One Perfect Mess

Archive for June, 2009

Seems that the hot topic of the day in mommyblog land is SAHM vs WAHM vs W..wait what the hell is the acronym for mom that works full time away from home? Anyway… it seems that the various sides are each feeling that they have the toughest time of it. It really boils down to your personality and what works for you. Personally I feel that it is very important to raise my own kids full time. I don’t feel that it is right for someone else to be doing the legwork raising my children. I want to be here when they scrape their knee or when they wake up from a nightmare. I want to be here when my little boy finally gets the hang of crawling. Are there days that I wish I could just hand the responsibility off to someone else and not have to worry about it? Try every single day. If I were at the office every day would I miss my kids? Hell yes. It’s damned if you do & damned if you don’t syndrome. That’s why ALL moms have the hardest jobs on the planet. If we stay at home with our kids then we easily feel isolated and stifled. If we work full time we feel guilty and miss our kids. If we try to do both and work from home, then we feel like we’re not doing either particularly well. That’s the beauty of being a mommyblogger. We can cheer each other on. All of us. Because really do any of us have it easy? Maybe if I had a full time nanny…

I made a very rare trip to the mall today with both kids. “The mall” meaning the big one thirty minutes away. The Weebles has outgrown her baby sized Anywhere Chair from Pottery Barn Kids that she has so coveted this last year. It’s gone everywhere with us and is second only to her blankie in favorites. I am a big time internet shopper. I so prefer to sit at home and order items to be brought to me and left on my doorstep. This seems much easier until I realize that my garage is completely full of cardboard again and that I have to break it all down and recycle it. So I turned to PotteryBarnKids.com to order up a brand new chair in the bigger size. However, the shipping all together on the stupid thing came to nearly $50 and not even I am lazy enough to not at least try to drive over and pick it up myself for that much. However, in retrospect, that $50 would have been a savings compared to what I’m going to spend now. Everything in the store was the perfect size for a little toddler. She ran from one thing to another climbing up in a adirondack chair, checking out the miniature picnic table and benches, playing with the notmadeofcheapplastic kitchen stuff. Oh my hell. The stuff I wanted to buy. I couldn’t mentally write it all down fast enough. Oddly enough the one thing she didn’t seem interested in was the damn Anywhere Chair which I did manage to purchase even while chasing her from one end of the store to the other with her brother in tow. If anyone from Pottery Barn is interested in using me for advertisement by all means. I will gladly include the words Pottery Barn in every post for the rest of my blogging days if you’d like to hook me up.

I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in nearly three years. We’re talking not more than four hours in a row and even that would be extremely rare. I discovered back when Andrew was in law school and I was working out every day and taking good care of myself that I really needed close to nine hours of sleep a night to function at my best. I honestly cannot imagine ever getting that much sleep again. During the two pregnancies I slept awful. Between having to get up to use the bathroom every 1-2 hours and the anxiety it’s a wonder I had two healthy babies I slept so poorly. Both the kids nurse on demand. The Weebles still almost always wakes up once a night to nurse, sometimes not at all, but then again sometimes twice. The Peanut usually wakes me up around 1, 4 and then again at 6. He hadn’t been going back to sleep after the 6 am wake up but now that he is in his own room I have been lying down on the couch with him and he’ll sleep until almost 8. So if I add it up I usually sleep from 11-1, 1:30-3:30, 4:30-6, and then maybe from 6-7:30. So that is almost seven hours, but somehow broken up like that I just don’t feel rested. I feel like I’ve been working all night, which in a way I guess I have. Does it ever get any easier? Since the Weebs is almost two I have to figure that factoring in the Peanut I’ll be going at a pace similar to this for at least the next year and a half and by then there’s a chance I’ll be pregnant again. Sheesh. Caffeine please?

Listening to rain
Both kids napping together
Cannot believe it

Must clean entire house
In laws are coming tonight
Why aren’t I working?

Three grocery stores
On my To do List today
I am my mother

I always heard from my dad growing up that the craziest drivers on the road were in minivans. Of course, nobody else on the road knows how to drive but him so his complaints don’t end there but that’s a story for another day.. Now that I pilot a minivan and have cause to do so I not only have to agree with him but can also completely understand why. What could be distracting me behind the wheel? Well let’s just review some of the things I’ve done while driving just in the last 24 hours or so. First off, I’ve driven erratic speeds. It’s just as annoying to me as it is to those following me but I speed way up when my passengers are melting down and I want to get where we are going in a hurry! Then when I realize we just aren’t going to get there fast enough I try to think of other ways to appease them. Snack? Toy? Pat on the head? So I slow down so that I can bend my right arm the opposite direction from how God intended it to go to hand over whatever I can find nearby to my tiny passengers. Just this morning I handed over the entire contents of a kids’ meal including the cup of mandarin oranges. Be warned, don’t go there. I now get the pleasure of trying to decide which I’d rather avoid more during their naptime, Jillian or cleaning orange syrup-y stuff off the car seat. Neither of which involve me sitting down twittering and reading blogs. So its really no wonder that minivan drivers aren’t paying attention to the road. I really need a driver or another adult with me at all times so that one of us can focus on actually driving. But who am I kidding? If I had another adult to help me out I wouldn’t use them for that purpose. I’d be letting them babysit while I took a nap myself.

My little peanut is five months old today. Five months that have been sharply divided between “oh my God I want to send this thing back where it came from” and pure bliss. After he got over his whole I Scream A Lot, Basically Whenever My Eyes are Open phase, he turned into the sweetest smiliest happy little guy I’ve ever met. And drooliest. My God the drool. He especially likes to stick his little fists in his mouth, get them good and drooly and them paw all over my shoulders and face. He also enjoys stuffing fistfuls of my newly cleaned and dried hair in his mouth leaving it goopy. I love how when he dozes off while nursing he’ll have my cross pendant clenched in his tiny fist as if to say “you’re not fooling me again woman, I’m holding onto you this time.” Last night he started imitating the Weebles. She would yell really loud and then he would too, both of them laughing. He’s now a champ in the exersaucer and the jumperoo, which gives us a whole new dimension of things to do during the day. He’s getting his knees up under him now when he is on his belly and its starting to make me nervous. I’m not ready for him to go totally mobile. How on earth will I keep all the small choking hazards off the floor with a toddler running around dumping entire cups of fruit loops on the carpet? He’s turned the corner and I can totally see my son the toddler instead of just my son the little baby. His room is all ready, we’re just trying to decide what to do about a crib. Kick the Weebs out and give him that one? Buy a new one? Or just move the minicrib from our room upstairs. I am hopeful that his sleep will be even better once he’s in a room of his own that is away from all the insanity that his sister blesses upon us. Speaking of his sister, I’d better go find her and get her down for her nap. She should be done eating her “nug-gucks” by now.

Last weekend my husband was out and about with this old ho. I don’t know what the hell they were up to but I’m a little tired of it. It’s been nine days now and still this ho is hanging around my backyard. Is it really so hard to put it back in the garage where he found it?

What’s that? An “e” on the end? Well that could have been confusing…