November 5, 2009

TGIT! (Thank God It’s Thursday!)

Happy Thursday to all of my readers…and to ME! I have been waiting for Thursday to come all week long. During a normal week, I’m counting down the minutes till Friday when I know that my husband will be home for the weekend and I can stay up extra late that night (10:30pm!) because there is a very good chance that if I’m really nice to him (meaning that I don’t kick him more than three times in the middle of the night for snoring), he’ll let me sleep in the next morning and get up with the butt scratcher. This week however, I have anticipated Thursday way more than Friday because tonight is DATE NIGHT!

For all you parents out there, I know that I don’t need to stress the importance of date night. There is just a general understanding that getting a night out to yourselves, completely free of the kiddos, is just absolutely essential for the well-being of your marriage. I won’t go into too much depth here, but the bottom line is that if your life revolves completely 100% around your children and you don’t make time to be a “couple” once in a while, then you are really headed down a bumpy road. Afterall, the whole reason that those kids exist is because at one point or another, you two were completely head-over-heels for each other and felt the need to fill this world with little mini-versions of yourselves. What better example of a good relationship can you set for your little ones than to show them that Mommy and Daddy enjoy spending time together alone? I mean, I see these mothers out there who just cannot fathom being away from their children for a few MINUTES, let alone a few HOURS, or dare I even say it…an OVERNIGHT!! Ok, the overnight vacay is a whole other topic which I will cover at a later date, but basically I just want to remove the veil from these poor women’s eyes so that they can see that leaving their kids to indulge in a little adult time is NOT a crime and that they will be better parents after they decompress a little. Nuff said about that!

This morning I was almost late to preschool because I realized that they may be going outside on this beautiful Fall morning, which means my little man will probably require a coat. I remembered that in the November school newsletter, they had it in captial letters that “ALL JACKETS/COATS MUST BE LABELED WITH YOUR CHILD’S NAME!” In a minor panic, I realized that there was no trace of a name inside my son’s coat. I only had about a minute and a half to think of a solution to this demand. I frantically started searching for a permanent marker to write his name in the back of his coat. Thankfully, I found it right before I almost stapled a business card to the inside. Desperate times call for desperate measures! This little setback and all of the little setbacks that happen during my hectic days just add to the reasons why I need this date night so bad.

Driving home from dropping my little guy off at school, I thought about how much my date nights have changed since I had a child. When my now-husband and I were first dating, he was living in Denver and I was in Tennessee. We did the whole long-distance thing for an entire year, which is probably why he got blind-sided and proposed to me. Had we been in the same city, I don’t know if he would’ve been able to put up with my crap. Anyway, on weekends when I would fly out to see him or vice versa, the red carpet was rolled out and we went ALL OUT for date night. Every night was date night at that point! I would get all gussied up each and every evening as he took me from restaurant to restaurant and totally wined and dined me. It was during that year that we started to get a little knowledge of fine wines, became great American steakhouse connoisseurs, and even found ourselves in the cigar lounge of those steakhouses enjoying a nice after-dinner stogie once in a while.

After we were married and I was finally living in Denver, we kept up with our whole “every night is date night” thing until we bought our first house. After that, things calmed down a LOT. There is just something about owning your first home that makes you want to play Suzy-homemaker and cook a nice, hot meal every night, curl up in front of the fireplace with a bottle of wine, cuddle, hold hands, and stare into each other’s eyes, etc. I’m gagging on my 3rd cup of coffee as I write this. We were holed up in that house during the final kid-free year of our lives with all the hot spots of downtown Denver only a light-rail train ride away! If I could travel back in time and tell myself all of the little secrets I know now about what was going to happen to my life after my son arrived, I’d probably have drug us out of that house each and every single night.

My hubby and I had our first official “child date night” about six weeks after the birth of our son. My parents were in town, and they really wanted some alone time with the bundle and assured us that “everything would be fine” and to go out, have a nice dinner and enjoy ourselves. The first time you leave your newborn baby is comparable to jumping off a cliff. It doesn’t matter who you leave that baby with, whether it be your parents, siblings, babysitter, etc., it is just as difficult and just as terrifying. You feel completely guilty for leaving your brand new little addition in order to steal a few minutes to yourselves, and you are also just convinced that no one else on the face of the earth can possibly care for your child as well as you can. We set our worries aside and went out to eat for our first date night at one of our favorite restaurants at the local mall. It was the about the most stressful dinner either one of us has ever had in our lives. We literally scarfed down the food, and hurried back home to the bundle as fast as we could. You know what? The bundle was fast asleep. In fact, he’d been fast asleep the entire time and didn’t even know and honestly wouldn’t have even cared that we were gone. He probably would’ve been thrilled to have those warm grandparent arms around him. Arms that weren’t drenched in “what the hell happened to my life” tears courtesy of his sleep-deprived mother. Damn! Why didn’t I have dessert that night?

The good news is that once you get that first “child date night” under your belt, each and every date night after that just keeps getting easier and easier. You get more and more used to leaving your child and you actually start to have FUN again! Who’d a thunk it? My husband and I are officially at the point where we absolutely jump on the opportunity every time the grandparents offer to keep our son so that we can go out and enjoy ourselves. Both sets of grandparents live out of town, so honestly, when they come to visit, they barely make it through the door before we are high-tailing it out of there to head to one of our favorite watering holes.

Since the grandparents aren’t here very often, we usually turn to our babysitter. I took a chance on a Craig’s List ad about two years ago and it was absolutely one of the smartest moves I’ve ever made. I totally hit the jackpot with the girl who watches our son. Finding someone other than a family member to trust with your kid is a nearly impossible task. There are just so many nut-jobs out there in this day and age, and somehow I stumbled upon the one-in-a-million babysitter. I guard her number with my life. Ok, maybe if one of my “lifer” friends was in a real jam I’d consider lending it to them, but I’d have to get something in writing saying that they would only use it in case of emergencies and would promise not to steal her from me. I still get worried that she will get married someday and leave me, but for now I’m just enjoying every night out I can get.

On to tonight’s big excursion. The hubster and I are getting really wild and meeting for dinner and then…get this one…we’re going to a MOVIE!! I probably won’t have time to get too “gussied up.” I mean, this morning I had the option of either enjoying one more cup of coffee or jumping in the shower. I chose the coffee. I did manage to put some make-up on, and I did shower and wash my hair yesterday, so it’s not a total bust. Maybe if I pull the hair back into a ponytail and re-do the make-up before I go, hubby will still catch a small glimpse of the hot chick that he married. And maybe if I get lucky, he’ll reach for my hand in the popcorn bucket.

The Mommyologist’s Last Word: To any yet-to-have-kids girls out there who keep saying, “We really need to try that new place that opened up around the corner!”, all I can say is “GO NOW, GO TONIGHT!” And let us mommies who live vicariously through you yet-to-be-mommies know all the steamy details.

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Posted Under: babysitter, date night
November 4, 2009

Lucky Number Seven

At 6:15am this morning, I literally jumped and sat straight up in my bed after being awakened by my three and half year old whimpering, “I need to go pee-pee!” over the baby monitor. He repeated this phrase a few times before I realized that I was in fact awake and not still dreaming. I made my way down the hall to his room, got him out of bed and led him into his bathroom. He lifted the lid to the toilet, pulled his pants down, got up on his tippie toes, and proceeded to do his business, lift up the back of his shirt, and scratch his butt. I had to laugh, because he does this every single time he takes a pee. No one taught him to do this. I guess some gender traits are just innate!

After he finished, I ushered him back into his room and told him that he had to go back to sleep until 7:00am. Seven has become the magic number in our household. Ask any one of my friends and they will tell you that my kid has not exactly been the best sleeper in the world. As an infant, he was up at least two to three times a night for the first few months. Granted, things improved once I took the advice of a dear family friend and put a tablespoon of rice cereal in his nighttime bottle. My mother had told me to try that little trick about a hundred times, but for whatever reason it is just so much easier to take advice from someone other than your mother. You would think that the fact that she raised me and helped me become the happy and perfectly healthy adult that I am today would have me jumping all over any piece of advice she gave, but no…I had to hear it from one of our good friends to finally listen. In talking to other new mommies, I’ve found that this is pretty much the trend.

After I put that cereal in my son’s bottle, he started sleeping through the night, but not on a consistent basis. Some nights just went way better than others, as is typical for most babies. I stress the “most” part because there are those less than 1% of mothers out there who have babies who actually sleep like normal human beings. You know what I have to say to these women? “GOOD FOR YOU HONEY!” Now shut the hell up about it before you make the other 99.9999 % of women out there feel like their babies are abnormal and that they are doing something wrong. They AREN’T. You just happen to have a prize winner of a baby. Oh yeah, and get your sleep now while you still can, because if the laws of fairness are true, your next little perfectionist will come out with horns.

I can remember one particular night while we were living in Denver. My son was probably around two or three months old, and I was using those Playtex bottles with the plastic liners. My little one woke up at about three in the morning crying for a bottle, and so I went into his bathroom, mixed the formula up, poured it into the liner, warmed up the bottle, and all while my poor baby was SCREAMING for that milk. I finally got it warmed up, took it into his bedroom and assured him that “Mama was here!”, and then I went to push the air out of the liner. For those of you who haven’t used bottles with liners, you have to stick your fingers on the bottom and lightly push up on them in order to get any excess air out of the milk. Usually the air pushes right out without a problem. Not that night. This time, the liner felt unusually hard to push. What did I do? I pushed up on it HARDER. The next thing I knew, the nipple of the bottle popped off, and I literally had a geyser of Nestle Good Start formula exploding all over me and my baby’s room. Of course, my poor baby is screaming even LOUDER at this point, and now I was too. I cleaned up the mess the best I could, all the while wailing about how exhausted I was and having no idea how in the hell I was going to get through that night. I went back into the bathroom and started the process again of fixing a nice, warm bottle to finally appease my poor baby. I was smart this time and let the air out of the liner while still in the bathroom…just in case it exploded again. This time it worked great and I went back into my child’s room to feed it to him and rock him back to sleep. TOO LATE MAMA! In all the commotion, he must have decided that he was sick and tired of waiting on me to fix that bottle, so he went back to sleep. I should’ve been ticked off at this point, but I was just so thrilled to have a sleeping baby that I ran back to my own room to get some z’s.

Around 11 months old, things started to get a little more routine and my husband and I were finally getting some decent sleep. I think I even started fixing my hair in the morning again instead of just saying, “f!*# it” and pulling it back into a messy ponytail, which was all I could manage after only a few hours of sleep. Things were certainly looking up! Then our little bundle cut his first tooth. That was the day that things really went in the crapper. For the next two-and-a-half years, the little angel was awake and ready to go EVERY SINGLE MORNING at around 4:30am. Ok, 5:00am on a really good day. Forget fixing my hair. I was lucky if I remembered to wipe the zit cream off my face in the morning. I remember distinctly getting up each day (or was that considered the middle of the night?) with him, coming downstairs, plopping him on the couch in front of Playhouse Disney, and then running to the front window to find every single house up and down our street PITCH black. My neighbor across the street had just had a baby…and there was not ONE light on in HER house! How was it that she had a newborn sleeping through the night and my little toddler was wide awake at 4:30am?? All I wanted to do every single morning was get in my car and drive up and down our street LAYING on the horn the whole way. If I was going to be up, I thought that everyone should be awake to share in the fun. After deciding that waking up the rest of the neighborhood probably wouldn’t win me any popularity contests, I would reluctantly go make my first of about five cups of coffee, then go sit down on the couch with my son and try to remind myself that “this too shall pass.”

My little man finally cut his last tooth right before he turned three years old, and I was right. The up-all-night and up-way-too-early phases did indeed pass. I also realized that he was now old enough to recognize numbers. Just for laughs, I put a digital clock in his room and told him that he could not get out of his bed in the morning until the first number on that clock was a seven. To mine and my husband’s complete delight, it WORKED! I finally sleep till seven o’clock on most mornings and will never take my sleep for granted ever again. I think that I more than paid my dues in that department, and I deserve every single solitary hour of slumber that I get! And yes, my little butt scratcher got right back in his bed after that 6:15 pee emergency today and slept until 7:30am. Life is good.

The Mommyologist’s Last Word: To any pregnant ladies or mothers of newborns out there, I cannot stress this enough: “SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS!” Oh yeah, and don’t use bottles with those plastic liners.

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Posted Under: bottles, formula, rice cereal, sleep, sleeplessness
November 3, 2009

Survival of the Fittest

It’s Tuesday morning and I’ve just finished eating breakfast with my son. On my menu today? I had my usual scrambled egg whites with salsa, (remember I’ve cut wheat, dairy, sugar, and now alcohol). On my son’s menu? I fixed him some of those same scrambled egg whites with a little melted American cheese, which he will eat about 5 times out of 10. I probably could’ve gotten him to eat them this morning if I hadn’t also included leftover sour cream coffee cake from Rein’s deli on his plate. Any idiot parent knows that if you want your kid to consume healthy foods, then you serve just that and nothing else. You don’t make your child a separate meal or substitute any menu items from what the rest of the family is having. If they don’t like it, then they just don’t eat. Tell that to a mommy whose kid has about three items that he will actually ingest on any given day of the year! My son’s diet mainly consists of McDonald’s chicken nugget happy meals with apple dippers (he gags on french fries), rolls or bread of any sort, and peanut butter. Don’t even get me started on the peanut butter because I know that I’m going to be up a creek with no paddle once he enters the public school system.

As I watched my little boy pick around the egg whites in order to make sure he got every last bit of the “sugary pieces” of coffee cake, (meaning the crusty sugar coated top part), I thought about how there are so many things I do as a parent that I SWORE up and down I would NEVER do when I had children. You know the high-and-mighty pregnant chick who thinks she has a perfectly well thought out agenda for how each and every day of her baby’s first 18 years of life will go? Yeah, that was me too. And if that is you right now, take my advice and get any preconceived notions about parenthood out of your head immediately. Trust me, this will save you a lot of days spent crying on the couch wondering what the hell happened to your foolproof plan.

When I was pregnant with my son, I used to run around preaching to everyone who would listen about how much I hated pacifiers and how there was just “no way in hell” that my baby would ever have one. I was convinced that pacifiers were an absolute “crutch” and that if a new baby was never introduced to one, then he/she would never know the difference. As I was reading one of the hundred or so baby and parenting books that had been given to me as a gift, I got really hooked on the whole concept of “self-soothing” for a baby. My baby would NOT need that pacifier and he (we knew we were having a boy at this point) would do just fine if I left him in the crib, let him “cry it out” and learn the technique of “self-soothing.” It is at this point that I will advise every pregnant woman reading this to throw out each and every single baby book that you were given aside from “What to Expect While You’re Expecting.” Reading too many of these other books written by “experts” may cause you to wind up in a mental institution after your bundle arrives.

My son was a pretty calm baby when we first brought him home from the hospital. He really only cried when he needed to be fed or changed. My husband and I were convinced that we had a real winner on our hands! I remember bragging about my newborn a bit…afterall, we were almost three weeks into our journey as parents and we were still pacifier-free! The little bugger must have understood what we were saying and thought to himself, “I’ll show you who is in charge around here!” Suddenly, out of nowhere, our perfect little angel was screaming at the top of his lungs from about 7pm to 10pm every single night. We tried everything. We walked him up and down the halls. We rocked him. I tried the whole “Shh Shh Shh” thing while bouncing up and down that my mother had learned from her grandmother and had taught me. I tried leaving him in the crib to “self-soothe” and that about turned me into a maniac. NOTHING was working.

Someone had given us a few of those forbidden items known as pacifiers for a baby shower gift. In a desperate attempt to save our sanity, my hubby looked at me on one of these evenings of terror and said, “WHERE THE HELL IS THAT THING?” It was hidden away in one of our kitchen cabinets. I could barely hear him over all the racket, but I reluctantly went to the cabinet, took the item out of the package, washed it in boiling hot water, cooled it off, and then decided that I was at my wit’s end and would give it a shot. I popped that sucker into my baby’s mouth and the next thing I knew, there was SILENCE. Yes, SILENCE. Well, maybe there was a little bit of noise from him sucking the finish off that thing, but other than that it was completely quiet.

That was the moment when all my good intentions went straight out the door. My baby was now a “paci-baby.” And you know what? I didn’t CARE! My husband and I did what we HAD to for our survival. Having a newborn completely turns your world upside down. If you focus for too long on trying to do what the “experts” say is right, then you will never get out alive! It was probably just as well that I learned this lesson earlier than most. I have done my best to apply it to other aspects of parenting, including the whole food issue. Granted, there are some kids out there who are phenomenal eaters and will eat anything you put in front of them. These kids are usually accompanied by mothers who love to brag about this to their other mom-friends who have McDonalds loving kids like mine. You know what I say to them? “KISS MY GRITS!” My kid may live on Bertucci’s rolls and chicken nuggets most days of the week…he also watches more TV than he probably should and had that pacifier until he was three years old (gasp!), but you know what? He is happy, and SO well-adjusted and I have better things to do with my time than worry about what he is going to eat for dinner that night. I am just thrilled if he eats at all! I have learned what works for ME and MY family and OUR survival. Don’t worry missy, your kid will give you grief in some other way down the road! And when he/she does, I hope that you learn the concept of “survival of the fittest!” As long as you love your child with all your heart and he/she is happy and healthy, then you are doing the RIGHT THING. Being a good parent doesn’t mean being perfect, it means being a survivor!

Ok, enough of my ranting and raving. Now that I’ve successfully finished writing this I need to go give my son the piece of candy out of his Halloween bag that I promised him if he left me alone without interrupting me so I could get this post done.

The Mommyologist’s Last Word: “My son chose a box of junior mints as his little bribery reward. Upon putting the first one into his mouth, he started gagging, proceeded to regurgitate it into my hand, and then started crying that he wanted a “different candy!” It’s official, my son gags on junior mints. Maybe he’ll do better with the milk duds. I rest my case!”

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Posted Under: baby books, food, McDonalds, pacifier, parenting, pregnant, survival
November 2, 2009

The Morning After

As I sit here writing this entry on the day after Halloween, I wonder just how many freakin’ times I am going to have to drive the porcelin bus before I realize and comprehend the fact that I just can’t party like it’s 1999 anymore. Hell, I can’t even party like it’s 2005! That was the year before my son was born, the year that my “party-days” took an irreversible change. The word “party” really has a whole new meaning these days.

I happen to live in one of those great one-in-a-million American neighborhoods where Halloween is truly an all-out event. There are actually plenty of families who don’t live in this neighborhood who drive up the big hill every year so their children can experience a safe night of trick-or-treating without being hit by an egg from a passing car or winding up covered in toilet paper. My neighborhood is the way that every single neighborhood in this country SHOULD be.

This was our second year of doing the whole “group” trick-or-treating thing. A few of my close friends also live up here in fairytale land, so the texting frenzy started between all of us as we chose a time and place for the whole gang to meet up and get the “party” started. The festivities began about 6:30 and we all met in the middle of the street, each family with a wagon in tow. Yes, the main purpose of the wagons is to lug our little tots around from house to house, but the wagons do serve another important purpose. They are our “to-go bars.” Halloween just wouldn’t be complete without a cooler full of booze attached to the back of the wagon. Nobody ever has a problem with our cooler, because they all have coolers hanging from the back of their wagons too. I guess there is just a general understanding up here on the hill that no one questions what is in the cup of any other adult out trick-or-treating with their kids.


We were out an about for an hour and a half or so, and then everyone wound up back at my our house to begin the Halloween “after-party.” As parents, if you want to get everyone together in one place for a good time, in almost every case it has to be an event that you can drag the kids too as well. The odds of everyone being able to get a babysitter on the same night, Halloween none-the-less, are just slim to none. My friends and I figured that Halloween wouldn’t fall on a Saturday again for another seven years, so we might as well go all out and have a big bash, kids and all, after trick-or-treat. We figured the kids would be hyped up on sugar and could stay up a little later and the adults could enjoy some chit-chat and more beverages. I love entertaining and all that jazz, so I was more than happy to offer our house for this shin-dig.

As everyone arrived and I hurriedly got the snacks and indoor bar assembled, the chaos begun. By chaos, I mean a GOOD chaos, so don’t misinterpret me on this one. Just try and picture three little three and-a-half years olds, plus one almost two year old, and one eleven month old tearing around the house like five little tornados. Those little buggers had a ball, but the next morning I awoke to find a leftover sippy cup full of juice in the fireplace and one of our glass pocket style French doors off the hinge. Don’t get me wrong, our party was an absolute blast, but it got me thinking about how much the “party” has changed since we all had kids.

I think that a good example of the big party shift is the difference between what produced a full-blown laughter session at our Halloween party versus one of the parties from my college days.

One particular Halloween party from my college time sticks out in my memories. It was my sophomore year, and I was dating a frat dude at that point. Anyone who has ever dated a frat dude knows that they are all pretty much the same exact guy, and for that reason I don’t need to go into any more explanation on HIM. Ok, back to that Halloween party. There were two distinct incidents that had me absolutely HOWLING with laughter that night. First, my then boyfriend and I were dressed up as M&Ms. He was the blue one and I was the red one. This was a band party, so you couldn’t even hear yourself think let alone yell out someone’s name and have them turn around to hear you. In an effort to get my attention, the blue M&M came up behind me and “goosed” me. There shouldn’t have been an issue here, I mean I WAS dating the guy! The problem was that apparently there was another blond girl dressed as a red M&M at this very same party, and it was her ass that got pinched, not mine. She was mortified and he was too. No….wait a second, this was a frat dude afterall. I think he was probably thrilled that he got to grab more than one tush that night.

On to the second big laugh from that same Halloween party. Sometime later in the night after the big “goosing” mishap, the blue M&M came stomping out of his room in a huff. I asked him what was wrong, and he was all bent out of shape because someone had stolen his beer funnel. Hang on a sec, don’t judge! You know that you funneled your share of beers too! I was a total champ at the funnel. My roomate that year taught me how to do it. I didn’t even need anyone to hold the funnel for me. I had it down to a science. Anyhoo, the poor blue M&M was completely devasated that his beloved funnel had been snatched and this pretty much ruined the night for him. The party was starting to wrap up, so I made my way back across campus to my dorm room. My roomate arrived a few minutes after I did, threw open the door to our room, looked at me and said, “Check out what I stole from the Pong house!!”, and then she pulled a bright pink funnel out of her purse. I am laughing out loud right now just thinking about that moment. We were both SCREAMING at how hysterical it was. Me and the blue M&M broke up a few weeks later after I found out he’d cheated on me with some low-life tramp. And we never did return that funnel. I wonder if my roomate still has it??

As for the comedy of the big Halloween bash from last night? There was no goosing going on, no funneling, there was pretty much no funny business of any kind taking place. You want to know what had us in stitches?? It was when my neighbor across the street realized that I had been calling one of my other neighbors by the WRONG NAME for two and a half years. The poor woman’s name is Ninette, and I had been calling her LIN-ette the whole time we’ve lived here. For whatever reason, we thought this was about the funniest thing we’d ever heard, and so I became the joke of the night. I’ve gone from butt pinching and funnel swapping to being the girl who calls the neighbor by the wrong name and winds up being the hit of the party! Times have changed alright!

Back to the porcelin bus that I was driving this morning. Somehow I just never seem to grasp the concept that if I’m going to have a few cocktails, then I need to actually eat something substantial beforehand to avoid being in the predicament that I found myself in this morning. The hubby and I are going on vacation (ALONE!) in December, so I’ve been trying to get off the five pound layer that I somehow put on between summer and Halloween. For the past week or so, I cut out wheat, dairy, and sugar. I was so proud of the fact that I had made it through all the festivities of Halloween without consuming one piece of candy. Sure, I was down a couple pounds today, but I’m not sure if it was from cutting the sweets or from the fact that I’d just lost everything I’d had to eat or drink in the past 24 hours. At any rate, anyone whose had a good hangover knows that there is only one thing that will really soak up the booze. GREASE! I sent the hubster out for a McDonald’s breakfast value meal this morning. That bacon egg and cheese bagel was about the most delicious thing I’ve tasted in weeks. Then this afternoon I went back and got a cheeseburger and a large fry. We’re getting chinese take-out for dinner. I’ll probably be up about four pounds tomorrow morning. Maybe I should’ve just broken down and had that mini-snickers afterall.

The Mommyologist’s Last Word: “Maybe I should get a red M&M costume next year. It might make for a more interesting party!”

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Posted Under: Halloween, hangover, party
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