Happy 13th Birthday, Grace...

Well, she's finally a teenager (even though it seems like she's been one for years)!!! 

Thirteen is a party year at our house, so Grace's birthday was pretty subdued.  She did pick out donuts for breakfast, after her guitar lesson, and she chose to have Gus' breadsticks and Wendy's Frosties for dinner, because she has wanted to dip a Gus' breadstick in a Frosty her "whole life"...

A few presents, although there's still one more for her party...

Couldn't be more proud of the person she is.. and is becoming... if I tried...

I love you, Grace!  Happy Birthday!  Love, Mama.

So, Here's How It All Went Down...

Seth and Grace's first Regional Celebrate Life is in the books.

Here's the haul:

Seth received a superior rating for his artwork, and Grace received a superior rating for her vocal solo and an excellent rating for her piano solo.  Grace also learned that it is difficult to run from one event to another in heels.

Grace warming up for her piano solo:

And quizzing... my goodness...

As I mentioned before, NEI went into the tournament seeded 1st.  After a bye round and a hard fought win, we entered into the round in which I could just feel the meltdown beginning to occur.  All year long, I have waited for the point at which Seth and Grace would hit a wall, and then they just... didn't...  Not on the district... Not at invitationals... Not at the St. Louis Quiz... And after an error out by Grace and then two correct questions by Seth and then three jumps Seth just couldn't get, I watched as he put his head in his hands and walked off from a really difficult loss.  And then the semi-final round began, and although he tried to keep it together, he just couldn't, and Grace wilted, too, and for the two of them, that was just the end.  But are you kidding me?  A regional semi-final quiz at this stage?  Who would've guessed?  NEI finished 3rd, and I couldn't be more proud of the contributions my kids made to that finish and the contributions made by the rest of the team.  Super... Stars...

Semi-Finals:

Once the team quizzing was complete, I admit that my thoughts turned to the potential for the top 16 quiz... and whether or not they (S and G) could really pull off anything else, this weekend.  Just hours before the meltdown, these are the faces of two kids as they waited for and then heard the individual results for the preliminary quiz rounds:

OK...  So... What Place Am I?

Grace went into top 16 in 4th place:

 16th?  Really?

I had mixed feelings about the Friday night concert.  What did they really need?  Probably sleep.  What did they want?  When asked, Seth, in his exhausted state, did not want to participate in the evening events.  Phil headed out to the van with him, and my understanding is that Seth was asleep in less than two minutes.  It was a good choice for him.  Grace, however, wanted to participate in the concert and evening activities.  As a mom who was super proud of her for making it this far and who knew she had earned the right to enjoy Celebrate Life in whatever way she wanted to do so, I agreed to stay at the concert with her.  Grace had an incredible time... so much fun.  I wouldn't trade it, but as a mom who was concerned about the next morning's quiz rounds; I can't say that I was certain I had made the right choice.

Six rounds of top 16 quizzing is a lot.  I think it is probably necessary to quiz that many rounds to get a fair and accurate outcome, but it's still a lot.  Coaching Grace is always interesting.  If she follows the game plan, there is almost no stopping her, and yet I trust her to make decisions outside of the game plan, as necessary.  At the end of five rounds, it was impossible for her to finish lower than 6th place.  I can't begin to tell you how many times I added... and re-added the numbers to make sure this was accurate.  At the time out after question 10, I was able to say, "Get one more, and you're definitely on the A team... no pressure or anything!"  And she did get one more, at which point I told her to just sit.  I'm not sure how huge the smile on my face must have been...

Seth had given a valiant effort in those first five rounds, but going into the last round it was obvious that the only chance he had at making the B team for General Assembly was to quiz out.  Even then, there were several other quizzers who would make the team ahead of him if they quizzed well in the last round.  But I have always said that anything can happen in a top 16 quiz off situation...

So... after Grace and I counted and re-counted and added... and re-added the scores...  And then after we added them again...  We had our own little celebration about her 4th place finish and headed out to the hallway to find Phil and Seth.  And all the time, I'm just hoping that I don't find Seth in tears, and then Phil just about bowls me over with news that Seth did quiz out in his round... and then Phil, Grace, and I are all standing in front of the white boards again... adding again!

Number nine.  Really?  Add it up again.  Nine.  Are we sure?  Add it up again.  Nine! 

And then I am just about crying (with an enormous smile on my face), because this kid has worked so hard, and I really thought we were coming to the end of the quiz year for him at regionals, and quite honestly, I just didn't expect this!  But that doesn't mean I never imagined it or never believed it could happen!  And then we're partying so hard about Seth we almost forget about Grace altogether, which is a complete riot, because no one ever forgets about Grace... but she laughed as hard as anyone...

A couple more shots for the road...

NEI A (AKA, "The Hobbits") Minus Sammy:

Grace and Jara walking back after receiving their awards.

Grace looked up to Jara all season long,

and it was fitting that Jara jumped over Grace

on question 20 of round 6

to be the 3rd place quizzer.

This shot makes me laugh, though...

They both look thrilled...

Sing... dance... make music... and quiz like your life depends on it!  Regional Celebrate Life was great!  General Assembly... Here... We... Come...

L.

Drama…

… is not what it used to be.

I can’t remember, for sure, when I first heard the word “drama” used with negative connotations. I think it was probably around 6 years ago…

You wouldn’t think that significantly changing the meaning of the word drama would have any real impact on my life, but it did. Suddenly, when I wanted someone to participate in a role playing type thing, I had to ask them if they wanted to do some acting. It just didn’t sound as good, but if I asked them if they wanted to get involved in drama, they kind of looked at me like I’d grown a second head. Thankfully, Mrs. Darbis (from High School Musical) eventually supplied us with the word, “theater”… and that sounded a little bit better… sort of…

When I was in Jr. High (and… uh… maybe early High School, too…), I remember having “drama”. We didn’t call it that, but it existed. I do specifically remember the words, “drama queen”… so I guess the concept was there. Let’s not have anybody guessing who the drama queen was, OK…

At any rate, kids had drama, even then… back in the stone ages…

It usually had to do with the boyfriend of the month… or the popular kids thinking they were all that (and a bag of chips)… or your best friend stealing your boyfriend of the month… or your best friend becoming one of the popular kids and leaving you behind.

Drama was about who you would dance with when the slow music played and how you would balance your birthday party list so there would be the same number of girls and guys (which there never was). It was about having somebody to sit with on the bus until they were all old enough to drive and you still weren’t. Then it was about begging your dad to drive you to school so your friends wouldn’t see you actually getting off “the cheese”…

As I got older, it became about making a 4.0 the last semester of high school in order to graduate with honors (just barely) and convincing other kids that it wasn’t so incredibly beyond the realm of possibility that someone would choose to get married at 17 without being pregnant (or even ever having had sex).

It was about crying over not being the #1 Bible quizzer… again… or not receiving a scholar’s endorsed diploma because you missed the fine print about having to take a 4th year of science.

That was kind of my experience, anyway.

But the thing about drama is that it’s supposed to be a façade. And drama isn’t a façade anymore.

Now, to be fair, let me explain that this post is coming out of my thoughts about something very serious that happened in my town last night. I was at home with my kids (kind of a rare occurrence for a Friday night), and after they were all asleep I decided to take a quick look at facebook before I turned in for the night, too (kind of a regular occurrence every night). I expected to see my usual fare… cute updates from friends about their kids… baseball news… amusement park news… a couple of posts about what somebody had for dinner… and some teen drama thrown into the mix. For the most part, that’s exactly what I found… except for one post that caught my attention and had something to do with a shooting.

To be completely honest, it took me a couple of seconds to grasp the reality of it. At first I thought it was a new application I needed to block… or a joke… or something. As a photographer, I actually had to think for a moment about whether the post insinuated that pictures were being shot… or guns. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that it was the latter.

I quickly sent a message to one of the teenagers I know who was on and within minutes had information in front of me about 4 teenagers (the news today says 5) who were shot near our bowling alley. I looked at the time and realized it was 10:12… just minutes after Phil should have sent the last teenagers home from the firehouse for the night. I ran upstairs to grab my phone. Upon opening my phone, I kicked myself for not having it on me, because a message had been left at 9:40. It was a staff member from another area youth hang out, calling to inform me of what I already knew. I hung up and called Phil… 10:13. He knew absolutely nothing about this and had, indeed, sent kids out to walk home within fifteen minutes. (Here I will digress for just a minute and say that it seems to me that in the case of a teenage shooting… with shooters at large… it would make sense for law enforcement to contact any places in which teenagers are known to hang out en masse. I understand that it would not be the #1 priority, but it ought to fall somewhere on the list.)

Of course, all of this set Phil into motion, calling the parents of the last kids who had left, getting the building completely shut down, and driving through the streets just to make sure none of “our” kids were still out. Mercifully, it started to rain, so there weren’t too many people on the streets.

As of this morning, the latest news article is listing one teenager in intensive care and all of them in stable condition. I cannot actually confirm the accuracy of this, but it is the best source I currently have.

What has affected me most, though, is the single word that keeps coming up in regard to this incident…

Drama…

As I continued to follow facebook feeds, kid after kid (and these are kids, let’s have no doubt about it) wrote about the drama… the fighting… and I just started to feel sort of numb to it.

I want to get in these kids’ faces and just shake them sometimes, proclaiming, “Drama is not real life!” What these teenagers experienced last night was not drama. What they experienced was real.

Now… I have no doubt that it very well may have started with drama. In fact, it might have started with drama much like I described from a 7th grade perspective. But at some point, this escalated. And I see a lot of that. It doesn’t generally escalate to a shooting, but it does escalate far beyond what teenage drama ever should…

I know kids who thrive on drama. They are not happy unless they are unhappy, and they tend to try to take everyone else with them. In fact, I have watched a few teenagers already “cashing in” on the adrenaline rush that this event is producing. They are going to be the ones who know everyone who was involved and create all the details to fill the gaps. Unfortunately, these kinds of kids almost never actually know what happened. It’s just yet another ploy to draw drama and attention to themselves (another reason why I am carefully selecting which kids’ pages I draw my information from and which ones I engage in conversation about this with).

And with that… if any teenagers are reading this today… let me caution you to be careful where you get your facts. To me, it seems like a very sick thing to try to capitalize on this, but there are kids out there who are going to try to be the heroes in this situation. Somehow, they will inflate the story beyond what it even is and look for a way to use this event to catapult themselves into the inner circle of popularity…

Seriously? Do we really need to inflate this story? I think it’s big enough, don’t you?

Let’s keep those who were involved in our prayers. And if the remote possibility even exists that an event such as this could cause us to re-evaluate the pressures and expectations we put on our teenagers, let’s do that, too. It is not as easy to be a kid today as it was when I was a kid (and that’s really not a million years ago… more like a dozen). I feel like teenagers are forced to grow up too soon now, and consequently they are dealing with issues that no one should have to deal with. As a side not, I also fee that teenagers are staying immature longer, and I think that is directly related, as well, to the inappropriate responsibilities we thrust upon them rather than the appropriate ones we let go. This is a post for another time, however.

For today, let’s be thankful for our families and pray for peace in our community.

Lisa

The Fine Line We Walk…

Like so many others, this post has probably been a long time in coming… and it could very likely get me into trouble, as many of my opinions are apt to do…

Last week I ran into an interesting situation while working the registration table for Friday Nite Fire. It was not unique, by any means… but interesting, nonetheless…

We had quite a few new students, and one of them struck me as particularly well mannered, interactive, and inquisitive. He spent a reasonably long amount of time chatting with me at registration and stopping back by the table throughout the night. He played a little bit with Miah, who was with me, and seemed to genuinely like babies. And it was not lost on me that he was dressed in girls’ clothing…

At some point during the night, another new student came and told me that she needed to go talk to someone at another popular youth hangout and that she would be back. We have a policy that you cannot re-enter the building after you sign out, so I let her know about this and she seemed rather distraught. She went on to tell me that the other organization had kicked her friend out earlier in the evening because he is gay and that she wanted to talk to someone about it, because it wasn’t right.

And now I had to choose my words very carefully…

I told her that I agreed with her that it is not right to kick someone out just because they are gay. I am nearly certain that this statement would have caused people to stop in their tracks if anyone else had been around. Thankfully, no one was… and here I am sharing this on the world wide web a week later…

I also told her that I still couldn’t let her check out and then back in again, and in the end, she and her friends decided to stay…

All along, I was smart enough to put two and two together and come to the conclusion that the new student I mentioned earlier was the kid who got kicked out…

Well… I didn’t really think a whole lot more about it until after our event was over and I got a phone call… on my cell… from someone at the other youth hangout. How this person got my personal cell number is a bit of a mystery to me, because not that many people have it, but I have got to assume that one of “my kids” (not my biological children, mind you, who were long since sawing logs, but one of my teenage kids) must have made his or her way over there after we closed and decided to make my digits public knowledge… (who knows what else they said)…

At any rate, there was a message on my phone saying that they couldn’t find a teenager who was supposed to be there, and wouldn’t you know it, I immediately recognized the name as yet another one of the new kids we’d had… and he was a foreign exchange student… so I figured I’d probably better call back and make sure we found him!

Once I got in touch with the person who called me, it was quickly discovered that the missing teenager had been found (I’m thinking he was probably missing for less than 10 minutes), and I was going to say, “Have a good night!” and then head on home… but wait… There was something else that they wanted to, “make me aware of”…

I took a deep breath… and I knew what was coming…

They let me know that earlier in the evening they had kicked a “young man” out because he was hitting on other young men. And they gave me his name. And of course, it was my new friend...

And now I had to choose my words very carefully… again…

So I simply said, “Oh… thank you for letting me know…” I mean… seriously… what else was I supposed to say? But I just felt like they didn’t think that was a strong enough reaction…

Now here I feel like I need to stop and say this. Over the years I have kicked guys out for hitting on girls and making them feel uncomfortable… or too comfortable… In the same way, I would not hesitate to kick a guy out for hitting on a guy… or a girl for hitting on a guy… or a girl for hitting on a girl… or whatever, if other kids are being negatively affected by it. Since I was not there at the other establishment, I cannot say, for sure, what happened. He may very well have come in and hit on guys and made them feel uncomfortable and been warned to stop and kept doing it and then been kicked out. If that’s what happened, then fine. But that’s not the behavior I observed from this student once he got to our building.

Basically, I thought this was going to be the end of the story.

Except my cell rang a few minutes ago… and since I didn’t recognize the number, I didn’t pick it up.

But there was a message.

It was from the same person who called me last week, just wanting to make sure that it had been clear to me that when they said the kid was “hitting on” someone, they weren’t talking about him actually hitting another student but engaging in sexual misconduct. Apparently there had been some sort of miscommunication about this? I’m thinking that maybe since we’re not open tonight a bunch of my kids showed up there and said that I thought their policies sucked or something… and by the way, I never did say that…

But… What exactly am I supposed to say?

Am I supposed to be like, “Oh my… thanks for clearing that up, because you know… I’m a moron, and I thought you meant he started a fist fight! We’ll make sure to lock the doors from now on whenever we see him coming”? (Yes, I’m sure that’s what Jesus would have done, right? – Please read the sarcasm here)…

Look… HE’S A KID! I am not… in any way… endorsing homosexuality with this post. But if I start kicking out every kid that comes through our doors who doesn’t fit into my exact mold of what the “perfect” person should be like, there won’t be any kids left! Heck… I won’t be left, either!

And so we walk a very fine line…

It is our responsibility to these kids to show them the love of Christ and to show them what it really looks like to follow Christ. It is our responsibility to teach… but it is not our responsibility to convict (that belongs to Holy Spirit) or to judge (that belongs to God). I often fear that we have no idea where our place is.

Lisa

16 and Pregnant...

... A Review

It would probably come as a shock to most people I know to have me admit that I’ve been watching a lot of MTV lately… Heck, it kind of comes as a shock to me. But I have… and this is why…

Near the end of my pregnancy with Miah, I was keeping a ridiculous sleep schedule, and I logged a lot of late night hours on facebook (even more than usual). During this time, I started seeing a lot of references to the show, “16 and Pregnant”. Many of these references were coming from teenagers we work with who are in the 13-16 age range, so it piqued my interest, and I was concerned enough about them, and bored enough at 2:00 in the morning, to check it out…

My main interest in the show, at that point, was that I wanted to know what these kids were watching. I wondered if this show was portraying a realistic view on teenage pregnancy or if it was glorifying the trend of teenagers getting pregnant on purpose (and if this is a new concept to you, I’m not kidding… that’s how it works now)…

So, I opened up an Amazon widow and paid $1.99 for the first episode. Thus began an interesting education for me in 21st century television… and life…

*Note: I later found out that you can watch the show for free at MTV’s website… uh… I found this out after I’d purchased the full first season, I think. This is one case in which my self proclaimed title of “cultural moron” didn’t really serve me well. I didn’t even know I was watching MTV at first…

Overall, I’m not sure I can recommend this show. I certainly can’t recommend every episode or recommend it without caution. But I will probably be able to use clips from it in certain teaching situations. The show does not, in any way, meet my standards for entertainment (although I would be lying to say that it’s not entertaining at times). I’m not sure that entertainment is the purpose of the show, however… And truthfully, I have had a bit of difficulty deciphering what the purpose of the show really is…

As a basic rundown, the show comes on with a girl introducing herself and giving the viewers an idea about what her life is like… what she is involved in at school… what kind of family she has… what her relationship with her boyfriend is like… Then, at the end of this mini introduction, she says something to the effect of, “but that’s all going to change, because I’m pregnant”… she turns… the camera gives us a profile view of her growing belly… and then the show begins…

Over the course of the next 40 minutes or so (if you buy from Amazon, it’s 40 minutes… if you watch on MTV, you have to endure commercials, so it’s longer), we follow the pregnancy. For the most part, I think MTV has done a good job of making this real. Generally speaking, the girl has to give up a lot of the things that she loves to do. Many of them drop out of school. A lot of the guys disappear. The reactions of the families have ranged from supportive to irate, but an awful lot of these families are just really sad to begin with. I have certainly had the most difficulty sorting through the parents who cuss their kids out or even physically harm their pregnant daughters. But there are subtleties, too, that I think sometimes go unnoticed.

For example... It took until the 12th episode I watched to hear a parent say, “I taught you not to have sex!” Uh… duh… if you never bother to teach your kids to wait to have sex, it is probably pretty reasonable to assume they just might make you a grandparent earlier than you’d imagined. Even so, the parent who finally proclaimed this was pregnant, herself, with her live in boyfriend, so perhaps there is something to learning from examples that are set… Still, she was one of the more reasonable mothers on the show. Episode after episode, though, I heard parents telling their teens, “We taught you about protection”! Seriously, think this through… Are 15 and 16 year old kids really thinking, “Hey, let’s slap a condom on it,” when they are in the heat of the moment? Uh… no… they’re not! It’s ironic, but I have heard time and time again that kids who are taught abstinence are more likely to get pregnant, because they are all having sex, so the kids who haven’t learned about “protection” are more at risk. Maybe this is true, statistically speaking. I don’t really know. But based on the sampling from this show, I would say that the kids who are taught abstinence are less likely to get pregnant, because they aren’t having sex… just a thought, of course…

Perhaps one of the most shocking quotes came from one of the pregnant teenager’s friends who informed her that you really can’t do anything to prevent pregnancy. I was glad the pregnant girl looked back at her and informed her that you can not have sex. Unfortunately, all of the girls in the room kind of looked around nervously, as if that was the most ridiculous thing they’d ever heard of, and giggled… wonder how many of them will be sporting bellies of their own soon…

I think that one of the most intriguing things, for me, is to watch the relationship between the parents to be as it unfolds. For the most part, either the guy or the girl (sometimes both) has been severely immature or just plain nasty. A lot of the guys walk out early on. And the ones who stick around are often treated pretty badly by the girls. The guys who make it (still in the relationship) all the way to the delivery room often check out once nighttime feedings and diapers become a reality. And in a lot of cases, grandmas and grandpas are left raising babies they didn’t really want to deal with to begin with. This is not always the case, and a few of the girls have done a pretty remarkable job.

I have followed the stories beyond “16 and Pregnant” to the spin off series, “Teen Mom”. I am not going to take the time to run down what I think of every participant in these series, but I am going to say that the one couple, of all of them I have observed, who seemed to be the most mature and capable of making adult decisions, gave their child up for adoption.

Now, I have had several friends and family members who have been on either the giving or receiving side of adoption, and I do not think that adoption is the best choice for everyone. However, I do think that it is a beautiful alternative to trying to raise a child that you do not have the capacity to raise, and there are so many couples out there who dream of children and are amazingly blessed by the gift of adoption. The fact that many people have commented on how selfish this couple was to give up their child is just astounding to me. True, by giving their child up for adoption, they have been able to retain some normalcy in their teenage lives, but in reality, I think it was the most unselfish choice possible, because they have given their child a chance to have everything they could not provide. It has been obvious that they have suffered emotional distress over this decision, and they will never really be “normal” teenagers again, but they made a loving choice, nonetheless.

I have to admit that I’ve gotten kind of “hooked” on the shows. I find myself wanting to know how things turn out for these kids… and their kids. I have always had a soft heart for teenage parents, and I find myself rooting for them to make the right choices for their babies… and for themselves.

And then I stop and take a step back and try to remember why I started watching in the first place… I know a lot of teenagers. In fact, I know a pretty good number of teenage parents. And what we really need to do here is to provide a support network for them and a means of prevention for those who are headed in that direction.

I never would have thought that MTV would come up with something productive. And, again, I can’t really wholeheartedly recommend the show (especially not for preteens, who are often the ones watching). But I can recommend putting your arms around a hurting kid and steering them in the right direction…

Lisa