Fevers and Towers and Pumpkins, oh my.

I am supposed to be helping Riley clean the playroom right now. There are two things wrong with this picture, and these are the two biggest reasons that I am blogging instead: 1) I had NOTHING to do with that mess- I never do- yet I always clean it. I don't care if that's part of being a parent, I don't feel like doing that right now. It's my weekend too- and 2) Riley's version of helping is a little skewed. For example, right now he is kicking off the cleaning by wandering around the room playing with everything he comes across and singing a song that he made up that consists of the word "Sorting" repeated over and over at different octaves.

This was a three day weekend, but I'll tell you right off the bat that I'VE BEEN CHEATED! Because the sickness that's been plaguing my household and dodging me finally lost the fight on Friday and I WON! I won a fever, a sore throat, muscle aches, a massive headache, the whole she-bang! It was like a lottery on opposite day. So I spent my bi-weekly off-Friday writhing on the couch, covered with goosebumps despite the thermostat being set to 75 and being wrapped in fleece, while my kids got away with murder because I lacked the energy it required to stop them from doing things they shouldn't. Luckily, my fever was gone by that evening, because I had promised Riley that I'd take he and Zoey on a picnic on Saturday.

And so I did! It was absolutely beautiful outside, so we packed up some stuff and went to Jim Barnett Park to eat lunch, which was immediately the furthest thing from Riley's mind.

What is so great now that he's started school is that his social walls are down. He's always been fairly outgoing, don't get me wrong, but he's never really been too confident in his ability to make friends. Now, he is. Okay, never mind. He's the same, I'm different because I'm not as worried about his ability to make friends. I admit it. Anyway, he takes off and collects names and digits and is never heard from again until he needs some apple juice or gets stuck in a tower.

He did get stuck in a tower. Zoey and I were chilling in the shade on a blanket and I hear Riley yelling. It's amazing how even when surrounded by 10,000 children, you can hone in on your kids voice- pick it right out from the other 40+ kids screaming "Mom!" simultaneously. I was able to trace his cries to the tower:

Seriously, what is up with the bar at the bottom of my pictures? Annoying.

I yelled back to Riley that if he needed to talk to me, he needed to come down to me and talk. Time passed. Zoey and I read a book, ate some grass that probably a dog had peed on, shared some goldfish crackers, and talked to admirers.

Then some little girl runs up and asks me if I'm "Rowley's Mom"? To which I reply "Uhmm, I guess." since I'm actually Riley's mom, not Rowley's, and I am not sure I want to take accountability for anyone else's child on accident. She then explains that she's been sent to deliver the message that my son is stuck in the tower and cannot get down. So Zoey and I leave our home base and head over to the tower, where I spend a good ten minutes convincing Riley it's okay to go down the huge slide and that I can't climb up there because I have the baby in my arms. I kept looking around to see which kids I'd need to kick in the shins for laughing at my son, but the other children were surprisingly empathetic and patient about it. Several tried to demonstrate how safe the slide was, or tried to suggest alternative methods of getting down. Finally, he came down the slide, and I made him come sit with Zee and I until he could calm down. Afterwards, he slid down at least five more times, and made that tower his bitch.

And then on the way out, he made out with the water fountain. I didn't realize it until I looked at the picture later.

A dog probably peed on that, too.

Today we went to get pumpkins. It wasn't a fun time. It was too hot, the food was expensive and awful, we had committed a huge parenting foul by forgetting the stroller and were doomed to pass Zoey back and forth, and the selection of pumpkins was fair at best. But Riley enjoyed going down the huge slide over and over:

Oh, and I almost forgot! On the way home, while I was taking a sip of my ridiculously expensive can of coke, something tried to enter my mouth from the coke can that was not soda. It was quite obviously a bug of significant mass, so I spit all my coke back into the can (and on my pants) and then acted like I was dying for a while, allowing Russell to poke fun at me. I assumed it was a stink bug, because we saw a trillion of them. When we got home I dumped the coke out on the driveway- IT WAS A BEE. I pointed at it and yelled "You wanna make fun of me now?" to Russell, 'cause he's scared to death of bees, but he mumbled something about how it probably was dead already and couldn't have stung me. Whatevs. He would've shat his pants if it'd been him.

So as another weekend comes to a close (Noooooooooooooooooo. So cheated! I want my Friday back!) I am happy to have spent some mostly quality time with my kids. I would do the trip to the park a million times over- maybe sans the tower incident- but now all I can do is go help my son "clean" the playroom.

O hai.

Sorry that I've forgotten about you. You see, I am doing constructive things, like trying to not be fat and lazy and sloppy and broke and unhappy. I'll elaborate.

A couple months ago, I started keeping a journal in which I make weekly resolutions. My first (unwritten) resolution was to not fill this journal with tripe and depression the way I have every journal before it. My recent expedition into the towers of boxes to find my art supplies revealed a graveyard of half-filled journals, all lamenting one thing or another and showing obvious evidence of having had pages torn from them again and again. These books, where they should provide a nostalgic timeline of my youth, absolutely offend me with their stupidity and uselessness. You couldn't pay me enough to revisit the crap that I've written there. I'll probably feel the same way about this blog in a year or so. It's the way I roll, baby. In any case, since I'm rambling, I vowed to myself to only be positive and encouraging and stay on topic with this most recent effort, and I've done so rather well thus far.

The premise is that each week I make three small resolutions- nothing huge like "Give up food", though that would be helpful. They're small things like "start flossing twice a day", "unpack the boxes in the office", "find a new pediatrician". That way they're attainable and still leave me feeling accomplished. Yet somehow, I've managed to not accomplish them lately, and that is the opposite of motivating. So I've been trying to get back to working on those, and it's left me distracted when paired with the other thing that still shall-not-be-named. You know, that potentially life-changing idea I had? I made a smart decision about it and recruited one of my brothers. This is smart because he's pursuing his end of the bargain ravenously, which means I am less likely to give up on mine. This brain works sometimes.

Anyway, to get to what you care about, I'll talk about my kids now.

It's been a battle of wills at our house lately. Riley is a force to be reckoned with, but the struggle to find a middle ground continues. I am not sure if he is still adjusting to having a little sister with whom he must share attention, but he's been particularly hard to get along with. I can readily admit that Russell and I aren't hugely patient, and I'm sure that has a lot to do with it, but we're making an effort to fix that. I also believe with all my heart that- while studies have shown there are some benefits to a child having two working parents- Riley does not get enough time with us. I think it would help if I had more time at home with him. I am at a loss of how to remedy this, but I'll explore all options nonetheless.

There are still peaceful times to be had, though few and far between. This past weekend, I was able to enjoy a long stretch of time with both kids in the playroom while Russell was at work. Here are some pictures I took on my phone:



Looks like fun, right? But Riley only likes letters.



So he starts a game of "Letter Swap"

While Zoey attempts to stealthily and quickly sneak pieces of Riley's toys up the stairs.

I am not sure why there's a grey bar along the bottoms of my pictures. This isn't really an explanatory caption at all, is it?

Other than that, Zoey's halloween costume came yesterday, and Riley's is coming today. I've also got a business meeting with my brother tonight, and tomorrow is my Friday, so some things to look forward to : ) Have a good rest of the week.

Donna's Story

I know I am late sharing this, and I can't put my finger on why I haven't shared it earlier. There is a wonderful woman and mother that writes for the website chicagonow.com,  Mary Tyler Mom, whose daughter, Donna, underwent 31 months of treatment after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. As September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, she's written a new blog entry every day this month. Each entry represents a month of Donna's treatment. I was fortunate to have started following this early on. Though my heart is breaking now as it draws to a close and the inevitable is coming ever nearer, I've found so much strength and inspiration through reading about Donna and her family. October 1st will be the final entry about Donna's struggle with cancer, followed by a post on October 2nd containing resources about how we can help the fight against cancer.

If you are interested in following the story, you can do so beginning here: http://www.chicagonow.com/mary-tyler-mom/2011/08/gold-is-the-new-pink/. I won't lie and say that is hasn't been a heartbreaker, but it's also been a tremendous eye-opener and example of the strength we're capable of as human beings. I can't fathom being able to survive having made half of the difficult decisions this family has had to make.

Russian Roulette

My dear friends on facebook, you've already sampled a tiny bit of the rant that is to follow if you read what I posted about Listeria this morning. If you're Kate, you've seen more than that, even, but you started it so it's your fault. It got me all fired up, and I've come to vent and possibly set some stuff on fire. I am going to focus specifically on the choices women are faced with during pregnancy.

I don't want to assume all pregnant women feel the same way I did, so I'll refer to myself only.

When I was pregnant, I was a sponge. My pregnancy occupied my thoughts constantly. If I wasn't talking about the human being growing inside of me, I wanted to read about it and absorb all of the information. I joined a forum community (to be fair, I'd already been a member since pregnant with Riley, but never really participated) just so I could interact with other women who, like me, were too preoccupied by being pregnant to carry on with their normal lives without frustrating everyone around them.

Pregnancy, for me at least, is this massive thing to come to grips with. Creating life is intimidating, exhausting and demanding. Lifestyle changes have to be made, more for some than for others. Your decisions are no longer only affecting you, they're now being forced upon your future child. When I was pregnant, the idea of my "child" was more abstract, especially before I started showing. I was able to hear a heart beat, and it meant a lot to me, but at that point it was all potential and possibility. I had images in my head. I was envisioning what life would be like someday when I got to meet this little one. As the pregnancy progressed and I felt the movements and eventually saw them, things start to become more real- like a fuzzy picture gradually coming in to focus. Then we knew what gender it was, and assigned a name. This was no longer a "pregnancy", this was our baby. This was Riley, or Zoey. This was our future, this was the rest of our lives growing in there, if we were lucky. This was tiny socks, fists clamped around our fingers, first words, days at the park, first days of school. This was graduation, college, the future president, a cure for cancer.

Having children means your life isn't really your own anymore. I had no true concept of this before I had Riley, and I was more reckless during my pregnancy with him. After he was born, I learned the true meaning of selflessness, and subsequently was more consciencious during my pregnancy with Zoey. The fact is that, like any other life, you have to cultivate and care for a pregnancy to the best of your ability because a healthy infant is NOT A GUARANTEE. Even if you do your very, very best, it's not a guarantee, but the silent agreement you make by deciding to have a baby is that you WILL do your very, very best to ensure its health.

There were things that I didn't take seriously enough during either of my pregnancies, and one of those things was listeria. There were always "by the book" moms or pre-moms I'd encounter that would preach about avoiding lunch meat or heating it to 'steaming' before eating it and I'd blow them off. The fact was that I was arrogant and of the mindset that bad things only happened to other people, people I didn't know, people that I didn't share any kind of connection with. I ate whatever the hell I wanted to- thank you very much- and I had done so with Riley, too. He was fine, so there you go. It didn't help the situation that many doctors were advising women that listeria was nothing they needed to worry about. I remember reading things from other pregnant women on the forums like "My doctor never heard of anyone actually contracting listeria from lunch meat, so he said not to worry about it."

I am sad to say that like so many others have, I had to learn the hard way by watching my best friend's first child succomb to listeriosis. The kicker, in her case, was that she was following all the rules and it happened to her anyway. The doctors said it was likely cross-contamination, maybe from a restaurant. Shortly afterwards, I found out about two more people in my extended family that had lost their pregnancies to listeriosis- one of them from lunch meat. Suddenly this was a REAL concern, and the group of naysayers I'd once been a part of seemed abruptly very reckless. If this could happen to someone that was taking care to follow the rules, think about how much more a risk those who weren't following the rules were running?

It is easy for many people to make selfish decisions when the life growing inside of them is still an abstract concept, or a distant potential. It's not unheard of for women to not relate to their child until it is outside of their bodies, and even sometimes then it takes a while. What's important is that we acknowledge the potential and possibility there. It has become a matter of grave importance to me over the past year to caution women that disregard the warnings they're given during pregnancy. They aren't just myths. They are warnings for a reason. Far too often, I've seen the excuse "But I did _______ during pregnancy and _______ is just fine!". I liken it to a game of Russian Roulette, where a revolver is loaded with a single round, the cylinder is spun and the gun is fired against the side of the head. Chances are better that you will get lucky than they are that you will put a bullet in your brain.

But do you really want to risk not getting lucky?

I have seen and felt the pain that accompanies the loss of a child. It is awful regardless of the situation, but I can only imagine how much more awful it would feel to endure it wondering if there was something you could have done to prevent it from happening.

Your responsibilities as a parent start at conception. Take warnings seriously, and if your doctor doesn't? Get a new doctor.

I can't think of a title for this.

Feeling a little down today. One of those days where the suspicion that my kids would be better off with another mom keeps quietly testing the walls of my consciousness for a weakness.

Due to a change in my schedule, I now work nine hour days four days a week- nine hours straight, mind you, I don't take a break for lunch. I generally leave around 5:40 am, arrive home between 5:00 and 5:30 pm. Recently, Russell's employer let someone go and subsequently has stuck Russell in a position that requires him to work until 6:00 Tuesdays through Thursdays. His drive home is anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour, so he generally doesn't get home until around 7:00.

Today I worked a nine hour day, came home to two sick kids, and proceeded to do the following:
Put on 'Rio' for Riley
Empty the dish drainer
Feed Zoey dinner
Put Zoey in her walker (The next several steps are done with the walker banging repeatedly into my ankles)
Make Riley dinner because he doesn't like what Russell and I are having
Make my and Russell's dinner (steamed brocolli and carrots and broiled tilapia)
Harp at Riley to eat his dinner
Eat my own dinner
Try to rinse the dishes so food doesn't get crusty
Turn on Johnny Test for Riley and give Zoey a bath
Attempt to put Zoey to bed (fail)
Take off my heels
Put Zoey to bed
Make a pot of coffee

Courtesy of Riley, who knows what's up.

Russell then arrived home, and I slunk off to take a shower while Riley went downstairs to play the Sims and Russell reheated his dinner.

All of my deep thinking is done in the 15-20 minutes it takes me to shower. I spend hours in the car every day, but that's mostly reserved for feeling awesome and singing at the top of my lungs. It stands to reason that it was while in the shower, then, that it occurred to me that the TV spent more time with my son today than either of his parents did, and I cried. I cried because that's fucking sad, and I cried because I don't know what to do about it. It's easy to say "Quit your job and stay at home with your kids like you want to more than anything, anyway", but the fact of the matter is that we need my job. We don't need in the way that if we didn't have it, we'd have to go without cable TV and any extra-curricular activities- though that's true enough. We need it in the way that if we didn't have it, we'd have to go without a house, and food, and insurance.

I'd like to think the time I spend with my kids is quality time, and that it makes up for lack of quantity. For instance, I put Zoey to bed every night. Russell knows this. It is a rare occasion for me to ask him to do it. I love sitting in there and giving her her last bottle and rocking her to sleep, even though it only lasts a few lullabies. For those few lullabies, this rapidly growing, independent, bulldog of a child is just a sweet little sleepy baby with her fingers loosely curled around mine and her long eyelashes all fanned out over her fat cheeks. I would stay in there for hours if I didn't have a million other things to do.

So big.

My biggest fear is that, in the same short amount of time that it took for Riley to be five, both of my kids are going to be grown and leaving home. I am worried that they're going to look back and remember their childhoods as being full of tv shows and toys and computer games, and only a handful of cameo appearances by their busy parents.

Since they've been born, I've tried to keep respective journals for both of them. My mom did it for me when I was a baby and it's one of the coolest things I've got from my childhood. Unfortunately, I am so caught up with just trying to milk the short time I have with them for all its worth that I haven't been great at keeping up with it. I really need to try harder, and I'm going to work on that over the next week or so, and hopefully never stop. That way, even if they don't necessarily remember how deeply and wholly I loved them, they'll have the proof.

That was a bit depressing, huh?

Let's end this on a funny note, shall we? Zoey, while crawling around on the kitchen floor this evening, spit up on said floor AND THEN LEANED DOWN AND ATTEMPTED TO EAT IT. Kids are gross.

Is this why some animals eat their young?

My son is a handful. He's a peculiar, fascinating child that keeps me on my toes, always. Sometimes I wonder if he was sent to me to teach me more about patience, or to shove it back in my face that I thought I had it all together for a little while when he was merely a tubby lump of baby flesh.

Recently, he's gifted me with several grandkids. Before you ponder how the mother of a five-year old finds herself in that situation, I should tell you that these grandkids are numbers that Riley assembled from legos. I believe I am the proud grandmother to multi-colored 1-5. 1 appears to be Riley's favorite. I should have taught him it's not nice to play favorites. 1 goes everywhere with him. It's a matter of concern that these are crappy legos, so 1 occasionally loses a brightly colored foot or a piece of his head, sending his doting father into a rampage.

This is how he rebels when I request a smile.

Riley has been trying to bring his children to visit their great-grandmother during the day when he's at her house. I've unfortunately had to forbid it after it became too hard to wrangle their body parts up for the commute home in the afternoon. But he'll find a way. For as long as we've been transporting Riley to and from Grandma's house, we've been finding things in his backpack, pockets, stashed in the car, etc. that he's attempted to smuggle back and forth.

Last night, as he happily created his "21 Hoppy Place Family" on The Sims (21 indicating that they are, in fact, the 21st family he's made with the name 'Hoppy Place'. There is an entire neighborhood filled with Hoppy Places. Inbreeding. Also, probably 60% of them are named 'Joe'), I realized it was bedtime, and informed him. He was understandably angry- who likes to be torn away from starving simulated families to death?- and as he stormed through the playroom towards the stairs, told me "I am going to take some of these number magnets upstairs." I told him no- we had to remove toys from his bedroom because he hordes them in his bed and ends up sleeping on piles of plastic and metal. He raged against me, and I continued up the stairs and talked to Russell briefly. I glanced over my shoulder to the playroom and noticed that he had formed his beloved blankie into a makeshift satchel, and was smuggling number magnets into it. I watched in silence for several moments and then cleared my throat and said "Sneaky".

Getting caught obviously hadn't entered his mind, and caused a tempermental explosion. He threw the magnets and stomped past me, stopping only to punch my hip, and up the stairs.

Is this the face of someone that may need an exorcist?

I'd be lying if I said that I haven't evaluated his actions a million times in my head, trying to figure out what it says about me as a parent and what it is I'm doing wrong.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm not doing anything wrong. He's got an absolutely explosive temper. He's as sly as a fox, and headstrong, and argumentative. He doesn't like to be told what to do. He thinks he's as smart as an adult and will challenge everything we say, and constantly demand to know where we're coming from when we ask him to do something. Maybe these are things that frustrate me when I am attempting to have a smoothly running home, or embarrass me when I compare him to better behaved children, but the fact is that they're not BAD things. He's not a little robot, and for every undesirable response we get from him, he makes up for it with something hilarious or tear-jerking. He writes us little notes- so many that I can't even keep them all- about how much he loves us. He tells us regularly that we're the best parents in the world. He treats his make-believe children with such tenderness and care, reading them books and stealing Zoey's toys to give to them. He constantly compliments us- tells me my dinners are "the best" and tells Russell that he's doing a "great job" filling the pool or mowing the lawn. These are the things that are important. He may not always say 'please' or 'thank you'. He may speak what's on his mind with complete unchecked abandon, but his ability to tap in and express what he's feeling, good or bad, is admirable. It's watching him lovingly assuring his lego children that he'll always take care of them that lets me know I've done something right. We learn how to parent from our own parents, after all.

Thanks Mom : )

The Man that Didn't Know About Heaven

So, I've decided to finally go ahead and start a blog, because it's cheaper than therapy and can be done on the sly while I'm at work. Win-win. I won't bother introducing myself because a) who cares? and b) if you read this, you're probably one of maybe two people. You probably know my address and possibly my underwear pattern. Though that does make you a sick freak, for the record.

I've been doing some serious contemplation this weekend (*cough* read: every 15 minutes for the past five years) as to whether or not I am competent enough to be a parent. I feel like every exchange between Riley and I sometimes is an argument. This past weekend was a three-day weekend for me, and I was really looking forward to it. I recently had a five-day-straight vacation from work to move (it speaks volumes of my life that moving is considered a "vacation") and I felt in that time, I hit my stride as a housewife and mommy. By the close of my time off, I had a routine in place. The kids and I were getting along beautifully. We'd hang out together in the play room while I watched Riley draw every letter of the alphabet on the Wii uDraw for the eightieth time (oh, but this time they're bubble letters! And it's an under-the-sea theme!) while simultaneously trying to prevent Zoey from cutting her teeth on every wire she could dig up from between the carpet and the wall. I was calm. I was patient. I thought to myself "If I didn't need the money, I could be happy with this, surely."

Cut to this past weekend. Friday was Riley's last day of art camp! I felt like such an official parent, dropping him off at camp, kissing his head and telling him I'd be back in a couple hours. Then I RAN ERRANDS! I know, right? Supermom. The last hour of camp was dedicated to showing off the kids' artworks, so I picked up my mom and brought her with me to check them out. They were pretty neat. So then we drop Grandma off and go home afterwards, and it's like passing through the door of our house is passing into another dimension, where fun is not had and niceties are few and far between. I won't get into the particulars of it, just imagine that it's a somewhat boring movie in which a five year old boy insists on thwarting his infant sister's every attempt at happiness, set to the soundtrack of my impassioned mommy voice chiding him, and frequent trips to sit on the stairs for timeout.

Using that analogy, the pivitol point of the movie would have been Saturday, when the infant sister's tired fussing reached a fever pitch and the five year old brother's shouts to silence her were drowned out by my yell- I'm not proud of this- that I couldn't wait to go back to work on Monday. That's the part of the soundtrack where you realize that you have the volume up to loud, and possibly that this movie sucks. Riley came upstairs, then, and wrapped his arms around his sister in one of those progressively tightening hugs that I eventually have to scold him for.

"Zee's crying because she's waiting for a REAL mommy" he said, and my eyes stung immediately. I don't remember what I said. Something out of anger, doubtlessly, and hurt. Then I slammed the pantry door open, and like a 17-oz glass bomb of karma, a full bottle of olive oil toppled from the top shelf and landed directly on the top of my bare foot. I paced the room for a few moments, breathless and sick to my stomach and overwhelmed, before leaning my head against the dishwasher and bursting into tears. Where the hell did Supermom go? Here I am, back to square one, where I am clueless and ruled by emotion and two steps behind my precocious son. Here I am, crying with my head on a broken dishwasher and a blue knot the size of a baseball rapidly developing on my foot. Not so super. The movie just continued to suck from that point on, but I've got a sneaking suspicion that my own attitude probably didn't help.

Don't you wish your girlfriend's foot was hot like mine?

Last night, while Russell had his own not-so-super parenting moment and brooded on the couch, Riley and I went downstairs. I started up Word on Russell's computer, as Riley's been obsessed with typing, and sat down on my own to do awesome things (don't ask). Riley has been learning to understand the red zig-zagging line that indicates a spelling error, and trying to correct it himself, but he asked at one point "How do you spell Heaven? It's not H-E-V-E-N, because it's got a red line under it." This got my attention, and after correcting his spelling, I asked what he was writing.

"It's a story about a man who doesn't know about heaven."

"Oh yeah?" I asked, "What happens?"

"Well, he asks God to tell him about it. You're in this story, you're God's wife, and I'm God's son."

God's wife, eh? I guess I can't be too bad a mom, if I'm given a role like that. Now I just need to figure out what my son is trying to teach me about heaven, and I'll be set.