Lessons in Motherhood

Just so you don’t think I’ve completely fallen off the face of the Earth, I’ll let you in on a secret…I’ve been on vacation!!!! Wonderful, glorious, relaxing vacation on St. George Island.

There are so many amazing pics from this trip that it was hard to decide which to post. So, I put a bunch on Flickr and am just showing a few here.

Poopie was not at all the word that I wanted to write in that title. Not the word at all. But then I remembered that my parents read this blog, in fact my parents are some of the only people who read this blog, so I don’t need to elicit any more eye rolling from them. Didn’t I cause them enough pain and suffering during my teenage years?

Did I just digress before I even got going on this poopie day story? Wow. I must be a little late on my Ridalyn pill. Is that how you spell Ridalyn? Darn. I did it again.

Ok really, here’s the story. So, ugh I don’t want to incriminate my husband, but I totally have to rat him out. Sorry, Luke. Payback is a biatch sometimes. But, I got a call at like 4:00pm today from Luke which began, “I’m so sorry. I’m really sorry.” That is not the way that you want a conversation with your husband to start EVER. So, while I’m contemplating all of the truly horrific reasons for his apology, he is muttering on and on about dog crap. Wait, what? Dog crap?

Yeah, the dog had a little accident in the hallway by the front door (at least she was well intentioned). She was having some stomach problems, and apparently, couldn’t wait. Luke found this mess while he was stopping home to pack a bag on the way to the airport. Did you figure out why he was apologizing yet?

He was apologizing because he only managed to scoop up what he called “the biggest of the piles.” Why? Because he was late for his plane, which Delta conveniently had moved the time up on and then later delayed. You heard me. They told him it was leaving 15 minutes earlier than scheduled, and then it left 40 minutes later than scheduled. And so there were huge piles of poop on my floor when I got home because he did not have time to clean it up.

That my friends was only my FIRST encounter with poop of the night. There’s more. Later, I got the girls into the bathtub, and they were having lots of fun. Suddenly, Sophia started making her classic Sophia has to poop face. I whisked her out of the tub with the poop literally hanging out of her butt. In the time that it took me to pick her up and put her on my toilet, the poop tumbled out of her backside and onto the floor. No joke. There was a turd on my floor. Yeah, and it’s not like South Park where turds talk and jump. Nope. I had to pick that bad boy up and throw it in the toilet. But, I have to say that I was kind of mentally pinning a Mommy of the Year award on my chest at that moment because not only did I just pick up poo, but I also got her out of that tub before that poop hit the water. So kudos to me.

But here’s the best part of the story. Yes, it gets better. I am stupid enough to put her back in the tub. I thought she was done. Hahaha….I’ll see you one Mother of the Year award and raise you one Dumb Mommy Award. Ugh. She was just postponing the inevitable which was her completing the dirty, turdy deal in the tub a few minutes later. At least it was solid, but seriously, there was poop floating in the water. All I could do was get both girls out of the tub, but then, seriously, what do you do in that situation? I mean how many times in life are you faced with poop floating in the tub? It’s really not something that you plan for.

So, I contemplated trying to play bob for the poopies with a plastic bag, but what happens if I missed and another piece of poop snuck up on me and hit my hand. Nope. Too dangerous. I had to kind of eye the poop on one end of the tub so I could safely reach my hand down into the water to pull the drain. It didn’t solve the poop problem but at least it wasn’t floating poop anymore and isn’t that better?

While the water drained out of the tub, I put both girls in the shower to clean the poopie water off of them, then got both girls back out of the shower, got everyone dried off, got them milk and finally into bed. Well, I’m sure you can guess what happened after that. Yeah. I had to go cut the gross diarrhea hair off of the dog’s butt.

Sunday was the first day that Hailey swam all by herself away from the stairs.  I was so incredibly proud of her.  She has known how to swim pretty much the entire summer, but she has been very leery of moving away from the steps. We tried bribing, cajoling, begging, pushing, and threatening, but nothing worked.  She just was not confidant enough to move away from the stairs.  Finally, she and I had a long talk before bed one night.  I told her that I was sad that she was missing out on swimming with her friends.  I asked her what she was afraid of, and we really tried to address her concerns.  It was the first real heart to heart that we have ever had.  It was quite a few days ago so I didn’t know if it would still have an impact, but it did.  She trusted me enough to try, and once she knew she could do it, it was all over.  This is about the tenth time she swam like this so she’s hamming it up a bit in this video by sticking her head in and out of the water.  She’s going to be a fish!

The happy ending to my last little rant is…

• I slept until 9:45 while Luke and Hailey watched a movie downstairs
• Sophia slept until 1:00pm. You heard me…1:00pm
• Her fever is gone
• Both girls had lots of fun at a birthday party in the ‘burbs this afternoon
• There was pizza at the party so I didn’t have to cook dinner
• Sophia went to bed at 8pm and fell right to sleep
• Hailey followed quickly soon after
• Daddy is passed out in bed with the computer on his lap
• Mommy will be passing out soon
• It’s not even 9:30pm
• Oh, and the watch is still ticking (I think), but remains in its hiding place two floors below me.

Welcome to another rockin’ Saturday night in the Hamilton household.

This is one of those entries that a clinical psychologist would have a field day with. They would probably tell me that I need to have some type of exorcism to rid myself of my pent up frustrations and angst. So, if you’re not in the mood to listen to me whine about my night last night, you might need to skip this one.

Still on board? Ok. Here goes. Sophia had a bit of a fever yesterday so Luke stayed home from work with her in the morning, and I took the afternoon/evening shift. Since he did not go to work during the day, he went in last night to catch up and avoid working over the weekend. That’s all fine and dandy, right?

Well, not when you have a toddler who is all wigged out on Tylenol or post-fever adrenaline or crack or something.

At 12:30am, she was screaming again. I rocked her for the third time last night and put her back down. Not 30 minutes later, she was up again. Ok. Now it’s 1am, and I’m in serious need of sleep because I am suffering from a cold too.

It’s at this point that I make a BOLD move. I took Hailey out of the girls room and put her in my bed. Thank goodness I did that because by the time I got back to Sophia she had worked herself up into such a fit that she threw up the milk she had just had to drink. Now, it’s 1:30am and I’m cleaning up puke for a baby whose eyes are glued OPEN. AHHHH!

After everything is cleaned up, I try rocking her, laying in bed with her, rubbing her back, putting her on the floor to play…ANYTHING to get some sleep at this point. Finally, I threw my hands up and let her cry herself to sleep. That was about 2:30am so don’t judge me, people.

Back in my bed, Hailey had commandeered the entire thing for herself. As soon as I lay down, I had feet in my rib cage. Ugh. Finally, I fall asleep around 3:00am.

Here’s where I lose it. At 6am, Luke’s mother f@#@’ing watch alarm goes off. Can I just rewind on the watch thing. Luke has been doing an AMAZING job at his lose weight competition and has been getting pretty serious about running. My step father recommended that he get a heart rate monitor to wear. Of course, Luke could not go get just a heart rate monitor, he had to go get the mother of all fitness, running, GPS, make you coffee, tie your sneakers for you watches. You know, so he can know where he is when he’s running around our 2 block neighborhood.

So, this watch does a lot of stuff and has a lot of buttons. Unfortunately, at 6am I am not in any mood to figure it out. Hailey, of course, woke up. I thought that I was going to seriously lose it, but I calmly took the watch down to flights of stairs, threw it under the mattress of the bed two floors below my bedroom, closed all the doors around it and hoped I never hear from it again. Then, I return to my bed and between Hailey begging for breakfast, the dog whining to go out, and the bursts of steam coming out of my ears, I started to dream about what would be the most fun way for me to smash that watch. Death by electric drill is what I decided on. More pain and suffering than drowning, running over with a car, or a trip out the window. Yeah. I need help.

It began as just a normal drive home from school – Sophia eating crackers she stole from Hailey’s class, Hailey babbling on about the awesomeness of pre-K, and Mommy muttering curse words under her breath at the traffic. Hailey had gotten a juice box from school and insisted on drinking it in the car.

Let me just interrupt this story to mention that when you are a mother you become somewhat clairvoyant. I don’t know if it’s really claivoyance or some type of mutated spidey-sense that tells you when a fight is brewing between your children even before the circumstances of the soon-to-be-fight have not even been created yet.

My Mommy-sense radar was BLARING when Hailey opened that juice box in the car. I told her, “if you open that juice box then your sister is going to want some, and you’ll have to share with her because it’s not fair that you have a juice box and she doesn’t.” Is your mommy-sense tingling now? Two minutes later, Sophia is SCREAMING for the juice box. I’m driving so I demand that Hailey turn over the juice box to her sister. Hailey, of course, conceded but only after having chugged half the juice box down.

Now, keep in mind that my intentions in this situation were noble, but the outcome did not quite work out as I had hoped. Sophia did not just take a sip of the juice box and return it to Hailey. She decided that it was her juice box now…permanently. Since I was driving, I had to wait until we were at a red light, reach behind my chair and wrestle (quite literally) the juice box out of Sophia’s hand. Of course, the juice was spraying out of the juice box all over Sophia, the chair, the car and my arm.

After securing the juice box for Hailey, Sophia began to scream. Then Hailey, realizing that her juice was all gone, began to whine about how Sophia drank all of her juice. “Technically,” I explained “Sophia did not drink all of your juice, she spilled it while I tried to wrestle it away from her.” Yeah, she wasn’t entertained or comforted by that technicality.

She talked the entire way home about the juice box, but my favorite line was… “Next year, I’m going to be in kindergarten at a different school, and then I won’t have to see my sister any more.” Ouch! Of course, later in the evening they were best friends again running around and making me crazy together.

I am picturing a future wherein I cannot get a word in edgewise…

Ok. I feel like I’m breaking a mirror by writing this blog. It’s entirely possible that in the future, I will have to endure seven years of bad luck, and by bad luck I mean a rebellious teenager with a messy room and a “I’m not you!” t-shirt. Yet, I just can’t help myself…Hailey is so much like me.

Exhibit A – She organized her silverware drawer in her play kitchen. Yeah. You like that? It’s all sorted, and all of the cups, plates, and tea pots are organized into different drawers and doors. It’s totally awesome until Fifi gets near it and then there is chaos.

Exhibit B – She loves to write. Sure it’s not the same type of writing that I like at the moment, but that’s only because she’s still learning how to actually put pen to paper. Oh, and to spell, but tonight she learned to spell red, blue, and brown. Thanks Pete the Cat book for your inspiration.

Exhibit C – Here’s the most interesting part of her new found love of writing. She has no sense of forwards or backwards yet. When I asked her to write her name on these thank you cards, she wrote the first three cards backwards. I started to get nervous that maybe she had a bit of a problem. Then I realized that she was writing it backwards because she was starting so far over to the right that she couldn’t fit her whole name going left to right so she just reversed it. When she started over farther over to the left she did it the right way. On a few, she got completely upset because she couldn’t fit all of the letters in a line forward or backward. Amazing how that little brain works.

Sophia knows maybe ten words. Among those are Mama and Whoa. So, you can imagine how often I hear “Whoa, Mama” from the backseat. It’s by far her favorite saying, and she has plenty of opportunities to say it while I say some other words at the Atlanta traffic.

When I picked up Hailey from school for the first time, I noticed a very interesting phenomena. There are pictures all over the door and the room of kids engaged in multiple activities. I noticed that the pictures are disproportionately of Hailey. Now, maybe I’m just biased, and this inequity is a figment of my imagination, but I don’t think so. I suppose that as a researcher I could count the number of pictures and then figure out the percent that are of Hailey versus the other kids in the class, but do we really need to go there? Take my word for it. There are a lot of pictures of her. Now, it might be that it’s because she’s just so darn cute, but I have a different theory. It’s because she’s the only one in the class who is consistently doing what she is told. Yup. That’s my theory. She’s actually doing the activities the right way, and thus they put up her picture as a model student. See, I’m not biased.