Blah, Blah, Blah, and more Blah!

I read somewhere, "Everyone knows how to raise kids, except for those who have them."

I love this phrase because you don't realize how true it is until you have kids. You can probably think back before you had kids and you were the one offering inexperienced advice, present party included. My mistake is that I thought people would stop this nonsense once you tell them you have four kids, or they know you have four kids, but they don't.

Remember Lucy from Charlie Brown? Always ready and willing to charge people for the advice she handed out? Well, I would like to take that and put a twist on it. How about for every person who gives me unwanted and unasked for advice on how to raise my kids, or what I shouldn't do when I'm pregnant has to pay me to listen to their BS? Double for those without kids!

When it comes to life, I've always been a do-it-yourselfer/ common sense kind of gal. Don't get me wrong, in no way am I suggesting that I've made it this far and never reached out for help or advice. But in my opinion, life is pretty much common sense. So, when people from all walks of life - family, friends, doctors, classmates - offer advice on parenting or pregnancy when I didn't ask for it, I get annoyed, sometimes pissed, but I always keep my composure while challenging their advice when I don't agree with it. Over the years, and pregnancies, this has included topics such as my choice to have repeated c-sections and debating on whether or not to have the baby Baptized because my view of the Catholic church has changed.

In general, I don't take it personally, but for some reason my current pregnancy has all sorts of people giving me advice. And not just innocent advice, like you should read this book or be careful lifting that. I could handle that. But the advice I've received during this pregnancy is harsh and almost unbelievable to my ears at times.

It started early in my first trimester. I was taking a writing course and someone wrote a story about a woman with postpartum depression. During peer review, one classmate said that the dialogue seemed unrealistic.
"There's just no way that a mother would ever talk to her child like this."
I couldn't hold back, so I laughed out loud and then I had to explain myself. There were a few of us in the class who had kids and we agreed that child services would be called on most parents if everyone knew what they were thinking, not acting on or saying, but thinking.
"That's just awful. I can't believe it. That's just awful to treat your kids that way."
My response: "Call me when you have a few."
Another girl piped in," Hell, call us after you have one. We'll see what you think then."

This semester, my third trimester, I walked into a class with a decaf, soy toffee mocha from Starbucks.
The girl who sits next to me, and who I usually exchange small talk with said in a snarky way, "That's decaf right?"
"Nah," I said because I knew where this conversation was headed.
"Oh, because that's not good for the baby you know." (Polite nod, while thinking Fu*$ you!)
A few weeks later she noticed I was wearing a blue bra under a white t-shirt and felt it was necessary to tell me, "Oh it doesn't matter anyway, no one is looking at you. You're pregnant."
I wish that had been the day I had my coffee because she would have been wearing it, but instead I loudly responded with, "You still on that crazy medicine? What do you call it, Wellbutrin?"

Then, at my last OB appointment, I had to hear it from the doc. This one really burned me up.
"Did you get your flu shot yet?"
"No, and we, my family, haven't had a flu shot in five years and we haven't been sick in five years."
"You know, the H1N1 is dangerous for pregnant women."
"Yeah, I heard. I also heard the shot they gave out last year didn't match the strain of H1N1 by the time people started getting sick from it, so really it was ineffective. Actually, my dad got his flu shot two weeks ago and he's been sick and sore ever since. I just don't trust that crap the government gives out. I was in the military and I've taken enough unnecessary mystery shots from them."
"Pregnant women die from it. I've seen it."
"I'll take my chances."

Until next time, "In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back," Lucy (from Peanuts)...

C'est la vie

Ever feel like there's a little evil person pushing the hands of time against you? Yeah, me too...

Monday, 11 p.m. - Just going to bed after a full day of classes, writing papers due for classes later in the week, and logging an entry into my tutor training log about my experience tutoring that day.

Monday, 11:48 p.m. - My 4 & 1/2-year-old wakes me up. I walk her back to her bed.

Tuesday, 1:03 a.m. -  My 4 & 1/2-year-old wakes me up, again.

"What's the matter, hun?"
"I can't see you, mommy."
"That's because it's 1 in the morning and you should be sleeping."
"I had a bad dream about Scooby-Doo."
I'm now kicking myself in the rear for letting her watch Scooby-Doo, so I could get homework done. I get up from the bed to walk her back to her room. I tuck her in and cover her with a blanket we somehow convinced her is a sweet dream blanket.

I get comfortable in my bed, but make the mistake of looking at the clock after I am unable to fall back alseep right away - 2:43 a.m. Are you kidding me? How have I been laying here for that long?

3:33 a.m. - Guess who's at my bedside, again?
"Hun, you're killing mommy."
"Mommy, I'm still having bad dreams. The sweet dream blanket isn't working."
I start to get out of bed...
"No mommy, I want to sleep in here."
"You know you can't, hun." Of course, I really would rather her just climb in and let me sleep. "Come on, mommy will sit with you for a few minutes in your bed."
This seems to make her happy, I give her a kiss and remind her that she's got a big day at school tomorrow.
"I hate school."
"I know."

5:19 a.m. - I finally just pick her up and let her sleep in our bed. She falls right back to sleep and so do I.

6:00 a.m. - The time my daughter normally wakes up and the time I planned to write this blog. I sleep right through until 8:07 a.m.

The morning rush - my husband and I are both running late to get out the door, but since he's the one who puts food on the table I take our daughter to school today, so he won't be late.

Even with the little bit of sleep she had, my daughter is surprisingly cooperative in getting out the door quickly AND in a good mood. Bonus! Of course, the fact that I let her bring cereal in her Jesse (from Toy Story 3) cup in the car was a big help.

I get her to school and head out to get myself to school. Oddly, there is hardly any traffic, so I enjoy my music and a relaxing ride. Then, as I'm exiting right, onto an off-ramp, a woman in a brown Mazda 626 suddenly decides that's the exit she is getting off and comes at me two lanes from the left, wedging me between the overpass barrier and her car. Luckily, I have awesome defensive driving skills and quick reaction behind the wheel, which I attribute to living in a major city for most of my life. I smell and see gray smoke coming from under the car - burning rubber. The Jesse cup is airborne and Berry Kix fly everywhere. Somehow I escape and the Mazda speeds off down the ramp, probably not even aware that she almost shoved me off the overpass to the traffic below.

In the parking lot at school, my energy is restored because I realize I have plenty of time to write this blog before my first class, but I decide to check the syllabus for my first class just in case.

"Oh, f%^&, I thought that sh*& was due Thursday!" I re-read the syllabus to be sure that the assignment I thought was due Thursday is actually due today - it's due today.

9:45 a.m. - I head to the computer lab to write a rough outline and a 4-page paper before my class at 10:30 a.m. It's a personal record, I get it done.

After class I head home, but not before another near miss in Parking Lot K. That parking lot is always packed and drivers tend to speed through it in search of the perfect spot. Walking into class, I've seen a bunch of near misses in cars almost hitting students walking across the lot. As I left today, the driver of an SUV must have not seen my car before pressing the gas pedal to the floor and almost T-boning my front end from his parking space.

I need to get home, stay there, and do my blog.

Once I get in the door, I just sit down. It had been one of those days and it was only 12:30ish.

Until next time, have I mentioned I'm 8-months pregnant through all of this...

Chick-fil-a Confessionals

In designated Chick-fil-a restaurants across America, behind enclosed, soundproof glass walls and doors is a play area for children under a certain height (although the height rule is regularly overlooked). I'm sure the intention of the company was to have this as a place for kids to make new friends, discover new ideas, get some exercise, and for light conversation between parents, sharing their parenting experiences.

Over time, I learned that while the kids are making new friends, discovering new ideas, and getting exercise, sometimes the parents are using this place to share way more information than which brand of diapers they use. You don't have to be a fly on the wall to hear about bodily functions, backstabbing, affairs, or other intimate confessions at this place. Nope, you just need to be in the wrong place at the right time - that wasn't a Freudian slip on the age old saying.

My first experience in the Chick-fil-a Confessional was with a complete stranger who confided in me about another mom and her "evil" daughter. It went a little something like this:

I took my 2 & 1/2-year old daughter to Chick-fil-a, mid-week, right as they opened. Soon after, another mom walked in with two kids.

We exchanged a courteous hello and asked the common question: How old is your son/daughter? We made small talk about the weather and somehow that made her comfortable enough to tell me about her most recent run-in with another mom.

"Your daughter really plays well with other kids," she said.
"Thank..."
She cut me off, "I just don't get some moms. Some moms don't teach their kids manners or respect for other kids. They let their kids bully other kids and don't punish them for it or nothin'."
So much for enjoying time with my daughter, this woman is going to bend my ear on this shit!
"My daughter has a friend, well had a friend, cause I won't let her play with that little girl anymore. She's a bully and her parents don't do anything about it. The little girl's name is R- and, well, you really can't blame her. It's how she's raised. It's her parent's fault."

"R-, that's an unusual name. Maybe she gets her attitude from an older sibling?"
"Nah," the woman said. "She only has a little sister named Ri-."

"Her mom's a bully, too," she said.
"How do you mean?"
"Well, her mom and dad are alcoholics who drink all the time and fight a lot, in front of the kids, too," she said. 

Her rant went on for about 15-minutes until she hollered at her kids to come down from the maze of tunnels because they had to leave.
She even made sure to warn me, "The mom's name is Kellie K- and if you ever run into her, her daughters are R- and Ri-.They are a dangerous family, stay away from them."

At this point, I burst into laughter.
The ignorant mom looked at me, confused.
"I'm sorry I'm laughing."
"I can't blame you," she said. "It's almost unbelievable."
"Well, no, that's not my point. I'm laughing because Kellie and unnamed husband have been my friends since high school. I'm surprised I've never noticed these problems."
The woman didn't even let her kids get their shoes on. She grabbed all of her belongings and raced her kids in stocking feet, snow on the ground, across the parking lot to her car.

Until next time, a warning for all moms desperate to confide in a complete stranger about cheating husbands, nipple cream, backstabbing friends, and other people's kids, remember, the soundproof glass only conceals the noise, not who or what you talk about.

Giving Things Up

Even though I should be a pro at guesstimating my due date by now, my jaw dropped when I found out that my assumptions on my current pregnancy were wrong. It's likely that yours were too. Don't worry, this is normal and not the beginnings of bad parenting.

We (moms) swear to know the moment of conception. We begin to count out the seconds, days (or nights), and weeks to predict our own due date. So, it's no surprise that when the doc pulls out the plastic, color-coded calender wheel from their official doctor jacket, we are baffled to learn that we are more than a few weeks off.

Have you ever truly read the statistics on pregnancy? Wait! Don't! In fact, don't read anything about pregnancy when you're pregnant - the contradictions from one doctor's book/article to the next will make you hysterical. Pregnancy is so complicated that even the pros can't agree on the subject. But, that's a topic for some other time.

In a traditional reproductive method, more than 100-million sperm are released and only 1 of those will make its way through several layers of a woman's egg, and that's only if the woman is ovulating, which means there is an egg available for the sperm to fertilize. (I wonder if this is where the term "one-in-a-million" came from?) If the egg is not there, the little guys will hang out for about 5 days waiting on the female egg, which is typical of a male:female relationship. With such a complicated and time sensitive occurrence, how can pregnant women expect to ever figure out when the fertilization process began? So, give up trying.

Another jaw dropper for us moms is when we find out that we're actually preggo for 10 months and not the suggested 9 months we've heard ever since sex-ed class in junior high. From the time of conception to the average time a baby is born at 42 weeks is really 10 & 1/2 months. WTF? Trust me, I'm feelin' your pain! 

The first time I became pregnant it was "we're pregnant" as in me and my husband. I didn't think twice about giving up certain things deemed bad for my health and the health of the baby for 42 weeks. With this pregnancy, there's a stronger emphasis on the "I" and what I'm giving up. It includes everything that I can't, or that I am not suppose to do. When I found out this time, after I had my "Oh shit" moment, I thought about another long, hot summer with morning sickness, no more caffeinated beverages, another 10 months of dark roots, and another beerless football season.

Then I did something a woman never has to give up when they're preggo - I went shopping.

Until next time, it's all fun and games until someone gets pregnant...

Congratulations, you're pregnant!

"But...but...but" and all the scenarios begin to run through your mind. Suddenly the phrase "romping around" takes on an entirely new meaning in your life.

Okay, so now what?

With a misleading congratulatory smile and handshake, that I've now labeled as "good luck with that", your OB hands over an overwhelming bag full of samples - baby food, power bars, nausea candy, nipple cream - pamphlets on nausea medicine, postpartum depression, college savings plans, blood-chord registry, breast feeding Vs. bottle feeding, which is different from the breastmilk Vs. formula pamphlet, 3D imaging centers that allow you to see your baby floating in amniotic fluid, and paperwork about amniocentesis testing, which requires the insertion of an oversize hollow needle through the mother's abdomen, into the uterus to withdraw amniotic fluid from the womb, so a mom can find out the most crucial genetic details of the baby.

All of the samples, pamphlets and paperwork discuss the extreme circumstances of what can go wrong alongside colorful photos of beautiful babies and happy mothers - what a crock!
No wonder why mother's are predisposed to worry, all of this is too much information too early.

Then, as soon as the word spreads that you're pregnant, everyone has their two-cent advice to give. Whether you ask for it or not.
From the docs it's the bag, from your friends it's "Oh, you need to read this book and that one but don't worry I have a copy of all 5 that I can give you" and it only gets worse from there.

Then your parents - and if there is a he involved, his parents - have advice from the prehistoric days when cloth diapers were still the fashion. "Don't worry if the baby gets sick, I've raised 7 boys and sugar-water does the trick everytime, honey. Docs these days have kids on so much medicine, no wonder why they're sick all the time."

Then you have those close to you, and sometimes random people, who give advice based on hearsay. However, their advice is mostly opinion-based because they don't have kids and likely no experience with kids at all. ALL mothers should use these people as a means to learn the process of selective hearing. This may be bold, but NEVER listen to these people. I can say this because I use to be an opinionated woman with no kids and no experience raising one, judging moms across the world. Before motherhood, I would feel the need to comfort a child getting spanked in the cereal isle, now I look at the situation and say "Thank God that's not me today! That poor mom."

The only people that seem to mind their own business about my pregnancy and the way I raise my kids are my grandparents. My grandparents just want to hold the baby, watch every precious little finger, wrinkle and slight movement. This can go on for hours. They never ask what kind of bottles I am using, or why I'm not breastfeeding, or yell at me because the baby doesn't have socks on. They just want to hold and coo their great-grandbaby for as long as the baby will let them.

For what it's worth, the first time I brought the congratulatory OB bag home I went straight for the samples. After 10-minutes of trying to free the first one from its airtight plastic wrap, I had had enough. I quickly picked out the coupons for the baby stores and dumped the rest. That's pretty much the same method I've used ever since. Actually, I was a bit disappointed that the bag from this pregnancy wasn't a bit more stylish, I was hoping to use it as a travel bag for the baby. I probably will anyways.

Until next time, count to ten or call a friend...