Kids make good accountability partners. Whether you ask them to be or not.
As a SAHM mom, I am with my kids pretty much all day and evening. With the exception of an evening out here or there. And my kids are watching me. They are taking in what I listen to on the radio, how I respond when I am tired, stressed. They are there for it all.
I have been impressed and sometimes surprised with how carefully they are listening to the words of the lyrics we listen to. It’s not just background music for them. For the most part, in our home, we listen to Christian music. There are some exceptions, but I make sure to screen the music I put on my ipod. Not just for them, but for myself as well. I want to fill my mind with things that are pleasing to God, not that which will distract me from Him.
With my careful screening, I was surprised one day when my son asked me to turn that song off. When I asked him why he said he did not like it because the mom died and why would I want to listen to a song about a mom dying. The song in question was Alabama’s “Song of the South”. I had put the song on my “upbeat fun” playlist because I particularly liked the chorus. But in one line it says, “Well momma got sick and daddy got down” and though it never says outright that she died, my son told me, “Mom, it said momma got sick and daddy got down so she died and why would I want to hear a song about a Momma dying?” And, how does a Momma argue with that logic? I promised to take it off my playlist.
Another day we were driving in the car and “Give Me Your Eyes” by Brandon Heath came on the radio. My 3 year old daughter said, “Hey Mom, that’s silly why did he ask for a heart. We already have a heart!”
These aren’t just random words floating around the their ears. My kids are listening and thinking about the words to the songs they hear.
And I want the soundtrack of their lives to be one that glorifies our Lord. Often my son will ask me when we’re listening to a song if they person is singing to God. “Mommy,” he’ll say, “Are they singing to God or just people.” And if it is a hymn playing, he almost always thinks it’s the angels singing.
That is why I absolutely LOVE the CD my daughter received from a friend for her birthday. It is called Seeds Family Worship. We were given the Seeds of Faith CD. Each song is right from Scripture. All of the lyrics are Scripture verses. At the beginning of each song they tell you the reference. They are not annoying kids music either. They are great worship songs. Listen here. I like that the tempo changes from song to song. You’ve got a great mix of fast and slow and different vocals. We have the cd in our minivan and play it every time we drive anywhere. We are listening to God’s words as we drive out and about. And I find myself dwelling on Scripture throughout the day. The first time we listened to it, I found myself almost choked up as I heard God’s words being sung to us. In a sense, it brought them to life, or personalized it for me. Then my son said, “Hey Mom, you gotta put the windows down so everyone can hear this. The people need to know that God loves them.” (Yea, then the tears spilled over). Every time the John 3:16 song comes on, he begs me to put the windows down.
As they listen to and digest these words, we’ve had some great discussions. For example, “What’s the witchesofsin"?” Wages of sin I corrected them. We then had a great discussion on Romans 3:23 and how wages means cost and what our sin cost. I really can’t say enough about how great these CD’s are. I plan to purchase a few more soon.
Whether we realize it or not, our children are listening and watching us all the time. Let’s take advantage of that opportunity to minister to them while they still value our input and opinions.
It’s been a few years since we’ve had a good snow fall here in MD. And by good I mean accumulating enough so that you don’t see the grass poking through the snow.
This is the only snowman we were able to scrape together this winter at the circus. Don’t the kids look kind of forlorn?
Seriously, take a closer look at our “snowman.” I am sure my friends up north are rolling on the floor with laughter at our patheticness.
Since Old Man Winter, didn’t provide us with much of the white stuff here, we decided to have our own snowman day. I’d been planning to do it in Jan and then suddenly I found myself a week from March and panicking b/c a snowman day in March with the St Patty’s decor up, just wouldn’t have the right feel. Originally, I had planned to invite a bunch of the kids friends over and have a big party with snacks and crafts and the like. But, I was running out of time and out of social energy, so we settled on a low key snowman day at home.
We started the day snuggled up in our pjs watching Frosty the Snowman.
After naptime our family friend stopped by and joined us in making our own indoor snowman out of ivory snow detergent and water. The super easy recipe can be found here. (tip: I found I had to keep adding in a lot more of the detergent though to get it to a thick enough consistency to form our “snowballs”). I really think that these turned out cuter than our “real” snowman.
When Daddy got home, he helped us top the day off by fixing snowman pancakes for dinner. 
So even though it looks like we’ll go yet one more winter without a “scrapbookable” snow fall here in the middle east coast, at least we can say we had our fun with snowmen!
“A sister shares childhood memories and grown-up dreams.”
Check out 5MFM for more Wordless Wednesdays.
Scott and I enjoy watching those “thrill drama series” such as 24, Alias, Heroes… I can remember when we would watch Alias, I would often have dreams where I would save the day with my mean back side kick and my “kickn” purple air. Ya, if only…
Well this morning I woke up and told Scott I had the strangest dream. In part of it we were going away for our honeymoon only it wasn’t really because we already had the kids and we were staying in this hotel like room underground in my parents yard. A safe house perhaps?
Things are a bit foggy as dreams usual are, but I vividly really being at a school and figuring out that there was a terror plot underway for bombs to go off in every school across America when they said the pledge. Apparently, all the schools in America pledge of allegiance at exactly the same time every day. I was trapped but somehow was able to secretly text a message which said, “no pldge” and somehow whoever received this message understood and was able to stop the terror plot. I have a fuzzy recollection of agents bringing the bombs out of the school buildings across America…none of them able to go off since they children never said their pledge.
Back to my romantic getaway. Before leaving for our “safe house” I recall telling my parents, “Only call us if there is a problem with the kids or a matter of national security.”
Yea because in matters of national security people always turn first to Crystal, stay at home mom.
Hmmm, guess you can’t tell what I watched last night before bed?
Today a dental hygienist visited my son’s class at preschool.
In the car he told me we needed to get him some dental cloth.
“Floss?” I asked.
“Yes,” he told me, “We gotta get rid of Mr. Black.”
pause
My son then commented, “I have no idea who Mr. Black is but we gotta get rid of him.”
I suggested maybe he was a cavity.
“Yea or dead food.” he replied.
So, this week at the circus we are tackling dental hygiene. He even told my husband before bed tonight that when he wakes up he’s gotta brush his teeth. “Of course I’ll come into your room first, b/c I always come into your room when I wake up, but then I gotta brush my teeth because we need to brush in the morning and night.”
I am so glad we have him to keep us all in line.
Check out 5MFM for more tackles.
I have been going non stop the past several days. Friends over for dinner, going to other friends homes for dinner, attending a party, hosting a surprise party…it has been social function after social function for 5 days straight. I have enjoyed each experience greatly, but I am an introvert and after spending time with people I need time alone to recharge. I have one more event tonight (a MOPS Family Fun Night at our church…being as I am the coordinator, I need to be there and be fun). Tomorrow I have big plans of staying home all day to recharge my batteries. The kids and I are going to make snowman foods, watch Frosty and do some crafts. Just us. I am looking forward to it greatly. Somewhere in there I also need to do some laundry b/c if you knew what my poor husband went through to find a presentable outfit this morning to wear to his presentation, well, if you knew than you would know that I will not be nominated for woman of the year anytime soon. Somewhere in the mad dash to find clean work clothes, I uttered the phrase, “Hey, I found matching socks… that’s good right?” Yes, a good indicator that you are at a low point.
And in the midst of all this “socialness” I have been absent from blogland. Typically the weekends are quiet time for blogging. Not this weekend… I leave the blog roll for a few days and come back to find that Monica’s husband is on his way home for R&R, Rebecca was out for a week due to the cold and returned as Martha Stewart, Jessie goes to Ca and sees Kirk Cameron, and M. has made it to her 100th post already!
I have had so many thoughts and post ideas rolling around in my head and yet when naptime is here and I have a chance to sit and compose I am finding it difficult to formulate it all. I have some funny kid anecdotes which I just may collect together in a a post if for no other reason than to ensure I “write” them down so I don’t forget them.
I’ll leave you with two pictures from the weekend. This is the kids trying to keep Scott from going to work on Saturday. As he picked our youngest up to hug her goodbye, the older two grabbed his legs to try to keep him from leaving. Sometimes they hide his keys or wallet or badge in the morning. Scott and I will be scrambling around the house looking for them and then out of desperation ask the kids if they’ve seen Daddy’s keys only to have them go and pull them out from under the couch cushion where they hid them. When we ask why they did that they reply, “so Daddy couldn’t go to work.” Some mornings it is quite cute and endearing…other mornings when he is late for a meeting it is a little less cute.
And my last picture will also not earn me the “Woman of the Year” award.
Like our new nightstand? This summer when I was cleaning and reorganizing the master bedroom I turned Scott’s night stand into the printer stand and moved his alarm clock to the file cabinet in the corner. On more mornings than I care to admit I find this as I am making the bed. Classy don’t ya think? At least it is multifunctional. When Scott’s not ironing his clothes in the morning, the ironing board serves as a place to put his reading lamp and book.
Sometimes it takes very little to turn the ordinary into something memorable. If your willing to change things up a bit, you can have fun with really, very little effort.
The other day the kids and I baked some cookies for a care package, but we saved some to enjoy with Daddy after dinner. While we don’t have dessert everyday, a chocolate chip cookie after dinner is not all that memorable.
The kids had the idea of eating our cookies under the table.
This simple action turned the ordinary into extraordinary.
They were delighted to have all 5 of us crammed under the table enjoying our treat.
We started with a girls side and a boy side.
This didn’t last for long as the girls soon enjoyed climbing over the “gate” in the middle to be with the boys.
I love this picture because of my youngest. You can totally tell she is saying cheese as she shows off her mouth full of chocolate!
“Life brings simple pleasures to us every day. It is up to us to make them wonderful memories.”
Cathy Allen
Have you ever been singing along to a song in front of your friends when you learn that the lyrics you thought you knew weren’t quite right?
I can remember in high school singing along to Amy Grant’s “Baby Baby” and when she says, “Baby Baby, I’m taken with the notion to love you with the sweetest of devotion” I instead belted out “love you with the sweetest talk of ocean.” My friend looked at me and laughed and asked what I just sang. “Sweetest talk of ocean” I replied, “Why?” It never occurred to me that it didn’t make any sense. To this day when I hear the song it is hard for me to hear anything but “Sweetest talk of ocean”
Another high school lyric gone bad was Better Than Ezra’s “Good” I can remember belting out “It was good livin’ with you warthog” in front of some of my youth group friends instead of “It was good livin’ with you (wahow).” I even remember asking why they are singing about living with warthogs. This of course was met with much laughing at my expense (as was much of my high school experience, but that is another point for anther time).
I think it is funny how I would just sing what I thought I heard never even considering how little sense it made or that perhaps I heard incorrectly. It also troubles me that I would sing in public so often as I do not have a good singing voice.
Recently Scott was singing Jingle Bells with the kids and had an epiphany as he sang one of the lines. He always wondered what a “sopen sleigh” ways, assuming it was a certain type of sleigh used in sleigh riding. It wasn’t until this January that he realized it was a one horse open sleigh.
The last misheard lyric I will share with you is another recent one. I had given the kids a Go Fish CD for Christmas and as I was jammin to the Mom song I thought one of the lines was kind of odd. While praising mothers, the song says,
“You’re the boss, the driver, The ultimate survivor A doctor, a cooker Your man thinks you’re a looker”
Only I heard, "“your man thinks your a hooker”
At first I just went with it. I even repeated the line to Scott to which he just shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Well I wouldn’t put it exactly that way, but…”
But then I got to thinking, “I hope my son doesn’t ask me to explain what a hooker is.” Which made me take pause and listen again as this was a CD by a Christian band targeted to preschoolers. Surely they don’t want little kids singing about their moms being hookers. I was so relieved when I listened again a few days later and heard it correctly. I think I even wrote as my face book status that night “Crystal is laughing at herself”
What about you? Have any misheard lyrics you’d like to share in the comments below? They are often good for a giggle or two. When checking the correct lyrics for one of the mentioned songs I stumbled across a site entirely devoted to misheard lyrics. A few had me laughing out loud. I’d love to hear yours.
You ever ever start playing a game without even realizing it until it’s well underway? Two years ago the kids and I were shopping in the candy aisle at Rite Aid looking for cheap V-day candy after the 14th, when we stumbled across this guy selling on clearance for a little over a dollar.
My son was big into motorcycles and Snoopy, so it was fun gift for him.
What we didn’t tell him was that there was candy hidden underneath the chair. He liked it as a toy bike and there didn’t seem any reason to tell him about the treasure inside.
My husband and I have gotten quite a chuckle out of this as we’ve seen him playing with it. We would joke with each other about the day he would finally dawn on him that there is actually candy inside. It became a game for us.
Today, two years after we bought the toy, my son brought it to me very excited and said, “Hey Mom, did you know there is candy inside this?”
Turns out he was showing the motorcycle to our 9 year old neighbor when he pointed out to my son that there was candy in the motorcycle.
I gotta admit we were a little disappointed that he didn’t make the discovery on his own. But, my son wasn’t too disappointed when I told him he couldn’t eat the 2 year old candy. He thought it was kinda funny that there was candy inside his motorcycle. I thought it was funny that for a full two years he didn’t realize that his toy was actually a candy dispenser.
Welcome to Not Me! Monday! This blog carnival was created by MckMama. You can head over to her blog to read what she and everyone else have not been doing this week.
While I was posting about my true love story each day last week, a whole circus load of activity was going on around here.
I did not…
- put my kids to bed without having them brush their teeth because we got home late from a church meeting and I was trying to rush the bedtime routine.
- I certainly didn’t forget to bring their fluoride in like I had promised resulting in my son waking up the next morning and saying, “Mom, you never brought us our fluoride, do you want us to get cavities?”
- take a picture of my son’s nose after he ran smack into the baby gate/wall on his way to bed
(please note I only took the picture so I could compare it later to see if it looked better or worse in the morning) (it looked worse…got a nice shade of black and blue a few days later too)
Back to my not me list. I also didn’t…
- show up at my pediatrician’s office on Wednesday with all three kids dressed and looking nice (I was feeling so proud of myself) at 8:57 for our 9:00 appointment only to learn that our appointment was actually Friday at 9:30.
- Take my son to the grocery store on Friday morning in his pajamas to buy his valentine cards for his party that morning.
- And I certainly didn’t give his teacher a gift which I used reinforcement circles to attach the card to because I couldn’t find tape in my rush to get everyone out the door in time for school. Classy, huh?
Yea… I know it looked like me, but it must have been someone else doing those things, because I was busy reminiscing about how Scott and I met and fell in love.
What? Give them chocolate fondue for dessert? Let them dip the fruit themselves?? No way, NOT ME!!
