Most of it’s wonderful.  We’ll have hours over late night coffee dates to talk about that. I’m already planning all the desserts I want to learn to make so we can linger over our plates and that kind of delicious conversation.

But sweetheart, there’s some other stuff that comes with girlhood too. Some stuff I’d rather you heard first from me. It’s stuff that isn’t as scary if we say it out loud and don’t let it sneak up on us.

My love, there will always be girls who are mean.

And you won’t outgrow it. There will always be mean girls. One day you’ll be thirty seven and reading the long line of stories that mean girls have left in their wake.

But daughter, that doesn’t mean we hide our hearts. That doesn’t mean we find a tower and Rapunzel ourselves away from the world.

No darling, it means that we learn to be braver than the mean girls. We out-love them.  That is the secret weapon. To pour on the unexpected love.  To meet them with open arms and mind, knowing that meanness is what bleeds from scars at their most raw.

Meanness is a symptom, not a condition.

And when they want to hurt you with their words, I will teach you how to hold up the shield of faith and firm belief that Jesus has declared you good and beloved. That you are precious and ransomed – His life for yours. There is nothing insignificant about you.

I will wrap my words, His promises and both our lives around you.

You were made to have friends, sweetheart. You were not made to be alone. This is a Jesus body we belong to and some days you’ll feel like the heart and soul and other days like just a bit of dried skin on the elbow and that’s OK.

It’s never a bad thing to be reminded that the whole world does not revolve around you.

But on the days when you feel like an outsider, on the days when your best friend stops talking to you, on the days when everyone gets invited to the sleepover and you don’t, on the days when you wonder if you fit in –

on those days, Zoe, I will remind you that love never quits.

Love always believes the best

And that sometimes the benefit of the doubt is the most precious gift we can give anyone.

I will treat your bruised heart with chocolate brownies, a tall glass of cold milk and The Princess Bride – yes, I’m certain it will still be my favorite movie even a decade from now.

And then I will send you back out into the fray, my love.

I will always send you back because friendship is worth fighting for. Women need one another. And if we give up at girlhood, what chance do we have during the minivan driving years?

Friendship is all or nothing Zoe.

A month ago you stood up and walked for the first time. Since then you’ve fallen often. But you set determined hands to the floor, tilt forward, push back up again and take the next step.

Never stop getting back up again, darling.

It’s the only way to keep moving forward to all that life waiting for you.

::

I think motherhood should come with a super hero cape and a cheerleader.
My {free} ebook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms might be the next best thing.
Enter your email address and it’s coming your way just before Mother’s Day!
Delivered by

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

Less so lately.

But at the sleep-deprived beginning I would read all those books that tell you when the baby should be sleeping and when the baby should be eating and when the baby should be this, that, and the other thing-ing and all I would see was a big, fat, red “F”

Jackson did nothing according to anybody’s schedule but his own.

And he threw up a lot. As much as I could finally get him to eat, he would look at me, cough and puke it all back out again. Forget crying over spilled milk, I wept over what felt like oceans of of baby puke.

Wept.

Parenting is not for the faint of heart. And it’s especially not for those type A personalities accustomed to having all their ducks in a row, all their check boxes checked and all their life, their sofa cushions and their cereal boxes neatly arranged.

After two weeks had passed . . .  it became very clear very quickly that our life would look nothing like the organized, orderly, controlled lives of the model parents in the book. ~ Spirit-Led Parenting: From Fear to Freedom in Baby’s First Year

I had a nursing chart. I’d harnessed my elementary school poster board and marker skills and set up a time table. After each feeding I would dutifully put check marks in the boxes – which side I’d nursed and how long – before I stumbled deliriously back to bed. Jackson cried, I nursed, I made check marks, and he never ever once slept or ate as much or as long as the books promised me and my chart that he would.

F, F, F, F minus in parenting.

I pretended it made sense to me. I pretended I had a handle on his “routine.”  I pretended I hadn’t started to resent all those parenting books lining the shelves of our teeny little one room cottage.

And still he ate at a snail’s pace and woke up regularly to eat slowly at 1opm, 1am, 3am, 5am and 7am.

I kept waiting to fall in love with him and instead I just felt like we’d both failed our midterms.

Disillusionment and despair quickly replaced the euphoria of new parenthood. Every nighttime wake-up, every too-short nap, every time I rocked her to sleep, I was confronted with my failure. ~ Spirit-Led Parenting: From Fear to Freedom in Baby’s First Year

The moment I found out I was pregnant with Micah I threw out every parenting book I’d ever owned.

We did it our way.

And by the time I had Zoe I was ready to revel in my parenthood.

I would have given a lot at the beginning for someone to have told me that there is no one “right” way.

Oh my but that would have saved me a lot of anguish.

The truth for many mothers is that when the mainstream advice does not work or feel right for our families, we experience tremendous anxiety over how our parenting choices will be viewed by those around us. ~ Spirit-Led Parenting: From Fear to Freedom in Baby’s First Year

Ain’t that the truth.

It’s taken me years to trust any kind of baby book again. With Zoe I hardly had any clue what stage she was “supposed” to be on because checking in with any of “those” books simply didn’t interest me.

I wanted to be her mother, not her hall monitor.

I wanted to get up with her any time she needed me. Even when I didn’t want to. I wanted to sniff her hair and rock her in the exhausted dark, knowing she was my last. And my first girl.

I wanted to just feed her. I didn’t want to have to keep score of how much she ate.

She wasn’t sick, she was gaining weight deliciously, and I knew that this last first baby year would slip through my fingers if I was too busy trying to plan for it. So we just lived it. Zoe and I. We lived every amazing, sleep deprived moment together.

We may have danced.

And if you’re tired and confused like I was three kids ago – oh how I’d like to come over with chocolate cake and the promise that no one gets it right the first time. No one gets it all right the sixth time either I’m told.

There are no perfect parents and no formulas that can produce perfect kids.

In fact, I’m convinced more than ever that parenthood, by design, is created to reveal all our many imperfections. Our short-tempers, our selfishness, our laziness, our flat out short fuses.

Nothing will light that up quite like a baby blowout requiring a full outfit change at 2am after an hour’s worth of nursing.

It’s meant to be glorious and utterly mundane at the same time.

the first year should be less about training our babies and more about God developing us as parents and human beings. ~ Spirit-Led Parenting: From Fear to Freedom in Baby’s First Year

This is the book I wish I’d had in my hands on at 5am on a cold South African morning when I was tired and sore and desperate for a formula that would give me back my old life.

I needed someone to tell me over tea and cake that my old life was gone for good; not what to do so that I could still live with one foot in my stay up late, sleep in late, come and go as you please world and one foot in my I want to be a mother if the baby will just leave me alone world.

I needed a safe place to grieve the loss of a stage of life I’d loved and wise words to bring me gently into a new life. A life where everything was unfamiliar and often scary. A life that couldn’t be reduced to a poster board check list.

And in their beautiful, gracious, kind, patient, profoundly encouraging book Spirit-Led Parenting: From Fear to Freedom in Baby’s First Year, Megan Tietz and Laura Oyer do just that.

They tell us we’re not crazy or alone or crazy alone.

They prescribe prayer and DVR’d shows.

They get how we might have felt like failures.

Oh precious panic-stricken new moms, this book is a gift to us all. It reminds us that parenting is so much more than pass fail.

Can I wrap it up along with some Downton Abbey re-runs and a basket of chocolate covered pretzels and send it over? Well, everything except the pretzels and DVDs.

GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED. Winners announced over here.

But I do have three copies of the book to giveaway. Yup, Three!

Just leave a comment by Friday sharing one thing you wish you’d known when you were a new mom and you’ll be entered to win a copy.

Gosh, you’re lovely. And brave. And I’m so cheering you on every step of the sleep-deprived way!

Just click here to leave a comment and be entered.

{Spirit-Led Parenting is currently sold out on Amazon but you can also order it at the Civitas Press Store}

Pst, other blogs spreading the word about this awesome book and more opportunities to win it over here. And nope, no one paid me to share any of this. I’m just so excited to have discovered a parenting book I can trust again:

• 4/10 The Gypsy Mama, Mama Monk, Little Hearts Books
• 4/11 Sarah Bessey
• 4/12 I Take Joy
• 4/13 Love Well
• 4/14 Joy in this Journey
• 4/15 The Stanley Clan
• 4/16 Life Your Way
• 4/17 Lifenut
• 4/18 Fried Okra, Live Renewed
• 4/19 The Pilot’s Wife
• 4/20 Nish Happens
• 4/23 Keeper of the Home

::

I think motherhood should come with a super hero cape and a cheerleader.
My {free} ebook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms might be the next best thing.
Enter your email address and it’s coming your way just before Mother’s Day!
Delivered by

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

So when we sit down at the computer and open a vein we offer life to someone else. We pour out what we’ve learned or failed to learn as a lifeline to someone else.

We offer our stories across computer screens, transfusion-like.

On Wednesday morning I re-live the same story I’ve lived a hundred times in a hundred different airports. There’s the familiar waiting, the knot in stomach, the worrying I’m at the wrong gate. There’s the anticipation and the flutters every time the automatic doors open and the aching, bursting excitement.

A mom comes through with three kids. They are all just years older than my own three. They come through at a flat run. I look from them over to the crowd; I want to see if I can spot who they’re running toward before they arrive.

It’s easy.

Light is pouring out of her, that smile so wide it cracks open the seams of Dulles airport. White, white hair and a body made for story time and chocolate chip cookies. She’s standing still but she’s running just as hard at they are.

I always cry at airports.

We share our stories because they lifeline remind us that we’re all created out of the threads of the same story.

The tiles are dirty white same as in South Africa, Guatemala, Ukraine. Airport tiles. Time loses all meaning in between departure and arrival gates. We simply wait. We suspend. We remember how little control we have over anything.

When you whisper into my inbox how you stole a year from “real life” to go home and raise your grand daughter my story stands up and screams applause at yours.

Time is wasted on airports. People simply are. They are angry or frustrated or desperately sad or whole. They are the realest versions of themselves when they are holding desperately to the people they love. We were never made for good-bye.

This is my boring, ordinary, sacred story.

I missed their wedding in November.

I watch the door open and close and open again with each new group of people who aren’t them.

He is my little brother who was always like my big brother and I’m so relieved I’m on time to meet him and his new-I’ve-known-her-forever wife. I’m usually late. He knows that. How many arrivals have seen me rushing to the gate and him already sitting on a chair waiting for me. Not today; today I am waiting. If you’re waiting in an airport you’re on time.

I wait.

I’m on time.

And when I see him the time between then and now unravels and I know he knows. This is how it feels to live in the in between. All those missed nephews and first neices, missed dedications and Tae Kwon Do lessons, missed birthdays, missed engagements, missed houses and moves and churches and opening nights and padkos, cross-country, Karoo nights.

When the doors slide open it’s all washed away.

And I’m there hugging his tall body and holding onto his hand. She’s my sister now and not just my friend.

For ten days we will get to live in real time again.

Tonight I write for all the homesick. Because sometimes home comes to us.

All we have to do is open our arms wide and welcome it.

::

::

I think motherhood should come with a super hero cape and a cheerleader.
My {free} ebook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms might be the next best thing.
Enter your email address and it’s coming your way just before Mother’s Day!
Delivered by

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

Some days when I see ugly, hard, hurting places in the world I want to counter them with beauty.

I want to bury my head in piles of freshly mowed grass and just bathe in the tender spring sunshine. I want to curl up in our king size bed between two softly snoring boys and let their peace wash over me. I want to eat chocolate frosting right out of the tub and call my brothers in South Africa and catch up for hours.

I want to find the everything that is true and noble and right and pure and lovely and admirable, excellent and praiseworthy and just wallow in those things. And I don’t think they need to be especially religious things to fall into that category. A favorite book that traces the character of courage; a favorite sweater that wraps me around with memories; a song that comes onto the radio and serenades the afternoon with a tribute to the ordinary -

a carrot top who can barely walk
With a sippy cup of milk
A little blue eyed blonde with shoes on wrong
‘Cause she likes to dress herself. ~ LoneStar

A baby girl taking her first steps and boys who hug so hard we all land in a laughing heap on the ground. Chocolate covered raisins and frothy cups of hot chocolate. Friends Stateside who speak Afrikaans.

I want to drink in the good and remember that the Light of the world is not set on a dimmer switch. He blazes. Always.

Give me eyes that I might see.

The tenderness, the compassion the mercy. The meeting of minds to circle our social media wagons around our children. The blazing comet that lights up the Internet on nights when good triumphs over evil.

I want to dance. I want to dance underneath a sky of fireworks blazing His goodness across the vast expanse of seeming dark. Because morning is coming and we are the morning people.

We might have nightmares, thrash around in the dark and grope towards a night light. But we are the destined-for-morning people.

We are the sunshine creeping over the edge of a dark rock rolled away people. We are the gaping hole in the side of a hill defied by the Light people. We are the dew early rise with the Gardner people.

We are the Sunday morning people.

We are the promises of new mercies every morning people. And those promises are our flaming torch in the midnight hour. They blaze a trail for our confused hearts and blind feet. They carve a way out of the darkness when there seems to be none. And they lead us towards the horizon.

And the whole universe testifies that morning will come.

As surely as the earth turns on its axle and rotates around the sun. As surely as the sun burns at a temperature of 13,600,000 kelvins at its core. As surely as its light travels to Earth in 8 minutes and 19 seconds to crack through the clouds and paint my son’s eyelashes golden.

Morning will come.

We must not become so accustomed to the dark, so confined by its four walls, that we doubt the morning. But even if we do, even if we lose our sight and our will to keep walking forward, the morning sends a Messenger back to find us – to bring us out into the light.

He is the DaySpring from on High – all light, all days, all morning springs from Him.

He will lead us tenderly, blindly forward, one foot at a time, until we feel the first flush of warmth on our cheeks. And eyelids swollen shut with weeping will be bathed in sunshine. And we will be the reflected glory of the Son who saved us.

The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death a
a light has dawned. Isaiah 9:2.

Amen.

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.

::

I think motherhood should come with a super hero cape and a cheerleader.
My {free} ebook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms might be the next best thing.
Enter your email address and it’s coming your way just before Mother’s Day!
Delivered by

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

Well, it happened and you can listen along with us as I talk about my middle name, why I don’t think I’m cool enough to be a “Rachel” and how my middle son likes to fart more than I think is probably normal.

Yea, deep stuff like that.

There’s also a side of surviving homesickness, travel with kids under age 6, and why I wasn’t as gung-ho about Downton Abbey as Twitter was. Kindly, don’t hold that against me, eh? Oh yea, and I talk about my daily chaos and the super hero who helps me through it.

So, if you’ve got a big stack of laundry to fold and need some company, you can tune into me and Tsh podcasting over here.

We laughed a lot. I hope you do too.

Laughter is an instant vacation.  ~Milton Berle

PS: Yes, yes my kids do wear cowboy boots with shorts. Yours don’t?

::

::

I think motherhood should come with a super hero cape and a cheerleader.
My {free} ebook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms might be the next best thing.
Enter your email address and it’s coming your way just before Mother’s Day!
Delivered by

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

I think motherhood should come with a super hero cape and a cheerleader.
My {free} ebook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms might be the next best thing.
Enter your email address and it’s coming your way just before Mother’s Day!

Delivered by

Click here to download a free copy of your own personal cheerleader,
because you totally deserve a cheerleader if:

1. You can’t remember when last you slept 8 hours in a row.
2. You’ve forgotten what warm food tastes like.
3. You can change a diaper in the pitch dark.
4. Other adults refer to you as “{insert your child’s name’s} mom.”
5. You’ve been to the pediatrician more times in the last year than the hair salon.
6. Your vacuum cleaner cries “uncle” before you even plug it in.
7. You regularly discover food in the microwave you’d forgotten you started to heat for yourself.
8. You spend two hours slaving over a dinner that your kids declare “disgusting!”
9. Your potty training sons have really bad aim.
10. You just discovered that the lid on the baby food in your diaper bag came off.

I wish I could send you each a live-in cook, cleaner, chauffeur and masseuse for Mother’s Day!

The next best thing might be my free EBook – The Cheerleader for Tired Moms. If you subscribe to this here blog, it’s coming your way in May!

It’s coming to you in time for Mother’s Day.

It’s a collection of your and my favorite posts about motherhood from this blog.

It’s free! for all Gypsy Mama subscribers. So, if you aren’t already, just click here to subscribe to the Gypsy Mama by email or in a reader {it’s all free!}

When the EBook launches it will be delivered with love, extra helpings of encouragement and a set of pom-poms to your inbox

Like the double Snuggie – it’s made to be shared!

It’s full of the things I wish someone had told me at the tired beginning.

If you’re a mom, you’re my hero. Period. This freebie is for you! {Click to Tweet!}

I’m cheering you on – loudly and probably with un-blowdried hair.

Much love and Cheerios,

Lisa-Jo {the Gypsy Mama}
{who owes Annie a lifetime of chocolate for bringing the Cheeerleader to life with her design mojo!}

::

::

I think motherhood should come with a super hero cape and a cheerleader.
My {free} ebook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms might be the next best thing.
Enter your email address and it’s coming your way just before Mother’s Day!

Delivered by

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

I told him not to buy me anything for Valentine’s this year. Just to write me a love letter. He liked the idea but his schedule was uncooperative. That was a month ago.

This morning I stumble into the bathroom pre-contact lenses and peer at an envelope that seems to have found it’s way onto the shelf next to the sink. My head is fuzzy from nearly five days of him being driven by the deadlines of work and me parenting solo. Thursday is our goal.

On Thursday we get his head and schedule back again. We’re living for Thursday.

But today is just Tuesday.

Micah and Zoe are still asleep and Jackson’s camped out already in front of either the Power Rangers or the Lynx. I have a bath in mind. A bath before anyone else wakes up. I reach over to run the water and wonder why a piece of junk mail has made it into the bathroom.

I squint at it.

Micah has an affection for writing on scraps of paper and leaving them breadcrumb like behind him. But this isn’t from Micah.

In the dark between shower and leaving for work he made me a gift.

I stand and hold this precious piece of junk mail for a long time. I trace my finger over the familiar loops and flourishes he makes of my name.

I feel beautiful.

Unshowered, dark smudges under my eyes and those extra baby pounds stubbornly still sitting on my thighs.

Half-blind without glasses and so, so beautiful.
::

You’re beautiful and brave and I love that you visit here!
Can I offer you my posts by email as a thank you? {Just enter address below}
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“What did you do today?”

And I think about lists checked off and conference calls and the crock pot I had to run through the dishwasher and still rinse out by hand. I think about the four rooms that I vacuumed and the EBook cover design I’m excited about. I think about a small garden in a ceramic tray the boys helped me plant and four loads of laundry.

I think about 8 diapers and two changes of baby clothes.

I think about the fried egg I burned for breakfast and the bagel sandwiches I made instead. I think about six bags of sand box sand and two baths that followed. I think about Skype calls and text messages and deadlines ticking ever louder.

I think about a first time reading of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and how Micah pulled a Joey and wanted the book as far away from him as possible after only the first two chapters.

And I think about that last hour of daylight before bath and bed and comatose sleep.

“We ran cherry blossom laps,” I tell him.

::

Motherhood should really come with a super hero cape, don’t you think?
Can I offer you my posts by email instead? {Just enter address below}
Delivered by

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

It’s fabulous. My friend Tsh is the awesome sauce behind it.

And as part of Simple Mom she hosts a podcast called Home Fries. Tomorrow she’s interviewing me. And she said we should see if there’s anything in particular folks would like to know, about, well, me.

It’s feels weird to ask. But, hey, I’m game.

So go ahead, leave any curiosity in the comments and Tsh and I will be sure to answer ‘em. All of ‘em. I pinky promise. And I’ll let you know when it airs, so you can enjoy me rambling on about my Cheerio-encrusted, always-behind-on-the-dishes, love-my-kids-more-than-carnival-food, crazy-chaotic-upside down life.

Love

Lisa-MyDaugherTurnsOneTodayAndMyHeartIsExploding-Jo

PS: Subscribers, just click here to come over and leave your questions in the comments.Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}

1. To go to the bathroom without an audience
2. A hot meal
3. Not to have to cut up any food but their own
4. Make up that hasn’t been repurposed as face paint
5. A bed without wet spots in it
6. Laundry washed and folded by someone else
7. A weekend worth of sleep
8. To get through more than three words without being interrupted
9. Self-cleaning mini vans
10. A world where sweat pants are more fashionable than skinny jeans
11. Non-fattening chocolate
12. Bottomless ice cream tubs
13. Dogs that don’t shed
14. Hamsters that can take out their own trash
15. The tidying super powers of Mary Poppins
16. Doctor’s offices that are always on time
17. Drive through everything!
18. A mute button for temper tantrums
19. A world without Barney
20. Pacifier locators
21. Self cleaning dishes
22. A lifetime supply of paper plates
23. Candy flavored vegetables
24. Hall monitors for our house
25. Guarantees that skinned knees are the worst our kids will have to worry about
26. Someone to pat our back and sing us lullabies too
27. On call massage therapy
28. Non-stain spaghetti sauce
29. Grass without the holes, dinosaur digs or rock collection
30. World household peace
31. Everyone to recognize how awesome our kids are
32. Room service
33. Music that makes moms and kids happy
34. A diaperreal genie!
35. Legos that melt in the mouth {thus preventing choking}
36. Daily naps
37. Time out that is more than just hiding in the laundry room
38. A theme song
39. Beth Moore on speed dial
40. Other moms to laugh, cry, and do life along side.

OK, what am I forgetting – let’s build this list together!

Subscribers, just click here to add your ideas to the comments too!

::

Motherhood should really come with built in candy, shouldn’t it?
Can I offer you my fat-free emails instead? {Just enter address below}

Delivered by

Click here to download my free eBook, “The Cheerleader for Tired Moms: A Collection of Posts from the Gypsy Mama” {please give it a few moments to download… cheering for you!}