Wordless Wednesday: You’re Doing It Wrong

Top Ten Tuesday: Mommy Confessional

In the four months I’ve been writing this blog (yes, it’s been four months — why aren’t I world famous yet?), I’ve done my best to provide you readers (all six of you) with plenty of frank details about my fears, obsessions, and overall insanity. No sugar-coating here, folks: I’ve admitted to being prone to crankiness and worrying that sweet Bubba will follow suit, mocked myself for panicking over leaving my child with Grandma for 24 hours, confessed my former life as a loser, and just yesterday I exposed myself as a hypocrite with the dietary habits of a five year old.

(As a sidenote, I must say that with thrilling posts like those, I’m shocked this blog hasn’t blown up in popularity! I’m so relatable. Who among us doesn’t write mental letters to Dear Abby as a form of self-therapy?)

But despite all the stories and glimpses into my brain I’ve already regaled you with, guess what? There are some things I have not yet shared! In fact, I can think of precisely ten secrets and crazy thoughts that I haven’t gotten around to discussing. How convenient for a Tuesday!

Wait no longer: here are my Top Ten Mommy Confessions (that I haven’t already told you about):

Do As I Say, Not As I Eat

A couple of months ago, Bubba couldn’t even hold a sippy cup — his preferred imbibing style was bottle or, on occasion, birdfeeder:

Now, he won’t even let me hold the spoon when it’s time to eat:

I know it’s cliche, but…he’s growing up so fast! I realized this weekend that we’ve only got a few more months of bottle-feeding left, and then he’ll be like…a real person.

A person whose nutrition I am going to be in charge of.

O Camera!

Ever since the baby started sleeping in his own room, I’ve been relying on a video camera positioned over his crib to keep me sane. Without it, I likely would have just moved right into his crib with him. If he’s sleeping while I’m awake, I check on him approximately 16 times per hour, and every night I set an alarm for 3am so I can take a quick peek to confirm that he is still breathing/hasn’t been kidnapped.

Or, I used to do these things.

Effective today, the camera is officially retired. More accurately, it was forced into an early retirement at the chubby hands of a curious baby. Specifically, this baby:

Allow Me To Improve Your Parenting Book…

Parenting books are extremely popular, and with good reason: no new mother knows what the hell she’s doing. The books make us feel better — we still don’t know what we’re doing, but at least we can feel good about the fact that we bought (and presumably read at least the first few pages of) a book about parenting. Effort counts!

The problem with these books is that they suck.

More specifically, they suck at preparing you for an actual human child. The two I have contain lots of dates and milestones and sentences that start with “your baby should…” (“by six months, your baby should be sleeping 10 hours per night, eating 30 ounces of formula per day, and causing you no fewer than 2 mommy-meltodwns per month”), but I’m not entirely convinced that the writers of these tomes have ever actually met a baby. I’m sure many fine medical journals and/or Wikipedia (depending on the quality of the book) were consulted during the writing process, but the authors would have been wise to observe a real live baby for a few hours, too. The books are fantastic if you’re working on some sort of a school project on infant milestones or if you are literally so dense that you need a book to inform you that you should probably throw some outlet covers on those exposed sockets at some point, but that’s really about it. If you’re reading a parenting book with hopes of getting an idea of what your baby will actually do or how he’ll behave, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

But I’m not just here to criticize — I’m here to help! If you are the author of the next volume of What To Expect After The Baby Leaps From Your Loins or any similarly-titled book, I’ve taken the liberty of outlining some new chapters you can include in your next draft. Royalties are accepted but not expected; knowing that future mothers will have access to this valuable information shall be reward enough.

Baby Sleep Secrets From A (Self-Ordained) Expert!

The “cry it out” method of getting your kid to sleep is a serious hot-button issue. Every mom in the world seems to have an alarmingly strong opinion on it, and they are all 100% sure that they are correct. If you’re a mother, try this experiment: write a post on Facebook informing your family and friends that you’re thinking about letting your baby cry it out. Within five minutes you will receive a comment like this:

“Good for you! It’s the only way they’ll learn how to sleep. You’ve got to do it now or they’ll never learn!”

Followed immediately by one like this:

“Please don’t do it! It’s so cruel and unnecessary! Here, read this book instead…”

There will literally be no “in between” comments. Crying it out is either the only way to get your child to sleep and you better do it soon or you’ll end up with an eight year old who can’t sleep anywhere but in your bed, or it’s borderline child abuse. It would almost be amusing if you weren’t on the brink of a fatigue-induced nervous breakdown brought on by your child’s refusal to sleep.

Or was that just me?

Top Ten Tuesday: Boys Rule, Girls Drool

Since the day last year that I found out I was pregnant, TFW made it abundantly clear that he really, really would prefer a boy (as if I could control it for him?). It would be so much easier, he whined. He wouldn’t know what to do with a girl. Wah wah wah. I was still in my first trimester and and I was already dealing with a big baby.

I, on the other hand, really did not care about the sex of the baby (other than a bizarre paranoia that it wouldn’t have a clearly-defined sex and I’d be dealing with a hermaphrodite, forced to choose its sex in a split-second decision while a scalpel-wielding doctor loomed above me in the delivery room; apparently that Middlesex book really stuck with me). I knew it’d be easier for TFW if the baby was a boy, though (he only reminded me every five minutes or so), so I was thrilled when the ultrasound technician pointed out a no-doubt-about-it penis on the screen.

While I was excited to start planning for “our son” instead of just “the baby” and also supremely grateful to no longer have to listen to my husband’s incessant whining about having to watch My Little Pony with his hypothetical daughter, I will admit that I was just a wee bit concerned about the prospect of raising a boy. As I’ve explained before, I come from a girl family. I have five sisters and really was never around boys growing up. Going to the homes of friends who had brothers terrified me — they were so…different. And noisy. And they played with different toys and roughhoused with their sisters and watched scary action movies and ran around with Super Soakers and did I mention how damn noisy they were?

I started to get nervous.

Loser No Longer!

For much of my life, I felt like a Loser with a capital L. I suffered from such an all-consuming lack of self-confidence that it makes me cringe just thinking about the former incarnation of myself, but it was literally all I knew for about twenty years.

As a little girl, I felt like a “loser” because I was incredibly easily embarrassed and a MAJOR crybaby, a condition you may have read about in medical journals under Something Is Wrong With This Kid, No Normal Child Acts This Way (perhaps you’re more familiar with the diagnosis’s acronym, SIWWTKNNCATW). Forget your homework at home? Burst into tears. Give the wrong answer in class? Sob uncontrollably. Embarrassed by your reputation as The Girl Who Always Cries? Better have a good cry about that!

And god forbid I try to make it through a sleepover…after one too many desperate 11pm calls begging my bedraggled mother to retrieve me, I wised up and started making excuses to avoid these events ahead of time.

(Loser, sure; savvy, absolutely.)

Pro Tip for Traveling With a Newborn: Don’t Do It

When Ryan was 8 weeks old, the hubbins and I faced a major dilemma. After looking for a new job for a couple of months, TFW was offered a position that sounded just about perfect: great people, fun environment, an industry he loves, yada yada yada.

So what’s the problem, you ask? The company was in Seattle…and we live in Los Angeles.

Despite my usual resistance to change (I’ve been known to experience a mini panic attack upon learning that dinner plans must be altered) and the fact that I lived my whole life in Southern California, I wasn’t necessarily adverse to moving. He needed a new job and this was a good one, and luckily my job can be done from virtually anywhere as long as I have internet access. And aside from my family, I don’t have many (i.e. any) friends in LA, so it’s not like I’d be measurably more lonely up there. Surprisingly enough to myself and to all who have ever had to put up with me, I was totally open-minded about the whole situation.

(Keep in mind, the baby was only 8 weeks old at this time and I wasn’t getting much sleep. I think my usual defenses were just down due to the fatigue.)

However, I’d never even been north of San Francisco, and TFW had experienced Seattle for a grand total of about 4 hours during the interview process (we won’t count the time he spent in the airport, although he did note that the Qdoba was delicious). Obviously, no matter how great the job seemed and how uncharacteristically flexible I was being, we needed to check out the city before agreeing to uproot our entire lives to move there. The company needed an answer within a week, so we did what any rational people would do: we booked a last minute flight and packed our 8-week-old infant up for a whirlwind 36-hour trip to Seattle.

Top Ten Tuesday: Who The Hell Needs That?! Me.

I have a really hard time spending money on myself. I’m very generous when it comes to presents or favors or loans and the like, but tubes of mascara have to be literally dried to crumbs before I will splurge on a new one (and we’re not talking Lancome here, people. Maybe its Maybelline!). Get my nails done or break the bank by downloading some new books for the ol’ Kindle? Non-essential and thus unapproved!

It’s not a lack of funds — I just have a hard time justifying indulging in something that benefits no one but myself. Perhaps intensive therapy to bolster my self-esteem is in order, but that sounds like a lot of work.

And it’s not just my money that I don’t want spent on stuff for me. When TFW and I went to register for wedding gifts a few years back, I had a full-scale meltdown in the middle of the Macy’s housewares department, right in front of the display of overpriced pots and pans. My oblivious husband-to-be was using that scanner like it was going out of style (“and I declare, our linen closet shall be stocked with enough towels for every man, woman and child this side of the Mississippi! AND EXTRA WINE GLASSES FOR ALL!!”), while I was inching closer to mental breakdown with every addition. After bickering with him about which pots and pans to select, I burst into panicky tears (literally — this tale is not hyperbole, sadly):