Category Archives: WTF Moments

Being a mom is not how it looks on TV.

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It’s 11:40 AM and I’m tempted to keep L up in his room until T comes home tonight at 5:30. The last couple of days he’s been astonishingly rude and obnoxious, culminating in a playdate (with a little girl he loves) where he told her he wished she would die, that he never wants to play with her, etc. I drove 25 minutes to a park that we spent 10 minutes in before I had to drag him out. Poor S was so happy at the park. Poor me was looking forward to having actual conversation with another mom.

He told me I’m the meanest mother. He told me I’m the worst mother in the world. Truth is, maybe I am? I must be to have raised this child.

He’s been doing so well lately. I thought we turned a corner. Is he never going to get easier?

I don’t know how to just move on and face the rest of the day with him. I feel so angry and disappointed and frustrated. I don’t think I have it in me to play with him any time soon. How long is too long to punish a kid for being a colossal jerk? Me disliking him seems like the only natural consequence, but that can’t be what I’m supposed to do.

Somehow I’m meant to compartmentalize things. I’m meant to not take things personally. I’m meant to not feel emotional responses to his outbursts. Who can do any of that? Are we supposed to magically become automatons when we have children? I’m a person and when I’m not treated well, when I’m embarrassed, or ashamed, or frustrated I feel it. I don’t know how to turn that off.

Winning Parenting Moments

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We all have those moments. (Don’t we??) You know, the times when you’re glad you’re not overheard or observed because you absolutely suck as a parent. Being the mom who makes you feel better about your parenting, I can assure you that I have lots of these moments. Here are a couple from just the last week:

me: L, you choose how to behave. Think about what you’re about to do. Think about your choices. (<—- Good parenting)

L: No! YOU think about YOUR choices! (<—- Bad child)

me: Trust me, I am. Right now I’m thinking about my choice to have kids! (<— Bad parenting)

Yup, that’s right. In a moment of anger I told my 5-year-old that I’m rethinking things, and in retrospect, I think that maybe I won’t go off the pill after all. Instead, I choose to be thin, well-rested and rich. I wiggled my nose but nothing happened.

I’m not the only crappy parent in my house. Here’s one for the menfolk:

L: (bouncing a ball in the house after being told not to) See? I didn’t break anything, so HA! (<—- Obnoxious child)

T: If you bounce that ball in here again you will have to sleep outside for the rest of your life. (<—- Bad parenting)

There’s something about one’s own children that can bring a person to his/her worst self in a matter of seconds. I can be a totally happy, reasonable grown-up one minute and with the smallest of efforts, one of my kids can transform me into my 3-year-old self. I’ve stomped feet. I’ve cried. I’ve yelled. I’ve threatened ridiculous things that no one believes.

How do they do it? Why are they so freaking good at it?

As an adult I have a multitude of jobs and responsibilities, some I’m pretty good at, some passable, and some not so good. As kids, my children only have one job: to find our buttons and push them. It’s all they work on day and night and they are brilliant at it. Truly, they have extraordinary innate talent and unflappable dedication to practicing their craft and sharpening their knives skills. I can try to keep a poker face, even succeed once in a while, but eventually they will get to me. They win every.single.time. Each win strengthens their resolve and their little hearts get just a little blacker.

So, if you don’t think your sweet little children have evil in their hearts, if you haven’t threatened to turn them out of your home forever, and if you haven’t tried to use witchcraft to make it all disappear, then you are doing better than at least one other mother. Congratulations.

Listography: Top 5 Beauty Products

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Today’s Listography topic is near and dear to my heart. Without a certain arsenal of products, I’d be locked away in a bell tower surely. I’ve been enamored with beauty products since I was a little girl, so I’ve tried more than my fair share. Here are my favorites, my stand-bys, my can’t-live-withouts:

1. St. Ives Apricot Scrub: I’ve tried all sorts of expensive scrubs but I always come back to this ultra-cheap option. It used to make me look well rested and fresh-faced, but since having kids the best it can do it make me look a little better rested and maybe 5 minutes younger. But I’ll take all the help I can get! It also feels really good and is cheap enough to use generously all over if needed.

2. Kate Somerville Serum: This stuff is far too expensive. But if you have a pile of extra money and don’t know what to spend it on, run to your nearest Sephora and pick up this serum. It feels wonderful. It’s like a cool drink of water for your face.

3. Bare Minerals Make-up: I love this stuff. Perfect coverage for a make-up free look without all the make-up free ugliness.

4. Vaseline: I’d love to find a petroleum-free product I like as much as petroleum jelly. I use it every morning and every night. 1-2 applications per day keep chapped lips at bay, and I use it around my eyes every night. I also use it to protect my kids faces against cold weather if we’re playing outside in the winter. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been complimented on my lip gloss when all I had on was Vaseline!

5. L’Occitane Hand Cream: This stuff is a luxury for sure. My hands are so dry they often crack. It’s awful. And with them in and out of water all day, if I go a few days with no moisturizer they look like something out of a crypt.

I know this is a top 5 list, but I have to add this last one. Seriously, without it I would not even bother with any of the others. It is the single most important product/item/food in the universe:

6. Coffee: If you think coffee is not a beauty product, then you haven’t seen me before I have a cup.

Anniversary

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Nine years ago I couldn’t eat. I wanted to, but just couldn’t swallow. I guess I was nervous although it didn’t feel like nerves. It felt like stress and excitement and anticipation, with a huge dose of the surreal in there too. I showered and dressed in a button down shirt so that I could change later without messing up my hair.

I was surrounded by my two closest friends, my sister, and my mom and we set off for the ultimate girls’ afternoon. We ate lunch at a lovely bistro, where again my body just wouldn’t allow me to eat. I knew I had to, and I nibbled on tiny bites. I didn’t want to be that girl later on. Tiny bite of bread. Tiny sip of water.

Soon we were off to the salon for some serious professional primping. Everyone looked so beautiful. White freesia adorned my hair, smelling heavenly as I moved. Everyone felt a little stressed and soon there was an altercation between my sister and my mom over my sister’s hair. I put my foot down. It was my day and they would just have to deal. I liked my sister’s hair, pulled back in an exquisitely funky up-do; my mom worried it was too “strange” and wouldn’t stand the test of time. Who cares? (By the way, my sister and I were right.)

Then came the waiting. And more waiting. More nerves. More anticipation. More tiny bites of food. Finally, FINALLY, it was time. Everyone was seated, waiting for me. My dad asked me if I wanted to back out. Told me it’s not too late. Are you kidding me? I couldn’t wait!

We faced each other and made our promises. We laughed through most of it, both of us feeling nervous and tense with all eyes on us. A perfect, well-thought-out kind of kiss and it was done.

“We’re married!” I said too loudly in disbelief. Everyone laughed and the tension evaporated.

The rest of the night is a blur of dancing, hostess obligations, socializing, smiling, posing for pictures, and feeling like the happiest, luckiest girl in the world. We checked in with each other every few minutes.

“We’re married!”

“I know! Isn’t it crazy?”

Now it’s somehow nine years, three moves, and two whole new people later. It’s strange that this life we’ve built together started in that surreal way, on that day. It’s all the hundreds of little days between then and now that have made us the family we are. The days when my hair was not beautiful. The days when we were not smiling for the camera, not on display. The hundreds of spontaneous, not well-thought-out kisses to say hello, goodbye, I love you. And the hundreds of unspoken promises we have.

I’m still the luckiest girl.

Imaginative or Just Nuts?

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I’ve decided that imagination is nothing more than a euphemism for freaking crazy. As parents we want our kids to be as crazy as possible, and then suddenly, when they become adults, we want them to stop being crazy. Crazy to the core, right now my kids are obsessed with magic balls.

These balls are invisible, naturally, and magical. They are apparently great fun to play with, but get lost easily. As they are siblings and therefore able to fight about anything, my kids have come to blows and melted down into tears over these balls. How do you referee a fight where one kid takes and hides the other’s magic ball without destroying the crazy imagination we’re trying to foster? What about helping a child recover a lost magic ball?

The other night L had a complete breakdown. I’m talking a good half hour of sobbing despondence over a lost magic ball. Apparently S snatched it out of his hand and threw it aside. We all know that objects she throws go in any direction except the expected direction, so there was no telling where the magic ball may have landed and rolled to. I tried to tempt him with a new magic ball that I happened to have in my pocket. (I’m always prepared.) This would not do. He wanted his magic ball.

It was not until the next time we encountered the problem of lost magic balls that I came up with an infallible solution. Magic balls, in case you didn’t know, always return to their owner if said owner sings a song. The tune doesn’t matter, but the words need to roughly be “magic ball, magic ball, come back to me, come back to me…” 

I now have videos of both kids walking around the lawn singing individual variations of this song and happily reuniting with their errant magic balls. I told you they were crazy.

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Not What I Meant

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Recently I was out and about with L while he was in one of his devilish good moods. Ever the charmer, this means he’s hugging babies and chatting up their moms. One of these moms fell for the act hook, line, and sinker. She said to me: “He’s so good-looking! You’re going to be in big trouble!”

This is where I should have said something along the lines of, “Yeah, thanks, I know…” Instead, I took the opportunity to make myself look like a complete ass. I said, “I guess it’s better to have a son be super good-looking than a daughter.” (WTF?) To this she said, “But don’t you also have a daughter?”

I have just effectively said that I think my son is attractive, but I don’t have that “problem” with my daughter. What’s the most graceful way to back out of this? I’m not sure, but I can tell you that it’s not like this:

“I don’t mean that my daughter is ugly. She’s uh, you know, normal. Cute. He’s just… I mean, I love my daughter. I think she’s great. She’s not bad to look at. I like to look at her. I don’t sit around staring at her…”

I went on in this vein for some time until I noticed that the mom had dismissed me entirely and was back to being enamored with L.

I have no moral to this story. I’d just like to officially take this opportunity to say: that’s not what I meant! I really should not be allowed to speak to people.

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We’re Ba-ack!

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We’re home! We made it. A little worse for wear and without our luggage, but home nonetheless. How to write a post that encompasses the last 3 weeks? It’s impossible. So, here are some random things:

  • New Zealand is awesome. Getting there is not.
  • Right now in NZ the summer is waning into autumn, which means that we had perfectly perfect weather. The kind of weather where you can be outside all day in a t-shirt without being too hot or too cold. I can’t tell you the temperatures, because they’re in Celsius and therefore meaningless to me. It was warm enough for the beach, but not quite warm enough to swim, which did not stop the male members of my family from doing so.
  • We spent a lot of our time on the road visiting with old friends and family. New Zealand is breathtakingly beautiful and the kids couldn’t possibly give a smaller crap about the scenery. They can’t be bothered to look up from their Leapsters to take in the view, no matter that the view may be from a death-defying perch on a twisty narrow road overlooking the sea, sheep-dotted hills, and snow-capped mountains.
  • For us, driving in New Zealand is a 2-man job. 1 person actually operates the vehicle, and the other sits shotgun reminding the driver to stay on the left-hand side of the road.
  • On long haul flights children do not sleep. On short flights those same children fall into the soundest sleep possible and need to be roused upon landing. Of course, this sleep pattern is unexpected, no matter how many times it happens, so the children are not outfitted with the necessary pull-up on those short flights. Did S pee a full bladder’s worth on two separate occasions in her plane’s seat? Yes, yes she did.
  • Children will ask “are we there yet?” and “are we in the sky yet?” before the plane has taxied away from the terminal.
  • When asked what his favorite part of New Zealand was, L will say that it was playing on my iPad on the planes.
  • Thanks to my mother-in-law, T and I were able to spend more time alone together than we have in years.
  • Despite being told prior to our sea kayaking outing that we will either encounter a hundred dolphins or none, T and I saw one dolphin. Considering that dolphins are social creatures and generally are not found alone, we figured this dolphin is probably a real jackass.
  • Unlike their sleepy adult counterparts, when children experience jet lag, they want to be awake. They act like crazy amped-up maniacs and cry every 5-10 minutes from 11:30 PM to 3:30 AM. In related news, I experienced no small joy when I got to wake my sleeping cherubs up this morning. It was a lights on, blankets ripped off kind of experience for them.

So there you have it. I’m back online and happy to be here. I’m exhausted and in Xanax detox. I still don’t have my luggage.

 

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Letter to L on His 5th Birthday

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Dear L,

You’re 5! This past year you’ve shed any lingering babiness and turned into a bona-fide kid. You’re tall and muscular and look so grown up. It’s hard to remember how little you still are sometimes, but you remind me with your cuddles, endless curiosity, hilarious interpretations of the world, and even your emotional instability. (Feel free to outgrow that last one any time now…)

Watching you take in the world around you is one of my favorite things. You are insatiably curious and come up with your own explanations of how things work. These are usually strange, non-sequiturial masterpieces of illogic. Your mind works like an MC Escher drawing and it sometimes hurts my brain, but it’s always interesting.

The inner workings of L’s thought processes. Explains a lot.

If I have as much excitement and joy in my lifetime that you find every day in ordinary things, I would consider myself lucky. Your emotions are big. Huge. This means that you experience more joy and happiness than the rest of us. On the flip side, you also feel more angry, more sad, more frustrated. Every year you get better at coping with these overly large feelings. My job is to help you along the way. It breaks my heart when you’re struggling with these things, but you are getting so much better at handling them. I will try to remember that you are grappling with feelings that seem too big for you, and I will try to not get as frustrated.

You’ve completely exceeded my expectations on this trip to New Zealand. You’ve shown maturity, kindness, patience, and understanding that I didn’t know you possessed. I’m so proud of you. You’ve looked after your sister, suffered extraordinarily long flights, waits, & car rides, endured tiresome visits with strangers, and accepted strange foods, people and places all with good nature and ease. (Well, mostly anyway.) We expect a lot of you as the big brother, the oldest child. And you deliver.

I expect this next year to be one of huge growth for you. You’ll start school and pull away from me in new ways as you grow. I’ll try to let you go. Happy Birthday, L. You are more than I ever expected, more than I could have ever imagined. You are a tiny version of the wonderful, exceptional man you will become, and I could not be prouder to know you.

Love,

Mom

Hello From the Other Side

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Sorry I’ve been MIA. I don’t have the luxury of spending all day connected to some internet device. (I am having serious iPhone withdrawal. Can I get methadone for that?) Anyway, we have arrived safely in New Zealand. The 31 hour trip over here was actually not as bad as I expected. This is in large part because my expectations were rock-bottom low. But I do need to give credit where credit is due. It’s also because I took Xanax. Kidding. I mean, I did take Xanax and that definitely helped, but the kids were actually pretty good.

On our way!

My fear of L getting arrested for plastic explosives (really silly putty) did not materialize. Neither did my fear of L getting arrested for pretending to have various weapons on board. I guess I can say that all my fears of my preschooler getting arrested were unfounded and we got through many security checks and flights without international incident or any sort of restraints.

Sleeping on the planes was problematic. S did not nap at all during the nearly 7 hour flight across the US. This lead to her being particularly grumpy during our 5 hour layover. Thank God for airport moving sidewalks! Those provided some much-needed entertainment and exercise. On a related note, I’d like to take this time to officially apologize to all travelers in the international terminal of SFO between the hours of 2PM-7PM. I may have given them balloon swords, hats, and dogs to do as they pleased with. And I may have let them run wild. Just a bit.

Confession: the kids were not the only difficult people to deal with during this time. I may have snapped at T saying, “The only words I want to hear from you are ‘How can I help?’ or ‘I’m sorry!’” At this point I decided to take another Xanax.

By the time we boarded the second, (14 hour!) flight it was about 10PM EST. My kids were freaking wrecks. Movies and dinner provided some distraction for a while but then it was time to sleep. We changed them into PJs and I can promise you that my little L walking down the aisle in his Superman pajamas was cute enough to wipe just about any slate clean.

Sleep was hard to come by though. It was hot, uncomfortable and they were just beyond tired. Eventually we got S stretched out on the floor at our feet and L stretched out across the seats with his head in T’s lap and his feet in mine. T and I were super comfortable sitting upright in our seats. (Not.) It was now about 2AM EST. The kids slept in 5-10 minute bursts and needed constant back rubbing and soothing. This went on for 4-5 hours and then we just gave up on sleep altogether. This means that they were awake for waaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. My children normally get 10-12 hours of sleep plus a nap. This was not good.

Amazingly, we didn’t get arrested for grumpiness going through customs. However, we took so long walking from the international terminal to the domestic one in Auckland that we very nearly missed our flight despite our 2 hour cushion. This turned out to be a blessing because waiting would have been a disaster. After a mad sprint to the gate, we were given 3 seats together and 1 seat several rows back in an exit row. Needless to say, I grabbed that 1 ticket and ran for it. Was I sweating and smelly and squeezed between two large men? Yes. Was it better than sitting with my kids? Oh yeah!

When we finally arrived I expected the kids to crash. I wanted to crash anyway. But the kids were full of energy and it was only 8AM local time. Even with the 18 hour time difference, long trip, and no sleep, my kids were ready for a full day. So we took them to the beach.

The fresh air was good for all of us. The kids were ready for bed by noon and we forced them to stay up until about 5:30. We’re now on day 6 and we’re all adjusted to the time difference and have a sort of routine going.

How am I coping with it all? Let’s just say that I won’t have any left over Xanax.