Things I never thought I'd say #5

Five is a good whole number, so this will be the last in my little series (sniff, sniff).

When I was young and immature, I hated salad and any kind of vegetables. Believe me, I know its a chore to get a child to eat vegetables but I think I might have been more extreme in my hatred of raw carrots, lettuce, celery, or really anything raw. My high school best friend and I prided ourselves on disliking salads. When we went to Prom and Homecoming, we left our salads untouched and somehow this was the cool thing to do while our other girlfriends nibbled away like rabbits at their salads.

My taste buds didn't really start to mature until I was in college and began to force myself to eat salads and raw vegetables. It is a true story that when I was preparing to spend a summer in Ukraine, I began a self-imposed training to eat at least one raw cucumber at lunch and dinner in anticipation of a summer of eating cucumbers under watching eyes. This training worked and I made it through the summer gnawing on those horrid veggies without gagging. I wasn't really able to maintain a conversation during those meals, but since my Ukrainian words were limited to "please," hello," "thank you," and "no more book pages as toilet paper," I did just fine.

After that summer, I became more and more adventurous and I now eat salad and select raw vegetables frequently (just had a salad for lunch!). So, the thing that I never thought I would say is

"Let's have an adventure this summer and try to eat more vegetables!"

My excitement began this past weekend when Asher and I attended a Sustainable Living Expo at Illinois Wesleyan. I learned a lot of interesting things but am most excited about joining a CSA. I'm probably showing my Mid-West "green" uneducation by saying I just learned that CSA stands for Community Sponsored Agriculture. Basically its like having a garden without the hard work. Members of a CSA pre-pay into the group in exchange for a weekly distribution of fresh, locally grown produce.

I'm planning to join a half share of the Mitchell Farms Produce CSA (www.mitchellproduce.com). It sounds like a healthy adventure to receive fruits and veggies every week and a challenge to try to use them all up before getting another round a week later.

If anyone local is interested in joining too, let me know! We could each save $20 if we sign up together!!

Although I still avoid cucumbers at all costs, I now have a husband who has agreed to eat all of the cucumbers we receive (and I'll eat his share of tomatoes).

Things I never thought I'd say #4

I thought I was done with this series, but I've been thinking about another statement recently as I've been writing about it for another project. This one is not something I actually originated, but I found myself repeating it often because it was kind of out there and mysterious.

My parents moved to Africa a little over 7 years ago to become missionaries. While I am extremelly proud of what they are doing and totally supportive of their work, its really not easy to have parents who live so far away and who I don't get to talk with very much. I just tried a new phone communication option with them yesterday, and almost ended in tears of frustration because the connection was so horrible.

While I was in college, I dreamed of living overseas doing some type of missions work. This wasn't a foreign concept that I picked up while away at school, although the passion was fanned there, but my parents had instilled this excitement of God's work around the world in our family from the time I first went to Brazil when I was 6 and my sister was 3.

My dad worked at State Farm for over 25 years - a very stable life and kind of the nerdy comfort zone that I find my little family in now. I imagined mom and dad would be doing missions trips for the rest of their lives, and would probably do longer stints once they retired, but never thought they would move away before retirement while I was still unmarried, my sister was still in college, and my brother was just entering junior high. But that's what happened.

Their first step in doing full-time missions work was joining Wycliffe Bible Translators. After completing a training course here in the U.S., they headed to Tanzania to do a field training where they lived in huts and eventually sent back pictures of my brother with spears and machetes attached to his body as if he was daily fighting off lions and large snakes.

Since the field training was meant to be very remote and physically challenging, we did not hear from them often at first. Until one day about a month after they left, I went to my mailbox and finally found a postcard from Tanzania! It was from my mom and one of her first sentences was,

"My monkey scratches are healing nicely."

What?? This was the first report I had from them on their well-being in the wilds of Africa. Was this supposed to be comforting? It was one of those things I never imagined I would be hearing from my mother.

Since they don't get mentioned often in this blog, I'm attaching a picture of my parents. Here they are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Looks beautiful, doesn't it? Anyone else want to sign up for the adventurous life that may include monkey scratches that need healing?

Things I never thought I'd say #3

An Ifft family tradition which I've implemented into our little family is to hide the Easter baskets after they've been stocked with Peeps, chocolate bunnies, and jelly beans. As we got older the hiding places became more difficult. I'm not really sure where the tradition started...maybe its like hiding Easter eggs, which we never did while growing up.

So on Easter morning I explained to Asher that he needed to look for his Elmo basket because it had candy and other treats in it. He seemed all excited until he spotted the cleaning supply bottle and a little rag which he had reluctantly left at the bottom of the stairs the night before.

He gravitated to the little bottle and immediately began to "squirt squirt" while wiping with the rag. Because Asher was otherwise occupied, I convinced Walter to look for his basket (although he did not have the same temptation to clean first). So here is a picture of the scene where Walter had found his basket in the closet and Asher continued to clean.
I finally had to say another thing I never thought I would need to say;
"Asher, look for your Easter basket then you can finish cleaning."

Things I never thought I'd say #2

Moving on, now to one of the things I've said to Asher recently that makes me wonder if I am doing something wrong in our home that made my son choose vacuums over toys.

Not too long ago, I was at Target with Asher looking for some things that he might like for his birthday (isn’t it great when you can shop for presents while your child is with you!?). I was letting him hold and play with various toys and he was having a great time until his eagle eyes looked way down and across the aisle and saw the vacuum cleaners! In a very loud voice, he shouted, "AUUMS, AUUMS" (translated to be VACUUMS, VACUUMS and meaning we needed to go look at them immediately because they are so cool).

I then heard myself say “We will go look at the vacuums, but first we need to finish looking at the toys.”

As the words came out of my mouth, I found myself hoping that there wasn’t anyone I knew lurking in the next aisle!

Things I never thought I'd say #1

Lately, I've found myself saying some things that I just never imagined would come off of my lips. Most of them have been said to Asher, and mainly are related to his continued obsession with cleaning - which we keep waiting for the day that will stop - but I also have found myself saying things to Walter that I immediately want to take back.

Walter is studying almost constantly these days (ok maybe not that much, but it feels like it), and last week we actually had a night where we were both home. I wanted to watch one of our favorite shows, but he was reading a book I had just ordered on a really interesting topic to us lately. Now, I LOVE to read and I do read almost every night.

During my single days when I spent many evenings reading for the entire night after work until I went to bed, I dreamt about the time when I would have a husband to sit on the couch next to me. We would both be reading our books and would pause every once in a while to tell each other some insightful things we had just read and then after some brief discussions or a quick laugh, we would return to our own books to be lost again in the words of the pages.

This was my romantic dream...that totally did not become reality.

Walter tells me that he enjoyed reading while he grew up and throughout high school, but then in college it become "uncool" for him to read other than if it was assigned reading. So he just kind of stopped reading. He will read if we are reading aloud to each other, or if we are on vacation and I have my nose in a book all day and he has nothing else to do (this was before Asher - now he gets to chase Asher while I read!). But other than that he doesn't just pick up a book and dive in.

So the other night when I told him, "Honey, please stop reading." I couldn't believe what came out of my mouth! I immediately asked to take the words back and changed them to "Wait wait, please keep on reading!" but it was too late. He put down the book and we went to watch The Office leaving a missed opportunity for my romantic ideal to become a reality.

Since this post got way longer than I intended, maybe this will be the first in a series of "Things I Never Thought I Would Say."

He Chose Mommy!

We (I) have had an incredibly busy week. I was gone several nights (and even a day) in a row leaving Walter and Asher home alone together. Asher loves his daddy and they did a lot of fun things together. But Asher kept my heart missing him yesterday while I was gone. He said exactly what I needed to hear during a conversation over Cheerios.

Its always fun to talk over the events of the day with him. There's usually something going on that's really exciting. Yesterday, there happened to be lots of exciting things lined up for Asher's day. We told him that throughout the day he was going to get to play with his friend Grant, go on an Easter Egg hunt, see his Aunt Becky, and go to a hockey game! We are starting to ask what his favorite things are just because his opinions are so important to us. So we asked which of those was his favorite thing. And guess what he said?

Out of all of those fun things, he said..."MOMMY!"

I'm still his favorite! :)

Our Little Boy is Two

Happy 2nd Birthday Asher!!

Two isn't exactly the age when children leave the house and start spreading their wings, but somehow, Asher seems older to me now that he turned two. He strings words together now, he wakes up and gets out of bed on his own in the morning, and today he even reprimanded me when I sloshed some coffee out of my mug by telling me that I needed to use "two hands!" (Hmm...maybe he's heard that somewhere before!)

This weekend, Walter's parents came in for the celebration and Aunt Becky and Uncle Sam drove over for the evening. We had so much fun together and even our shy little boy enjoyed all of the attention.
Asher requested an Elmo cake this year which is what I made. When we talked about his birthday in the days leading up to this weekend, he would always say, "mommy make Elmo cake." So mommy made an Elmo cake.
Much to everyone's dismay, but to mommy's delight, Asher was very organized as he opened his presents. We had made Asher's cleaning obsession public knowledge previously but until Saturday, no one knew that the obsession extends to organization. After he opened each present, Asher would go put it away where it belonged. Here he is putting away the Elmo movies he just opened.

In the Ifft Family growing up, we loved the Bernstein Bears. I think my sister had every one of those books and bought the new ones as they come out (just like with the Babysitters Club). One of our favorites was Bernstein Bears and Too Much Birthday. I think Asher and Grams illustrate that title exactly!