It feels good to look forward to seeing your son. Lately I’ve felt so swamped — and especially after all that snow with no break — I haven’t exactly loved all my many minutes with my boy.

Today I went to the National Institutes of Health for a conference on Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC), which I hope to write about in more depth later. But the experience of the day was something in and of itself. Getting dressed in real-people clothes, taking my boy to a friend’s so she could drive him to school and pick him up, getting on a crowded Metro during rush hour, and then listening to a lot of doctors talk about best outcomes for moms and babies… Well, it was intense. Especially considering that I’m 4 months pregnant and hoping for a home VBAC (HBAC) with baby #2.

I knew E would probably be okay, but I also knew it was a long day for both of us. We were both exhausted when I picked him up from the park. I could not wait to trade my button-down and blazer for a sweatshirt and just sit on the couch hugging and talking to him. If we weren’t both hungry with dinner nowhere in sight, I would have happily sat there for an hour. It felt good for that to feel so good.

For someone always looking at her watch and struggling to just be in the moment when I really want to be writing or researching or exercising, that uncomplicated couch time was a true delight.

Tell people that you might need help, and they come through!

This has nothing to do with my last post about mood blues, which aimed to say that no one can help me but me. No, I’m talking about offers from other mamas to help out with my son this summer, when I’m expecting baby #2 in early August.

I wrote a post on DC Metro Moms blog the other day about missing out on sending my son to summer (day) camp with the two friends he went with last year. Since I wrote that piece, one mom has agreed to send her child to camp with mine for four weeks of the summer, and at least five moms have come forward to offer to have my son over for playdates while they or their babysitters watch him – before or after the baby. Truthfully, they admit, it would be good for their kids, too, because they are not going to have as much social time in the summer. Who can afford a nanny and camp when school is so expensive and there is a second child who can’t go anywhere yet? But still, the generosity has been inspiring. This just might help me learn to take people up on their offers to help. What a concept!

Read “Dissed for Summer Camp,” the original post on DC Metro Moms Blog.

Just what all does one do during a snowed-in weekend like we’ve had here in the DC area? I got an email this morning telling me that DC Metro Moms Blog was low on posts, so I imagine I’m not the only one who did not use the time to catch up on writing. (I hope that’s not for lack of electricity, but there are still some outages, I hear. We got lucky [knock on wood] and clocked in at only 18 inches, a low for the region!)

Over these past three days, I have let the computer collect some dust. I took an unplanned two-day hiatus from even opening the email box for the nonprofit group chapter I run. (That’s going to have to end soon. Just as soon as I get up this post!) I was already behind from just general life and from last Wednesday’s thoroughly unnecessary snow day with no preschool.

Since the snow began to fall on Friday, I have avoided finishing a freelance assignment and replying to long overdue personal notes, taking the time only to delete emails from lists I should get off of and from yoga studios telling me they are closed. Oh, and I took photos of the snow and sent links to my family. That’s about it. It’s kind of revolutionary to see the lid of my laptop closed and my phone quiet.

The only real thing I’ve wanted to do is clean the house… Read the rest of this post at DC Metro Moms Blog.

My apologies to my sister DCMM writers who I found out after writing this post have been — and in some cases still are — without power!

See my recent post, “Ill Take a Village. Please.” at DC Metro Moms Blog about missing the extra hands that helped entertain my son over the holidays.

At least this week he was back to school and re-started a Spanish class, which gives me half day of help on Thursday and keeps me from entering the weekend totally depleted and ready to hand the boy over to Daddy for 48 hours.

Originally posted at DC Metro Moms.

After a week home with a son who was just sick enough to have to stay home from preschool, followed by a weekend of the biggest December snow ever in D.C., I was ready to get out o’ town on Christmas Eve. The cab that took us to the airport for a week with family was driven by a man who explained that his youngest son, too ill to go out in the snow, was kept busy by his two older brothers. He gestured to my almost-four-year-old son, “He needs a brother or sister.” Ahem.

Nosy, but right. I don’t really love the dynamic the three of us have going on at home these days. Life was very different (read: much more fun) with the two other toddler cousins, their parents, and grandparents around the first half of our holiday visit. It kind of sucks that this happens only once or twice a year.

Managing three kids under four in one unfamiliar house was challenging and requiring of some adult supervision, sure. But my son was playing, all the time, and it usually didn’t involve me. This was a major bonus. I can’t even believe I’m saying this, but I actually took a nap. Twice. I might as well have been fed grapes by a golden-chested god . Three cheers for cousins!

…

Read the rest of this post at DC Metro Moms.

This pumpkin is cheerier than I am these days.

Now I understand how my mom must have felt with chatterbox me as a preschooler. My son will not stop talking. Or singing. Or shrieking. Or making vroom noises. Or just plain saying, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Are you listening to me? Mommy! Mommy! Listen to me, Mommy!” Yes, sometimes I fail to respond immediately, but it tends to sound like this even if I respond every single time.

I feel guilty for wanting more childcare, but this kid is driving me up a wall.

This post originally appeared on DC Metro Moms on November 6, 2009

Gym Childcare: Mandatory TV?

I wouldn’t even consider leaving if the monthly fees weren’t so expensive. Well, that and I must say I was intrigued by the idea of a spa on site at the new place – I could work out AND get a pedicure or a massage for $1/hour childcare! It had better evening and weekend parking, and a saline pool, not to mention newer exercise equipment. And a friend of mine says the yoga is good. But TV as a requirement for my three-year-old?
Sorry, but I pay sitters to play with my kid specifically so I won’t have to resort to the TV. I spent way too many hours as a kid learning how to talk trash from “General Hospital,” and I just don’t like how my son acts when he’s all hyped up on visual stimulation. Waldorf education claims that early media exposure just keeps kids from doing their natural think of imagining stuff themselves. Even if I didn’t agree with that, I know that if I’m already bringing my son to a busy, chaotic gym, I might have to peel him off the walls to get him back home. Now what does that do to my yoga buzz?
To his credit, the manager was nice, if surprised. He didn’t know about the policy, and, when the inquiry I sent to the company headquarters was forwarded directly to him, he reiterated in an email to me that, as a father, he understood my concerns, and they would work on the noise level. Indeed, when I picked up my son that one day, the sound was low, and the show was a cartoon.
But the manager also said the company takes customer concerns very seriously. So then why haven’t I gotten an answer almost three months later? I’d like to know what they are thinking with this policy. I finished out my trial week without a second childcare visit, and in the end I decided that the new place with its multiple music video screens on every wall was actually too high-strung even for grown-up me. I think it’s just not the right fit, but the lower cost did inspire me to quit my other gym, too. Now that my son is in preschool and I have more flexibility (but less cash), I’m headed for the cheap county fitness center, and the bike trail.
I received a promotional email from the new gym manager last week and asked him if he ever heard back from corporate. I told him why I didn’t expect to join the gym right now, including a note that I would want to at least get a response on the company’s rationale for a policy I disagreed with on its face. He wrote back a quick thanks with “let me know if I can ever be of service,” which I responded to by asking again what the reasoning for the policy was.
Now the gym is strangely quiet.

Comments

Today was the first day I’d had any childcare in two weeks. There was snow, then a fever, then my boy’s dad got sick and needed tending. Today’s four hours of babysitting went fast, but when they were over, I had a supremely lovely time with my son. It was a chilly rainy day, and I decided I was just not going to leave the house. E had had a mini outdoor excursion with the sitter and the other little girl who came over, so we just hung out. After spending a week nursing him like he was a newborn and hearing “can you hold me?” and “can I nurse” in that weak voice punctuated by a cough, it was great to have my buddy back.

I have a journal I’m developing to help me record developments and special events month to month, but I don’t often sit down and just write to my kid. A friend gave me The Mommy Journal, and I almost picked it up tonight, then thought about writing his “birthday letter” a month early (I did one at one year and think I never did year two – yikes!) but somehow I feel right now like I can get so much more down through a keypad.

So here’s part of the letter I’d like to write to my son today.

Dear E,

I write a lot about you, my dear boy, some for blogs, some for essays that will probably never make it into print, some for poems and essays that have. If something happened to me, you’d have a lot of insight into my mind. But every once in a while I realize that it would be wise to tell you to your face and to write directly to you simply how I feel about you in a way that is not skewed to the side of frustration or mommy-self-exploration. So this is the long version of my looking into your eyes and saying, “You are so much fun.”

In fact, you are a rock star. Your dad and I cannot believe the things that come out of your mouth, except that I keep hearing myself or him or some cosmic combo of what we’d say if we turned into one person. This morning, your dad left late for work because he was still a little sick, and he was still here when W got here to watch you and S for the morning. You were telling W about the valentine that D made for you the other night, describing in detail the cute flowers that pop up. I thought your story needed illunstration so W could appreciate how spot-on you were, so I fetched the card off the mantel.

You then went on to point out to W that behind where the card had been was a photo of Barack Obama. It’s actually a photo your grandma took on Inauguration Day, of you looking at Obama on the television screen, and it’s pretty cool. (In case you haven’t heard the story enough, your dad biked down to the Mall that day, and I left early, before either of you was awake, to go with a friend to see the ceremony from seats right in front of the Capitol. It was amazing, but it was a long day, and I had a hard time fully appreciating the privilege I had. In fact, you’ve heard so much about my tale that you‘ve been telling me, “Then the Metro was broken and you had to get out and get a taxi cab. And you were frustrated!”)

Anyway, W asked you, “Who is Barack Obama?” You answered in the clearest voice imaginable for a child who is not even three years old, “He’s our President!” Your dad and I were wowed that you responded that way totally unprompted. (And, lest you wonder about my politics if I should turn colors in old age, underneath our pride and astonishment in you was a deep relief that this reality has come to pass and that you will know this man as your first memory of a president.)

But we really shouldn’t be amazed by your sharp replies. They come out of your mouth all the time, with joy, with exuberance, with delight at the ability to express yourself. You were telling me today about someone “offering” you something — maybe it was when T peeled you an orange the other day at your dad’s band practice. Sometimes I wonder if the Waldorf education police are going to come after me for talking to you too much or making you get too big a vocabulary for your little stature.

But it’s not all fancy words. You know how to work it with slang, too. Yesterday I wrote on my other blog about how you said to me “C’mon” to get me to rethink my complaint. But when I wrote that, I’d forgotten that you used that phrase earlier in the day looking for a colorform/sticker of Murdoch, one of the Thomas trains (whose names you suddenly know after I relented to just one of your many desires in Staples last month and bought you that goofy workbook). You said, “Where are, Murdoch? Come on, Murdoch. Oh, there you are. I found you.” There are big and small stickers of the various trains, and you call the big one the “mama Percy” and the little on the “baby Percy.” Often when we talk about real babies, you ask or tell me whether or not the baby is crawling yet. “He doesn’t walk. I think he just crawls. Yeah. He does.”

Your hand gestures are opinionated and intentional. You point, you show us a serious two (one index finger on each hand), you put your hands up for not knowing. We recently watched old video of you babbling with crazy, meaningful gestures at around a year old; now those gestures elaborate clear-as-day words. You seem to have just about perfected your “R.” I caught you on video at the zoo a few weeks ago (our first diaper-free outing!) talking about a “funny biRd.” You slow over the R’s as though you’re making sure you’ve gotten it out and have been heard. The L’s are not so defined but are still highly intelligible.

We had a nice afternoon today after W and S left. You played well while I ate lunch, and then we worked on a puzzle before having a quiet nursing time and then moving on to make rolls for school (after I got a chicken in the oven). Even when I had you on the other side of the kitchen gate so I could deal with raw meat unfettered, you happily chatted with me. What a treat!

Two weeks ago you were so ill, you would hardly let me leave your side. We were nursing on the couch most of the day. If you weren’t asleep, I had to have you on my back in the Ergo. You had a fever for a full week, went back to diapers (new pull-ups, which you took to calling “undies”) and were so pale and quickly thin, we hardly recognized you. One night you showed enthusiasm for eating whatever random food we had but then, in the hour I was out tutoring, threw it all up, your shrunken tummy too overstuffed. Then you ate nothing for two days and when you finally told us to see how your rice tortilla was a plane a few nights later, we knew you were back.

I was kind of stressed out and busy before you got sick, so I was not fully present to your coolness for a while there. Having had to pause to deal with illness, now I’m having so much fun watching you learn about the world and get excited to show me things you’ve come up with. Normally I try to acknowledge what you’ve done without judging or heaping empty praise, in line with what I’ve read of Alfie Kohn and Unconditional Parenting. But when I videotaped you today, I was trying to capture some of your verbose essence and so kept prompting you to make you talk. I asked you questions and said, “Good!” when you shared a response. (Your father assures me this does not sound like the normal me.)

Even though I hate listening to myself, I’m glad to have captured a long convo for your part. I asked what else you ate with rolls at the Waldorf school (thinking butter), and you said, “Enzymes” (as in digestive enzymes, which we’ve been taking for the last few months). “But you forgot to bring my enzyme yes-ter-day,” you added, using the word that has come to mean “at any time in the past.” I asked you what the weather was like today and you said, “Well, it stopped raining!” To my inquiry about it being cold or warm, you replied “It was freezing!?!” and then proceeded to describe your time outside this morning running down the hill in our back yard.

I know from watching that older babble video the other day that I really will forget what life was like at this point in time. The more I write, the more I can hold onto. And I hope for you that all this time I’ve spent writing — while mostly for me to keep me sane — will possibly tell you something about yourself that you’re glad to know.

I sure do love you. Thanks for teaching me so much.
Love,
Your mama, Jess

Childcare is a good thing.

This is how I felt yesterday as I drove to the sitter’s house six hours after dropping E off for no particular reason other than to get to some writing, cleaning and posting stuff of Craigslist and Freecyle in the hopes of eventually seeing my basement floor again. Outside of one long jag when I went to the Weston A. Price Foundation conference, this was the longest I’d left my son with someone who wasn’t his dad. The sitter was a SAHM who runs a daycare but whose clients have all left for now while she’s waiting to have her baby. I knew that E would enjoy playing with her daughter and that she’d call me if anything went wrong.

I got a little bit of several things done, and I had two meals in peace. Nothing was completed 100%, which always seems to be the case. The childfree time always has an endpoint, and I’m so protective of it I hate to even take phone calls when my son is napping or with a sitter. I’m so used to multitasking with him around, I crave doing one thing at a time when he’s not.

Still, I loved the feeling of looking forward to seeing my boy after a big chunk of time apart, knowing I wouldn’t tell him we had to do one thing over another for the last few hours of our day, other than have dinner and go to bed.

We enjoyed traipsing around the sitter’s courtyard and then playing with fire engines at home. A year ago he wouldn’t leave my side, and now it’s wonderful to hear him ask to go back to the sitter’s house rather than ask to nurse five times an hour.

Yes, I thought, childcare is a good thing. I later read an essay in Mama, Ph.D. about a theater professor cringing at her 30-hour a week childcare schedule during a baby gymnastics class where some toddlers were there with nannies and others were there with moms who were aghast that a woman would leave her toddler for two hours. There are clearly a lot of positions on the spectrum. Another was the essay “Day-Care Depression” featured in the new XX Files column in the September 7, 2008 Washington Post Magazine, in which Doreen Oliver talked about the joy she found in eleven hours of childcare a week while her son got sad, so they took a break and made a switch.

I feel very lucky to have found several folks my son has fun with and whom I trust. However, I’m constantly counting the minutes. So when my husband mentioned that he’d be home for the first hour of this morning’s four-hour nanny share (at our house) before leaving for a doctor’s appointment, I flipped out.

“We have to share the basement?! That’s not optimal,” I barked. In my childcare time-sheet, it’s lost time if I can’t be productive in the way I want to be when my son isn’t pulling my pantlegs. There were other things I could do — run errands, run a few miles — but I wanted to be able to set that agenda. Basically, Don’t F— with my free time, Dear.

Fast-forward a week…

I didn’t finish this post I started writing last week. Where did the time go!? Ha! Well, yesterday during my precious four hours of childcare time, I somewhat reluctantly headed over to a working-at-home moms meeting. I’d initially written off the meeting as just not an option since it was something I could have done with my son. Why pay someone to do something you can do with child in tow? But once I’d looked at the host’s web site, I realized she sounded like a cool person and a great professional connection to make and that it would probably do me good to stay in touch with other WAHMs in my immediate area. And the meeting was when it was.

“How long have you been working for yourself?” I asked the host. “When I looked at your web site, I felt like kneeling to bow, ‘I’m not worthy,’” I told her. She shared her journey of setting up her business pre-pregnancy and all the highs and lows since then.

My sense going into the meeting had been that all these other moms were doing real outside-the-home work and I was just dabbling to keep myself sane. But it turned out that we weren’t so far off from each other. In a little over an hour in one woman’s living room, I learned how three different moms balance the different parts of their lives and how they struggle with balance. Childcare took a good bit of our discussion time.

We talked about how our experiences with depression at different times have affected our work, our mothering and our marriages/partnerships. And I got to talk and listen without worrying about what my son was taking from another child or what books he was pulling off of someone’s shelves. There was an easygoing six-month-old in our midst, but all the toddlers and preschoolers were elsewhere. This meant we actually got to finish sentences, that is when I wasn’t interrupting people to add in some scintillating insight about how I could relate. (I think perhaps my son’s usual presence has helped me not dominate conversations so much. Hmm…)

Embarrassment over my lack of conversational restraint aside, it was great to share, both to hear stories and also share my own struggles such that one woman — the organizer of the group, in fact — sighed with relief, “I’m so glad to hear you say that. I thought it was just me.”

I’m coming to realize: it’s never just you, honey.