Mommin' It Up!

August 11, 2009August 10, 2009

When in Virginia

Last week Bobby, the kids and I spent a week with my parents at their house in Virginia. During the school year, my folks live here in Ohio, but my dad is a teacher, and since they are cute old people, they have built themselves a love nest atop a mountain in Virginia near where my dad grew up. We love visiting them there because it is beautiful, quiet, free, and my parents cook us three meals and day and help us care for and entertain our children. This year as always we had an awesome time. I took over 400 pictures so I thought I’d share a few of my favorites with you! There are really too many to share in one post. So maybe I’ll include a few more later in the week.

Here are a couple pictures from a creek off the Blue Ridge Parkway that we go to every year, Otter Creek.

Sophie in the creek (looking cute in her Lands’ End swim suit, might I add! And rockin’ the swim diaper of course.)

Joshua caught many little fish at the creek! He had a blast. (I caught a craw-dad myself. But Joshua was unimpressed!)

We had a picnic lunch there and a lizard REALLY wanted to sit with us. He would NOT get off the table!

Another one of our favorite places that we hadn’t been in a couple of years is Sherandoh Lake. It is a gorgeous lake with a beach surrounded by mountains. We had a fun day there swimming and had a picnic lunch. It is just a gorgeous, fun place!

Joshua had a blast on playing on this innertube. (Boy that is a skinny kid! Somebody give him a sandwich!)

Sophie enjoyed running down the beach (she DOES love a good chase!)

We played a lot at my parent’s house. I love this picture of my Sophie blowing bubbles:

Here’s my dad with Joshua, after climbing the steep hill behind the house with their walking sticks!

There is of course, a lot of wildlife up on the mountain! My folks have a hummingbird feeder and there were 5 or 6 of them battling for this feeder. But I could only manage to get a picture of one of them at a time:

Bambi and his dad

Apparently we were also visited by a *gulp* BEAR one night but all he did was leave some tracks, and none of us even woke up. I am sure am glad because I would have fah-reaked out if I’d seen him!

That’s all I’ll ~~bore you with~~ share right now. More to come later this week, including some gorgeous pics of our visit to a wildflower farm. Get excited!!

July 29, 2009

Oh, What a Night

Last night Bobby went to a concert with some friends and was planning to be out late, so I decided to take the kids to the park and out for ice cream. Sophie was none too pleased to leave the park and was still fussing when we got to Baskin Robbins. She even fussed when I tried to give her a bite of her chocolate ice cream – for some reason she didn’t like the looks of it. (I told you, she is CRAZY!) So, I did what any good mom would do and I SHOVED a bite in her mouth. After which, she decided chocolate ice cream is good, and she happily ate about 1/2 of the kids’ cup I’d gotten for her.

Fast-forward to 2:37 a.m when I hear Sophie crying loudly over the baby monitor. I take Ambien to help me sleep, and since at this point I’d only had about 4.5 hours of sleep as opposed to the eight you are supposed to be able to “devote yourself to” with Ambien, I was a LITTLE out of it. I stumbled to Sophie’s room and could smell the tell-tale stench of PUKE before I even opened the door. But once inside, I could not figure out how to turn on her light. I was just too out of it. Fortunately Bobby came in the room just then and turned it on, having his wits about him. It was then that we saw our little girl covered in chocolate ice cream puke.

It was not pretty. That, combine with Ambien dizziness and the smell, sent me running to bow to the Porcelain God myself. So. That was awesome. Bobby, who is Superman, sent me back to bed and gave Sophie a bath and cleaned up all the mess himself.

This morning, Sophie seems totally fine. Bobby said she was fine in the middle of the night, too. No fever, super-cheerful, etc. So, I am going to have to blame this one on myself. As Emily said when I told her about last night’s events, “That’s what you get for shoving ice cream in her mouth, MOM.”

Lesson learned!

July 22, 2009

Having My Cake

For the past few months I’ve been sharing on and off with you about my struggles with depression and anxiety. And I am happy to say, after months of tweaking meds and what-not, I am a lot better. I’m not totally the carefree girl that I was, I still have issues at certain times of the month, but I am much, much better, and I’ll take it.

One thing that still bugs me about myself – is it my “new normal” self, or did I used to be this way too? I can’t remember – is that I get so exasperated by the little things in life. Bad traffic makes my heart race and my temper flare. It’s all I can do to control myself with the kids in the car, to keep from yelling in frustration. When I am in the shower, and I hear the kids fussing and fighting, my head wants to explode. When Sophie defies me, I take it personally. When Joshua asks me questionafterquestionafterquestion, or asks me to do something when I am clearly already busy, it makes me insane.

But the other day, as I was looking in the bathroom mirror, putting product in my wet hair to try and encourage it’s lazy waves, and Sophie started screaming and fussing in from the other room, mad at her brother about something, and that exasperated vein in my forehead started to throb, I just took a deep breath and realized: I need to put on the big girl panties of motherhood. I have little children. This is what they do. Sure, they are often sweet and funny and they make my heart burst with pride, but they are also messy, tempestuous, and selfish. And every day with them will be exhausting but it will also be beautiful.

So.

I am all for being real. I am all for letting my feelings out – why pretend that something is perfect when it’s not? That would only serve to make me crazier. My kids make me crazy. Several times a day. But they also make me deliriously happy. And if having my cake and eating it too smacks of discontentment with my life, then I’ll just have it. Put it in front of me and I’ll stare at it maybe sniff the icing and take in its sugary scent, but I won’t have a bite. In fact, I’ll take mine without a fork. Just in case.