Are You a Mombie?

     Apparently there is a term floating out there, a label if you will, for all of us hard working moms who happen to stop paying attention to the world around us and our own needs and instead focus on our children.  It's a Mombie and it's kind of an uncool twist on the term "Zombie".
     I heard the term when talking to a twenty-something; which is something I hardly ever do these days (talking to a twenty-something... with the exception of family).  And I explained to the twenty-something that (a) I have a bad memory and I don't remember my high school identity so it's not as though I had lost my identity when having kids.  I think officially it means I never really had an identity so there wasn't one to lose. And (b) on a similar note, before I had kids all I ever really did was grade papers at school, bring them home and grade papers while watching TV and then on Friday nights go to trivia.  And (c) sometimes Moms look like Zombies because we are so flustered that we have to focus and we actually don't see where we're going... we only see where our kids are going so instead of paying attention to things around ourselves we're paying attention to things around them... which is why our kids are completely safe and us Moms are constantly tripping over things and running into trees (and backing out of garages too close to the side of the door and scraping off siding).
     I suppose in retrospect I tried to defend myself and perhaps it was a completely fruitless effort because in essence to a twenty-something my life really might seem like one of a zombie.
     It was Mother's Day today and Liam was very excited. He wanted to give me his present which turned out to be a home-made notebook and a pen completely wrapped with about six layers of uncoordinated duct tape.  He told me underneath it was a pen from a classmate's mother whose phone number had changed at work so she gave all of her old pens to the class to use.  He was very excited and then he asked me when Father's Day was because apparently he can't wait for that either.  Perhaps they have another pen project in mind.  Then Joshua asked when Kids' Day was and I responded like EVERY OTHER person would respond "Every day is Kids' Day."  Which it is, I assure you.  Even Mother's Day is really Kids' Day in disguise.  Today after a lovely breakfast we went to a festival and had a lovely, albeit cold, day. We took pictures next to tulips and then immediately hurried up to the kiddie area to watch a juggler.  Then we went to the rock climbing wall where Liam reached the top and rung the buzzer (yay!) and then directly to the bounce houses.  As I stood outside a bouncy-bounce obstacle course while my kids goofed off inside, it occurred to me that we had just been bouncing a couple of days ago at Liam's school carnival... and a couple of weeks before that at his baseball opening night and before that there was a birthday party and, well, you get the idea.  How much of my time was spent waiting for my kids to bounce in bouncy bounces?  How many of our pictures are trying to capture that one glorious moment as they slide down a 40 foot slide?  Since when have playgrounds become completely anti-climactic compared to the glory of a bouncy bounce?  If it's Mother's Day shouldn't there be a Mother's only bouncy obstacle course?  Perhaps we could get our nails done while our kids waited for us outside.
     Aha!  But it really was Mother's Day because I got to walk up and down the craft aisle at the festival looking for my gift and holding a little guy's hand. We even walked past artists' tents and for lunch I got to eat Pad Thai while they ate pizzas, hot dogs and nachos.  Only at a festival, right?
     So am I a Mombie?  Are you a Mombie?  Maybe this kid was just a twenty-something self-centered prick... or maybe he was onto something.  What are zombies focused on... brains... more and more brains... and that's about it, right?  And Mombies are focused on their kids... it's all about the kids.  Yes, but it's sooo much about the kids.  It's helping them find matching clothes, treating their allergies, putting them to sleep at night, teaching them to read, working on projects together, holding their hands when you cross busy roads, persuading them to eat their protein before they get ice cream, introducing them to wonderful things like deep fried Snickers, dancing with them, checking out schedules of local festivals in advance so you know what time the juggler is going on, waiting in line for balloon animals and then fixing unwound balloon animals later in the day, cleaning dirt out of shoes, putting together snacks before a baseball game, choosing the right preschool, giving "car washes" instead of showers and having a towel ready to dry out his eyes, coming up with reward-systems to persuade/teach them to become more independent by getting themselves dressed each morning, cutting up their meat, buying fruits and veggies and downloading apps like Fruit Ninja and Where's My Water and every new update for Angry Birds for them to play on your phone.  There's a lot on my mind.  So I think that settles it.  We're not Mombies because we think about more than just one thing, unlike a zombie who only thinks about eating brains for their own self-centered reasons.  Yes, you heard me, self-centered reasons.  A zombie never thinks of others.  A mother always thinks of others.  So the self-centered prick is a zombie and I'm just a mom, someone I've always wanted to be. And that's about it for now.  Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms out there.  Keep up the good work!

Thanks to the three guys in my life for making me the Mommy I've always wanted to be.  I love you up to the moon and down into the earth. 

My Foolishness

    After our tangled web of lies - from the Leprechaun leaving footprints and change to the Tooth Fairy's Sacajawea coins, the Easter Bunny and his (her) green cellophane grass and jelly beans... I guess I was just tuckered out and hadn't considered the whole idea of tricking my kids today.  So I didn't. We had a regular day of skipping between doctors appointments and haircuts.  Since it was such an un-fun day and it was the last night of Passover, I agreed to make the kids pancakes for dinner.  Excuse me, I agreed to ask their father to make them pancakes for dinner.
     I had decided not to prank the kids... but then I had an epiphany.  Prank pancakes.  Instead of gross salty coffee that my poor dad had to endure every April Fool's Day, this would actually be tasty.  So while Liam took his shower and Joshua cried while wrapped around my ankles for no other reason than just to stress us out while we were trying to do something nice... we made our prank pancakes.  Some had strawberries, others had blueberries. My personal favorites were the banana bacon pancakes.  Liam's favorites were the peanut pancakes, he was too stuffed to try the edamame in a pancake.  Joshua enjoyed his cereal pancakes.  None of us liked the jelly bean dessert pancakes.  Just made the jelly bean more gooey and tough.  And the M&M pancakes tasted like burnt chocolate.  There were also crunchy Chinese noodle pancakes, oyster cracker pancakes, sausage pancakes, strawberry pancakes and grape pancakes too.  And we topped it off with blue or green milk too!

Pancake fillings... this could be a disaster

Jelly bean pancakes (trust us, don't try this).

       After a stressful dinner service I was eager to bite into my first pancake.  And it took about 5 minutes for the shadow of doubt to come over me.  So eventually I checked on-line and it turns out, the joke truly was on me.  Today was in the last night of Passover... and for anyone who knows how the Jewish calendar works... that means that Passover isn't officially over until tomorrow night at sundown.  And I'm pretty sure that pancakes are a form of "leavened bread" and that therefore they should be avoided until Passover is actually over.  Oops.  Hopefully G-d has a sense of humor on April Fool's Day too.
    

Prank pancakes!

Joshy and his pancakes!


 

Never enough syrup for Liam!

Tomorrow It Will Be Today... But Try Explaining That To A 3 Year Old

I cannot tell you how many times Bill or I have had a conversation just like this morning's conversation with Joshua:

Joshua: Mommy, is it tomorrow?
Mommy: No Joshua, it's today.
Joshua: But when will it be tomorrow?
Mommy: The day after today is tomorrow.
Joshua: But what is today?
Mommy: Today is Tuesday.
Joshua: Is today yesterday?
Mommy: No, yesterday was ... yesterday.
Joshua: Yesterday I wanted it to be tomorrow.
Mommy: That's today.
Joshua: But I want it to be tomorrow.
Mommy: (dumbfounded)
Joshua: When will it be tomorrow?
Mommy: Today is Tuesday, tomorrow is Wednesday.
Joshua: (whining/crying) But I wanted it to be tomorrow today!
Mommy: It is tomorrow, if you think about yesterday being today.
Joshua: (loudly crying/whining)

Apparently today he was looking forward to a friend's birthday party at the sitter's house and she had made cake pops for the kids. And his friend's birthday was today, which was tomorrow yesterday.  Does that make any sense to anyone else... because apparently it doesn't make sense to Joshua at all.

They Make Aprons For People Like Me

     Once again, too ambitious.  We decided to make banana muffins before dinner this evening. Never make banana muffins before dinner.  Always take care of the basics first- such as the cleaning and the dinner.  Then, if there's time (which there won't be), work on the banana muffins.
     It was all going well; we were starting on the dry ingredients after finishing up the egg, milk & oil mixture. I went in search for the salt which is the baking cabinet above the microwave.  It's a horrible concept, putting the baking cabinet above the microwave, with its bags of flour and sugar and tipsy almost empty bottles of sesame oil and vanilla.  I wasn't entirely surprised when a jar of apple cider vinegar came hurtling out of the cupboard at me.  What did surprise me is when it catapulted itself off of our wet ingredient bowl and onto the floor, upsetting the bowl and everything in it onto my jeans and shirt.
     I immediately went into my familiar routine of damage control, sopping up wet paper towels full of eggy oily milky mess off of the floor and oven.  I walked back and forth to the sink to wet my paper towels and that's when I saw Liam, who was working on the dry ingredients, dump a spoonful of flour onto the counter.  He was covered in flour already and I contemplated just having him use his shirt to clean it up.  Instead I gave him another wet paper towel and helped him push the spilled flour onto a napkin.
     We continued our cooking; starting over with the wet ingredients of course.  I went to look for the whisk to beat in the eggs, milk and oil.  Where was the whisk?  I looked on the floor, thinking it must have shot across the kitchen in the horrible bowl spilling incident of 5 minutes ago.  Curiously, Liam found the whisk... it was in the open utensil drawer.  And that is when we realized that not all of the bowl's contents had spilled onto the oven, floor and my pants. Some had also spilled into our utensil drawer, along with the wet whisk.  Beautiful.
     For someone who regularly messes up the kitchen and who is known in our house as "the messiest cook ever" (which is saying a lot because we let Liam and Josh help with the cooking)... this was even a big mess for me.
     I'd like to say that the rest of the project went well, but it didn't.  I realized we had used white sugar instead of brown.  I realized that Liam had put too much flour in the mix (surprise) and when we made the strudel topping we used mushy butter instead of "firm" as directed and it just wasn't so crumbly.  I put the ill-fated muffins into the oven and looked over at the sink full of utensils and baking dishes.
     Then I realized it was just about time to cook dinner.  By the time I was done with the dishes and disinfecting the drawer, I felt just about "done" with cooking for the night. Still, I put together some spaghetti with meatballs... only I didn't have the energy to make meatballs, I burnt the meat because I was writing this blog post and I realized too late that the only pasta we had was gluten-free corn pasta my mom had left here (blah!).  By this point in time, I could hardly care so I just used whatever was left of our elbows, penne and tri-colored rigatoni mixed together.

     Here are a few final thoughts:
* Thank God I didn't have PMS!
* It is true that I am a messier cook than my children are at their current ages (it can only get worse).
* Next time, I should wear an apron (and for that matter, so should they).
* Next time I decide to bake and cook in the same night, I will set up a video camera and send in the tape as an audition for Worst Cooks in America.
* I will never again laugh at the cooks who end up on Worst Cooks in America.
* Thank God my husband not only knows how to cook, but is quite good at it.
* If I let the kids cook with me, will they become better cooks because of their experience in the kitchen or will they learn all of my bad habits from me?

Here's a Prophecy: Next Time There's A Lot of Hype About The End Of The World I Won't Buy Into It (but secretly I'll be a bit worried)

     It was the year 1999 and everyone thought the world was going to fall apart.  People had been hired for tech companies for the express purpose of saving the world from what I think was a hilarious mis-step of computer geeks decades before.  There was talk of alien invasions and all sorts of crazy biblical prophecies.  At the very least we thought that someone could use all of the hype to do some crazy terrorist stunt. 
     Where was I?  Packing my bags to head out on a flight to Israel.  I can't imagine why this would have caused my mother to have heart palpitations.  I mean, not to be obvious, but going to Israel on a good day is a little bit tricky.  If you asked me why I would possibly want to go to Israel on New Years Day of 2000, I would have told you first "Because it's a free trip, duh." and then I would have said something on the border of snarky and beyond-my-years-wise like "If I was meant to die, so be it.  It's fate and I must live my life in full without fear."
     13 Years later and I find that I reach a high level of anxiety just traveling across the state to go to a Children's Museum with my kids.  What has changed?  On my trip to Israel we drove in Jeeps through knee deep mud with land mines on both sides of the road.  We passed by bombed out buildings and stayed to chat in villages that had dealt with numerous hostage situations.  I wasn't afraid.  I was soaking it all in while meanwhile my mother at home was probably curled up with her head under the covers repeating, "She's almost a grown up, she's almost a grown up, she needs to make her own decisions, she needs to make her own decisions,..."  This is pure speculation of course, I can neither confirm nor deny that my mom was scared to death while I was gone, I'm just assuming. Because if Liam or Joshua ever decided to leave the country- let alone to leave the country at a particularly precarious moment in history to a particularly volatile region of the world almost literally on the other side of the planet... if they ever decided to do that, I would be scared to death- but I would let them go.
     Where was I?  Yes, current high levels of anxiety.  And I've thought about this a lot lately as the build up to 2012 started to mount, say 2 years ago.  It started with the history channel featuring the ancient Mayan civilization- back when they actually used to have shows based on history on the history channel.  It started with shows that totally downplayed hysteria like "How The World Could End!" (Note my snarky yet wise tone.  I haven't changed much).  At first I watched them like the 21 year old I used to be with a note of acceptance that we must live our lives and accept what will be.  But then I looked over at the bouncy seat and saw a baby who hadn't yet gotten to live his life.  Suddenly I felt, quite selfishly, that I hadn't gotten enough time with him and that two years more just wouldn't be enough.  And then I projected a bit (and by this I mean, I thought ahead.  I realize the way I wrote it, it makes it sound like I threw up a little bit), I projected an image of my baby at the age of 3 1/2 with his short little legs trying to keep up as I ran away from the end of the world and I just didn't think he would be able to run that fast and I thought, "Well, I have two years to start weight lifting to get ready to be able to carry him!"  And this was all quite a lot to take in.  It got to the point that I had to leave the room when the history channel was on.  I would peek back in at the end just to watch the 3 minutes which disproved the episode, or brought up reasonable questions.  But always I would fail to leave before the last line, "The Mayan calendar may not predict the end of the world... or perhaps it does.  Only on December 12th of 2012 will we know the truth."  Or something menacing like that.
     For awhile I kept my anxiety to myself, but it became too much to hold in and eventually I started asking around.  Other moms got that same fiery looks in their eyes and I could tell we were all holding back at least a little bit of fear.  None of us had a plan, we just knew we wanted to survive whatever might happen in 2012.  Well actually, one mom friend said something quite unexpected, but it did make me think... she said she would lie down and hope that the end would be quick for her and her daughter.  Ugh.  That made it all seem so real.  My friend was going to die?  And meanwhile I would be running with a 30 pound kid?
     Here is a reproduction of a texting conversation I had with my sister who is also a mother about a year ago.
Lori: Oh my god, I'm watching a show about Nostradamus.
Me: I know, it's freaky :(
Lori: I should really turn this off.
Me: Turn it off!!!
Lori: What are we going to do?
Me: It's nothing, plenty of what he said was proven wrong already.
Lori: Like what?
Me: Don't know.
Me: I looked it up on google.  Lots of stuff.
Lori: That makes me feel better.
Lori: I should turn this off.
Me: Turn it off!!!
Me: Well now you have to watch the end where they disprove it.
Lori: Ok.
Lori: That was depressing.
Me: You should have turned it off.
Lori: (crying can't be communicated via text) we need to live each day to the fullest.
Me: Goodnight.

     I looked for the texting conversation but couldn't find it.  I even plugged in an old phone.  It was like "Frankenphone" but I think maybe the texting conversation happened sometime between my current phone and that phone I just plugged in and really with cell phones, who can keep track. So anyway, that's not an exact quote but it's a "gist" of our text-versation.
     So why was 2012 so frightening even though we are rational human beings who knew full well that if they Mayans were so good at predicting things, wouldn't they have prevented their own demise?  Possibly it scares us out of our wits for the same reason that we all got so scared when we heard about the shooting in Newtown, CT.  Even though I'm a teacher and know that kids are safe in school and even though I tell my students that anytime they ask; just like every other mother in America, I pictured my own first grader hiding in a bathroom with his teacher.  Stories about flooding and kids being pulled away from their mothers make us cry without warning on a Tuesday morning before work.  Nightmare scenarios flash before our eyes on a regular basis and we have to smile just to ward off the demons. 
     You know what they always say about bears... don't get between a mother and her cub.  We have that protective instinct too.  Without the claws true, but we can never be too complacent.  We always need to be ready to protect our kids.  And the worst fear that any of us as mothers has is... someday we might fail at our job.  It might be because they can't run so fast with their short little legs, it might be because there's only so much you can do when it's the end of the world, or because they're simply not with you when they need you most because they're halfway around the world.  I didn't know if I'd be able to write this blog post about my greatest fear in 2012.  I thought maybe my fears would be founded.  Mostly I knew for sure that it was all hype so we continued to live our lives just fine.  We have an emergency kit and an idea of what we might do if something extreme were to take place... but mostly we just kept on going as normal.  And as the days got closer and closer, it seemed like there were fewer specials on the History channel (they had at this point moved on to quality programming like Pawn Stars and American Restoration- no really, I watch them both!).  By the time December 2012 came around, I figured it was just time to get a new calendar (figuratively of course, because I have a Motorola Smartphone).  I figured that it really all had been just hype.  I filled my car up with a tank of gas and went to work as usual and soon enough it became a great big joke for everyone. 
     Secretly though, me and millions of other moms (possibly even you) let out a sigh of relief.  Happy to live another day, another day for us to worry about the future of our children.

Toothless

     Years have been invested in Liam's teeth.  Time and care and patience have been put into their growth and then their cleaning.  We tracked their appearances.  We visited the dentist at about 2 years and have returned whenever they have asked us to since.  We eagerly awaited the next stage in Liam's mouth-development.  We awaited... the Tooth Fairy.  We even watched the movie, The Tooth Fairy, starring The Rock, as a preset so Liam wouldn't be too startled by the concept.
     Our adorable little baby boy who grew his front teeth first and gave us those first toothy smiles was finally losing teeth.  One-by-one... actually, make that two-by-two because apparently once one falls, it's neighbor loses all will to survive and must fall out too.  And before you know it, the adorable toothy grin turns into... a toothless awkward grin.  Yes, that's right.  Awkward. 
     Currently Liam looks as though he has been punched in the jaw.  And this is an improvement over what you would've seen at Christmas-time.  He is missing a front tooth and the second one has jutted out, already growing to jinormous proportions and is distinctly using the extra space to lean to the left.  Meanwhile on the bottom of his mouth, his two new front teeth have jagged tips. 

 "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth"

     The bottom left is a sore scene.  Liam recently lost his fifth tooth, which I was getting quite concerned about it.  Behind it, the adult tooth was already growing and it now seems content to sit back there, as if being left out from the row in front.  Yes, for a couple of weeks, Liam was growing a second row of teeth behind the first, much like a shark.  Maybe I should have put an end to this ridiculousness, but I just couldn't bring myself to yank that tooth. That's why I was in fact happy when a friend of his elbowed him on a bean-bag chair at his afterschool program.  It was one of those fateful afternoons when I could have arrived slightly earlier, had I not stopped to talk in the halls.  But I did and as I walked into the afterschool care to pick up Liam, I saw him running frantically to his teacher and then, when he caught my eye, to me, holding his tooth.  We didn't have one of those little blue treasure chests to put the tooth into so instead we nested it inside of one of Liam's origami paper boats he had made afterschool that day. We carried it home gently and when we got home, we put it into a little blue treasure chest we keep just for this occasion and slid it under his pillow.
     Liam's mouth is now in such a poor state, that I think it is only fit to schedule an early appointment with the dentist.  Surely these teeth will rearrange themselves into order... or is it more likely they will continue to trample each other and cause disarray?  Perhaps the dentist will help...  Cute songs can prepare you for the inevitable, your child will lose his/her baby teeth no matter how well you take care of them and he may even lose these two front teeth on or near Christmas... but nothing can quite prepare you for a toothless grin, a temporary lisp, the grossness of dried tooth blood on a tiny blue plastic treasure chest box and the idea that soon you will need to pay for braces.

Priorities

     You come home in a rush, with a plan in mind on how you are going to get the kids settled, clean up a little bit and get yourself ready for a night out starting at 6 pm.  You are running a little bit late because your son at school needed to show you his latest fortune teller that he's made and each fortune.  It takes you a moment to decide if your favorite fortune is "You will be dehydrated" or "You will fart gold".  After an extra five minutes spent zipping up the coat and such, you head out the door determined to get home in time to do a load of dishes and vacuum the floor before the babysitter arrives.  Is it strange to want to clean a little bit before a teenager comes over to watch your children?  Perhaps.  But isn't it also strange to clean before the cleaning lady comes over.  I mean, not that I get a cleaning lady myself but that's in the job description, right?  Although... perhaps if that's someone's job and they come over and you have a messy house, they would be quicker to judge than, say, a teenager who has moldy English muffins under the bed and dirty clothes from middle school still strewn on the floor.  Stop!  You are digressing and you need to rush home.
     You get home, motivated by a rare night out to get everything in order.  You may even squeeze in that load of dishwashing.  But then something stands in your way.  Something completely ridiculous.  A knotted Yo-Yo string.  Had someone said to you, "When you get home, instead of cleaning and getting the house in order, getting the kids settled and yourself ready, you will need to spend 20-30 minutes untangling a Yo-Yo string" you would have laughed it off.  You would have visualized yourself putting that Yo-Yo away immediately or perhaps even just throwing it out.  But in this case, your oldest son has a new obsession with Yo-Yo's and doesn't want to stop playing with his new Yo-Yo, which is making your youngest son jealous and so you go off in search of the old Yo-Yo (instead of cleaning, settling the kids in and getting yourself ready).  And when you find that old Yo-Yo you realized it is completely tangled up.  So you sit down for a *couple* of minutes to straighten it out so that both kids can have potentially dangerous objects on strings to play with in front of the flat screen TV.  10 Minutes later, you feel like you're making some amount of progress but then the younger one is getting impatient watching his older brother struggle with his Yo-Yo so the younger one starts sitting on one of your arms, mauling your head, twiddling with your hair (I hate that!) and generally being a nuisance.  20 Minutes later you are ready to throw in the towel but you feel that just a couple more loops- and... nope.  Damn it, now it's worse.  A few more minutes of struggle and then you just cut the string off and re-tie it which is really what you should have done in the first place.
     Why do we get side-tracked?  Is it because we are soooo interested in what is going to happen next in the Scooby Doo episode that is on?  Or because we have tons of extra time to look for the missing Yoda slipper?  Or maybe we get side-tracked because there's nothing a mom loves more than to fish out letter magnets under the fridge.  And then when you fish out the letter magnets under the fridge, you realize that it's extremely dusty under there and you really should vacuum.  Which leads you to notice that the bagless vacuum cleaner canister needs to be emptied... and then cleaned out of course because the vacuum cleaner is getting dirty (holy oxymoron).  There's always the imperative side-tracking such as sewing Boyscout patches onto sleeves; thus spending an unaccounted for 2 hours on sewing a patch because your son spent 30 minutes tying knots and earned a badge.  And why do so many of these side-tracking tasks involve untangling (laces, kite strings, random twine, you name it!)?  You think you have plans for the evening and BAM! You find yourself in a homework quagmire or reading the directions on a messy science experiment and then cleaning up after the messy science experiment while the kids are nowhere to be found. 
     Perhaps it is just me.  Perhaps I am just not focused enough.  I mean, I was able to get out the door only about 30 minutes later than planned.  Huh- this might be why I'm always late.  But that's off topic, I was able to get out to the party dressed and ready to go. And untangling the Yo-Yo only cost me a little bit of prep time.  So I didn't have time to paint my nails.  On a positive note, in a week or so, I won't have to get side-tracked again by realizing that my nail polish is peeling and that I need to forsake my laundry duties in order to get the nail polish remover to take it off.  Which would then remind me that I need to clean all of my rings and other jewelry with the silver cleaner that is located next to the nail polish remover and then that I need to sort it all and neaten up my jewelry box because it's not like I have anything better to do.  Hmmm... priorities.