Coating My Son

24 Feb 2011 9 Comments

by Natalie in Parenting Battles Tags: ,

I’m convinced my 2-year-old is part reptile. That’s the only logical explanation. The little dude is never cold so he’s got to be adapting to his environment like a cold-blooded crocodile.

I don’t know how many times I have fought him this winter to put a coat on. Normally he’ll flop around on the living room floor like an oversized fish out of water while I yell at him and chase him around with his coat in my hands. He’ll scream, cry and arch his back so it’s virtually impossible to put his coat on.

He usually walks to the van in tears because I pinned him down and made him put it on. What am I supposed to do, let him freeze? I was particularly firm about his coat-wearing habits in December when he had a cold. I wasn’t about to let him make it worse just because he was being stubborn.

But sometimes my willpower is low and I have to admit that I have let him go to the grocery store, church or even out to eat coatless. You should see the looks I get from strangers as he shivers his way inside.  I know what they are thinking, “Buy that kid a coat for heaven’s sake!” I’m surprised no one has taken pity on us and slipped me a $20 as coat-investment money. Little do they know about the battle we undergo each time we leave the house.

Seriously, the child has a very nice winter coat and at least a dozen jackets he refuses to wear.

But winter weather attire isn’t the only warm protection my 2-year-old shuns. He’s been boycotting blankets and covers his entire life. He refuses to sleep with anything but pajamas covering his tiny body. Sometimes I try to cover him with blankets when I kiss him good night while he is sleeping. Then, only minutes later, I hear him thrashing through the sheets as he rolls out from under their imprisonment.

He must be a lot warmer than I am.

I know it is my obligation as a good parent to keep him safe and healthy, but how much do I infringe upon his freedom to insist that he does what I want?  I usually make him wear a coat, but I’m not about to straight jacket him into bed at night because I think he’s probably cold. Maybe he’s not.

Things are actually getting better as far as coat wearing goes. I recently convinced him, now that winter is almost over, that his basic tan coat is actually a hunting/army combination jacket. It has a large ranger badge on its side sleeve that helps validate my story. Sometimes now when I tell him we need to get our coats on he’ll scream, “I want my badge one!”

Now I know he’s not wearing it for the right reasons. He doesn’t care that it’s keeping him warm. He’s wearing it because the kid loves to dress up. He thinks he’s in costume and I’m okay with that.

We have a lot less fights than we used to. And that might lead to fewer glares from concerned, yet clueless, strangers about the welfare of my children.

Luckily, it’s almost spring.

Living with the Elephant

17 Feb 2011 18 Comments

by Natalie in Dealing with Death, My Angel Baby Tags: ,

If the topic of death makes you uncomfortable, skip this post and check back next week. If you do end up reading this post in its entirety you will probably smile at the irony of this warning.

I have a giant elephant in my living room. Unfortunately he doesn’t just stay there. My current elephant – the death and birth of my baby boy – haunts me wherever I go.

It finds me every time I meet someone new. They ask a simple, non-threatening question, “How many children do you have?” Then I coil back like someone just socked me in the stomach.

How many kids do I have? That’s an interesting question. The real answer – three. I have been blessed with three beautiful boys. But one of them is no longer with us. He was stillborn last spring.

That makes the answer more difficult to define. I never really know what to say to people.

I feel guilty saying I have three kids – especially to a mother I see wrestling three young children. I have three boys, but I definitely don’t have the responsibility of raising all three right now. I do not chase around a four-year-old, 2-year-old and a 10-month old.

Technically I only have two. But I will never forget my third, and heaven knows my body won’t either.

Yes I was pregnant for 37 weeks. Yes my ankles swelled up. Yes my back felt like it was going to break and my sciatic nerve sent jolts of pain down my thigh. Yes I fought my eyelids every afternoon as I sat on the couch with my three- and one-year -year-olds wondering how I was going to stay awake until 6 p.m. when dad got home. I was tired, I was sick to my stomach and I was dying to have a baby to bring home to make it all worth it.

But I was forced to come home empty-handed and brokenhearted.

So what to do?

My children aren’t afraid to talk about their brother. I’ve heard my four-year-old proudly exclaim that he has two brothers, but one’s in heaven. Then there’s my two-year-old. He’s always telling people his brother died and he wants to play with him.

If they aren’t embarrassed about their angel brother, why am I? Maybe it’s because I’ve seen several people shrink back horrified when I tell them my baby died.

It happened just last month when I went to renew our dinosaur park passes. I forgot that last year we listed “baby” on our pass because we didn’t know yet what we were having. This year when the worker updated my information she asked what our baby’s name was. When I told her he died she looked terrified, then replied something like, “That sucks, I’m sorry.”

Yeah, it does suck. And I’m glad that worker’s “sorry,” but it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t even my poor baby’s fault. His death was out of all of our control.

Another awkward issue associated with my baby’s death is his birth-death reversal. Yes my child died before he was born. What does that mean? It means he has no birth or death certificate. Basically, he never existed.

But believe me he did. I felt him kick every time one of my piano students played an upbeat song. I felt him go crazy when I’d lie down to sleep — turning somersaults and handsprings in my womb.

I heard his heartbeat the day he died. He was alive, and he was mine.

For now I will probably continue to address the awkward elephant that tromps into my life almost daily. I will probably make people uncomfortable as I tell them I have three boys — two on earth and one in heaven.

But I can’t forget my third child – no matter how short his life was.

Cooking up disaster

10 Feb 2011 Leave a comment

by Natalie in Failed Housewife Tags: ,

Growing up I had a serious eating complex. Food was my enemy. I ate merely to survive, not enjoy. So needless to say, I didn’t invest a lot of time in developing killer cooking skills. When I got married, I was literally starting from scratch and I still consider myself an amateur chef.

And I have a lot of amateur-chef stories to back me up.

Like the fall I experienced a number of canning disasters. Not only did I manage to blow up a bottle of spaghetti sauce splattering tomatoes all over my parents’ back patio (apparently my dad’s camp chef cooks about 100 times hotter than an indoor stove) but I melted my mom’s juicing hose trying to bottle grape juice and burned one of my favorite kitchen towels. It was hand-painted with a cute little girl on it and the words “Tuesdays I just cry” below her.

Ironically that happened on a Tuesday and I felt like crying.

I think of that towel every time I have a cooking disaster, which happens more than I like to admit. Like last Sunday when I tried to make dinner rolls and brownies.

I’ve had a 25-pound bag of flour in my pantry for about three months that I need to get rid of and I’ve been anxious to try my friend’s new “easy” roll recipe. However, we used all of our eggs at lunch and because it was the Sabbath I decided not to go buy a dozen but use an egg-substitute recipe.

I started with the brownies. I checked the egg recipe – but unfortunately I didn’t read it all the way through. Needless to say, 25 minutes later I had successfully made brownie oil surprise aka brown bubbling goo.

Luckily, I flipped my recipe card over before starting on the rolls. I followed the egg-substitute recipe to a T, but the rolls weren’t rising.

Now I have to admit I can make a mean chicken pasta salad and delicious sugar cookies, but those are only two things on a very short list of foods I have managed to successfully make more than once.

I have never handmade a delicious batch of dinner rolls. And I’ve wanted to. So I started to panic. It was 6 p.m. and I was seriously craving my rolls. Especially after I knew the brownies were inedible.

I think I checked under the towel a dozen times to see if they had grown. I decided to relax a little and help get the boys in bed. To my surprise the egg substitute kicked in and they actually turned out okay, despite the fact that I underestimated the rising time and didn’t get to enjoy a warm roll until about 9:45 p.m.

Now I know what you are thinking, “no wonder her kids don’t eat well.”  I know I’m no Rachael Ray or Paula Dean but maybe if I keep trying I’ll be able to add to my list of repeated successes.

I actually enjoy cooking now, even if it occasionally ends in disaster. When that happens I simply laugh it off and head to Wendy’s. Unless it’s Sunday, then I end up serving cereal.

Mealtime Madness

03 Feb 2011 1 Comment

by Natalie in Parenting Battles Tags: ,

The 2-year-old has been strapped tightly into his booster seat. The 4-year-old volunteers to say a short blessing. The food is dished up and placed onto the table.

Then all heck breaks lose and we are smack dab in the middle of another dinnertime debacle.

Right now mealtime is my least favorite time of day. I hate it. I loathe it. I detest it. It ranks right up there with bath time, bedtime and grocery shopping time. Yet it seems 10 times worse because I have to suffer through it multiple times each day.

At mealtime my inner she bear is unleashed. I grunt and growl and scream at my kids to eat — to no avail. But there is only a certain amount a young, nervous mother can handle.

For example, I honestly don’t know how hard it is to remain sitting during a meal. I mean sitting down on your two round cheeks. For some reason it is nearly impossible for my oldest. I don’t know how many times I tell him to sit down and turn around while eating.

Then there is the chipmunk-cheek approach my 2-year-old uses. He hoards food in his mouth like he’s storing it for winter. I’m not talking about pea-sized portions either. There have been times I’ve scraped finger scoops full of food out after meals.

Now I am sure that some of my children’s poor eating habits derive from my own mealtime ADD.  As a busy mother I often sit down to eat, then pop back up to grab someone a drink, a utensil, a napkin, whatever. They have learned from my bad example, yet they are the source of most of my mealtime ADD.

I got so stressed out last year when feeding my children that I took a they’ll-eat-when-they-are-hungry approach for a while. That backfired big time when I took my 2-year-old to the doctor and got chastised because he had lost weight. I literally think my two boys would happily starve to death if I let them.

Yet I refuse to cater to their picky bird-sized appetites and therefore remain in a mealtime conflict. I keep hoping their massive teenage appetites will kick in early and they will start eating me out of house and home. Until then, I guess I will just have to arm myself for battle by making lots of Jell-o jiggler and macaroni and cheese side dishes. Side dishes to accompany the “gross” main courses they won’t touch.

Career Mama

03 Feb 2011 2 Comments

by Natalie in About Me

I graduated at the top of my class after serving as editor of my college newspaper and earning several journalism awards. I landed an internship at my favorite daily newspaper and was offered a full-time reporter position when the internship ended.

I was living my dream.

Then what did I do? I quit about a year later. I was pregnant with my first son and knew deep down I wanted to stay home to raise my children. I just didn’t know how hard that would be.

This year I will celebrate my fifth anniversary of stay-at-home-momhood, and I couldn’t let another year go by without writing something. But what should I write?

I’ve heard people say that to be a good writer you have to write what you know. What you experience. What do I know? Well, I no longer cover court, attend city council meetings or ribbon-cutting and groundbreaking ceremonies. I don’t have access to behind-the-scene parties or high-profile interviews. I’ve turned in my press pass and therefore my front-row ticket to exciting, news-breaking drama.

So what do I do now? I wipe boogers off the wall — boogers that have been meticulously placed in low-profile areas by my four-year-old son. And I’m getting pretty good at it.

Yet I know I am not the only mother doing this.

That is why I am starting this blog. I am going to write about the joys, headaches, heartaches, drama and ordinary excitement that come with being a stay-at-home mom. Hopefully other mothers will laugh and cry as they relate to my experiences as a wannabe perfect housewife.

Call it a personal rant, call it a therapeutic writing session, whatever it is it’s going to be good. If nothing else, it will be a great way to document my laughable failures and occasional triumphs of motherhood. Enjoy!