Mama bank account deposit

Our first MOPS meeting was today and it rocked. It's been 6 months of hard work and two weeks of intense stress for several of us on the steering team, much like fall sorority rush for those of you who have been through it. It all came together today, and when the meeting was over I found myself standing there smiling. I met some great women at my table, I learned something new about my sister in law, I got lots of snuggle from my little niece, and I managed not to make the craft project a total debacle. I'm really looking forward to getting to know my discussion group leaders better as we work together as a team, I'm really looking forward to getting to know my tablemates better as we share a table for the next 10 weeks, and I'm really really really looking forward to my weekly deposit into my mama bank account. I felt filled up after the meeting, and ready face the craziness of the week.

The MOPS slogan is "Better moms make a better world" and after today I totally agree.

This is my coping strategy

We bank (banked?) with Washington Mutual.

Happy Birthday Emma!

Four years ago Emma rocked our world with her dramatic entrance 3 weeks early and she's kept us on our toes ever since! What a blessing to be mothering such a vivacious girl with a personality and imagination that never ceases to amaze me. I can't wait to see what the next year brings us because I've been seeing little glimpses these last few weeks. From asking all of her teachers to call her Tinkerbell (including labeling her art Tinkerbell instead of Emma) to reading site words and sounding out other words, to being the most helpful older sister any little brother could ask for, it's been so much fun to watch the 4 year old Emma start to appear.

For tonight, we've started a tradition both Hubs and I had in our family of the birthday kid picking dinner for the night. Emma's chosen grilled pizza and she'll be dining on the Celebrate plate I got last year for special occasions. I baked a cake last night and I need to cut it into individual stars and frost them. Hubs is getting her birthday bike from his mom's on his way home from work and I need to wrap up the Disney Princess placemat and Little Mermaid placemat I got at the dollar store. Emma's already gotten two phone calls and two cards in the mail and was over the moon excited about both of them. She got a pink crown with her name in gold glitter at preschool and we brought muffins for snack time.

It's been quite a delightful 4th birthday I'd say.

My Buddies

I'm trying to make an effort to hang with each kid individually more often. They are both so energetic, and dare I say demanding, when we go out that I'm doing crowd control and herding cats most of the time. I feel like I don't have many opportunities to hang with just one kid for any length of time and hear just their little voice, or follow a conversation without interrupting to say something to the other, or just see the world through just their little eyes.

Now that Emma is in school three days a week, Grant and I have all kinds of buddy time. He's a pretty funny guy. And obsessed with airplanes. He can hear them in the sky when they are just a faint buzz, and he'll track them in the sky until they are gone. He loves to carry our reusable grocery bags on his shoulder as we walk through the parking lot. He sings while he sits in the shopping cart. He's getting really good at digging sand and getting it into buckets. He can hold on tight and swing on the big kid swings, although he prefers the little kids swings because he can swing higher.

Carving out alone time with Emma is trickier. I've shortened her resting time and we spend the time until Grant wakes up either reading or playing games. She's reading now. I mean noticing sight words and sounding out other words. She's getting awesome at Memory too. We play with three stacks now (36 cards) instead of 2 stacks (24) and she holds her own. We went to her preschool visit day alone on Monday and it was so awesome to be able to sit with her while she painted and moved around the room, meeting new friends. It was wonderful to be able to catch her eye across the room and share a smile. After her visit, we went and got our hair cut together, and again, it was so nice to be able to have shared, calm time. She's sooooo much calmer when we're out and she has my undivided attention.

The buddy time with each kid has been really settling for my heart. It has strengthened the bonds between each of us, and I need to keep doing this to help maintain those bonds and keep my kid time bank account full.

Emma's Nursery Rhyme Day

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.

And when she was good,
She was very very good.
But when she was bad,
She was horrid.

That pretty much sums up our morning. She was either fire on wheels, attitude seeping from her pores, listening ears buried under her bed, ugly voice coming from her throat or she was total sweetness, offering to help Grant with his buckles in his booster chair, pushing him on the swing, quietly sitting at the park munching apples. No warning when the drama would appear, and no indication it was ending. She could turn it on and off in a second.

I know it's because she's back at school and having to adjust to getting ready and going in the morning after a fairly lazy summer. She's working hard at making new friends, learning a new classroom routing, figuring out her teachers. Hub's has been working hard lately so hasn't been home as much, fall activities are getting started again, alot is changing from our summer time routines.

I know all that but that doesn't make nursery rhyme days any easier.

Oh great

So I cleaned off the kitchen counter this weekend. I mean REALLY cleaned it off. Cleanest it's been in a long time. It was partially because of the continuing ant drama, and partially because we were having people from Hub's work over and he didn't want the "clutter" out. So off the counter went my notepads and stickie notes, my calendar, my corresponding colored pens for my calendar and various things (or "clutter). And by cleaning I mean I stuck some things in the laundry room, some things got "filed" in various drawers and my huge desk calendar is laying on top of my shoes in my closet.

Now the ants are finally, probably gone, and Hub's friends are gone, and I can't find a thing. My calendar hasn't made it back out onto the counter so I'm floundering and hoping I'm not missing something crucial. My RSVP list for Emma's party is buried in some drawer somewhere, and people are RSVPing. My orange pen doesn't work anymore, I'm scrawling things on random scraps of paper with Emma's pencils. It's stressing me out.

This is why I don't clean off counters regularly. I'm chaotically organized, and without the counter chaos I'm hopelessly disorganized.

Living in a salad bowl

I read earlier this morning that vinegar is a good ant deterrent. And I also read that vinegar is a good economical, all natural cleaner.

So I combined the two ideas, mopped (for the third time in 24 hours) all the ants on the dining room floor with vinegar and water, and then marched outside and sprayed all the ant trails around the dining room.

And now my house smells like Italian salad dressing.

I'm not sure how much longer I'll be here

The ants appear to be taking over the house, room by room. It may not be much longer before the take over the living room and carry the computer out with them.

It's still bothering me

So Monday night I created the opportunity to go grocery shopping by myself. Sweet, blissful, aloneness. Well as alone as one can be in a major grocery store. I rejoiced in pushing a regular cart, in lingering to make decisions, in not having to negotiate a flavor of pudding away from pistachio or lemon.

Anyhow, as I was pushing my cart to the car I was approached by a clean, regularly dressed woman who looked tired. She apologized for bothering me, explained she and her children, who were waiting in the car, were trying to get to a small town nearby (she told me the name of it) to a woman's shelter, and did I have anything that I could give her to help out.

I stood there, with my grocery cart full of food, next to my nice car, with my purse with a wallet with a few bucks in it, and told her no.

She thanked me for my time, and walked off into the parking lot. With a heavy heart, I loaded my car and drove home, praying that if she was for real and in need, that God would bless her with what she needed.

It's still bothering me.

This is why I don't mop

So I mopped the tile for the first time today in....well I had to clean cobwebs out of the bucket first, so it's been a while. Anyway, I mop away, I feel great about finally mopping instead of just sweeping.

Not even 30 minutes later, Emma spots ants all over the floor I had just mopped, Grant chucks his cracker bowl full of crackers onto the floor, and I'm feeling irritated because I just mopped. Why are ants crawling on my CLEAN floor, but weren't on my DIRTY floor?

Then at snack time, Grant spills yogurt all.over.the.floor. And I had to leave the room to take a few deep breaths. Normally, no big deal, I'd just wipe it up. But I had just mopped! I wanted the floor to be slightly clean for at least 12 hours.

See, this is why I hate mopping. Give me a broom any day.

This thing called Mom

I logged in to write a post about our ant takeover, and to share my unscientific results that lead me to conclude that ants are nocturnal. As fascinating as that topic would be to everyone, I just can't get a conversation I had earlier today out of my head.

First, some background. I'm currently saturated in Mommy things. Along with being a stay at home mom (or a work at home mom when I'm doing Arbonne things), I'm on the team that is getting the MOPS group started at our church, I volunteer almost weekly in the church nursery, and I coordinate the volunteer schedule for the nursery at church. Add to all of that the moms I meet at the park (today it was a woman I went to junior high and high school with) and my friends who are moms, and it's an understatement to say that I'm surrounded by mommy.

And as good of friends as I am with several of the moms, and as much as I talk with other moms about teething or sleeping or rough days or whatever, we hardly ever talk about our hardest mommy moments. It made me start to wonder if I was the only one who wanted to run screaming from the house some days, or go back to work just to not have to clean a poopy bum one more time or to stay in bed all day and pretend I wasn't a mom. It made me wonder if I was mom material. Especially stay at home mom material.

Then I started reading the book that goes along with the MOPS curriculum, The Mommy Diaries. The moms who write the "diary" entries are like me - they sometimes feel like they are drowning in the mommyness, they sometimes long to be alone, they sometimes are overcome with frustration, with anger, with sadness at the loss of their before mom life, they wouldn't trade their kids for anything in the world. They are honest about their shortcomings, about their growing pains, about the adjustment to being a mom. They were saying things that I hadn't heard people say to me before. I started to have faith that I wasn't the only one.

Today's conversation that has left such an impression on me was with a mom that has three girls, with a fourth on the way. She has creative ideas for her kids, she is nurturing, uses a calm voice all the time, her children are calm and complaint. Basically, she has it all together. I watched her kids at a local park this morning while she had a doctor's visit, and when she came back to pick the kids up we found ourselves chatting about the adjustment we went through when our first kids were born.

She said to me "I still worry that I haven't bonded well with her because I had such a hard time and I needed so much help. I sometimes feel like she bonded so much more with her dad as a newborn."

I was floored. Her honesty was so refreshing, and it was so awesome to hear a mom share such doubts. Such normal, human, motherly doubts.

Because really, as moms, we are so so so hard on ourselves and how we are mothering. We exhaust ourselves to ensure our children get the very best experiences, the very best this and the very best that. We lose our selves in the mix, we doubt ourselves, we beat ourselves up. All in the name of doing the best by our kids.

My conversation with her, combined with my reading in The Mommy Diaries has made me realize I am not alone in my feelings, my doubts, my guilt. I vowed to myself on the drive home from the park this morning that I'm going to start being more honest about this thing called mom. I'm going to reach out to my fellow mommys, lean on them and provide them with a place to lean. We're raising the next generation here people, and we're going to be better moms if we turn to each other for love, support, and a great big hug in times of stress and doubt.

Hug on mamas, hug on.

Not as mute as we thought

The speech therapist who did Grant's assessment called last night to go over his results. Good news is he's making progress and doesn't qualify for services yet. Bad news is he has some red flags so she wants me to call her back in 3 months if I still have concerns.

His receptive language was off the charts, but I already knew that. I mean the boy can follow 2 step directions with ease. And he totally blew her away with all of his signs and how well he uses them. She agreed the noises he was making were weird, and he's dropping the last letters of most words. Her biggest red flag was that he doesn't babble in strings (or really at all) while he's playing, and while he'll imitate silly noises, he doesn't really imitate words. And he's got the whole sensory thing where he licks everything and chews fuzz and won't put certain foods past his lips. If he was a pregnant girl I'd say he had PICA. I've been brushing his lips when I brush his teeth, and he's tolerating that more. He's responding to deep pressure on his shoulders too when his body starts to get out of control.

So we'll keep doing what we're doing and see where we are in 3 months. She's sending some developmental milestones so I have something to compare his abilities with in the next months.

For those of you who knew I was going to be secret squirrel about my former job, I ended up fessing up that I was an ECSE. It actually helped, because then we could "talk shop", and she took my sensory concerns more seriously.

She did tell me to get rid of his paci, but that's not going to happen any time soon. He only uses it to sleep, and I figure he doesn't need to be speaking while he's sleeping!

I hope I don't forget.....

-the little "woooooo" that comes from Grant when a live song comes on the radio
-Emma's sheer delight at making a "silly" face for the camera
-Grant's 'beow' for the word cat
-the way Emma studies and corrects to get just right the angle when taking a picture with my ancient cell phone camera
-Grant's down dog yoga pose when he thinks he's doing a somersault
-Emma's beam routine when she felt like Nastia, and her gymnastics teacher's reaction at her incorporating several beam elements into the routine
-Grant's "whew" when he's taken a long drink of water
-how Emma nibbles chocolate chip cookies to make them last as long as possible, savoring each little nibble

Good bye Strawberry Shortcake

Alas, despite my best and repeated attempts, Emma will not be having a Strawberry Shortcake birthday this year. Despite the fact that she loves Strawberry Shortcake, and despite the fact that I bought Strawberry Shortcake party favors from the Target $ spot months ago, Tinkerbell invitations will be going out in the mail.

I had to weigh the $5 I spent on party favors against an hysterical fit in the aisles of Target today, and the loss of $5 won out. Although I'm still thinking about handing out Strawberry Shortcake favors anyway. Mainly because I hate the whole concept of party favors. But that's a blog for a different day.

Newest love

Gillette Venus Embrace razor - best shave ever. Seriously, ever.

The Hallway

The hallway light was on the other night as I walked from the living room to my bedroom. The light is rarely on, so it offered a new perspective and made me realize that the hallway has played quite a role in our family's lives.

The first night Emma was home the hallway light was on most of the night. I fumbled hopelessly in the "dark" of her room trying to get her, nurse her, then get her back to sleep without slamming my numb stomach against her cradle. Hour after hour I walked down that hallway to feed her or put her back to sleep, the bright light making me squint, my sleepiness causing me to forget to turn the light back off. The glare of the light reminded Hubs and I that our life would never be as it was before Emma was born.

Both kids took their first steps down the well lit hallway. It provided a long soft place to walk from one parent to the other, or in Grant's case, from one parent to a sister. It was an exciting time, my heart bursting with pride that each child had tackled such a major accomplishment.

Nowadays, the hallway has several uses. It's perfect for working on somersaults, although Grant tends to crash into the walls more than he rolls down the hallway. It also provides a nice place for a rousing game of chase, and Emma often uses it to gain some speed before she completes her Olympic vault in our room. Recently, it has become the time out spot for Emma because she HATES to sit alone, and her room was too much fun for a time out.

Friday, Emma and I got married over and over and over in the hallway. She put on her "marrying dress", we held hands, and marched down the hallway as I sang the bridal march song. Then we got to the end, promised to love each other forever, kissed cheeks, and declared ourselves married. Grant clapped and said "Wooooo" to celebrate our ceremony.