Mommin' It Up!

January 9, 2009January 8, 2009

Putting Away the Loot

Christmas is past (by fifteen days), a new year has begun, and I’m…stuck in a living room with twice as much crap in it as it had before. You see, my problem with the post-Christmas clean-up isn’t putting away the tree, the ornaments, or the stockings. That’s a snap.

(Because my husband does it.)

My problem is: Where do I put all this new STUFF? Specifically, all my kids’ new stuff. Like, the FIVE new board games Joshua received:

Or Sophie’s new posse (it’s a real tough bunch. You do NOT want to mess with Soph and her crew):

And then, there are the toys that are actually more like pieces of furniture. Exhibit A, Joshua’s (Christmas dream come true) Fisher Price GeoTrax set:

Exhibit B: Sophie’s Leap Frog learning table (which she adores!):

I’m throwing a baby shower for a friend of mine Saturday (if she doesn’t have the baby today. ‘Cause she was having contractions all day Thursday. Squeeze those legs together Megan!), so I am sitting here pondering where to put all of this new stuff that Santa brought, cause really, everysinglecarfromcarsmovie and all of Sophie’s posse are not invited to the shower. Aside from just throwing it all in the kids’ rooms until the shower’s over, I don’t have a clue!

My post-Christmas clean-up? It’s still not done! But it will be by Saturday! How about yours? What’s your biggest Christmas clean-up hang-up?

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By the way, this post is part of a Blog Blast sponsored at Parent Bloggers Network and Right@Home. I like to visit Right@Home to print coupons for some of my favorite SC Johnson products (like Glade candles. ALSO Emily’s favorite.) but the site also has great cleaning and organization tips and yummy recipes too! I’m headed over there now to see if they can solve all my problems for me, and you should too!

January 6, 2009

A Humiliating Movement. I Mean Moment.

When you get married, let’s be honest, you have no idea what you are getting into. When you are all googly-eyed and in love, floating down that aisle on your father’s arm, watching your groom beam at you, you never think you will one day tearfully (okay, hysterically) say to him in a hospital room after you’ve just birthed him a child:

“I’m just really scared I’m not going to be able to poop.”

And you never dream he will say in return:

“Honey, let’s just get you a suppository.”

Ah, sooo romantic. The stuff dreams are made of, truly.

But that is exactly what happened after I had my second child. With my first, I’d had an emergency C-section, and suffered an awful complication of surgery, called an ileus, which is a paralyzed bowel. Basically, I couldn’t poop or pass gas. I swelled up ’til I looked like I was nine months pregnant again and I was in agonizing pain (and also, I had a giant incision in my gut. So.) The pain was much, much worse than my actual labor pains when I’d been trying to push Joshua out.

So, after I had Sophie, and had another C-section, I was terrified of getting an ileus again. So I tearfully took my husband’s advice, got a suppository from the nurse (what a fun job. Why does anyone want to do that??), pooped, and -voila! – no ileus! Made recovery much, much better.

Fast forward three days. We are at the pediatrician’s with baby Sophie to get results from a blood test to check her bilirubin levels as she was a wee bit jaundiced when we’d left the hospital. Sophie’s doctor is checking her over and asking all the routine newborn questions, when he looks up at me and says:

“And how have the bowel movements been?”

I stuttered a bit. “Um, well…I’ve only had a couple.”

He looked at me quizzically and then – he couldn’t help it – stifled a laugh.

“That’s great,” he said, “but I was asking about the baby.”

(Ohhhhh. RIGHT. Not EVERYONE was obsessed with MY bowel movements. In my post-partum and vicodin-induced haze, I’d forgotten.)

I just started laughing – I laughed, I cried. It hurt my incision to laugh but I couldn’t stop! My husband was laughing too – why? Because my answer made perfect sense to him. He was also still a tad preoccupied with my bowel movements.

Now that’s love, isn’t it?

(I still can’t look the kids’ doctor square in the eye.)

January 5, 2009January 5, 2009

A New Year’s Resolution for our Daughters

Take a look at this:

More than a year ago, I posted a similar video, and many of you commented about your concern as well.

Now, I’ve joined other bloggers in spreading the word about Dove’s effort to combat the onslaught of negative messages girls face every day.

Real Girls, Real Pressure: A National Report on the State of Self-Esteem, commissioned by the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, reveals that there is a self-esteem crisis in this country that pervades every aspect of a girl’s life including her looks, performance in school and relationships with friends and family members.

— Seven in ten girls believe they are not good enough or do not measure up in some way, including their looks, performance in school and relationships with friends and family members
— 62% of all girls feel insecure or not sure of themselves
— 57% of all girls have a mother who criticizes her own looks
— More than half (57%) of all girls say they don’t always tell their parents certain things about them because they don’t want them to think badly of them
— The top wish among all girls is for their parents to communicate better with them which includes more frequent and more open conversations as well as discussions about what is happening in their own lives.

Dove is making a difference in the lives of girls across the country through their Self-Esteem Fund. Through nation-wide workshops on self-esteem, national advertising campaigns, and downloadable tools on their website, they are giving girls, moms and mentors the tools they need to boost the self-esteem of girls.

When I agreed to join the movement and blog about this issue, Dove’s PR people sent me a book called “Life Doesn’t Begin Five Pounds from Now,” by Jessica Weiner.

Here’s an excerpt from the review in Publisher’s Weekly:
This volume reads like a manual, helping young women to decode what Weiner calls “the Language of Fat.” She writes perceptively about how girls and women bond over expressions of self-loathing for their bodies (“I noticed just how hard it was to stay intimate with my girlfriends if I wasn’t body-loathing beside them”) and argues that the simple words “I feel fat!” mask an internal world of insecurity and pain.

The idea that we speak “a language of fat” really resonated with me. How often do we use expressions like that? I know I do it. A lot.

So, to get back to the title of this post, this is my New Year’s resolution, to stop speaking the language of fat. No good can come from this language, and it has negative impacts on everyone who can hear it.

Especially her.

And I want her to always have the confidence to wear rainbow-colored rain boots.

So that, my friends, is my New Year’s Resolution.

What’s yours?