A day in the life...

I had one of those nights last night, where I was left with a small shard of sanity. And it is that very shard, that I felt the need to share.


Background. Last few weeks have been nutso. Family stuff, birthdays, Easter, more family stuff, work, oh- and two kids that are conspiring to not sleep through the night. I mean, why should they? They both knock out 2-2.5 hours naps each day, so what’s a little overhead time at say, 3 AM?

Add to that, they are both battling ear infections, last one confirmed yesterday at a noon time Dr’s. appointment. And McGirl is cutting teeth. In short, my kids are snotty, crabby, non-sleeping, drooling little beasts that while I love them more than I can express, I have wanted to turf out to the curb on a fairly regular basis lately.

So queue up the reel from last night’s installment of “The McConville’s” and it would look something like this:

Get home from daycare. 2 year old FREAKING out because he can’t have his “binky” – keeping in mind that he has a binky in his mouth. So, unless he is planning on using it to plug some other orifice (decidedly unadvisable) there is not really a reason for drama. But it was non-stop.

10 month old decides to chime in and throw a screaming fit… because I had the nerve to set. Her. Down. On. The. Family Room. Floor. With. Toys.

There is knock on the door. Its my mother in law grabbing some stuff that she left on Easter Sunday. So both kids crying, I still have my jacket on and oh, the kitchen is still in some assorted state of total chaos from the hosting of said Easter dinner. I mean, like my floors looked like a movie theatre floor after a midnight preview of the newest Twilight movie – gross.

So Grandma gets her stuff and says bye. I am trying to get the kids calmed down for 2 seconds so I can think about getting dinner ready. Finn then moves his hysteria from his ever present need for his binky to an absolute and pressing desire to be “outside, OUTSIDE MAMA!!!!!” And pressing his snotty, drooling face against the sliding glass door.

Finally get a healthy, well-balanced meal on the table – Mac N’ Cheese with some left over Easter ham thrown in for protein (beats the hot dog alternative), a dinner roll and carrots. See, carrots. I told you it was well-balanced. Both kids hork down the food. But not before getting it down shirts, in hair and basically setting the stage for bath night. And let’s not fool ourselves, I don’t have a regular “bath night” routine. I give them a bath when they are gross. Not just sorta gross – that you can fix with a wet wipe, we are talking toddler GROSS.

In an effort to keep things moving at a decent pace and prevent any further meltdowns from either front, it was bath time for both of them. This was both genius and my ultimate downfall. Get both kids in the tub – not before there was a pseudo-breakdown about how many toys are needed in the tub. Manage to get them clean, while somewhat managing to keep them both from drinking the bath water. I mean, soap in the water is one thing, but I think Finn **might** have peed in it. And while most of you would have drained the water and restarted, I couldn’t confirm so we went about our business. Go ahead, call DHS now. But the ratio of possible pee to the total water volume of the tub made it so small, it just wasn’t worth the battle.

And this is when my good idea starts to go wrong… ever try and get a 2 year old and 10 month old dried, diapered and into PJ’s at the same time? Exactly.

Get Finn wrapped in his towel, tell him to go into his room and I will be there in a minute. Take the baby and get her dried off and try to get her dressed. Which shouldn’t be a big deal, except she was playing game of “wriggle-baby” made more difficult by the lotion I had just slathered all over her.

Meanwhile, Mr. Pants-off-Dance-off is running around the upstairs buck-ass naked and shutting all the bedrooms doors, ending with him shutting himself into his room.

Get baby dressed (finally) go and open the door to Finn’s room and discover that he has now peed on his carpet.

This is about when my eye starts twitching uncontrollably.

So, go to get him diapered before something **really** nasty happens, and dressed and realize I have no diapers. Grab the baby so she won’t take a header down the stairs (see, not a totally horrible parent), pull Finn off the changing table and tell him to stay put (still naked). Get downstairs as fast as I can, dig through the Mom bag (challenge in and of itself) to find a diaper, heave my totally overweight self back up the stairs as fast as I can, baby still in crook of the arm, and get back to his room.

He peed on the carpet…. AGAIN. And I know what you are thinking, why oh, why would you leave him naked? That is just silly. Game time decision folks. Sometimes in the spur of the moment, you just don’t have time to really think.

I get him diapered, dressed, trying the whole time to keep the baby from crawling all over said pee spots on the carpet. Drop her in her crib (she starts wailing), tell Finn to keep her company – he walks out of her room and slams the door. And I go find the Resolve to get the floors cleaned up.

After all this, I get the 10 month old down. Get Finn downstairs with plenty of binky’s in tow, as I gave up on the “why on earth do you need more than one binky” argument roughly around the time of the second carpet pee and turn on whatever cartoon is readily available that guarantees’ that he will get that zombie-stoner look and sit in front of the TV for a good 30 minutes without questions. I take one look at my train-wreck of a kitchen (and the supporting movie theatre like floors) and promptly go get a beer before I do one more thing.

In short, last night was a bit of a bitch. But I did survive. I always seem to survive. More importantly, the kids survived. Hell, I even got the kitchen cleaned up. Made Joe bring me dinner as I wasn’t going to do a single thing that would potentially mess up the kitchen given that I had finally gotten it clean. Those floors, well that is another matter for tonight.



Now Listening: My “Passion Pit” radio station on Pandora.

Martyr 101

Been a bit since we have chatted. Hope all is well. Here in the snowy-wonderfullness of Jan/Feb in Iowa, the weather continues to be a hot (pun intended) topic.


It’s the STORM OF THE CENTURTY

SNOW-POCOLYPSE

SNOW-MAGEDDON

You get the picture. The weather people in this area should get Emmy’s for hyperbole. They could give Stephen Colbert a run for his money in that arena. Regardless, in my mind while snow does in fact suck, its Iowa. Its February. Its sorta expected, so deal.

One mild venting and then on to the topic of the day. And I will caution as I prepare to unleash this. I don’t mean to sound less than grateful, and understand that there are probably only a handful of people other than me that are hoping as hard as I am to see this new business be as successful as it can, oh – and I really do understand that my husband is working his ass off right now. All those things aside…

For those of you that weren’t aware, Joe has been working on getting a restaurant open for going on a year now. Well on top of buying a new house and moving this month (or I guess technically in January) all of that finally came to a head and we are open for business as of Monday.

Check out the website here: http://www.gustopizzaco.com/ or better yet, stop in for a bite.

Advertisement over.

So what this means is that for the last 3 or 4 weeks, I have hardly seen my husband. My kids have hardly seen their dad except on their morning drive to daycare. We have conversations via text. We bump into each other in the hallways in the mornings. You get the picture. So this means I have been playing single mom to a certain degree. And by the way – mad, HUGE, GI-NORMOUS shout out to single moms/dads. I only play one on TV on occasion. I don’t know how you do it. Yikes. So while I am still working my full time (and highly stressful) job, I get the joy of coming home every night and being mom. Not that it isn’t great. Don’t mis-understand. I love my kids. More than I can explain in years and years of posts. Its just that after a long day at work, some nights you just want to be a lazy bum, and you can’t. So I am trying to keep our house together – and that’s a challenge as we still have boxes to unpack from the aforementioned move. But after working a day, spending a few hours with el-kiddos and getting them to bed, the idea of spending a couple of hours sorting and unpacking boxes pretty much blows. So if I get through 2 of them in a night, it’s a victory. So this morning, after the usual cosmic battle with the alarm clock, I am getting ready. McGirl is her usual cheering, CHATTY self. Talking to whomever will listen – and most mornings, it’s the cat. Finn is running around the upstairs, dragging his monster truck blanket (a new fav) and shouting “NEMO’s” and “TRACTORS” at the top of his voice. Which is 2-year old speak for “Mom, I would like a pack of Nemo Fruit Snacks and John Deere Tractor Fruit Snacks that I plan on shoving in my mouth and eating in one fell swoop”

Joe is getting ready and in the course of a few minutes asks me 1) where is my clean underwear 2) do I have any clean work shirts? My first response, was did you look where they are supposed to be? No. Ok, start there, otherwise, check the laundry basket. Next question, as I am frantically blowing my hair into a static-y, frizzy mess in my hurry to get out the door, is “Does Finn have any clean clothes? You didn’t do his laundry last night?” This last question had me ready to scream. No, I didn’t do his laundry, I thought he was ok. But more importantly, after dashing out the door from a hellacious day at work, barely making it to daycare before they turfed the kids to the curb, taking both kids into the grocery store for some essentials, getting them both fed, playing, putting them both to bed, taking the garbage out, emptying the dishwasher and then getting myself some dinner, I must have just OVERLOOKED the laundry situation. In short, my kid went to school today wearing jeans that he might have worn yesterday, socks that will probably make his feet stink even more than usual and a shirt that is 2 sizes to big (but is clean) and I left the house less than pleased at my husband. Yarg. I try not to play the martyr card – which is hard, as I come from a long line of accomplished martyrs. But can a girl get a break?

DEEP BREATH

Moving on….

I know that I devote way too much content here to motherhood. What can I say, it has replaced the rockstar single life I used to live as the topic du jour….Mostly, because I no longer have a rockstar single life to talk about. Oh, I am probably up at 4 AM, but for VERY different reasons. A crying baby, as opposed to a crying, drunk girlfriend or ex-boyfriend as the case may be. I used to cut off my shot intake in a night at 3 or 4 – depending on the hour and if we were going to hit an after-hours party. Now my shot discussions are around whether you should get your toddler a flu shot. So as you can see, perspective has shifted a smidge.

Thus bringing us to our ramble of the day….And today, its not so much a ramble, but a blatant self-realizing moment that needed to be shared. This morning, I was digging through my purse for my iPod. Needed some tunage (as outdated as my music collection is these days) to get through my morning. The white noise at the office is just a bit too much for me to process. So pulling things out of my purse in an attempt to find said iPod. And this dear reader is the exact inventory of my purse as of 9:07 this AM:

• Umbrella

• Package of gum

• Book of Target coupons

• An empty sunglasses case

• Wallet

• Case for digital camera – no camera, just the case.

• Case of baby wipes

• Contact solution – I don’t wear contacts.

• Broken cell phone – doubles as a toddler toy.

• 2 matchbook cars

• 2 stuffed baby rattles

• Container with baby formula – enough for two 6 oz bottles if you are curious

• Sippy cup – CARS themed

• Pair of Finn’s socks

• 4 diapers – 3 for Faolan, 1 for Finn

• 1 oversized crayon in RED.

• Chapstick

• And roughly $0.83 in change in the bottom along with a small bowl of Cheerios crumbs.

You will notice the glaring omission of the iPod.

Now, a little history as you process the above contents and mentally create a picture of how big said bag must be to hold all that….crap. My mother always carried HUGE purses. In fact, at one point, she had a purse within her purse. And I swore, that I wouldn’t go down that path. And for years, was quite successful. As the Rubbermaid bin in my closet will attest, I had purses for every occasion, style and color. But the one caveat, was that they couldn’t be big. And they weren’t. Compact, cute and stylish. Enough room for a wallet, cell phone, some make-up essentials and occasionally a camera or sunglasses. Fast forward to about two years ago (if that is possible within the time/space continuum)… and BABY. So now, you have a diaper bag for the litany of baby shit that you cart around and a purse. And for awhile, I did both.

DUMB.

So then, I moved key purse content into diaper bag. But that was short lived as inevitably, I would move stuff to diaper bag, and then promptly realize at about 11:53 AM on a Monday that my wallet wasn’t with me at work and I was going to have eat the stale granola bars in my desk drawer for lunch as I had no money with me. So what is a sorta-hip, self proclaimed small purse girl to do?

Answer: and this is one of those, unfortunate mom-moments, suck it up and accept that this, like many things you SWORE you were never going to do, is something you have to do. You get the big purse and rationalize it that carrying one big bag makes more sense than one diaper bag and a purse. And you hate it, but you do it. And then you realize why you hate it. You can NEVER, and I mean never find what you are looking for in the damn thing. I think that the dryer-gnomes that eat the one sock all the time have cousins that live in my purse and hide things that you know are supposed to be there. Yet, all I ever manage to find when I am rustling through the damn thing is receipts of stuff I bought 2 months ago, wrappers to gum and the aforementioned Cheerios crumbs. At some point, this should all get better. I mean, it has to get better. I can’t keep lugging all this crud around. Otherwise, I will end up with a left shoulder that is decidedly larger than the right.

Now Listening: The Blueprint 3 by Jay-Z

Let's get down to it

Ok – lets talk turkey. Well, not turkey in a literal sense. That topic is SO 6 weeks ago.

 

Let me re-phrase: Lets have a down and possibly dirty conversation. And yes – if you are my parent or in any way or shape possibly offended, disgusted, embarrassed or otherwise made uncomfortable by a candid conversation about sex then STOP READING NOW.

 

Alright. Now that we have the squeamish taken care of, lets get down to business. I feel like at this point I should have the ability to talk in a public forum about this stuff. I am 35 years old, married with 2 children. So, yes. I have had sex. More than once in fact. Hell, even more than twice. And as evidenced by the two little mini-Joe’s running around, I had it before I was married. Shame, shame, shame. But I digress.

 

I really like sex. A lot. In a perfect world – I would have it daily. But this entry isn’t about a perfect world. Far from it. This entry is about the less-than-perfect; 15 lbs heavier than you want to be; slightly lumpy and stressful world that some of us call reality.

 

There is this prevailing thought that I believe most first time parents have. It goes something roughly like this “My life isn’t going to change. I am going to be the same person, do the same things and live like I always had. I will just have this precious, well-behaved little person with us.” And they genuinely do believe that to be the reality that faces them. My guess is (and I base this on my own mental state at the time) that many of them extend that thought into the bedroom. It just sounds more like this “We will still have sex whenever and wherever we want to. As loud as we want and with the total monkey-abandon that we have always enjoyed. We are keeping the sex-swing and nothing will convince me otherwise!” – and for the record, I don’t have a sex swing. Its creative license people. Reads better, trust me.

 

To that I say --- pppsssshhht. What-evah!!

 

Here is the slow evolution of your sex life once you have kids. Actually – from right before you have your first one. You are overdue. You are trying anything and everything to get the kid out of you. Power washing your house while drinking pineapple juice and doing jumping jacks? Check. Walking the length of the mall and back again? Check. Attempting head stands and well balanced tree-poses from your prenatal yoga DVD? Check. And the sex. Everyone tells you to try sex. Here is what they don’t tell you about this glorious, life-affirming, embrace your womanhood part of your life. You are the size of a double-wide. Just getting out of a chair is a 12 step process. And you want to throw SEX on top of that? Yeah. It’s the sort of balancing act that you never imagined yourself to be in, prenatal yoga DVD be damned. Much less willingly doing. And for the record, I don’t think it works.

 

You get home with your new precious bundle of joy and the idea of sex is somewhere in the outer stratosphere of your existence. Your v-jay is like, down to your knees and is weighing in at 30 lbs. You just squeezed a living being out of the nether regions. You are affixing a “Dead End” sign at your ankles and nothing is getting past it. All your partner or husband heard when you left the hospital was “no sex for 6 weeks”. In his mind, the clock is ticking, down to the second and never in your whole existence has he been more interested in a doctors appointment. So you go to the appointment. And you get the all clear. And the reality of things is this –

 

• The only person making as much noise in the middle of the night in the house that they want is your newborn howling their head off .
• The room that housed the sex-swing is now a laundry sorting facility and the swing itself is now buried under 18 receiving blankets and the 13 of the 42 outfits that your bundle of joy has gone through in a day.
• You haven’t showered in 4 days.
• You haven’t shaved since, well, god only knows when. Probably in the last 6 months as that was the last time you saw your bellybutton. -
• Your hair is perma-stuck in a ponytail shape as that is the only hairstyle you are now familiar with. You might have dried up throw-up in your hair. You are not sure.
• Your super cute, vintage tops and designer jeans are still in a tub marked “my old life” and have been replaced with your husbands ratty college fraternity t-shirts, that now sport two rings of dried boob-milk stains where you have leaked on them, yoga pants and of course, flip flops. And possibly more throw-up. Again, you are not sure.

 

And you think to yourself, if ANYONE can find this attractive (you motion to your whole self) then sure, I will give it a whirl. And low and behold, your dear husband sees past all of this and thinks… “Sweet Jesus, it has been at least 6 weeks, if not longer. If I don’t have sex soon, I will explode” So you do it. And it sorta isn’t fun. Not like the first time suckiness, but not really how you remembered it.

 

And over time, as you get used to this new reality, you begin to shower. Hell, you might even begin to shave. You start to fit into some of those old clothes. Although, they never really fit right again. Even after you lose the weight. And sex starts to be something that you might, maybe, want to consider having again on a regular basis.

 

And here is the new challenge. You now have something of a routine working out. You are starting to feel human again. But now you have a kid. A kid that at some point becomes mobile. A kid that while they sleep through the night, is still prone to waking up whenever. So you sneak around. You go for just doing it, rather than doing it well. Foreplay has become urban legend. Not that it matters anyway, ever since the baby your boobs are a no-fly zone. Somehow the idea of them as a food source and a sex object is just too much to process. The areas that you tended to for years with waxing, shaving, sculpting and lord knows what else, now look like some sort of 70’s porn bush. You would love someone to spend some quality time down there, however you feel bad about even bringing it up due to the aforementioned lack of grooming. But who has 20 extra minutes in the shower? All the extra time and money for trips to the salon now that all your extra time and money go to the money suck that is children?? Because, I certainly don’t. I am however, open to suggestions if anyone has them. Bottom line, you could double in a National Geographic special where the indigenous tribes run around naked without a grooming care in the world

 

And if you manage to do the deed once a week, you feel pretty darn good about it. You think you are getting the hang of this new sexual reality. You are having fun, you are in the mood, he is in the mood, You are really getting into it, when you hear a cry from another room. He says “just let them cry, it won’t hurt them for 20 minutes”. And who are we kidding, 20 minutes is about all it takes given the current environment. Maybe a guy can do that – but all I hear is a crying kid. And if I am not in the moment, I don’t care how much fun it would be, I am not going to enjoy myself. So you get to be the bad guy, stop what is shaping up (literally and figuratively) to be a good time and tend to the demanding voice from the other room. It doesn’t seem fair, you think as you are scrambling to find your underwear before you go into their room , and flip the switch from lover to mother …. why should you have to pick between these two things that you love – and yet are constantly at odds with one and other? And you are crossing your fingers that when you return to your bed, you can resume where you left off, knowing full well that you have a 50/50 shot at best that he is still awake.

 

So this is my reality today. If you can get me to not fall asleep on the couch somewhere between the Daily Show and the Colbert Report , you are making progress. If you can find 20 minutes of uninterrupted time to charm me out of my pants, you have a pretty good shot of clearing the goal line. Odds are, I will be more than agreeable to a good time. But lets be honest here, if you do charm my pants off, be prepared for the cotton granny panties. The lacy bits and thongs of yesterday are buried in the back of the underwear drawer. One day I will bring them out again. I promise. After I get caught up on 2.5 years of sleepless nights, find my waistline, and get that grooming thing back in check.

 

Now Listening: Lungs by Florence + the Machine

Tis' The Season