Dear Dance Centre Mother,

Dear Dance Centre Mother,

When you make moronic, judgemental, comments it is very difficult to keep my mouth closed. I'm assuming you do not have an internal voice filter that says, "Listen, don't say that out loud, you don't know these people, this comment may hurt or offend them." You may not understand the struggles some people go through daily and quite honestly hourly.

I don't worry about what number I was in line at Jack N Jill PreK registration at 3:00 a.m., I worry that my daughter will not receive social skills training on her IEP.

I don't worry that her leggings will not match her top, she doesn't wear anything but cotton blends, due to sensory isues.

I don't worry that she will not be a top cheerleader, dancer, fill in the blank, I worry that she may never have a close friend.

I don't worry that the popular kids will not play with her at school, I worry that they will tease and torment her.

I don't worry about her birthday cakes and gifts and who will be invited, I worry about the after effects of the sugar and dairy in her gi system that will effect her sleep and attention for weeks.

While I have these worries, I have these joys that you will never experience. I cried tears of happiness when I saw her approach her friend in the driveway and hold his hand. Joys can be as small as consistent eye contact or an unrequested hug. Our successes can never be measured by your standards, nor does that bother me.


What bothers me is your lack of empathy. When you comment that disabled children should not be included in your child's classroom, the rage fills my lungs and heart. I pray that you and your family never have to deal with a disability because sometimes karma can be a bitch and so can I.
Love,
Me

I'm Back....

Today we returned from camping with my parents and the girls. It was a wonderful trip!! Imagine that... overnight in a camper with my parents and two toddlers and I used wonderful in the sentence.

I lived in the moment and enjoyed the girls instead of focusing on schedules, to do lists, and organizing that will never get done.

We played board games, toasted marshmellows, played on the playground, listened and danced to bands. The girls were even given lessons with a hula hoop.

Did I mention it also rained for this trip? We overflowed my parent' s toilet bowl into their camper, woke the entire campground at 6:45. We may never be invited again but we had a blast.

Unexpected Weaning?

Tonight may be the last time I nurse a child. Tears are streaming down my face as I write this. If I could take back all the times I complained of nursing my children, the midnight feedings and the sleepless nights, I would for one more night. One more night of her & I, uninterrupted. But life is not written like that and the antibiotics I must take are more important to help me heal than to have some Hallmark moment.

Why People Don't Believe I'm in My Late 30s

I get this a lot. I'm not trying to brag, but many people don't believe I'm 39. I have finally figured out why - I'm very immature. When people would tell me this, I would gloat for a few hours, I'm so young, I don't have many wrinkles, I don't tan, yadda, yadda, yadda. But lately I've realized people are stating this after I do ridiculous things.

Take yesterday for instance. In the beginning of summer, I bought a plastic tricycle for Kira at a yard sale. It looked like it had been throught the wringer but still had a few good years in it. I paid my $5 and kicked myself in the arse when the pedal fell off on the way to the car. How cheap do I look asking about their refund policy. Anyways, I brought it home, the neighbors kids broke the other pedal off and Kira was never fond of the thing so it was just an eye sour that she used to store her rock collection in.

Why in God's earth do I decide to ride the piece of shit yesterday? On top of that poor decision, I decide to hold Eliza while I try to pedal my 105lb (white lie) on this bicycle. The strained plastic gave way, shooting shrapnel in all directions, while I fall on my ass in my driveway. Luckily, I fell straight backwards, so I was able to hold Eliza up so she didn't get hurt. But she could of. Stunts like that not my great young looks make people think I'm not 39.

Off topic but if you haven't watched VH1's Brett Michael's Rock of Love, you must drop everything and watch this train wreck. I LOVE THIS SHOW. The various strippers, dumb bimbos, wacked physcopaths that are contestants on this show are the craziest bitches you have ever seen. The show reminds me of what we used to look like in the 80s with posters of Matt Dillon, Poison, and Motley Crue on the walls of my bedroom. Elimination night is the best, the tarts are all dressed up for an hooker 80s prom. But what is worse than their clothing, is Brett thinking he will find true love this way. He is proof drugs, sex and rock and roll rot your brain. Brett must ditch the eyeliner.

Crazy Does Run in My Family

Today was my sister's annual pig roast. It is a wonderful affair, we get to see family members that we don't get to see often. The kids are usually splashing in the pool, running in the yard, the keg is flowing, etc, etc. The pig roast USED to be a lot of fun. Fun before I had children. I would go, drink beer, talk with family, friends, eat. It was a great day.

Present day, with a 3 year and 6 month old in tow, minus the hubby = sucky pig roast day. I should have known better. You don't leave the house when both children desparately need a nap (Kira was asking to take a nap yesterday). I couldn't put the baby down anywhere because she would have been trampled by the kids playing tag. Kira had two number 2 accidents where she was frozen in her spot, crying. The baby cried whenever anyone held her besides myself. After 4 hours of this type of torture, I decide to leave and my oldest felt it was time to finally socialize since she had been glued to my hip since we arrived. I often wonder, do I do a bad job parenting, since it seems like only my children were acting up, but then I remembered I had the youngest children there and I was solo. Too bad.

Then on the way out, my FATHER and my aunt yell down to me, what is the baby's name? My father, who sees the baby a few times a week, saw her a few hours after birth. My father, 63 years old, seems to have all his facilities wants to know what her name is? Are you kidding me? He must have seen the look of my face - old man you are pushing to be put in a home. Because he said he was confused because Aunt Marilyn kept calling her Alicia?

See why I"m nuts.

Pottery Barn Unplugged

I'm getting rid of my oldest daughter's crib bumper set and I'm very sentimental over the fact. It's not the fact she is turning three and no longer looks and acts baby. It's not the fact I'll never carry another child inside of my body. And it's not the fact it was ridiculously expensive.

Almost four years ago, when I discovered I was pregnant, I poured over decorating magazines and catalogs on how to decorate the baby's nursery. I absolutely loved the Pottery Barn nurseries, soft pastel curtains hung over the expensive chenile baby bedding. Who wouldn't want that nursery to pamper their child, what perfect mother wouldn't buy the microfiber over stuffed rocker? I cut pages out of magazines, clipped them into a binder, hoping my child's nursery would look just the way it did in Pottery Barn. But in creating this "perfect nursery", I began to think I would be the same type of parent you saw in the magazines. The perfectly coifed mother, lounging on the zany flower area rug. The unharried mother, rocking that sleeping child in the microfiber rocker.

I'm even laughing while writing this piece. Like in high school biology, I realized I studied for the wrong test. Instead of pouring over these catalogs, I should have been reading Harvey Karp's The Happiest Baby on the Block or What to Expect in the First Six Weeks.

I knew motherhood would be difficult but I had no idea. My family turned out to be so far from Pottery Barn. What I realized was that Pottery Barn couldn't comfort a colicy baby like her mother. Pottery Barn did not sell stain resistant bedding, carpeting, clothing that repelled projectile vomit from a newborn. I also realized, the mothers in the catalogs didn't look like me. They didn't wear the same outfit for three days, have permantly stained shoulders from spit up or dark circles under their eyes. Dammit, they were paid models, bitches.

It took me a long time to resign the fact, my home will never be catalog worthy and with that realization came the fact that neither would myself. I wanted to have what I thought was all, happy, healthy, cute baby, slender, hip mom with the really clean hip house. Instead I have the great, happy, healthy children, stressed, tired mom with a very dirty, chaotic home. And I'm ok with that, I wouldn't want it any other way.

The other day after dinner, I watched my husband take my youngest outside in the stoller, and check out his gardens with a Sam Adams in the cup holder and realized you would never see that in Pottery Barn catalog. I didn't want to get rid of the bedding set since it would mean I was abandoning my ideal notion of parenthood. Goodbye bedding, it was never meant to be.

Little Experts

A favorite author of mine, Anna Quindlen, wrote the following piece for Newsweek a few months ago and I saw it again today. Timing is everything because today I was obsessed with getting the baby to nap and trying to figure out why she wouldn't nap. I was neurotically pouring over her journal to determine what her sleep patterns were for the week like they were something to be graphed with some predictability.

In addition, I was pissed that she wanted to be held for the majority of the day. Didn't she know I had "shit" to do? Wasn't she aware my to do list was growing a mile each second I held her? I also remember when Kira was a baby, being upset that I would have to rock her to sleep. Everyone told me not to spoil her, she would need to be rocked to sleep forever. Granted it took a long time, but she is not yet 3 and doesn't want to be rocked to sleep. I sometime have to ask her for extra hugs at bedtime. I have to plaster my fridge with this piece, it is so important for me to remember.

All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take
great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I
am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have
learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who
sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need
razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed
more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets
and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I
bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried
deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the
past.
Everything in all the books I once poured over is finished for me now.
Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and
sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, have all grown
obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are
battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust
would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the
women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they
taught me, was that they couldn’t really teach me very much at all.Raising
children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple
choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No
one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another
can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet
trained at 3, his sibling at 2.When my first child was born, parents were told
to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up.
By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of
research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting
certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust
yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring
over one of Dr. Brazelton’s wonderful books on child development, in which he
describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was
looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there
something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his
tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I
insane? Last year he went to China . Next year he goes to college. He can talk
just fine. He can walk, too.
Every part of raising children is humbling, too.
Believe me, mistakes were made. T hey have all been enshrined in the,
‘Remember-When- Mom-Did Hall of Fame.’ The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the
bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I
arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer
camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on
her geography test, and I responded, ‘What did you get wrong?’. (She insisted I
include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald’s drive-through speaker
and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I
include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two
seasons. What was I thinking?But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most
of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is
particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs.
There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in
the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could
remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how
they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to
get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the
doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.Even today I’m not
sure what worked and what didn’t, what was me and what was simply life. When
they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they
were because of what I’d done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true
selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.
The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was
sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the
three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to
excavate my essential humanity. That’s what the books never told me. I was bound
and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out
who the experts were.

To my little experts....