A Musing Maralee

October 2, 2012
by Maralee
8 Comments

Parenting Tip of the Day #1

Are you at the end of your parenting rope about some little behavioral quirk? I might be able to help.

To start: You’ve got to have a child who is capable of some level of delayed gratification (probably older than 2 and I’ve used this with kids all the way through teenage years), a snack/candy that comes in an individually wrapped package, a specific behavioral problem you are tired of dealing with, and a specified period of time.

For me- I’ll be using a 5 year-old who says “poop” all. the. time., a 3 year-old who doesn’t want to stay in bed for quiet-time, and a 2 year-old who stomps her foot when she doesn’t get her way. For my candy I have a pack of fruit snacks for each kid (Smarties, snack size m&ms, and sweet tarts also work well, and in a pinch you can use a handful of chocolate chips). I will be starting this program in the morning and ending after nap.

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September 26, 2012
by Maralee
21 Comments

Foster Parenting FAQs

I am so encouraged by how many people are starting to consider foster parenting. It can be a scary idea at first, especially with how foster kids (and even foster parents!) are portrayed in our society. A lot of the reasons people shy away from getting involved are misunderstandings of how things actually work. These misunderstandings keep out the quality, loving, compassionate, and wise people that are so very needed in “the system”. And the less quality people get involved, the more the foster parent stigma continues to grow. If you’re considering foster parenting, I wanted this to be a chance for you to see the questions I am most commonly asked answered from my point of view. I do not speak for a specific agency, I can’t address every issue in every state, and I’m not licensed to dispense advice about this stuff. I’m just a foster mom with a heart for these kids and nearly a decade of work on their behalf. Use these answers as a starting point for your own fact-finding journey to see if this is where God is calling you. And PLEASE feel free to add your own questions in the comments here, on facebook (www.facebook.com/AMusingMaralee) or via email. I’m happy to answer what I can. You can also contact Christian Heritage for more information through the link on the right side of my blog.

How do you become a foster parent?

Becoming a foster parent involves getting a license. This means you need to take a class that will help prepare you for what it means to be a foster parent (the expectations, what the kids and families may be like, what the process looks like, etc.). This will end with a homestudy. A homestudy is not as scary as it sounds- it just means your home needs to be safe and have the physical room to house an additional child. This whole process takes a couple months from beginning to end and is a necessary part of being sure kids from unsafe situations aren’t just moved to another unsafe situation but are placed in homes where they can be loved.

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September 24, 2012
by Maralee
2 Comments

Justice Will Roll Down

This last Sunday at church the song played during offertory was one of my favorites. I leaned over to my five year-old Josh and said, “Do you know what this song is about? She’s singing about how someday we will see God’s justice. Even when it seems like people get away with doing bad things, God is watching and he will take care of it someday.” Josh’s eyes brightened and he said, “Like when Danny bites me? Awesome.”

Don’t we all long for God’s justice! To know He has seen the hurts of our heart and wrongdoers will not go unpunished. I have found such freedom in God’s justice. I naturally tend to be a right fighter and this used to make it hard to work with kids who came from difficult families through foster care and group home work. My love for these children made me wish I could see justice done to those who had hurt them. Realizing now that those people will someday face a God whose love for these children is so much greater than my own and whose justice is perfect has instead allowed me to pray for the salvation and repentance of these families with a holy fear. I now have a compassion for those who I used to only make me feel frustration and resentment. I have actively learned what it means to pray for my enemies and do good to those who have persecuted those that I love. I am free to choose merciful love because my God’s justice will be perfect.

September 17, 2012
by Maralee
8 Comments

Is it okay to hate?

Things parents of toddlers hate:

Recliners
Anything within arms reach in the grocery store check-out aisle
Incoming phone calls during nap time
Fireplaces
Light switches out of reach
Light switches within reach
That 10 minutes sitting in the exam room before the pediatrician comes in
Grandma’s knick-knack shelf
Late-night grown-up TV shows that go back and forth between super quiet dialogue and super loud gun fights (I’m looking at you, “24”)
Stairs
Children’s TV shows with catchy theme songs
Snowsuits on newly potty-trained children
“Employee use only” ladders-to-nowhere in home improvement stores
Anything that looks kind of like playground equipment, but isn’t actually playground equipment (thank you very much, giant red cement balls in front of Target)
Elevator buttons
Drinking fountains
Candy on the sidewalk
Toys that make noise when you accidentally kick them while stealthily walking out of your child’s room

What would you add to the list?

September 13, 2012
by Maralee
9 Comments

In Defense of Fostering Older Boys

I am an advocate for foster care. No, seriously. It is so beautiful to me how many of my friends have gotten their foster license probably just so I’d quit hassling them about it. I believe so strongly in getting involved in caring for the needs of hurting children and I’m not sure how everybody else doesn’t just have this same passion. I will talk to people in the library, strangers at the mall, your local church- I will talk to anybody, anywhere about foster care.

A lot of the people I talk to these days are young couples. I have kind of my standard spiel I give that’s designed to help families think about foster parenting in ways that will not burn them out, protect the family they already have, and meet the needs that are out there. I advise families to only take kids younger than their youngest child. So if I’m talking to young families, this means I do a lot of advocating for the babies of the foster care system. Our two little ones came to us as infants not even able to sit up or crawl and my love for them makes me a bulldog about finding other families who will help the helpless. I also talk about babies because I think they reach into our hearts past our stereotypes of “foster children”. We can see them as innocent victims more easily than when we look at teenagers. I also do a lot of talking to stay-at-home moms and I think there is a unique need for those women to take on the needs of babies too young or sick or insecurely attached to be sent off to daycare.

But all the while I’m talking about the babies, I’m thinking about My Boys. Not my sons, My Boys. Before becoming foster parents Brian and I spent five years as houseparents in a group home setting. The house could hold eight boys, but we usually had six or seven at a time. Let me be sure and clarify- these kids were not technically foster children, but were boys placed in a residential group home setting by their parents (who retained all parental rights) to keep them from entering foster care. During those five years we had a hand in helping to raise 17 boys. These kids were between the ages of six and eighteen during their years with us. We were responsible for not just their home life, but also their schooling because this place worked on a homeschool model where the houseparents functioned as the primary teachers. So right now I spend my time telling people that not every foster child is a fifteen year-old boy, but I am very VERY aware that some precious kids ARE fifteen year-old boys. And they are every bit as valuable and in need of love as the little ones.

So there are some things I’d like you to know about the big boys who are in need of a safe place to sleep tonight. This is one of those moments I’m glad I’m writing and not public speaking because there are tears in my eyes right now thinking about the faces of these boys I have loved.

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September 12, 2012
by Maralee
1 Comment

Our basic need

Learning how to motivate your child can feel like a huge exercise in futility. We can try our best with all kinds of sticker charts, prize boxes, candy rewards, etc. and still feel like we aren’t speaking our child’s language. While we need to figure out what specifically motivates each of our children so we can help them achieve their goals, I have learned that there’s one important motivator that seems so obvious it can be easy to overlook.

My first thoughts about how each child is motivated by different rewards and consequences came through a nannying job I had during my summers home from college. I worked with a family who had a little girl with Wolf-Hirschhorn Syndrome. I could try to describe this syndrome, but I think you’ll find this website does a much more complete job than I could: http://wolfhirschhorn.org. For the sweet girl I worked with, it meant at 9 years-old she couldn’t speak, couldn’t eat orally, wasn’t potty-trained, and had a host of physical and developmental delays. And I loved her. I wanted so badly to reach past those difficulties and struggles to reach her heart. She wasn’t a pushover by any means. She was a tough little fighter who had strong preferences she sometimes wasn’t able to communicate. That would be frustrating to any of us and it truly was frustrating to her. I made it my goal to find what motivated her and figure out what she enjoyed so I could encourage her positive behavior.

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September 10, 2012
by Maralee
9 Comments

To Sleep or Not to Sleep

Well, I’m filing this one under “thank goodness I didn’t already ruin my child”. Have you seen this article about how it may actually be okay to let your baby cry a little at bedtime? You can find it here: http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/10/its-o-k-to-let-babies-cry-it-out-at-bedtime/

Lots has been said and written about how to handle bedtime with a baby. You can find such extreme opinions and an amazing amount of anger directed at anybody who disagrees. It runs the gamut from “kids will have brain damage if they’re allowed to cry at all” to “by not teaching a child to self-sooth you are handicapping them for life”. I really appreciate how this study looked at long-term sleep and attachment issues and found that kids who had “sleep training” (crying for periods of time with some form of comforting offered) didn’t have attachment or sleep problems.

I’m no sleep scientist, just a mom working through the normal sleep ups and downs of a Kindergartener, two toddlers and a baby. I’ve heard a lot of talk about dealing with sleep issues and I do a lot of reading about it, too. I’m blessed with kids who are pretty decent sleepers right now (although this was not always the case) and I want to give you a little something to consider, whatever your current sleep situation might be.

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September 6, 2012
by Maralee
11 Comments

Stay at Home Reality

Have you seen this article in its various forms running around the internet recently? It details how a study by the American Psychological Association determined working moms are healthier and happier than stay-at-home moms. This article gives the reasons why working moms fare better and it’s hard as a stay-at-home mom to not want to yell, “Yeah, BUT. . . ”

In some ways I find it highly offensive to say I’m not as happy or as healthy as my “working” counterparts, but in other ways it’s almost validating. I think we moms talk so often about the emotional benefits– “I love my kids so much”, “I feel so fulfilled”, “I’d be so sad to leave them”– that we don’t acknowledge how tough our job really is. There are absolutely days when somebody has pooped in the living room and then tracked it on the bottom of their foot through the house to the bathroom that I know for a fact I’d be happier if I were working outside the home. This is a thankless job and some days I wish I at least got a paycheck. In today’s society I can be emotionally and physically exhausted by my “job” and still feel like there are people who don’t respect what I do or think of less of me because that’s what I’ve chosen to devote my life to. My husband says when somebody asks him what I do and he says I stay at home the women often respond, “Oh, I could never do that.” I’m not sure how to respond to that. You could never do that because you think it’s a waste of your life? You could never do that because you’d be bored? There are days I want to say “I could never do that” too.

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September 4, 2012
by Maralee
18 Comments

I don’t want to write about weight.

I don’t want to write about weight. I am not an expert and it turns out I’ve only ever lived in this one body with its metabolism and genetics, so I feel at such a loss to make any grand, sweeping statements about weight that could apply to anyone else. So I’ll make my caveat up front- this is just my experience. But maybe it’s your experience, too.

I don’t want to write about weight, but I’m having a hard time not thinking about it. A brief history- I’ve always been a skinny girl. I weighed about the same weight (give or take 10 pounds) since I was 20. But then I turned 30. And then I got pregnant. It was my third pregnancy, but this was the first one that made it past the first trimester. Having lived my life feeling full really easily (I’ll never forget my dad saying “Buffets are wasted on you.” So true.), the constant hunger of pregnancy was so foreign to me. Pre-pregnancy if I got a Big Mac meal at McDonald’s I’d have to take home a doggie bag of a quarter of a sandwich and half of the fries. Pregnant Maralee did not work the same way. I honestly found myself crying because I felt like I could never get full even though I knew I didn’t need to eat more. And it wasn’t like I was just eating junk. I was very conscious about eating well for this baby, but I was eating a lot.

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August 30, 2012
by Maralee
18 Comments

Raising a Fighter

I have been known to describe one of my children as a “strong willed child.” I have come to learn some parents have a negative connotation with that phrase. They feel it implies a child is stubborn or just plain naughty. I’ve just never had that feeling about it. I’m guessing that has to do with growing up being called a “strong willed child” myself. I vividly remember my dad (a man of few words) telling me when I was a very young kid that every person has a personality that’s made up of their natural gifts and tendencies. He said your personality is like a bag of groceries– you have lots of ingredients in there you can use to make something wonderful or something yucky. He said having a strong will was a great ingredient to have, but you had to use it the right way to see something wonderful. I found that inspirational, if maybe only because I’ve always enjoyed food. If you want an analogy I’ll understand, please don’t use sports, just use food.

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