Coffee Tables and Birthday Parties

                  
I have been in search of a coffee table on and off for the past 7 months. We haven't had a coffee table in our house since the children were born. It's because I am neurotic and I think that coffee tables are hazardous to young children. The sharp edges of a coffee table are head level with toddlers. I could imagine my kids running around, tripping, and cracking their heads open. Therefore, we have lived for over a decade with an open space living room.

Now that my kids are older and have a bit more sense about themselves I think that we can move forward with a coffee table. The problem I am having is that I cannot find one that I like. I am very specific. I want something very solid, distressed, beat up and simple. I also don't want to pay an arm and a leg. I have something very specific in my head. I have searched online, craigslist, thrift stores, retail stores. Nothing appeals to me.

I am getting to the stage of my life where I want to buy my forever things. I need to LOVE the coffee table I am going to buy because that will be the coffee table that is in my living room 40 years from now. I am not going to settle on just any coffee table.

The other day at breakfast I was lamenting to my husband about the coffee table situation. You know, because my life is hard. I was trying to explain to him what I want. "I want something solid, weathered and beat up. Something like my dad's coffee table." He looked at me suspiciously, "You want your dad's coffee table. You are emotionally connected to that coffee table." I scoffed at him. "I am NOT connected to my dad's coffee table. You are being ridiculous."

"Well, it's your grandparent's table. It's always been in your parents house. It was in the back room when we were dating. You need the coffee table because it has memories for you." I was annoyed. "I am not. I just like it because it's shabby and beat up." "How did it get that way?" I shrugged, "I don't know - from my sister jumping off of it." "SEE! You are emotionally connected to it."

So I devised a plan to get my dad's coffee table. He came over unexpectedly the other day. "So dad, how are things going with your coffee table?" He looked confused. "It needs to be refinished bad." He kind of hates his coffee table, so I was taking advantage. "I want to get something newer in there. Like a glass table and a rug." Win-Win. "Dad, how about this? Why don't you let me take that old dingy coffee table off of your hands and I will buy you a brand new glass coffee table AND a rug." He thought about my proposition for a minute. "Can it be a blue rug?" I laughed, "Sure."

So the coffee table saga is over. I am so glad. I can't wait to be able to be a fat lady and snack in the living room.

Besides my preoccupation with coffee tables, I have been thinking about the kid's birthday parties. I am thinking that we will have their parties in June this year so we can get invitations out before the school year ends. I accepted requests for birthday parties last week. My oldest daughter requested SkyZone and my youngest requested Blackbeard's Cove. I went online to figure out how much it would set us back.
SkyZone is $499 and Blackbeard's Cove is a savings at $269.
                    
No. Just no. I love you but we could spend the weekend at Disney World for those prices. I went to my daughters and broke the bad news. My poor 8 year old shrugged and said, "I guess we could do the skating rink again." Whoomp, whoomp.

My oldest daughter dropped a bombshell when I delivered the news to her. "I want to have it at the Ice Palace, but mom....I want to invite boys too."
         
"You want to invite boys to your birthday party?
"Yeah, boys are my friends too."
"I guess you can have boys at your party."

Boys at birthday parties leads to dancing with boys which leads to playing spin the bottle with boys. (Do kids still do that? I played spin the bottle at my 12th birthday party. In my parents house. When they were home. Where were they? Sorry mom).

Am I selfish and mean for wanting my daughter to still think that boys have cooties? I don't like it.

No.Sleep.Till.....Ten Years from Now

              
The alarm went off at 5 am yesterday morning. I opened my eyes and then I had a revelation. Oh my God, there are no children in my bed. They sleep in their own beds all night long and don't come in to bother us in the middle of the night anymore. This school year is the first time that this has happened. It has FINALLY happened.

My husband and I literally endured sleep deprivation for 10 years. An entire decade. For an entire decade we did not experience 7 hours of sleep consistently for more than 3 days at a time. TEN YEARS. That's an entire decade.

I recall being pregnant with my oldest daughter and people saying things like, "Get as much sleep as you can now because you won't get any when your baby comes." I thought, Of course, babies don't sleep well, we'll get through it. Someone should have said, "SERIOUSLY LADY! YOU WON'T SLEEP GOOD EVER. GIVE IT TEN YEARS."

Sure enough my daughter was a horrible sleeper, the worst. When she was a baby she was up at least very 2 hours at night. Put her down at 8, up at 9:30, put her down at 10:00, up at midnight and refused to go to sleep and cried for an hour, put her down at 1:30, up at 3:00, put her down at 3:30, up again at 6 am...just as my husband was going to work. I used to think, Please, PLEASE don't leave me. It was the worst.

She didn't nap during the day, she would take random half-hour cat naps IF I was holding her. She went through a period where she would only sleep if the lights were on. If we tried to turn off the lights she would wake up SCREAMING immediately. That lasted at least a few weeks. We slept with the lights on over our bed.

When she was an older baby she would wake up in the middle of the night and want to play. I would do anything to try to get her to go back to sleep. Rock her, nurse her, make sure there was no stimulation but to no avail. She would get tired eventually and would lay down and try to dowse off. I had to pretend like I was sleeping and that was the only way she would go back to bed. God forbid, I opened my eyes to peek and see if she was asleep because if she wasn't and she saw me open my eyes, she would be wide awake again and start the process all over again.

We tried everything, read every book on the subject and nothing seemed to work. We resigned ourselves to it. When she was 12 months old, she was still waking up 4 times a night. I thought, "I'll night wean her, then she will surely sleep through the night." No, no she didn't.

Eventually she started waking up only 1 or 2 times a night but when that happened she started refusing to actually go to sleep at night. We figured out the quickest way to get her to go to sleep was to drive her around in the car. We could do 1/2 an hour of driving or have a 2 hour battle at home. It was for our own survival We would give her a bath, put on her diaper and PJs and read her a book and then we would all load into the car. We just drove anywhere.

You couldn't look back at her to check if she was asleep because, once again, if you looked at her she would perk right back up. We'd be driving along and my husband would say, "Is she asleep yet?" I would check the rear view mirror and see her with her eyes closed. I whispered, "Yeah, but I don't think it's safe yet. Just drive down to the Circle K and that should do it." We did that for about four months.

Then we decided it would be a good idea to have another baby and our youngest child took the sleep deprivation to a whole new level. She actually slept better as a baby, she would only wake up 1 or 2 times a night but our 2 year old was still waking up once a night.

When she was 3 or 4 my oldest daughter started sleeping all night. IF she was sleeping in our bed. That was fine, she was sleeping so that was a miracle. However, she is a sleep walker so sometimes I would find her wandering the room in the middle of the night and have to get up to redirect her back to bed.

My little one is my up-all-night-forever child. She also is a sleep walker. I caught her once in the middle of the night trying to use the bathroom in my closet. She went through an 18 month period where she had horrible night terrors and would wake up in the middle of the night SCREAMING and you would have to go in and hold her tightly to get her to go back asleep.

When we weren't be awoken by children roaming the house and screaming bloody murder, we would just get woken up by kids coming in our bedroom in the middle of the night and crawling into our bed - pushing us to the side to get a cozy spot right in the middle. I've probably spent 1,000 nights of my life cliff hanging off the edge of the bed with an elbow in my back.

Sometimes they would wake me up to just tell me things. At 3 am I would be poked and have to know that they need to use the bathroom, take off their fake fingernails, or to look at the bug bite on their leg.

The struggle is real. I used to talk to moms who would complain to me that their 6 month old baby doesn't sleep good and I had no sympathy. "Well, my six year old doesn't sleep good, so you can just go cry to someone else that cares." Then there are the moms whose kids sleep 20 hours a day. "Well, you know, little Jimmy is just such a good sleeper. He takes two solid 2 -hour naps during the day and at 6:30 pm he just climbs into bed on his own and sleeps until 8 the next morning." I'm just looking at her like:
                                         
                                                    We can't be friends.
The worst part about having kids who are horrible sleepers is that other people judge you so harshly. Surely if you were a good parent your kids would sleep better. Then they give you advice. We have tried it all: no sugar, white noise, cry it out, routines, warm milk, standing on our heads. Truly we have. We just accepted that we were never going to sleep again....until now.

Ten years of consistent interrupted sleep does take a toll on you. Let's take a look:

Before 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation:

After 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation:


Before 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation :

After 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation:


Before 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation:

After 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation:


Before 10 years of Sleep Deprivation:

After 10 years of Sleep Deprivation:


Before 10 years of Sleep Deprivation:

After 10 years of Sleep Deprivation:

(This is my husband, holding what is left of my brain in a jar. See how 10 years of sleep deprivation has aged him? He is screaming inside: What did you do to my wife?)

Now, don't confuse uninterrupted sleep with sleeping-in because I have another 5 years for that, I think. I was so excited last night because my 8 year old slept over a friends house which meant she would not wake me up at 5:51 am like she usually does on Saturday. I crawled into bed imagining how glorious it would be to sleep until 8 am.

Until the alarm clock went off at 6 am this morning. My husband set the alarm clock to SIX f***in AM on a Saturday when my daughter is gone. I hate him so much for it. I tried to go back to bed. I tried so hard but it was to no avail. I needed it. I have ten whole years of sleep to catch up on. Mom problems.

Mom, Where is my....?

                          
I am having one of those weeks where everyone in my house is annoying me. Okay, it's pretty much like most other weeks. There is one thing that is making me especially crazy. The fact that my kids are CONSTANTLY asking me to find their stuff.

This isn't a new thing, it's just making me go nuts. They will ask me to find things before they even look themselves. Why? Why do you need to do that? I swear every day, "Mom, where are my shoes?" "Mom, have you seen my book bag?" "Mom, will you help me find my head phones?" It's not just the kids, it's my husband too. He might be the worst. "Honey, have you seen my....."

Why does everyone in the house think that I keep a mental inventory of where everything is at all times? Not only that, they expect me to drop everything I'm doing and retrieve their sh*t. I could be doing the dishes and someone will come up and insist I stop and go scavenging with them.

No. Just no. I have to go through the list of places they need to look first before coming back to me. "You need to check the living room, the stairs, and the car...." because of course whatever they are looking for is NEVER where it is supposed to be. They will run off and then come back to me two minutes later.

"Mom, I checked everywhere." Then I walk into the living room and find whatever they are looking for laying in the middle of the floor. Then I get, "I swear it wasn't there a minute ago." I materialize things apparently. It's a super power. I am putting Finder of All of the Sh*t on my resume under Regurgitation Sanitation Coordinator.

I did lose it on my 10 year old yesterday. She conned me into buying her mechanical pencils over the weekend. It was 7 am on Monday morning and I was trying to get everything together to walk out the door and she was following me around asking, "Mom, where are those pencils?" "I don't know." "I need them." "Go find them." This was the conversation as she followed me from room to room. Finally, I walked over to the pencil/pen jar and handed her a pencil.

"I can't use these. I need a mechanical pencil." Oh.my.God. "I don't have time to find the pencils. Take this pencil." She crossed her arms and scowled and said, "No. I'm not going to use it." I did what any sane mother would do in that situation. I threw the pencil onto the counter  angrily and screamed.
                               
I didn't scream words. I just let out a blood curdling scream of anger. She didn't say anything but grabbed the pencil and went to the car.

Like I said, it's not just the kids. My husband won't even look for anything. "Honey, you need to buy more Lysol wipes." "No I don't. I just got some. They are under the sink." He shakes his head, "No, they aren't. I just checked." I walk over, open the cabinet and move the bag of trash bags to reveal the Lysol wipes. "Did you move anything to look?" Silence.

He expects things to literally jump out at him and scream, "Here I am." If not, default to the wife. She will find it. He also asks me where we keep things, which is annoying. "Where do we keep the can opener?" "Ummm...in the same place we've kept it since we moved into this house FOUR years ago. Christ Almighty."

I am annoyed with him. Today I made a comment that "I have a household to run." Do you know what he said to me? "I wouldn't say that you run it." "What are you trying to say? I don't clean the house to your standards." He shrugged, "It's just not your top priority. I'm not mad about it. I'm just sayin.'"

          
I was highly offended. "Take it back or I'm going to close the lady factory." He rolled his eyes at me. "I'm not saying you are a bad mom. I'm just saying the house could be cleaner." The house could be cleaner, pigs could fly, I could look like Heidi Klum. The world is an imperfect place.

I do the best that I can. I have two kids who are slobs and a dog who is an asshole. The house will get cleaned but it doesn't stay that way long. I do give it the college try.

I also am busy living my life. I have coffee with girlfriends, help at the school, take naps. This is not 1832, I am not going to spend my day beating rugs and tending fires. I'm a modern woman.

The truth is that I have written this blog to avoid doing the dishes. I need to win the lottery so I can hire a live in house keeper. I'll need two probably.

Growing Pains

                                 
Things have been so busy around here. Being busy is my drug. It's extremely unhealthy. I really should seek therapy for it. I need so much therapy. The irony of the whole thing is that I would need a therapist to come to my house to fit my schedule. We could conference call between gymnastics classes. I am so f'ed.

I am having a hard time with my oldest daughter right now. She is so moody. I hate it. She vacillates between thinking I am her favorite person in the universe and thinking I'm the most embarrassing person that ever existed. Her opinion of me (of us) can change from minute to minute. She will be eleven in just a few short months and she is very mature for her age. It's such a weird time because it's like she wants to be five and fifteen all at once.

Sometimes she craves my attention so much. She will hug me, want me to lay with her, still want to blow bubbles and jump rope and the next minute she is sitting on the couch with headphones in her ears, scowling and rolling her eyes when I try to talk to her. Some days she acts like I don't know anything and like I am the oldest person on the planet. God forbid I try to listen to a song on the radio when she is in the car. "Mom! The nineties are over. You need to get over it."
                                     
It's the hormones. It has to be. There is no other rational explanation. Now I understand how my husband feels all the time. I really feel sorry for him. When there are three women in this house he is going to be in hell.
                                                
I get it. I don't even hold it against her. It's a developmentally normal thing. I remember being 12 years old and sitting next to my parents and feeling like there were oceans inbetween us. I just want it to be different for us.

I confronted her about it this evening. She shrugged, "Don't take it personally. I only don't like you when I am in a bad mood and when I am tired. Also, when I am hangry and when you stalk me." haha. She calls me a stalker because I ask her a million questions about everything and because when I kiss her at night I just stare at her for a while. "Mom, stop doing that! You creep me out!" I'll say, "You are just so beautiful and I made you and I love you." She pulls the blanket over her head and says, "You're such a stalker."

If she only knew. I will be a stalker. On her first date I will be two rows behind her in the movie theater wearing a hat and sunglasses. I will be crouching in the bushes with binoculars. I will be following three cars behind her to make sure she is going where she said she was. Every breath she takes, every move she makes, I'll be watching....

It's just a hard transitional time. It's not just because our kids are growing up too fast. My husband and I are growing up too. I feel like just a second ago we were these carefree teenagers, making out in the back of movie theaters and driving to the Jersey shore with the windows down and then we woke up one day and we were 30 pounds heavier, with laugh lines around our eyes and kisses that are interrupted by a preteen who is telling us to get a room and a third grader yelling at us to help her find her shoes.

What happened to us? I don't know how we have gotten here. All the years inbetween seem like a blur. I need time to slow down a little bit. I hate it.

Rancid Gas

                                           
It has been so busy around here. I know what you're thinking, Tell me more about how "busy" your life is as a stay at home mom. I can practically see you rolling your eyes through the computer. Please find the world's smallest violin and play it in my honor while I complain about how hard life is.

On Monday, I picked my daughter up from gymnastics and we were talking about the day. Suddenly, I experienced a whiff of the most horrible smell I may have experienced in my lifetime. It was horrible, rancid. I rolled down the window and turned to my daughter, "Oh my God! What is going on with you? You need to use the bathroom or something." She was offended. "I didn't fart, mom." If you dealt it, you know you dealt it and it was not me. It had to be her. "You need to drink some water and eat some fruit or something. It smells like something died in this car. I need to take you to the GI specialist." She was so pissed, the veins in her neck were popping out. "IT WASN'T ME, MAMA!!!!!" She was so mad that she didn't talk to me the rest of the ride home.

The next day, I dropped the kids off from school and then came home to do my Cinderella chores. I looked at the menu on the fridge to check what we were having for dinner. Pork chops. I opened the freezer to get them out and I could not find them. I must have forgotten to pick them up, I thought to myself, I guess we'll have spaghetti tonight instead. Later, I had to go to the bank. I opened the car door and the smell hit me like a ton of bricks, burning my nostrils.

Did her nasty gas stay in the car? Sink into my seats? I checked the car to make sure no one left their lunch in there. Nothing. I went to the bank and then was going to put the envelope in my trunk. That's when I discovered the source of the smell. The pork chops I purchased had some how made their way into a box of clothes that I was planning to take to Goodwill and had been rotting in my car for 5 days. That was the dead body smell. I felt soooo bad. I blamed my sweet little daughter for the smell in the car that was due to my own negligence. Bad Mom Award. Horrible. Worst Mom Ever.

Not 10 minutes later I saw I had a voicemail. It was from the school. I was nervous. What happened this time? My kid threw up, has a fever, punched someone...who knows. I listened to the message. "Mrs. B, you have been chosen as March's Parent of the Month....." What? I didn't know that was a thing. I was like:
                     
Word has not gotten around yet about the fact that I am the worst mom ever. I called my husband. "I have big news, honey." He seemed anxious. "What is it?" "I have been named Parent of the Month." He laughed at loud and said, "They obviously don't know you." "I KNOW! That's exactly what I thought!" That's why we've stayed married for so long. We're on the same wave length.

I love it. It appeals to my ego. My name is even on the sign outside of school. We drove by it the other day and I pointed it out to my daughter. "See! I always knew my name would be in lights." She rolled her eyes at me and said, "You are so annoying, mom." Then she asked me if she could be a car rider that afternoon. "Okay," I told her.

That afternoon, I picked her up from school. Which I'm sure she will never ask me to do again. I picked her up and we drove down the main road. There were crowds of students walking home. I was watching all the kids and just witnessed so many bad decisions. I need to just mind my own business but I can't help it. There was a boy and girl walking home and he had his arm around her. Not around her waist but high up her rib cage. Dangerously close to the no-no zone. "Who is that kid?" I asked my daughter. "She's my friend's sister, she's in 7th grade." I shook my head, "Her mama would not like that. They need to leave some room for Jesus in between them. You don't let a boy put his arm around you until you're married. Got it?" She rolled her eyes at me. "I know, mom."

I am serious. The minute you let a boy put his arm around you, you are just opening the door. It's like a gateway drug. We will be doing Duggar courtships in my house. I was not born yesterday.

Then to my right, I see two girls playing on a huge concrete storm drain. Can't they climb a tree instead? We were at the stop light and the girls walked off the top of the drain and came close to the car to say hello to my daughter. I rolled down the window. "Girls, don't play on that storm drain. It's dangerous. You could fall and seriously hurt yourself or worse. There are probably gators in that water, too." My daughter put her face in her hands, embarrassed.

We drove off and she told me that I was embarrassing. I didn't care. "If something happened to one of those kids and I just drove by, I would feel bad about it. It's been raining a lot. Kids can drown and be seriously hurt. NEVER PLAY NEAR A STORM DRAIN!" She huffed, "God, mom. I don't. I'm not going to let you pick me up anymore. You are soooo annoying." I turned to her and said, "You can't talk to me like that. I am the Parent of the Month."

Referee Time

          
We had the usual weekend, jam packed with sleepovers. My 8 year old slept over a friend's house on Friday and my 10 year old had friends sleep over our house on Saturday. I had some basic rules for Saturday night:
1. Eat the pizza and shut up
2. Entertain yourselves
3. No pictures on Instagram
4. No inappropriate music
5. Don't play in my make up and closet (last time they used all my $30 CC cream)
6. Don't bother the parents

We sat downstairs and watched a movie while the girls played upstairs. We let them sleep in our room and I fell asleep on the couch. At midnight I heard stomping down the stairs. My 10 year old woke me up and was yelling that her little sister was taking up all the room in bed. My eight year old showed up and started discounting the story. Her sister turned around and said, "You're lying." My eight year old walked right up to her and smacked her hard on the arm. Then it dissolved into a physical altercation.

I hopped off of the couch and put myself between them in an attempt to pull them apart. "CHILL OUT!!!" I screamed. I pointed at my eight year old angrily:

                      
"YOU! YOU'RE DONE. YOU LAY ON THIS COUCH AND YOU SLEEP HERE!" I was so annoyed. When I signed up for this whole mom thing I didn't know I was going to be a referee. I don't even own a black and white striped shirt. It was in the middle of the night for God's sake.

I ushered my oldest daughter back upstairs and I went to lay in her bed. I could hear the wails of my eight year old echoing throughout the house. Screaming and crying at the injustice. I just wanted to sleep. That was it. I was too tired to go downstairs to tell her to shut up. I heard my husband say something to her and in a second she was completely quiet. I don't know what he said but it obviously put the fear of God into her.

I quickly fell asleep. As always, it wasn't for long. I felt a nudge a short time later. My little one had wandered upstairs. "Mom, mom. Can I sleep with you?" I didn't even have time to answer before she crawled into bed with me. She nudged me to the edge of the twin side bed as she always does and I slept uncomfortably for the rest of the night.

I had nothing planned for the next day. Once the kids were gone I was going to nap and relax. I was exhausted. The last little girl was getting picked up. I opened the door to walk her out and out of nowhere a dog ran up to me and started jumping on me like I was her long lost relative. It was rainy and wet and she tracked mud all over me me. My husband came out with a leash and put it on the dog. It had a collar so we assumed that surely she belonged to one of our neighbors.

We walked door to door looking for her owner. No luck. We didn't know what to do so we took it back to our house. It was freezing cold outside and we couldn't leave her in the back yard. We brought her in and our dog freaked out and they had a dog fight in the hallway which my husband put his life at risk to break up. We put her in the cage but not before my husband looked the dog in the eyes and said, "You're a real asshole, Summer." You know, because the dog can understand English.

Here we were babysitting a dog who was the size of the horse. My relaxing Sunday was dissolving before my eyes. I called the SPCA to get some direction. I explained the situation to the man on the other line. He asked, "Did you take her somewhere to see if she is microchipped?" What? Get the hell out of here. A dog shows up randomly at my house and I have to run errands now? I might as well take her out to dinner while I'm at it. Jesus Christ Almighty.

He gave me the number for animal control. I called the number and the lady on the other end was a huge beeotch. "Animal control doesn't work today," she said dryly. "I'll send an officer." I hung up and turned to my husband. "The cops are showing up apparently. We'd better clean up so they don't think we are neglectful parents." I spent the next 20 minutes speed cleaning the house.

A short time later a police officer showed up at the door. I let him in and explained the situation. He called in to someone on his radio. "When does animal control get in tomorrow?" The person on the other end said, "She's off tomorrow. She'll be in Tuesday at 8:30." The cop shrugged. "So you have two options. You can keep the dog outside until Tuesday or you can keep her inside until Tuesday."
            
First of all, there is only 1 person that works animal control in our city and when she is off you are just on your own. I hope a rabid raccoon doesn't show up in your attic while she is on vacation because you will be out of luck. Secondly, why did the cop get forced to have his time wasted by showing up to tell us something that he could of have just told us over the phone?

I thanked the officer for protecting and serving and showed him out. Then I sat with my husband on the couch and the random dog stood in front of us, staring. Before we knew it she jumped on our laps. She was huge. Her ass side was on me and her front was on my husband. She must have weighed a hundred pounds. She looked back at me like, What are you going to do about it? I'm your new house guest. Someone just kill me.

The doorbell rang at dinner and it was the owner. They were out looking and one of our other neighbors directed them to us. I was so glad to unload the dog back to it's rightful owner. After dinner I cleaned up and made lunches and signed reading logs and got ready for the next day. The whole day was gone. Wasted. I was tired and grumpy.

That was my weekend in a nutshell. Damn dogs.