Doh!

Our family as Simpson's characters.

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Discrimination Nation

My resume is circulating and I’ve received several calls. I’ve decided to hold off on the full time job search for a few more weeks, because I want to wait before I do anything rash. You know, rash, like getting a job or something. One of the calls that I received was from a staffing agency that doesn’t get many design job postings. Because they had one and my resume qualified, the girl that I was talking to was very eager to help me put my best side forward in relation to potential employers. She asked why I had a one year gap in my resume. I told her that I had been staying home full time with my kids for the past year. She responded that I should probably put some of my freelance work on my resume for the past year so it would look like I had been doing at least some work. At least some. Because you know, when you stay home with kids you are laying around watching Soap Operas and eating bonbons all day.

This pissed me off on so many levels that I didn’t even know where to start. One, this is a person that will connect me with a potential employer and two by the sound of her voice, she doesn’t sound more than 25 years old and I’m betting she wouldn’t get it anyway. I’m so tempted to add stay at home mom to my resume and actually build a job description for it. Maybe when Jorma goes back to work I will add the SAHM job description and I’ll post it online and see if I get any hits at all. At least it employer conversations would make for decent blog entries.

What's Up Wit Dat

Maybe you’ve noticed. Maybe you’ve received an email from me and wondered why my website is part of my email signature. Maybe you’ve thought that I’m just that proud of myself, (of course I am) or that I’m a bit of an exhibitionist (not so much) or even that my kids are THAT cute, (of course they are) but probably you’ve wondered why it's there. There are several reasons for this and I’d like to share all of them with you.

First and foremost. I’m trying to drive up traffic on my site. Why would I do this? That’s simple. More traffic = more people, more people = more clicking, more clicking = maybe an ad or two, maybe an ad or two = maybe some income. That’s right. At some point I’m going to throw some ads in the sidebars of my site. This might piss some people off. This might make some people stop coming to the site completely. I mean, how dare I try to make an extra five dollars a month by allowing the world to read about my personal life. So to that I say, fine, don’t come back to my site… but if you could just click on that Amazon ad over there on your way out the door? Thanks.

Second. Motivation. It helps me to write because I’m writing for an audience. You wouldn’t know it by the comments left on my posts. In fact, if you base my traffic on my post comments you’ll be thinking that Amanda and Dawn are going to have a lot of clicking to do if I did put ads in the sidebars. You might be right. At any rate, it helps motivate me to write on a regular basis if I know that I’m writing for someone else. I’m writing for the kids and husband, clearly. I love that if I get hit by a bus, they have my writings. It’s memory insurance.
Blogging is sometimes like second job… or a fourth job if you are staying home with kids, it can be difficult to sit down and do your homework at the end of the day, but I’ve made it a habit. Habit enough that if I don’t blog for a few days… I actually feel a sense of guilt. After all, Dawn and Amanda are depending on me.

Third. It makes me nervous to post my writing online. Before I hit the send button on my email to post a blog entry, I get butterflies in my stomach. It’s sort of a digital version of public speaking and I think we all know how I feel about public speaking. So I do it anyway, for the same reasons that I put myself in other situations where I might be forced to speak out loud to more than two people. Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.” Being brave enough to say, Hey, Look at ME! is part of the ever present, resistance to fear movement.

So there it is, that’s the reason my website is part of my email signature. And if you have a blog, you should add it to your email signature. I promise I’ll click on your ads.

Heaven in a Carton

Ben and Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Ice Cream. Need I say more?

Mommy Learns Colors

Tonight at dinner:

“What’s dat?”

I offer him a taste, “That’s bleu cheese.”

“No it’s not”

“Yes it is. Its bleu cheese, just like the cheese in bleu cheese dressing. You like bleu cheese dressing”

“It’s NOT blue cheese”

“Yes it is baby. That’s what it’s called”

“It’s NOT!”

“Yes it is!”

“It’s WHITE cheese, MOMMY!”

Dear Connor - 32 Months

Dear Connor,
Your Dad hasn’t started working again yet and I’m faced with the possibility of going back to work… and suddenly I just can’t get enough of you. When I was staying home and it was just me, you and your brother some days all I wanted to do was run upstairs and lock myself in the linen closet so I could be alone for five minutes. You have to understand that I’m an only child. That I’ve always had a large group of friends around, but have never minded being alone and sometimes even relished it. Moving from living by myself to not being able to pee alone, was a much bigger adjustment than I had anticipated, most likely because I never anticipated it at all. Now that I’m thinking about joining the workforce again I keep looking at you and thinking about all of the stuff I’ll miss. I think about how you are going to be in school before I know it and that not too soon after that, you’ll only be seen in public with your Dad and me if it involves a new PlayStation.

We’ve been working on potty training this month and you are doing quite well. You are happy to pee on the potty as long as you have a constant reminder that it’s something you need to do. We haven’t made it to the pooping part yet, mostly because you insist on holding yourself up on the regular potty instead of using one of the three child size potty seats we have in the house. It’s hard to relax when you are dangling over a hole filled with water. I think your aversion to the seat is that you never see us use and because of that, you won’t either. If I could fit my butt onto one to show you how great they are, I would, but sadly, after two children and an exercise deficiency, it’s not going to happen.


You are turning into a defiant little thing and it cracks me up. It’s so hard not to laugh when I say, “ok, you need to clean this up now” and you respond with “NO! YOU NEED to clean this up now!” in all seriousness, as if I’m going to cave and start picking up the Cherrios you just threw across the floor. I never knew that attitude could come in such a small package. Sometimes it scares me because I hear myself in you. You came up to me last week when I was cleaning off the back porch and said, “You made a mess! Now I’m going to have to clean it up!” you sighed and walked away. I would have been ok with this, if you would have then actually STARTED cleaning up, instead of walking over and taking your box of crayons and dumping them out onto the floor.
We’ve moved you to a toddler bed. It’s actually not a new bed, but your crib, with the front panel removed so you still have three sides enclosing you. We added a rail to the front of the bed, so you don’t roll out and wake us up yelling. It’s bad enough that you wake us up yelling now only to announce when we come in that you either need ice water or a lullaby.

The advantage to the toddler bed is that you don’t hurt yourself climbing in and out of the crib. We decided to convert the crib because you were climbing in each night to go to bed and climbing out as soon as we left the room. We figured it wasn’t really keeping you in anyhow, so what was the point. Now that we’ve removed the bed, it’s a free for all in your bedroom at night. Although the crib wasn’t keeping you contained, it was preventing you from dragging each and every book in the room into bed to sleep with you and if you were really tired when we put you down, it just wasn’t worth the effort to you. Now that all you have to do it sit up and step out and even if you are tired, you spend a good 45 minutes rummaging around in your room, turning lights off and on and pulling the cushions out of the rocking chair just because you can. The other night I went into your room to check on you because at 9:30 the light was still on. You had fallen asleep with about 15 books in the bed with you and had a train track clutched in your fist. You were wearing underwear over your diaper and sleeping in a shirt that I’m sure I didn’t put you to bed in. You looked like you’d been to a 2 year old version of a college frat party.
With the toddler bed has begun the birth of bedtime procrastination. You want a book, another book, a lullaby, a cup of ice water, another hug, another lullaby or to find your glow in the dark lizard. Anything but bed.

You are outgrowing the nap, a turn of events that terrifies me. Once the nap is gone so is any time I get to work or do anything else that doesn’t involve a two year old trying to climb into my lap to “help”. It makes me sad in other ways too though because it’s one more step away from the womb. For two years now, I’ve scheduled our life around nap and I’m not sure how to stop. Luckily, your brother will still be napping in a couple of years, so I can be set in my ways a while longer.

One thing I’ll say about you for sure, is that you have a good time. You frolic in the grocery store and amazed by the lines of a carrot, crazy over the stickers they put on the bananas. A trip into an unfamiliar bathroom is an exploration and a flashlight in a darkened room is a thing of wonder. You marvel at the world, unstressed and free you enjoy life. Sometimes it drives us nuts, all of your investigations and lack of seriousness. That you can cackle with glee, running around the living room with a pair of underwear on your head right as we are trying to get you dressed to walk out the door to a function that we are already late to. But if I learn anything from being a mother, I hope it’s to be just a little more like you.
Love,
Mommy

Sticks and Stones

Today we had playgroup at our house for the first time and I would like to state for the record that Connor did extremely well, not pushing or hitting anyone. Well maybe a little hitting, but that kid wasn’t taking it and hit him right back. And it wasn’t really hitting as we know it, it was more flapping around in the air, attempting to cause enough of a distraction that he would be able to take another child’s toy, so I guess the other kid just flapped right back. At one point Connor went over, (I swear I’m not making this up) and sat by himself in the kitchen floor and built a tower of blocks. I kept hearing another child cry and would shout out in a warning tone, Cooonnnnooorrr, because I’ve been pavlov’ed into thinking that when I hear another child get upset, it’s because Connor has taken a toy or is attempting to use their head as a step stool to climb up the curtains but today… I was wrong. It’s happening… the terrible twos are slipping away from us.

I’ve heard that the 3’s are so much worse because they start talking back. But talking back is sssooooo much better than some of the other destruction that occurs when little boys are left unsupervised for three minutes, like when you are trying to pee. Talking back doesn’t ruin a sofa or chase a cat, it doesn’t hit its brother or go tearin-ass through the living room with a bottle of maple syrup it’s stolen from the fridge. Talking back is just that. Talking.

I might feel differently when it’s directed at me, but I used to do tech support for a living and there is nothing that a two year old can throw at me that’s any worse than someone that’s been trying to print for an hour with a printer that was powered off which was why they were getting an error, printer not responding. And I know it’s not worse than someone at a Speedway race event that’s just been cut off from the bar. Sure maybe there will be a little bit of defiance, but that I can handle, just stop spitting cranberry juice on my damn sofa.

The Best Nest

Tonight while reading “The Best Nest” which Connor refers to as The Bird Singing Book I came to the dramatic part of the story. Mr. Bird is distraught because he can’t find Mrs. Bird. This is because Mrs. Bird, insisted on building a nest on top of a bell in a bell tower and lo and behold when Mr. Parker rang the bell she flew away. Mr. Bird mistakenly thinks that a cat ate her and is flying through the rain, crying. During this part of the story, I even did the dramatic voice, making Connor take notice and sit up in bed.

When I explained to him that Mr. Bird was SO sad that he was crying, Connor’s little face wrinkled up in a look of disbelief, “WHERE is his MOMMY!? WHERE IS SHE!!!???” he demanded, immediately upset. It was so hard to read the next page without laughing…

 

Great temptations

My chat with someone from an online helpdesk. You have no idea how badly I wanted to start accusing him of spying on me and telling him that now that I’ve been to that website my printer stopped working and demand that he fix it… but I didn’t. But only because he had access to my email address.

 

15:12:34 <dewchild> excellent. thank you. 

15:12:42 <Vince> you are welcome

15:12:55 <dewchild> Can you see my computer? 

15:13:38 <Vince> your ip-address

15:13:59 <dewchild> Actually I was kidding... I used to do tech support for a living... I couldn't resist. 

15:14:04 <dewchild> have a good one. 

15:14:16 <Vince> :)

15:14:20 <Vince> you too bye

Dear Tristan - 9 Months

Dear Tristan,
According to the baby books, this is the last month of tremendous growth before you slow down and level out. You are already wearing 12 month clothes, so long is your torso and sometimes when I see someone else holding you, you look more like a toddler to me than a baby because your legs hang down to our hips. You are going to be tall. We keep warning your brother that you are going to be bigger than he is, so he should be nicer to you… you know, not smacking you in the forehead with the palm of his hand when he walks by and I think he might be starting to listen.

The two of you are starting to play together. This mostly involves him dragging you around the playroom by your arm, while Mommy or Daddy, run over to stop him and then explain again that little brother is not a doll, but you love it all the same. You’re brother had discovered that you are an avid listener and that you will watch him intently while he holds one of his toys saying, “Let me show you how this works, Trist-tan,” over and over again. He’s starting to watch out for your fingers and toes when he shuts the playroom gate and best of all, (deep sigh of relief) he’s stopped beating the crap out of you. I’m not sure if this is a result of us being firmer with the time outs, or because it just got old but whatever the reason, I am so grateful. You are eating like a champ. You love all fruits, especially banana and are all about the cheerios. Cheese is a favorite too. You are still waking up in the middle of the night hungry. Usually it’s one or two times and every now and again, you sleep through completely, waking up around 6am for the day. Lately you’ve been sleeping until 7:30 which is a blessing. 7:30 is much easier for us than 6am.
You are such a bouncy thing. You bounce in our lap, while standing up hanging on to the sofa and even just standing on the floor while we hold your hands. You love to climb something. Anything. “Mommy or Daddy laying on the floor! Nothing better to climb!”. We have to keep your nails trimmed because nothing is worse than getting a fingernail up the nose, while you grab on using your velcoraptor like talons to climb over our head while we are laying on the floor. You’ll climb up over us and the slowly roll yourself off, landing in a heap on the floor, only to get back up and climb up again. Mommy and Daddy - Providers. Nurturers. Circus. You are the toughest kid I’ve ever seen. Nothing phases you. I hear that the second child is like this, but I’m in constant amazement of the tumbles that you can take. You’ve acquired the cold that’s been going around the family and you don’t seem to be bothered by it in the least. You Dad pointed out yesterday that when you are cutting teeth and making bone marrow all at the same time a cold is nothing and that you were probably looking at us with our Alka Seltzer cold plus like we were a bunch of wussies. Your Dad still isn’t working so you are getting to spend extra time with him right now which you love. Your Dad and I are in a constant state of stress over the lack of job but you don’t seem to feel it at all. You are the happiest baby on the planet. You are so quick with a smile, even if it’s just in your eyes. You light up the room with your smile when you look up and suddenly see anyone in the family standing there, (including the cat), you are always so happy to see us that you seem to glow. Although you may not see it on my face all of the time, because being a mom can be such a demanding job I want you to know that whenever I see you smile, it makes me glow too.
Love,
Mommy

Potty All the Time

We’ve started potty training Connor so be prepared for the first of many posts involving everyone’s favorite subject, poop and pee. At first I thought, Potty Training - it can’t be that different from training a puppy right? I wasn’t sure where to start in the potty training project, never having potty trained anything that did not walk on four legs, so after reading articles and talking to friends, we’ve developed our own method. We just put the kid in underwear. And it works. It doesn’t work because he’s wearing underwear and doesn’t want to get himself wet. It works because he’s wearing underwear and I don’t want him even sitting on the sofa until he’s at least tried to pee. It works as a constant reminder to me, that he’s not wearing a diaper. So he goes to the potty, about every 30 minutes.

When he actually pees on the potty, he gets a reward. An m&m, a smartie or some other odd random foodstuffs we have on hand. “YYAAYY! Connor! YOU PP’ed ON THE POTTY! YAY~ You get a PISTACHO!” It’s only a matter or time before we work in his multi-vitamin and the pack of stale saltines at the bottom of the pantry. The reward system however, is almost working too well. Instead of releasing his bladder all at once, he lets go for about 3 seconds, gets down, demands an m&m and runs into the kitchen naked. Then about 10 minutes later, it’s a miracle! Behold! I have pp’ed on the potty AGAIN! (but for only three seconds). Or at least that was it today. Tomorrow he’ll probably have mastered bladder control in an attempt to let out a stream every 60 seconds so that he does nothing but sit naked on the potty all day, eating m&ms. If I left the door open so that he could see the TV from the downstairs bathroom, for him it would be heaven indeed. 

At some point we’ll have to stop with the rewards all together, but if we can get him potty trained by the end of the week, it will be worth every bit of the sugar and spoiling. It’s so much easier than newspapers on the floor next to the door.

A Matter of Appreciation

Being a parent can be a thankless job. Like my toddler, I’ve found that I also need a bit of positive reinforcement at times. Just a thank you now and again. We’ve been pushing the please and thank you quite a bit around the house and Connor is doing well in the showing appreciation category, so I thought I’d take it another step. Now I’m working on statements like, “Thank you, so much”, “Thank you for all that you do” and the most difficult to master, “Thank you Mommy, I appreciate all of your hard work.” Except Connor misinterprets the last phrase and keeps saying that he “appreciates all of my artwork.” After spending three months painting a mural in his room, that one works for me too.

I’m enjoying the “parrot phase”. I can’t resist coming up with new and interesting things to have him repeat, but more importantly entertain me or the husband. The other day while Connor and I were in the grocery store he was in one of the “Car” grocery carts. A hybrid of cart and ride on toy, these creations are both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because most kids love to sit in them and they can make a grocery trip manageable and a curse because it’s like trying to drive a Semi down a grocery aisle. Most unwieldy. The particular cart we were in, had the car on the front of it, so that Connor was able to sit as I pushed the cart down the aisles. He discovered at once that while Mommy disapproved of him jumping out and running, through the produce department, for example, he wasn’t reprimanded for laying on the steering wheel of the car and hanging the top half of his body through the cars, “windshield”. He was yelling BYE BYE! EVERYBODY!!! At the top of his lungs so I figured at least if he was going to be hanging out of the front of the car and yelling, I might as well give him something decent to yell, so I asked him to say instead “I’M KING OF THE WORLD!” since he was hanging in the perfect Titanic-ish position anyway. Of course once he determined that he was allowed to yell hanging out the front window of the car, he soon lost interest in it trying instead to see how close he could get his mouth to the bars on the back of the car, before he was not so politely asked by Mommy not to touch the car with his mouth.

The unsurpassed part of the parroting phase however, is the statements that he just absorbs and then springs on you when you least expect it. Today when cleaning up our junk room, I picked up some toys from the floor and handed them to Connor. “Mommy is cleaning this room, so I need you to take these toys back to your room.” I explained. He took the toys from me and as he was leaving the room he said, “Thank you for cleaning up Mommy, you are such a good little helper!” leaving me staring down the hallway after him. Good little helper isn’t the thing that I would write on my resume for my position as stay at home Mom, but I knew what he meant and I thanked him for saying it.

Temper, Temper

Temper, Temper
Originally uploaded by Dewchild

I found this picture while browsing through our pictures. Our generation has baby albums with pictures printed and arranged. Connor's generation when asking for baby pictures, will be handed a stack of CDs... with tens of thousands of pictures.
You'll have to note in this pic, that the socks are upside down and the shirt is on inside out and backwards.

Word to Da Mama

The first word thing always confuses me. Is it the first word the first time they say it? Or the first time they mean it? Tristan has been babbling Dada for a while now, but not with any discrimination. He’s started on the Ma-ma now and I get to hear it several times each day, after each of which I coo over how wonderful he is to be saying Mama so he starts to associate that the word gets attention from me specifically. He starts the beginning ma part like he’s about to hum, mmm – mama! I know he’s not talking to me but at me and my heart still swells each time all the same. This might be in part because Connor’s first word was Dada and his second word was Cheese. I sorta felt like after 22 hours of labor, mama should at least be a runner up for first word.
With the testing of the voice Tristan has developed something new and fun. The scream. Tristan’s scream isn’t one of discontent or apprehension… it’s a scream of joy. It’s a scream that says, EVERYONE! EVERYONE! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT WHAT I CAN DO! And if there was something that was louder than ALL CAPS, I would have written it in that, because it’s just that loud. Piercing. In fact, the scream is so loud that since the scream started… Tristan has been hoarse. When he cries or babbles, he sounds like he’s smoked a pack of Newports while he drank his fifth of Whiskey. It’s that bad. And that pitiful. There is just no way to explain to a bitty babe, that if you want your throat to quit hurting… you have to stop with the screaming.
For our listening pleasure Connor likes to chime in. So the two of them scream together in harmony as the crystal in the cabinets rattles and threatens to shatter.
And me, I just try to take a deep breath and go to my happy place, while I say over and over to myself… What in the hell was I about to do again? And this is how Mommy brain progresses.

Tristan Takes a Stand

Let the record show that today, Tristan stood by himself, without assistance for a full 4 seconds. Although he was completely unaware of it at the time. When he started to lose his balance, he didn't even worry, he just slowly reached out and grabbed my pants leg. He didn't miss a beat and he didn't even drop focus from whatever piece of lint he was eyeing on the bathroom floor.

Remember me?

Remember me? The one that wears house shoes to Lowe’s?

I’ve been slacking on the blog. Again. Mostly because I’ve been busy working up stuff for design clients so the time that I usually dedicate to blogging, I’ve been dedicating to building websites and logos. I’ve been thinking about overhauling my website and even changing the name from VisionSpeak Studios to Carolina Design Café. Most of the stuff I do is local by word of mouth, so the design café idea gives it more of a local, casual flavor. Of course before I change names, I have to build a site and build a site that I love. I figure once that’s done, it will have been a few months anyway, so at that point I can decide if I want to spend more money on a domain name… and a different host. I like the host that I use now for the design site and this one, but it’s so. So. Slow. No one can send more than 3mb via email to me because of their server specs and sometimes it will take days before I get an email that’s been sent to me. But the host I use is free for life after you pay the initial set up fee, and you can’t really bitch about free.

I need to start work on my Dad’s new site idea, which I’ll be happy to unveil, once I’ve got it completed, although since I haven’t even started it might take a month or so. Dad’s site is a fishing venture and I need stock photos! So if you have any great pictures of fish, or fishing stuff… (Especially fly fishing) and you don’t mind signing a release form, (which basically means that you won’t sue me for using it later and I won’t put your head on a penthouse models body) send it my way. I’d love to use it on the site. Pictures of kids fishing might be good too. I haven’t mentioned it to the dad yet, but I’d like to write a column for a kids and fishing section of the site. My first e-zine gig. Even if I had to assign it to myself.