Mothering Mayhem: Life with the Wild Boys

When I was in college mornings presented little challenge whatsoever.  I could wake up, wash my face, brush teeth and hair, and run out the door with as little as 5 minutes prep time.  I was young, and responsible for only one person. And that person still didn't need makeup.  It was a beautifl thing. As a mother, all things simple are gone, and mornings are a time of utter and total chaos in la casa.  We will start with a brief introduction to personalities as expressed in the morning.  Gavin and I, we wake up incredibly well.  The alarm goes off at four and I'm out of bed and in the excercise room.  After an hour I come back up, make coffee, and venture in to wake the cop.  The cop and Gabe, they do mornings poorly.  The cop has improved dramatically within the last year.  Gabe has not.  So, after I tell the cop coffee is brewing I clear out and allow him space.  While I get ready for the day he makes our two, very...

I have long been fascinated with science and medicine. Hence the sports medicine major and biology minor.  And up until the cop banned me from Web MD during my first pregnancy I would obsess over potential illnesses but also over baby development.  And somehow I still remember that babies are born with reflexes which they outgrow during the course of childhood, like the rooting reflex for nursing, and the walking/stepping reflex, and the Moro reflex. The Moro reflex, as I recall, was a startle reflex believed to be left over from our time as monkeys, when we needed to grab on if we started falling, and was named for the discovering physician.  I'm thinking I may be on my way to recognition in a similar fashion. It appears that babies, or at least MY babies, were also born with a heightened sense of pheremone detection.  It doesn't seem to be limited, however, to simply sexual situations (although believe me, they can sense those from about a mile aw...

Ah, parenthood.  I sit here typing, I am slowly recovering from a raw throat and sore body as a result of a full Saturday of family fun.  But I feel compelled to type, if only for standing firm in my resolve to seek my own nerdy revenge.  That's right, a woman who slighted me has become (dramatic drum roll)....blog fodder. Let's start at the beginning, shall we? (Mainly to provide me with a little bragging rights, admittedly). I am the ultimate example of living vicariously through my children.  I was a super unathletic child.  Nothing about this has really changed, come to think of it, since I can still sustain serious injury opening a drawer. Take soccer, for example.  I played for three years and never made it past fullback.  In three years I could count on one hand how many times I touched a ball during a game.  But I made countless dandelion necklaces, and could make the majority of weeds into projectile weapons, so that has to count f...

As has been previously outlined, the cop and I are not youngsters.  Don't get me wrong, we aren't ancient.  We just opted to do the whole "responsible" thing where you get married, have steady employment, get a house, and then procreate.  It worked for us.  I'm not saying it's necessary, but knowing that half of my kids genetics would come from a man who honestly believes that it's perfectly reasonable for one piece of kitchen cutlery to cost the same as a month of daycare for a preschooler it just seemed risky to bring them into the world before we could afford them. Being older parents has afforded us lots of opportunities, and we have a blast.  But it can also be humbling.  Such as my encounter with the Walmart fabric clerk.  While buying patterns and fabric (for my mother to sew for me, because Lord knows I don't have those skills) and attempting to maintain some semblance of control over my two wild children in the cart, I was asked by the clerk...

Let's spend a little time examining public disciplining of children, shall we? Just jump right in to a hotbed of debate and open the door to immense judgment and criticism? Yes, yes I believe we shall. It would seem the people with the strongest beliefs about discipline are not actually parents.  That's right, we're on to you all. With your haughty looks and sneers of disapproval. That's why every parent on earth ignores you or (in my case) openly laughs at you.  Because non parents have NO idea. But I'm going to do my best to enlighten you a wee little bit.  Picture it: Old Navy.  You have run inside for a quick, yes quick, quest to find Hawaiian shirts for  three and five year old boys. Why? Because during the one pick up you actually made from daycare last week when you weren't relying on the kindness of EVERYONE else on the emergency card due to last minute overtime demands, you were informed you had to bring something for a bake sale Tuesday, money...

Sunday morning. A thing of beauty, but for what the cop and I have dubbed "fair hangover." It started as a simple plan.  Every year we go to the county fair.  It's a tradition, it furthers our appreciation of small town living.  Plus, about a quarter of the entries are by Auntie or our oldest boy.  Seriously, there's not many livestock areas you can wander past that the teenager doesn't have at least one competitor entered in, which adds to the "rustic charm" of the fair experience since loosely translated it means we will be spending time with every form of livestock known to man and I will not have nearly enough hand sanitizer to keep me sane throughout.  This year, with the new schedule, I decided it was time to try an evening fair experience.  This was common for me as a single and with my older kids, but since the addition of the wild boys it has been a virtual impossibility.  This means that for several years now I have missed what has bec...

Often times, when children visit or are babysat by family members it takes a little while to gently tease out whatever damage may have been done.  This is not the case with the wild boys.  They come home eager to tell tales of all of the forbidden extravagances they have been allowed.  And that's to be expected.  But perhaps most entertaining is when they have experienced something entirely new that a family member has clearly not felt entirely comfortable explaining.  We've all been there.  None of us want to be the monsters that ruin the fun of Santa or the Tooth Fairy while we are in charge of someone else's child.  But this time it was poor Auntie suffering the questions of pregnancy (insert dramatic sound track here). Somewhere along the line while Auntie watched the boys they encountered a very, VERY pregnant lady.  And when Auntie brought them home they were very interested in when I would have another baby (ummmm, never. EVER. I tipped t...