Tag Archives: Preschoolers

OMG, It’s Monday! Prayer: When I Try to Help God

 

O Lord, recently, I saw a preschooler “help” her father unload items at checkout. The little girl worked diligently, but squished a loaf of bread. I tensed, expecting frowns. Impatience. Yelling. Instead, Daddy thanked her for her help. OMG, that’s so like You. When I offer eager, squishy-bread obedience, You smile. 

How to Get a Backache

Image by Pfüderi from Pixabay.

Achieving a backache often depends on the subject’s age.

Sadly, if you’re under 20, nothing induces a backache — unless Mom demands you clean your room.

However, creative 20- to 30-year-olds can realize backache goals. Try triple Axels on your skateboard. Carry your unmotivated friend piggyback up a mountain. Impress your lady by lifting her sofa above your head.

If all else fails to achieve back pain, your dad’s demand that you get a job will.

Thirty- and 40-somethings often succeed because they have jobs. Plus, they carry wailing three-year-olds into Little Overachiever Preschool. Every. Single. Day. They also drag 50-pound bags of manure to butterfly gardens for their grade-schoolers’ science projects. Pushing their cars from snowdrifts crisscrosses vertebrae. Nothing, however, works better than taking a terrified Lab to the Happy Doggy Clinic for shots. Paying for damages to furniture, building and staff will add a bonus headache for your Tylenol® pleasure.

Image by Mark Thornton from Pixabay.

More options materialize after a 50th birthday. You haul backbreaking bags of money to your student’s college. Your spouse finds that fitting into skinny jeans takes her to the ER. A game of pickup basketball lightens your mood, but not only will you hurt your back, you may lose a kidney or two. The pain will intensify when you sleep on the sofa because you played basketball instead of cleaning the garage.

At age 65, demonstrate to young whippersnappers what it was like in the good old days. When real men shoveled snow without wussy snowblowers. When real women scrubbed floors on their knees instead of using wussy Swiffers. Show everyone at the block party how real ice cream was made by cranking for six hours. All good-old-days activities are good for a week-long backache.

Image by J. Laso from Pixabay.

Soon, though, you’ll reach the ultimate in back pain with no effort whatsoever. Whereas, weeding flower beds to outdo another retiree once put you in a body cast, now, reading a seed catalog accomplishes the job. The past effects of pickup basketball occur when you pick up a basketball a kid tossed into your yard. Or when you pick up cards at a euchre party.

At age 20, nothing gave you backaches. Now everything gives you backaches.

Image by Kevin 120415 from Pixabay.

So, luxuriate on your heating pad. Lie back in your hot tub.

And don’t let anyone make you clean your room.

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: What’s your “favorite” way to achieve a backache?

OMG, It’s Monday! Prayer

O Lord, all the trouble on Planet Earth must break Your heart, too. But OMG, a single smile from a four-year-old T-ball player reminds me You are still present in this world! 

Wild Mama

Every mother, no matter how devoted, experiences moments when she yearns to … go wild.

 I should have known on a day when I dared sleep in, trouble would soon follow.

Sleeping in was unknown luxury during my years as a young mother, a fairy-tale fantasy that inevitably dissolved in a shower of Cheerios and the wiggles and jiggles and messy, precious kisses of my preschoolers.

Sleeping in existed in a different solar system — or perhaps in a different galaxy far, far away.

But that knowledge evaporated as I lay in a bed I wouldn’t have to make, savoring the ecstasy of a quiet — yes, quiet — 16th-floor hotel room.

My husband already had left for his conference. I went wild and indulged in forbidden pleasures:  a cup of real coffee (double cream) in bed, steaming hot from the first mellow sip to the very last; a television program in which most people already knew how to count to ten; and a long, sinful bath filled to the top, with no Mr. Bubble or rubber duckies in sight.

After bathing, I ignored my ratty plaid bathrobe hanging on the hook. I didn’t decide what to wear. Instead, I wandered around the room, carefree and content as Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Prolonging my wild mama fling — unhampered by diaper bags, car seats, nap times or must-have blankies — I pondered how I would spend an entire day without children or Happy Meals.

Intoxicated with my liberty, I forgot my mother’s advice to always close the drapes and faced the room-sized picture windows. The panoramic view of city streets and smaller buildings far below dazzled my eyes, my soul. Embracing the endless, azure sky, I sang, “I’m free! Free!”

helicopterChuk-chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk! A dragonfly the size of a 60s Cadillac suddenly hovered by the window.

I hit the floor as if attacked by enemy fire. I yanked the bedspread (Too late?) across my prostrate, naked form.

Had he seen me?

The traffic helicopter pilot waved.

Then he and his mighty machine swept off to corners of the universe where other derelict mothers in need of reform might lurk.

How about you? Ever have a day when you morphed into a wild mama?