while my family and I recover from the dreaded Stomach Bug from You Know Where.
Heather Spohr is posting about this year's March of Dimes walk and how you can join Team Maddie. The March of Dimes is a cause close to all our hearts because it is about babies, but Maddie was a very special baby and Heather is a very special mommy. To march for Maddie or support Team Maddie, click over to The Spohrs are Multiplying and sign up.
My heart dropped to my stomach when I clicked on Amalah and saw that Amy's father passed away a few days ago after a very brave fight with cancer. Amy's pregnant with her third boy and she is sort of a rock star. Her sense of humor and her writing are enviable. This is an unimaginable loss and way too early. You might want to show her some love.
Finally, I know it might shock you, but I do love me some non-mommy and family blog action as well. I met a blogger who calls herself The Zadge at BlogHer last year, and let me tell you something: she's awesome. She's not a mommy to humans, but she is a mommy to some furry people, and she is freaking hilarious. She has become one of my favorite people to read, so check her out at Blue Skies and Yellow Dogs. Also? I LOVE her decorating and home renovating skillz.
Hope to be back in fine form soon... the carpet cleaner is on his way!
Facebook friends I no longer relate to, part deux:
Sunday, March 20, 2011
The one who lost her college baby weight, not that she was ever in any way even remotely pudgy, and now looks like a skinny Barbie doll, who spent the past few weeks posting status updates from the Paris fashion shows and reviewing the clothes of designers including Gaultier and Chanel.
Um, I could give a kick-ass review of Old Navy yoga pants and the current selections of the Merona line at Target. Look for my updates from there. And yes, it was a sobering day when I realized that in the Target world, I am quite decidedly not a Mossimo or a Converse One customer. Merona is my section. It was more defining and shocking than the day my OB gave me a scrip for a mammogram. Welcome to "maturity," Mama.
Um, I could give a kick-ass review of Old Navy yoga pants and the current selections of the Merona line at Target. Look for my updates from there. And yes, it was a sobering day when I realized that in the Target world, I am quite decidedly not a Mossimo or a Converse One customer. Merona is my section. It was more defining and shocking than the day my OB gave me a scrip for a mammogram. Welcome to "maturity," Mama.
Man and the Moon
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Tonight we piled into the car, the older boys and I, and C. gasped at the sight of the moon. "The moon! It's huge and it's gold!"
It was a gold moon, at least at dusk. As the night wore on, it became big and bright, the super moon that people have whispered about for weeks. As we drove home, we looked at the moon.
Last week, I chaperoned a field trip to Kennedy Space Center for Firstborn's third grade class. We don't live very close to the center, so it was a big field trip requiring about nine hours of time including travel and about a zillion components to the child care arrangements I had to make for the other two children and the puppy, but it was worth it. I hadn't been to the center since I don't even know when -- probably since my very early 20s -- and Firstborn had never been.
I walked Firstborn and his friend around the exhibits, and I enjoyed how much the two of them really appreciated the magnitude of what we were seeing. We walked into the Space Shuttle Explorer, and touched the walls with the kind of halting, hesitant touch one usually uses in holy spaces. They giggled and squealed in the simulator that made us all feel like we were actually blasting off in a shuttle (including incredible gravity effects that made us lose our breath). They stood in awe of the giant Apollo rocket that hung above our heads while we ate overpriced hamburgers at one of the cafes.
After taking a bus out to the launch pad area, our eyes glued to the peaks of the rocket boosters of the Space Shuttle Endeavour, already on its launch pad, we piled into a screening room to watch an introduction to the Apollo program exhibits. The theme of the screening was 1968, and my two little charges' minds were blown by the examples of how much has changed since then -- the price of gas, the price of movie tickets, the price of a Whopper.
Towards the beginning of the short movie about the Apollo program was a clip of JFK, talking about why Americans were trying to go to the moon. The Soviet Union had beaten us to space, after all. But now, even though our first attempt was not successful, we were determined not only to go to space, but to the moon. It was the stuff of fairy tales and The Twilight Zone, I imagine.
President Kennedy was speaking to a football stadium full of people at Rice University in Houston, Texas. It was September 12, 1962.
But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
The words struck me, and I hoped that Firstborn was listening to them the same way I was. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that's what we do. We choose to do the hard things. We choose to go to the moon.
You can tell me that our country is a hot mess. You can say that politics are polarized beyond functionality, and they are. You can bemoan the youth of today, the broken education system, the pathetic and ridiculous state of health care. We have so many problems. And today, with so many American service men and women still in Afghanistan, still in Iraq, and still in Japan under threat of radiation, we bombed Libya.
I look at my child, and I see hope. Because when I told him the space program is ending, and when he heard the tour bus driver remark that although a summer launch is planned, there is no funding for it, he blanched. Of course we can't end the space program, he protested. We can't. Why would we do that?
Money, I told him. We cannot afford it. It is an answer he, like so many children in our country, has come to understand and know well these past few years.
But we can't, he said firmly. We have to keep going to the moon. Of course, he is right. We have to go to the moon.
If we have to go to the moon, I have to believe that we will figure out a way to make the rest of things things right. We have to do better, because we -- under the hairshirts of so many issues, so many problems, so many hurdles of late -- we are still that country that said, we are going to go to the moon because it is hard. And we did.
We have it in us. Right now it is dark. Japan is under an ominous, huge dark cloud of despair. The Middle East is a field of land mines. Our country -- a country full of people that I believe, at heart, are still dreamers and doers -- is a mess. But over us all tonight shines a crazy bright moon, beckoning us to remember how small we are, how big the universe, and how very essential it is that we remember we are all in this together. We owe it to our children to remember.
It was a gold moon, at least at dusk. As the night wore on, it became big and bright, the super moon that people have whispered about for weeks. As we drove home, we looked at the moon.
***
Last week, I chaperoned a field trip to Kennedy Space Center for Firstborn's third grade class. We don't live very close to the center, so it was a big field trip requiring about nine hours of time including travel and about a zillion components to the child care arrangements I had to make for the other two children and the puppy, but it was worth it. I hadn't been to the center since I don't even know when -- probably since my very early 20s -- and Firstborn had never been.
I walked Firstborn and his friend around the exhibits, and I enjoyed how much the two of them really appreciated the magnitude of what we were seeing. We walked into the Space Shuttle Explorer, and touched the walls with the kind of halting, hesitant touch one usually uses in holy spaces. They giggled and squealed in the simulator that made us all feel like we were actually blasting off in a shuttle (including incredible gravity effects that made us lose our breath). They stood in awe of the giant Apollo rocket that hung above our heads while we ate overpriced hamburgers at one of the cafes.
After taking a bus out to the launch pad area, our eyes glued to the peaks of the rocket boosters of the Space Shuttle Endeavour, already on its launch pad, we piled into a screening room to watch an introduction to the Apollo program exhibits. The theme of the screening was 1968, and my two little charges' minds were blown by the examples of how much has changed since then -- the price of gas, the price of movie tickets, the price of a Whopper.
Towards the beginning of the short movie about the Apollo program was a clip of JFK, talking about why Americans were trying to go to the moon. The Soviet Union had beaten us to space, after all. But now, even though our first attempt was not successful, we were determined not only to go to space, but to the moon. It was the stuff of fairy tales and The Twilight Zone, I imagine.
President Kennedy was speaking to a football stadium full of people at Rice University in Houston, Texas. It was September 12, 1962.
But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
The words struck me, and I hoped that Firstborn was listening to them the same way I was. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that's what we do. We choose to do the hard things. We choose to go to the moon.
You can tell me that our country is a hot mess. You can say that politics are polarized beyond functionality, and they are. You can bemoan the youth of today, the broken education system, the pathetic and ridiculous state of health care. We have so many problems. And today, with so many American service men and women still in Afghanistan, still in Iraq, and still in Japan under threat of radiation, we bombed Libya.
I look at my child, and I see hope. Because when I told him the space program is ending, and when he heard the tour bus driver remark that although a summer launch is planned, there is no funding for it, he blanched. Of course we can't end the space program, he protested. We can't. Why would we do that?
Money, I told him. We cannot afford it. It is an answer he, like so many children in our country, has come to understand and know well these past few years.
But we can't, he said firmly. We have to keep going to the moon. Of course, he is right. We have to go to the moon.
If we have to go to the moon, I have to believe that we will figure out a way to make the rest of things things right. We have to do better, because we -- under the hairshirts of so many issues, so many problems, so many hurdles of late -- we are still that country that said, we are going to go to the moon because it is hard. And we did.
We have it in us. Right now it is dark. Japan is under an ominous, huge dark cloud of despair. The Middle East is a field of land mines. Our country -- a country full of people that I believe, at heart, are still dreamers and doers -- is a mess. But over us all tonight shines a crazy bright moon, beckoning us to remember how small we are, how big the universe, and how very essential it is that we remember we are all in this together. We owe it to our children to remember.
Walking on broken glass
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Today was not a great day. We stayed home all day, and instead of decompressing and enjoying the staying-homeness of it all after a very busy Saturday, my kids fought and destroyed things all day long. Husband was at work, and after struggling to do some housecleaning amidst the house-uncleaning efforts of my children, I decided to lie down and rest for a bit. It is Sunday, after all, I reasoned. I'm SUPPOSED to rest on Sundays.
No sooner had I been lying down for all of ten minutes, but I heard my older two children fighting, screaming, chasing one another down the stairs. And then it came. Glass shattering.
After my middle son's accident this fall, when he went arm-fist through my kitchen window, I take shattering glass seriously. Luckily, this time it was a glass IKEA vase and I managed to get in there before he or the three-year-old could walk on any of it. But let's just say that by 5 PM tonight, my nerves were completely shot.
This was compounded by a nagging heartache I have had for several days now. On Friday, C. went to my friend's house for a playdate. That night, she was over for dinner en masse with all of our children when she told me, laughing, about something C. had said at her house. Somehow, the subject of marriage came up, and C. told her very matter-of-factly that he would not be getting married when he grows up. "Why?" she asked. "Don't you want to have children?"
"Noooo," C. answered firmly. "Children are too much work, and my mom is mad a lot. I just want a job and a dog."
My friend thought C. was clever and funny. I laughed along with her, but inside I died a little. C. is just turning seven this month, and apparently I have already ruined him. I'm mad a lot? That's all he can see?
I am mad a lot. The five men I live with, big, small, and furry, are very frustrating. They break things. They fight. They complain. They don't clean up after themselves. Children are a lot of work (at least he recognizes that part). But once again, I had it hammered into me that somehow, I am not making this work. My kids are not supposed to feel like they are my work, that I am mad a lot and it is because of them.
I'm feeling really beaten down and defeated right now. I want to be positive and creative with my kids. I sit on Firstborn's bed at night and talk to him, and I am kind of amazed at what a cool kid he is. He's so articulate and so perceptive and I feel like I don't want to jinx it but look! He is kind of turning out well after all! And then we have a day like today, and I am trying to go to bed and yet dwelling on the times I yelled today, how I am damaging their psyches, how frustrated I am that my kids argue and fight and berate and bicker over toys. On days like this, I want a do-over. On all of it.
My children are not the only thing in my life, and being a mother is not my only basis of my identity, but my honest truth is that, as Jackie Onassis said, if I mess up this whole parenting thing, nothing else much matters to me. And I am being honest when I say I truly worry that I am, in fact, screwing it all up royally.
[ I feel really guilty that so many of my posts are angsty. I try to write when I am feeling good and positive, too, but more often I feel all writealicious when I am emotional. So just know I am not phishing for "You're a great mom!" reassurance or always throwing quite as much of a pity party as it may seem, but this is my outlet and here I get it all out. Flipside to today's post:this morning we finally put Just Dance in the Wii and Firstborn and I danced to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and "Eye of the Tiger" together and we have not laughed that hard in a long time. So it's not all bad, it isn't. It's just that what weighs on my mind are the heartaches more often than the hilarities. Bear with me.]
No sooner had I been lying down for all of ten minutes, but I heard my older two children fighting, screaming, chasing one another down the stairs. And then it came. Glass shattering.
After my middle son's accident this fall, when he went arm-fist through my kitchen window, I take shattering glass seriously. Luckily, this time it was a glass IKEA vase and I managed to get in there before he or the three-year-old could walk on any of it. But let's just say that by 5 PM tonight, my nerves were completely shot.
This was compounded by a nagging heartache I have had for several days now. On Friday, C. went to my friend's house for a playdate. That night, she was over for dinner en masse with all of our children when she told me, laughing, about something C. had said at her house. Somehow, the subject of marriage came up, and C. told her very matter-of-factly that he would not be getting married when he grows up. "Why?" she asked. "Don't you want to have children?"
"Noooo," C. answered firmly. "Children are too much work, and my mom is mad a lot. I just want a job and a dog."
My friend thought C. was clever and funny. I laughed along with her, but inside I died a little. C. is just turning seven this month, and apparently I have already ruined him. I'm mad a lot? That's all he can see?
I am mad a lot. The five men I live with, big, small, and furry, are very frustrating. They break things. They fight. They complain. They don't clean up after themselves. Children are a lot of work (at least he recognizes that part). But once again, I had it hammered into me that somehow, I am not making this work. My kids are not supposed to feel like they are my work, that I am mad a lot and it is because of them.
I'm feeling really beaten down and defeated right now. I want to be positive and creative with my kids. I sit on Firstborn's bed at night and talk to him, and I am kind of amazed at what a cool kid he is. He's so articulate and so perceptive and I feel like I don't want to jinx it but look! He is kind of turning out well after all! And then we have a day like today, and I am trying to go to bed and yet dwelling on the times I yelled today, how I am damaging their psyches, how frustrated I am that my kids argue and fight and berate and bicker over toys. On days like this, I want a do-over. On all of it.
My children are not the only thing in my life, and being a mother is not my only basis of my identity, but my honest truth is that, as Jackie Onassis said, if I mess up this whole parenting thing, nothing else much matters to me. And I am being honest when I say I truly worry that I am, in fact, screwing it all up royally.
[ I feel really guilty that so many of my posts are angsty. I try to write when I am feeling good and positive, too, but more often I feel all writealicious when I am emotional. So just know I am not phishing for "You're a great mom!" reassurance or always throwing quite as much of a pity party as it may seem, but this is my outlet and here I get it all out. Flipside to today's post:this morning we finally put Just Dance in the Wii and Firstborn and I danced to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and "Eye of the Tiger" together and we have not laughed that hard in a long time. So it's not all bad, it isn't. It's just that what weighs on my mind are the heartaches more often than the hilarities. Bear with me.]
Minutiae
Dirty dishes -- including a milk glass -- on the kitchen countertop.
A pile of candy wrappers on a bedroom floor.
A mound of wet bedding to wash -- AGAIN -- just like yesterday. Despite pull-ups.
Said wet pull-ups still in pajama bottoms on the bedroom carpet.
Traces of poop on the bathroom floor, and I haven't even looked to see what the toilet bowl holds for me yet.
A wet, wadded-up hand towel in the same bathroom. On the floor. In the corner.
Clothes on the floor -- in the MASTER bedroom -- that are not mine.
It's not the big stuff, not the over-arcing traumas or the nagging issues of marriage and parenthood and stay-at-home-momhood that bring me down. It's the minutiae. The constant, never-changing, daily, they-never-learn-or-change-minutiae. When they cart me off to the asylum, tell them that's what did it. And put me in a clean, white, padded room free of anyone else's body fluids PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY.
A pile of candy wrappers on a bedroom floor.
A mound of wet bedding to wash -- AGAIN -- just like yesterday. Despite pull-ups.
Said wet pull-ups still in pajama bottoms on the bedroom carpet.
Traces of poop on the bathroom floor, and I haven't even looked to see what the toilet bowl holds for me yet.
A wet, wadded-up hand towel in the same bathroom. On the floor. In the corner.
Clothes on the floor -- in the MASTER bedroom -- that are not mine.
It's not the big stuff, not the over-arcing traumas or the nagging issues of marriage and parenthood and stay-at-home-momhood that bring me down. It's the minutiae. The constant, never-changing, daily, they-never-learn-or-change-minutiae. When they cart me off to the asylum, tell them that's what did it. And put me in a clean, white, padded room free of anyone else's body fluids PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY.
Passion
Thursday, March 3, 2011
I have made it pretty clear in the past that of all the sports and activities my children have tried or engaged in, baseball? Not number one on my list.
Truth be told, I just have a really hard time getting super worked up about children's sports, and baseball parents -- in general -- tend to be a little hardcore. At least, the baseball parents in my neck of the woods. I am sure part of it is that my kids are not, so far, athletic prodigies. And, you know, neither was I. Husband was an athlete, but he didn't get serious about his sport until middle school. So, at this point, I see athletics as great for conditioning and burning off ya-yas, but I'm not counting on college scholarships here. Secretly, I might be hoping we can snatch a scholarship for chess or violin. That would thrill my nerdy heart.
Firstborn is playing his third season of baseball now. After our disastrous first season when he was five, I tried to distract him with any host of other activities, but we came back to baseball last spring and had a better season. This year, he's playing in the same pretty crazy-intense league, but he's in the B league for his age group and he's one of the oldest in his division, so he's finally kind of a big man on campus. Keeping in mind that he is turning nine this summer and he's tall for his age, picture that one of his teammates is five years old, in Kindergarten, and is the same size as my three-year-old. Firstborn is finally the supahstar he has always believed he is.
The thing is, Firstborn is not naturally talented in baseball. He looks like a foal out there in the field -- all legs and knees and limbs akimbo. He has a decently strong arm, but his accuracy is sketchy, in part because those legs never set -- they just wobble. Sometimes he hits really well; other games, he can't hit the nose on his face. He doesn't always make the best decision about what to do with a ball he has successfully fielded. But baseball is the first and only thing we have ever found that Firstborn will work on, happily, whenever he is asked. He never flinches about practices or games, and heaven knows there are plenty of both. He is always up for a game of catch or a trip to a batting cage.
He loves baseball.
And so here we are, knee deep in practices and games and oh my God, how does one successfully wash white baseball pants? HOW? We spend hours at the elementary school field, the littler ones running around messing with the school garden (oops) and picking weeds, my seasonal allergies having a field day -- literally -- with my sinuses. We sit in the metal bleachers for hours at games, eating hamburgers grilled at the ballpark for dinner followed by Ring Pop chasers, chasing after wayward three-year-olds, hoping that we will get home before 8:00 PM.
I want to support Firstborn's dream. It's killing me, for several reasons, among them bedtimes and siblings who like to run right where foul balls might whack them dead. But after years of trying to skirt it, I am finally realizing that until he tells us otherwise, this is his dream. It makes him happy. Better get used to it. The look on his face when he brought me the game ball from the first game this season -- his name etched into it with the date -- sealed my fate. It's not what I would choose, but the past almost nine years have given me something of an education on not getting my way. I'm starting to mature myself and let my kids be the people they are, both when it thrills me (Firstborn made trading cards for the Greek gods this week! Swoon!) and when it doesn't (two games and a practice in the span of five days).
Now, the almost-seven-year-old is saying he wants to try baseball. Over my dead body. Well, maybe.
Truth be told, I just have a really hard time getting super worked up about children's sports, and baseball parents -- in general -- tend to be a little hardcore. At least, the baseball parents in my neck of the woods. I am sure part of it is that my kids are not, so far, athletic prodigies. And, you know, neither was I. Husband was an athlete, but he didn't get serious about his sport until middle school. So, at this point, I see athletics as great for conditioning and burning off ya-yas, but I'm not counting on college scholarships here. Secretly, I might be hoping we can snatch a scholarship for chess or violin. That would thrill my nerdy heart.
Firstborn is playing his third season of baseball now. After our disastrous first season when he was five, I tried to distract him with any host of other activities, but we came back to baseball last spring and had a better season. This year, he's playing in the same pretty crazy-intense league, but he's in the B league for his age group and he's one of the oldest in his division, so he's finally kind of a big man on campus. Keeping in mind that he is turning nine this summer and he's tall for his age, picture that one of his teammates is five years old, in Kindergarten, and is the same size as my three-year-old. Firstborn is finally the supahstar he has always believed he is.
The thing is, Firstborn is not naturally talented in baseball. He looks like a foal out there in the field -- all legs and knees and limbs akimbo. He has a decently strong arm, but his accuracy is sketchy, in part because those legs never set -- they just wobble. Sometimes he hits really well; other games, he can't hit the nose on his face. He doesn't always make the best decision about what to do with a ball he has successfully fielded. But baseball is the first and only thing we have ever found that Firstborn will work on, happily, whenever he is asked. He never flinches about practices or games, and heaven knows there are plenty of both. He is always up for a game of catch or a trip to a batting cage.
He loves baseball.
And so here we are, knee deep in practices and games and oh my God, how does one successfully wash white baseball pants? HOW? We spend hours at the elementary school field, the littler ones running around messing with the school garden (oops) and picking weeds, my seasonal allergies having a field day -- literally -- with my sinuses. We sit in the metal bleachers for hours at games, eating hamburgers grilled at the ballpark for dinner followed by Ring Pop chasers, chasing after wayward three-year-olds, hoping that we will get home before 8:00 PM.
I want to support Firstborn's dream. It's killing me, for several reasons, among them bedtimes and siblings who like to run right where foul balls might whack them dead. But after years of trying to skirt it, I am finally realizing that until he tells us otherwise, this is his dream. It makes him happy. Better get used to it. The look on his face when he brought me the game ball from the first game this season -- his name etched into it with the date -- sealed my fate. It's not what I would choose, but the past almost nine years have given me something of an education on not getting my way. I'm starting to mature myself and let my kids be the people they are, both when it thrills me (Firstborn made trading cards for the Greek gods this week! Swoon!) and when it doesn't (two games and a practice in the span of five days).
Now, the almost-seven-year-old is saying he wants to try baseball. Over my dead body. Well, maybe.
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