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Posts Tagged ‘motherhood’

  1. FML. A day at the beach.

    July 21, 2015 by admin

    Today’s beach excursion was brought to you by the Griswold’s. The breakdown:

    7:30am. It’s a gorgeous day. The morning is filled with such hope. Text husband: “Packing up for the beach!” Multiple smiley face emoticons.
    10:30am. Pull out of driveway. Hope is fading fast.
    10:31am. Pull back in to driveway to pick up recycling pile knocked over by minivan. Swear under my breath. Sort of.
    10:32am. Pull back out of driveway.
    10:33am. The kids ask about lunch.
    10:40am. Stop at Dunkin’ Donuts. Order coffee over 4 shouting kids. Concede to munchkins. Pull over to dole them out.
    10:45am. Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
    10:50am. Pull onto the highway. Are we almost there?
    10:55am. Hope returns. No traffic.
    10:56am. Take sip of coffee. No sugar. Hope turns to anger.
    11:25am. Arrive at beach. Troll for nearby parking. Park 3/4 mile away.
    11:35am. Argue about who is carrying what. I end up with baby in hiking back pack, beach toys, cooler, bag with towels, beach umbrella. Six-year-old carries sun hat the baby has thrown on the ground. After a few feet, he stuffs it in one of my bags. We walk. I feel like a horse with no name. One of the kids has a blister. He wants the world to know.
    11:50am. Arrive on beach. Drop everything in the sand. Two kids ask for lunch. One has to go to the bathroom.
    11:55am. Open sunscreen. Kids scatter. Chase and slap it on.
    12:20pm. Sunscreen applied.
    12:25pm. Kids in water. Baby playing in sand. I sit down.
    12:30pm. Kids too far out. (Is that a shark fin?) Baby crawling away. Preschooler poops in swim diaper.
    12:45pm. Ahhhh. Nice. All kids digging in sand. Notice tide is coming in. Fast. Beach blanket gets soaked. Move all of our things up against the toes of two elderly women wearing giant straw hats.
    12:50pm. Screw it. Despite the fact that I’m wearing cotton shorts and my husband’s old hockey t-shirt, I go in the water with kids.
    1:05pm. Frantically check incoming tide every 30 seconds. Move things into elderly women’s laps.
    1:30pm. Give kids the 5-minute warning.
    1:40pm. Give kids 5-minute warning.
    1:55pm. Give kids 5-minute warning.
    2pm. Kids get out of water. They belly flop in sand. I tell them to rinse off. They ride the waves for 10 minutes while I pack everything up, give the death stare and whisper yell. Elderly women look on in horror. Repeat 3 times.
    2:30pm. Get ogled by less encumbered beachgoers as we make our way to the car at the top of a very. steep. hill. Cooler tips over. Everything spills out of bag. Two kids “are dying.”  But I’ve sweated out 10 pounds.
    2:50pm. Get back to car. Eat leftover munchkins when kids aren’t looking. Change 2 diapers. Buckle sand-covered kids in car.
    2:55pm. Text husband: “FML.”
    3pm. Drive off into the sunset. Tell kids we’re never going to the beach again.

    christmas_vacation_001

    At least we didn’t get stuck under a truck.


  2. Kitchen Hacks for the Un-Resourceful

    March 2, 2015 by admin

    I am not necessarily known for my resourcefulness in the kitchen. But I have a lot of lofty ideas. I look up recipes that require obscure ingredients and then I buy said ingredients.  For example, I might buy a whole bag of Chinese mallow. Then let it rot in the vegetable drawer of my fridge. Because I run out of time. Or energy. Or both.

    Just kidding. I’ve never bought Chinese mallow. I don’t even know what that is. Or if it’s technically edible. Or legal. But you get the idea.

    The point is, a lot of times I buy an ingredient for a specific meal – like a bunch of basil or scallions when I only need one leaf or bulb – but then never use the rest.

    But tonight, while looking up recipes I probably won’t make, I ran across these kitchen hacks in one of my favorite cookbooks: Cooking Light’s Dinnertime Survival Guide. (Because that’s usually the mode I am in: Survival. One strand of culinary-challenged DNA away from having my Mom of the Year status revoked). Anyway, I thought these hacks they might help someone else too. Maybe we can all save our moldy cheese and cold coffee together.

    Who am I kidding?

    I’ll never do any of this crap, but maybe you will.

     

    BeResourceful


  3. My Totally Lame (but Mostly Achievable) Parenting Resolutions for 2015

    January 9, 2015 by admin

    Ok. So there are a TON of articles floating around the Interwebs about New Year’s resolutions for parents. I’ll sum them up for you right here: Be more present. Act more patient. Don’t yell. Make more Pinterest crafts. Be a better wife/husband. Cook healthier meals. Keep a clean house. Set aside more “you” time. Stay off of: social media, your phone, your computer, your tablet and every other digital device. Say “yes” more. Be stern. Be kind. Be everything. To everybody.

    As a parent, I want to achieve some of these things too, but…I don’t see me staying the course. And failure, my friends, is not an option this year. So, I am instituting some of my own, more reasonable and achievable – albeit lame – series of New Year’s Resolutions. I may not win any Mom of the Year Award with any of these, but if I can stick to them, my life will no doubt become infinitely better than it was before. In 2015, I resolve to:

    1. Apply my age-defying eye cream.  Every. Damn. Day. 

    Husband says it’s a gimmick. I say I’ll never know if I don’t use as directed.

    2. Take a shower every morning. 

    If you have early risers like I do, either you get up at the butt crack of dawn to take a shower. Or, after you’ve had your first cup of coffee and nervous breakdown, and you send off whomever is of school age, you sit the rest of them in front of the big magic box while you pull yourself together and clean up your act. Generally I shower every day, but not always in the morning. Why? 1) because I don’t like butt cracks and 2) I like to pretend that I don’t use TV as a babysitter. Sometimes, showers happen right before husband arrives home from work to show that I do indeed have some self-respect. Other times, 5 minutes before I need to pick up the boys from the bus stop so the driver doesn’t think I’m a total loser. But a shower in the morning – now THAT is a game changer. It not only provides some motivation to not be a total slug, it also stops the UPS guy from cringing when he delivers my jumbo box of Pampers Sensitive Baby Wipes from Amazon.

    3. Have fewer PJ days. 

    Having the occasional pajama day is great, but we’ve been having WAY too many around here. So many, in fact, that when I ask my children to put on daytime clothes, they look at me incredulously and ask “Why? WHY!?” Why indeed, I say. But it’s time to show that we too conform to societal norms.

    4. Not to cry over spilled milk. 

    Literally. I cry (or yell) when my children spill milk. Or anything else for that matter. My husband is famous for telling this story from when we first started dating about how he spilled a glass of water on the rug in my apartment and I went into panic mode, racing into the kitchen like I was on fire and returning with a cloth to start sopping up his mess. He claims to this day that I even yelled, “Water on the rug!” as if I was screaming “Fire in the hole” to a line of marines. And still, he married me. Lucky guy.

    5. Keep my kitchen island clear of things which do not belong on a kitchen island so we may actually use it for its intended purpose. 

    KitchenIsland

    No one can sit here.

    6. Serve frozen chicken only once per week. 

    LMAO.

    7. Stop lamenting my advanced maternal age. 

    I can no longer say I’ll turn 40 someday. It’s happening. This year. I have four children: ages 9, 5, 3 and 6 months, and there are times, usually when I am applying my age-defying eye cream, that I torture myself by calculating what my age will be at certain stages of my children’s lives. Sure, I’ll only be 48 when my oldest graduates high school. But for my youngest? I’ll be f’ing 57 years old. That’s way more than halfway to dead, people. These are usually the times when I turn to my husband and ask: What the hell have we done? Then I look at the young, innocent faces of my beautiful children and think, we better get that Last Will and Testament notarized. But I have to stop this. Have to. Forty is the new 20, right? In that case, I’ll only be 38 when my youngest graduates high school. Sweet!

    8. Stop lying to my kids

    Oh I’ll still lie about the big things: like Santa Claus and the overall quality of their artwork. But it’s the little lies that really count. Like when we all sit down in the dining room for lunch and they ask why I have potato chips and they have carrot sticks. “I ate my carrot sticks just now in the kitchen.” Lie. Or when I tell them they’ll get sick from a bite of my chocolate protein bar because it is specially formulated for adults. Lie. Or when I tell my three-year-old that no, you absolutely can’t watch Doc McStuffins – AGAIN – because she, her big freakin’ book of booboos, and cast of freak toy friends are on vacation. Bold. faced. lie. It’s got to stop.

    9. Buy myself something. Anything.

    A pair of underwear. A tube of mascara. A jar of body glide so I’ll start running again. The bar is low here. But no, a stock pot from the local discount home goods store doesn’t count. Even if it is stainless steel.

    10. Drink more. 

    I’m not talking about water. Wine. Yummmm. Alcohol. Delicious. More beer! I haven’t imbibed much since the baby was born almost 7 months ago. This needs to happen.

    11. Wash my kitchen floor once a month. 

    This would be a huge improvement. HUGE.

    12. Exercise twice a month. 

    As long as I eat…nothing, this should help me achieve my fitness goals. Bonus resolution: I will not post the details of my workouts on social media.

    ResolutionBlog

    13. Make tons of evening dentist appointments. 

    Sometimes it’s more pleasant to have my teeth scraped with a sharp, metal instrument than deal with bedtime.

    14. Throw away the Play Station.

    Honest. I think that’s all it would take. Just one little follow through on one of my big. empty. threats. In 2015, I am going to give away all their stuff to little kids that clean up and take care of their things. Or, I really will leave them home alone if they refuse to put on their shoes. Or throw out the Play Station if they keep bickering. Or make them take an ice cold shower if they don’t leave hot water for anyone else. Or put them in the dark basement send them to bed with no dinner eat all their candy make them sit in a naked timeout. Wow. I am really f’ing mean. (Note to self: I can resolve to be nicer in 2016.)

    15. Make fewer trips to Target. 

    I love to buy bins and baskets and then put stuff in them. Mostly kids crap that I don’t want them to use anymore but crap I don’t want to throw away either. I am like a moth to the fire in the storage section at Target. So I just can’t go.

    16. Cook the food that I buy or buy the food that I cook

    Two nights ago, I put a package of frozen, thin-sliced turkey cutlets in the refrigerator to thaw. They are still there. And every time I open the refrigerator, I look at them and think “WTF am I going to do with thin-sliced turkey cutlets?” Kids aren’t going to eat those. In two more days, I will throw them away.

    17. (Step 1) Write things down on my calendar. (Step 2) Look at calendar to see what I’ve written down. 

    Step 2 is new for 2015 and will hopefully help me improve my attendance record.

    18. Finish painting our kitchen. 

    We started in 2004.

    19. Find the cause of my husband’s snoring. 

    Then, eliminate it.

    20. Sleep through the night at least once a week. 

    I haven’t slept in 9 years. And when you have 4 kids, someone is always awake. Please let 2015 be the year of sleep. Sleep will make me a kinder, gentler more normal person.


  4. Correction

    April 11, 2013 by admin

    In my last post, Moms are Superhuman Too, I implied that mothers who have grown babies inside their own bellies were the only mothers to develop superhuman powers.

    I. Was. So. Wrong.

    Of course there are a huge segment of moms who, for whatever reason, are unable to carry children in their own wombs. It was a simple case of not thinking about all the different ways we come into motherhood that suggested the implication that these moms don’t have Superhuman Powers. Of course they do. Any mom who loves her child has these powers.

    Sincerely,

    Michelle