Weekly Photo Challenge: Green
This was totally spontaneous. My little guy grabbed his preschooler scissors, plunked himself down and started pruning for a good 20 minutes. 🙂
Catch 22
Starting a blog about things that go wrong while raising children is so much fun. I’m constantly having wild experiences with my children that provide the best writing material I’ve ever had.
The irony of the whole thing is that I literally have about one hour of free time each evening to do what I want to do. So it’s the time of my life with the most to write about but the time of my life that I have absolutely no time to write it.
Our little family has been through some real ups and downs. Right now we are in a great big “up”- one of those times when life is so sweet and wonderful that you almost don’t want to breathe because you know things can change in an instant. One of those times that I feel my heart could burst at any moment with awe at the grace I feel to have such blessings surrounding me.
It’s the ultimate catch-22: the little blessings that wake me up at all hours of the night, keep me running, stepping on Lego, cleaning up stinky messes, playing referee and leave me begging for solitude some days, are also the little blessings that make me love in a way I didn’t realize was possible. In parenting the highs are high and the lows are low. If you don’t have the lows you can’t appreciate the highs in the same way.
Multitask-a-rama
This morning at around 7:30 a.m. I suddenly realized that I don’t think it is humanly possible for me to multitask anymore than I already do. During one moment in time this morning, I was:
- googling “symptoms of whooping cough in children”
- reading four text messages from my best friend
- brushing my teeth
- trying to stop little A from swirling her dolly in the toilet
- planning supper in my head
- figuring out what time we needed to leave the house
- putting my foot on the toilet seat to stop little A from swirling her dolly in the toilet (again) 🙂
Try it one day. Stop to think about how many things you are doing at once. Make a list and post it here if it’s interesting (or funny)! Related articles
- Only 2% of People Can Multitask Successfully [INFOGRAPHIC] (mashable.com)
p.s. No one has whooping cough.
4.5 years of sleep deprivation (Murphy’s Law #3b)
Getting two children to sleep, stay asleep and sleep past 5:00 a.m. is an Olympic event in our house.
- Once your darling toddler is sleeping through the night again (after a brief, 9 month hiatus of getting 16 teeth), she wakes at 5:00 a.m. for a diaper change. This isn’t much to complain about if you usually rock her for 2 hours in the middle of the night, but still, 5:00 a.m. is early.
- Your toddler quickly falls back to sleep, at which point your 4-year-old immediately wakes up and asks “is it time to wake up, Momma?” in that really loud, awake-sounding voice that means he is definitely not falling back to sleep. You know the voice. Resistance is futile.
- You try everything under the sun to
forceencourage said child to stay in bed: night lights that change colour at parents’ preferred wake time, numbers printed above a digital clock with a hopeful “7:00”, begging, pleading. These things work sometimes with a singleton. It is all a little more complicated when there is an eagle-eared, sleeping toddler on the other side of a paper-thin wall. - At every 5:00 a.m. wake up you promise yourself that you will go to bed early that night. Even if you dragged yourself around like a wet blanket all day, you will get an instant second wind the minute everyone is asleep. You stay up way too late, wake at 5:00 the next day and the pattern repeats itself over and over.
- On the day you have a babysitter booked and really, really want your toddler to have a good nap she won’t. She will have trouble getting to sleep. You will need to change her diaper two extra times. The minute she is finally sleeping your preschooler will run up the stairs, yelling, “Momma? Momma? Where ARE you?” and the little one’s eyes will burst open.
- When your youngest is between 12 and 18 months old and (some days) you manage to function somewhat normally, you will sit in the rocking chair, hum Ave Maria and stare at the beautiful, precious child in your arms. That vanilla-cupcake baby smell, the soft hair, velvety-smooth cheeks and tiny baby breaths make it all worthwhile. 🙂
You may also like:
https://murphymusthavehadkids.com/2012/06/24/oh-bedtime/
https://murphymusthavehadkids.com/2012/06/21/sleeping-through-the-night-murphys-law-3/
Go to the bathroom alone (Murphy’s Law #13)
On the first birthday I celebrated after becoming a mother, I received a card with a picture like this on the front:
Inside the card was written, “Go to the bathroom alone.”
Ah, the bathroom. To someone without young children the bathroom is a sort of sanctuary. A quiet place. A place to pour a hot bath, examine gray hairs, read a magazine.
When there are toddlers and preschoolers in the house, the picture changes. On a good day, a mother will close the door and spend 18 seconds doing what she needs to do before the first knock comes. On most days in our house, the door is wide open and there are two small people watching my every move. In B’s words, “Momma, whyyyy are you putting that stuff on your eyes? It makes you look mad. Momma, whyyyy do we need toilet paper? Momma, whyyyy do we need to go pee?” And on and on.
Little A is mostly interested in trying to swirl her toothbrush in the toilet. Oh, and pointing at any water on the floor and making sure I know it is “wet!” She loves to empty out the baskets under the bathroom sink. The other day it took me 10 minutes to find my mascara. It was under my bed with some deodorant and a soother.
A few “Murphy’s Laws” of the bathroom:
- The minute a mother gets in the shower, madness enters the house. Fully clothed children will suddenly run down the hall naked. Dogs will bark. The doorbell may even ring. Children who were innocently eating Cheerios and watching Toopy and Binoo will suddenly start screaming and freaking out.
- The morning a mother allows herself a few extra minutes of sleep is the morning she finds her four-year old coated in penaten cream. Said four-year old will find the only tin of penaten cream left in the house, which is stored on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet.
- Leaving your toddler’s diaper off for a few seconds always results in some sort of accident. Our new house has already been christened 3 times by my darling daughter.
I know there are more but my brain is tired from chasing children around the cul-de-sac, picking tubs of blackberries and singing 500 Miles five hundred times at bedtime.
What happens when you try to go to the bathroom alone? 🙂
Fear and Bumbos
High Alert! Breaking News! Yesterday new parents around North America were tweeting, facebooking and texting in a panic. No, it was not a child abduction or abuse case. No, it was not a report on children being mistreated, starved or locked in a basement. It was just another Bumbo recall.
Before I had Brother B I marched out and bought a brand-new green Bumbo. That’s what you do now when you have a baby: buy expensive plastic things that will make you a good parent. The Bumbo helps your baby sit up before they can sit alone. The typical baby uses it for about 3.5 hours over the course of a few weeks. In 2007 a “recall” was issued because too many parents were using the Bumbo on the table or counter. Babies were falling out. Duh. The “recall” involved putting a sticker on the Bumbo that basically said, “Don’t be an idiot put the Bumbo on the table.”
Every since I was young it has bothered me that you need a license to have a dog or cat but anybody can have a baby.
The latest recall of 4 million Bumbos is due to a few injuries. A couple of parents left their child in the Bumbo (either on a table or off). The children wriggled around, fell out, and banged their heads. They got hurt. A no-brainer. Not a reason to cause a panic and give new mothers yet one more thing to worry about.
Let’s call a spade a spade. Bring out the helmets and the bubblewrap. Close the curtains, lock the doors and keep those children safe!
Related articles
- Bumbo recall a parental failure (o.canada.com)
Murphyisms of the week (Murphy’s Law #12)
Two moments this week made me think, “Murphy’s Law” in a big way:
1. Even if all children are happy and occupied the moment before I immerse my hands in the gooey mess of hamburger-making, the minute I’m covered in ground beef, Little A will have Lego catwoman’s head in her mouth and will refuse to spit it out.
2. Do not let children play with cellphones! Little A was in her strap-on chair at the kitchen table. Brother B was teasing her with Big White Teddy. She grabbed BWT’s head and pulled. Brother B grabbed BWT’s back and pulled. Little A started falling forward. I started yelling. I yelled louder and did that slow-motion-but-really-fast-moving thing to grab her and prevent a disaster. I yelled some more. It all turned out fine, until I realized Little A had my cell phone and had auto-dialed the health unit. The phone was still on. It had been on for 24 seconds. The 24 seconds in which I was yelling.
All morning I waited for a call from some authority who would question my parenting skills. Thankfully they must not have had caller ID. 😉
murphy must have had kids 