Brand New Pain.

“She’s not brand new anymore, she’s just another kid!”

You love her more because she’s brand new and I’m not brand new anymore.

Not brand new. That’s what my 5 yr old shouted as we drove home from Chapters where we left a toy behind because the line was too long.

It took this moment of frustration and fatigue for her true feelings about being the eldest of three girls to come out to me.  My heart fell to my knees and my stomach fell clear out of me. Even her sister knew that this was big and to keep quiet and she’s just 3 yrs old.

I told her the only thing I could. That she was right. That her baby sister is just a kid, not a brand new baby anymore. And sad as I felt about the realization that my first born was hurting, I was equally saddened by the realization that  each will experience similar feelings of being loved-less than the others.

If it’s an exaggeration to say that every parenting book written tells you not to tell a child that you love them more I’d be surprised. My theory when I had my first child was that I would only love her that way. It was inconceivable to me that I could actually love more than one child. Then my second was born and I realized that just as she had grown in my body, so too there grew within my heart another little heart just for her.  I’ve said it repeatedly to all of them, you don’t share my love, I have a heart in my heart that belongs to just you – it’s for you and me and no one else and you don’t have to ever share my love.

And today I learned that some little ones need more. They need you to love them more because love leeches out of them faster than it might another child and their account of love needs to be filled more often, in more ways.

After getting her sisters out of the car I took a moment to place my hand on her heart and say:

You, my dear, are my first daughter. You made me my favourite thing to be: a mommy. I have known you the longest and I love the most and each day that passes I love you more because each day I know you more; and I will find a million ways to show you each and every day just how much I do love you and always, always, always will no matter how many brand new people come into our family.

And as her little soul seemed to expand and her body appeared to relax, I glanced up to heaven and said a silent prayer that I could heal the pain by being more mindful of my daughters need for loving reminders that no matter which brand new person is around, she doesn’t shine any less brightly.

A.

What to really expect when you’re expecting

Go for it. Buy the cutesy pastel coloured pregnancy books. But read this short little ditty too.  It’s high time you knew what to really expect when you’re expecting- especially past month 5 – as you embark on this journey.

It all starts sweetly enough….

Month One

1. You likely won’t know you’re “in the family way” unless you’ve been peeing on a test since the day you had sex. So you’ll just feel sluggish and lazy and people will say, “damn, you’re lazy this week!”

2. You’ll find that your nose involuntarily scrunches at certain foods and you’ll have no idea why.

Month Two

1. You’ll fall asleep all over yourself.  Anywhere, all the time, no matter what.

2. You’ll likely experience nausea a week or two into this month.

3. You’ll continue to scrunch your nose, but now you’ll know why and you’ll be uber elated or cussing.

Month Three

1. You’re not fitting into your pants but you’re not really showing so you’ll just look fat. That’s right, don’t bother sticking your stomach out to “seem” more pregnant than you really are. That will come soon enough…at which point you’ll be sucking your stomach in so that people can say “wow, really? You don’t look 5 months pregnant!”.

2. You’ll buy your first pair of maternity pants. If you’re knew to this, you’ll also buy just about everything the store happens to sell. You’ll gleefully fill in your name, email, social security number and blood type when asked for it because you could win a $50 gift card if you spend $100 or more the next time you shop at the same store.  And do you know why you will do this and check off “YES!” to receiving special promotions from partners? Because if you fill in that little card, you get to also write in that you’re having a baby on a specific date. You’ll get to write that it’s your first…you’ll practically pee yourself from the sheer excitement.

If you’re a pro, you’ll buy the one pair that will take you from work to dinner and two top’s max and when that overly friendly sap at the store offers you the deal for next time just by filling in the form, you will stare her down with that “do I look new to this?” look you’ll have naturally cultivated after receiving call after call and parcel after parcel of unwanted crap at home because you didn’t know better than to fill in the form that first time.

3. You’ll browse baby things here and there now that your head isn’t framed by the toilet and if you’re a first timer, you will buy a bevy of books on the subject of being pregnant, eating right when pregnant, exercising when pregnant, having sex while pregnant (in month 7 you’ll be seeking out that book on how to tell your husband he’d have more luck convincing a nun to have sex), naming your baby, baby proofing, and what gear you must, must, must, must have.

Month Four

1. You’ll sign up for every permutation of prenatal class there is and then only attend about 40%-60% of the sessions. Unless they were reaaally expensive. The lesson here is of course, spend a lot of money to ensure you go, or alternately, go for the cheapy classes so you don’t feel as bad for blowing them off to eat your way through the evening.

2. You’ll feel pretty darn great and excited and you’ll look good too unless you’ve been indulging in all the chocolate and fries you’ve been craving.

Month Five

This month is the same as month four. Read that one again.

Month Six

1. You’ll be aware that you should have been doing kegels at this point. You’ll also notice that your thighs and ass are rather rounded.

2. You’ll begin to think about the nursery and what you’ll need to bring baby home in. You’ll shop around for strollers, debating with yourself over the delux version – because your baby deserves the prettiest/coolest/most novel stroller, car seat, high chair, crib – or the model that does what it needs to do and has a big basket underneath without the fancy price tag. GO WITH THE BIG BASKET STROLLER. Go with the lightest stroller you can find. Go with the one that folds umbrella style so that you can actually fit it and other things in your trunk. In fact, don’t buy a stroller without discussing this with me first!

Month Seven

1. Your belly will look a little less cute a whole lot more, WTF?  Even the maternity clothes won’t be so cute anymore and if you are among the lucky ladies who have no choice but to ‘let ‘em rip‘ the smell won’t embarrass you anymore. You’ll just shrug and tell people to walk away if they don’t like it.

2. You’ll be happy the day of delivery is coming and probably fend of the occasional panic attack if you’re prone to them. Your husband will start to stress as he realizes that a) he’s now officially a family man in the making, b) he’ll have another mouth to feed, c) you’re going to continue to be a bitch for another two months and then lead him through the tango of post-postpartum depression.

Month Eight

1. You’ll pee your pants each time you cough, sneeze and sometimes – just for the fun of it – simply for shifting position.

2. You’ll find that the baby effectively kicks you out of your own body and takes over. You will be able to identify personally with every alien movie wherein an alien bursts from the midsection of a human.  Those little “Awwwww”‘s you used to let out in month 5 and 6 whenever the baby moved or kicked will turn into “cut it out!” as you force a little foot, elbow or knee back “inside”.

3. Your husband or partner will become a good for nothing piece of sh-t (except my husband, who still rocks*) who did this to you and deserves all your rage…so you won’t feel badly for yelling, complaining, or being generally short tempered. Come to think of it, anyone who does anything that is not precisely as you would like it to be will be entirely at fault for said egregious action. Poor, poor you, dealing with these stupid people.

* A word about my husband. I’ve had the flu for over two weeks and before that experienced the torture of a dislocated and rotated pelvis which had me bed ridden for three weeks. This means that for essentially the last 5 weeks my husband, Al, has had to take over a TON of stuff with the girls, the house, work, the dog, feeding us and getting everyone where they need to be when they need to be there. So while I am within my god-given right to be awful given that I am 8 months pregnant with the flu, a sinus infection, and a still painful pelvis…I have to give it to him. He’s been a champ and I love him. But don’t tell him because he may use this against me somehow at sometime in our marriage.

Month Nine

[I probably ought to disclaim that I hate this month, so the tone may be more aggressive here. When you've hit this month you'll know why]

1. By now you may have hemorrhoids (that’s when a piece of your lower intestine or bowl – feel free to correct me) hangs out of your ass.

2. You won’t see your vijayjay which means you can’t groom for the big day so someone will have to do it for you. This is more important than you think.  On the day you deliver, everyone will have stared at your lady parts before the delivery is through – the nurses, residents, students, your doctor or whatever doctor was on call and hell even the janitor if they happened to come in to remove the trash from your room.  Your only saving grace will be to look like you’ve got at least something put together as your face contorts in pain and you cuss everyone around you. So go get groomed. Besides, if you tear you’ll want as clean an area down there as possible AND when you bleed for weeks afterward, the clean up is muuuuuuch nicer if you don’t have curdled blood in your public hair.

On that note, I leave you to find a lovely lady who’ll do a Brazilian and have a great sense of humour while doing it.

A.

Blow it out

Sucking and blowing and all that jazz.  Sounds fun, right?

More than fun, it’s imperative. Life affirming behaviour that you will be grateful to do when you’re congested.  Of course the sucking and blowing I’m referring to involves saline solution, a squeeze bottle…uh…wait. Perhaps I need to be clearer here.

Blowing your nose and sucking up saline water – again all about the nose -  in order to clear your sinuses is what I’m talking about.

Because as if the sinus infection/flu wasn’t bad enough, if you’ve had a kid or more, you get the added bonus of most likely wetting your pants anytime you cough or sneeze.   If you are 8 months pregnant with a flu/sinus infection and you sneeze, cough or basically shift position you will as a matter of course wet your pants – don’t talk to me about kegels – and know that you’re the reason I am sharing my pearls of wisdom.

There are few things you can take that are safe during pregnancy. Everything here you can do/use, pay particular attention to point #6.

So here is how you can alleviate your painful flu/sinus symptoms and get better sooner:

[Do note that I am not a doctor or health care practitioner of any kind that any advice/suggestions/tips you read here are not intended to replace the care you are given by the doctor of your choosing. I'm just a mom following the advice of a plethora of other moms who's evidence of success is purely anecdotal].

Okay, with that out of the way, are you ready?

1. When you START to feel like you are coming down with something, whip out your neti pot or nasal bottle irrigation system as I like to call it and start doing multiple “rinses” throughout the day. I don’t care where you are – at the office, in the car, do it! You will hate you for not doing it if you get sicker. Don’t know what a neti pot is?

This is a neti pot. The one above is the model I have. You can find any number of different styles and you can buy them at any pharmacy.  The idea is that the warm water is poured into one nostril and (eventually) drips out the other nostril. Want to see it in action?

Or, how about neti-ing as a group? Because you know, why would you want to drip snot out of your face in private?

2. If you irrigated yourself as per step one and still got sick, bummer.  Double or triple (as per my naturopath whom I adore and am still heart broken over her move to Chicago) your Vitamin C intake. No more than 3000 mg per day until your stool (that’s poop) is soft.

When it softens it indicates that you’ve had enough and cut it back down to 1000 mg daily until you’re better. Other supplements that boost your immune system are: zinc. And, Heel, a naturopathic medicine company makes three cold/flu/sinus remedies that’ll knock your socks off. You can learn more about them here, most health food or natural health centers worth their while carry the line. This was my arsenal for attacking this bout of flu/sinus grossness:

This is for flu/cold symptoms.                 This is for sinus/rhinitis etc.

3. Steam your face over a pot of hot water – do not burn yourself, that would just suck even more – to loosen the mucous stuck in your face. Blow your nose and wash your hands. In fact wash your hands or at least sanitize them every time you touch your face.

4. DO NOT consume Dairy. It aggravates your mucous membrane making it worse. No: milk, cream, yogurt, ice cream, cheese of any kind.

5. Take a lemon. Squeeze the juice into a glass and gargle with some of it. The rest of it, swallow (again, only swallow if you have not gargled with it, want to be clear here). If it’s too much for you to tolerate, add some warm water and honey to sweeten.

6. Moan and complain until friends and family bring you soup, pick up your kids and do laundry. If your husband is worth his salt, he’ll fill in the gaps and give you a much needed reprise so that you can recuperate. My husband is not available for sharing. He’s mine, allllll mine.  Ask someone else.

Feel well,

A.

Terror in Titty Town?

My cervix may be far from D day but my brain is not. I can’t seem to turn my thoughts away from the subject of boobs. Nursing. Nipples….more specifically pain and cracked nipples.

This is a very brief tale of woe of my initiation into breastfeeding and then a how to for doing it differently.

Learning to nurse Naya was excruciating.  She showed off for the nurses when they came in to help us start with latching and nursing at the hospital and then decided she wasn’t going to put the same effort into nursing at home.

My biggest mistake? When she latched on and it hurt, I used to rip her off of my breast. Then I’d let her fumble about as if she would know what to do on her own and got frustrated when it didn’t work…ending in yet another bad latch and yes, another ripping off.

You can imagine how long it took and how much pain and suffering we both endured. Another hugely painful mistake? Not using nipple cream after each nursing session while I healed.

God help me, I may have let her nurse through cotton on a couple of occasions because I swore my nipple would actually get torn off if I tried to remove the pad any more than I already had.

My mom, who didn’t nurse either my sister or myself repeatedly urged me to switch to a bottle and seemed both perplexed and annoyed that I insisted on keeping at it.

Like everything else that is part of becoming a parent, there is a huge learning curve involved.  Breastfeeding is something that needs to be learned to do.

It is as natural as having sex, but don’t go trying to tell me you got that perfect your first time out…or in…or out…you get the picture.

I was determined and in the end emerged victorious and proud because instead of surrendering I remained true to my belief that breast is best and found the way to do it. Naya and I suffered through three weeks of toe curling, tears down my face pain and then it was sweet and simple slurping from them on. She nursed until she was 11 months old.

With Sienna, I learned what it meant to experience a blocked duct. And I learned that to open said blocked duct when the warm shower massage doesn’t cut it involves a Dr. repeatedly pricking your nipple with a needle. Sound painful?  Know that it’s not nearly as painful as the blocked duct is. She nursed until she was 13 months old.

A word on pumping milk and using a bottle: if you can do it, power to you. I’m envious and happy for you all at once. I could likely get more milk out of my elbow than I ever managed to pump out of either breast. I knew the girls were nourished because they were thriving and growing, but if the piddly 1 oz of milk mocking me from the bottom of that little bottle where to be used as any kind of gauge, malnutrition would have been assumed. And that’s after over an hour of pumping with a Medela electric pump at the prime time of day to pump.

I’m over that now and relieved that Naya’s first words weren’t cusses. They easily could have been.

So with baby three, I thought it would be useful to remind myself and nursing mom’s everywhere about resources to get you – or keep you – on track with breastfeeding.

1) Be in the know.

There is a plethora of breastfeeding support to be found locally and online. If you’re a surfer girl, Breastfeeding.com, it’s a good place to begin as it has articles, forums and a fairly comprehensive Q&A with real and useful replies. For hands on, person to person information or support, ask your local hospital or health clinic if they know of groups or go online and search for “breast feeding support groups”.

You’ll find that there are probably a few organized groups where you can find other moms and get the information and support you seek.  Conduct a search for “Nursing Consultant” to find specialists who can come to you or answer your questions by phone.

Another phenomenal resource? Local or online mom’s groups or social groups for mom’s with babies and toddlers. Not only are you likely to get allll the best practical information, but a commiserating ear as well.

2) Recognize the signs that you need a pair of trained eyes on your boobs.

Hot and often red areas, tenderness or full on pain that makes you want to walk about topless everywhere, hard areas or masses. Get checked out. Call your GP, a lactation consultant, or walk into a clinic for assistance. This is important, can be serious, and trained help will significantly alleviate the issue and your nerves.

3) Creams/lubes & homeopathic remedies.

Taken orally or applied to the nipple aid in the healing of the skin if it gets sore, raw or down right cracked as you and your baby learn to nurse together. Where to get good stuff? Visit your local health store or nursing center.

Mom-centric cafe’s servicing mom’s with young babies often carry a couple of lines of better known and great quality options of lotions that are safe to use while nursing.

A brand I found useful in keeping the breast pad from sticking as I healed between nursing is Lanolin Breast feeding cream by Lansinoh. Another is Bag Balm. That’s right. Bag Balm…for udders. Shut up, it works look for the little green and red square tin.

Here’s hoping you can avoid a visit through titty town terror. Enjoy breastfeeding!

A.

Household Tips & Tricks

I stumbled onto a post with tips and given that lately I’m all about the tips – those nuggets of wisdom intended to ease my life, I wanted to post it because I picked up some new ideas that liked it a lot.

So here it is, a list of tips compiled and unattributable as it seems the author is unknown. I’ve kept the tips I liked most, I’ll credit Ana with the list since she posted it and you can find her complete list of found tips in her post.

Know of others? Add them to the comments.

1. Stuff a miniature marshmallow in the bottom  of a sugar cone to prevent ice cream drip.
2. To keep potatoes from budding, place an apple in the bag with the potatoes.
3. To prevent egg shells form cracking, add a pinch of salt to the water before hard-boiling.
4. To determine whether an egg is fresh, immerse in a pan of cool, salted water. If it sinks, it’s fresh, but if it floats, throw it away.
5. When boiling corn on the cob, add a pinch of sugar to help bring out the corn’s natural sweetness.
6. Run your hands under cold water before pressing Rice Krispies treats in the pan and the marshmallow won’t stick to your fingers.
7. To easily remove burnt on food from your skillet, simply add a drop or two of dish soap and enough water to cover bottom of pan, and bring to a boil on stove-top.
8. When a cake recipe calls for flouring the baking pan, use a bit of the dry cake mix instead and there won’t be any white mess on the outside of the cake.
9. If you accidently over-salt a dish while it’s still cooking, drop in a peeled potato and it will absorb the excess salt for an instant “fix.”
10. Wrap celery in aluminum foil when putting in a refrigerator and it will keep for weeks.
11. Place a slice of apple in hardened brown sugar to soften it.
12. Cure for headaches: Take a lime, cut it in half and rub it on your forehead. The throbbing will go away.
13. If you a problem opening jars: Try using latex dishwashing gloves. They have a great non-slip grip!
14. Potatoes will take food stains off your fingers. Just slice and rub raw potato on the stains and rinse with water.
15. To get rid of itch from mosquito bites, try applying soap on the area and you will experience instant relief.
16. Ants are said never to cross a chalk line. So, get your chalk out and draw a line on the floor or wherever ants tend to march.
17. Use air-freshener to clean mirrors. It does a good job and better still, leaves a lovely smell to the shine.
18. When you get a splinter, reach for the scotch tape before resorting to tweezers or a needle. Place tape over splinter, then pull it off. Scotch tape removes most splinters painlessly and easily.
19. Don’t throw out all the leftover wine: Freeze into ice cubes for future use in casseroles and sauces.
20. Alka Seltzer tips: –Clean a toilet. Drop in 2 tablets, wait 20 minutes, brush and flush. –Clean a vase. Fill with water and drop in 2 tablets. –Polish jewelry. Drop 2 tablets into a glass of water and immerse the jewelry for 2 minutes. –Clean a thermos bottle. Fill the bottle with water, drop in 4 tablets, and let soak for an hour. –Unclog a drain. Clear the sink drain by dropping 3 tablets down the drain followed by a cup of Heinz White Vinegar. Wait a few minutes, then run the hot water.

Girl vs. Boys

If you thought it wouldn’t be until she hit adolescence that you’d hear “I hate you!” you’ve never had a 4 yr old daughter.

So let me be your guide. I am rapidly becoming somewhat of a know-it-all on raising….well, at least having…girls. During a visit this morning with our close friend J and her kids, Noosh earned back-to-back time-outs for being rude and then remarkably ruder.

As I set the timer for the time-out it’s fairly certain that everyone on the block heard N yell out a smattering of phrases that signaled her anger over being placed in time out. She sat there, but she was disturbingly loud, rude, and let’s be honest, annoying.

Listening from the family room, J and I stifled our silent laughter and quietly started calling out random things our daughters have said in frustration. It sounded like this:

“You’re not my mommy anymore!”

“I’m going to live at another house with nicer parents!”

“I don’t love you anymore!”

“I am not looking at you anymore…this is me not looking at you”

Both our daughters are 4 yrs old. They growl, throw just about anything within reach, and scrunch up their faces in very primal ways to show their disdain. They are four, and somehwere somehow they learned to say “I hate you”. I swear to god it did not come from us.

J has three boys along with her daughter and I have Sugus who’s 2 1/2, and what we both remarked on is the amount of drama associated with having a girl compared to the more physical exertion of having a boy. Our consensus? The girls are hands down require more emotional energy to navigate.

Having only daughters and expecting another I only know of the hair, clothes, and attitudinal drama associated with raising girlies and very little about the energy output of boys.

So now I’m curious, just how much more “energy” does it take to raise one gender versus the other?

How does the emotional drain of the verbal/psychological fatigue compare with physical fatigue? I heard that it takes more energy to be pregnant with a boy than a girl….I learned that from Grey’s Anatomy so don’t go quoting me or anything dumb like that. But what about when they are born?

Do girls cry more? Yell more? Scream more? And why am I under the impression that while boys may be louder and wilder, girls are more…dare I say it? Demanding.

I’m going to find people to weigh in on this and get back to you.

In the meantime, if you can shed light on this, please do – I’d like to hear from you. Whether you’re professionally in the know or have the real-life kind of training of raising both son’s and daughters, or are an innocent bystander with an opinion, lets hear from you.

A.

Say something nice to me

The truth is in the buds.

Don’t tell N, but I brought 6 Oreo’s into bed with me.

I was eating the first of the six Oreo’s when I closed  my eyes and suddenly realized that what I expected to taste: chocolate and cream wasn’t tasting like chocolate or cream at all.

In fact wasn’t taking good at all. So I placed a second whole  Oreo in my mouth and wondered: does chocolate really taste as good as we have been conditioned to think it does?

It’s supposed to be better than sex…supposedly most women prefer it to sex. Poor things…anyway, it’s usually less messy, it’s oral, it satisfies a craving, it releases endorphins, and you can enjoy it in public without any dirty looks, unauthorized picture taking/videoing or risked forced community service.

My slavery to chocolate has been documented over the years and more recently widely conveyed to the world at large given that by month 5 of this pregnancy, rumour had it the baby would look more like a Toblerone triangle than a baby and be known as Ferrera, Tella (as in Nutella), Kit, Kat, Toble, or Hazel (again as in the ever yummy nutella spread).

So it comes as no surprise that when we spent part of the holiday season visiting family in Northern California and enjoyed a few days in San Fransisco, a visit to the Ghirardelli chocolate shop was mandatory and that this and the trolley ride cemented our girls as fully fledged members of our SF love club.

A brief – and relevant – side bar about our trip: on our first day exploring the city we went to obligatory fisherman’s wharf, saw the sea lions, rode the carousel, watched a mediocre magic show and ate clam chowder out of a bread bowl. It was on our second day that we went to Ghirardelli Square, ate more than our share each of  milk chocolate caramel square samples, bought chocolate for the car ride, the plane ride, some just because I need more chocolate now, and some to give away (which became the I didn’t eat them, the baby did. I was used…merely a tool stash of chocolate).

Loaded up with melt in your mouth chocolaty goodness, we hopped onto the trolley for a ride through the city and wound up at {name of mall} …. where we descended to the most phenomenal food court ever in a desperate attempt to counteract the sugary crashes that were making the girls unbearable and both us crazy.

F—ing chocolate.

Here’s the point: after a healthful vegan meal all four of us were spoon-swording in self-serving efforts to get the most gelato into our mouths (hubby brought us a huge bowl of chocolate, praline, and strawberry gelato) when some of N’s strawberry gelato blended with my chocolate.  Suddenly every sensory receptor in my mouth and brain realized that I liked the taste of strawberry more than the chocolate (which was stupendous, actually, but I wonder if it really tasted like I have been trained over the years to think chocolate tastes).

More to the point: sitting here now, admittedly saddened by my total lack of enjoyment of the aforementioned 6 Oreo’s (don’t tell me you assumed I didn’t keep eating them?) I wonder how many foods there are that we think we know the taste of but actually don’t, and how many we think we like yet if we stopped buying into the conventional wisdom that some flavours are universally good we’d discover that there is probably just a very well honed, well funded chocolate lobbying organization.

When you drink hot chocolate, does it actually taste hot chocolatey or are you telling yourself it does? What other foods taste nothing like what you think they taste if you eat them with your eyes closed? I’ve always thought that ketcup chips taste more like licking a nickle than ketchup. I find that raw zucchini doesn’t taste like anything at all,and while when cooked taste delicious and mild,  if you offered me a zucchini cookie I’d look at you funny.

My 4 yr old, N, often hesitates to try something new and then just about every time she tries it says, “actually, I like it”. Evidence that how we perceive something will taste influences what we actually taste more than the flavour itself.

And on a side – but again, related note – “white linen” room spray….it doesn’t actually smell like white linen anything. It smells like detergent. You can put any colour linen in the wash and wind up with the same scent, but we all accept that yup, that smell is “white linen”. A whole other post just might be crowning here….

A.

What not to do when you’re expecting.

I thought I was doing myself a favour today when I called a spa here in town and asked whether they were able to fit me in for a massage and a facial. I had a vision of myself floating about a pretty spa in a robe with a serene and somewhat hazy smile on my face.

Every cell in my body released tension just as soon as my eyes connected with the proper prenatal massage pillows arranged on the table that would allow me to finally lie on my stomach.

The massage was blissful, soothing. So good in fact that I didn’t even care about the patch of hair on the backs of both my legs left there because I simply couldn’t reach that high up my thigh to wax it. That’s right my friend, it was that good. I was relaxed and at ease and when it ended I didn’t feel that it had been too short nor too long, it was just right.

Then it all went to shit.

I put on the robe. Don’t put on the robe.

The robe that promises to in and of it’s self deliver soothing feelings of lux pampering. The robe that feels nice until you see what your body – stuffed with a baby – looks like in the mirror. Suddenly, let’s say it’s less lux and more reflux as you wonder why there is such a disconnect between your lovely fantasy about how you would meander about the spa and how you actually waddle looking a good 20 extra pounds rotund than the 20 you actually are carrying around.

Next, don’t get a facial.  Lying on your back for an hour with a slew of creams slathered on your face is not nearly so refreshing or spa-ish when you’re in your third trimester. It will undo all the good the massage delivered. Your back will ache, the baby will be pressing against your bladder in such an acute way that you kinda want to let yourself just pee on the table and don’t only because you were raised right.

Instead, get a massage at a spa that guarantees they have prenatal pillows so that you can finally lie on your stomach without hurting yourself, the baby, or winding up with an elbow or knee in your ribs.

Get a pedicure and not only enjoy the deflating effect the massage creates but you also get to sit in a comfy chair sipping tea and leave with pretty, smooth toesies.

Get a make-up make-over with a high end line of cosmetics and take either a gloss or cheek stain home because the “glow” you may have now will be gone about two weeks after you deliver and are sleeping 1/2 a night.

Get a hotel room – alone or with hubby – and lie in bed watching movies and ordering room service. Sleep in and return rested and relaxed.

A.

Lessons in parenting. From my 4 yrs old???

Seriously?

The words “who’s idea was it to have children, anyway” actually formulated in my brain and spilled out of my mouth to stun my husband.

Forget the terrible twos. If you can leave town while your child is 3 and 4, DO IT.

They talk back, they have opinions, they are RUDE, they are annoying, they whine, whine, whine.  They take forever to do everything make demands instead of requests, and for some strange reason act as though they live in a democracy.  This is no democracy. This Parent/child contract we tacitly consented to when mommy and daddy had sex is entirely about what we each HAVE to do.

My compulsory tasks are: 1) feed you, 2) wipe your butt, 3) kiss your boo-boo’s (though that comes straight from the heart), 4) educate you, 5) take you to at least 100 extra-curricular activities and generate stress for you in your young life, 5) show you off, 6) teach you manners, 7) teach you respect, 8 ) give you a safe place to live.  In no particular order.

A child’s compulsory tasks are: 1) Listen to ME, 2) Do as I say. We’ll keep it short because little ones ought not be overwhelmed with responsibilities.

Are they cute and bright and smart too? Sure. But the crap they pull whips the crap out of you and leaves you begging for a pillow to scream into or a quiet plush room with a locking door and sound proof walls to hide in.

We teach, train and praise. We disciple, threaten, and bribe. Lord help those parents who don’t…they’re in for a world of hurt.

What prompted this particular post?

My 4 yrs daughter’s monologue on how other parents are not  rude to their children like I was to her, insisting that she put her PJ’s on and brush her teeth.  This on the heels of 5 repetitions to put on her PJ’s (yes, I get that was my mistake), a 30 minute long stream of whining (this time from her not me), and three thrown toys and said PJ’s.

“I didn’t want you to say I can put my PJ’s on!!!!!!!!!” has become the amazingly loud background noise of the night as N wails and whines about not looking pretty with the PJ’s and her headband. Frankly all I wanted to do as my arms tensed and my face hardened is shout “SHUUUT UUUUUUUUPP!!!!!” and fling her into her room.

I don’t think it’s just the hormones here….really, age four is massively annoying and worse still past 7 pm.

Overall I find that past the 7 pm mark, I don’t do very well as a parent. I’m pretty terrific in the morning and during those middle of the night sessions but 7 pm, particularly during the winter months find me at my worst. Everyone I know is strongly advised to not call my house at that time, chances are a bitch will answer the phone and you’ll wonder if you dialed the right number.

At 7 pm this is what I like to do: get cozy, have a tea and either read, blog, stumble on the net, or watch something on Netflix with my hubby. I want sweet soft kisses goodnight from kids who go promptly and easily go to bed and I want to not hear them again until at least 7 am. I want to hear the words, “can I get you anything?” (which I happily always do) and then blissfully lie in my bloated state until sleep washes over me.

So can you imagine then when it’s 8:30 pm and there is still a 4 yr old N whining and complaining and not doing what she’s told just how hard it is for me to mask my aggravation?? I figuratively rip through the memorized reference notes in my brain for excerpts on techniques on how to best engage my daughter and I come up with only one: let her very capable dad deal with it.

A.