Motherhood Uncensored

Potty in the USA

In my humble parenting experience, it seems as though Margot is ready for potty training.

Now I'm in absolutely no rush to get her potty trained, regardless of how many people tell me how much of a pain and expense it is to have two kids in diapers.

Meanwhile, they're not coming to your house trying to potty train your kid. Or driving around town having to stop at every single gas station and Target bathroom.

Potty training is rush week for parents. Without the parties. Or the Zima. 

First of all, the whole taking off the diaper and attempting to save it so you're not wasting the precious diaper just so they can sit on the potty and grin at you for 15 minutes while you wait to hear the sound of the tiny tinkle hitting toilet water leaves much to be desired.

I mean, you can spend half your week's grocery money on Pull-ups that tell you when they've peed, meanwhile it's clearly obvious because they're drooping off their ass and have turned four shades of whatever or have glowing stars on their asses.

Yes, I'm sooooo glad that I spent all that money so my kid and I can be alerted to her own bodily functions.

She already knows when she pees, as evidenced by the stacks of diapers that are immediately ditched all around my house.

Every now and then it's one of those diapers, which sends me off around my house like some sort of animal tracker, attempting to sniff out where she's been and what she might have sat upon or contaminated between the time she took off her diaper and the time I found her. 

Sometimes I take a moment to bask in the glory of my own existence when I'm down low, sniffing the carpets like a bloodhound.

College professor. Book author. Poop tracker. Look how far I've come.

I really need something that will tell her that she has to go.

I also need a self-cleaning carpet.

She's been waking up dry for awhile now, and definitely likes her privacy when she's getting the zoom-zoom-zoom out of her boom-boom-boom.

But every time I sit her on the potty seat, she makes fake pee sounds with her mouth and then runs away, at which point she usually goes and pees somewhere.

So I decided screw it and take one of those damn online scientific potty training readiness quizzes and figure out if I should actually make the effort, or just duct tape her diapers on and call it a night.

And wouldn't you know, I learned that she probably is ready for potty training.

And that she's also a smart ass.

Mom it's my birthday

I hate birthday parties. Kids birthday parties, to be exact. There's not much to love about 30 kids traipsing through germ-infested jumpy castles followed by cheap pizza, cake, and an over indulgent present opening session where the birthday child tosses masses of toys and wrapping paper to her left and right after looking at them for all of three seconds regardless of how many beers you can ingest during that two-hour period.

Unless you're the birthday child or the child with a 6th birthday in a few weeks, I'm pretty sure I just described hell.

On a cold day. 

I thank my lucky stars that I've got at least one kid born in the summer, which I have decided somehow relinquishes my obligation to throw such parties.

Instead, she picks a friend to take to a special afternoon out - like last year's kid-adapted High Tea at the Four Seasons or this year's mini-pedi at the local nail joint.

And then, we celebrate during our annual family vacation at the Jersey shore, with a few family members and friends, a gigantic supermarket bought cake, and a couple of presents.

Up until this year, it's been the highlight of each year - the ring of the Boardwalk games and rides, the bustle of the sweaty underdressed beach crowds, the discomfort of sand in every single body crevace.

While it has become increasingly expensive for us to make the haul, given that we must now rent a car and a condo (since we can barely squeeze ourselves in the in-laws' teeny place), it's a tradition that I'm happy to keep up - if only so my kids can experience real pizza, frozen custard dipped in Jimmies (not sprinkles thank you very much), and the accents.

Yes, it's wooter ice, not wah-ter ice.

Unfortunately, it's become harder to distract her from the extravagant party - not because she wants to run laps around an inflatable castle kingdom, but because she wants the presents. And it's hard to explain the value of a family trip to the glorious Jersey shore to a near 6-year-old, crammed into a bathroom sized condo with her entire family after inhaling hair spray fumes from too many girls wearing shorts with "Property of Vinnie" airbrushed on their asses.

How can you put a price on that?

But then I remembered that I turned six once.

So I told her it costs around ten American Girl dolls for her yearly family birthday vacation extravaganza. And that instead of getting presents, she should just ask her grandparents for money so she can buy whatever she wants.

And that just about did it.

Score one for mom and birthday party hating parents everywhere.

TGIFU

I have to giggle at all the TGIF!!!!! tweets and Facebook updates because I honestly can't even remember the last time I ever said that. When you're a stay-at-home-mom or even a work-at-home-mom, then for the most part, Saturday is just the same as Friday, except it's sort of worse because in your mind it should be different than Friday, with your husband home for two straight days and all. 

But alas, I'm awake at o' dark thirty with the kids, making breakfast, and already breaking up fights just like it's any other day, all while trying to catch up on emails, finish up a book proposal, and unclog a toilet that had an apparently larger-than-I-thought piece of a magic eraser shoved down it.

But today I've found a wide open bag of now stale chips on the counter, a pile of dirty pots still in the sink, and a very, very brave man still asleep in the bed.

Okay, so I'm wrong, it is a little different. But as you may be able to attest to, it's certainly not anything worthy of an acronym, unless it's WTF!!!!!!!!!!

A date with a boy

It's rare that I spend any alone time with my son, the middle child, the apple cider vinegar of my eye.

He's either with his older sister or his younger sister, or both of them at the same time. And since the younger sister came along, he's forfeited his own room for a shared space with bright pink walls, and his super cool fire engine collection to a little toddler who thinks the fire engine siren is an animal sound.

Didn't Old McDonald have fire trucks on his farm?

So I know he needs some time alone with me, but that time is hard to come by, with a sitter just two mornings a week which I try to reserve for work, or at least work that requires a continuous thought.

But what I could do during those few precious hours I could do at 11pm - something I can't say for spending time with my son, or at least that I wish I couldn't say thanks to his three-time midnightly visits and sleepover parties these days.

But he needs it. I need it. We need it.

And so off we went on a surprise trip to the Georgia Aquarium.

I chased him around the fish tanks, with three second stops in between to actually look at fish.

We named eels. We touched sting rays, against my better judgment. 

 And I held his hand. Only his.

We ate lunch and sat next to each other, admiring his new plastic submarine and intensely discussing why hammer head sharks' heads were shaped like hammers.

He thanked me every other breath - for taking him to the aquarium, for buying him a toy, and for giving him his favorite "Guacamo-wee." 

And I thanked him, secretly, for letting me be his mom.

Because on days when it feels like a job, and boy, that's a whole lot of days, I need times like these to remind me that I'm pretty damn lucky.

Baby Alive is going to kill me dead

I thought I had brilliantly foiled my daughter's attempt at getting a Baby Alive doll for Christmas by throwing her an American Girl doll bone.

Besides, we've got a real live baby here (and what do you know, another one on the way!) who likes to eat and then poops and pees and needs diaper changes, so I was hoping that somehow the idea of taking care of a real live baby, and not a plastic fake one would be much more enticing. 

Not so much.

But thanks to Asia or Gabrielle or whatever that $100 doll's name is, we avoided the peeing and pooping Baby Alive doll - that is until we recently instituted a formal allowance system in our household, which has helped to both keep things a little more orderly around here (beds made, dishwasher emptied, dog fed - whoops!) and support my daughter's insatiable, but thankfully, fairly frugal appetite for shopping.

It's amazing "how expensive" everything is once you have to buy it with your own money.

And so when she discovered that the Baby Alive doll was only $39.99, which is basically how much a pair of legs on another American Girl doll costs, she was bound and determined to save up her money for one.

I figured I had a good few weeks to change her mind with one stop at the Disney store (also known as "my desperate last resort") but then good old Auntie BFF sent along a box full of a few recent birthday party favors, which included A PAIR OF WHISTLES (which she shall be paid back with the set of bathtub recorders I'm sending as a belated birthday gift) and belated Christmas gifts - most importantly, a $10 Target gift card.

Couple that with the fact that on a recent trip to Target she found out that the Baby Alive newborn doll is only $29.99 and let's just say baby four, named Jenna or Elliot or "that freaking doll" is alive and kicking.

And peeing on my couch. Just what I needed. More pee.

[Disclaimer: Yeah, yeah. The link to the Baby Alive doll is through my Amazon affiliate, which means if you for some ungodly reason want to purchase it, then I'll get a kickback from that or whatever you purchase through the link]