TJ Hirst

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

“I don’t want to tell you again to leave your sister alone,” I yelled down the stairs.

“OKKKK. . . .” my son said.

Does this sound familiar at anyone else’s house? For some lucky souls, school starts this week or next; we have two more weeks to go. I thought I’d lose my mind when I tried to comprehend all that we have piled into those two weeks.

In addition to all the last minute doctor appointments, schedule pick-ups, open houses, meetings with teachers, band camp, we still need to buy school supplies and school clothes, and we’re going to try to squeeze in a much-needed family camping trip. Shopping for school supplies is on the schedule for today.

When I woke up yesterday I just want to sit down to the computer and write a thoughtful post for Try-It-With-Me-Tuesday challenging myself to spend some quality time with my children. In actuality, I really wanted to escape and spend some quality time alone.

Instead, I did my motherly duty and I ignored my computer and my desk and my “me time” and went to check on my kids’ assignment to clean out their individual cabinets and organize their desks. What I saw seemed hazardous, but I held on and suggested I could work with them. Then, they knew what that would mean.

We spent most of the morning cleaning, tossing and reorganizing. We emptied every cabinet and reassigned each child a new cabinet, plus one for me and one for supplies.

I’d avoided this project all summer. Ironically, now, the more we did, the more energy I felt to tackle the other projects that would domino from this one. The final result impressed all of us. Now, if we can just keep it that way until school begins.

Back to school is my new year. Is it that way for you? What do you plan to organize?

Join in by trying the challenges with me, commenting, linking, or suggesting a challenge. If you want to write a post on your blog about what happened when you took the challenge, I will publish your link. Just link to my website in your post and send me your link. Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

The new homes in our cul-de-sac and the surrounding streets house a large handful of 8-12 year-olds, all transplanted from other neighborhoods. Each has his or her own notions about competition, fairness and friendship. The first few summers felt like a soap opera of silly fights and resulting alliances that divided the kids into two groups.

All were basically good kids but one boy used his influence with some of the younger ones to create schemes to torment my children and their friends. Beyond just name calling, one day his young but tough sister led two others to ring our doorbell more than 30 times in a row during dinner. When we finally caught them, I brought my cordless phone with me and insisted that the instigators call their mothers from my front porch.

My son stewed over trying to make things right. “What can I do?”

“Be a leader and include them,” we said. But to be honest, we didn’t really know what would work.

This summer, in an unrelated strategy, we set aside busy scheduled activities and challenged our children to creatively fill their own unstructured time. Within weeks, my two youngest began building a fort on our property line with a neighbor—the leader of the other group!

Now, they spend hours every day planning, hauling and building. Right now, while I type, neighbor kids—from both sides—hammer and dig alongside the two leaders, my son and the former bully.

They’ve disagreed, of course. Last week this boy came over and told my son, “I’m quitting the fort.”

“Are you worried?” We asked him.

“No, he’ll be back.”

And he was.

They took us on a tour. Their former fort floor was scattered in discarded remnants on the ground. We asked about them. They explained they’d had to tear it up a summer’s worth of work and rework the design. Clearly, they cooperated. The power is in the process, not necessarily the end result.

The Question: Have I Seen the Hand of God Reaching Out to Touch Us Today?

I plan all that I can. I’ve always been this way. I planned my career in high school including where I wanted to go to graduate school, when I would marry and have my first child and how many children I would have. Silly me, I thought these things were in my control.

When I met my future husband years ahead of my perceived schedule, I ate my humble pie and then tried to see God’s hand in what He might have planned. But learning is a process, and I still approached motherhood with my ideal plan of the perfect spacing and birth order of each sex. Specifically, I didn’t have an older brother and I wanted my daughters to have one.

I had a girl first. I never felt disappointment but adoration for her life. Next, I had a boy. By then I was all mom all the time and cared more about controlling my temper than controlling our family dynamics. I’d long forgotten my desire for my daughters to have an older brother by the birth of my third and last child—a girl.

Fast forward nine years later. I stood in my kitchen last night cleaning up after I’d sent my youngest daughter and my son off to bed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them reappear with each other. I was just about to scold them for not obeying, when I saw two pajamaed children—almost head to head—carrying on about something they wanted to do the next day. The back and forth between them, which I had interpreted as friction, connected them in their own way. I heard the admiration in her words as they figured things out together. In her gestures and her eyes, I saw her love.

God’s plan had unfolded. Without my help and in unplanned and seemingly contentious moments they’d grown together into the ideal I’d imagined. He does plan better than I do, if I’ll let Him.

Read Part I in this series.

Even on the ordinary days of Courtney King Walker’s life, her creative side comes out. Creativity helps her discover how to organize her life, get chores done or help her children. She creates in the garden and in the kitchen. And she creates music.

Music is definitely the most creative part for me—playing songs that come from the heart. There’s creative parts of me that I can’t explain. It’s coming from the Spirit, the connection to God. All of my songs are something I feel strongly about. They are unique, personal thoughts that come out of trying to understand the world around me.

When she reads the scriptures, she receives a powerful feeling about Jesus Christ and how He loves little children. Her LDS perspective shows her that babies are perfect and do not need baptism as infants. Christ’s invitation in the New Testament of the Bible and in the Book of Mormon to bring the little children unto Him became the basis for her song, Little Hands, Little Feet.

Listen to it here:

Little Hands, Little Feet, copyright 2001 by Courtney King Walker, all rights reserved.

I thought of the little children as His allies. I have a hard time believing that the little children didn’t feel his divinity. He always called them to Him. They were always following Him and wanting to go with Him. I can just imagine these little connections happening.

The little children in the song follow Christ through his earthly ministry and to his crucifixion. Courtney wrote and recorded this song at the same time as His Eyes. Courtney plays the piano and Jill Thompson and Linda Stewart sing vocals. One of the most touching parts is when they sing about Christ’s resurrection:

Then the sun shined His light
and awoke the world from night.
As we wiped the tears from our weeping eyes,
we looked for a sign.

Little Hands, little feet, they did say.
He is gone away, despite your faith,
But then He stopped and He looked my way

“The children knew he was alive more than the adults,” Courtney said about these words. “And He answers the silence, ‘Come Unto Me.’ “

The repetition of the words “Come Unto Me” invite all who listen—not just the children—to come unto Christ. Originally, she titled the song Come Unto Me, but her friend and vocalist, Jill Thompson, convinced her that the title should be Little Hands, Little Feet.

The little hands and little feet of four children fill the Walker home. In raising them she has learned the need to balance songwriting with mothering so that neither suffers.

Writing music is something that takes patience and quiet. I have to let my barriers down and let the Spirit guide me. With babies you have to stop for a time. Right now is the season for children. I can’t get the good inspiration I need for writing music or being a mom if they are in conflict.

She remembered an experience when she was in the process of writing a song. It was the middle of the day and her children were around her at the piano, wanting to play along with her. She felt frustration toward them and realized, “If I am yelling at my children to write a spiritual song, I am missing the point.”

So, she lives her life in sequential phases. For some time she was in a creating phase when she wrote a lot of music. She composed primarily at a keyboard for several hours in the evening when she could be alone and quiet. She put on headphones to tune everything out except the spiritual connection she was seeking. In that way, she took what was in her head and expressed herself.

For now, she has written the words she needs to say, and she’s moved into a new phase in which she is taking it in, learning and absorbing. She is grateful for her roles beyond songwriter as woman, wife and mother to find ways day-to-day to apply that continuing creativity.

Fulfilling The Desire to Create is Part II in a series from an interview with Courtney Walker. Read Part I here. TJ will publish more of Courtney’s words and songs in Everyday Biography, next Wednesday, July 16. Little Hands, Little Feet is copyrighted by Courtney King Walker, 2001, and downloads may not be sold or used without permission. You may contact Courtney by email at walkerfamily5 (at) gmail (dot) com.

Ingenuity: n. 1. Inventive skill or imagination; cleverness. 2. Imaginative and clever design or construction.

Our home sits on unique triangular-shaped, one-acre lot with a steep hill and undeveloped forest. We chose it because we could position the house up high to take in the views but also enjoy the trees. We built the home right at the front of that pie shape and left the woods natural.

When we were at my parent’s farm, Grandpa loved showing us his planned projects to improve their property. We also took a short hike through a state park that everyone loved.

When we returned home, I wondered aloud with my 11-year-old son, NH, if he wanted to build a hiking trail through our forest to a fire pit/campsite and make a nature loop back to the house.

He’s nurturing that idea as his own summer project with research on the Internet, sketches and notes the site plan, and initial marking of where the trail will go. I love to see his mind catch hold of this idea and know that he is old enough and skilled enough to carry it through with our help. Now, he’s the leader on this one, and we will post his progress along the way.