Most parents have one child that pushes them to the brink, forces their "A game", raises the parenting bar, mandates more creativity and tons of patience. For us, that child is Noah Matthew.
Noah is a constant reminder of the Father's love for us. Daily we watch as he breaks our rules, ignores our correction - spits on our genuine efforts of patience . We are left torn between utter and complete love and gentleness and total exhaustion and disappointment.
Many days he uses up more gentleness than we even knew we had. Parenting a child like this helps us understand the depth of God's love for us and the true meaning of grace and forgiveness. We've got ONE kid that pushes us. Imagine the sheer volume of nonsense the Lord deals with daily.
The boy is a mystery. The boy makes us tired. The boy is darling. The boy drives me nuts. The boy melts my heart. Oh how I adore him.
His latest trick has grown annoying quickly. It started with dumping the hand pump soap dispensers out into the sinks. What fun! A few times asking him not to do that and a few time-outs later we switched to bars of soap at his bathroom sink. Problem solved? No. He moved on to shampoo. No less than six full bottles of shampoo have been dumped out in the shower. Never mind the trouble he got in after each and every bottle was dumped; if you spy on him in the bath you can still catch him twisting off the top preparing to pour. We moved the shampoo to higher places.
Yesterday we asked where the bars of soap had gone, only to learn that he flushed them down the toilet. The dumping of bottles of hand-soap and shampoo created bubbles, we could see how that entertained him - but flushing bars of soap down the toilet seems to offer no reward at all. Unless you count a spanking as a reward.
If it were not for the fact that he loves dirt and animals, maybe we would just do away with soap all together. Noah LOVES this cat. He wakes up asking to go see the cat. The poor kitty has had enough of Noah to last her all nine of her lives.
Last night he was walking around with his Childrens Bible opened up to the story of Noah in Genesis. He said, "When am I gonna boat with my ark again?" We told him we are not so sure an ark is part of his story. Then he said, "Aaaawwwww, what about the beard? I don't got no beard either!!!"
Once he stops dumping all of our soap down the drains we'll talk about growing some facial hair. Until then he's beardless.
