Mother’s Day Interview

I was entertained by this interview from a friend’s blog, so here it is from my kids. Dorrie is in bold, Jonas is in italics.

1.) What is something that your Mom always says to you? She does say that she loves me hold your hand NOW!
2.) What makes your Mom happy? hugs make you happy Jonas happy
3.) What makes your Mom sad? when me and Jonas do mean stuff together Dorrie sad
4.) How does your Mom make you laugh? by making funny faces! funny! faces!
5.) What was your Mom like as a child? did you play games? Jonas is kickin’!
6.) How old is your Mom? I can’t remember What does Dorrie got?
7.) How tall is your Mom? Really tall TAAAALL!
8.) What is her favorite thing to do? you like making crafts. Happy!
9.) What does your Mom do when you’re not around? Sometimes you play with Lily and Jonas Lily!
10.) If your Mom becomes famous what will it be for? For showing off. Fire truck! NEE NAW NEE NAW! CHOO CHOO!
11.) What is your Mom really good at? Making yummy stuff Little huggies!
12.) What is your Mom not good at? building blocks Mom? Good at?
13.) What does your Mom do for a job? You clean the house! FLYING!
14.) What is your Moms favorite food? Chinese food Pirates!
15.) What makes you proud of your Mom? When you make really yummy food. Carrots!
16.) If your Mom was a Cartoon Character who would she be? Bot because he is my favorite character on Team Umizoomi! Baby duck!
17.) What do you and your Mom do together? Crafts! Pinch. (???)
18.) How are you and your Mom the same? we both have necklaces round and round and round!
19.) How are you and your Mom different? you have glasses and I have regular eyes Carrot! Banana!
20.) How do you know your Mom loves you? because you give me hugs Hop! Hop hop!
21.) What does your Mom like most about your Dad? You like him because he brews. Dora the Explorer!
22.) Where’s your Moms favorite place go? You LOVE to go to the park! Coffee!

Quit with the mother-blaming before I punch you in your nads.

This is a rebuttal of that CNN piece on trampy girl’s clothing.

I agree with some of the original (without demand there wouldn’t be such a market, the buck stops with the parents) but this response helped me clarify the squicky feeling I got from the original (shaming an 8yo because she’s wearing warm weather size-appropriate clothing, mother-blame for negotiating compromises with kids when you don’t know the situation or their value system at home).

I mean, a culture that idolizes Jasmine and Ariel is not a culture that can legitimately clutch their pearls over a midriff shirt. A culture that won’t let kids play outside because of a media-created fear of sexual predators is not a culture that can then mock little girls for dressing like “tramps.” And a culture that mocks and shames parents for complying with cultural norms is pretty much what we’re left with. Changing it takes more than just buying your daughter clothing from Lands End.

(Disclosure: about 90% of my kids’ clothing is from Lands End. So there’s that.)

Patheticness Hack

I tend to be pretty attached to things. Sure, I go on periodic clutter-chucking rampages, and I throw out all sorts of things, many of which are important and I later regret trashing. But if I didn’t do that, I’d be living on an episode of Hoarders, so really it’s all for the best.

Perhaps the big reason is because I tend to attach memories to things. I have a fleece from high school that makes me remember the sidewalk sale when my mom bought it for me. I have a pair of birkenstocks my mom got for me after a breakup in high school. I have probably ever t-shirt I’ve ever been given at any event. And I also have no dresser drawer space anymore.

I was going through and culling maternity clothes, saving some for pregnant friends, donating some, and realizing that some were beyond help. No one wants my tank top that has a big italian beef grease stain right on the belly shelf. No one. I realize this.

A few weeks ago I put Lily in a pair of footie jammies and realized there was a hole in the toe. She was about to grow out of them (a 12 month size at 7 months, that’s about par for the course for my babies), and so logically I should just throw them out, right?

Lily, March 2011

But I kept seeing the Christmas when they were given to baby Dorrie by a loving family member. And all the times I smushed my chunky girls into a skin-tight set of Disney jammies and smiled because my babies were so adorable. I don’t even like Disney. I don’t like bubble gum pink. (To be fair, I do like polka dots.) But my babies make them adorable anyway.

Dorrie, February 2007

So, I had a lightbulb moment. I should start a rag bag! I can cut up stuff I’d otherwise be trashing, then I can use them while cleaning! I get to avoid using paper unnecessarily, it’s just rags so I can throw them out of they’re irreparably gross, and I will go through them slowly to reduce the sniffle factor of getting rid of memory-laden clothing.

Now I have a bunch of rags in my rag bag that all bring a smile to my face when I use them – whether it’s the maternity shirt I bought when pregnant with Dorrie, the first postpartum “normal” shirt I bought after she was born, the Disney jammies, an old holey pajama shirt from college… It makes it less painful to get rid of clothing AND more fun to clean.

That’s some win-win action going on right there.

Sounds Like The Old One

Today my husband took the older two kids to the zoo for the afternoon. A confluence of crap made it so I was basically single parenting for close to a week, from last Thursday to this most recent Thursday.

You single parents. I must pause here to salute the SHIT out of you. Damn. The baby had RSV and ear infections and amoxicillin, the toddler started sleeping until 6:12am until the DST time change hit on Sunday and then started waking at 3, 4, and 5 in the morning for the day, the preschooler is currently my subject in an experiment to see if one’s ear can actually be talked physically OFF, and I got a stomach bug that laid me out to the point that I was telling a 4 year old to watch the baby while I passed out on the couch. I thought about calling friends but didn’t want to risk passing the horribleness of the stomach bug to other people so… Well. We made it, anyway.

So, since I desperately needed some time where no one was talking to me or needing things from me, and the house looked like its main caregiver had been sick and overwhelmed for a week, my husband took 2/3 of the kids to the zoo while I wore Lily on my back and cleaned. It was shockingly enjoyable, particularly since I’m not one who usually likes cleaning. But a little tivoed Star Trek: The Next Generation (NERD ALERT NERD ALERT) and some time where I could do things continuously without having to stop to referee fights/prevent accidents/answer questions/get snacks/change (as many) diapers was amazingly fun and productive.

I ended up getting one of those thoughtworms, though. The things where you can’t stop thinking about one thing and it’s annoying you but you can’t turn it off? The ONLY thing I managed to think about for a solid part of my relaxing afternoon was how HORRIFIED my Self of Four Years Ago would have been at my present situation.

I was one who enjoyed babyhood but my world really was pretty rocked by that first baby. The second baby was pretty easy because my world came pre-rocked by that point. The third has been pretty incredibly hard, but I really think that is more because of the 17 month age difference between two and three, versus any substantial increase in difficulty from two to three kids.

So four years ago I had one eight month old baby. And I couldn’t get anything done around the house. I spent most of my afternoon wondering just how shocked and horrified I would have been had I known just how much harder it could really get.

I realize that there’s no way to tell yourself that. And there’s no way to warn anyone else and have it be helpful and not just make you a giant whiny doom-filled asshole. Honestly, I debated not writing about it because I don’t want a first time parent coming across this and feeling wretched. But I think it will help the thoughtworm get out of my head, so here it is.

Now I am sitting here in a clean house, that smells less like dog pee (fucking rat terrier marks everywhere and yes we have tried that, and that too, and yes we’ve tried that and no, it does not work and I am so sick of smelling pee), where things are put away and vacuumed and wiped and I put out new notebooks and crayons for the kids for when they come home and no, I wouldn’t change a thing. But I will say it was better than a nap, and that is really saying something.

Tipsy Valentines

Lily would like to wish everyone a happy, stable, non-tippy Valentines Day.

(This is what happens when the current photography memes are for babies who aren’t off the charts in height and weight!)

Frittering away my time slightly differently…

Since I started blogging and stopped and started again and forgot about it and blah blah so on, it seems that the hierarchy is now: blogs for long-form, tumblr for short-form, facebook for shorter & private, twitter for shortest and public. Sometimes the ebb and flow of the internet confuses me.

Anyway, I started a tumblr that I am going to play with for a while as a place to put stuff I either don’t want to fight about on facebook but is too long for twitter, or stuff that is too short to talk about in detail here. Maybe I’ll figure out some sort of linking system? It is all a big mystery. It is a good thing that I spend so much time stuck on the couch under a hungry baby, eh?

http://leahbc.tumblr.com/

Chaotic Good

Here is a snippet of how our reading time went down today:

Me: “That’s not my monkey! His tail is too velvety!”
Dorrie: “What’s velvety mean?”
Jonas: “MORE! MORE BOOK! MORE!”
Me: “Lily please don’t grab the book and stuff it in your mouth. It means soft, like this part of the book.”
Jonas: “MORE!!!”
Dorrie: “Look, I found my rhymes book! This one looks like Hey Diddle Diddle!”
Me: “That’s not my monkey! Its tongue is too fuzzy. Yes, that’s Hey Diddle Diddle. Can you wait until this book is over for me to read a few?”
Lily: *pokes herself in the face with a board book and whimpers*
Jonas: “AGAIN. THIS ONE. MOOOOOON.” *chucks

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

at my head*
Dorrie: “WHEN are you going to be DONE? I am WAITING FOR MY NURSERY RHYMES.”
Me: “I need to finish this Monkey book, and then I’ll read you three nursery rhymes.”
Jonas: “The MOOON! The MOOON!” *More Caterpillar chucking*
Me: *reads Monkey book and three nursery rhymes at the speed of a fleeing antelope*
Lily: *whacks self in eye with corner of board book, blinks confusedly*
Dorrie: “Now do these ones!”
Jonas: “CAT MOON! CAT MOON” *throwing The Very Hungry Caterpillar at my eye with pinpoint accuracy* (thank goodness for glasses!)

This stuff is why those idyllic Public Service Announcements about reading to your kids for 20 minutes a day make me stabby. Not because I don’t read to them, or because I don’t think people should prioritize reading to their kids, but because they tend to make it look like you’ll be sitting on a lovely (made) (clean) bed with a rapt, attentive, SINGLE child.

I am not entirely sure any of the three of mine actually got anything out of our reading session today, but at least all of them clamoring for books is better than pleas for TV? Right?

Happy New Year!

The Christmas season was fairly high-stress for no real significant reason besides just too many balls in the air. Here’s to more juggling practice in 2011!

This is absolutely the funniest video I’ve ever taken.

Seriously, just buy it.

Sleepless in America: Is Your Child Misbehaving…or Missing Sleep? by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Let me get the SINGLE negative about this book out of the way up front: it is titled and marketed too narrowly. Sleepless in America is NOT about just children and their sleep habits. It is about how to get yourself, your spouse, your baby/toddler/preschooler/schoolkid/teenager, EVERYONE to sleep in a kinder, easier, gentler, more loving way.

People with kids get a lot of advice about sleep. I’ve seen conjecture that because of the Back to Sleep campaign, babies sleep worse these days – which has turned “how is she sleeping?” into our generation’s version of our parents’ “is she potty trained yet?” People also tend to think that their way is the only way, hence they will push anything that works for them from leaving babies to cry to cosleeping. Have you ever had a pediatrician tell you to “put the baby down when drowsy but awake?” Have you ever had a baby who didn’t then jolt awake screaming angrily? I haven’t. If you have, I hope you enjoyed it! Experts tend to write books that push their own agenda as well, so some pediatricians write books bout leaving babies to cry and how that is the only way to have a healthy child. Some write books about magic quick fixes like swaddling, controlled crying, crib sleeping, cosleeping, etc. Some write books advocating lengthy sleep logs and attention to detail, which seems a bit ludicrous to me as people reading a book on sleep issues probably aren’t getting enough sleep be at all detail-oriented. The No-Cry Sleep Solution was a great example of that – one I WANTED to love, I TRIED to love it, I just failed at it because when you are that sleep-deprived, you can’t do what books seem to think you can.

Sleepless in America is the book I wanted that book to be. It explains why you, your spouse, your baby/toddler/child can’t sleep. It gives the reasons that most of the sleep advice out there is actually harmful, what is harmful for some children but beneficial for others, what is perpetuated out of habit and custom instead of actual human need, then gives you easy, gentle solutions for adults and children of every age group. These solutions aren’t quick fixes. There’s no “three nights of crying then she slept through the night!” answer here. But they are easy, kind, loving, and help you treat yourself or your child as a human being worth of respect, closeness, calmness, and love even at night.

If I had read this book when my 4 year old was around 9 months, I don’t think I would have ended up doing anything different. I would, however, have felt better and less confused and rudderless about what I ended up doing. I also may have been able to implement some ideas earlier and had to do less experimentation.

This book is the best book I have ever read on sleep (and I’ve read a lot of them!). It is kind, understanding, loving, and allows you to take what you want and leave the rest. Everyone should buy it.

View all my reviews

Whippin’ It Out

I need some crowdsourcing here.  Check out this photo:

(Jonas was about 2 months here, Dorrie was 2.75)

Now please explain how a bystander telling this nursing mother to “use a cover at least” would somehow help them be less uncomfortable. Are they bothered by being able to see the back of a baby’s head? Is it all round and smooth and evocative of boobies? If it is that they can tell what is going on, then I would think it would be WORSE with a nursing cover, heaven knows those don’t really camouflage what is happening – they do hide the BABY though. Are baby heads offensive? Someone with that much of an issue with their status as a mammal must also be a proponent of hiding pregnant women once they start showing – after all, they are all icky and SEXED UP and growing a baby!

My theory is that people who take offense to breastfeeding are actually taking offense at having to acknowledge breasts being used for their primary (non-sexual) purpose. Insistence on a cover of some sort is not going to somehow cover a woman’s breast better. The vast majority of women can do that just fine without a tent. (Or, if they have a tough time breastfeeding and staying within their own modesty comfort level, will choose to use a cover of some sort themselves instead of having it thrust on them by icked-out bystanders.) Instead, insistence on a cover is going to make the woman feel dirty and wrong. What better place to keep your women, eh? Particularly those women who are comfortable enough with their bodies to use them openly and confidently – better take them down a peg!

Baby heads are not offensive.

The knowledge that breastfeeding is going on is not offensive.

Insisting that a woman should use a cover to cover something you can’t even see happening but are grossed out about anyway? THAT is offensive.