Tag: Lessons

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Sayonara

Well, today is the day. My last day as a member of the gainfully employed.

Bittersweet? Definitely. I’m beyond sad to be leaving a workplace I loved, but I’m also excited to get to spend time at home with Della. I think these next couple months with just her before the new baby comes will be priceless.

And we already have plans for our first day home together. I should say I’ve made plans for us, she’ll just be along for the ride. Since tomorrow is her birthday, I’m going to take her to the zoo for the first time. I hope she loves it, since she totally digs animals right now. I think 1 or 2 of my girlfriends and their little ones may join us, so D might have a birthday entourage.

And although tomorrow is her actual 2 year birthday, her monthly update post will have to wait a bit. (nothing new there, though) We have her 2 year checkup tomorrow night, so I’ll get her official height/weight stats there to include. Plus during the day we’ll be busy zooing, not blogging, duh.

I sent my farewell email out at work yesterday with tears in my eyes, but they dried pretty quickly. I’ve realized I need to just calm down and enjoy this time off instead of constantly bemoaning the fact that my paychecks have dried up like those tears. This is the time I so craved after D was born. What am I afraid of now?

So hopefully I’ll still be around fairly regularly to keep you all entertained, even though I’ll no longer be sitting in front of 4 computer screens all day. Maybe my eyesight will enjoy this break too, come to think of it. I do owe you a lot of pictures from our recent travels though, plus I’ll still keep you abreast of my weekly pregnancy growth.

And with that I say good-bye, desk at work; hello, summer!

 

 

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Friday Funk – Things I Can’t Say edition

A few weeks ago, the beautiful Shell of Things I Can’t Say invited me to do a guest post on her blog. I was flattered and thrilled! And I am pleased to announce that today is my day.

This is only my 2nd guest post anywhere, ever, so I’m a little nervous. Please excuse my sweaty palms and twisty stomach. I really hope I don’t disappoint!

Now if you would be so kind, please head over to Things I Can’t Say and see what I have to say about mawage… er, marriage.

 

 

 

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Do I want my kids to be French?

One of my sisters sent me an excellent article written by Pamela Druckerman for the Wall Street Journal online the other day, and I couldn’t help but immediately want to share it. The full article can be found here. It is pretty lengthy, so I’ll do my best to break it down for you.

The basic gist of it is that French parents have mastered parenting, if you will, with an ease and calm that their American counterparts can often only dream of employing.

Say what? I know.

But before you start throwing freedom fries at me, let me explain the rest of what the article imparts. I think by the end you’ll agree with me that we American parents could actually stand to take a few notes from our cohorts français.

Those of you with children, think for a moment…

Who of us hasn’t

  • Left behind a sea of shredded napkins and salt packets after a meal at a restaurant?
  • Chased a boisterous toddler incessantly around a table/room/floor/building/yard in the hopes of wearing him/her out or simply as a form of entertainment? (i don’t know about you, but rampant toddler-chasing doesn’t rank highly on my list of fun)
  • Lugged around every toy or game imaginable with which to bribe said toddler when needed in exchange for peace and/or good behavior?
  • Given up on saying “No” and just given in to a child’s demands before your sanity was utterly and permanently shattered?

Now, who in the crowd doesn’t want

  • Respectful children who mind their parents from the 1st request, not the 100th?
  • Children who can entertain themselves happily without constant attention?
  • To not have to lose their voice shouting for obedience from their offspring?

So what does Ms. Druckerman suggest we do? I’m so glad you asked. Let’s begin with a little comparison though, again, from the article above.

What French parents are doing:

  • Being involved with their families without being obsessive. Good parents aren’t at the constant beck and call of their kids, but instilling patience and a sense of delayed gratitude in them.
  • Stimulating their kids, but not 24 hours a day.
  • Not suffocating children with a million lessons here and play dates there, but instead letting toddlers do just that – toddle.
  • Setting rigid, unwavering boundaries, but entrusting their children with independence and freedom within those boundaries.

What American parents are doing:

  • Hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, overparenting, “kindergarchy” – basically all up in their kids’ faces all the time.
  • Not being firm and consistent in teaching kids “No”. As such, their children are accustomed to, and usually demand, instant gratification – running around wherever/whenever they want, snacking all day instead of waiting for meal times, generally displaying a “whatever” mentality when it comes to obeying their parents.
  • Allowing their kids to be attention mongers and basically running the show.

Now let me make crystal clear – this obviously is not meant to apply to every single French parent and every single American parent. No, absolutely not. Nor am I implying that it does.

I know there are countless outstanding parents building strong, wholesome families around here, and I’m sure there are just as many shitty French parents who have no idea the meaning of the word. But just from personal experience, I have witnessed enough examples of the American parenting style focused on in this article to agree that this argument does hold some weight.

Ok, so now what do we do about this?

Isn’t that the million dollar question. But fortunately, the suggested answers seem pretty reasonable and downright easy to me:

  • Be stern in your commands to your children. Don’t shout and yell at them, but be convincing and authoritative in your tone.
  • Be consistent. Don’t give up right away when your child says “no” and runs away. You’re the parent – they can learn that.
  • And I think the best advice actually came from my sister herself: “Though I was a quasi-mother for all of three weeks or so, it showed me good reason why parents need to be stern, strong, and straight forward from the get go, all the while still being loving, caring, and comforting.”

Well said, A, well said. I think all parents can agree that those are some good words by which to live.

And no, I don’t want my kids to be French. I just want them to be happy and well-behaved. After reading this article, that really doesn’t sound like much to ask at all.

 

 

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Beware parking and Frontier

Hi guys! We’re back from vacation, and although I long achingly to be back in the Maui sun, it is nice to be done traveling. And it was funny – when we got home last night and walked in the house, it looked surprisingly bigger than I remembered. Odd, since we were only gone 10 days and our house is tiny.

I will have plenty of vaca recap posts complete with picture after picture after picture, but I need to get them all organized first. That in itself will take a few minutes, but I promise they will come.

First, though, I wanted to warn you about 2 things we encountered during this trip. One night last week we parked in a public lot during a dinner out in Lahaina, a little beach town on Maui, and our credit card number was ripped off by the outfit running the lot’s pay box. It was one of those lots where you park in a numbered space, then pay at the unmanned box/kiosk based on your space number. Well, instead of being charged the $5 for the night of parking, they tried to charge over $620 on our card online from Barcelona last weekend. Um, yeah right.

Fortunately our credit card company called to alert me to some possible fraudulent charges, and I promptly told them that no, that was not us trying to make those charges. What the f?! Thanks a lot, Tick Tock Ticket, or Tik Tok Ticket, however it was spelled. I couldn’t believe it. The other car in our party paid with cash for the parking, so we were the only lucky ones to get scammed. Jerks. Lesson? Pay with cash for little things, especially when you’re not dealing with an actual person for payment.

Second, Frontier Airlines officially lost my business yesterday. We had a 10:35 flight home from Denver to Milwaukee yesterday morning and were at the airport easily by 9. Plenty of time to check in and make our flight, right? Wrong! The check in line was wrapped all the way through the maze of guides and out into the middle of the ticketing area of the airport, and since D was traveling as a lap infant we weren’t able to check in online ahead of time to bypass the line. Well crap. We figured we’d have no issue, though, seeing as we were plenty early and things seemed to be moving fairly quickly.

However, when we finally made it up to the counter and tried to check our 3 small bags as we had on every other leg of this journey, the snotty Frontier agent refused to allow us to check in for our flight, saying we were within the 45 minute barrier when they close the flight. Um, what?!? You idiots made us wait in line for over an hour, with not one agent walking through notifying people that it was getting close to the cut-off time to check in for the earlier flights, like every other airline I’ve ever flown on does. You know what I’m talking about – the agent going through everyone in line asking if anyone’s on the next closest flight, and getting them up to the front to get checked in to make sure they’re on it. Apparently Frontier doesn’t believe in that system and would rather fly their planes half-empty instead.

So not only did she not allow us to check in for our morning flight, she wouldn’t even check availability on other airlines with similar or even close departure times. She dismissed that request with a quick, “No, there’s nothing else available.” Uh, I’m sure there is, but thanks anyway for taking those 4 extra seconds to check (turns out there were 2 other flights on different airlines with departure times close to ours). Nor would she take the time to see what our options were the following morning. Again, “No, nothing,” with an obvious lack of actually pulling anything up on her computer. So we were placed on standby for the 3:08 flight yesterday afternoon, with the chance of being continually rolled over on standby until the first available confirmed seats on the 8:51pm flight on January 4. What?! No.

Not only did we not want to spend 2 more days in Denver, but the Rose Bowl in which the Badgers were playing was on yesterday afternoon at 4pm CST! If we had to miss that because of Frontier’s beyond terrible ticketing agent, I was ready to throat punch someone. Ok, so we’re on standby, now what to do with our bags? One of Frontier’s saving graces has always been their policy of not charging you the extra $20 to check carry-on sized bags. Yeah, well, this girl obviously didn’t abide by that policy. She was going to charge us $60 for our 3 bags instead of the $20 we’d been charged by Frontier on our first flight to begin this vacation, since 2 of the suitcases were easily carry-on sized. Whatever. So we only checked 1 and the car seat through for free.

This is already making me mad again just thinking about, so I’ll try to make this long story short. After our disastrous encounter with the girl at the ticketing counter, we had to go through security 3 times since we forgot about things in our bags that were larger than the TSA approved sizes for liquids and gels. As we’d checked everything through the whole time up until that point, we hadn’t had to worry about that. Awesome. 1 time they made R pay to check his bag, but when I went back the 3rd time to check D’s, the woman was much more understanding and did not charge me to check the carry on. Um, how about some consistency, Frontier?

Thank god we were 2 of the 3 people who made it on that 3:08 flight on standby (D doesn’t count for a seat since she was a lap infant), and we made it home around 6:30 last night. Only 5 hours later than originally planned. At least Frontier does have the in-flight TVs so we could watch most of the Rose Bowl on the plane. We missed the very end on the drive home but tuned in on the radio, just in time to hear us lose. Ugh. Oh well, at least we were miserable at home instead of still stuck in Colorado.

So there you have it – beware of shady little unmanned parking boxes and Frontier Airlines’ ridiculously terrible customer service. You’d better believe I am filing a complaint on their website. We at least deserve our $20 back for having to pay to check R’s carry on, something for which we have never been charged until yesterday morning. What made me most irate about the whole fiasco was the ticketing agent’s attitude – she kept huffing and puffing and putting her head down on the counter in exasperation at how long the line was. Huh? That’s not our fault. Just do your job and get us on our flight! She obviously failed.

1 highlight of being stuck in the Denver airport for 5 extra hours yesterday? D was an absolute dream of a traveler, even taking an almost 2 hour nap while we waited.

 

 

 

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I’m beginning to feel seriously disliked

By my own 14 month old.

Has anyone else with a toddler experienced this, or am I just lucky to suddenly seemingly be the object of my daughter’s disaffection?

The first signs came weeks ago, when diaper and clothes changes on her changing dresser became all-out battles. As soon as I pick her up to lay her up there she begins writhing and kicking in the air, doing anything she can to avoid landing on her changing mat.

This is so crazy to me, because she used to absolutely love it up there. I mean L-O-V-E it. When she was really little she’d get all excited and wiggle around when placed on it for changes. We called it doing her “mat jigs”. And even up until recently she was perfectly content to look at one of her books or play with a lotion bottle while being changed.

But now it’s like her changing mat is on fire or a bed of nails when we put her on it. It usually takes all my might these days to keep her in place so as not to get poop smeared all over her, me, the wall, and the dresser when it’s dirty diaper time.

And I’m kind of ashamed to admit this, but the other night I even resorted to leaning my full weight onto her to push her down so I could get her diaper changed before putting on her pajamas. I mean come on. A grown adult using full-body strength to flatten down her kicking and flailing toddler all for the sake of 1 f’ng diaper? Seems ridiculous, but that is to what I’ve been reduced.

I’ve also been getting “that look” from her a lot lately. That look where she raises her eyebrows and opens her eyes real big, then kind of crinkles up her upper lip and gives a squeaky grunt like no! I don’t want to do that!

Really? You’re ONE. I don’t remember there being a clause in the rule book of life that says ONE year olds get to call the shots. I’m the mom, just trust me right now.

I know I’ve mentioned this one before, but she already exhibits some terrible 2-ish behavior, too. Like the throw-herself-down-on-the-floor-and-cry when she either doesn’t get something she wants or gets something taken away from her that she’s not supposed to have. Very mature.

And if she’s in her high chair and decides she’s totally over eating or sees something on her tray that displeases her, she smashes all her food then swipes her hands across her tray real fast to fling everything onto the floor. Rude.

And the most recent display in this category is the crying meltdown that ensues when she reaches her arms up to you to be picked up but you’re doing something or your hands are full so you can’t get her THAT VERY SECOND. Awesome. Because we’re so heartless that it takes us longer than 1.5 nanoseconds to pick up our child when she thinks she needs to be held.

But this next one is the real winner.

I swear to you, D would rather camp out at daycare round-the-clock than come home with me in the afternoons now. I’m not gonna lie, either. It kinda breaks my heart a little each time and is what has most made me feel like a mommy unloved.

I’m so used to her plowing over any toy and child in her path to get to my arms when she sees me in the door to her room when I arrive for pick-up, that now when she doesn’t even want me to hold her I can’t help but feel totally rejected.

2 perfect examples…

Monday this week her class was on the playground when I picked her up because the weather has been so gorgeous these past couple days. She and another little girl were being pushed in a double-seater swing by the teacher, and when she saw me she lit up with outstretched arms to come get me. Awesome, that’s what I love.

We went inside so I could sign her out on the attendance sheet, and she made an immediate bee-line for the wooden rocking boat in their room, climbed in, and started rocking like crazy. Oh that’s so cute, I thought. I’ve never seen her play in one of those before. Ok, time to go, so I reached for her to pick her out of the boat and carry her back out the door.

You’d think I was coming at her with a hot poker the way she recoiled and grabbed onto the handles of the boat for dear life, wanting nothing to do with me and the nice home to which I was taking her. Hmm, all right.

I finally was able to pry her out of the boat and set her down on the classroom floor since she was trying to flop away from me. Mistake. For then all she wanted to do was run around and play in her empty classroom. The flopping and squealing immediately resumed when I gathered her up to take her out to the car to head home.

Then Tuesday this week I experienced a similar get-away-from-me-Mom episode, again when I picked her up from daycare.

Their class was out on the playground enjoying more sunshine, and this time D was going down the slide when I arrived. She spotted me mid-slide, and I shit you not, she splayed out on the slide when she got to the bottom like she usually does when I try to pick her up even though I was nowhere near her, then sat up and tried to shove a whole handful of wood chips in her mouth with that defiant look on her face again.

What? Like eating wood chips is going to get you out of coming home with me? Puh-lease.

There was no greeting me with outstretched arms this time. No. The teacher had to carry her squirming body and hand her over the fence to me. At least this time I knew better than to put her down when we went into her room to sign out. I may still be there trying to remove her from the premises if I had.

So what gives? What has happened to cause this fall from grace of mine? I used to be the one she wanted all the time. Now it seems like I’m the last one she wants. I guess I more expected this assertion of independence around oh, say age 15, not 1. Is this normal? Or have I really done something wrong to make my little girl not like her mommy anymore?

 

 

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Finding a little Mom Sexy of my own

I recently discovered a great blog, the Mommyologist (i know, i’m sorry, i’m way late on that one. but better late than never, eh?). It’s hysterical. Mary is the Mommyologist – a career woman turned stay-at-home-mom, and she takes us on her journey through this craziness that is motherhood.

She’s funny, she swears, and she lets us know that it’s ok when we feel like total parenting failures and are ready to pluck our eyelashes out one-by-one – this job called parent isn’t always all puppies and rainbows. Or eating chocolates and drinking wine during nap time, if that ideal is more your style.

She also started the Mom Sexy Revolution over a year and a half ago. SM, what the hell is Mom Sexy? Yeah I had no idea either, but it’s really simple…

Just because we’re moms doesn’t mean we have to be relegated to the frumpy-jeans, bad hair cut, stuck-in-a-rut, no time for “me” brigade. We can still be cute, we can still be fun, we can still rock it. Mom + Sexy = Mom Sexy. Voila!

So anyway, I did a little super-sleuthing, went back through her archives to learn myself a thing or two about her Mom Sexy crusade, and believe or not, it’s stuck with me. And it comes to me at the most random times.

Now if you know me very well, you know I’ve never been one to “flaunt it” or really even consider myself sexy at all. So I’m more surprised than anyone to hear myself saying I’ve found a little Mom Sexy. But I totally did…

I’ve started working out as part of a group of 4 women with my trainer instead of just one-on-one sessions each week, and Monday night was my second group session.

Now for a little background, after the first week I came home and told R I didn’t think I was going to like this because there’s a girl in the group who was a track runner at UW-Madison, graduated 4 years after me, is tiny and petite and rock solid, and just had a baby 6 months ago and bears no signs of pregnancy whatsoever.

So yeah, I was jealous and felt like I was competing against her. Which I totally am not, we’re all just there for the workout, but I couldn’t shake that twinge of envy. I felt like a huge clod next to her. So that didn’t exactly get me off to the greatest start attitude-wise for this little workout group, and was pretty much the opposite of Mom Sexy.

Well this Monday I decided to try to kick it up a mini-notch. I wore a cute workout tank to the gym that night to show off my guns instead of a baggy t-shirt, and tried to feel confident going into the session. I’m in decent shape right now, but I still feel like an Amazon compared to the runner.

And of course, what did she wear that night? A cute little workout tank too and skin-tight running shorts to boot! Ugh. (i feel kinda bad talking shit about her, because she’s actually quite nice and i’m sure they would all think i’m an idiot for feeling this way. but whatever, i just do.)

All right, forget the outfit, you’re here for a good workout. And man, did we ever get our money’s worth that night! Our trainer must have majored in ass-kicking in college, and now she’s going back for her Masters in making-sure-your-clients-can’t-walk-or-raise-their-arms-the-next-day.

But at one point I was doing chest flys with a band stretched around a pole, and my Mom Sexy suddenly came to me. I was looking down toward the floor and thought hey, my abs look nice and flat right now. My arms look really strong. My legs look even stronger as they’re supporting me in this stance. And you know what? F runner girl, I’m the hot one here tonight!

Granted, all those thoughts took place in about a 7 second span, but still. It was a glimpse of my Mom Sexy and it felt great.

So thank you, Mommyologist, for awakening something I never even knew I had – my Mom Sexy. I may not yet be grabbing my butt and boobs in admiration like she does (seriously, go check out her site and videos. she’s got some awesome ‘tude goin’ on.), but I am feeling pretty good about this mommy body of mine.

And for all you other moms out there, try rockin’ a little of your own Mom Sexy. You just might surprise yourself.

 

 

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Last of his tribe

Things like this amaze and fascinate me. The fact that there are still uncontacted tribes in the jungles and forests of the world. That there are still indigenous peoples living among us, on a planet that we generally think of as fully civilized. How awesome is that?

The “Last of his Tribe”

I can’t even imagine this man’s life. A single, solitary soul in his native jungle land, the lone survivor of his entire people. Fending off cattle ranchers that would gladly hunt him down, trying to grow food for subsistence while having to harvest it undercover so as not to be poached like the rest of his tribe. Having no one with whom to communicate, as the people documenting and trying to preserve his existence have no idea whatsoever of the language he speaks. And not even knowing that some of those strangers following him through the land are really trying to protect him, not kill him.

Could I survive as he does? Probably not. How does he do it? How does he find the strength to keep on in the face of the constant reminder that everyone he has ever known and loved is gone and he will never again find anyone like him? I don’t know that I could. Or does he even know that? Does he know that there is no one else like him out there? Or are there really more and we are the clueless ones? Maybe he’s a lot more cunning than we assume.

I would love to catch even a tiny first-hand glimpse into worlds like these. Worlds so entirely different from the one I’ve always known. Worlds so unique and astonishing that we will never be able to fully appreciate them from the comfort of our 4-walled, heated and air conditioned, fully wireless living rooms. Worlds that might make us really appreciate all that we do have and admire and respect those that have none of it yet are equally happy and well-off if not more so than we are. Worlds that force us to realize we aren’t the only ones living here, so stop trashing the place.

There’s much to learn from the Last Man. I hope we can.

 

p.s. another one of our friends had her baby boy early this morning! congratulations T, with baby S!!!