In Which Squirrelboy Stands Up for His Faith and I Realize How Many Awesome People We Know

Even though I know many families for whom an education at a religious school has been a great fit and I don't disparage it as a choice, I never seriously considered sending my children to a Christian school. Even when I was homeschooling Squirrelboy for middle school I used very little Christian specific curriculum (and modified what I did use) and purposely joined a homeschool coop that, unlike the majority in our town, welcomes anyone and is not tied into a particular religion, let alone a particular expression of Christianity.

So my kids have spent their entire educational careers either in public school or in a homeschool environment that was purposely diverse in terms of the worldviews of the families involved. Despite the fear I encountered from some of the Christian homeschooling families I got to know during my homeschooling years, neither their teachers nor the curriculum they have been taught have been opposed in any way to our beliefs. In fact, both kids have had some amazing teachers in the public schools who were Christians who specifically believed they were called by God to teach in the public schools. They've also had plenty of great teachers who don't share our faith but have not in any way tried to denigrate it.

That was all absolutely true until last week in Squirrelboy's biology class. Since his high school classes mostly operate on a semester schedule he started some new classes in January. In science, he moved from physics to biology. He had met the biology teacher before, and even interviewed him about the climate strike that he helped organize early in the school year, and had a good impression of him.

Squirrelboy still likes the teacher overall, but he was both annoyed an taken aback by the way the teacher chose to introduce the idea of what is and what is not scientifically verifiable. He put, in the category of scientifically verifiable, Earthquakes, and, in the category of not scientifically verifiable, Angels. Point taken. Angels are part of my cosmology, but I agree that they're not scientifically verifiable. I can think of several less controversial things the teacher could have used given that he lives in the Bible belt, but whatever. If he had stopped there, Squirrelboy would have been only slightly annoyed.

The biology teacher went on to speak against all religion as not scientifically verifiable and therefore wrong. He specifically said the the Bible cannot be believed because it is based only on witness testimony. He apparently even went so far to deny the existence of Jesus as a historical figure. Throughout the class period, Squirrelboy respectfully pushed back against these ideas. The teacher gave no credence to his arguments.

That afternoon, Squirrelboy got into the car feeling pretty angry. We talked it through, and he decided he wanted to write a paper detailing the evidence for at least parts of the Bible being historically verifiable and give it to the teacher, just to show how strongly he feels about this issue. 

I wrote a Facebook post about Squirrelboy's experience, and I was amazed by how many people came out the woodwork to support Squirrelboy and his courage in standing up for his beliefs as well as to disagree with the way the teacher presented this issue. I got everything from comments from Christian friends cheering me on for raising a child with a strong faith to comments from Atheist friends who were appalled that an educator would bring his own religious biases into the classroom in this way. All were supportive.

In addition, many people reached out both to me and directly to Squirrelboy with suggestions for resources Squirrelboy can use for the paper he wants to write. Christian, Jewish, and Atheist friends all suggested resources. That Friday Squirrelboy went to a conference with our church's youth group. One of the adult chaperones came up to him and said, "I have all kinds of thoughts and resources to share with you this weekend." Squirrelboy had set up a meeting with our pastor, and the pastor's wife (who was another chaperone) told me she and her husband were listening to a podcast and at one point he said, "Oh, that's a great thing to bring up during my meeting with Squirrelboy!" (though of course he called him by his real name).

Squirrelboy had his meeting with our pastor yesterday, and he said it was very helpful. Kittygirl and I waited out in the van during the meeting, and the pastor came out with Squirrelboy afterward to summarize what they'd talked about. He also ordered a book for Squirrelboy which will be delivered directly to our house. Who does that?

I'm incredibly proud of Squirrelboy for standing up for his beliefs. It's further proof that, so far, I have managed to do a a pretty good job with Squirrelboy despite the evidence to the contrary I might have decided to take from last week's phone misuse affair. I'm particularly heartened by the fact that I've managed to raise a kid who is learning to own the faith he's being raised in for himself. Due to my own upbringing (which I may, or then again may not, write about another day), I have often felt like I'm stumbling through the dark when it comes to what it means to raise children in a Christian home. Last week's evidence is just the latest piece to suggest that I'm doing a good job after all. 

Trust me, it's not because I'm totally awesome and super spiritual. I give all the credit to God for this one.

In Which My Tween and My Teen Aren't as Responsible as Adults (But For Some Reason that Surprises Me)

News flash: 8 year olds and 14 year olds aren't adults. You would think I would know this, and I do of course in theory, but sometimes I still find myself expecting my kids to act like adults when it comes to their decision-making ability. That came up in different ways for both kids this week.

Though I've gotten better about not compulsively checking my Dexcom share app, I do still often take a peak shortly before her lunchtime and sometime in the afternoon (her lunch period, for some unfathomable reason, falls at 10:35am). When I checked before lunch her bg was coasting in the 80's, which is a totally awesome number to be at right before a meal. I figured she might actually stay in range for the whole school day, which isn't super common and would be totally awesome.

When I looked again shortly after noon, her bg was nearly 300 and still climbing. I could not for the life of me figure out how that could have happened. I'd allowed her to switch from greek yogurt tubes to gogurt tubes, which have a little more sugar. Could that have made such a big difference? We'd had an issue with a bad pump site a few days earlier. Could it have been happening again?

There was nothing I could do until I picked her up at 2:45. I checked her pump as soon as we left the building, intending to look through the history and try to figure out what happened before giving a correction. I didn't need to go that far, however, her pump was still on the "confirm bolus" screen from lunch, which means that she did not deliver any insulin for the lunch she ate.

To my credit, I learned a lesson after I reduced her to tears for not bolusing for her snack at Girls on the Run in the fall. I didn't get angry. I told her what I saw, explained that I was relieved there was such a simple explanation for her high blood sugar, then gave her a correction and sent her on her way.

Internally, however, I was pretty annoyed both that a) she forgot to complete a process she does EVERY.SINGLE.DAY. and b) the teacher didn't notice. When I reflected on it, though, I realized that it's actually expecting a lot to give my still relatively young child responsibility (even very part time) to take over for one of her organs that stopped doing part of its job. Under normal circumstances, kids without allergies can just eat without thinking about it. It's not as if she willfully sat down and ate her lunch without pulling out her insulin pump. She entered the information. She just forgot to deliver the insulin.

Diabetes, as much as I hate this fact, is a marathon, not a sprint. Barring a cure (which I don't think will happen until Kittygirl is a young adult, best case scenario), Kittygirl will have to deal with this disease her entire life, long after I'm done raising her and having at least some responsibility for her actions. My job is to teach her to manage her diabetes as well as I can, and to try to do so gently so as to either make burnout as a teen or young adult unlikely or something she has the tools to overcome.

In another venue altogether, Squirrelboy reminded us this week that he's still not completely responsible. Monday night he was caught using his phone in an unapproved way later at night than he's allowed to use his phone for anything other than listening to books before falling asleep. He wasn't accessing anything objectionable, but he was breaking hard and fast rules nonetheless, and the phone history showed it wasn't the first time.

Understandably, Mr. Engineer was pretty upset when he caught him. I was already in bed when it happened, but I heard about it in the morning. Squirrelboy had lost his phone for the day, and he came into the living room in the morning crying. I thought he was crying about losing the phone, but it turns out that what really upset him was that he had disappointed his dad and he was afraid Mr. Engineer would never trust him again.

I assured him that that wasn't the case, but he didn't stop being stressed and nervous until he and Mr. Engineer had had a talk about the incident after dinner. This reaction actually made me happy, because it shows we're doing a pretty good job as parents. If our teenager breaks a rule and his main cause of distress is having possibly lost his dad's trust, I call that a parenting win.

New rules have been set, including the phone charger being moved to our bedroom and the phone being plugged in to charge before bedtime and not moving until the morning. Perhaps we should have done this to begin with, but, as a general rule, we prefer to let our kids have a good amount of responsibility unless and until they show they aren't ready for it.

That applies to both diabetes responsibilities and general life responsibilities. Sometimes it turns out well. Other times it doesn't, but the way we react to those times (like, say, not freaking out about a high blood sugar caused by user error but rather using it as a teaching moment) has the potential to teach our kids a lot.

In Which It's Hard to Be the Best

I took a long break from blogging while traveling for the holidays, but now I'm back and I intend to start posting once or twice a week again. We'll see whether my goals to intentionally exercise and to devote time to writing my own fiction and being part of a critique group combined with my extra work because we're getting new carpet this month actually allow me to do so. At the least I'll be sure to carve out a regular time for blogging when the house is back in order sometime in February :).

On to today's subject. As you've probably picked up by now, Kittygirl's diabetes has not seemed to impact her schoolwork in the least. Ever since she started school, schoolwork has come relatively easily to her. She's not perfect at everything every time, but shes performs better in everything in elementary school than her brother did while expending less effort.

Don't take that last sentence above to mean Kittygirl doesn't care about school and is lazy. She loves school and always does her best work. The difference is that doing so isn't difficult for her in the way it is for her brother. He often takes at least three times longer to do his homework than his teachers intended for it to take, whereas it's not unusual for Kittygirl to complete her work in half the time the teacher thought it would take. Standardized tests were always really stressful for Squirrelboy and I remember both of us feeling stressed in his third grade year as he faced his first set of state tests. Kittygirl, on the other hand, is super excited about the tests coming up in the spring and wishes she could speed up time so she could go ahead and take them.

Kittygirl also excels in athletic endeavors more often than not. During the two seasons she played soccer, her coach said she was the best girl of her age he had ever coached. She was never the best in her ballet class, but she never struggled greatly to catch onto the steps either. She moved up to the intermediate class in gymnastics two months after starting in the beginning class.

For most of her life, most things have come really easily for Kittygirl. I have joked before that she got diabetes because otherwise parenting her would have been way too easy. However, this post isn't really about bragging on Kittygirl's great competence. It's about how that competence can actually be a weakness on occasion.

Every once in awhile, Kittygirl runs into something that actually challenges her. One example is the game Ticket to Ride, which Mr. Engineer loves to play and is very good at. Kittygirl has started playing it fairly often during the past six months. She's improving, but she's still not as good as her dad and she only sometimes equals her brother. This really bothers her. In fact, she'll sometimes throw a little fit and refuse to play because she "can never win." It doesn't occur to her that her skills are growing and she will eventually win a game, quite possibly in the near future. It just bothers her that she wasn't the best to begin with. The board below is a game my kids and one of their cousins played with Mr. Engineer on our Christmas travels. They all beat him, which is pretty astounding. However, Kittygirl was still upset because she didn't get first place and she "never wins anything," which is manifestly untrue.

Later during the same trip we went to a roller rink with cousins. The cousins have their own roller blades and are very good. Kittygirl has skated a few times at our local rink and is decent on regular skates, but she decided she wanted to rent roller blades to be like her cousins. It took her a long time before she was at all confident, and she hated it until the very end. She kept skating (or blading?) up and complaining about how horrible she was and how much faster everyone else was going. Pointing out that everyone else had probably been blading for more than an hour total in their lives did not help. She expected to be good right away. By the end she had gained a little confidence and she even asked for roller blades for her birthday, which is coming up at the end of the month.

I can't really blame Kittygirl for her expectations to be good at everything. She comes by them honestly. I'm a lot like that too. School was always super easy for me. I hated my sophomore honors English teacher for years because she had the audacity to give me B+ in the first quarter. I didn't have Kittygirl's natural athletic ability, but I did have her expectation to be good at the athletic endeavors I tried. That meant that I was frustrated when I did try sports and never put in the effort it would have taken me to be, if not excellent, at least decent. I eventually gave up on sports altogether. The exception was horseback riding, but I never had an interested in competing in that, so it didn't really matter if my seat wasn't perfect or I was terrified of jumps.

I've seen this tendency in myself as I've recently begun to take my writing seriously. I was critiquing someone else's novel manuscript and I expressed to Mr. Engineer that I was jealous because I didn't think I could write anything that good. He basically told me to get over myself and stop comparing my writing unfavorably to the writing of others, especially to the writing of other unpublished authors. As long as I know I'm doing my best work, it shouldn't matter if I think someone else's work is better. There's room in the world for a lot of different books.

And if, ultimately, my writing isn't good enough to be published (other than on this blog :)) or simply isn't the right style at the right time, that's okay too. My self worth doesn't need to be bound up in that. There are plenty of things I'm good at whether or not I ever have a novel on bookstore shelves.

 I've even seen the tendency to expect perfection crop up in Squirrelboy as he's gotten serious about his filmmaking endeavors. He critiques other students who don't understand as much as he does or who think making a film is easy. He also looks back at his own past efforts and heavily critiques them. I try to gently point out that a) not everyone cares about quality filmmaking in the same way he does and b) his past efforts aren't necessarily bad, their flaws just show how much he's grown.

What I need to remind myself of and impart to my kids is the fact that, just because some things are easy for us doesn't mean a) they're easy for everyone or b) every single thing we ever do will be easy for us. The fact is, lots of things in life take hard work, determination, and a lot of time to master. That's okay. That's actually good. Life would be pretty boring if we were automatically excellent at everything the first time. There would be no room to appreciate those who had mastered those things and there would be nothing to challenge us and compel us to work hard.

Keeping these things in sight will be useful to me both as I try to find my own way in the world and as I prepare my kids to do so.

In Which All I Want for Christmas Is a Closed Loop System

We're visiting my parents for Christmas right now, which we do every year. Because of this, we always open our family Christmas presents before we travel. It just doesn't make sense to lug a bunch of presents with us only to lug them all home again. This is especially true given that we'll be staying in three additional places during this trip. However, the kids often bring their favorite gift along with them. For Kittygirl this year, this was a hoverboard. They don't actually float like the ones Back to the Future promised my generation our kids would have, but they're pretty awesome nonetheless.

Kittygirl has taken to riding the hoverboard all around the house, prompting one of my brothers to start calling her a cyborg. I commented that this was particularly fitting given that her insulin pump is akin to a robotic pancreas. The thing is, though, in its current incarnation, it's a pretty pathetic robotic pancreas.

As anyone in the diabetes community already knows, despite the impression that some people outside the community has, an insulin pump is in no way equivalent to a pancreas. It doesn't automatically give you insulin (except for the basal insulin you've programmed it to give you) and even the pumps that do more in combination with a CGM don't give the results that a fully functioning pancreas gives.

As I've shared before, having diabetes does not feel like a huge burden to Kittygirl at this point. It annoys her sometimes, because we don't always let her eat exactly what she wants exactly when she wants to eat her. Her skin is sensitive and her pump and sensor sites are nearly constantly itching, and she gets annoyed when she's about to do something and we ask her to pull out her pump. However, overall, diabetes is just a small bump in the road of her life.

However, the burden is much heavier on me as a caregiver. This is particularly true because I've done my own research and I am constantly aiming for an A1C and time in range that are closer to nondiabetic numbers than to the minimum recommended by official sources. I'm still only mediocre at that, and it's a lot of work.

I've heard stories of kids who ask Santa for new diabetes technology or even for a cure for Christmas. Kittygirl has never done anything like that. I don't believe a magical being is going to lighten the burden of being a diabetes caregiver for me, of course, but I do see technology on the horizon that has the potential to do this.

Currently Kittygirl's Tslim X2 insulin pump runs a program called Basal IQ which shuts off the basal insulin when her blood sugar starts to drop and it predicts it's going to go low. There are people who have had few or no low blood sugars since starting to use Basal IQ. That has not been the case for Kittygirl. It does prevent some lows and help mitigate others (I know this for sure because I was fed up with it not working as advertised and turned it off one day, only to realize it really was helpful).

Just over a week ago, Tandem's latest  update, Control IQ, gained FDA approval This system will feature a much more advanced version of cutting off basal when it predicts low blood sugar, including reducing basal before cutting it off. More importantly, however, it will automatically both increase basal and give extra corrective doses of insulin as blood sugar starts to rise.

I'm very excited about this update. I think it has the potential to change our diabetes experience for the better. However, unlike many people,  I'm not excited in the main because I think it will greatly improve Kittygirl's A1C or time in range. Based on the data that has been shared from trials of the system, my sugar surfing skills produce numbers that are at least as good as and sometimes better than those the system produces for the average person.

The difference is that I only achieve those numbers through constant vigilance and frequent microdoses of insulin through the pump or small doses of fast acting carbs to head off a low blood sugar. There are times (and these times are increasing as Kittygirl does more activities independently) when I'm not available to do this. There are other times when I'm wrapped up in doing something else or  engaged in an activity that makes it impossible for me to use the pump (like driving). Though I still anticipate doing some of the things I do now when I'm with Kittygirl after her pump gets Basal IQ, I will have more peace of mind when she's away from me or when something else in our lives hinders me from being so vigilant.

I'm not actually getting this for Christmas, of course, the FDA approval of Control IQ makes it likely that I'll get it in the first quarter of 2020, which is pretty exciting.

My ultimate dream is for a system that requires even less interaction and doses glucagon for low blood sugar instead of just cutting off basal insulin. There's been a system like that under development for a long time, but it isn't approved yet. They've been predicting that it will be approved in a year or two for at least five years, so I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, I'll take the reduced burden that Control IQ is likely to give me.

Kittygirl, meanwhile, will enjoy her new cyborg status as she rolls around grandma's house on her hoverboard with her far from perfect but still fairly advanced robotic pancreas.

In Which I Believe in Magic (Sort Of)

When I was a naive, young college student and a relatively new Christian believer, I would have discussions with my Christian friends about whether or not, presuming we became parents in the future, we would introduce Santa and the Easter Bunny. Somehow the Tooth Fairy never came up. The debate was over whether, in introducing mythical gift givers and thus potentially focusing on gifts during these holidays, we would obscure the celebrations of the birth and resurrection of Jesus, respectively. We also feared that, when eventually our children discovered that Santa and the Easter Bunny were make believe they would be tempted to relegate Jesus to that realm as well.

Now, as a 40-something mother, I have not only embraced Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny (not to mention the Tooth Fairy), I have added an additional mythical gift giver to the assortment plus two holiday visitors.. Squirrelboy no longer believes in mythical gift givers, but he believed in Santa pretty firmly through Christmas of 4th grade, longer than many of his peers. Just before Christmas of his 5th grade year he told me that he believed we (Mr. Engineer and I) were Santa Claus, and probably the Easter Bunny too. I confirmed it, and recruited him to help keep the magic alive for his sister, who was 4 at the time. For the record, he never even brought up the question of whether Jesus was part of the make believe children's magic.

Christian families make different decisions about  mythical gift givers, and I don't mean to malign those who have prayerfully chosen not to introduce them. However, I have personally found that immersing children in a world of magic from an early age can be spiritually beneficial. It's pretty much impossible to explain the mystery of the Trinity to a three year old. Heck, it can be difficult for a 43 year old to understand the idea that God is simultaneously one God and three persons. However, it's not hard for a three year old to embrace the mystery of a kind man who travels around the world delivering presents on Christmas Eve.

I believe that introducing children to magic and mystery at an early age can ultimately be a really good thing for their spiritual lives. The fact is, the Gospel contains a lot of mysteries. Somehow the all-powerful creator of the universe mystically impregnated a young woman without the benefit of intercourse or reproductive technology and was born on earth as a baby who grew into a man who was 100% human and simultaneously 100% divine. Then that God-man purposely got himself executed in order to serve the punishment for sin for all of humanity, remained dead for a few days, and then rose from the dead, thus defeating death.

If you have been raised to believe that only what you can see and touch is real, frankly, that story sounds incredibly stupid and unbelievable. In the western world, however, even many Christians live as if only what we can see and touch is real. Introducing my children to a magical world conditions their hearts and minds to accept the unbelievable. As they've grown older and begun to ask their own questions about our faith, they have accepted that a lot of it is hard to understand and doesn't always make practical sense. I don't believe this would have worked as well if they had not been raised in the atmosphere in which we have raised them.

I should add that we have never focused on presents as the main reason for Christmas or Easter. We give presents to each other to celebrate the gift of Jesus. Santa also brings presents to celebrate the gift of Jesus, and all he does is fill the stocking and leave a few small gifts or one medium sized gift. The Easter Bunny brings candy and a few small gifts to celebrate Jesus' resurrection. Despite my misgivings pre-parenthood, I have never found it difficult to focus on Jesus and blend in mythical gift givers.

Because two holiday gift-givers weren't enough, we also added the Candy Fairy. She comes after Halloween and Easter and trades any candy the kids don't want for a small toy or some cash. We introduced this the first Easter after Kittygirl's diabetes diagnosis. She had gotten a lot of candy at a plethora of Easter Egg hunts, and I wasn't ready to deal with figuring out how to dole out the candy fairly and dose insulin for it. So I told her that I'd heard that, if she wanted to save just a little bit of her candy and leave the rest out, there was a Candy Fairy who would take it and leave a toy. She was all in, and to my surprise, so was her brother. The Candy Fairy came back for Halloween and has been a twice-yearly feature in our house ever since.

Finally, our family hosts both an Elf on the Shelf named and a Shepherd during Advent.

We don't focus on the elf telling Santa whether the kids have been good or bad. Santa, in our family mythology, gives gifts to celebrate the birth of Jesus, not gift dependent upon behavior. However, he observes our Advent practices and reports Christmas wishes to Santa. Our little Shepherd boy spends Advent searching for Baby Jesus and finds him (in plush version) on Christmas morning. He then stays with us for the twelves days of Christmas reminding us to keep celebrating. The shepherd also comes back a few weeks before Easter to remind us of the Easter story.

Even many people who don't embrace any spiritual belief point to the Christmas season as a magical time. There's no reason that embracing that magic has to harm your child's budding faith. On the contrary, it can help it blossom.

In Which My Christmas Tree Becomes a Metaphor for My Life

First of all, happy St. Lucia Day! If you don't happen to  have ever lived in Sweden or be of Swedish origin, you've probably never heard of this day. St. Lucia was a young woman from Sicily in (I think) the 4th century. She was ultimately martyred for her refusal to marry a powerful Roman who was a pagan. She has become the patron saint of the blind (because her eyes were reportedly poked out before she was killed) and of Sweden. She's probably patron of a few other things I as a protestant don't know about.

Sweden adopted Lucia, I think, in large part because her names means light. St. Lucia Day takes place on what (before the calendar was changed) used to be the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year. Her arrival (in the form of girls and young women dressed in white and wearing a evergreen crown with candles) heralds the return of the light and the fact that the days will gradually begin to get lighter and Spring will eventually come. Given that in parts of Sweden it is dark all day long at this point, that's an important reminder.

Facebook posts from my Swedish friends indicate that the commercialized Christmas season has crept further back in the year there just as it has here, but, when I was an exchange student in Sweden in the mid 1990's, the arrival of Lucia heralded the beginning of the Christmas season. Advent had already begun of course, but Christmas decorating, baking, etc., began in earnest after the 13th.

Years ago, before Squirrelboy was born, I was taking my writing more seriously and I had a story published in Spider magazine about a little Swedish girl celebrating St. Lucia Day after her family moved to Peru. When it was first published I didn't have kids', but I offered to come read the story to the classes of my friends who were teachers. Once Squirrelboy started preschool I read it to his class. That continued until 3rd grade. I've now read the story to Kittygirl's class every year since kindergarten, and today was the day. Since I most often come in to read about diabetes, I really enjoy reading something entirely different.

The story was always well liked by Squirrelboy's classmates, but it polls especially well at Kittygirl's Spanish Immersion school. There are both teachers and students at the school who were themselves born in Peru or whose parents immigrated from Peru. It's also particularly gratifying when I read the author's name and the students realized that I, Kittygirl's mother, wrote a story that appeared in a real magazine. I think writers are these far-off mythical people in their minds. Inevitably someone asks if I want to write a book. I was happy this year to report that I've written a book and am researching the best route to get it published.

I've been immensely gratified by the way my kids have reacted to my intention to start taking my writing more seriously, even if it means that there may come a time when I have less time to devote to them. Kittygirl, in fact, social butterfly that she is, would be over the moon if I a) spent enough time writing and b) made enough money to send her to the afterschool program. However, I'm not counting on that since she only has 2 1/2 years left of elementary school. The kids are super excited that I'm working on a book, and both of them have asked to read it when I'm done. Kittygirl even told her gymnastics teacher that her mom is writing a book.

This season has reminded me that my life is a work in progress. I think that's really true of all of our lives, even if special needs of any kind don't figure into them. It feels especially true if you're in the season of actively parenting small (or even taller than you but under 18) humans, but I don't think it ends when your kids leave the house, and I think it applies even if you  never had kids to begin with.

Our Christmas tree this year served as a metaphor for this. Mr. Engineer and Kittygirl left to get a tree at about 2pm Sunday. The idea was that they'd be back no later than 3:30, the tree would be up a little before 4, and all the decorating would be accomplished by the time the kids went to bed.

That's not what happened, however. It was almost 4 by the time the tree-procurers returned, but that wasn't the main obstacle. They had chosen the biggest tree we've ever had. Somehow it didn't occur to Mr. Engineer that our small tree stand might not support a larger tree.

It took him a long time to get the tree balanced in the tree stand. By the time it happened, in fact, we were sitting down to dinner. Five minutes into dinner there was a crash from the living room we all rushed in to see the tree tipped over onto an end table. Thankfully, there were no highly breakable decorations in the path of the tree.

Mr. Engineer made a detour to Meijer after dropping off Squirrelboy at youth group.  He came home with the most expensive tree stand, reasoning that a heavy metal stand would be more likely to help the tree balance. After a lot of work, we realized that stand was also a failure. Mr. Engineer made a trip back to Meijer for a third stand. This time he get one intended for a tree measuring up to 10 feet even though our tree is only 8 feet high. The good news is the new stand was plastic and only half the cost of the metal one he returned. The even better news is that it finally worked.

By the time this was all done, it was time for the kids to get ready for bed. I convinced Mr. Engineer to work together to string lights on the tree. This is an activity that's impossible (or nearly so) for one person to do alone in the position in which we put our tree (up against the picture window in the living room).

It wasn't until Wednesday that I actually finished the tree. Given that I'd expressed late last week that I was going to start taking my writing more seriously I had to actually spend some time editing my long-neglected novel. I also had to grocery shop on Monday and do a handful of other errands. In the end, though, the tree really was the most beautiful one we've ever had and I think it was worth the trouble.

We didn't realize when we set out to get a Christmas tree on Sunday afternoon that it would turn into a multi-day ordeal involving three tree stands, two trips to the store, and a tree crashing down in the living room. If we had known what this tree would bring, Kittygirl and Mr. Engineer might have chosen a smaller tree. I'm sure this hypothetical smaller tree would have been nice, but it wouldn't be the thing of incredibly beauty that our current tree is.

I think life works like that more often than not. We often set out with a particular plan for the way our lives are going to go. More often than not, that beautifully crafted plan crashes around us just as our tree crashed down in the living room.. We could have conceded defeat, tossed the Christmas tree in the backyard, and bought a smaller, easy to decorate artificial tree. It would have looked fine, and I imagine there are families out there for whom this could have been the best choice because of a variety of other stressors operating on their lives.

Most of the time, though, it makes the most sense to persevere and figure out how to reconstruct our plan in a way that fits our current circumstances. That might look like accepting our child's or own diagnosis and figuring out how to fit it into our lives. It might look like realizing our original dream (having healthy kids, or kids who are brilliant in school, etc.) isn't going to happen but learning to find the hidden blessings in what we do have.

As I discussed more in depth in a post back in September, my theology doesn't teach me that "everything happens for a reason" or that God purposely orchestrates every single aspect of every single person's life. What I do believe wholeheartedly, however, is that, at the end of time, everything will be redeemed and that, while we live in time, God can use our circumstances (as horrible or simply annoying as they may be) to teach us and to bless us even though He did not directly cause them and He grieves over the tragic things in our lives as much as we do.

God desires to shape our lives into something beautiful. However, this takes time. In fact, I think we may actually be reshaped into different beautiful things at different stages of our lives. Right now, though, some of us are caught in the messy middle. Maybe we realize we are being shaped. Maybe we even firmly trust that God is shaping our lives into something breathtaking. However, right at this moment, we feel like an undecorated Christmas tree tipped over in the living room. We're afraid we might just be tossed away to make way for something simpler and easier to put up.

In the end, though, God will lift us up, balance us, and decorate us appropriately if we allow Him to do so.

In Which I Put On My Own Oxygen Mask

Parenting is a lot of work. I don't know a parent who wouldn't agree with that. If you're parenting a child with any type of special need, be it social, educational, intellectual, behavioral, health, or some other category I haven't thought of, it's exponentially harder than normal parenting (which, as I already mentioned, is no easy jaunt through Candyland to begin with).  Because of this, it's easy to lose sight of who you are outside of being a parent. I think this is especially true for stay at home parents.

For nearly 15 years now, my primary identity has been as a mom, first as Squirrelboy's mom and later as Kittygirl and Squirrelboy's mom. I had to deal with a little bit of extra stuff fairly early on when Squirrelboy failed to start talking on time and I had to get him evaluated and eventually get speech therapy. As Squirrelboy's dyslexia and then his ADHD became apparent as he went through school my plate got even fuller. With Kittygirl's type 1 diabetes diagnosis, my plate was so full it no longer really resembled a plate but rather a huge pile of stuff that might possibly be hiding a plate underneath it.

My mom identity morphed when Kittygirl was no longer a preschooler and it was a little bit less acceptable to be "just a stay at home mom", but I saved myself a lot of judgment by homeschooling Squirrelboy for the next three years. Now that both kids are in school for 7 hours a day I've been getting a lot of questions about what I'm going to do next. Granted, if I had a penny for every time someone had asked me that I'd only have about 20 cents, but that's still a lot of questions.

There are a lot of things I might enjoy doing. Raising a kid with diabetes has gotten me interested in the medical field and I've toyed with the idea of going back to school to become a nurse, particularly with an interest in being a school nurse. I've also started subbing very part time as a helper at Kittygirl's former preschool and I've been reminded of just how much I love preschoolers. In that same vein, I really enjoyed teaching at Squirrelboy's homeschool coop and I've toyed with the idea of getting certified to teach.

All of those ideas have some pretty big flaws, however. In nursing, the only thing that's really interesting to me is helping kids with diabetes, and the fact is there's no guarantee that any school that hired me would even have students with diabetes and that wouldn't be my main job even if they did. In order to teach in any realm long term I would need to go back to school. Ditto with nursing. At 44, I'm just not keen on fitting school back into my life, let alone paying for it. Mind you, I haven't totally discarded those ideas. I still may go in one of those directions eventually.

However, what really gives me joy is writing. I've always considered myself a writer, even when I wasn't actively actually writing. I had a few magazine pieces published before Squirrelboy was born, and I finished a middle grade novel that was summarily rejected by a slew of publishers when he was a toddler. At that point, I shelved both the novel and my writing dreams and concentrated on being a mom.

I'm beginning to realize, however, that who I am as a person and not just as a wife and mother has gotten buried over the years. Don't get me wrong. I've loved all the time I've been able to spend with my kids and I don't regret it. What I do regret is not carving out even a little bit of time for my own pursuits, including writing. A large part of the reason I started this blog was to force myself to write regularly.

The blog has done its job. I have recently begun learning what it takes to submit your work to an agent, which is the route that might have been best 14 years ago, but is definitely the best choice now if I'm serious about getting my fiction published. I've dusted off my novel, joined a critique group, and realized that the manuscript I thought was ready for submission 14 years ago needs some serious work.

To that end, I've realized that I'm going to do that I can't dedicate quite as much time to my blog. Don't worry, you handful of faithful readers. I'm not giving up the blog entirely. I'm just no longer planning to write every weekday. I still plan to check in at least once a week, sometimes probably even two or three times.

Keep reading, and, if you too have allowed parenthood to bury your identity, find your own way to begin digging your way out. It will probably look entirely different from my way, but that's okay. Oh, and about the title.... Remember how in the emergency instructions on a flight you're told to put on your own oxygen mask before assisting someone else? As you've probably heard, that image has been used as a metaphor by more than one writer to encourage people to care for themselves before pouring themselves into caring for others. I'm nearly 15 years late, but I'm finally putting on my own oxygen mask.