School Shopping Stress

18 Aug 2011 Leave a comment

by Natalie in Don't ever take your kids..., Parenting Battles, What's a mom to do? Tags: , , ,

It’s no secret that I am not excited to send my 5-year-old to all-day kindergarten this fall.  But I decided to try to show my support and encouragement for his new school year by taking him shopping for some new school clothes.

Big mistake.

The shopping trip backfired, doing nothing to better our relationship.

I spent most of the time hollering, “Knock it off,” as I chased down my 3- and 5-year- olds while glancing at clothes out of the corner of my eye. Luckily I invited my mom to come, so she could help me reel them in.

We went to one store and were in there for less than an hour. It could have been less than a half hour if my boys would have behaved. I keep waiting for the day that they realize that if they cooperate and do what I ask them to do, it will make things go faster, giving us more time to do things that they ask to do.

But they still haven’t figured that out so they fight back making things worse.

First of all we made the mistake of trying to get the boys to sit in a shopping cart. That would keep them close, right? Right. But the department-store shopping cart is about one-fourth the size of a grocery-store shopping cart. And they have problems with the carts at the grocery store.

I think the urge to pinch, punch and pick on your brother is multiplied by 100 when you are in close proximity. They weren’t in that cart for two minutes before one of them was crying.

Then we let them down. That’s when I wish I would have had two of those kid-leash things.

I understand that kids are crazy and that little boys don’t love to shop, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s okay for my children to run around the store hiding under folded clothes and swinging from hanging rails.  They literally looked like wild monkeys.

They were having the time of their lives at my expense. I think in their mind the department store was a whole new McDonald’s-style playground with unlimited possibilities. Fun for them. Death for me.

One of the highlights was when we asked my oldest to try on some slip-on sneakers. We wanted to see him walk in the shoes, but of course the pair was hooked together with an elastic band.

He put one shoe on his left foot and then took off as fast as he could, hobbling around the corner with the right foot’s shoe and inch away from tripping him with every step. I thought for sure he was going to come crashing down into some end-cap display. At least it slowed him up making him easier to catch.

Then came time to try on a pair of jeans. You would have thought we had asked to re-administer his kindergarten shots. He flopped around on the floor trying to get away while my mom held him down and pulled his legs inside.

It was mass chaos and it stressed me right out. My mother thought it was hilarious. Probably because I did stuff like that to her when I was young.

But was really got to me was the fact that I was trying to help and take care of my son by buying him some nice things for school and he treated me like dirt. He acted completely ungrateful as he totally ignored my pleas for good behavior. Hopefully after the talk we had when we got home he’ll think twice before acting like that again – at least anytime soon.

Now that I think about it maybe our shopping trip didn’t completely backfire. It helped me realize that it might be nice for me to let someone else deal with his wild-side outbursts for a change. Believe me, I’ll miss him while he’s at school, but a little structure and discipline will do him good.

Churchtime Fun

21 Jul 2011 6 Comments

by Natalie in Parenting Battles, What's a mom to do?

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It’s 10:58. We’re running toward the chapel doors. My four-year-old leads the way to the left side of the room where we normally sit. I pull my 2-year-old along as he races to keep up. “My pants,” the 2-year-old yells. I turn around to see his slightly too big black dress pants around his knees. I turn forward again and see the four-year-old booking it to the front of the chapel. A nearby sister helps shove my son’s pants up and I race to the front of the room and sink down next to my oldest — on the front row. I look up to the stand and catch my husband’s eye. All he can do is smile.

All in a Sabbath day’s worship.

Sunday mornings are crazy at our house. My husband has meetings so I am left alone to get the kids and myself ready for church. How I am supposed to have a spiritual experience after yelling at my children to get out the door is beyond me.

I don’t know how we do it, but most of the time we get to the church in one piece — we’re not early by any means — but we manage to plop onto a pew relatively close to our meeting’s start time. We bring with us a church-time circus that I am sure is not only disruptive but highly entertaining for all.

Half of the time I sit down and glance at my Sunday best and find I’ve spilled toothpaste, cover-up or breakfast down my dress. One Sunday I splashed butter all the way down my skirt and leg while rushing to get rolls ready before church. I spent the first five minutes of sacrament trying to wipe away and camouflage the long grease stain that ran down my side.

Most Sundays I spend a majority of the meeting drawing pictures at my 4-year-old’s command only to erase them and try again, because to him they don’t look like what he requested.

Then there’s the 2-year-old’s drama. He refuses to go to the bathroom before we leave our house but something about Sacrament brings it out of him. Many times he’ll scream, “I need to go potty,” during a quiet part of the meeting and I rush him to the nursery toilet — sometimes twice.

I’ve given up on singing hymns. At most I get through three measures before my children either need me for something or slam the book in my face. If I’m lucky, the chorister will choose a song I have memorized and I can sing off and on while I do other things.

I pack three hours worth of treats and activities in an oversized beach bag “just in case.” In case one of the boys burns through the games, paper or goldfish I have packed and I’ll have to dig down deeper to find something that will pique his interest and buy me a few more minutes of reverence.

I spent hours making quiet books (see slideshow above) for Christmas hoping they would help. I’ve affectionately nicknamed those books the “not-so-quiet books.” When the boys play with them, they fight over the pages and pieces — even though they each have their own identical books. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even feel bad if they don’t want to get the books out.

By the time the meeting is over we have left a trail of destruction all across our bench. I swear if the kind old man who brings treats for my boys each week gives them Nerds one more time I am going to flip.

Normally I can’t wait until the closing prayer. Then I can set them lose to find their dad while I clean up our whirlwind of devastation.

Why do I put myself through all of this? Why do I sit nervously in a quiet chapel worrying about my child’s next outburst? Why do I get out of bed early each Sunday morning so I can start getting ready for a stress-filled sacrament?

I do it because the Lord has given me everything. My meager three-hour Sunday worship is only a small way I can show my gratitude.

I do it to show my two crazy boys that my religion is vital to my happiness on Earth. And even if I hear less than 5 percent of what the speakers say, I am following my heart by dedicating myself to my worship.

It’s not easy taking my boys to church alone and I am sure I will complain about it at least a few more times before my life is through.  But if I don’t start taking my children now, how will they learn reverence and respect for a Heavenly Father who gives them everything?

Thank heavens for good friends and neighbors who let me sit by them and help me entertain my irreverent monkeys. Because no matter how crazy our church-time circus becomes, I will continue to go each week. Heaven help me find the patience to survive.

Helping Hands

30 Jun 2011 Leave a comment

by Natalie in Failed Housewife, What's a mom to do? Tags: ,

Whoever said that many hands make light work has never tried to complete simple household chores with a 2 and 4 year old.

A while ago I asked my kids if they felt “strong” enough to help me rip the sheets off of my bed. Oh they felt strong enough all right. I left my room for less than 30 seconds to grab a new set of sheets from my bathroom only to return to two ghost-like shapes poking from under my mattress cover.

They had crawled under the bottom-most sheet and were using it as a tent.

I read somewhere when I was a brand new mom that you should rest when your child rests, eat when they eat, sleep when they sleep, etc. Well, I have tried to take that advice but it’s too hard for me. If I do that, not only do I leave out any extra time for myself, but I leave out any cleaning time. So, I took another approach and decided to enlist their help while cleaning.

I don’t know if that was a good decision. Sometimes my boys are too “helpful.”

You should see me try to clean our fish tank with their help. One of them helps scrape algae off the glass while the other holds the siphoning hose’s end in to the water bucket. Not only do we end up nearly killing Nemo, but inevitably the hose gets dropped and we splash water all over the wall, ceiling, floor and ourselves as we try to suck the tanks rocks clean.

How many of you have tried to clean your bathroom with your young kids’ help? No matter how many times I tell my 2-year-old to stand back while I’m using bleach cleaner on the bathtub, he still ends up with a bleached out streak across his clothes near his tummy. The curiosity is too much for him and he has to lean over the ceramic edge.

Dusting is also pretty fun for us. My boys fight about who gets to be the “sprayer.” Then whoever wins that battle usually wastes half the bottle of furniture polish because he likes the way it foams. My shelves definitely get shiny. Just don’t hop quickly onto our piano bench on any day we’ve dusted. You’ll launch yourself across the room.

Vacuuming has got to be one of the hardest chores to get done with their “help.” They both love it so they fight, scream and yell for their “turn.” That’s one chore I wish I could do while they were sleeping.

I don’t know what the answer is. I could clean after they went to bed but then they wouldn’t learn how to help. They really would think a fairy came in the night to clean things up.

I think it’s good to have their help. It’s good to teach them how to do chores. I just have to make sure to clean on days that I have a lot of patience saved up. For many times their helpful cleaning leads to more messes. Maybe they have the saying wrong, it’s not that many hands make light work but its many helpful hands make light work.

Everything He Needs To Know He’ll Learn In Kindergarten

23 Jun 2011 8 Comments

by Natalie in What's a mom to do? Tags: , ,

I do not want to send my son to all-day kindergarten. Some of you may call me crazy, but I’m definitely not looking forward to it. With each passing day I feel more dread for the fall, when I no longer will have him here all day to play with.

I know it’s only from about 8:30 a.m. until 3 p.m. but that’s six and a half hours without my baby! Wow. What am I going to do? What is my 2-year-old going to do?

I know I am not thinking rationally and there are plenty of things that I can do with my 2-year-old to stay busy while his brother is gone. It’s just that he and his brother are best friends. Sometimes I think they should have been twins. The three of us have a blast together and now it’s going to be very different.

Don’t worry, I plan on taking my youngest to the local children’s museum for toddler time, and I’m sure we’ll spend most of our Wednesdays at our public library’s discover day. We’ll do all the things I did with my oldest when he was an only child.

My 2-year-old will probably be just fine acting as king of the house while he’s the only child at home. Until he has another sibling someday… whenever that may be. It would have been nice for him to have a little brother to play with, but things don’t always happen they way we plan them to.

Anyway, there are a number of reasons why it’s hard for me to let go of my son and send him to school. For one, I love his company. I have spent 99.9 percent of his 4-and-a-half years with him. He has literally been at my side from day one. When he was a newborn he would sit on the couch next to me in his Boppy pillow while I typed up freelance articles for the Deseret News. I was so happy to have him that I wanted him with me all the time.

It’s also hard for me to see him go because I gave up a lot when I had him. It changed my whole world. Don’t get me wrong, I chose to have him and become a stay-at-home mom. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard for me to turn my back on my college education and dream career. Now that he’s going to school I feel abandoned. I gave up so much for him and now he’s leaving me!

Again, I know I am being dramatic. He’ll come home to me every afternoon and we’ll live it up in the evenings. I loved school and so I am so excited for him to get to learn and grow like I did. I am actually a little jealous that he gets to go do all the things I loved doing.

I am just going to miss him so badly while he’s gone. I also don’t want to have any regrets. I keep asking myself if we have read enough stories, watched enough Disney movies, fought enough “wars” or found enough dinosaur bones in the backyard together. Have I done all that I could with him? Will the memories be enough to carry me over while he’s gone?

I sure hope so. Because whether I like it or not, he’s going to turn 5 this summer and I’m going to have to turn him over to his teacher for most of his waking moments. That’s when I’ll live for early-out day, the weekends and summer vacation.

Caring for worms

26 May 2011 2 Comments

by Natalie in Crazy Things I'll Do Only For My Kids, What's a mom to do? Tags: , , ,

I have officially become grateful for something that I absolutely detest: worms.

I have pretty much hated worms my entire life. I don’t like that they slither out of the soil when it rains and sneak up onto my sidewalk. I don’t like that mischievous little boys toss them at undeserving little girls on the elementary school playground. I don’t like how I can’t figure them out. They don’t even have eyes!

I even hate the way it smells after it rains as the slimy things dry out in the sun. And no matter how much my boys beg, I refuse to take them fishing as bait.

Yet this spring my heart has been softened and I have started to change my mind about worms.  Without them, I wouldn’t be able to work in my garden. See, the juicy, wiggly guys keep my two crazy boys occupied while I weed, water and plant.

My children have become completely obsessed with digging for worms and I couldn’t be happier, as long as I don’t have to touch them. Normally if I spot one I’ll dangle it over the side of my shovel or rake, and then holler at one of the boys to come and get it.

They fight over who can grab it and then pick it up with their bare hands and rush it back to their bucket, bug cage or worm home they’ve created.

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I planted a bunch of tomatoes in our garden while the boys made worm soup. Disgusting? Yes. Creative? Maybe. Occupying? Definitely.

Is it horrible that I let worms babysit my boys while I work in the yard? I absolutely love gardening. I love raking, weeding and harvesting. Nothing calms me down or helps relieve my stress like pulling out some nasty weeds.

That is why I have become grateful for something I hate. Thank you, worms.

I’ll let my boys play with worms all they want if it gives them something fun to do while I work in the yard. I only have three rules: worms do not enter our home, they do not enter our mouths, and we wash our hands as soon as we are done playing with the slimy, nasty guys.

Nearly Killing Nemo

05 May 2011 3 Comments

by Natalie in What's a mom to do? Tags: , , , ,

We nearly lost Nemo yesterday. Our oversized goldfish was flopping around struggling for air in his gills at the bottom of his tank.

My four-year-old said he was flopping like the dead fish we catch at the pond. He was twitching while floating sideways – not a good sign. Although it sounds like I am being dramatic, it was an intense situation for a while.

Especially because I was sure I had killed him.

I cleaned out his tank on Tuesday and I probably didn’t do it as carefully as I should have. It had a bunch of algae on the sides so I scrubbed the glass extra hard then siphoned as much of it out as I could. Since it was really dirty, I measured an extra amount of algae-thwarting medicine and dumped it inside. You’re supposed to wait 24 hours before putting a filter cartridge back in so the chemicals can disperse through the water.

Well, not only did I wait to put the cartridge in, I waited to turn the filter back on altogether. Nemo’s tough so I didn’t think anything of it until I saw him swimming sideways in the corner.

I raced downstairs in a panic to find a filter cartridge so I could turn it back on. I thought Nemo was a goner but despite his body arching backwards, his gills were still slightly moving so I had to take a chance.

We’ve had Nemo for 2 years now. We got him and his 10-gallon tank for free on KSL.com after my son begged for a fish for months. Although I hate cleaning his tank and it’s hard for me to remember to feed him each night, I’ve gotten attached to the orange-gilled guy.

He’s getting really old for a goldfish – he’s going on 4-years now- and so I suspect he’ll die soon anyway, but I wasn’t ready for it happen today.

Maybe it’s the guilt of nearly killing him or the emotions of my son’s one-year-memorial carrying over, but I seemed a lot more stressed about Nemo’s near-death than my sons.

The oldest kept screaming, “Yes! We get to get a crab now!” The youngest didn’t really know what to do. He kind of sulked in the corner.

I know I have complained about our family pet, and I have probably secretly wanted him to die, but I wasn’t serious. I was terrified that he was going to go belly-up while the three of us stood there and watched.

Luckily for us, turning the filter on and dumping some extra food in the top of the tank seemed to miraculously heal Nemo. I am happy to say that he is once again swimming around happily.

What has this experience taught me? To never again be flippant when caring for another living thing – even if it is as small as a goldfish. Heaven help me if we ever get a dog.

Reading Babies???

14 Apr 2011 9 Comments

by Natalie in What's a mom to do?

Photo of Braxton Hill taken by Angie Hill.

 

Why on earth would you teach your 18-month-old baby to read? You don’t teach someone to run before they can walk, so why teach someone to read before they can talk?

There is a commercial on my children’s favorite cartoon station for a learning program that claims it can teach any child to read. The commercial features a man showing an 18-month old flash cards with words on them like “foot.” The baby then points to her foot, demonstrating that she knows how to “read” that word. She can’t even talk. How can she “read”?

A doctor created the reading program for his daughter. But now it’s gone viral, penetrating every half-hour cartoon my children watch on this channel.

Seriously? So you teach your child to read before they are two. Then what? Do you force them into doing algebra by the time they are five? Are they speaking multiple languages at 10? Do they graduate from high school at 13? Enter college before they’ve hit puberty?

Don’t get me wrong I was ecstatic when my four-year-old read his first book a couple of months ago. He has now entered the exciting world of reading! A world I devote a lot of my time to. But the child is four, not 18 months.

I love my children. I want them to be smart. I want them to be successful. But I don’t want them to miss out on being children. There is a time and a season for all things.

Right now I want them to play in the mud looking for bugs. I want them to roll down the grassy hill in my back yard staining their knees. I want them to dump toys all over their bedroom floor in the name of fun. I even want them to pick their nose – as long as they don’t wipe boogers on my wall. That’s what kids do!

Sometimes I think we as parents worry that our children won’t be “smart” enough unless we invest in programs that push them intellectually. I think it’s important to encourage our children to learn and grow, but I don’t think we should force them to grow up too soon.

Personally I worry that if I shove learning down my kids’ throats I will prematurely catapult them from childhood. There will come a day when they are asked to turn in reading charts or meet reading-page quotas. For now we will have story time at our house on a regular basis, but I will do the reading.

My Artistic Son

31 Mar 2011 13 Comments

by Natalie in What's a mom to do? Tags: , , ,

This is a picture of him thinking about pirates and how much he loves them.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a naked piece of paper at my house. Nearly 99.9 percent of all pages in our home have at least one doodle somewhere across their surface – especially if they are notebook bound.

This is a bleeding shark. Notice the frame? Yes, we had to make it a paper frame.

You see my four-year-old son has transformed into a full-blown artist, drawing for hours each day on anything he can get his hands on.

It is also difficult to find a working pen at our house. That’s my son’s true medium of choice – pen and hand-held notebook. He’ll draw for hours with a small book in hand, ripping each page out and handing it to me when it is “finished.”

What’s wrong with him drawing so much? I love my little artist but it’s nearly impossible to get him to do anything when

This is a whale shark eating tiny fish or plankton.

He found out I loved unicorns and so he went through a unicorn phase.

he’s drawing. He tunes the world out and focuses on his work. Forget about him coming to dinner and you can kiss cleaning his room goodbye. He always seems to be “almost finished” with each picture when I ask him to come. It’s been a major frustration for me at our house lately.

Honestly I am glad that he has found something creative and inspiring that he enjoys – it beats throwing rock at windows,

chasing me with muddy worms or beating up his 2-year-old brother. Who knows, maybe in 10 years I will beg him to draw instead of getting into trouble as a mischievous teenager.

This is a tracing from a toy gun. Notice the heart. He told me that means he loves guns.

But there is another problem with his new hobby. I am running out of display room in my home for his finished pieces. Normally I hang them up for a few days on our crowded fridge front. Then I save some of my favorites and toss the rest. I wish I could save more but we’re talking about dozens of pages each day.

I bet if you pieced together each of his drawings end to end, they’d reach halfway to China – mostly because he refuses to draw on the “back” of pages. He has to have a clean, fresh canvas for his masterpieces.

These are humans being eaten by sharks. Notice the blood?

I worry that one of these days he’ll see some of his work in the trash and it will crush him. I also worry that I will regret getting rid of his work. Maybe one day he’ll be famous like Van Gogh or Monet and I’ll want to show off his early shark-dinosaur-monster period.

Seriously, it has been fun to look at his drawings from six months ago and see how much he has grown as an artist. He’s getting really good. I’m amazed at his creativity and attention to detail. I love that his drawings allow me to see what goes through his preschool mind.

I particularly love how he depicts me – normally with angry eyebrows. Maybe I should let up on him a little and be happy that he has found something innocent that he truly loves.

This is one of his pictures of me. Notice the angry eyebrows and teeth?

This is another one of my favorites.

This is one of my favorites. It's a cat.

This picture is of a whale and three hammerhead sharks.

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