Piece Makers

Anyone with children can tell you how quickly your home can go from peaceful, to pieces! I have learned to be the consumate peacemaker in a home with seven "piecemakers"! I have often been asked how I handle the chaos that ensues with having such a large family, and there simply isn't one magic solution. First of all I have fine-tuned my "selective hearing". We all learn that as kids, so it's a skill you most likely already possess! It's always amazing that if you whisper "come get ice cream", children in the next room, or even downstairs will hear you. Conversely, if you are yelling "Time for bed!" at the top of your lungs, kids playing in the same room as you will always say "I didn't hear you say it was time for bed". So I have used this skill to advantage as a mother as well. I can wake out of a dead sleep at the slightest breathing variation in a sleeping baby in the other room, but I have learned to tune out the loud yelling and laughter that kids produce while playing. I let the noise just swirl around me along with the kids as they run around being...well...kids! There is a difference, however between "good" noise and "bad" noise. When the bickering and arguing start, my selective hearing kicks off and I find myself more often than not in the position of referee. Children, by design, are there to take your sanity and shred it into pieces! My husband tells me it is in their "job description". As I take a step back and look at this cycle of "piece-making" and "peace-making" I realize that it is by design; it is a process that teaches and helps us to become. As children, newly come to this world, we cannot comprehend, in its entirety, much of what is around us, so we take it apart. We break it down into "pieces" that we can see and comprehend. Symbolically speaking, that is. I hear so often adults complaining that their teenagers don't see the whole picture. They are trying to counsel their kids to be wise and check out all their option, not to do foolish things because they disregard the future to indulge in only the present, but I submit to you that that is the way things ought to be. Children are "piecemakers", they have to be in order to learn how life works. Then, as they mature, and if they have been given all the right pieces they begin to see how it all fits into one magnificent whole; then they begin to "piece" things together. Then as healthy, well-adjusted adults they make the transition from "piece-maker" to peacemaker. Theoretically speaking anyway. I say that because I'm sure there are many pieces of the puzzle that I am still missing, but you get the idea. So keep being a peacemaker and watch with wonder what amazing things your children will learn and become as they put the pieces together.