Mom to the Screaming Masses

Honesty about Motherhood from me

Feel free to add your own truisms.

You never know how many times you'll say things like Eat over your plate!  and Everyone wears underpants.

You will rejoice if you catch the puke in your hands and it doesn't hit the carpet.

You will never know how one kid can generate SO much dirty laundry.

You will hurt, like never before, if your child is hurt. 

Especially if another of your children hurts a sibling.  How can you hurt so much?

Things like GLASSES and BRACES and MILK and SOCKS become line items on your budget.

You'll never know how you will change.  The mother who was militant about natural birth and cloth diapers can, and will, morph into a person obsessed with a child's Campaign posters.  Change is good. Embrace the change.

You will just KNOW if your kid is faking an illness.  You will become an expert at discovering that the child has a test that same day.

You will never drink so much coffee ever.

You will never have enough money, enough time, or enough patience. You will feel as if you've lost your mind.  You'll wonder, after you've picked up something off the floor for the 1,00th time in a day, why you don't have abs of steel. 

You will leave the house without a change of clothing for your child under five exactly ONCE.  You'll learn your lesson VERY quickly.   You may learn to bring an extra shirt for yourself as well. 

You'll be calm in the ER, dealing with a broken bone, a food allergy exposure, or dehydration. You'll fall to pieces later.

You'll laugh when your child does, cry when your child does, feel excitement and delight on a schedule not your own.

You will be happy, sad, glorified, crabby, delighted, fulfilled, disappointed and thrilled - all in the same day.

The Infamous Pot

Happy Mother's Day to all of the Mothers out there - I hope it was a great day, a celebration of all you do for your family.  I hope you were treated like the royalty you are!

Three Minutes in the Grocery Store

That kind of sounds like that old party game Seven minutes in Heaven, where you'd go into a closet with a boy at a party and, oh never mind.  I never played it.  But my parents read here. 'Nuff said.

No, what I wanted to ask was this - there is a contest locally that, if you win, you are provided a shopping cart and three minutes to toss in whatever you'd like.  Where would you go - what sections of the store would you avoid, what would you stock up on?  Where would you concentrate?

I'm thinking meat, frozen veg and breakfast stuff, and cereal. You?

I fully expect to get lots of mail on this one

Because I am certain that, after reading this, you will all be MOST envious of my life. 

Emma has been talking all week about the Mother's Day gift that she has been creating in class.  All WEEK, I have heard about this - it will be so great, the best present you ever got, I can't wait to tell you, can I tell you now - it's been THE topic of conversation this week.

Today when I picked her up at school, she came running out to me, carrying a pink gift bag.  It was stapled closed - "so you won't peek, Mom" - and a handmade card was attached, on which was painstakingly lettered M O M.  Tucked between the card and the bag were dandelions, clover flowers, and buttercups - the teacher had let them go out and pick flowers.  She fairly vibrated with excitement, and gushed about the gift all the way to the car.  She chattered nonstop on the trip home.  "You will love it, Mommy!  I can't wait to give it to you - it's your favorite colors and you are going to be so happy!"

Let me interject in here that I had a moderate headache all day long. This is important to the story, but has nothing to do with her.

I listened to her until we got home.  She quickly unbuckled and grabbed her gift, calling to me, "I'm going to hide this in my room, so you can't find it!"  She stepped out of the van...

and she dropped the bag on the driveway.  I heard a crash and I knew whatever it was had shattered.She whipped around to me, mouth and eyes wide, and immediately began to wail.  She flew all the way through upset into hysteria in the space of .2 seconds.  "It was my - sob, sob - present to you!  Sob, sob - it was - hiccup - your favorite colors, and sob, hiccup, wail - it had my FINGERPRINT on it!" 

My Philosophy on Life, on a T-shirt

I wear my iPod at work - I don't ever wear both earpieces and I listen to it at low volume, but it helps to make jobs like prepping 400 cheese sandwiches or scrubbing out a tilt pan, up to my elbows in soapy water, just a bit more interesting. 

We had to have a piece of equipment repaired on Monday.  I was listening to my music, more probably than not dancing around a bit - I do love me some music and love to dance and canNOT be still. I was also chatting with a coworker, ribbing her a little for various things - we have FUN. I like the people I work with.

The repairman did his work and stood near the table I was working at.  He watched me for a minute, chuckled a bit, and said, "You? You are your own best entertainment, aren't you?"

AMEN to that.  I'm so getting it on a t-shirt.

Sixteen

At a bit after 9 on the evening of May 6, 1992, I became a mother for the first time.

It was a medically filled birth.  I had gone to the hospital WAY too early - I think I'd had four contractions - and so fell prey to a cavalcade of interventions, courtesy of a teaching hospital.  I think that the only person who didn't have their hands up in me was the cleaning guy.  Twelve hours after I first stepped foot in the hospital, during one of the worst storms of the year, with The Wonder Years playing in the background, a blue eyed, red haired boy was born, and with him was born a mother.

He was my first.  First trip to the Emergency room, first childhood surgery, first one to fall and put his teeth through his lip.  My first of everything - he was the one I experimented on and realized that cloth diapers weren't so hard, that breastfeeding was challenging but oh so worth it, and that a person could not, in fact, die of boredom on the 112th round of Battleship.  He was the one who helped me to see the way I would need to deal with teachers and coaches - my first struggle with sports and lessons and buying folders and crayons. 

I've made plenty of mistakes - I'll admit that.  He's by turns moody and sullen, but then chipper and lively.  I think he's turning out very well, in spite of his mother.  He's polite to grownups, goofy with his siblings, shakes hands when introduced and says Ma'am and Sir with teachers and relatives.  He's made second honors every grading period since he's been in high school.  He runs cross country and knows everything that there is to know about every single member, past, present or future, of the NFL.  He still tells me that he loves me when we separate, even in front of his friends - unless he's mad.  Then all bets are off.  His room is abominable and his handwriting deplorable. 

I took him to dinner by himself tonight.  He chose a hamburger and fry joint, and we sat and talked about school and his friends and sports and french fries and summer jobs - all by ourselves.  He didn't want a party and he didn't want gifts and didn't really want anything, but I wanted to let him know how important he was to me - and so we went to dinner. 

Happy Sixteenth birthday, Nikolas.  I love you and I'm very proud of you.

Crackberry

This weekend, while I was at soccer for eleventy billion hours, I noticed something interesting. 

When I called my mother using my cell phone, she couldn't hear me.  I said, "Hello?  Hello?" Nothing.  I repeated the call - nothing.  Thinking that she was having trouble, I gave up the idea of talking to her and put my phone away.  Later, the Hubster called - and I couldn't hear him.  I wondered if I'd activated the speaker phone - I've done that before - and when I pushed the button to use it, I was suddenly able to hear.  So I spent the weekend talking to everyone on the speaker phone.  Driving down the Interstate in my soft top Jeep at 65 miles an hour, using a speaker phone, means that I really didn't do much talking - a bit of yelling, but it really was awkward.

Yesterday, I went to my service provider.  My phone was out of contract, and so I was offered the option to purchase a new phone.  The pretty pink phone with the Cosmo Martini glass screensaver has been discontinued - but a similar model - a different Razr - was offered to me for $249 with a $50 mail in rebate. 

Ugh.  Too much money.

I spent today calling various people on my SPEAKERPHONE.

I caved.

GPS is of the Devil. It's true. Just ask my daughter.

We were given a free GPS for my van.  When I learned of the location for one of my children's Saturday soccer matches, I decided that I'd take the GPS unit.

Just in case.

I'd been there before and it was a LONG way out there.  I'm really good with direction and can find my way home most all of the time, but this was just to be on the safe side.  A back up, if you will.

Before leaving home, I checked with my daughter.  Cleats?  Check.  Shin guards? Check.  300 bottles of water, albuterol, arnica cream, extra socks, flip flops, snack, book to read on the way?  Check, check, check.  I loaded the double jogger into the van, grabbed the tons of kids that kept escaping, the backpack of snacks and the cooler of water bottles and hopped into the driver's seat.  I programmed the GPS and we drove away.  TIme estimate - 40 minutes.  Good job, Mom.  We'd arrive ten minutes ahead of when my daughter needed to be there. 

The End of an Era

For this spring, anyway.

Today is TOURNAMENT day. Rather, the first of two. My schedule for today looks like this. 

One child has games at 9:15 and 12:30, in a location an hour away.  The location is in the middle of nowhere, which requires me to bring enough food and drink and extra clothes and pain reliever and coffee to accommodate half of us, since we can't go anywhere between games. Note to self:  do not forget the Arnica.  And the nebulizer - one kids asthma is FIERCE this week.

One child has games in an opposite direction at 1 and 4.  I've secured a ride for this child to the first game.

One child has one lone game at 10.  I've begged my mother, who volunteered graciously to drive this child to the game. 

So I leave early with the two little ones, watch two games for one child in an undefeated team.  Leave that location, drive to catch the tail end of the second child's first game, go home to pick up another child, go back to watch the second game of the second child.  Go home and collapse.

Let's not even mention tomorrow, hmm'k?  Cuz that's day two of the tournaments.  Lather, rinse, repeat. And I know that all parents go through this, but I'd venture to say that not many do it by themselves with this many kids on this many completely different schedules.  Cut me some slack, because right now I feel like a whiner. 

Seriously, I love the fact that my kids play soccer.  LOVE soccer, love their coaches, love how it has developed them and stretched them.  I would never change that.  Ever.

I hate the way it screws with my life.  The fact that I'm always running from one place to another, one practice to another, I'm usually late either dropping off or picking up, and I'm behind on EVERYTHING  by the end of the season.  My younger boy misses scouts more often than not during soccer season, because while I can almost be in two places at once, there is no way I can do three. 

I'm committed to feeding them a healthy dinner, but half of the time they are eating it in the car, as we rush to practice and pray not to hit the lights.  Gah.

Songs We Love and Massacre

I have lots of music on my iPod.  I pink puffy heart the thing - I wear it to work, to the gym for weight training, when I run or walk, use it in the car - in short, it's a part of me.  It's lime green with pink earphones - no, I'm not especially classy, nor am I somber. 

The music on there is an eclectic mix.  I have everything from jazz to dance, classic to punk, Indian to Irish, children's to rock.  I usually add songs one at a time - for example, I added Born to Hand Jive when I was working with my daughter's class for the talent show, and realized that it had a really good rhythm for running.  (Try it before you laugh.)  The soundtrack from Chicago is there because I heard one song that I loved in Vegas and couldn't buy it without the entire album.  Same thing for the music from Once.  As well as P.S. I Love You.  I think I love you, Immigrant Song, Should I stay or should I go? 

You get the drift.  I added one song today and I wanted to share the reason for it with you.