The Curse of the Cheerio

I'm sure you have all had those moments when you have said, "my children will NEVER do that." Well, that is how I have always felt about cheerios. Riding in some mom's minivan with old cheerios hidden between all the cracks, cheerios stuck to sticky spills in the cup holder, cheerios crunching underfoot as I sat down, I vowed I would never be one of "those moms" who lived in a filth of cheerio remains.

I think I have become one of those moms. The good part is that cheerios have not yet made way to my car. However, my kitchen has been taken over. My daughter loves cheerios. She doesn't just like to eat them: she enjoys banging on her highchair tray and watching them fly onto the floor, she smiles at me while she grabs a fistful and tosses them over the edge, she thinks it's hilarious to fill her mouth and then laugh at something funny, sending soggy cheerio bits spraying everywhere. She especially likes to eat them off of the floor.

I do my best to contain the mess. I pick them off of the floor several times a day and I wipe down her high chair every few days, but invariably I find the remains of a cheerio ground into the carpet, hidden in some unlikely place, or stuck in my daughter's hair. Yesterday I even found one in my purse.

While a cheerio takeover is definitely gross and exasperating, the real issue for me is this: I always thought I would be one of those easygoing moms that let nothing phase them. I am finding, though, that I am becoming more uptight than I ever thought I would be. My roommate in college, Kathleen, and I would always joke that when we had kids, my kids would be the ones running around naked while her kids would be spotless in cute Gap Kids clothes. We talked yesterday on the phone and realized that we have reversed rolls: it drives me crazy when my daughter's face and clothes are dirty and we are off our schedule and she has become a baby-wearing, living in Seattle without a car, riding the bus everywhere mom.

I think that the longer I am a mom and the more kids I have, I will probably go back to my old hippy-granola ways and stop letting the messes, the sheduling upsets, and the cheerios ground into the carpet bother me. I may even let my kids eat cheerios in the car someday! For now, though, I am doing my best at figuring this whole mom thing out and loving every precious moment of it.

Vampires to Christ

I finished reading Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt by Anne Rice a few days ago. Yes, you read me right--the Anne Rice of Interview With A Vampire fame. She became a Christian a few years back and decided "that if I believed in Him as completely as I said I did, I ought to write entirely for him," in her words. What resulted from that commitment is a truly wondrous fictional account of Jesus's childhood. Rice brings to life to the human side of Jesus in a way that will probably forever impact the way that I think about Jesus and his life, while not at all diminishing the side of him that is God. She writes with reverence about Jesus and his family while adding fascinating details from her extensive historical research and from her own imagination. Her next book, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, comes out in a few days.

I could write so much more about this book, but I'll leave it at that and encourage you to read it yourself. Rice writes two short essays at the end of the book explaining her conversion and detailing some of her research. She spends some time explaining the role of faith in her coming (back) to Christ and I found her words particularly thought provoking.

She writes (sorry this is long): "I didn't have to know the answers to these [theological and social] questions precisely because God did. He was the God who made the Universe in which I existed. That meant He had made the Big Bang, He had made DNA, He had made the Black Holes in space, and the wind and the rain and the individual snowflakes that fall from the sky. He had done all that. So surely He could do virtually anything and He could solve virtually everything. And how could I possibly know what He knew? And why should I remain apart from Him because I could not grasp all that He could grasp? What came over me then was an infinite trust, trust in His power and His love. I didn't have to worry about the ultimate fate of my good atheistic friends, gay or straight, because He knew all about them, and He was holding them in His hands. I didn't have to quake alone in terror at the thought of those who die untimely deaths from illness, or the countless millions destroyed in the horrors of war. He knew all about them. He had always been holding them in His hands. He and only He knew the full story of every person who'd ever lived or would live; He and He alone knew what person was given what choice, what chance, what opportunity, what amount of time, to come to Him by what path. That I couldn't possibly know all was as clear to me as my awareness that He did."

Maybe reading this should have been a "duh" moment for me, but I must admit I have a hard time trusting God with the unexplainable parts of life: I struggle with fear and my faith is severely tested when I dwell on death, sickness, evil. Rice's thoughts on faith have made me question whether I can truly lay my fears and anxieties upon Christ and move on in faith, fully trusting that God is in control and that I really don't have to worry.