Life with Dirt

Being the parents of six children means that you often have to make explanations. We are consistently asked here (and everywhere) how we "do it" with them, why we had so many of them and especially why we adopted two of them. These interrogations lead me to feel that we are always on display, and that the children should be displayed beautifully. But, as these pictures evidence, being a kid is a dirty job. And, well, being a mom who wants her kids to be happy, I find it very conflicting to keep them neat, clean and presentable all the time when happiness to them is life with dirt. Faces are often smudged, dresses smeared and fingernails laced with evidence of life with paints or other mark leaving mediums. Many times when we "show up" in public I look at the kids and find that they resemble the images conjured up by life on the streets in a Dicken's novel. At times I feel embarrassed that my parenting is not "up to par" as to have the kids scrubbed clean and the clothes fresh off the line when we head to the grocery store. And at other times I kind of feel like messy faces and dirty clothes = a happy child, because they are evidence of that child enjoying the things that children should; prentending to be fairies in the garden and digging for buried treasure...so I try to stand tall and walk straight even if the kids look like the "before" shots in a laundry detergent add. I wonder what other people think of me, of us; but I think I'm getting to a point in my mothering (at least I hope I'm getting to this point) where how the kids behave means more than how they look. And dirty kids are usually pretty happy, so they tend to be better behaved. Make sense?

If you come across us Grahams wherever we may be, I hope you'll look at our happy faces and see the children saying "please and thank you" and helping one another with hands held & sweet smiles among them, and not look too close to the smudged faces and dirty fingernails. Please forgive the mother who didn't hose them down before going out in public; she was too busy putting away the finger paints and digging up the fairies in the garden...