Tag Archives: preschoolers

My Son Thinks He Is A Cat.

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Asher is 4.

Four is a magical age, full of excitement, wonder, and pretending to be a kitty cat for 3 weeks straight.

We are in week three — yes, THREE — of Asher impersonating a cat. His favorite past time is watching cat videos and then putting his observations into practice. He uses his paws to bat things around the house. He walks on all fours and perches on top of furniture.

He pretends to be afraid of cucumbers.

He scratches.

Asher

We have long conversations about what activities cats do and do not enjoy. “Cats don’t like to take baths,” Asher insists every night at bath time. “Cats can’t swim.”

“WANNA BET? I had a cat named Wonder who used to swim across our lake,” I tell him. Which is yet another strange-but-true fact from my childhood that seems to grow weirder and weirder the older I get.

One morning I overheard Robbie say “Now, stand up on your hind legs so I can get you dressed,” when he was helping him get ready for school. Hissing followed.

Last week, he rolled around on the grocery store floor while I was paying for our food. I pretended nothing was out of the ordinary, because that’s what mothers who are trying to foster independent, free-thinking, feline wannabes do, right? They just play along. Kind of like I’m doing right meow.

The pooping in the yard thing makes so much more sense now.

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Extraordinary Things.

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Motherhood is getting hit over the head with a plastic bin full of toys, because your child doesn’t know how to ask you to open it like a civilized person.

Motherhood is multiple, over-sized, unapologetic glasses of wine.

It’s earplugs, noise machines, and tiptoeing down the hall; it’s double shots of espresso ordered through a drive-thru because you haven’t had time to buy groceries this week and you are desperate for caffeine, SO STOP YOUR YAMMERING AND GIMME MY COFFEE.

Motherhood is self-sacrifice. Your heart and your mind, your body, your money, your energy and your breath. You pour it all out, everything you have, because you are a mother.

Motherhood is Vicks Vaporub, saline spray, and Kleenex bought in bulk. It’s the feeling of excitement when you see diapers on sale, the joy of finally throwing out an almost-7-year-old Diaper Genie, and the sheer anguish of potty training.

Potty training is a low point.

Motherhood is when you get news that makes your mouth go dry and your chest feel compressed, but you still have to go through the motions and be a mom anyway.

Motherhood can be a real bitch.

Motherhood is painful and uncomfortable from the very start. It is a bloaty, crampy, I’m-fat-and-my-heart-is-outside-of-my-body feeling that never ends. It’s overwhelming, always. It forces you to stretch in ways you never thought possible.

Motherhood makes you grow because you have to.

Motherhood is every joy and pain, the deepest love, the greatest source of hope. It brings us to our knees — in prayer, in suffering, in gratitude, in wonder — because it is worth every ounce of energy that we invest.

Motherhood is extraordinary, because all extraordinary things are hard.

And glorious.

But mostly hard.Joy(If you liked this post, then you should follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!)

Summer Begins and To-Do Lists End.

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I spent the weekend with my family and a long to-do list nagging at the back of my brain.

I’ve allowed myself to get run down in body, mind, and spirit. I’m spent. I have nothing left to give anyone, and every time I look at the mountain of laundry or face another meal time, I just want to cry.

It never ends. None of it ends. It is unending.

It’s hard for me to enjoy my family when I get like this, and I know that to prevent going into this bad place I have to take care of myself. I have to sleep enough and exercise. I have to write. But sometimes, I can’t do those things simply because I’m a mother and the thing about motherhood is that you tend to sacrifice your needs for everyone else.

I never understood it before I found myself holding a painfully full bladder while I helped my son pull his pants up and down and waited as the endless seconds ticked by until he was finished.

The End of the To-Do List (the beginning of Summer 2015.)

“Pretend you are a grown-up. What would you do for the day? First I would wake up and make coffee. I would go to work. Next I would go investigate science. I would show my family. Then I would get my pj’s on and go to sleep.”

Mothers begin a long journey in selflessness the moment they realize that their body is housing another human being, and that human being is going to have thoughts and opinions and will want to eat at inopportune times and will become very upset when you don’t serve him pancakes on the red plate.

That human being might learn how to screech “MOMMY!!!” at frightening volumes and cause you to spend the entire day in fight-or-flight mode.

She might bite.

He might have a temper.

You, the mother, will be forced to adapt. To care for and shape these humans into people of character is no small task. It’s very tiring.

I’ll say it again: IT’S VERY TIRING.

Right now my kids are small and their needs are immediate, so finding time for myself is hard. My days are a constant struggle to cope with it all, still enjoy life, and arrive at the end of the day not hating anyone … including myself.

Tonight I was staring at their uneaten bowls of dinner and thinking about the to-do list I still haven’t started when I realized that the baby was crying in her crib. It took everything in me to stand up. I didn’t want to be needed anymore. I wanted to clock out for the day. And, in yet another act of being a mother, I walked into my daughter’s room anyway.

I didn’t feel like it, but I’m still her mother.

She was relieved to see me. I took a deep breath and picked her up. As we sat in the rocking chair in her room, she laid her head right over my heart and rested against me as I badly sang — half because I really can’t sing, and half because I was trying not to cry.

I never want to forget how it feels to hold my youngest child when she wants to be held. She leans into my body, wrapping her tiny arms around me and tucking herself in. I’ve already forgotten what it felt like to hold the boys when they were this small, and it hasn’t even been that long. OMG, WHAT IS HAPPENING?!

We rocked for an unknown period, and for the umpteenth time since becoming a mother in 2008 I realized that my children give back more to me than I give to them — to-do list be damned.

Which is fitting, since I won’t get much accomplished for the next 2.5 months.

What To-Do List? (Or, the beginning of Summer 2015.)(If you liked this post, then you will LOVE I Still Just Want To Pee Alone! Click here to find out more!)

Where Are My Earplugs?

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Yesterday, I made the grave mistake of looking at the school calendar. The realization of how quickly the school year will end and Summer Break will begin threatened to choke off my air supply.

I wish I could be one of those moms who gleefully await summertime. Those are likely the same moms who do fun activities with their (calm, obedient) children while I frantically try to keep my (energetic, experimental) kids from setting the house on fire. I wish I could be more optimistic and just have fun, but the truth is that I am always on pins and needles waiting for one of them to get seriously injured.

I love my children, but they exhaust me. Does that mean that I’m not cut out for motherhood? I chose to be a stay-at-home-mom. WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?! Am I too uptight? Am I doing it all wrong?

I’m admitting out loud, right now, that motherhood is ass hard. That does not mean it’s as hard as my ass, which isn’t hard at all. This is not a literal statement. I mean to say that IT IS SO HARD THAT THERE ISN’T AN ADEQUATE WORD, SO I ADDED “ASS” IN FRONT OF IT. If you can’t get on board with that, then I don’t know what to do with you.

I make this proclamation after a long stretch of parenting issues that individually aren’t that bad, but added all together at once are just a lot. I’m exhausted. I feel like I have nothing else to give, and yet — there it is, another snot bubble on the horizon. There’s another person who can’t figure out how to get his underwear right side in and needs help because he cannot possibly put his underwear on if they are inside out.

At night, when all of the children are tucked in bed asleep, after the middle child has been taken to the bathroom to pee so he doesn’t have an accident in his bed, and I have spent an adequate amount of time with that strange man who lives in the house with me, I insert my ear plugs and pray that whatever rest I get will be enough to get me through the next day.

Today, when I sunk to a low point and looked at the clock for the umpteenth time to see that it was still not 5 p.m., something snapped me out of it. I got a moment of beauty.

Our baby, the same one who tries to stick her head in the oven on an almost-daily basis, learned how to stack blocks.

And I was there to see it.

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So yes, I would be lying if all I did was talk about the beauty of motherhood. It’s not mostly beautiful. It’s mostly painful and frustrating and uncomfortable and scary and tiring, with moments of beauty sprinkled in — just enough to make it worth it, but not so much that it’s easy.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

The best part about being a mom is that those sprinkles are all you really need to push you to the next level. My little block-stacker spends most of her time undoing everything I’ve done: she puts important mail in the trash, pulls clothes out of baskets and contents out of cabinets, and tries to systemically empty every box and bin in the house. But damnit, SHE CAN STACK.

I’m a proud, exhausted mama. Now … where are my earplugs?

Diagnosis: Mother.

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Today I realized that my 3-year-old isn’t as attached to his special blanket anymore. I realized that I have never rocked my 21-month-old to sleep, because she is the third child and in this house, the third child gets a bedtime kiss and dumped into her crib without ceremony.

Now that my oldest eschews rocking and my middle only lets me do it sometimes, I WANT TO ROCK SOMEONE BEFORE BED, DAMN IT.

Motherhood makes me feel like a crazy person. In fact, I am a crazy person.

To prove my point, I have created a visual aid using a family picture of us from October 2012, two months after The Great Negotiation.

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Because everything about this picture screams “WE NEED MORE CHILDREN!”

What’s The Great Negotiation? That was the time I spent months trying to convince my poor husband that I wasn’t done having children and we needed more, despite the fact that we were struggling on one income and had two very challenging boys — one of whom was not quite a year old. I felt like we totally needed to throw one more baby into the mix. That made sense to me.

This is how I know that mothers have something deeply, psychologically wrong with them.

The Great Negotiation took place during date night at Outback Steakhouse. My husband eventually wore down and said “FINE. But I have to get a vasectomy before the baby is born.” And I said, “FINE. I’m ordering a beer.”

Less than a year later, our daughter was born.

Less than a year after that, I regretted allowing the vasectomy. Because I have a mental illness.

It’s called Mother.

Overwhelmed.

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Sometimes, like now, I find myself completely overwhelmed with my life and I wonder if something is wrong with me. Why can’t I just chill out and not care about the mountain of laundry shoved in my closet or the toothpaste that got squeezed all over the kid’s bathroom?

I have piles of paperwork-slash-multiple writing projects accumulating all over the house, and just when I get started on one, someone comes along and pushes the papers to the floor, poops their pants, or starts yanking on the cord of my laptop.

Robbie will look at me curiously and throw out comments like, why are you so grumpy? He says that he makes these statements hoping that it will, and I quote, “snap me out of my mood.” I’ll let you draw your own conclusion about how well that works.

 

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Today we all got dressed for church and the children sat nicely on the couch in a row and definitely did not smack each other in the face while they waited for me to take their picture. Asher also did not get upset because his shirt was touching him. He was calm and completely rational.

Maverick listened to all of my instructions and did not squeeze his little sister until she started screaming. And she most certainly did not jerk the bow out of her hair multiple times.

So yes, excellent question, Robbie. Why AM I so grumpy?! Certainly not from tiredness. Since you’re home to watch the kids, maybe I’ll take a little walk and think it over … I’ll come back when I have it all figured out.

I may be gone awhile.