village

I can not emphasise how much we need our village to raise our kids.  This "village" is the people that we trust to care for our kids on the millions of fog delays, early dismissals, and snow days.   It's the family that went to pick up A. when I forgot it was an early dismissal day (oops!).   It's the people that don't mind being called or texted at 6:40 am when I'm trying to reconfigure my patient's and still make sure that my kids are loved and supervised.  It's the people that share and instill the values in our kids.  It's the people that probably will be future advisors and trusted companions to our kids when they don't want to or feel like they can't come to us with whatever issue.  I take pride in finding these people and am sooo grateful for them!!!

some of our village

Living in small town America, we do most things with at least one of the people in our village.  However, we are just now venturing into the world of Lacrosse.  Being from VA, neither B nor I have any experience with Lacrosse.  We know one other family; it's a family that we adore and is DEFINATELY part of our village.  However, on this particular day, that family was not there.  This was one of the very first lacrosse practices and I was on my own with the 3 kiddos.  R. needed to be fed, A. needed to go to the bathroom, and K. was feeling nervous about getting on the field.  The coach started talking and K.'s nose started to drip, drip, drip blood.  Then it began to gush, gush, gush blood.  Thankfully, having an infant, I had wipes.  A. forgot about the bathroom and fed R. while I dealt with K's nose.  30 minutes later and an entire package of wipes later, we finally got him on the field.  I took over feeding the baby and A. could escape to the bathroom.

Now, I do take pride in being calm in an unpleasant situation, but I really can't imagine that I looked like everything was completely under control.  I do not believe that I looked like I was such a super mom that an offer to help was totally unwarranted.  I don't think that I was so amazing that the cop in uniform or the aquantance that I know for sure is an offduty nurse could not have even acknowledged the situation.  However, I do know that the lack of my village being there made me so sad.  I do know that I question even taking K. back to practice because the people that I want to be in his life would have helped or at least offered.  I do know that I've been thinking about this for days and I've come to the conclusion that this is where I have to practice what I preach to the kids.  I have to model how I would act and hope that as I get to know these people, they will become a different type of village.  I"m going to have to, as I say to the kids, "let my little Jesus light shine".