Attack of the Were-mom

Have you ever had one of those days where you just aren’t your self? A day where you turn from mild mannered mom to mean ogre at the drop of a hat?  I spent yesterday in just such a state.  The day started out well enough.  I woke up on time (for a change) and even managed to get a cup of coffee before the kids woke up.  Then, my oldest started complaining that he wasn’t feeling well.  Two moments later, my youngest was vomiting all over the couch.  As I scoured the cushions my head began to beat. 

The morning rolled on, my kids fighting like wild dogs, my head thumping.  For children that didn’t feel well, they were expending a lot of energy pummelling each other.  They were kind enough to take breaks from fighting to make a mess of my house.  This is when the ogre first appeared.  “For kids who claim to be sick you are acting like animals!!,” I shouted.  My headache continued and my anger grew. 

I started cleaning the house.  The kids destroyed each room as I finished cleaning it.  I yelled, my anger grew.  I found myself shouting at them.  They continued to test me.  My shouting turned into screaming.  I was in full on ogre mommy mode.  My headache had reached a level of intractable pain. 

After sending my children to their rooms, I began to vacuum the floor.  Mysteriously, halfway through vacuuming the living room rug, the vacuum stopped working.  “Not my Dyson!” I cried.  I loved that vacuum, I couldn’t believe that we had managed to destroy yet another vacuum with our filth.  Then I heard the familiar giggles from around the corner.  My little “angels” had escaped their bedrooms, unplugged the vacuum and begun laughing wildly at my disgust.  That was it, I could handle no more.  I screamed, I yelled, I shouted profanities until I was hoarse.  My head hurt so badly, my vision was blurred and I considered the possibility that I was having a stroke.  I lost it.  I lost my mind.  What kind of adult would yell at a child that way?  To top it off, I was probably having a stroke.  I sat my kids on the couch and walked out the back door.  I know I shouldn’t have walked out of the house, but I needed to get away for a minute.  I walked to the mailbox and collected my thoughts.  I really felt like an ass.  My kids might suck, but they were just being kids, I shouldn’t have lost my cool like that, I was acting worse than they were.  I went back inside and my kids were sitting right where I had placed them.  (I must have really been scary for them not to have scattered the second I turned around)  I had no choice but to apologize to them for my ghastly behavior.  “Mommy shouldn’t have yelled like that.  I’m sorry I was acting like a big mean ogre,” I said.  To which my youngest replied that Shrek was an ogre, but he was nice.  So there you have it, I’m yet again, an ass at least ogres are nice.

More Kids? Think Twice.

As a mother, I can find a way to feel guilty about everything. One random bout of guilt this week was inspired by Amanda’s two beautiful boys: Why, oh why was I so selfish and did not give my daughter a friend for life, a sibling? She is so caring and nurturing of Amanda’s littler one and all of her friends’ new baby brothers (no one around seems to be producing girls right now; though everyone seems to be having a second child, of course).  I was driving home from work, feeling incredibly selfish about my choice (yet again, of course) and actually started to cry when I pictured my daughter lovingly playing with a little sister.

Yet like most guilt, this whole line of thinking was based on an idyllic image of these two brothers’ best moments. I know from all of my friends that the reality of wee siblings includes a lot of jealousy, fighting, competition (and, of course, fierce love). I also used to have this incredibly naive idea that it would get easier with the second one; that you’d learn a few things with that mysterious first child that you could apply to subsequent ones. HA!

Like all cases of reality, the truth is mixed: Sure, you learn some strategies for getting them to, say,  learn to blow their noses (be a dragon, really blow!), but the little buggers are as different as stray socks in the dryer. Your first one might have been the best sleeper, but a picky eater while the second will be a night owl and eat everything not nailed down (until he gets a hold of hammer when you are distracted by the first one and pries it up).

Oh motherhood! No right choices, only the best choices you can come up with in the (usually desperate) moment.

Artfully Disasterous

In effort to entertain my brood and perhaps manage to take care of getting some gifts, I took my kids to the local paint-your-own-pottery place.  I would like to caution all mothers of toddlers against attempting to take their children to these places with less than a 1 to 1 adult to toddler ratio.  While the children had a riot, I am still reeling from the experience. 

Trouble started when we began to pick out the pieces of pottery we wanted to paint.  Unglazed pottery is exceptionally fragile and therefore should not be touched by anyone, let alone children.  I found myself swatting little hands away from the merchandise left and right.  Then, we couldn’t agree on what to paint.  One wanted to paint a plate while the other wanted to paint himself.  Once I picked the item to be painted the fun really started.  My two year old had to sit on my lap in order to be tall enough to reach the table.  This doesn’t sound bad except paint began to fly and considering my position, I was subject to getting my own new coat of paint.  By the time the painting was done, I had ceramic glaze in my hair, on my face, and in my ear.  My two year old had painted a moustache on himself, and had painted his brother from fingertip to elbow.

I thought we looked awful!  Of course, that was before I saw the mug we had just made.  That was awful.  My children had taken turns painting with their own color choices.  One part of the mug was orange, another part was yellow with teal swirls and the background was purple.  I thought I was coming up with a great grandma gift, a coffee mug made by the grand-kids.  What I ended up with was a mug covered in psychedelic vomit and a lot of stained clothing. 

Pre-Web

I admit it: my daughter does watch the occasional YouTube video. This is mostly because her father and I are nostalgic about cartoons of our childhood. We pull up a classic bugs bunny or pepe la pew and enjoy watching her laugh at these familiar images. However, our girl can’t operate a computer mouse nor can she “keyboard” as they call typing in school these days. And I’m more than fine with my three and a half year old lacking computer literacy. My husband and I are both extremely technologically adept so I have no concerns that she’ll pick it up as soon as she actually needs to.

Yet I know there are a multitude of toys on the market that are essentially kids computers, computer games, or computer-like toys. There are also zillions of sites targeted at wee ones that have come in handy when my daughter asks me who various characters are from other kids’ lunch boxes, t-shirts, etc. However, I can’t help but marvel that there is actually a set of content providers out there building sites expressly with preschoolers in mind.

Today I read that both Nickelodeon and Disney are preparing online content for preschoolers. Disney is introducing Bunnytown, which is to promote its Saturday morning puppet show. However, Nickelodeon is promoting MyNoggin, a “curriculum-based learning” game that is part of a subscription based ad-free service. I am sure it is my inner Luddite showing, but I’m just not all that excited to get my daughter online quite yet. While I’m a huge fan of the internet for research, learning, and entertainment, I also believe in building a strong foundation instead of just slapping together a pre-fab house. I sincerely want my daughter to love books and to understand the basic underpinnings of learning before she ventures out into the wild wild web; I want her to go there properly armed.

Life’s Not Fair

So I was chatting with Amanda the other day and she was talking about the difficulty of maintaining a sense of equality between her two boys. She and I share many parenting theories, but differ on many as well. And we say viva la difference! Part of what is interesting about blogging together is the juxtaposition. Anyhow, I was thinking about a common kid complaint she struggles with more than I, given her two kids to my one: “That’s not fair!” Uh, well, duh. I’m sure it wasn’t just my mom who replied to my complaints about unfairness without a moment’s hesitation: “Life’s not fair.”

Without a doubt, only-children differ in many ways from their multi-sibling friends: some positive and some negative. One thing they don’t get to learn right at home is how to share with other children. Sure, we try to teach our girl to share with us, but at preschool or daycare is when she’s really learning these lessons. Heck, I’ve heard her be downright nastily possessive with her wee peers and I shudder to think how often her teachers must have to correct this behavior in her (and others). But these are hard lessons she needs to learn, and better now than later.

While I don’t envy any mom who has to break up these scuffles dozens of times a day at home, I think they are better taught there than out in the cruel world. Even for moms lucky enough to be able to afford two (or more) of everything, the world just doesn’t work like that. Life is, in fact, unfair. While there may be four balls on the playground, there are not likely to be enough for every kid to have her own. While you may be equally academically qualified to get into a university, some other candidate may live in a regional area the school needs students from to meet a quota. While you may have a nearly equivalent academic record in college, with similar internships and activities, the factors that land you the job may not have anything to do with fairness. And so it goes.

None of these daily battles we fight–for manners, for neatness, for healthy eating–are easy or fun. However it seems to me that if we don’t fight them we will be leaving our kids to fight them (and maybe lose) out in the world without us.

Mommy Fat

Baby fat is cute. Mommy fat is not. With a three year old, I no longer have the cute baby as an excuse for my jiggly bits. Unless you count eating all of her food scraps as an excuse. Okay, I admit it: I’m a bit touchy about my weight. I took 10 pounds off at the start of the summer and have managed to keep it off, which I do feel good about. But I have almost accepted this other exra 10 may be here to stay.

So imagine what it was like when I was loading the dishwasher the other day and my daughter said, “Mommy, you are fat.” While my first instinct was to head for the bathroom and purge (kidding! It was really to say I know, and collapse into a puddle of tears), I held back and with faux calm replied, “uh, what makes you think mommy is fat, dear?” To which she responded by poking me in the (36D) boobs and saying, “right here, mom, see, you are fat.” I stifled a pathetically relieved laugh and said she was right, my breasts are mostly made of fat, but that it wasn’t the kind of fat most people minded…

Potty Mouth

My daughter has officially entered the “Adam Sandler Phase” of toddler humor in which all comedic roads lead to poop. My daughter has inherited my love of getting a laugh and neither us fears the low-brow joke in the search for a giggle. However, fecal humor has been where I draw the line. Wait, correct that: neither vomit nor gagging sounds are funny to me either. But I digress.

So while I am surprised at the sheer glee the word poo (or any of its variations: poopy, poop, et. al.) elicits from my girl. Much like the facility I have with the f word, my girl can use poo has all parts of speech. And like my own (sorry) potty mouth, it is charming. If, for example, I am having a bad day, there’s nothing quite like being told dinner is poopy. And what could be more fun than hearing that my daughter learned “poop” today at school?

Yet the hardest parts of this funny fecal phase for me has been 1) not laughing (her gigles are contagious!) (no, that doesn’t mean I actually do find poo humor funny!) and 2) not going for the poo jokes myself because I’d do almost anything to get her to laugh.

OO-OO-OOO-OOPS

I am truly a nasty ogre mommy.  My son has recently developed a stuttering problem.  I have been trying to help him by encouraging him to slow down, take a deep breath and repeat what he is trying to say correctly.  After doing a little research via medical books and the Internet, I have discovered that by doing this, I am making the problem worse.  It turns out that young children, most often boys go through a period of development where stuttering can occur.  The stutter will 98% of the time correct itself with NO intervention.  In-fact attempting to intervene will cause more damage in speech development and in the fragile psyche of a child.  The best thing a parent, or care giver can do is to patiently and quietly listen offering NO correction.  I am an ass.  I have to go now so that I can start a savings account for the therapy that he will undoubtedly need just because of me. 

Grow up!

I hire interns who are usually between 19-21. I hire assistants who are usually between 21-25. Over the past five years, I’ve had a couple who were amazing: budding young worker bees with tons of promise, needing only job-specific tutelage to get started on the success track.

However, the majority of these college and just out of college young people have ranged from: I’m brilliant so don’t really need to pay full attention or apply myself completely to My poo doesn’t stink (my mom told me so!) so anything I bother to do should be good enough. Now I was pretty sure that my perception of these youths was tainted by my general antipathy and curmudgeonliness. But it turns out I’m not alone in my opinion.

I got an email today about a new book by Dr. Terry Noble, who makes five suggestions for parents who want to encourage personal responsibility in their children:

1. Cut Their Allowance to Zero
Taking away your child’s allowance lets them know that you are not a personal ATM. They must earn their pocket money themselves.

2. Whatever Happened to Chores?
Instead of lining your children’s pockets for contributing nothing to the household, why not pay them for cutting the lawn, taking out the garbage or sweeping the porch?

3. Give Them Responsibility at a Young Age
Children are chomping at the bit for some responsibility by the ages of 8 and 9. Why not teach them responsibility with jobs that they can handle such as putting away the dishes and clearing the table after a meal?

4. Get Them Moving
What are they learning sitting on the sofa?! Getting kids away from the television and video games will help them not only with their physical health, but will also force them to interact with their peers…a skill that seems to be on the decline in our “virtual” world.

5. Be a Positive Role Model
Children lack suitable role models, mostly due to everyone being so darn busy. Lead your child by example–taking the time to listen to their daily lives will translate into them caring about others.

NowI’m not endorsing Noble. He appears to be self-published, and is not a child psychologist or anything like that. But he also appears to be self-made and unafraid to express some thoughts I’ve had for a long time: You should build your child’s self esteem, yet not unequivocally. When your kids work hard and or do well, hurrah! But every single move they make isn’t, in fact, the best–much less the end-all, be-all. A touch of humility, even (shudder) insecurity, may actually leave a bit of room in your child’s ego for actual learning. And life has got a lot to teach, sometimes the hard way.

Bunny Undies

My name is Amanda and I am a reality show addict.  While I don’t think I am ready to give it up, I must admit I may be in need of a twelve step program.  Last night I watched “The Girls Next Door.”  For those of you who have a life and may not know what this is, it is a show centered around the lives of three Playboy Playmates who live with and date Hugh Heffner.  Interesting premise, I know.  You will be shocked to hear this, but for a bunch of girls dating an octogenarian, they are really quite shallow.  This makes for good watchin’.  My favorite Bunny is a 20 year old bleach blond with the IQ of a turnip.  While she may be a stunning beauty, her moronic remarks keep me tuning in week after week.  In my favorite episode, she tells Roberto Cavalli, couture designer and native Italian, that The Olive Garden has the best authentic Italian food ever.  But I digress, last night’s episode featured Dumb Bunny finding a stray pair of panties in her laundry.  (A common hazard at the Playboy mansion I’m sure)  Anyway, as she discovers the foreign drawers amongst her skivvies, she gasps in horror.  Not because someone elses bits have been in them, but because she is appalled that the maid could think they might be hers.  She didn’t want anyone to think that she would wear what she referred to as “granny panties.”  My dear readers, I don’t know what sort of undergarments your grandmothers wear, but I would doubt that they were in any way similar.  A walk past my grandma’s clothes line would reveal large, nylon bloomers that, when stretched could cover more area than the Louisiana Purchase.  The undergarment in question was a tiny little bikini brief that I would consider to be “Saturday night” drawers or even perhaps, if they were really clean, going to the doctor drawers.  The kind of unders you wouldn’t be embarrassed if someone saw.  Certainly not worthy of throwing a disgusted fit over.  Why, my husband would be thrilled if those were my “grannies,” of course, he’s seen what lurks at the depths of my dresser drawers.  And let me tell you, it’s not that far off from the old nylon bloomers that disgusted me so long ago.  Aging really sucks.