I heard a crash and screaming, and half the store was rushing to my side to help me pull the cart off my screaming toddler. OR... the time when Levi crawled under the cart at Walmart while I was talking to a friend and scooted just far enough down the narrowing rungs on the cart to get his knobby knee hopelessly stuck. He was screaming so loud that people came from aisles around wondering what I had done to him. OR... the time when Claire had to go to the bathroom and, while I was headed toward the family restroom, she ended up walking into the men's. She was in there 10 minutes, and I thought she was in the women's the whole time. We searched the women's restroom and started to head down coronary alley as she sauntered out of the men's room swinging her sweatshirt in the air. I said, "Claire, didn't you notice that was the men's room?" She said, "What? It is?" I said, "Yes, didn't you think it was strange that there were men in there?" She replied casually, "There were only a few." These are the annals of Millater shopping lore.

Somehow I always think that the next time will be different. However, today was no exception. We decided to meet my sister at the library for an hour around 10:00. Austin is usually my right arm when we do things like this, because he's my extra set of adult eyes (not always hands, but at least he sees what they're doing). It's hard when each one heads a different direction as soon as we enter the building - trying to keep track of where everyone is and what they're doing. Aside from Levi and Violet personally tasting every, single item of pretend food the library owns and Violet nearly leaving the library with a strange man, things went pretty well.

On to the UPS store. I got distracted on the way to the UPS store and thought I was going to Walmart. So after I got parked and all of the kids unloaded at Walmart, I realized to my joy and pain that I didn't need to be at Walmart at all. So everyone got back into their seats (to the refrain of weeping and wailing from the younger two), and we headed over to UPS. The package delivery went without incident, and we headed to the pool store, which also went without incident, because everyone stayed in their seats.

Then... Jiffy Lube. On a good day, I'm not fond of Jiffy Lube. It smells funny. The floor is always filthy. The chairs have some sort of sticky residue on them. The magazine selection consists of Field and Stream and racing fare. The bathroom is unisex and, therefore, an adventure in disgustingness. They always give you the "you know nothing about your vehicle" shame fest/sales pitch. Oh, but they offer complimentary coffee and water. There's only one catch - you have to bring your own cups - and your own coffee and/or water. (Nearly every time I go, there is no coffee, very little water, and no cups.) The added joy of bringing children to Jiffy Lube is the tiny lobby, the grimy toys (that I'm sure have never made the acquaintance of a Lysol wipe), the greasy floors, the stale air, the rickety candy machines in the corner, and the almost (but not quite) empty water cooler with no cups.

On this particular occasion, we had not yet eaten lunch at 11:34 AM when we pulled in, and we were in a rather lengthy line. We didn't pull out of Jiffy Lube until 12:34 PM (which is a whole other meridian), which means that it wasn't as much "jiffy" as it was "lube". I doubt they'd bring in as many customers if they called it Sluggish Lube or even Sluggish, Dirty, and Bring Your Own Cups Lube. However, if they had a suggestion box, I might have been tempted to comment, "if you advertise a 'no butt crack view guarantee', you might bring in some more customers." The kids didn't seem to mind. They were craning their necks to see the goings on in the big shop next to the lobby... the men working together like a big, hairy, well-oiled machine. The first 5 1/2 minutes went smoothly as the kids were interested in the grimy toys they only see about 3 times per year. But after they had emptied the lego container onto the floor and table and taken all the pieces out of the 3 puzzles, they were unimpressed and began to move on to the non-toy toys. I was trying to track down a book to read to the kids as I turned around to see Levi thoroughly licking the front window right under the OPEN sign. As I searched, next to the actual two styrofoam cups they had for (nonexistent) napkins to clean up the slobbery slime/grime combo on the window, Violet found a broken popsicle stick in the garbage can and proceeded to suck on the sharp end of one and round end of the other before I could reach her. As I was taking that away from her and re-trashing it, I looked to find Levi swinging the cord of the OPEN sign around his head - barely missing his sisters' faces as they were squealing. The sign was swaying back and forth precariously like it could fall any second. He had apparently unplugged the sign and was using the cord as a mace. As I re-plugged it, an elderly man, who had walked in earlier, snickered at one or all of us. We decided to share a styrofoam cup of water (the last dribbles of water from the cooler) - just for something to do, but as I was trying to prevent an accident involving a chair, the water got dumped on the floor and on Sadie.

The man in charge of customer service came over for my sale's pitch - which was punctuated by intermittent "Can we go to Donalds?" from Levi and a polite smile from the salesman. He told me a flat out lie about my vehicle mileage/oil change ("per the manufacturer") frequency, and I told him he was wrong and offered to show him the vehicle manual on the subject... to which he responded that the vehicle manual assumes we are using synthetic oil, and then he tried to sell me the synthetic oil at 3x the price of regular oil. I had a 50% off coupon, but that still didn't sound like a deal to me. Short on time, and desperate to leave, I pulled the ol', "I'm just a brainless woman, and I have to talk to my husband before I change anything with our vehicles," routine (which always works since it's a different guy every time). After accepting a half price tire rotation, I sat down to play with the kids until the van was done. They had brought in two stuffed animals, which they had been throwing up in the air - and after the Sheltie narrowly missed the elderly man, I decided a safer game would be for Claire and Levi to throw them to me and I would throw them back to them. They stood back against the wall below the counter to play catch with mom. It went well for about 75 seconds until Levi got excited and jumped up as he threw resulting in a loud crack of the top of his head against the bottom of the countertop and loud screaming and wailing. Shortly after I got him calmed down, the man came with my car keys, and I wanted to kiss his feet. After chasing around my Grease Monkeys for a full hour, I was ready for the relief a couple of car seats provide.

The exhaustion of running errands with the children makes me wonder where I'm going wrong sometimes. I realize that there are 6 of us who all want our way, and that has a part to play. I want my children to, not just learn to pick up their toys, but to learn to take responsibility for their actions. I want them to gradually put away their childish ways as they grow older. Lately I've been reading about the putting away of "childish things". 1 Corinthians 13:9-12 says, ⁹For we know in part and we prophesy in part;¹⁰but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. ¹¹When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. ¹²For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. It makes me wonder how many of my childish things I have yet to put away... selfishness, complaining, slandering, ungratefulness, procrastination, and the desire to be entertained, - even insecurities... so many things that I see in myself that shouldn't be so pronounced anymore. These things make life difficult. Because of these things, I have friction with those who surround me, with those I love. I am stunted in my growth. I can only get so far in my relationships, in my personal growth, in my spiritual walk, all of it - before I am frustrated and thwarted by those childish ways.

Verse 12 makes me happy though - it says that although I now only know God partially, understand spiritual reality dimly, and only slightly understand my purpose - I am fully known by a Father who wants to help me put away my childish ways. He enables me to put things in their proper place. He works with me to help me grow up into a person who is okay with acknowledging my own weakness and dependency. With my own children, I am training them for physical independence... so that they will be able to meet their own needs. God is training me to recognize my dependence... so that I will remember where to go to get my needs met. Of course, independence is only an illusion anyway - we are still always connected to one another - if only in our need. We are certainly connected to our power source... that which keeps our heart beating in our chest... our Battery. I can be thankful for those needs, because they always lead me to the Source of their meeting.

I poke fun at the folks at Jiffy Lube, but, to their credit, they have always done an excellent job taking care of our vehicles. They meet a need for our family too. Running errands with my grease monkeys is never easy, but it's always a learning experience.

For the Birds

A couple months ago my husband was working 72 hour weeks at his job. My own father works at the same place as Mark does and has for most of my life. As a result, I'm used to the types of things that go on during these weeks of long hours. One thing my mom still says to this day is that things always go wrong when there is no one around to fix them. A refrigerator compressor goes out. The clothes dryer quits working. The van gets a flat. Those types of minor irritations generally accompany everyday life, but when your husband is your handyman, they seem worse somehow. I found this out last year during a set of long work hours for Mark.

Last fall Mark got a new lawn mower. He had never before owned a new lawn mower, and had spent hours each week working on our old one. We went ahead and bought a spiffy new lawn cart to go with it. This lawn mower is his mechanical pride and joy. He changes the oil regularly, washes the deck after mowings, and all but spit polishes it and kisses it goodnight. He taught Austin how to run it before he taught me, and I assume this means that a man of nearly any age is more trustworthy with machinery than I. I did my fair share of mowing in junior high and high school for my parents - who own quite a bit of acreage. So I'm not completely inept at running machinery. However, I do have a tendency toward paranoia at swooping birds, and I have been known to jump off machinery and run around screaming that the birds are attacking my hair. I always say, birds can recognize good nest material when they see it.

Anyway, Austin is actually the one who gave me mower instructions, and he is a great instructor. If I was half the student he is an instructor, we wouldn't have run into trouble. On this particular occasion (as I often do) I was trying to figure out how to entertain the kids while getting work done. So I thought - "the lawn needs mowed" and simultaneously "hey, big lawn cart, and kids love rides." So I hooked up the cart and told the kids to hop in the back. Claire and Levi gladly did. I gave strict instructions that they remain seated at all times while the mower was in motion. They looked at me like that was a no-brainer, and we proceeded as I engaged the mower. The first 5 minutes or so things went GREAT. The kids were having fun, and I was getting work done. It was like parenting utopia. I had entered the magical world where work and fun meet and seem to effortlessly pair. As it turns out, they've met before and couldn't stand each other and decided it would never work out. On this occasion, they only briefly acknowledged one another in passing.

Our lawn is a hilly place - especially in the back. The first problem came when I realized that Austin hadn't told me how to engage the brake. (This happened, you see, because this new machine had something called hydrostatic transmission - which, for all you women out there, means it stops or slows when you take your foot off the main pedal.) This being a hilly lawn, you can imagine the problem as I was barreling down the hill toward the 32' round pool. Visions of running into the water-filled mammoth on my lawn mower - kids in tow - tore through my mind as we bounced down the hill recklessly toward it. I swerved and barely missed the pool. I ended up on a flatter surface and, when I could actually breathe again, I decided I should go find Austin for a few more lessons. So I started to climb the hill slowly - only to realize that the machine didn't want to pull me and the children up the steeper incline at the degree of turn I was asking. So we started to roll backward... back toward the pool. The lawn cart suddenly jackknifed - stopping us briefly, and the insides of the one tire ripped out and the whole tire just fell off the wheel hub. As I glanced sheepishly at the MADE IN U.S.A. sticker on the back of the lawn cart I wondered if it applied to the tires on the cart as well, because I had to console myself that they were manufactured elsewhere. (Of course, I'm not even certain that my fellow Americans could build machinery that could see me coming.) I finally found the brake, but the parking break eluded me. I pushed down tightly on the brake and sent Claire off to find Austin to show me where the parking brake was before we rolled any farther down hill. I realized that I would have to eat humble pie in front of my teenager - which is never fun, not to mention that his dad would surely be consoled that he had made the right decision about who to train on the proper use of his new machine. The fact that I was "only trying to help" would be appreciated but mostly eclipsed in the muck of not only having to still mow the lawn but also having to now fix the mower and cart that I had driven into a pickle.

Fast forward a year, and spring outage 2010 comes. Mark is working his long hours again, and, as Sunday morning comes, a strange scratching in the flue/pipe of our living room wood stove. I've long found this wood stove useless for us, and we just store old newspapers in there right now... in case the apocalypse comes, and we can't buy pinatas and other paper mache` items anymore. We'll have quite the business, I imagine. But I digress... There was a bird in our flue. It flew into our flue. (homophones) I love nature, but flying things and I don't always get along (as evidenced in the above narrative). My dad came that morning to pick up Austin for church... as the little ones were sick, and I was staying home with them. He said that he was running late, but when they came back they would help me get it out of the flue. Well, after about an hour at home, I realized that the scratching and flying had stopped, and I assumed that the bird had flown the flue. The dog, however, was not as convinced and kept his eyes firmly peeled as he shook nervously at the edge of the stove.

I reached into the stove to put the Saturday paper inside, and something jumped and flapped. It was the bird. I screamed and shut the door. The dog was going crazy. The kids thought I was the one who was going crazy. Anyway, after about an hour I thought to myself, "This is stupid. I can catch a little bird, and put it outside." Do you ever get that? The pioneer spirit of my great grandmothers rears it's can-do attitude and gets me into trouble. I grabbed a large plastic bag and held it in front of the door of the stove and opened the door. The bird saw a chink in my armor (maybe that it was a plastic bag) and flew straight out the door and into our living room. It flew back and forth divebombing me and the little ones. I was screaming, ducking, and holding onto my hair. It was a true coward-fest my children were witnessing. I think I scared the poor bird (a sparrow, if you were wondering), and it ran into a window and fell to the floor on the stairs. I rarely wish death on any of God's creatures, but I went to try to take what I hoped was a dead bird outside. As I went to pick it up, the bird flew up into my face and started circling the living room again... to the (I'm loath to report) same refrain of screaming and lunacy I had demonstrated only minutes before - apparently 2 minutes had not matured me at all in this particular area.

Finally the bird flew downstairs, and I regained a small amount of composure. Weighing all my options and realizing that I couldn't leave the creature down in my family room to "grossify" it all up, I went downstairs to search for it. I found the stunned creature about 5 feet from the glass sliding doors clicking. It was clicking its beak. I don't know what that means, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with stress. If had had a beak, I am pretty sure I would have been clicking too. I moved closer to it, and it didn't even try to move away from me. I figured it would start to fly again, but it just sat there. I grabbed a towel and tossed it over the bird, and the bird still sat there. I picked it up to move it outside, and it still didn't move. It sat in the grass for a good 10 minutes, and, as I was about to take its picture for memorabilia, it flew away. I was glad I hadn't killed it - or vice versa.

All in all, dignity gone (which isn't a new thing for me), I felt pretty good about the outcome. "Hear me roar" and all. I managed to handle the situation (with very little grace), but I got the job done. I would surely impress my dad and Mark that they didn't have to help little, old, helpless me. I ended up with a decent story to tell as well. I didn't make friends with the aviary kingdom that day. That would have been the ideal outcome, but I don't think I'll be enjoying birds any time soon - except through binoculars and on my dinner plate.

I feel blessed that I do have men in my life who will take care of me. I know some women bristle at the idea, but I like to be taken care of, and I don't mind being thought of as "the weaker sex", because sometimes - especially physically - I am. And I like that my dad, my husband, and now my sons, all like to come to my rescue when I need it. Family is an excellent thing. We were at a combined, family birthday party tonight, and I needed to write 4 birthday checks, but halfway there realized we only had 3 checks left in the checkbook. Mark and I debated as we were giving everyone else $30 checks, we had two $20 bills between us for cash, and we couldn't give someone $40 over the rest. What a dilemma. I realized, as tacky as it sounds, family are people that you can ask to give you change from their birthday card money. Dad was happy to oblige and come to my rescue again. :)

I'm pretty sure that God gave us family to show us how He wants us to be with Him - close enough to be real... forgetful, weak, silly, and all... He knows it all anyway, but I'm convinced He gave us a voice for a reason - He likes to hear it. Sure, we could communicate with Him through our minds only, but He loves my voice. It is music to His ears. No matter what I say, He wants to hear it - and maybe the weaker, the better, because, "When I am weak, then I am strong."

II Corinthians 12:9-11

⁹But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. ¹⁰ For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.