Other People's Children

Tonight we are hosting two boys from a touring choir group.  It's about day 5 of a 17 day tour with about 30 boys, ages 10 - 16 and holy moley is it well organized.  The boys are polite and one of them is talkative and both of them like "The Simpsons" and want to know about Cedar Point so we aren't at a loss for conversational topics.  They've also been well taught to introduce themselves and shake hands which I think is quite possibly the most valuable thing they'll take away from this whole experience.

I was in choirs as a kid and I can recall my own mom hosting kids from a traveling high school marching band so when one of my colleagues was asking around if anyone could be a host family it seemed like something we should do.  Fortunately, J was amenable to the idea, if a little baffled by the whole concept.  We really only have them here for a few waking hours both days, so it's not like it's all that taxing, but I'm still glad that I can usually count on him to be a good egg about such things, which is one of the many reasons I love him. 

It feels a little strange to be on this side of the kids-who-aren't-related-to-me-staying-at-our-house equation.  I've had other people's children here before, of course, but always with their parents here, too.  So I am, for a couple nights, "The Mom."  Why this should feel different from any other night I'm not really sure, since I'm "The Mom" every night.  But still.  

It also seems a little amazing that someone else who has never met me, and can only really trust me by proxy of proxy of proxy, has entrusted me with their pre-teenage children.  It speaks of people with a deep faith in the goodness of others, and enough trust in their own parenting skills that they're willing to send their children off into the world for two weeks without them.

This is even more profound given that the boys are not to use computers or phones during the entire tour.  No email, no texting no phone calls home.  The only way they are supposed to communicate with their parents is via actual letters.  I'm not sure why they have this rule, or even if it's a good one, but it makes the whole thing just a little bit more amazing in this age of instant all-the-time connectivity.

So for now, I am The Mom for these two boys and will get to practice having near-teenagers to get out of bed for a couple mornings.  

I hope someday someone will do this for my kids, too.

This Is Why I Never Get Anything Done

I'm fairly certain that there is an app for my phone that will let me record notes for myself.  I would find this app tremendously useful since I am constantly thinking about things that I could write up into a relatively easy blog post, if only I could keep it in my brain for longer than a few seconds.  By the time I actually get to my computer at the end of the day, I haven't the faintest idea of what it was I thought would be so droll to write about earlier.
So I'd like to get this app, should it exist.  I've been thinking about looking for it, which wouldn't take long to do, except that I usually don't remember to even look for it while I have my phone with me.  Unless I'm in my car.  Driving.  Then I think of all the great things I could be doing with my phone at that moment if I weren't so inconveniently distracted by navigating a 1,000 lb vehicle through heavy traffic at high speeds.
Times like right now, when it's very quiet (the kids are at daycare) and I have nothing else pressing to do (except all the things I was planning to get done over Spring Break which I have yet to get started on) would be perfect for finding this app on my phone.  Except that I don't have my phone with me.  I never remember to keep my phone with me after I walk in the door.  I leave it in my purse, or on the counter or even in the car and just forget about it entirely until I am sitting down and want it again.  But I'm sitting now, see?  If I get up again to get the phone then I'm liable to see the gargantuan mess in the kitchen, and remember the pile of laundry sitting in the living room.  While I'm taking care of those chores, I'll walk through gunk on my floor (my floor is always messy.  Always.) and decide it needs to be mopped.  But before it can be mopped it has to be swept first, and when I go to get the broom I'll realize what a mess the laundry room is because we store the play-doh in there, and the kids were tasked with putting it away yesterday.  Which means that there are 3, 478,621 little play-doh related toys strewn about my laundry room, making it difficult to do anything else in there.  By the time all of that is cleaned up, I'll remember to put in another load of actual laundry, and see that there's a huge stack of ironing to do if I ever want to wear any of my dress shirts again.
Except that the good ironing board is upstairs so I'll carry the big pile up, and turn on the tv so I can watch something while I'm ironing.  This is not effective since we only get 4 channels on the upstairs tv since they switched over to digital signal or whatever.  They sent us some notice a year ago about getting a free box.  I asked J to take care of it, figuring this fit under the heading of "All Things Technological" and was thus his job.  He classified it under "All Things Having to do With Household-Related Nuisances" and reassigned it to me, thus we have a fairly useless tv in our bedroom.  All that aside, being upstairs reminds me that DD's bed isn't made up since she wet it last night, and I still have laundry to put away from the last iteration of laundry.  All the while, I'll be thinking of clever and interesting things to write in a blog post, but forgetting all of them because I don't have the app that records me.  I won't even have my phone with me.
You see how it goes.  It's the grownup version of "You Give a Mouse a Cookie."
By the time I'm done with getting everything and nothing really done, it'll be time to go somewhere and I'll get into the car, whereupon I will discover my phone.  But I won't have time to do anything with it because I need to be driving.
Many of the things in my life are like this.  Calling handymen, hiring local kids to do yardwork, all of the little tasky things that pile up in a household.  By the time my brain settles enough after a day to think about all of them...it's 10:30 a night and too late to call anyone.
And even if it weren't, wherever I'd be, I still wouldn't have my phone.

Something I Forgot....

I originally wrote this post a month ago, and then promptly forgot about it in the rush of getting ready for Christmas. It's a nice little bit, though, and cheerful, so I thought I'd just go ahead and post it late.
Word to the wise, though, now that's it's January, don't vulture my parking spot.  I will consider it my personal mission to make you regret it.


I braved the mall yesterday to find a gift for my Dad.  I'd originally gone someplace else, but it turns out the store I'd wanted had turned into a WalMart or something, and I had to go to my backup, Macy's.  Before heading to the dreaded Mall-at-Christmastime, I treated myself to a walk around World Market, which has lots of little trinket-y things, and an interesting blend of foreign, gourmet and just plain bizarre foodstuffs, and is a nice place to sort of wander-shop for those people you'd like to buy a gift for, but have no idea what to get.  Also a good spot for fun stocking-stuffers.  So that was nice.
The mall was, well, the mall at Christmastime.  People were parked everywhere, some even just gave up at finding spaces and added ones on at the ends of rows till they pretty much blocked the little roads that are supposed to go around the lot.  I can't really blame them.  You gotta be flexible about parking at Christmastime.  I wound up parking in the very last slot in a row, but I didn't care.  It was nearly 60 degrees out and sunny. (Really.  It was gorgeous.  No coat.  On December 20th in Ohio.  While this doesn't bode well for the polar bears and penguins, I guiltily enjoyed it.)
Other drivers were carefully stalking people leaving the mall, tailing them at 3mph while a long line of other frustrated drivers piled up behind them, making the shopper look like the Grand Marshall of the Parade From Hell.  Now, usually I have great loathing for people who "vulture" parking spots, and will even go out of my way to be as slow as humanly possible (easy when you have two toddlers along) when packing up, buckling in, etc.  I do this only when there is a spot, or even an entire empty parking lot starting three slots down from my car.  I have had a guy vulture my spot to save himself the trouble of walking an extra four spaces.  Granted, he could have been someone with difficulty walking, but given the robustness of his gestures towards me and my kids, I kinda doubt it.
At Christmastime, though, the anti-vulture rule goes out the window.  There is no other spot, and the person behind me isn't looking to get in closer, they're just trying to park at all and get into the damn mall to buy something their kid decided he needed yesterday.  So I have sympathy.
And, in truth, it wasn't that bad.  I didn't have my kids along.  I found what I wanted.  A lady next to me in line at Macy's offered me the use of her 15% off coupon, and it didn't even require that I have a Macy's card.  Five bucks off!  At Christmas!  How sweet is that?

Things I Wish Someone Might Have Mentioned

I spent some time recently with a pregnant friend -- her first -- and we got to talking about this and that and it occurred to me that there were several things I wish someone had bothered to tell me. I mean, I'm sure this information was out there somewhere, but while I was pregnant, it just wasn't something that stuck well in my brain.
There's all this advice out there about parenting, and a lot of it just served to make me feel guilty because I wasn't doing all of it, wasn't feeling the way everyone said I should feel, or just wasn't doing the right things the right way and well enough for them to count. This is not that kind of advice list. This list is for the parents who are quietly terrified that they are going to seriously eff things up, but can't tell anyone, especially their spouse, because that would just be, well, awful.*

1.  You are about to be a member of a club that is simultaneously well known and completely unknown at the same time. Everyone knows that there are parents out there, but until you actually are one you really, really don't get it. I'm not trying to make parents out as having some magnificent mystique that make them better than everyone else, 'cause they aren't, but parents just feel differently about the world once their offspring is part of it. I can't explain it, but it's partially a feeling of absolute vulnerability that never goes away.  

2. If you are a pregnant mom right now, you are tired. Growing another person is tiring. It's exhausting. You want to sleep all the time. This may not seem possible, but once the baby is born, you will be more tired. More exhausted. All. The. Time. The good thing? It gets better. It will take a few years, but you will actually get to sleep through the night again. Until you have another baby.

3. Being exhausted and sleep-deprived will make you crabby. This is okay. Your baby will survive crabbiness. And there will be times that you will hate your baby. Believe it or not, this is okay, too. You are not a bad parent for having this feeling. (You are only a bad parent if you give in and act on it. Despite what some religions and parenting gurus espouse, thoughts don't count.) This, like sleepless nights, is temporary. It goes away. You really will, or do love your baby. But hours and hours of endless, unwavering screaming for no reason when you are absolutely spent would give anyone the urge to fling baby down a flight of stairs. In your deranged state you will think that at least in jail you could sleep. Instead you put baby down safely in her crib and shut the door for 15 minutes. You regain some sanity, and baby will survive a few minutes of alone time. Let the guilt go for this one, okay?

4. Speaking of loving your baby, not everyone feels the instant overwhelming love that everyone gushes about. Maybe all you feel is panic, or just a sense of unreality. (Having a human being come out of you is sort of an unreal experience, really.) Give it time. It will come. Do all the things a parent who was wildly in love with their baby would do--coo and cuddle and say all sorts of loving things, sing and smile and rock him gently, feed and stroke and play with tiny toes and fingers and gradually you will realize that you do, in fact, love this baby more than you've loved anyone in your entire life. If this doesn't happen, and isn't working, and you just feel, well, nothing, you might have post-partum depression. (see #5)

5. (Caveat: I have never had post-partum depression, but I do know people who have, and I know, for sure, it is REAL. It's real as a tumor and about as funny.) Post-partum depression is when your body chemistry doesn't get lined up right and your brain doesn't make the right kind of neurotransmitters to keep you functioning properly. It dampens everything. Blankets your mental landscape with a layer of dust so thick that to think or feel properly about anything takes so much energy that you can't do it, especially when your energy is at low ebb to begin with because you are trying to take care of a baby and not sleeping. If you feel like this, GET HELP. The problem is chemical and there is better living to be had through chemistry. And feel free to give a resounding "f*ck you" to anyone who tells you that you should just be able to get over it on your own. If they did, well, bully for them, but this is about you and you are entitled to the help you need.

6. This one is entirely of a practical nature, and has to do with women's bodies. So if you're a guy and would rather not know, skip ahead. Okay, ladies, now that we're alone -- I had always thought that during pregnancy your period just stops. Turns out it doesn't. It just stops coming out. While you're pregnant, there's this big buildup of blood in there, along with fluid and baby and god knows what else. And it all comes out. For me, I had two c-sections and thus did not push any of it out along with my children. I suppose some women do. For the next several days I had to wear the world's ugliest lingerie, a diaper-thick papery/cloth-diapery thing with webbing to hold it up, and I had to change it several times a day. It is, in a word, gross. And disturbing. (Okay, that's two words, but it really is. It is odd to bleed that much and not have it be of concern to medical personnel.) The point is, nobody told me this would happen. It was just "here you are, dearie" from the OB nurses like I should be figuring out why the hell I want these god-awful things and they're all surprised that I wasn't expecting this.

7.  You will sometimes suck as a parent. Despite all your best intentions, you will do things wrong. You'll stick your kid with diaper pins, or accidentally bang their little noggin into a doorway (they stick out a lot farther than you think when you're cradling them in your arms.) You'll overheat the formula and leave something dangerous lying around and make the bathwater too cold. You'll lose your temper and yell at your toddler, and maybe even swat his behind because you just can't stand it anymore. You'll let her eat nothing but cheese for three days because that is all she will eat without screaming for 15 solid minutes. You will forget to buy diapers or bring a change of clothing, and you will hire at least one incompetent babysitter. It happens. Not that it's good to make a habit of being forgetful, and it's a good idea to learn from your mistakes, but it's not a good idea to beat yourself up about it and lie awake at night berating yourself -- or your spouse. Neither of you are going to be getting enough sleep as it is, so forgive yourself and each other.

8. Keeping number 7 in mind, be very, very careful of how you judge another parent. The one who has a coatless three-year-old in 30 degree weather as she hustles the 20 yards into daycare? The one who gives her child melatonin at night? The one whose floor hasn't been vacuumed in months? The one who dozes on the couch for two hours while her kids watch Sesame Street? Don't judge. Especially if it's before you've given birth and tried this for yourself. There could well be a some day when you pray that nobody is watching you be a parent because you know you'd be found wanting.

9. You don't suck as bad as you think you do. If your baby has colic and does nothing but scream for 3 hours a night every damn night no matter what you do, it's not because you suck as a parent. It's because mother nature is sometimes a real bitch for no reason, and your baby just has colic. Babies come with lots of built in things, and sometimes you get an easygoing baby, and sometimes you don't. If you get the hard kind, it's not because you deserve it or that you're doing something terribly wrong. You know more than you think you do, and you're better at this than you think. Have faith.

10. Last, but not least, you will be getting a lot of advice. A LOT. You might seek it out, or have it thrust upon you by well-meaning grandmas, mothers-in-law, sisters, friends and strangers. Keep this phrase handy "Oh?  Okay. Thanks for the advice. I'll keep it in mind." Then you can deep six anything you think is not for you, or just total crap. Feel free to do it now. Won't hurt my feelings a bit.


*there are parents out there who are truly awful.  They do wretched things to their children out of their own mental illness, addiction or raging narcissism.  If you are one of those parents then please go get help now. You can start here.

I Don't Be Hatin' on Your Brand of Crazy

     So it's come to my attention that people think I hate the kinds of parents who go crazy with Elf on the Shelf or any of the other hundreds of things parents (usually moms) do to make their children's lives magical and wondrous.  This is not so.  I am perfectly fine with anyone who wants to spend three hours after her kids are in bed making cookies and then powdering every surface in her kitchen with flour, and leaving little elf-tracks in it before heading up to bed.  She's more than welcome to do so.  I'm just saying that I reserve the right to think that she's absolutely nuts.
    I do my fair share of bizarre parenting things, like paying full fare to go to an amusement park for two full days with a 2 and 4 year old.  This means I've essentially paid close to 100 bucks plus hotel and gas money to spend two days standing in lines to watch my children go around and around and around while listening to peppy child-themed tunes through scratchy speakers.  It's expensive, exhausting and makes my children indescribably happy.  So I do it.  And it's insane.  Feel free to make fun.  I certainly do.  So, should you be a mom who absolutely loves to go nuts with the holiday elf or whatever else it is that floats your boat, knock yourself out.  I don't hate you.
     What I do hate, however, is when one of those moms comes along and accuses me and all my slacker-mommy friends of being bad parents or of even not wanting our children in the first place because we don't do these things that she finds so important.  I pretty much have the same issue with any people who feel the right to tell me I'm doing it wrong because I'm not doing it their way.  This goes for the breast-feeding advocate who tries to make me feel ashamed and lazy because my children were bottle-fed.  (There are reasons, and they are most certainly none of her business, thankyouverymuch.)  And it goes for the childless person who tsk-tsks me for allowing my child to eat crackers in the grocery cart while we tool through the store (Yes, I pay for them.  So do all the other moms who do this.)  And it goes for the strangers who shoot rude stares at my friend who takes her profoundly autistic son out in public, and he behaves as autistic children do.  It's for the helicopter parents who rebuke me for letting my kids play outside alone, and the ones who call anyone who lets their child "cry it out" a monster.  Same for those who want parental rights revoked for co-sleepers and late-breastfeeders, largely because it just weirds them out, and they call it abuse*.  All of these people will cite bogus, slanted or poorly done research to back up their judgmental claims, and none of them could tell me the difference between correlation and causality.  These people I have no truck with, and wish they would take their judgy selves off to mind their own beeswax.
   That said, I have great love and admiration for all the super-mommies (and daddies) out there who go positively bonkers trying to make their kids happy.  I know there's been backlash against these folks, and I've seen the ridicule and claims that it's making their children into a generation of whiny, entitled brats.  Frankly, just growing up in middle-class (and up) America in the 21st century is going to risk that, so what's the harm in throwing in an Elf?  I also have great love and admiration for slacker-mommies who are usually too tired at the end of a long working day to mess with all that, you know?  So, please stay off my back and I'll stay off yours, 'k?
Peace out, folks.  Enjoy the holidays, be it Chanukah, Solstice, Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year's or I'm-a-curmudgeon-and-don't-celebrate-nothing Day.**



*Calling things like lack of an Elf and bottle feeding "abuse" lessens the import of actual abuse, which, btw, I also have no truck with, and will (and do) report.
**C'mon.  You know someone who would celebrate this.  You know you do.

We Have to do Whatnow With an Elf?

Thanks to a FB friend of mine, I happened upon a new mommy blog, but it's not one of those mommy blogs about 900 detail-intensive ways to make sure your offspring have perfect childhoods.  It's called People I Want to Punch in the Throat and she's suddenly (like a couple days ago) exploded in popularity.
She wrote a bit about her "Elf on the Shelf."  For those of you without children or who, like me, have deliberately tried to remain oblivious to obnoxious trends in parenting like baby knee pads and The Perfect Child's Birthday Party, the "Elf" is a little toy Elf that comes out a Christmastime, like the Advent Calendar from Hell.  There are women who dedicate hours to making messes the "Elf" made and then cleaning them up, all for seeing the resultant joy and wonder on their children's faces.  ("Oh, that's funny, mommy!  Look what the Elf did!  Hee hee!  Can I watch Dora now?")  They do all this after the kids are in bed for the night.  These women apparently never sleep.
This new blogger's elf pretty much moves from one shelf to another, unless she forgets to move it.  She is my kinda mom.  Not to outdo her on the bad-mommy front, but my Elf does even less.  I know this because I do not even have an Elf on the Shelf.  My children have not read this book.  I didn't even know it was a book until she mentioned it on her blog.  I thought it was some bizarre Christmas tradition started by local women with way too much damn time on their hands.  Apparently not.  It is the invention of some author who must have felt that buying your children a truckload of gifts, wrapping and storing them, decorating a tree, and the house, baking 12-gazillion cookies, throwing a holiday party and making gifts for all 23 daycare teachers was not enough for Mommy to do in December in order to be a Good Mommy.   You think I'm kidding?  Jen (the blogger) got comments from women (you know it was women, right?) who said they felt sorry for her children because they did not get the full Elf experience.  I have seen a picture of this woman's house.  It is huge and gorgeous, with a nice lawn.  These are not deprived children.  One woman went so far as to claim that Jen must not have wanted her children in the first place.  Because she doesn't want to spend hours each night making phenomenal messes the "Elf" did and then spend hours the next day cleaning it up.  This makes her a BAD MOMMY.
If this is BAD MOMMY behavior, then Child Services is going to be banging on my door any second now.
Like I said, we do not have an Elf.  I was tremendously glad when our school principal outlawed Elves at school because it was too much of a distraction from the school day.  (Now I'm not just a Bad Mommy, I'm a Bad Teacher, too.)  I also let my kids watch television, eat Kraft Mac and Cheese (sometimes at the same time) and buy them clothes from the Thrift Store.  There are days they don't eat from all the food groups, they have been known to play in the back yard by themselves and I fail to get them into bed by 8:30 on a regular basis.
Right now, instead of taking my children to COSI, I'm letting the 3 year old have a long nap and the 4 year old is watching and episode of Pocoyo.  For the second time.
All I can say is that I know that I do lots of wonderful mommy things, as does the blogger and all of my mommy friends.  I even have mommy friends who have Elves that do goofy things, and more power to 'em.  You do your thing.  I'll do mine.  And, as they say, the kids will be all right.


PS -- I finally figured out how to make words into links.  Not that this is hard at all, but I'm a reluctant technology adopter, so I'm really proud of myself here.  Just sayin'.

I Need a Wife, Too*

My parents came to visit a few days ago.  I love my parents.  For three days, all the dishes in my kitchen were clean, all the laundry was folded and there was no cat throw up anywhere.  Life was good.   I commented on this to my mother, and she said that once she went back to work (when I was about 13-ish), she realized how much she really wanted to have a wife, too -- someone to cook and clean and help out with the kids because it was pretty damn apparent that she didn't have enough time to do all of that anymore.  And despite being generally decent kids, my brothers and I weren't all that helpful in the household-duties department.  I mean, we did the dishes after dinner, and even cooked occasionally, but we pretty much only cleaned our rooms at gunpoint.
Mom and Dad also kept the kids occupied and happy, a thing I mention only because both of them have just started to scream.  Darling Daughter has just taken Darling Son's toys again.  She's smaller, but always seems to win these fights.  She takes what she wants, and shrieks with unholy volume when anyone tries to take it back.  Her usual target is DS, who usually comes to us, weeping, instead of grabbing back or hitting.  Sometimes he even tries to reason with her, but as she's three, it usually doesn't work.  As his daycare teacher says -- DS is a lover, not a fighter.  DD, on the other hand, would punch and shriek her way through a crowd of kitten-holding nuns to get a toy she wanted, and that's just the way she's built.
Now, we do strive to impress upon DD that violence isn't acceptable, and eventually it will sink in, I'm sure.  (really.  any day now.  she's going to figure it out.  really.)  But honestly, I can't say with any certainty which way of approaching life is the better one.  So other than trying to mold aggressiveness into assertiveness in DD, and helping DS hone his negotiation skills, I think it's probably best just to let them be who they are.
I think this was also my parents' philosophy, and I'm rather grateful for it.  For that, and for folding all the laundry.  Come back and visit anytime.  (The clean clothes are piling up again.)



*iTunes - Music - Open Lines & Signals by Bernice Lewis