It's just another manic birthday...but does it have to be?

  I can't believe it either.  The timing is going to be one mad scramble.  Brace yourself. Where did we put the Cuervo?? I am on the trail of arranging another birthday party. Our princess is turning 8 soon and, spoiled bunny that she is, we are having a party at a local arcade.  I am less than thrilled about this but it couldn't be helped.  While I never had my act together, I do try to plan ahead at least a little for our daughter's birthday.
  This year mom's car accident threw me for a loop.  I forgot all about planning for a party once my mom called and said she was in the hospital.  Long story short, she had a bad car accident and totaled her car.  It was an honest mistake, I think, but mom was pretty shaken up. It only took a week or two for the worst of the dust to settle but my focus got shifted and I just wasn't thinking about party plans.  What we wanted to do, have people at our house, was no longer going to work because the entertainment we wanted to rent was no longer available.
  As we say at our house, bologna happens.  I now need to move forward and accept help from a party place.  On the upside, I get to focus on the grown up family party - yes,  there's 2 gatherings. This means a lot fewer people at my house.  This is a plus since our house is too small to have people indoors so I keep everyone in our garage. The family crowd is also quite helpful since the inlaws and close friends ask 'what can we bring?'.  My house also gets a good cleaning since company's coming. That's about as much fun as a fork in the eye but at least I end up with a clean house.
  I also need to work getting ready for a consignment sale.  I registered to sell so I need to start getting my stuff together.  The problem is keeping ahead of things so I'm not behind the eight ball and killing myself to get it all done.
  A friend recently asked me a great question.  'Do you have to have a birthday party for her?' This got me thinking - again.  Why are we going through all this as if it was some sort of 'requirement'? I mentioned this to our girl. 'You know, I said, not everyone has birthday parties.'  She looked at me as if I had asked if she wanted to be disemboweled.
  Here's a biggie for the mommy to do list.  How do we instill some gratitude in a daughter who is incredibly blessed? I'm guessing this is going to take baby steps, possibly billions. We struggle as it is to keep our girl from getting greedy.  Unfortunately, I've seen that overstimulated look of a kid tearing through gifts, barely acknowledging one before the next one gets opened.  I plan to call on the cavalry for this one.  I plan to ask our family therapist for some ideas. In the meantime, I'm open to suggestions from you, dear reader.  

For the love of God, slow down!

  Recently, I saw a friend post on Facebook that he saw pumpkin spice coffee at WaWa in August.  I thought, 'don't worry, in ten minutes it'll be Christmas'.  I think the retail after summer sling shot to the holidays is really bad for a mommy who feels overwhelmed already.  For me, they're just heaping on more s**t I'm not ready for- and in a shameless money grab to boot.
   I'm amazed like everyone else how fast the summer flew by. Funny to think how I was worried about how I was going to keep our girl busy all summer and now she started third grade this month! It still feels like I just brought her home from the hospital. Tempus fugit does not need any help.
   I look forward to the weekend for obvious reasons but is that really such a bright idea? Most people don't have the luxury of either a job they love or independent wealth. How do you find pieces at least of your week to enjoy so you're not 'looking forward' past your whole life? I don't want my week to be something to 'kill off' at least not completely.
  So how do I pull out of my personal vortex?  My week blurs by in a to do list of household crap.  I find this funny in the sense that I'm a stay at home mom.  You'd think I'd have free time.  I haven't been bored since I was 8.  I would be baffled as to why the house isn't immaculate but that's a wall of pudding because of the 2 children I clean up after, ages 8 and 53. There's plenty I would like to do but it seems I don't often make it past the brussels sprouts portion of the list, at least not during the day.
  Getting it all done so you won't be sorry is a big cattle prod but is it really such a bright idea?  How important is this really?  What's the worst that will happen if it doesn't all get done?  Will something explode?  
  It seems odd to me that the things I journal about always end up resolving themselves.  Every single time I go back through those hand written pages of worries they always turn out fine.  I wish I had a grip on that fact from the beginning.  If there is objective evidence that worrying is a waste of time, why do I keep doing it? I can only surmise it must be a deeply ingrained habit.
  Maybe the problem is my vision.  My eyes are way bigger than my stomach when it comes to all the things I want to get done.  There's no way I can pull it all off, not without a cape and phone booth.  Some things simply will not get done and I have trouble accepting that sometimes.  It would also help me to keep my eyes on myself, too.  I am not the Martha Stewart type.  When I am lucky enough to come up with something creative, it's usually in response to an emergency.  There will never be a birthday party with homemade perfectly decorated anything in our future.
   Those close to me also know that I am notoriously late for everything.  Maybe the way to get ahead is to take a step back.  I'll settle for baby steps on this one since we know what a basket of sunshine I am early in the morning.  I'm trying to get up a few extra minutes early to allow more time for the harassment campaign known as getting my daughter ready for school.  Once during the first week of school I fell asleep and was late to go get our girl.  Baby steps apparently came back to kick me in the butt.

Eureka, sort of, finally!

  "She needed to be 'bitch slapped' but he didn't do it".  I heard my spouse read this to my daughter before bed recently.  Someone is apparently getting frustrated with our girl's choice of reading material.  We've gone through this before when our girl was smaller.  She would get stuck on one book until we all had it memorized.  After a while we'd get bored and mess with her by changing things in the story.  Half the fun was seeing if we'd get caught. "That's not what that said!" At least we knew she was paying attention.
  This was all part of the "process" involved in getting her majesty to get ready for bed.  Some nights are better than others, of course.  The stories are probably my fault.  I'm a book nerd from way back and when I had my daughter, that was just a cheap excuse to get more books.  The downside of this is inventory management.  I'm a regular at library book sales and I have a ball looking.  It's one of the few times I will voluntarily shovel my butt out of bed early on a weekend.
  The rest of the process can be attributed to standard kid operating procedure.  Our girl is a professional staller.  Can I have some water? I'm hungry! Is it a bath night? Things got a bit hairier at during second grade.  Our girl's math grades were almost swirling the perimeter.  We tried the computer math games, math dice and getting her 'help' with figuring out the cost of treats at the grocery store.  Finally, her teacher suggested flash cards and our therapist helped out by suggesting they be neon.  Somehow flashcards got added to the "process" mainly because I couldn't figure out how to get any cooperation earlier in the day.
   I think the captive-audience-because-you're-upstairs helps.  It was painful at first but it got a little better when she figured out that these weren't going away anytime soon.  This harrassment continued all through the summer.  What frustrated me was that I didn't figure out how to take the torture out the flashcards until almost September.  Our therapist suggested that since our girl is more of a visual kid, I could just get her to find the answer to a math question in a pile of flashcards.  When we went to the library one day and ran into one of her teachers, she gave me the second half of a great idea!  We could have a race.
   Built into our bedtime saga is now a math game.  I spread out the answer cards and 'race' our girl to find the answers.  She had so much fun beating mommy that she asked for more cards!  I had to wonder if she was feeling well but I've learned to shut up and go with it (selectively, that is) for as long as it lasts.  Despite the fact, that I'm a CPA, my seven year old wins the math race every time by a mile.  She hasn't figured out why mommy is so slow.  Sometimes I don't get it, either.

exercise - in masochism?

   I am very jealous of my gorgeous instructor, John.  It began as a horrible girl crush.  The man is young, handsome and in fabulous shape.  He's the complete opposite of my husband.  That's an ongoing struggle I have in my marriage.  My spouse is my best friend and we are practically joined at the brain.  I didn't marry him for the unbridled sex appeal but sometimes I miss that.  I'm having an imaginary illicit affair with my teacher.  Good thing he's not aware of that, I wouldn't want to skeev him out.
 Before anyone gets the wrong idea, make no mistake.  We are all of us right where we belong.  That is to say we are all paired up with the perfect spouses for us.  'John', my teacher,  has also never been anything but a consummate professional.  We all know I've made a commitment to run to the end of my chain and bark (to quote a comedian) and I'm cool with that.  Those that know me and my spouse know how spoiled I am and also know I'm smart enough not to louse that up.  John is also so married it can be seen from space.
  I've been taking classes with him for years now.  He began teaching self defense at my dojang.  Recently, he started a new series of real world self defense and intense fitness classes.  They began with an evening information session to survey for interest.  I figured it sounded neat and a little intimidating but I wanted to check it out.  I decided I'd have no problem looking at John for an hour a few nights a week so I signed up.
 Thus began an odyssey into what I can only guess is some warped combination of humoring my mid life crisis and an undiagnosed mental illness.  We started classes and I had no problem watching those nice muscles.  After the first week I woke up so sore it felt like my hair hurt and I was cursing Mister  Handsome Pants -- and I kept coming back.
 The lunacy continued and included such fun things as flipping tires, box jumps and ground pounds and went on to include burpees and "hood drills".  Hood drills, just to enhance the masochism, involve an exercise in reacting whatever threat is in front of you once a hood is removed. (See undiagnosed mental illness.)  
  What's even wierder is the fact that I enjoy these classes or should I say the benefit of them.  I've had fantasies about working out at home in my basement but the reality is that I'm someone who needs to leave the house.  I've also noticed that the older I get the closer to impossible it becomes to get in shape (unless you count round as a shape).  Normal gym workouts no longer seem to give the same results they used to.  I could also eat salad until I develop a nose twitch but still stay ostensibly the same size.  Unfortunately, I also need to sweat like a farm animal and do it often just to break even.  The sessions themselves are fast paced and you don't see the same exact routines twice.  Putting it mildly, by the end of a class, I 'mell.
  I'm guessing the real root of this warped addiction goes pretty deep.  When I was a teenager I lost a lot of weight the "wrong way" and ended up in the hospital.  I recovered physically but haven't been able to see myself clearly since.  I did manage a healthy pregnancy although I was frustrated that the only thing the doctors removed was the baby. They could have taken some extra but no, just our daughter.  Besides the peer pressure of "not wussing out and quitting", my pants are the other big reason I return.
   Somewhere around the sixth week of training from hell, I noticed my abs were improving and my jeans were starting to feel loose. I was teetering on the verge of feeling good about how I looked and was unwilling to give that up. I was trapped, dammit.
    I am one of the older students in our group. Some evenings you'd think John was making a concerted effort to kill us.  There was one particular evening recently when we were doing four rounds of craziness.  By the fourth time,  my burpees had gone from a normal looking down and up to flopping myself on the floor and praying for death.
  What helped a lot was the camaraderie of this group.  Maybe you latch onto each other in a crisis but these people are da bomb all the same.  I've gotten cheered on to finish a set of evil exercises by people I've just met that night as well as the regulars. They also make you feel like you want to finish your set even if you have to drag yourself across the floor with your teeth.
   Every once in a while, we'd all go out for a drink after class, too.  I try to be careful not to put back on too much of what I took off but either way, they're fun evenings because I get to listen to people's blackmail stories.
  I've also learned to look at the world differently.  I'm a bit more aware of my surroundings.  The self defense courses have taught me to look at my environment as a source of weapons should I ever need it.   Every class with John is a combination anatomy and physiology and a physics lesson.  I am a little bit proud of how much stronger I've gotten and I plan to keep training to build up muscle memory.  That part, I'm finding, seems to take a while.
   I figured out another reason why these classes are so much fun and the biggest reason I'm jealous.  The passion is infectious.  John really enjoys what he does.  It's as if someone told his parents, 'Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. you have a bouncing baby law enforcement professional.'  There are very few people I have met who are doing what they were born to do.  My ex, my mechanic and my instructor definitely are born to their jobs.  I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.
     I plan to keep trying to figure what I am meant to do, in between classes when I can walk, that is.

Bad Mommy on parade???

   It can be a real minefield.  When you are around what you perceive to be "bad parenting", how do you handle it? I took our girl to our local Chik Fil A for lunch after her CCD program as a sort of reward.  Someone posted on social media that they were having a chicken giveaway so being the cheapskate that I am I thought it would be a good day to take my kid to lunch.  Unfortunately for me, half of Gloucester County had the same idea.  The place was mobbed.  The promotion was for a free entree for every customer who showed up dressed as a cow.  That was the one half of the promotion I missed.
  We lucked out and found a good seat in full view of the play place.  I managed to get us settled and waited in line to order food.  If people took voting as seriously as free chicken I'd feel much better about the upcoming election but I digress.  Fortunately, I looked down and found a cow spot sticker on the floor.  I put it on my shirt just for the heck of it, not expecting anything. When I got to the register,  Playing dumb, I asked the cashier if there was some kind of party at the restaurant.  The guy was nice enough to tell me I was supposed to dress like a cow and gave me a free sandwich just for a stupid sticker!
   When you order a kids meal rather than giving you a toy, they give you a book.  As a mom, I always thought this was great.  As it turned out,  my daughter really didn't need another book, especially one that was written for younger kids.  Oddly enough, there was an older girl sitting across from us who was waiting for her mom.  She was older and after talking briefly, we could tell she had "special needs".  My girl decided that she didn't need her book and gave it to the older girl who was sitting there and chatting.  Every once in a while, she surprises me and makes me proud of her.  It's really disconcerting!
   The other girl's family came and joined her and my daughter decided to go to the "play place".  This   "other girl" also had a little brother who (we discovered later) also had issues.  He also chose to use the play place.  This boy was overweight and younger than my daughter.  A short tine later my girl came out crying saying the kid kicked her in the stomach. Assessing how bad she is hurt is one of the hardest things I run into as a mom.  Half the time we refer to it as "injuring her hambone" depending on the amount of attention Meryl St reep's boo-boo is getting.  While I want her to be able to shake things off, I also want to make sure I don't downplay something serious.  Nobody ever clutched their chest and yelled for an accountant.
   Evidently, its older sister must have told the manager because an employee came by and offered her a bag of ice.  In the meantime, the nasty boy had apparently been bothering two other kids.  The little beast emerged from the play place, refused to apologize and threw a hissy fit when he was denied ice cream!  I saw the mother take her kids up front.  Oher mothers were looking on and  commenting.  "She's not getting him ice cream is she??!!"  Fortunately, the family left shortly afterward without dessert.
  The manager came over to us and asked us what happened and if my girl was ok.  I let her know everything was fine.  To the restaurant's credit, the manager took our information and offered my girl a free ice cream cone, which she gladly took.  It's been very rare in my experience to see fast food places give a rats ass about their customers despite the litigious world we live in.  These "play places" are hard.  They are offered for the convenience of the customers, they are not free childcare!  As the parent of a one and only, it's not easy to back off the helicopter.  Oddly enough, the best parenting advice I ever got came from probably one of the worst parents (in retrospect) I've ever met, my father. He once told me "You guys didn't come with instructions!".
   That, in a nutshell, is it.  The advice that covers everything.  My problem is my brain and the drop shoot effect I seem to suffer from.  My friends know all too well what a sarcastic critter I am and diplomacy is not one of my strong suits.  According to my spouse,  I am aptly named, Barb.  How do you avoid judging someone when the situation looks so bad others are commenting?  Doubt has been removed, one would think, about what you're seeing.  Worse than that, as one who overthinks everything, I worry about what kind of impression this is making on my kid.
   Young as she is, it didn't take long for my little Judge Judy to make comments.  "He was mean! He shouldn't have done that! He's supposed to know better.  That was not nice. He was bothering other kids, too!"  I found myself reminding my own daughter that it's not our place to teach him how to behave.  That's his mommy's job.  It appears that judgements are about as easy to avoid as germs!  This is not the first time I've been "caught by surprise" in these parenting situations.  I'd say it's pretty much a way of life.
       

motivational ranter

   It's a Saturday evening and we're watching the news. Funny thing is that one of the featured stories is really close to what I wanted to write about.  That subject is motivation.  During the summer my daughter has no homework.  Typical of seven year olds she also has an incredibly short attention span.  During the school year, when she did have homework, it was a never ending battle.  What espicially frustrated mommy was that this kid spent more effort trying to weasel out of homework than she would have just to do her damn homework.
  One of the biggest issues we had was with writing.  Her teacher was an amazing woman who really got involved with her kids and didn't bury them with homework.  You'd think we were asking our girl to rip out her eyeballs or learn nuclear physics over 4 measley sentences!  Every night at home was too much fun for humans.  I could only imagine how she was behaving in class.  By the end of second grade I bought the teacher a gift card to a liquor store.
   All of this is just the latest in a never ending battle for raising a competant human.  This brings me to one of my biggest parenting gripes.  I am ungodly frustrated by the fact that it is seemingly impossible to get this gorgeous, brilliant human being I gave birth to to just do what the hell I ask without some kind of bribery involved.  One of my problems is my age.  I grew up in the pre-behavior chart era.  My "motivation" started with dealing with an angry Polish woman and the reward was not getting the s**t beaten out of me.  Flash forward to today and now I have to figure out what to reward my squirrely princess with so she'll do her math!  Incidentally, the news report I mentioned profiled a program in California that pays kids money to stay out of trouble.  I can only imagine what my folks would have said about that, after they stopped laughing.
   Rewarding kids for doing what's expected seems to be everywhere.  I recently read a book called Mean Mommies Rule by D. Schipani.  I wish I had read it earlier.  I think it would have been much more helpful than those what to expect books by a mile.  The author details her attempts to raise her kids to be independent functioning humans who are responsible for their own happiness.  It talks about hearkening back to an earlier era of when kids had chores because they were family members and people didn't have the luxury of materiality.  It appears that we loved our daughter a little "too much" in some respects.  I am finding that to "reverse some of my mistakes" is going to be a long slow process but my daughter is not the only stubborn person in the family.
  I am holding onto the fact that our girl is still only seven. She is older than I would have liked to be figuring this stuff out although things could be worse.  Our little girl is not an out of control beast but there are definitely areas we need to work on.  Part of my problem is that being a bit isolated means I don't have a good handle on what is age appropriate for certain behaviors.  How old should she be to do the wash, for example.
  There were things about my childhood I wish were different, no question. However, there's too much about today's environment that makes me wish I had a time machine.  Anti bullying campaigns drive me nuts.  I get the impression that parents are expecting the schools to help raise their kids.  It's true that it really does take a village but rather than pressuring schools to fix bullying shouldn't people be raising their kids not to be assholes in the first place??!!  Again, my dinosaur brain goes back to the days when there was a grapevine and people were honest.  If someone else's mom saw you do something stupid, unless you ran faster than a phone call, you were in trouble when you got home.  The grownups rarely questioned the accuracy of another parent's report, either.
 I admit I don't recommend spanking - I just completely understand it.  Everyone reacts to discipline differently.  I grew up a nervous kid.  $3000 worth of therapy and several hundred milligrams of prozac later and everyone is fine is not how I want to raise my daughter.  Doing the hard work of parenting is way more complicated than spanking to get your way and moving on.  Making someone understand the why of how things have to be can be draining to say the least.  I will probably looking for the happy medium until my kid is thirty.

Mother's Day

     Recently it was Mother's Day and it was a very rainy one.  It was also the weekend of our daughter's First Holy Communion.  This is a big deal for Catholics and our girl was very excited.  Mom mom took her shopping and as funny as it seemed, she fell in love with one dress and we couldn't talk her into another one.  It reminded me of that moment when you try on a wedding dress and you realize when you find "the one".  Weird since she's only seven.  I have plenty of time to worry about big things like that but flashforwards are easy when you see your second grader in a white dress.
   We were lucky in that our group was scheduled for an 11:30 mass.  This was great for mommy since we know what a freaking basket of sunshine I can be early in the morning and the little apple in question didn't roll fall from my tree either.  However, another stronger genetic anomally made me shovel my butt out of bed earlier - the urge to bargain hunt.  That same morning there was a consignment sale at our local middle school.  I also happen to sell with these people in the fall so I was familiar with the type of merchandise they would have for sale.
   Being an only child, our girl doesn't want for much but I always figure it's worth a prowl because I enjoy the thrill of the hunt.  It also helped that I didn't desparately need stuff so I could relax a little.    That takes some stress away from worrying about someone else beating me to something I needed.  For a shocking change I was early to the sale.  I had to double check to make sure I was in the right place but after a few minutes a line began to build.
  I found a few good things and tried to keep it moving so I could get back in time.  The last thing I needed was people freaking out on me the day of First Holy Communion because mommy was shopping.  As soon as I got home I finished getting dressed and we got our girl ready.  She looked wonderful and even remembered most of what her teachers told her for the mass.  Even my sister in law and niece from Audubon showed up which was really nice considering how busy they are.  We survived lunch with french fries and ketchup with her dress intact.
  The next day was Sunday, Mother's Day and there was supposed to be a May crowning of Mary right after mass.  First Holy Communion kids were invited to come back in their outfits and participate in the procession.  It was also my mother's birthday so we were double whammied.  I was able to come up with a few small gifts for mom and after mass we went to breakfast at a local diner.  It was nice and low key.  It was after we returned home and mom left that I thought maybe I would get a Mother's Day.  Fat chance.
  The very creature that made me a mother in the first place wanted nothing to do with me and pitched an oscar winning hissy fit.  She complained loudly that no one was available to play and why was there no holiday devoted to kids??!!  As we say at our house A plus for hutzpah.
 It was at this point that mommy was fed up.  I had already been stressed out due to someone's behavior that week to begin with.  This was just the cherry on top of the crap sundae.
 Daddy, who is usually oblivious, came to the rescue.  He sent me upstairs for a nap while he dealt with princess hemorrhoid.  After my rest I was even able to go out to a local music store and shop.  What made that fun for me was boxes and boxes of cds of every conceivable type and they were all $1 each!  I almost closed the place.  In the meantime, my spouse did laundry and hung it outside, made sure I had flowers and a few gifts to open and even made dinner.  He destroyed my kitchen but he made dinner and it was obvious he was trying hard.
  Frankenbunny, on the other hand, wasn't done yet.  After the evening's bath, her majesty refused to get out of the bathtub and dry herself.  Mommy lost it.  I picked her up and threw her naked, wet miserable butt in her room and closed the door.  Happy fucking Mother's Day to me.  I think it was Roseann Barr who said this was why some animals eat their young.