I admit, I have been avoiding this as much as I try to avoid handwashing a sink full of grease-stained and moldy, macaroni and cheese-crusted dishes, and this time, I am not talking about having to change my two year old’s poop-stained diapers.  Believe it or not, I get frustrated with making New Year’s Resolutions.  I envy those blog writers who naturally know how to narrow their thoughts to a few attainable goals, and I especially commend anyone who can stick to their goals until the end of the year.  Unlike these great goal-setters, making realistic, honest resolutions that I know I can stick to and not break before the end of January has always been difficult for me.  However, after much pondering (and chewing through the end of my pencil to the point of no recognition), I have finally come up with just a few goals that I would like to share.  By writing them down and sharing them this year, I am also hoping that I won’t give up on my goals as easily as I give up on a pair of too-tight, pre-pregnancy jeans.

1)  Spend more time with and show more appreciation for my family.  I love my family and do all that I can to support my husband and each of my kids.  I am there for them, praise and help them, and do all that I can for them; however, this year, I want to take more time to do special things for each of them to show them that I appreciate them.  Through the busy and hurried confines of everyday life, I think my feelings of gratitude sometimes aren’t conveyed very well.

2)  Grow and manage our finances better so that we can save.  We aren’t people that like to splurge, and rarely do we find ourselves dining in fine restaurants reserved for only the wealthy.  However, if we could cut the costs of unnecessary things (like spending high dollars on extra cell phone internet) or substitute non-name brand items for more expensive items, we could save a little here and there.  We probably won’t become millionaires, but every little bit still counts in this economy.  Finding more creative ways to market and grow our tire and car business to bring in more income will probably also help us in being able to put money away.

3)  Make healthy choices.  I am not talking about stuffing myself with only tofu-made concoctions and salads everyday.  I am not a going to be the food Nazi here.  However, if I moderate what I eat and when I eat it, change some cooking methods (e.g. broiled versus fried), and balance exercise with moderated eating habits, I can still achieve the same results.

After thinking long and hard about these goals, I also realize that these and other goals that I set for myself are not set in stone and that I may need to change them to meet the demands of our busy, ever-changing life and world.  Too many times have I clutched ignorantly to New Year’s resolutions made at the beginning of the year.  Too often have I felt defeat when I don’t meet those goals because things in my life have changed one way or another and I have been too rigid with myself in trying to meet my goals.  This year, I vow to keep my goals attainable by changing how I can accomplish each goal when I need to, or by changing them altogether if they no longer apply to my life. With that said, I hope that you have resolved your own resolution frustrations, if any, and again, have a blessed New Year!

I know that my little Arthur loves me and that I am the center of his little two-year-old world.  For no other will he give wet, soggy puppy dog  kisses that seem to linger even after I have wiped the saliva off my face.  Only to me will he cling, wrapping his little body around mine like a piece of tight-gripping velcro and screaming at the top of his lungs if anyone should be so kind as to relieve me of my duties by taking him.  It is for my privilege and mine alone that he saves his poopy, unchanged diapers. “Nooo!  Mo-mee!” he would declare while crying and throwing a fit if anyone else dared to wipe his poop-stained, smelly bottom.  Luckily for him, no one ever objects to his wishes, especially when they involve changing stinky, poop-smeared, two-year-old diapers.

It was probably with this same affection then that he woke me up this morning at four in the morning.  “Go-o-o, Mo-mee!  Go-o-o!” he screamed at me, stirring me from the lovely dream I was having.

“Arthur, sleep,” I begged him drowsily but to no avail as he continued pulling on my arm with both of his little, pudgy hands.  “What, Arthur?  Do you want water?” I asked him groggily.

“No-o-o!  Want go-o-o!” he whined.

“Fine,” I said to him reluctantly as I kicked off my warm, cozy blanket.  I was still half-asleep as I allowed him to half-drag me into the living room.

I plopped down on the sofa, ready to continue that wonderful dream I was having before; however, Arthur had plans of his own as he handed me the television remote. ” ‘Mote!  ‘Mote!  V.V. on!” he demanded.  I turned the television on for him and snuggled up against the sofa.  I tried to close my heavy eyelids over the tired pupils of my eyes.  Arthur shook me again and started whining. “No-o-o-o!” he cried.

“What do you want?” I implored him, desperately wanting to go back to sleep.

” ‘Mote!  ‘Mote!” he screamed.  I started to turn the channels, which quieted him until I turned past the Wiggles.  “Wait!  Wait!” he screamed.  Whatever infatuation toddlers have with dancing men in multi-colored shirts and too tight of pants I will never understand; however, I did know that my sleep was calling me.  I was ready to do anything at this point to get back into my warm, inviting bed, so I turned back to “Prancing Men in Tight Pants,” which immediately made him quiet.  Again, I tried to drift back to sleep, but Arthur wouldn’t have it.  He climbed clumsily over my curled up legs and onto my weary lap where he plopped himself.  “Up!  Up!” he cried as he shook me furiously to get me to sit up.  “See, see,” he laughed as one of the Wiggles jiggled around like jello in an earthquake.  I held him and bared through his “Prancing Men” show with him.

By the time the Wiggles sang their good-bye song, he was fast asleep in my lap.  However, all sleep had left me by now.  Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t squint my eyes shut anymore.  It was pointless anyway, since I couldn’t even remember what my wonderful dream was about anymore.  Instead, I looked at his angelic, sleeping face.  He looked so adorable and innocent laying there in my lap.  As annoyed as I was over losing sleep, I couldn’t help but also feel a rush of affection for this little mischief-maker.  Who else but my little two-year-old would want for me (and me alone) to spend quality time watching “men in tight pants,” with him at four in the morning?  I was the apple of his eye at this age, and he was my baby.  Someday, he’ll grow up and want nothing to do with me.  He’ll pound away at his video games and be too busy with his soccer, football, and many other activities.  He’ll fancy fast-moving cars and hot teenage chicks with long flowing hair and big, breasted boobs, but for now, he was just my little boy.  I kissed him on his sweet, tender cheek as I hugged him tightly and blinked away the tears.

At just a little under five feet tall, I admit that I am vertically challenged.  As a child, I was never the first, second, third, fourth, or even the fifth one picked for games such as basketball that require long, lanky legs and lengthy, elongated arms.  In fact, I always watched as the crowds of kids slowly dwindled away onto opposing teams, until I was the last one left to face the grumblings from the team that finally acquired me.  However, my littleness always allowed me to play a lethal game of limbo, and I was always fast and furious at flag football which allowed me to get back at the cranky kids who griped about me being on their team.  Yet when I married and finally became a parent, I longed for kids with long-limbed legs and lengthy arms who wouldn’t have to endure the mockeries that I received as a child.

Unfortunately, with a five feet four inch tall husband, height just wasn’t in our gene pool.  No matter how carefully I planned and measured each meal or how many bad tasting, vitamin-fortified concoctions I drank during each pregnancy, we still ended up with lethal limbo players instead of tall, lanky basketball players.  Of course, my babies were always the cutest in the nurseries with their petite little bodies and tiny, whimpering cries, and, I must confess, I was a little relieved that they weren’t too big for me to hold, cuddle, and carry around without assistance.  However, I knew that someday someone would make them the butt of laughters because of their size.

That day came when Autumn was in third grade.  She had many friends and was well-liked.  She had grown up with many of the children, and not once had any of them ever chastised her about her height or looks.  However, it is amazing how one child can change the make-up of a group of seemingly normal friends.  “Short stuff!” she would call Autumn as she tried to convince the rest of the group not to play with my daughter.  I listened almost daily as my daughter poured her heart out each time I came home from work.  At first I tried to just comfort her and give her advice as somehow some probably never-bullied before researcher claimed that the more adults became involved, the worse the bully made it for the victimized child.  Back then, being a young mom (and having parents who were first time immigrants that didn’t know how to deal with these types of situations), I swallowed every bull-crap researched advice available instead of listening to my gut feelings.

Finally, I received the call from the principal one day.  Autumn had bitten her bully and was sitting in the principal’s office.  Katie, the principal, who was also a colleague of mine, was trying to decide whether she should suspend Autumn.  I rushed through traffic from the school that I principaled at to Autumn’s school.  The ride seemed like hours even though her school was only ten minutes away.  As I walked into the principal’s office, Autumn looked up at me with her big, brown, frightened eyes which were also puffy and red from crying.  Deep down, I was livid that my poor little girl, the true victim in all of this, was in the principal’s office facing suspension while the little bitch who had picked on her from the start of the school year was out there, walking away free with no noose around her neck.  The calm, reasonable educator in me disappeared as the superhero mom in me raged and began to gain the strength needed to protect my child.  I tried to keep my cool though as I finally confessed everything to Katie, telling her how Autumn had tried every trick in the book to work things out with Nelly, her bully.  When that didn’t work, she tried to avoid Nelly.  She even tried to make new friends just to be away from Nelly’s group of taunting little girls.  By this time, I was so furious that I thought I would have a nervous break-down.  Luckily, Katie was also a mom herself, and understood exactly what I meant.  She encouraged Autumn and I to speak with the school guidance counselor who later worked with Autumn, Nelly, and a group of other girls to help prevent the bullying from continuing.

By the end of the school year, Autumn and Nelly had not become best friends; however, they had learned to respect one another, and the bullying had stopped.  When my son, Kalel, went to fourth grade and encountered his bullies, I no longer sat quietly in the shadows, whispering words of encouragement and giving him strategies to avoid his bullies.  Instead, I went straight to the principal and guidance counselor and demanded that something be done.  Within two weeks, the bullying had stopped.  We cannot sit still and wait for our children to find their own ways of dealing with bullies — ways that may most likely end in someone getting hurt.  Schools claiming that children need to find their own solutions to bullying are in for disasters like Columbine and the Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover case in May of 2009 where the 11 year old victim hung himself.  Instead, we must work collaboratively with other adults and together, as a community, we must help our children build bonds of respect for one another.  We must give a clear message that bullying is unacceptable no matter what age and what type.

Come this New Year, it will be ten years since my father-in-law passed away.  As the world turns and the days pass by from year to year, my husband and I continue to miss him.  He was a wonderful, caring, and loving man, and words still cannot express how we felt that horrific day that we discovered he had left this world.  My children were still quite young when it all happened.  The only one who somewhat remembers is my oldest, Autumn, who is now thirteen.  The following poem is her commemorative to her grandfather.

TIME  SLIPPED  PAST  ME

Time slipped past me as I
drifted in my sleep
when the sound of weeping
wakens me.

Walking down the hall I watch
as my father crouches
in front of a picture,
tears streaking down his face.

With his hidden mask I’ve
never seen, not once, a tear fall
down his rosy cheeks.  Every tear
cried by him makes a tear of pain run down my face.

With my tears so loud my father turns
and picks me up.  He holds me in his arms.
The words tremble off my father’s tongue
and my heart stops beating.

I understood my father’s cries and wished
I could have said something, but
my heart was as cold as ice and
my mouth couldn’t move.

My tears came down hard like a stormy rainy night
and the moon cried tears
to see my father’s face.
My grandfather had passed away.

I never had the chance to tell
my grandfather that I loved him.
I never got the chance to show him I was proud
to be his granddaughter.  Instead I didn’t talk much.

My grandfather committed suicide
for he hated himself.
He thought he was a bad man and
thought that no one loved him.

As he was being hauled away
his body a statue, I then wanted to hug him;
I then wanted to say,
“I love you.”

I am saddened that now he can’t see who I am.
He just saw what I was–
a mean, sad, shy, little six year old,
whom he thought was beautiful.

I listened and held my breath as Arthur screamed at the top of his not so tiny two-year-old lungs.  I had the sense that they were at it again, my two-year-old and my four-year-old.  “Shae!  Shae!” Arthur yelled at Rayner.

I put down the greasy, glass dish that I was just about to wash (by hand since my dumb dishwasher has been out, but that’s in a previous post), and wondered what crises was causing Arthur to cry as if his favorite toy had just been squashed to smithereens.  I didn’t have to wait long as the plastic floor covering of our kitchen was soon filled with the tiny trampling of toddler footsteps.

“Mo-mee, Nerner noe shae!  He no gee me caw!” he babbled angrily, telling me that Rayner wasn’t sharing a car with him.  Before I could even call Rayner to come over, he had already summoned himself, and was chattering in his defense.  His four-year-old speech was just a little clearer than Arthur’s two-year-old babbling.

“Ahter stoe my Bo-boe-bee,” he declared.  Arthur had stolen his Bumble-Bee Transformer toy.

“No!  Mie…mie…foun i! Foun I!”  Arthur screamed.  I’m not sure where he heard it from, but somehow, he had really taken a liking to the whole finders- keepers concept.

“Can you share it with Arthur?  He wants to play with it too,” I said to Rayner calmly, trying to refrain myself from doing something I might regret later.

“O-tay, bu pease tell Ahter not to hi me.  He gi me a owie,” Rayner replied.

“Arthur, did you give Rayner an owie?”

“Noooo….Nerner hi.  See…owie,” he replied, pointing to his head.  Somehow, I didn’t believe him as he made his big brown eyes look bigger than they really were.

“No hitting Rayner, or Rayner won’t share with you, okay?”

“Taayyy,” Arthur answered, his big, brown eyes looking even more innocent than before.

“Now go play and be nice,” I said to them both.  Somehow though, my extra sixth mom-sense, the one that understood exactly what babbling and gibberish meant, knew that this wouldn’t be the end of it.

Start…Stop….Start….Stop….Start…Stop….No, this wasn’t a fun game of musical chairs, nor was I fondly trying to fix a long-lost treasured but broken video tape.  Instead, I was stuck in Dallas/Fort Worth traffic while trying to complete a number of errands before heading to my brother’s college graduation ceremony.   Having lived most of my driving career in small town Wisconsin and rustic and rural Arkansas, I am not used to driving through heavily-trafficked highways at all.  I know I am not the best driver, but I am not exactly the worst driver either.  I am just the “easy-to-panic-when-I’ve-got-five-kids-in-the-car” type of driver.

Now don’t get me wrong. I really don’t despise highway driving.  In fact, I find that I do my best thinking while taking long, relaxing road-trips on highways uncluttered by other passing vehicles.  Somehow, the kids are always lulled to sleep for longer periods of time by the gentle constant cadence of our tires moving smoothly across long stretches of vacant highway pavement.  I relish these few “me” times.

However, Dallas/Fort Worth driving is far from this, especially during the busy holiday season. Yesterday was no exception, and probably even worse, as numerous school districts around the area held their last day of school before the holiday break, enabling many families to finally make their long awaited migrations to pre-determined holiday destinations.  Vehicles of various kinds and colors flocked the highways and we found ourselves in a regular start-stop pattern instead of the preferred soothing smooth-riding rhythm.  The majority of the time, I found myself paying more attention to what my kids were doing in the back of the Expedition than to my driving.  Pretty scary I know, but when you’ve got two kids arguing like squirrels brawling over the last remaining nut on the ground, a crying and screaming two-year-old (who was also trying to tear his way through the straps of his car-seat), a whiny pre-teen who would rather be home listening to her dead, uncharged I-pod, and a video-game crazed son whose Nintendo DS jingled a tune each time he paused to think, you just can’t help but turn around more often to yell at the kids.

Of course, while all this was going on inside the car, the beamer to the left was also swerving in and out of lanes like some graceful ice-skater trying to elegantly weave across the ice.  Except he wasn’t so graceful as he almost side-swiped the left front-end of my SUV, so while I was screaming at my kids, my horn was honking excessively at the driver of the beamer who, by now, had given me the finger.

Four hours later, we finally made it home. I felt like I had run a mile-long marathon even though I had only been sitting in the car yelling at my kids and honking my horn at all the lunatic drivers on the road.  By then, I had lost my mind, but at least no one had lost an arm or a leg.

Last week, my daughter sat for three laborious hours filling out the tiny bubbles to a mandatory eighth grade career assessment that she really did take seriously.  Being a somewhat ambitious child (one of my few ones), she truly wanted to know what type of career she would be best suited for.   By the time the exam was over, her brain felt as fried as okra that had been sitting overdue in the deep frier, and she was as career-confused as ever.

She wasn’t suited for teaching or anything that had to do with kids, since, according to the analysis, she despised children.  I guess living with four overly energetic boys who enjoy running around, rummaging through her things, and using them for unintended purposes has really taken a toll on her feelings towards children (particularly little “loony boys” as she calls them).  Somehow the analysis also showed that she cracks under pressure, so a career in a fast-past journalistic environment with countless deadlines was unlikely, even though writing is her forte.  She enjoyed math as much as she enjoyed children, so her chances of getting employed in a mathematics intense field was out of the question too.  She was demanding and bossy though, so according to the career analysis, the best profession for my 4 feet, vertically challenged and underweight child was being a police officer.  Hmmmm…..I guess the assessment didn’t take weight and height into consideration.

I know that my daughter wishes she were more like her seven year old brother, Wayne who is very aware of what he does and doesn’t want to do.  Once during a lesson on President Obama, he was asked by his first grade teacher if he wanted to be President of the United States someday.  He confidently told her, “No because the job is too hard.”  Instead, as he told my brother, he just wants to be a fat man when he grows up.

However, this was Autumn and not Wayne.  I wanted to tell her that I felt bad that her assessment turned out the way it did and that it was probably just a glitch, but this wouldn’t justify for other outrageous results from future career analyses that she would take.  I don’t understand why our society feels  a need to push children towards one profession or another at young ages.  I know some research guru probably decided that it would help children to be more goal-oriented, but I don’t think he contemplated how children like my daughter (children who are beginning to explore and develop their interests) would be affected.  In the end, I had no answer for my pour perplexed daughter.  All I could do was encourage her to keep up the great work that she has been doing in and out of school and tell her that she was still young and had time to develop her skills.

For the past four weeks, my dumb dishwasher has been out.  Imagine having to wash 200 dishes by hand each day!  That’s 1400 dishes each week, 6020 dishes each month, and 72,240 dishes in a year!  Unbelievable?  Yes, but when you live in a large family such as ours, it is not impossible (especially when your dishwasher just stopped sputtering out water).

“Get the darn thing fixed or get a new dishwasher!” you might tell me, but when you’re a substitute teacher making $70 a day (on days that you actually are needed), getting a new dishwasher or spending $200 to get one fixed just isn’t feasible.

If there is one thing I love more than blogging, it is teaching.  I am an awesome teacher (no really, I am) with great teaching and principaling credentials.  Parents brag on me for being able to motivate their child the way no other teachers have.  Administrators love me for my willingness to try new approaches and my ability to collaborate and share teaching ideas with other teachers.  Every school that I have subbed at has complimented me for an outstanding job, yet no one wants to hire me as a teacher.  What?!?!  Am I to stay a permanent substitute teacher for the state of Texas?!?!  I have called almost every local school district around here and they tell me the same story, “There just aren’t many teaching jobs with all the budget cuts, so we have had overwhelming responses to that job.”  Well then, stop posting on Craigslist that teaching fellows are needed for all the unfilled teaching jobs in Texas!  Do you blame me for becoming a flagging fanatic?

It gets worse.  I can’t get a job in any other industry either as I have been stuck in the teaching field for so long.  Employers will look at my resume and say, “Well, I see here that you have a Masters degree in Education Administration and that you’ve worked for the past ten years in the school systems, but do you have experience working elsewhere?”

“Well of course I do.  I blog and market my blog.  I just don’t get paid for it.  I have also co-owned and co-managed a factory farm that produced turkeys for Butterball.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but we’re looking for someone with just a little more experience.”

I walked into a job agency once to apply for a call center position.  The recruiter told me she was looking for someone with more call center experience, yet hired the guy next to me who had a criminal background for battering his wife and had been at four different jobs in the past year!  Of course, she wasn’t very savvy anyway.  If I had not been too upset at the time over not getting the job, I would have filed a privacy complaint against her since she conducted all of her interviews asking for personal information in front of all other candidates.

I told my husband that I really regret moving from Arkansas.  It was redneck country, but at least the natives had been nice enough to give me an awesome teaching job at a truly wonderful school.  Down here, we have only faced rejection from job to job.  Ironically, we had been enticed to move here after Butterball discontinued our turkey farm contract, since we heard that Texas had a low unemployment rate and had a large job industry.  At this point, I don’t know if I’ll ever get a permanent job in this state, but I guess it could be worse.  I am thankful that my husband has continued to be supportive, and my children have continued to be sweet and wonderful, even though my older ones know that we don’t have as much money as we did when we lived in Arkansas.

The shadows created by the flickering flames of the fire danced like ghostly visitors within the confines of the bamboo-and-straw-made Hmong home.  Outside, evening covered the village with her dark embrace.  The cool blackness, illuminated only by the the twinkling stars and a thin sliver of moonlight, heightened the eeriness of the night.  The straw-covered house stood at the end of a row of twenty similar-looking houses that made up the entire village.  Inside the house, my mother and her brothers and sisters circled the fireplace, waiting anxiously to listen to the grown-ups’ tales.

They had been waiting since the first reddish-gold rays of the sun had set as it was believed that these dab neeg, or “people spirit” stories, could only be told at night so as not to upset the spirits who lived all around us.  As my mother waited, her mind pondered anxiously over what she would hear that night.  Would the night’s stories be about brave souls fighting valiently against evil spirits and mythological creatures, or about talking animals that once lived alongside us?  Perhaps if she were lucky, they would tell the tale of two star-crossed lovers whose romance surpassed even time and death?

As an adult, my mother continued this tradition of oral storytelling.  In fact, I remember being that same little girl that my mother once was as I too waited anxiously with my own brothers and sisters to listen to her dab neeg.  These stories had been passed down from her parents, and their parents, and so on and so on.  The stories were much more ancient than even the terrible war that had brought the Hmong people from China to Laos.  They existed long before the French missionary developed a written form of our language and taught it to the Hmong, and they certainly existed before the Hmong became secret soldiers for the American CIA during the Vietnam War.

I listened intently like a child intrigued by a new toy as my mother began each story.  “Txeej thauv od…” (Long ago..) she would start.  As she painted the events of the story with her words, I tried to picture them in my mind.  I imagined each of the characters as she described them and used her many different voices to portray each one.  I was a statue unaffected by everything else around me as I listened to the story chants that made the story even more delightful, and even to this day, I wondered at how she remembered these long rhymes and repeated them each time she told the story.

Years later, when I finally learned how to read, I thirsted for great written literary pieces in the same way that I had hungered for my mother’s stories.  Little did she know that she had planted a love for reading within me with a cultural tradition passed down from generations of ancestors.  My mother — who had never gone to school as a child; who came to the United States as an immigrant, illiterate in the English language and unaquainted with the American educational system — had done something that only educational gurus preach.  She was unaware of the facts that storytelling helped to develop an understanding for written story elements, increased a child’s vocabulary awareness, and boosted a child’s interest in reading.  Instead, she was teaching me an ancient tradition older than Hmong history itself.

As I stared blankly into the gray and white “new post” screen on my Wordpress dashboard, searching for something to write about, my mind began to wander desperately.  I thought about what to send for Kal’s and Wayne’s school Christmas parties.  I thought about what I was going to do if Arthur’s cough didn’t go away.  I thought about all the things that everyone wanted for Christmas this year.  I thought about….

Just then, two of my boys whizzed by in speeding laundry baskets pushed by my other two boys. The boys drove around in their white laundry basket hot-rods like NASCAR racers competing for the NASCAR cup.  As I continued to watch, the automobiles somehow transformed, not into giant Autobots or Decepticons like in the Transformers movie, but into giant caves where three of the boys hid from a stalking lion.  The lion, who somehow resembled Kalel, my oldest son, crawled stealthily around the two white Rubbermaid caves that were inhabited by Arthur and Rayner and Wayne.  The lion pounced towards the plastic cave containing Arthur and Rayner.  The two boys jumped out of the cave, and somehow,  Raynor, like Samson with his extra burst of strength, picked up the white cave with all of his might.  He held it out in front of him like a large, white shield to protect himself from the wrath of Kalel.  Kalel lunged at the laundry basket, but realizing that it was a tough barrier, started punching at it.  The laundry basket then became a white, retangular-shaped punching bag as all four boys took turns jabbing at it.

There was no need for expensive Nintendo Ds’s that sat around dusting in their almost uninhabited rooms, nor should I waste money on battery operated and electrical remote control cars that wear out after a few months of play.  This year, for Christmas, all I need are more laundry baskets and the imaginations of energetic little boys.