Baby-Raising Products You Absolutely Don't Need

Why are they making raising a baby so hard?! Mothers have been raising babies since Genesis with not much more than a breast and a cloth to wrap around the babies' butts. Zoom up to my baby-raising years and I did have the luxury of a stroller, a carseat, and a handful of bottles. It's really not as hard as people make it seem.
Wait - let me take that back - it is hard. It's a lot of work to raise a baby (right.) A lot of sleepless nights, frustrated tears, juggling everything. But somehow, day after day, you find your own crazy routine and systems and you make it into the toddler years. Ta-da! And then you start over in a new crazy routine and system. And they are "hard" because there's a lot of pressure (from everywhere) to get this baby-raising thing right because we're talking about a person here. Its not like making the perfect soufflé. Its a BABY!
So yes, those are 2-3 hectic, stressful years. But adding more products doesn't really reduce all the craziness because then there will be all these gadgets to monitor. And isn't it one of the most frustrating things when a machine that is supposed to make things easier doesn't do what its supposed to do and makes your life even harder (urgh!!!!)
What's got me thinking of baby stuff now, when my youngest is on the brink of middle school? I saw this article "12 Parenting Products That Seem to Good to Be True." I read it out of curiosity - what's out there now that could've made raising my four babies so much easier? Let me be jealous. As it turned out, there is NOthing on this parenting products list that I would get. Not one. Why not?

• Cost - $410 for a Keurig to make a bottle of formula? Please! Here's my baby tip - I never gave my baby's warm formula, always room temperature. Why? Because then I could make formula anytime, anywhere, quickly, without worrying about whether it was the perfect hot-ness.
• Ridiculousness - baby sleep monitor built into the one-sie? I can't sleep with an electric blanket, but they suggest you put your infant into an electronic bodysuit to monitor her sleep? Only $199 by the way. Baby tip - walk into the baby's room and check on them. If you are that nervous, get one of those regular old sit-on-the-dresser monitors. You don't have to have baby wired up.
• More-trouble-than-its-worth - full sleeve bib? Trust me, its easier to strip your child shirtless before a spaghetti dinner than try to get her out of a tomato sauce splashed full sleeve bib without getting sauce all over the place.

It's all too much. Yes, juggling baby and a bottle and a diaper and perhaps even another child - it can be hard. But, all these fancy, expensive gadgets aren't going to make it that much easier. You don't need a machine to give you baby's continuous temperature. Touch him. You don't need a remote controlled baby swing, that you turn off and on with your phone. Hold her. You don't need an alarm clock so that you can talk to your child from your room. Be with her. Baby's need love and attention. Give it.

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Getting The Perfect 1st Day of School Picture

If you’ve got kids, you’ve got to post the perfect first day of school picture on Facebook / Twitter/ Instagram/ Periscope.  You’re little sweety waving & smiling as they board the bus. Or blowing you a kiss thru the car window. Hanging up their backpack in the perfectly neat row of cubbies in their new classroom. And then a mom and kid pic – you smiling with your trying to look like you woke up like that make-up on, hair combed and a clean blouse and cute still-summer shorts.

As if the first day of school isn’t stressful enough!

Because this is probably the first day in almost two months that you’ve had to wake up your whole family before 8 am.  And if you are lucky enough to have high schoolers, you’ve had to get up at the break of dawn. Then you had to pack lunches, and realized that since you went to the grocery store last week, the kids ate all the snack bags of chips over the weekend and handed out the juice boxes to their friends at the pool.  And where are all those dang forms, especially the one that proves your kid got his measles shot this summer so they will let him in the school door?

You spent a mortgage payment on back-to-school clothes, but the little one refuses to wear the new outfit you picked out – the identical pink dress or red and blue striped shirt that they wear every year so that it looks so cute in the scrapbook on the “how they are growing” page. Instead, they want to wear their favorite summer movie t-shirts, so your daughter is wearing a Minion t-shirt and overalls with fake black glasses and your son is wearing a Straight Outta Compton t-shirt and jeans and won’t smile.

And they changed what time everyone goes to school this year, pushing it back 15 minutes – just enough to screw up your schedule, but not really enough time to get any sleep that makes a difference – and changed the bus routes, so you actually have to check the bus route schedule this year for the bus your kids have been riding for 6 years to figure out what time its coming.  But what mom worth her coffee puts her kids on the bus on the first day of school, so you’ve got to drive them to the door to prove to everyone that you aren't one of those free-range willy-nilly parents.

But before you load up the kids in the car, you’ve got to fix your hair and swipe on some lipstick and put on a real clothes. You cannot do the in-pajamas drop-off today because you know that other mom in your kid’s class is going to be there in an outfit that matches her kid’s, with a full face of make-up, unchipped manicure and hair fresh from the salon.  She’ll be there with that cute-sy sign she made stealing an idea from Pinterest, a chalkboard with cute-sy lettering announcing the first day of school and the new grade. (She also wrote a funny haiku for her kid’s lunchbox, you’ll hear about that from your little on after school.)

There's just enough time to pour coffee in your car mug, search for the top, get the kids to stand on the front steps and not poke each other.  Try to get a couple good shots of them smiling without making those goofy faces they usually do when you pull out a camera, but they never do when they are taking selfies.  Hurry to school and try to get towards the front of that nightmare of a drop-off circle. And before the teacher on drop-off duty blows her whistle at you, you snap a couple more pictures of the kids in front of the school before they see their friends and you get one last picture of the back of their heads as they run into the school.  Waving from the curb is the PTA President and if you make eye contact for too long, she’s going to ask you to chair the fall festival bake sale or to join the healthy food committee, so you wave, jump back in the car, and knock over your coffee onto your nice clean outfit.

Now to get home, flip through the morning pics, and find that one good picture of your lovely darlings and try to think of something new and catchy to say, but its been too hectic a morning for all that so you’ll just go with “first day of school – when did they get so big – tears” like everyone else.

Whew. Relax. Finish your coffee and clean up breakfast. In six hours, it’ll be time for the “home from the first day of school” picture.

Happy Back-to-School Day!

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How to Build the Best Fort Ever with Your Kids

Back in our youth, my brother and I were pretty good fort-builders.  With a stolen borrowed sheet, some clothespins and yarn, we could finagle a cover over the front hedges or a lean-to in between a couple of trees.  Give us a couple fried bologna sandwiches and plastic cups of Kool-Aid and our mother wouldn’t see us until the streetlights came on.

My kids have the luxury of a play structure in the backyard, a requirement of every suburban home these days.  They’ve taken some leftover house paint to decorate it and hauled some make-shift furniture into it.  On occasion, however, they will construct a second outdoor home with a blanket and some plastic poles left over from something, or a separate indoor room with the couch pillows and a sheet.  I don’t participate at all in any of the construction.

So, my mouth dropped in awe when I saw this article about these amazing forts that moms could build with – no, for! – their kids.  These things had lights, poles, semi-permanent structures, contraptions hanging from the ceiling of the living room. And if you didn’t want to actually sew and cut, you could order them all ready made.

Have we been doing this fort-building wrong all along, just making it up from whatever was around the house?  Nah. I shook my head at this article and the guilt-laden message it sends.  Moms: unless you are taking charge of building these play structures for your kids, you’re failing as a mom.

I think the real message should be: Moms, step out of the way and let your kids develop their own creativity.

That cardboard “house”? Great. Give the kids the box, some markers, and a pair of scissors and let them figure it out.  It will be just as fun without moms perfectly straight cuts and lined brickwork.

The tent in the bedroom? Wonderful idea for a hideaway. Tell the kids where the sheets are, give them some binder clips and send them off to build their own space.  They will be fine without mom sewing hemmed covers for the sides.

There are a lot of articles out there on how to play with and entertain our kids.  They would have you believe that if you are not hop-scotching and crawling through the playground tubes and providing perfectly pitched pots for the kid to bang on, you are not doing your job.  And we moms, myself included, internalize that message. If you are not entertaining your kids, you are abandoning them. Show your kids you love them by being with them all the time, doing everything with them.

What we’re doing is crippling their creativity.  Every time we say “here, look what I did for you” or “here, this is the thing you should play with and how you should play with it,” we’re not letting our kids develop their ideas and problem-solving skills.  The other day, I took my daughter to the playground. She climbed up on this spinning structure thing and hung upside down and asked me to spin it around. Umm, that’s not the way I would’ve played on it, mainly because my body is not as nimble and partly because my adult mind had an idea of the prescribed way – the safest way - to play on the thing.  But my ideas shouldn’t have gotten in the way of what my daughter thought would be fun.  When we parents tell our kids how to play, we’re not letting them grow as their own people with their own memories.  They can’t develop their own sense of pride and “look what I did” when we do everything for them.

Instead, let’s give our kids the tools to create their childhood.  Give them a blanket, some string, and a sandwich; step back and let them imagine.

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How many times do I have to repeat myself?

1440.

That’s at least the number of times I have said (yelled, called, screamed, hollered) “wake up” this school year. Not even counting weekends.

It’s the minimum number of times I have answered the question “huh?” with “get down here, eat breakfast – don’t forget your milk, and get out of here for school.”

It is the approximate combined total number of times that I have asked for lunchboxes that were under the bed, on the couch, by the front door, in the car – everywhere but in the kitchen and reminded folks to leave their lunchbox in the kitchen when they get home.

It is the least possible summation of times that I have said “get your stuff ready for tomorrow” and “didn’t you get your stuff ready last night?”

It is pretty close to the number of times I have signed “I gotta turn this in today or I won’t get to…” forms at 7 am, pulled out wrinkled dollars from the bottom of my purse for “I forgot to tell you I don’t have any lunch money” lunches, and scribbled checks for “oh, yeah this is due today” permission slips and registrations.

It is the number of times someone has said “have you seen my…” or “I can’t find my…” at 6, 7, and 8 am.

It is way below the number of times I have said “put up your phones” and “go to bed” repeatedly within a two-hour time span.

It is June. Four kids, 180 days of school (well, almost, but who’s counting). And if you’ve done the math and still don’t get to this number – hit “x 2” on our calculator because it’s not sufficient to say things once to each child.  I feel like a broken record. Except with a broken record, it’s the exact same thing every time. With a repetitive, worn-out mom, there is variability in volume, the gritting of teeth, the caffeination level and the litany of “how many times do I have to say…?”

Apparently that number is somewhere around 1440.

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Currently...Shopping, Stitching, Pouring and Other Stuff

Hat shopping. I love hats. You can check out my Hats Hats Hats Pinterest page and see that I believe in the bigger and brighter, the better. Through the winter, I probably wear a hat almost every day – nice, bright felt and wool hats, ostensibly because it’s cold, but we know better.  Now – we’ve reached spring hat season, which, of course, kicks off with Easter Sunday.  Then, for me, it’s my sorority’s fashion show luncheon that funds our scholarship fund. It’s ladies who lunch – wearing hats and so much fun.  And then – to the races!  I’m returning to the Virginia Gold Cup this year with my girlfriends, so hat shopping is in a frenzy because now we’re really talking about a Hat (with a capital H, yes.)

Sighing over celebrities who try to act like they are regular folk. Did you hear, Gwyneth Paltrow tried to promote the SNAP program by committing to eating on $29 a week? Yes, read that sentence again. Millionaire actress was going to try to feed herself on food-stamp program budget.  Really? That’s probably what she spends on coffee and a doughnut (because, I’m sure she eats chocolate dipped doughnuts with her coffee, while doing her oh-so-hard job.) She quit by day four.  Message: this is hard, let me stop pretending I’m poor and find an easier cause to uphold.

Picking out my next crochet or knit project. Right now, I’m working on baby blankets for my boom of pregnant friends. I need something for myself, though.  What I’d really like is one of those long long sweaters (dusters, I think they’re called) or maybe a bright summer shawl.  I’m trying not to buy any more yarn and dig through my stash (go ahead and laugh fellow yarn-lovers), but we’ll see. I need something by the time I leave for my sorority convention, because you know I crochet during any long meeting that I can get away with it.

Still researching drivers’ ed. Actually, I haven’t really started other than asking other parents which drivers’ ed their kid is going to because I’m a bit in denial that my kid is old enough to start driving. I took her out and let her drive around the school parking lot the other day. I can’t get her into drivers’ ed soon enough.

Enjoying pineapple vodka and rum.  A couple weeks back we had a luau-themed shindig and had a bunch of pineapples. We could not eat them all and I had to think of something to do with them. So what do you do when life gives you a bunch of pineapples? Slice them, put them in bottles and pour vodka and rum (in separate bottles) over them.  Close, let sit for at least a day, then enjoy in your favorite cocktails.  Keep away from the children.

Enjoying 100,000! Thank you for reading - our little blog has hit over 100,000 views!

Have a good week folks! Keep Piddlin’!

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What Mother Came Up With Post-Sports Game Snacks?

Team snacks. Ugh. The thorn in the side of every kid sports team parent, or at least this one.  I was so relieved to somehow - perhaps fate, sports-gods, luck - slip by mostly unscathed from this modern-family gauntlet of kid activity requirements.  Then, last week after Nat’s basketball game she came over with juicebox and a bag of cookies in hand.  “Where did you get that?” I asked as if she was carrying a live virus.  Suzy’s mom brought snacks for everybody. Ugh! Are we starting a snack list, are we going to have to switch teams?

Who came up with this?  Why, why do kids need a snack after an hour sports activity? And why do we have to stay together to eat it, since the game is over, can’t we all just go home (or more likely, to the next kid sport activity)? And why, why do we have to share in this responsibility of feeding the kids, why can’t every mom just bring their own kid a snack?  Now, I have to be conscious of your gluten-free, no sugar, no salt, no peanut, no soy-based, no red food coloring, organic only, locally raised food requirements.  I can barely shove four water bottles, oranges and granola bars in a bag for my own kids and now you want me to consider all these other kids, too? Who, I want to know, came up with this?

No Place I'd Rather Be

With my morning coffee at hand, I yelled "hurry up, come eat! We need to get ready to go!" to my son yesterday morning. Another swim meet.  The day before, we had been at the pool about 7 or 8 hours.  We were heading back for a weary day two.

While waiting I turned on Facebook, that thing we all do with a few unfilled moments. We have to check in and see what our friends had for dinner, what exciting thing they did the night before, what they've done with their hair today as shown in their latest selfie. There was a post from a high school friend. The day before, his 5 year old son had suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. Stopped breathing.  I looked for signs of a terrible hacking scheme. I told my husband, also his friend, hoping he would say, "no, it's not true - there was a virus that plays cruel jokes on Facebook pages." But instead he looked at me as if I was the one making a cruel joke.  He has helped my daughter with school projects, and I told her, too, and she looked at me in confusion because his son was a little kid and how does a little kid die?  I checked his page and it was filling with condolences and, then, a memorial fund announcement, because who sets aside money to bury their child?  This was not a joke. It was a terrible, painful true thing.

How do these things happen? Why do these things happen to the littlest souls?

I packed my sons swim bag, grabbed his snacks and a cup of coffee. I sat at the pool on a hard metal bench for almost ten hours and watched him swim for a total of a little less than 6 minutes.  I didn't complain. I was patient. I smiled to see him moving through the water. There was no place I'd rather have been.

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Getting Back into the School Routine (for Moms)

It's going to take a couple days to get back into the school routine.  Waking up, getting out the door - with lunch and homework. Doing homework.

Yesterday was the first day of school and we did well getting going in the morning. But the first day usually is a good one - the excitement of the new year, the new outfit, seeing friends again. Even getting up early is kinda easy for one day.  But, getting through that day and having to do it all over again the next day? How exhausting.  Even for the kids.

Back-to-school is a mom adjustment, too. At least it is for me. After months of only having to get two kids to the pool in the morning and one kid to basketball in the afternoon, each for a couple hours, and then a relatively open (lazy) schedule after that, the school year routine takes getting used to again.  Now, I have to return to - or reinvent - a productive day schedule.  While the kids are gone and the house is relatively empty (just me and the dog, sometimes my work-at-home husband), I like to get some writing done in the quiet.  But I also need to do my housekeeping, get some groceries, follow up on my sorority and PTA tasks, and - oh, yeah - that dinner before 7:30 p.m. thing. And back to an exercise routine (read about our vacation ice cream tour on to understand why.)

I estimate it will take me this week to get myself settled.  Catch up on laundry. Restock the pantry and fridge with lunch stuff.  Dust off the crock-pot. Clean the house without people in it.  Then next week, I'll be ready to get back into a productive routine.

How do you readjust to the school year?

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Mom's Going Away To-Do List

Before going away from home for a few days, I've got a pretty lengthy checklist. Before my last trip, I -

• Baked a blueberry coffee cake for breakfast (and added eggs to the grocery list)  
• Did about 5 loads of laundry, mostly towels, mostly picked up off the floor or pulled from swim bags
• Washed all the cups we own and half the dishes, piled up from the day before
• Washed and braided my daughter's hair and crossed my fingers that it would look like something when I got back  
• Started packing for my trip
• Fixed lunch for the kids 
• Gave the dog her flea & tick medicine
• Checked swim meet entries for the meet I'd miss while gone
• Printed the calendar of activities the kids had while I would be gone  
• Did another load of laundry when I realized no one had enough underwear to last until I came back
• Walked the dog
• Packed yarn & needles for my current knitting project and convention stuff I needed for my trip  
• Folded a load of laundry, but didn't put it away (that's a lot to ask for) 
• Finished packing, surely forgotting something  
• Got in the car and left

 

My husband also had a business trip at about the same time. Before his trip, he -

• Packed his clothes and work bag  
• Got in his car and left. 

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My Child's First Resignation Letter

Again, my children signed up for a bunch of activities, stuff that they really really wanted to do and promised to do without whining or dragging their feet when time to go to practice/rehearsal.  And again, mid-way through after realizing that practice is every week and not always so fun, they are whining and dragging their feet. But for the most part, they get there. You know, because I paid for it and they have to commit to a thing and sometimes activities are boring, life can't be a merry-go-round of excitement all the time, etc., etc.

Which leaves me to wonder - what am I doing to myself? Why not just let them quit and then I can stay home, save some gas, and finish reading this book I've been carrying around with me forever?  Is teaching them the concept of commitment really worth my sanity?  Well, the last time my daughter gave me the list of excuses - so much homework, a stomach ache, looks like rain - I decided that there's a lesson to be learned in quitting, too.

I let me daughter quit one of her after-school activities with two conditions.

1. She owed me half of the fees that I had paid. She had birthday money, snow shoveling money, allowance and could pay me back in installments.  No point in me taking a financial loss when she changed her mind. 
2. She had to write a letter of resignation. Yes, like the kind when you leave a job.  I wanted her to realize that you can't just walk out on an activity and leave a group who is depending on you to show up. Whether a choir, a sports team, the school play, or game of jump rope - folks are counting on you to be there and take your role and if you're going to quit on them, you at least let them know you're leaving and offer an explanation.

The letter is done, we emailed it to the appropriate people and they have acknowledged that they received it.  We are free from racing across town one evening of the week, our calendar has a few more blank spaces on it, and I've read a few more pages in my book. As for my financial recovery?  Still waiting.

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Our #1 Responsibility: Protect our Children

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I’m actually scared to turn on the news or open my Washington Post.

I’m scared that there is going to be a report that the “body” of young Relisha Rudd has been found. Not the “person” or the “child,” but the “body.”

Perhaps if you don’t live in the DC-Metro area, you haven’t heard of this case, I’m not sure how wide-spread it is.  But in late February, the mother let her 8-year old daughter leave the homeless shelter with a janitor that had been giving her child gifts.  She was finally reported missing almost a month later, after the janitor’s wife had been found shot dead in an area hotel.

* Ding * Ding * Ding *

When a grown-man who is not related to you (or even related to you) nor is even really your own friend offers your child, your daughter, gifts – that’s a big red flag and warning bells signaling “danger!”  A little too much, a little too scary-stranger? Maybe. But I don’t think so.  We’ve heard of the mother-bear instinct, we’ve seen it with dogs and their puppies. You get to close and they will bite off your hand. Because that is supposed to be a mother’s natural instinct – protect your child.  Relisha’s mother didn’t do that.  She let this man continue to give her child things and then one day, she handed her baby over to this man to take away with him.  And when he didn’t bring her back the next day or the day after that or the day after that, she didn’t tell anybody.

So, in my CSI/SVU watching mind, that tells me she knew that she was wrong in giving this man her daughter or she didn’t expect him to bring her back because of some deal they struck. My maternal brain cells are trying to block thinking about what a mother would, could, has traded for her child. How do you take the flesh and blood from your own body and hand it over to someone else? What could be worth that trade?

So, yes, without judge nor jury, I am single-mindedly determining the mom GUILTY.  There’s probably some technical, legal terms, but bottom line she is GUILTY of not protecting her child.

How and when did the police get involved?  When the girl didn’t show up to school for an accumulated 30 days, social welfare was notified and some days later the police were called in.  And this is where more finger pointing occurs.  The mom lied to everybody about where her daughter was and why and with whom, but we’ve already determined she’s guilty. Who else dropped the ball?  Hindsight is 20/20 as they say, but reading over the trail of events over this girl’s lifetime in a recent Post article, it seems that her life was basically a game of Hot Potato. It was thrown around, dropped, and kicked to the next person her entire life.

I don’t live in DC and I don’t vote in DC. But if I did, I’d want to know what a new Mayor will do to better protect the children of that city.  Maybe when kids are found abused and in unhealthy living conditions, the city can do more than write a report. Maybe schools can check up on a kid before they’ve missed a month of school. Maybe the folks at the homeless shelter could provide better security for their residents or screen their employees better.  Maybe some more folks could act like they care about a little, defenseless brown girl.

Because our primary responsibility, duty, requirement as mothers, fathers, parents, members of a society - is to protect our children.  They're depending on us for their life.

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No Gwyneth, We Don't Think Your Mom-Life is so Hard

Okay, so let’s start out saying that being a (good) mother is not easy.  Being a bad mother just takes a lot of half-*ss effort in neglect and irresponsibility and bad judgment, but it’s a relatively lazy existence, so let’s separate out those moms who are going that path. Anyone in that category is probably not biding her time reading a mom-blog.

But to be a good mom, wow, that requires a lot more.  You’ve got to feed these little people healthy food that makes them grow, not just potato chips and sodas; wash them on a regular basis; make sure they’ve got clean clothes that fit and a place to sleep other than at their school desk and that they can read and speak and walk to the best of their abilities; you’ve got to teach people to say “please” and “thank you” and smile at people who speak to them, but not crazy strangers; you have to clap at music recitals even if they were off-key and cheer at their baseball games and be ready with a big hug when they lose the championship game. You’ve got to take a little 8 lb. bundle of reflex movements and grow them into a full-size, functional, contributing, happy, soulful person.   Whew. That’s a lot.

And we each will make our attempts to do that in different ways, as many different ways as there are mothers and children (some kind of billion factorial, if I remember correctly from stats class.)  And you know what, it’s going to be some kind of challenge for all of us because nowhere in the mom-handbook does it say that this motherhood thing is going to be easy.  In fact, I think they forgot to give me my mom-handbook when I left the hospital.

So…. With this recent chitter-chatter about Gwyneth Paltrow’s comments that moms with regular office jobs having it easier than her 1-movie/year career. Yeah, I think she’s wrong in saying that.  Yeah, I rolled my eyes, too and thought, “really, Gwyneth? You’re saying that out your mouth, out loud?”  Because we’re thinking, give me your salary, give my your nanny and chef and housekeeper and chauffeur and you can have my 9-to-5 and making school lunches before I leave for work and cooking dinner when I get home life. Today, I’m editing in between making biscuits and doing laundry and taking the kids to the movies because there’s no school, pushing aside the manuscript writing I’m already behind on.  And someone will read my plans and think “sheesh, glad I don’t have to do that” and someone else will say “ooh, I’ll trade you for my day!”  And I’ll say one or the other about another mom.

We focus on the one who’s got it easier, but we ignore the fact that someone’s got it harder.  What we need to be doing is focus on the blessing we have, as we are, and what lies before us.  And that goes for me, too, undoubtedly.  But you know how we think….

The coffee’s always sweeter on the other kitchen counter.

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