You're Not My Type

Parents of the world UNITE!

That’s the motto that I think we should all scream every day as loudly as we can to as many people as will listen before someone calls the cops.

Raising babies is a very hard job.  The decisions you make along the way are personal. You do what you think is best for YOUR baby…which may or may not be what someone else thinks is best for THEIR baby. 

And here is where the so called “Mommy Wars” are born.  Because if you believe strongly enough that you are doing something right then that means anyone who is not doing it that way is wrong.

And now we have to go so far as to label people’s parenting styles.  They have to have names and they have to have rules.  And you have to follow all the rules of the parenting style you chose or you will have spent all that money on books that lay out the rules for nothing.  And we can’t have that.

I don’t understand this phenomenon.  Why do we have to pick teams?

“Ok, you’re on the red parenting team and you’re on the blue parenting team.  You have to hate each other.  Ok, GO!”

Let’s take so called “Attachment Parenting” for example.  I recently read a description of this type of parenting which started with the sentence:

“In attachment parenting the goal is for parent and child to form a strong emotional bond.”

Ahhh…I’m sorry.  Is that not the goal of ALL parenting? 

“Congrats on the new baby!  Do you feel attached to him?”

“Oh, no.  I didn’t pick that parenting style.”

My best friend recently had a baby.  She exclusively breast feeds and she wears the shit out of her kid cause he loves the baby carrier.  But if I ever found a cloth diaper in her possession I would think that some other being had taken over her body because there is NO WAY she would ever use those. 

WTF type of parenting is this?  Where does she fit in?  Could it possibly be that she doesn’t have one single “type” of parenting style?  We just don’t know. I’m going to set up an appointment for her to be evaluated by the experts.  She clearly needs some direction.

Authoritative parents want their kids to follow the rules.  Permissive parents are “nurturing and communicative”.  Helicopter parents want their kids to be safe.

Go ahead, folks.  Pick one! 

Unless you pick one you can’t be on a parenting team.  And if you’re not on a parenting team your child will never survive! Plus, if you don’t know what type of parent you are how are you possibly going to know which other parents you’re supposed to hate?

And we can’t just all start getting along because then Time Magazine will have nothing to write about.

Know the phrase “everything in moderation”?  Can we start applying that concept to how we raise our children?

If Suzie only eats vegetables and Mary only eats fruit…then they’re both friggin’ lame and missing out on something. 

Will the world as we know it cease to exist if some parents decide they want to be attached to their kids while keeping them safe and want them to follow the rules while every once in a while giving in?

Let your kids be free! Except if they’re gonna fucking kill themselves by jumping off the top of the jungle gym.  Then step in.

Breast feed your baby! Unless you can’t or don’t want to.  Then stick a bottle in that kid’s mouth and get him fed.

Establish ground rules and enforce them!  Unless you feel wild that day.  Then let them stay up an extra half hour to snuggle and watch a movie as a special treat.

The only parenting style that should exist is “Parent”.  And we can all be on that team. 

Next time you pass parents out with their kids give them a high five and say “Hey! I see your kids are alive and well.  Nice work.  Way to go team!”

And then when our kids are grown and out in the world on their own we can all sit around, have a cocktail and sign each other’s parenting year books:

Team Parent 4-Eva!

Love,

Things Carter Says…

p.s. Stay in touch!

A Day

I’m sure childless people often wonder what we parents do all day when we’re home with our kids. I guess they just can’t imagine this lifestyle.  As a parent I often wonder what childless people do all day as well…but then I have to stop because I have violent stabby feelings towards them as I imagine what their weekends must look like. 

So I figured I’d give everyone a glimpse into what a typical day at home with kids looks like here.  After you read it you can send your condolences…or wine…yeah, send wine.

So here we go, a day in my home:

Get woken up by someone poking you in the face.

Make coffee.

Drink a sip of coffee, put coffee down and help someone pour milk.

Correction: put coffee down and help someone clean up milk because someone tried to do it themselves rather than wait 15 God damned seconds.

Make someone toast.

Burn it.

Make someone toast again.

Realize you never finished your coffee.

Drink cold coffee.

Practice your ninja skills by attempting to dress an unwilling participant.

Make another cup of coffee.

Climb your stairs…stand and stare around blankly as you try to remember why you climbed your stairs.

Go back downstairs.

Break up a fight, sweep up some crumbs, dust something, realize you never finished your coffee.

Drink cold coffee.

Switch half a batch of laundry from the washer to the dryer.

Hear “I’M DONE” coming from the upstairs bathroom.

Hear it 47 more times in the 20 seconds it takes you to climb the stairs and wipe him.

Make a peanut butter sandwich.

Cut it incorrectly.

Pay DEARLY for your mistake for the next half an hour.

Play Legos. 

Search for little Lego pieces for ten minutes before you start vacuuming so you don’t suck them up.

Inevitably suck up a Lego.

Go to fold laundry and realize you never finished putting the clothes in the dryer.

Start to wonder if you have some sort of attention deficit disorder because this happens to you a lot.

Hear more fighting.

Thank God for whoever invented TV.

Begin checking the time every 10 minutes and fantasize about the moment your husband walks through the door.

Go to fold laundry…realize actually getting the clothes into the dryer is not one of your strengths.

Pour wine.

Start preparing dinner.

Stop preparing dinner because someone’s sock is not on correctly and if their sock is not on correctly then THEY CANNOT LIVE!

Realize you never finished your wine.

Laugh hysterically at your little joke as you would NEVER forget to finish your wine.

Pour more wine.

Good News: Your Kids Will Live

It seems these days we can't turn on the TV or browse through our Facebook news feeds without coming across some article or some expert testimony regarding all the ways we are potentially harming our children.

We're always being told we can do better. Do more. No wonder moms never feel like we're good enough. Because as soon as we start feeling competent we turn around and are confronted with evidence to the contrary. Once you learn the basic rules of parenting those f'ing bastards go off and change the manual.

If I had another baby I wouldn't know if I should front face the car seat, back face the car seat or put the car seat on the roof...

Well, let me tell you right now, I'm not the person who is here to tell you how to keep your kids in the safest, cushiest, most fantastic bubble of them all.

I'm the person who is here to tell you all about the things your kids can live through...

For example, you're kids can use three different types of pacifiers, breast feed, bottle feed, guzzle formula, eat only breast milk, take a bottle from you, your husband, the dog, the old guy down the road...and they will live.

Your kid can fall out of an infant swing when they are four months old because you thought you strapped him in but actually didn't...and they will live (well, they'll live till five at least cause that's how old Carter is and he's not had any complications from that so far.)

Your kids can suck on crayons and live.

Your kids can go outside in negative temperatures without gloves and live...and then when they're crying about how they can't feel their fingers you get to say "I told you so, you little know it all jerk!"

Your kids can walk barefoot from the car to the house through puddles on a rainy day because, even though you told them not to, they kicked off their shoes in a fit of rage on the way home from a friend's house. (Bonus to this one: they will never do that again.)

Your kids can have weeks where you and your spouse have this conversation:

"Have the kids had any vegetables this week?"

"Ummm...ketchup?"

Your kids can eat off the floor and live. Grant spent a good part of his infancy eating off the floor. I would have Carter in the high chair, dropping Cheerios left and right, and little baby Grant would crawl around and eat the debris. And I would think "Score! This feeds the baby AND cleans the floor!" And he's alive. I promise.

Your kids can come home from Nana's house and tell you they had cookies, cupcakes, donuts and candy and then proceed to buzz around your house with the crazy whacked out look of an addict who's maybe had one hit too many. And they will live. Well, let me clarify, they will live through the sugar rush...I don't make any promises that you won't kill them when they're in this state. (Also, Mom? I've taken out a bounty on your head for this incident. Watch your back bitch!)

Your kids can only do crafts at school because you fucking HATE crafts...and they'll live.

Your child can wear pajamas to his brother's kindergarten drop off every day because they refuse to get dressed with any sort of urgency and you refuse to exert the effort required to make them. And also you're jealous.

And finally...you can catch your kid sticking his fingers into the margarita salt you have in your cabinet and licking them and he'll live. And know what else? When he's of age he's going to have excellent taste in cocktails!

Introducing Baby Cat

I don't know if everyone is aware of this but I actually have three children.

I have Carter, Grant and...Baby Cat.

Who is Baby Cat you ask? Why, he is Grant's feline alter ego. And I consider him one of my children because I spend close to as much time with him as I do with actual Grant.

Now, let me just clear this up right now...when Grant slips into this role he's not simply being "a cat". Baby Cat is a specific cat. It would be like calling Mickey just some mouse. You wouldn't do that. It's Mickey f'ing Mouse. And it's Baby f'ing Cat.

We were first introduced to BC a few months prior to Grants 2nd birthday. He started mewing a lot and we thought "Hey! He knows what a cat says!"

But then he started trying to communicate with us by mewing and then we thought "Hey! There's something wrong with our kid!"

At first when we'd ask him what he was being he'd say "I'm a baby cat!" It was always a baby cat, not a regular cat or a kitten. Eventually he dropped the "a" and he just became Baby Cat, the persona.

We thought it was funny. We thought it was cute. We thought he would outgrow it...

Then suddenly he was three and guess who's still around? Baby mutha f'ing Cat.

Every morning we would wonder who Grant was going to wake up as that day. He's a sleeper-inner so I'd go in to wake his ass up and he'd just open his eyes, stare at me for a minute and then either yell at me for waking him up or...calmly mew at me. Turns out Baby Cat is a way better morning person.

So there we were acting like a completely normal family when secretly we had a cat son.

We managed to get through Grant's first year of preschool with no public displays of Baby Cat. But everything changed this past November during his school's annual pot luck dinner....

Every class had come up with an art project that the school was auctioning off as a fundraiser. One class made a cookie jar with their names written on it, and so on and so forth. Grant's class did a big frame with pictures of the kids holding signs with what they wanted to be when then grew up written on it.

So amid all the cute "princess" and "fireman" answers I found this:

 

Oh what the hell!

For almost two years we had managed to keep Baby Cat internal. Now here he was totally outing us. Oh wait...don't forget the best part: those project were auctioned off. So some other parent in his class now has this picture in their possession. I should have bid my life savings just to get my hands on the evidence that I'm raising a cat.

A few weeks later I walked into the school to pick him up and noticed his class had hung up some art work outside the room. The kids had squished white paint on a pice of paper and called it spilt milk. Then they had to say what their spilt milk looked like...

Giant. Baby. Cat. Of course. Why would it NOT look like that?

So we're now going on two full years of Baby Cat with no end in sight. I would understand this more if he had a lot of exposure to cats. We have dogs. And I'm not even sure he had yet to meet an actual cat when all this nonsense started.

Some day I'm going to be having a conversation with someone and it'll slip out...

"My son thinks he's a Baby Cat."

"Aw! That's adorable. How old is he?"

"Seventeen."

In recent months the cat obsession has moved from him simply BEING a cat to him being an advocate for all cats.

Grant was watching Muppet Christmas Carol with my brother in law and there's one scene where Rizzo the Rat slams a door and a cat runs into it...which presumably hurts the cat. My brother in law laughed. Grant immediately gave him a dirty look and very seriously said "That's not funny. I love cats." He then sat there for a few minutes, arms crossed, mumbling under his breath "That's not funny...cause I love cats. That's not funny..."

Mother of God!

At what point do I check him into cat lovers rehab?

The Mom Before Christmas

I’m the Mom before Christmas, welcome to my home!

Have you met my children? Here’s Piss and here’s Moan

 

They’re overtired and cranky and had too much cake.

F you, sugar…it’s 10! WHY ARE THEY STILL AWAKE!

 

The parties we’ve been to have taken their toll.

Getting them back on schedule is sucking my soul.

 

We decorated the house and hung every stocking.

I think they look straight…that could be the Nog talking.

 

I shopped and I shopped and I fought all the crowds.

 And I didn’t punch even one person.  So proud!

 

The pies are all baked but no thanks to me.

Cause I don’t do that shit, yo! I just buy Sarah Lee.

 

The damn tree is trimmed and the presents are wrapped.

Don’t ask us for more cause your parents are strapped.

 

Santa is coming! But I’ve done all the work.

That’s why I always say that guy’s a real jerk.

 

My kids asked for a toy and they’re happy to get it.

I spend all the damn cash, Santa gets all the credit!

 

But their faces lit up makes it worth all the stress.

Even though I’m now poor and my house is a mess.

 

I can’t be mad though, cause I love Christmastime!

Merry Christmas to all, and to all some good wine!

No Home Alone for You

One of my favorite parts of the holiday season is getting to watch my Christmas movies.

 

Other movies you could watch at any moment of the year.  Assuming of course that your kids don’t suck every ounce of life from you during the day and after they go to bed you actually have the staying power to sit down and watch a movie.  It doesn’t happen here…but hypothetically speaking you could watch any movie at any time.

One of my favorite Christmas movies is Home Alone.  The first one.  Actually, the second one is good too.  By the time they got to the third though…WTF! Knock it off.  Anyway, the first is the best by far. 

As with any holiday tradition that you enjoy, I am waiting for the day when I can sit down with my kids and watch that movie and laugh and laugh.  I know they would get a kick out of it and I would love it even more watching them enjoy the movie alongside me.

But not this year.

I’m not sure when I’ll feel safe letting Carter experience Home Alone but I can definitely say I’m not there yet.  I have a few good reasons…

1.       The Line “Look what you did, you little jerk!”

Because it will undoubtedly become his new favorite thing to say.  To Grant. 

And don’t little brothers have enough to worry about without having shithead lines hand fed to their tormenters by Hollywood? 

2.       The maternal guilt factor in this film is just not fair.

Seriously, the mom is freaking the hell out and going crazy and the dad is all like “Whatever, we’ll get there when we get there…anyone have a crepe?”

Hello! Dude, why is your wife the only one who cares that your young child is home alone?  At very least I think my husband would be paranoid that Carter would break something in the house that he would eventually have to fix.  So he’d want to get his ass home if only for damage control purposes.

Moms have enough trouble being guilty about mundane every day matters.  Do we have to put up with this crap when we watch movies too?  The film basically says “Hey Moms, everything that goes wrong ever in life is your fault.  YOU’RE the one who put him in that attic in the first place.  NO ONE ELSE has any responsibility here whatsoever.  You deserve every second of polka music that you had to endure.  Merry Christmas ya filthy animal!”

3.       The police in this town are completely worthless.

God forbid you take more than two seconds to look around the house.  You must be so busy enforcing law in suburban Middle America that you couldn’t POSSIBLY do anything besides ring the doorbell to investigate this matter. 

Police officers are among Carter’s heroes.  I want him to call on them in times of need instead of saying “Eh, I saw Home Alone…they aren’t gonna really do anything anyway. That kid was stuck in his house for days.”

4.       I routinely scare the shit out of him by threatening to leave the house without him.

Before watching Home Alone:

“Put your coat on…”

“Let me just make this guy do a back flip first.”

“Put your coat on now or I’m leaving without you…ok…bye.”

“NOOOOOO!  Ok, I’m putting my coat on!”

After watching Home Alone:

“Put your coat on…”

“Let me just make this guy do a back flip first.”

“Put your coat on now or I’m leaving without you…ok…bye.”

“Ok, see ya.  I’ll just sled down the stairs and eat pizza while you’re gone!”

If he thinks being home by himself is going to be a blast I lose all credibility.  I need this card.  I play it often.  I once actually pulled out of the driveway without him because he wouldn’t put his shoes on.  I thought his head was going to explode he was so upset. The therapy bill for that one is gonna be large.  Whatever, he put the damn shoes on after that…worth it in my book.  How else would I get  his ass out the door most days?  He must continue to believe being left alone in his house is a bad thing. Screw you Kevin for making it look like a party.

5.       Um…EVERYTHING KEVIN DOES TO THE BURGLERS!

Hey , Cart! Here is a bunch of dangerous yet HILARIOUS shit for you to try!  Blow torches are a ball!  Have you tried making someone step on a nail lately?  Good times, good times. 

I know for a fact that if I let Carter watch this movie his evil genius brain is going to start working overtime.  I will actually expect smoke to come out of his f’ing ears because he’s so busy plotting how to throw together any one of the extra super cool booby traps that he just viewed. 

I’ll have to start sleeping with one eye open…and flicking water on all my doorknobs to test if they’re hot. 

So yeah, I’m not ready for this yet.  Maybe next year. But probably more like when he’s 25…and doesn’t live with me anymore. 

He's Making a List

Well, it’s that time of year again. Christmas is right around the corner.  Time to buy more shit for my kids that they don’t need and we don’t have space for.

Every single toy store has figured out that if you want to increase sales you need to appeal directly to your target audience.  That’s why the covers on all of the toy catalogues are BRIGHT GREEN or FLORESCENT YELLOW…so your children will be sure to spot them in the pile of other mundane crappiness that the mailman delivers these days.  (Seriously, does anyone get anything other than bills in their mail anymore?)

So my kids have started looking through these catalogues and circling what they hope to receive for Christmas.  It’s been a very long process because a new one comes to my house literally every single day. 

And while we’re on this topic:

Dear American Girl Doll Company,

Sending your catalogue to a mom of two boys clearly makes you guilty of intentional infliction of emotional distress and can be considered cruel and unusual punishment.  My lawsuit against you is pending…

I digress.

My kids have started making lists. 

Carter’s list is all over the damn place and includes outrageous requests:

“Santa won’t be able to fit a Jeep Grand Cherokee with monster truck tires in his bag.”

And everything he’s ever heard of or looked at:

 “Florida is a state, not a Christmas gift.”

 And some things I’m relatively sure he has no fucking clue what they are:

“No…you can’t have the Mir Space Station for Christmas.”

This week I made them each come up with two big and three small things that they really reeeeeeallllly wanted to get for Christmas.  Santa has started her shopping and she’ll be damned if anyone comes up with an 11^th hour request that they simply cannot live without. You’re writing a list now and you’re sticking to that list, kid!

Carter was predictable at first: Legos and Power Rangers.  Fine.

But then he hit me with: “I want a Tennessee Titans football helmet.”

Hey, Random Boy…we live in Boston.  WTF is with the Tennessee Titans?

His next choice of gift was a map. 

Um, if I buy you the map does it get me out of buying you the out of commission Russian space station?

Your list is really running the gamut here.

Ok, whatever, I’ll get you the random football helmet even though it’s gonna get you beat up on the playground, some Lego ninja shit and the best map that money can buy.

Well, one kid down and he’s the tough one.  I was thinking Grant would be a breeze.  Only, he sucked even worse than his brother.

Know what he asked for? A new car seat.  Yup.  Car seat.  Every three year olds dream gift!

You’ve got to be shitting me kid. 

I tried to get him to give me an idea that didn’t suck Christmas balls and this is what I got…

“I want something long.”

Is there any way you can be more vague here? That would really help me out.

Clearly I was going to have to come up with ideas of my own.  So I grabbed a bottle glass of wine and did some online shopping…

The Cool Mom in me: "I'm gonna buy my kids these cool light up swords they've been asking for! They'll be from Santa. They're gonna love them!"

 The Frugal Mom in me: "And man did I get a good deal! They'll look big and impressive in the pile but they're so cheap!"

 The Sane Mom in me: "Woah! What the fuck are you two doing? You bought our kids WEAPONS for Christmas? Bitches be crazy!"

The lesson here, my friends, is don’t drink and shop. 

This is exactly how Carter ended up with a drum set last year.