More Unanswerable Questions

Last night, over goldfish, my son posed a couple more of his unanswerable questions. Except it turns out that this time, his questions have actual answers. And they ain’t pretty.

So the first thing he asked me was, "What happens if you eat fire?" I’ve never been to Vegas or the circus, but I know this thing can be done - or at least the illusion of this can be done (if you want to know more about the logistics you should check www.youcaneatfire.com). Before I could really give him a concrete answer, my son decided on his own, that eating fire would be way too hot and therefore probably impossible. But he carried that four year old logic all the way through and determined that if you ate something smaller, and therefore less hot, that definitely would be doable. "No you could not eat fire, so it would be TOO HOT" he told me "but you could probably eat a match stick." Looking past how impressed I am with my son (and my own parenting) that he knows that a match stick is essentially fire encapsulated (I mean he hasn’t even taken Safety Town yet!), I decided to investigate what actually happens if you do eat a match stick. I am assuming by the lack of information on the topic, ingesting one match isn’t going to do anyone much harm. But if you eat matches all the time, then that could lead to a serious situation. In fact there is an entire eating disorder based on the practice! As an alumna of a single-sex high school and a once active delta gamma sorority member, the news that there was an eating disorder I had never heard about was completely shocking. Its called pica and it turns out that people with pica just can’t help themselves around all sorts of "foods" completely void of nutrition - they eat matches, or rocks, or pencil erasers or even poop. And then I started to think about this and became alarmed, because this would indicate that entire groups of children (namely those between 12 and 36 months) are suffering from an eating disorder. Thankfully, a requirement for suffering from pica is that you can’t be a toddler, so poop eating is completely within the realm of normal for those kids. But if you’re not a toddler or dog and you do eat too many matches you can get something called hyperkalemia. I have to admit, that I don’t really know what happens here, but it seems pretty obvious that its must be life threatening and involve something similar to turning into a super-active battery. My son thinks that almost all food that isn’t white or made of shredded cheese is too hot for ingestion so I’m pretty sure he will not fall victim to pica of the match eating variety and die of hyperkalemia.

This morning, as I drove my son away from his Montessori preschool, he asked me "What happens when your hair is so long it touches the ground?" This made me smile immediately as I tried to figure out which hippie (child or adult) he had encountered during dismissal to inspire this question. We immediately discussed the most obvious ramifications of super long hair. It makes it tough to walk, because you might step on it, you would have to put it in a really high pony tail for gym class, you might accidentally poop on it or get it caught in your diaper if you were a baby, it would drag along the ground (by definition) and get stuff caught in it, it would get really muddy. And then we got to the good stuff, highlights of which included, there would be a good possibility that you would flush your own self down the toilet if it got caught in there by accident, and a squirrel would probably climb up it and ride around on your head (I’m not sure if this one makes super long hair an asset or not).

This is one of my favorite parts of parenting. Just listening to your kids explore hypothetical questions outside of the limits of maturity and reality. Its hilarious and endearing and heartbreaking (because you’ll watch them first gain and then lose this skill as they age) all at once. As my friend Lori says, its an awful lot like being stoned, without the sleepiness and the munchies.

By the way, while trying to figure out what would happen if you ate a match, I found out that you can actually make your own rocket out of a match stick. It’s just a guess, but I think that you could definitely hit a matchstick rocket with a bullet and if you did it wouldn’t do much of anything.

Spring Break - Days Five, Six, and Seven

Ok so my husband and I took a break from Spring Break and headed to Chicago for the weekend. It was a lovely little vacation. Not a lot happened that is worth sharing (and none of it is relevant because the kids weren't with us). I would like to share the following: on Saturday, my older daughter turned to my mother and asked her: "Did Mommy go somewhere?" That's gotta make any mother feel good, to know that it took her child more than 24 hours to notice that she was out of town. At least my kids are independent!

Spring Break - Day Four - Unanswerable Questions

Spring Break- Day Four - Answering the Unanswerable

Kids ask a lot of questions. And "a lot" as a quantifier is an understatement. My kids ask me stuff all of the time. From the minute they wake up I am peppered with questions. Usually the first of the day is, "Do we have school this day?" quickly followed by "Why do we have school this day?" These types of questions are simple and therefore simple to answer - "yes" and "because its Tuesday" - you don’t even have to be awake to nail these! But as the day unfolds, the questions usually become more difficult - "Why does my waffle taste like it smells like cinnamon even if the box only says Homestyle because that is gross?" But they are still answerable - "probably because you are making that up to be a pain in the ass" or "in some people’s homes the style is cinnamon - ISN’T THAT CRAZY!"

Sometimes though, the questions get so difficult they are downright unanswerable. And that is a dangerous thing. Because unanswered questions jeopardize your entire credibility as a parent. When your kids come to you for answers it’s because they assume that you are an expert and, knowing this, you can’t pin your whole reputation to false information. So its in your best interest to answer all of their questions to the best of your ability. And if you don’t have that much ability, you’d better get it quick. Because too many "I don’t knows" or "Ask your father’s" will soon have your kids consulting someone else when the really important questions come up. And let’s be honest, you don’t want anybody else (their friends, your neighbors, your husband) explaining things like puberty, or sex, or relationships.

The empty hours of Spring Break at our house have become a breeding ground for these dangerous, unanswerable questions. This afternoon while eating lunch, my two older children posed a series hypothetical situations to which they fully expected legitimate answers. And from the moment the first of these questions was posed, I had a familiar feeling that I was screwed. Here’s how it went down.

Child One: "Mommy, if you shoot off a missile and then it hits a house made of wood - doesn’t it keep going through the wood even though it will explode up the whole house?"
Me: " It will definitely explode up that house - but what do you mean keep going?"
Child One: "KEEP GOING THA-REW!"
Me: "Uhhm."
Child Two: " Well what if the house is made of bricks, so then it will just explode it up and stop right?"
Me: "So are you asking me if missiles can be stopped by bricks but not wood?"
Child One: "What if you shoot off a missile and it hits another missile, which missile will explode first?"
Child Two: "What if you shoot a bullet at a missile, then what about that?"
Child One: "Or what if a missile hits some lava?"
Chile Two: "YEAH!"
Child One: "Mommy how about if you shoot off a rocket and a missile which one is faster?"
Child Two: "What if you hit a missile with a bomb?"

I am seriously unable to answer any of these questions. My knowledge of missiles and rockets is limited to the movie October Sky ( which I have seen approximately 27 times while substitute teaching for high school physics class). I don’t think - "If you get really good at building rockets you won’t have to grow up to be a coal miner" - is the answer my kids are looking for. Usually when I don’t know the answer to something, I do what we all do, I google it and then I wiki it. No luck, the Internet offers no answers to the unique scenario of a bullet hitting a missile. It is pretty easy to locate instructions on how to create both a missile and bullet, but I didn’t really want to spend significant time on those sites (enabling damning cookies just seems too risky in this day and age). Aside from inspirational teen movies, the only other missile knowledge I have is related to the recent government plan to shoot a missile at a rogue satellite thereby blowing up the satellite before it can land somewhere on U.S. soil. This sounds disturbingly similar to the kind of thing my kids were proposing. Which should only serve to scare the pants off of all of us - upper level, national security decisions are being made by a group of people with the problem solving skills of a preschooler and a second grader all hopped up on goldfish and apple juice!

And none of that left me with any real answers for my kids. You see when kids ask questions, they don’t want answers to other similar questions, they want answers to their EXACT questions. So I was stuck doing the thing I hate the most, waiting for my husband to come home and turning over all the questions to him. It turns out that neither of us knows what exactly happens when a missile lands in lava, but we’re pretty sure it’s awfully hot.

Spring Break - Day Three or Why I Hate Candyland

This was one of those days where I can’t possibly tell you what we did today. Mostly people just wandered about our house making messes while I cleaned up messes that had been made previously. Here’s what I do know:
1. Xavier has had the same shirt on since he went to bed Sunday night. I realized this today and while I played with the idea of making him take a bath and change his whole wardrobe, I think it will be far more interesting to wait and see if anyone else notices this. To understand why this is legitimately interesting I have to point out that I am only one of three adults who sees this kid on a daily basis (his father and my mother both have seen him on several occasions since he put the shirt on).
2. I hate Candyland. Growing up I loved Candyland. If you ask any adult without children, they will list Candyland as one of the top games of their childhood. Think about it: it takes place in an enchanted forest decorated with delicious treats, you get to move your little gingerbread self on a candy-coated path through that forest, and it is the only game that really speaks to the fantasy of drifting around in an ice-cream sea. And the only requirement for getting to play in that enchanted forest was, well there was no requirement. Candyland requires no skill whatsoever (by "skill" I mean basic ability). Wikipedia suggests that Candyland requires color recognition but all that really means is that blind people might experience a slight challenge playing Candyland. I mean you don’t have to be able to name the colors to play, all you have to do is match the square on your card to the square on the path. There’s no reading, no counting, no thinking. There’s NOTHING in this game except moving a little gingerbread man along and thinking about candy. Except if you are one of my kids. Then playing Candyland involves a whole bunch of scheming and lying and mistrust. In general, playing Candyland is an opportunity to showcase your worst self. Details of our most recent Candyland game should be sufficient to illustrate this point:
It was Xavier’s idea to play Candyland yesterday and because I couldn’t really come up with any good reasons why we shouldn’t play - I agreed. I insisted that both his sisters play with us and after twenty minutes of arguing over colors (just so you know, I ended up with green which was in fact my LAST choice) and seating arrangements, we got down to it. Right out of the gate there was trouble. Polly knocked over the deck of cards and we had to wait five minutes while a VERY concerned Xavier reassembled the deck. After that, Xavier started things off by drawing an orange card. What luck! This put him squarely on Rainbow Pass and saved him quite a bit of trouble. Had it been someone else’s child, I definitely would have suspected some funny business. Then I started noticing that both kids were experiencing quite a run of double square draws. At that point I had some suspicions but no actual proof that there was some serious cheating going on in Candyland. And besides I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do even if I did have the proof. I mean calling the kids out on cheating would mean that we would all be there much longer than I wanted to be and they were actually getting along quite well (even if it was only because they both were kicking my green ass). So I had decided on turning a blind eye to the situation until Xavier drew the Gramma Nutt card. At the time, he was two thirds of the way to King Kandy’s Kastle and this was a major setback indeed. The kid flipped. And that is when I improvised and came up with one of the best add-on board game rules ever. I told Xavier he could either go back to Gramma Nutt’s cottage (which I pointed out was made of peanut brittle and very possibly deliciously salty) or he could miss four turns. He contemplated his choices for about fifteen seconds and went back to Gramma Nutt’s. Before long, he had another bad draw and that is when the real (and by real I mean downright obvious) cheating began. Pretty soon the kid refused to even acknowledge what card he had actually drawn. When it was his turn to move he would sometimes stop on the color that he drew, but that didn’t mean it was the next square of that color. His sister caught on and begin to get furious. And I was forced into action. See we actually have a family motto and the third part of the motto is "no cheating", so me choosing to ignore the cheating was simply intolerable from a parenting perspective. I called him on it, and reminded him of the rules, and threatened to throw him out of the game and made him miss a turn or two. Eventually the game ended with everyone celebrating with King Kandy, but I didn’t feel any better for having taught him a lesson. I just felt tired and disappointed and maybe just a little bit pissed off that I played it straight and still came in dead last (that’s right, a 21 month old with a "weyow" guy beat me).

Spring Break - Day Two

Mommy goes shopping for a swimsuit. Mommy has a cavity. Mommy is so depressed by 4:30 p.m. that Mommy contemplates death by Michelob Ultra (that I think, is safely impossible).

Spring Break- Day One

I woke up this morning with gleeful anticipation. "I will embrace this opportunity" I told myself. "I will enlighten my children" I promised. "We will make memories and have experiences (that aren’t related to ass wiping and pokemon)." " I am a good mother - goddammit!" I fed my children and asked them five to seven to twelve times (depending on the child and the particular article of clothing) to dress themselves and then at 10:00 a.m. sharp we piled into the car to visit the museums.

Our conversation en route went a little something like this:
Me: "Hooray! I am a great mom - this will be fantastic!" (that was not out loud, although it could have been as no one was paying attention)
Emma: "Where are we going anyway?"
Me: "To the car and airplane museum"
Emma: "What! You never told me that. I never wanted to go there!"
Me: "Oh you will like it so much." Someone told me that if you smile while you say stuff, it will sound nicer like you actually mean to be smiling while you are saying it, so I probably was smiling when I said that.
Polly: "Yuyyaby Elmo" (which means Lullaby Elmo and has no relevance to anything going on whatsoever."
Xavier: "Mom you forgot to buckle me in."
Me: "Oh, Ok sit really still until we get there and then you won’t have to waste up anytime unbuckling yourself."

When we arrived at the first museum, the splendidly boring Crawford Auto Museum, there were two good omens immediately - a Triple-A member’s discount on admission and a model train in the lobby. Not much else happened at that museum. The kids were impressed by the vintage car collection and had fun climbing on the one car they were allowed to touch. They also had a great time cramming themselves into the Tinkerbell replica. A tiny boat in which one man spent seventy days alone at sea. I’m not much for boats and sailing but I can see how that guy had a pretty great idea - he crawled into his little boat and no one could talk to him or touch him for more than three months! Then we spent some time in the other half of the museum, the part without the cars and planes and boat, the part with absolutely nothing interesting in it at all. Here are the highlights: Polly walked into a pole and banged her head pretty good; Xavier revealed his love for pushing empty strollers into my heels; I discovered that Emma loves museums and has to look at everything, even the Carl and Louis Stokes exhibit (which makes her completely unrelated to me); and I found myself in the middle of the lamest toy city playroom ever thinking "My God this might be the most boring thing I have ever done" and then simultaneously feeling incredibly guilty, because a better mom would have been loving every minute with her kids.

We finished that museum in just about two hours, which is incredible considering the lack of actual exhibits in the place, and marched across the street to the Museum of Natural History. When I was a kid I loved this museum and my kids love this museum. So after lunch in the café, which needs no reliving, they trudged happily through the galleries looking at dead animals and rocks and whatever else is natural and historical.

So if you discount the whining and the incident where one child slapped another in the planetarium, the museum was a success. But the whole time we were there I was pestered by this nagging thought - "I am so fucking bored, this is so boring" and its partner thought "I am such a bad mother." I’m pretty sure I am not the only woman I know having these thoughts this week, and I know that they are due to both the overall tediousness of child rearing and the incredible guilt we feel as mothers who find out daily that motherhood is not a nursery rhyme. And thinking these things over on the way home from the museum, I resolved not to become so absorbed in and disappointed by the negativity and dangerously high expectations of this job, and these next two weeks in particular, and instead to focus on the little things that my children do and that I do with them that give me joy and laughter and relief that this really was a good idea after all.

And then I got home, and too tired to make dinner, fed the kids peanut butter sandwiches and drank three beers and ate a bowl of goldfish by myself in the kitchen and waited patiently for one of those little things to happen.

Spring Break

It is Spring Break. When I was growing and in public school, we always had a few days off school in April. Usually, we had Good Friday off and then maybe, but only maybe, the week following Easter Sunday. This meant you had just enough time off from school for your parents to the throw you and your Easter baskets into the car and drive five or ten hours north, west, or east (but never south) to see their parents, so that the whole family could bitch about the cold and the snow and the general greyness of springtime in the Midwest while you played Uno with your siblings and waited for the real cartoons to show up on your grandparents limited reception t.v.

When I switched to private school in the seventh grade, I was introduced to a whole new concept - Spring Break. This was revolutionary. Not only was Spring Break totally unrelated to Easter, it was two weeks long! And the same two weeks every year - the last two weeks in March. In this new Spring Break world, families would jet off (I say "jet" because that’s what they did, they flew on a jet) off to all sorts of exotic points south - Florida, Georgia, islands like Aruba and Jamaica. And return two weeks later, well tanned and grumbling about the unnatural cold of Cleveland weather. While I found out about this kind of Spring Break from my friends, I never actually experienced it (we did get to go Washington D.C. and Colonial Williamsburg one year though). I can tell you as an adult, I’m not experiencing it either.

Our family’s two week long Spring Break experience officially starts tomorrow, and I can already tell you that I wish the schools would go back to the old long weekend routine of my elementary school years. In many ways I am thankful for the break, the kids can sleep in (but they won’t), I don’t have to make any lunches (except the ones we all eat together everyday), no one has to get dressed (this will cut down on laundry), and I don’t have to pick anyone up in the middle of anyone else’s nap. Those are the upsides to the break. Oh yeah, and the ideal of spending two weeks of quality time with my three beloved children. But as thankful as I am for the time away from the school routine, I have this sinking feeling of dread when I think about the next two weeks. Especially when I hear the three of my kids talking at me all at once (and saying nothing) and think about how that sound will not stop until nine p.m. tonight. And I am racking my brain to figure out how we will all make it through, of course I would love to have us make it through, bathed and clothed and enriched with cultural experiences and spilling over with freshly minted childhood memories, but I have a feeling I am going to have to settle for making it through alive, without strep throat or ear infections, and having eaten pizza for dinner less than six times.

Inappropriate, Appropriate Language and Appropriate, Inappropriate Language (or Teaching Your Kids to Swear)

This will be a familiar scene to many moms. You find yourself in the car with your husband. You are showered and wearing your best underwear and your grown-up shoes (which your husband lovingly refers to as your "bitch boots"). This can mean only one thing, you and your husband are ready for a night out, ALONE. The kids are the farthest thing from your mind. And because it is so damn relaxing just to be in the company of another adult, you aren’t even really talking, you are just quietly taking in the scenery. Until something catches your eye, something you are always on the look out for -maybe its a cow, or a train, or an ambulance, or a silly costumed adult selling something- but you are so prone to searching out this thing that you notice it immediately and can’t help but to exclaim in your best mommy voice, "Look honey, there’s a cow! (or a train, or an ambulance, or a firetruck, or whatever commonplace thing it is that your husband doesn’t give a hoot about). And there you have it, no matter how grown up you look, and how far away the kids are, its pretty hard to put away your mommy personality.

This tendency can present itself in other facets of your life and result in varying degrees of embarrassment. You can imagine how uncomfortable it would be to tell your a friend, or a friend’s husband to "say please" when ordering at a restaurant, or to find yourself kneeling down attempting to tie another adult’s shoe, or to accidentally follow a friend into the stall in the bathroom… Most often for me though, I find the mommy version of me appears quite often when I am a little bit stressed or frustrated and a good-old fashioned "cuss word" would be just the thing to express it. Except that for some reason I don’t swear. Instead I find myself declaring things like "Oh Crime!" and "Farmer!" and "Shimey Show!" Phrases that are so ridiculous, I don’t even know how to spell them. The other day I spilled a good bit of dinner on the floor while making it. There were no children within earshot. And my immediate reaction to the spill was to stomp my foot and yell "Shimey Show" (which I think means Shit! but I am not really sure). Now think about what would have happened if I did that when I was out. I mean out with drivers-licensed , college educated and yes, employed people. I would look like a real ass and all my pretensions of interesting adultness would be shattered. And trust me, nothing blows your adult-not-a-mommy cover faster than dropping your family’s own rated-g version of the f-bomb in adult only company.

Don’t let me mislead you though, as my husband (and children) can attest to, the problem with me and my inappropriate language is that I can’t seem to get the censoring at the appropriate moment thing down. So for every time I’ve slipped and said "Oh, farm her!" (which my kids would interpret as oh! farmer!) when discussing something with another adult., there have been at least five or six times where I just let go and used the standard language in front of my children (and whatever other children happened to be in the room at the time).

You can imagine this must be very confusing for my kids. Which is worse Farm or Fuck? What exactly does "Shimey Show" mean and how can it mean "I left my wallet in the car" and "I forgot to pick up your sister?" at the same time. I have a good friend who frankly talks like a pirate in front of her kids. And they are quite familiar and even adept with the correct applications of all of the less savory words. She doesn’t feel guilty about this at all. And I don’t think she should. As she has pointed out, if the worst thing her kids do is say fuck every now and again, than she will have done a damn good job of raising her children. And she’s right.

This had made me wonder however, if I have done my kids some sort of disservice by wavering between my own personal swear words (the use of which will only bring them ridicule in the adult world) and the real deal (which we agree can not really offend their tender ears all that much). Fortunately my four year old son put a stop to all my worrying the other day. He and his sister, who is seven, were eagerly watching the snow fall and discussing the notion of a "snow day". Because Xavier is only in his second year of school, he is just beginning to really grasp the delicious freedom of a snow day which I think is obvious from what I heard him declare to his sister - "If there was no school tomorrow so there was too much snow, that would be fuckin’ weird!" And he was right, snow days aren’t just weird, they are fuckin’ weird. And in that moment I knew that my kids would never, ever innocently utter Farm! or Crime! in frustration. Instead they would say what they really meant (and conjugate it).

Working Mommy Versus Stay-At-Home-Mommy

From the moment you are brave enough (or naïve enough) to share the good news of your pregnancy with your family and friends and let’s face it, the general public because you can’t hide that thing for long, you are faced with millions of complicated questions about your intentions for life after the baby arrives. Are you a breast or bottle girl? Will you vaccinate or just focus on really good handwashing? Disposable or Cloth (which really should be phrased as gross or GROSSER)? Will you have your son circumcised or will you just let nature be (thereby ruling out any possibility of him ever experiencing oral sex)? At their core most of these decisions are more about your baby, than you. Except there is that one burning question that is equally about both of you (and your spouse/partner/lover/whatever) too - will you work or will you stay home? And no matter which you decide to do, you will find that immediately it will set you squarely into one camp of mothers or another: the mothers with careers or the career mothers.

And the mothers from those camps don’t cross over, they may coexist peacefully on the playground, but their relationships are tainted with suspicion and judgment and of course, guilt. Of course moms may get along one on one with other mothers from the opposite camp, but when it comes to group interaction you’ll see a line down the middle more clearly than you would at a sixth grade dance.

I could spend pages exploring, the psychology and the guilt and the motivation behind making and living with this decision, but I am not a social anthropologist and really, I am the mother of three with a shit-load of laundry and a bathroom to clean. So I’ll spare you. I do however, want to let you in on one little secret and I think once I put this out there it might be as eye-opening for you as it was for me. This whole tension between the mothers with careers and the career mothers may be due to a simple misunderstanding. By way of explaining, I’ll share a little anecdote with you. During a visit to the playground, a friend of mine (who happens to be employed - just so you know that I do have one or two of that kind of friend) overheard a conversation between a couple of moms in the career camp. One mother was bemoaning the fact that her nanny had been absent for a week or two and she had taken her place at home with the children. Now you must understand, this mother was not begrudging her nanny the time off. And she wasn’t complaining about all the things she couldn’t do because she was home with her kids. Instead she was simply admitting to her friend that she was miserable at home because she didn’t like who she had become since being at home for a couple of weeks. She warned her friend "Shoot me if I ever tell you I want to stay home, all I do is yell at these kids all day long." While a part of me would love to poo-poo this mommy with a career and claim that she is clearly not cut-out for full-time childrearing, I know that’s simply not the case. What I do know is that someone, preferably a stay-at-home type mom, should take this woman and absolve her of her guilt by telling her our (career mommies’) little secret, that’s all we do all day too! That’s what mothering is, hard and frustrating and relentless. And yes there are little moments of hilarity and tenderness and all that good stuff, but there is a lot of struggle in between. This poor woman has been at her office all these years thinking that all those PTA moms and after-school brownie bakers are greeting their kids with sing-songy voices and simply coping with all the hair-pulling, and spills, and selective listening and general bad behavior that comes up in any given day. She could not be more wrong. Sure, we stay-at-home-moms may have a few more tricks up our sleeves for these situations, like turning on the vacuum cleaner or locking ourselves in the closet with a glass of wine, but we’re not having any better of a time than she would.

So I say this to all the working mothers out there who are struggling with guilt over leaving your children at home: stop second-guessing yourselves, the reason no one is yelling at your kids right now is because you are at work and there is someone with them who you pay to NOT yell at them. And to all the stay-at-home moms who have wondered if they would stop yelling and start appreciating their kids a little more if they weren’t with them all of the time: stop second-guessing yourselves, no matter how much time we spend away from our children we will never altogether stop yelling at them, because they are our kids and we love them. And sometimes they deserve it.

This is not a Mommyfesto

Mommyfesto - "a companion blog to Daddyfesto" in the same way that "mommy" is a companion to "daddy" - less theory, more action; a little bit crazy; and bitching the whole way through.

The first thing you should know is that I don’t have a lot of theories on motherhood or parenting. I know a lot of people who have spent years (ok maybe just nine months and some change) collecting and cultivating their theories on parenting. Determined to find the best way, to have the best kids, they have read everything Amazon has to offer on rearing children. Some of those parents (or parents-to-be) have subscribed wholesale to a single theorist: they are touchpointists, or ferberites, montessorians, or, my personal favorite (really it is), love-and-logicians. Others - the majority- have taken a little of this and a little of that and created their own parenting protocol. I didn’t do either.

Over the past few years, I have occasionally thought maybe I should do a little research into my "profession" and have done my very best to make it through some of the literature. But then something like lice, or a mysteriously wet bed (and a screaming preschooler with damp pants), or flashcards, or poop (not in the toilet) or more likely, a new season of the Real World, would happen and the book would be forgotten long before I finished the preface.

And I didn’t do it ahead of time for a very good reason. There was no "ahead of time." I mean not in the planning, hoping, obsessing, picking out names and schools sort of "ahead of time." You see, I got knocked up, but before it was cool. Happily, the right guy knocked me up and now I have three kids and almost eight years of motherhood under my belt (and above it and on my ass) to blog about. But I still don’t have any theories, or grand plans, or manifestos. Instead I have only anecdotal evidence that may or may not support your theories.

So this is it, my "mommyfesto" little bits of mothering experience, observations, and maybe some advice, but mostly its just me typing in the vain hope that someone out there is listening to me because God knows, nobody is listening at home.