A Little Bit of Controversy

Alright, so I was on Facebook last night and one of my friends commented on this article about mothers who left their kids in the car, so I decided to read it. This is kind of unusual for me because, well, I’m lazy and the article was fairly long. haha. Now, go read this article because if you read the rest of my post, you’re not going to get it and/or think I’m a horrible person/mother. I’ll wait….

So I read it, and afterwards, I read the comments because when something serious/controversial is written, the comments are usually a good read.

As I was reading these comments, it baffled me that the majority of them were completely ridiculous and, honestly, mean towards these mothers. These aren’t women who were being neglectful. They weren’t thinking, “I’m going to leave my child in a hot car because I’m too lazy to get them out.” They were thinking, “I have to get toilet paper. My child is asleep. It’s not hot out and it’s overcast. I’ll be gone 10 minutes tops.” They locked the door and went into the store only to come out and find people standing at their car. This isn’t the problem that I see. Someone watching out for kids is what the article was about. The whole “it takes a village” mentality. The problem was the attitude of these people. They weren’t helping for the sake of the child. They were doing it because they felt the mom wasn’t being a good parent, which is different even if you don’t think it is. Let me explain my thinking.

Someone who was worried about the child in a case such as this would first make sure the child is okay. Peek in, tap on the glass. Especially if you saw the parent walk away. While I don’t agree with leaving a child in a car like this and would never do it, other parents might disagree. The circumstances of these children were not dire. For crying out loud, one of the mothers left her two children in the car, one of which was eight! She had an iPad and could text her mother who was in the store. This situation in particular is ridiculous. If I were that child and saw a bunch of strangers outside the car staring at me, I would’ve texted my mother and said there were creepy people looking at me, wouldn’t you? Those people could’ve easily asked the child if she and her sibling were okay. The other two situations, maybe they couldn’t. I bet if any of those people had waited and said in kindness and out of concern, “I was just making sure someone was coming back quickly. Did you know it can dangerous to leave a child in a car like this?” Why not talk to a parent like they are human beings rather than assuming they are horrible, no good parents who don’t care about their children. 9 times out of 10, I would guess they would be responsive to your question if you said it in a kind and concerned manner rather than accusing them. One lady commented that she had her own children to get home to and didn’t want to put herself in danger. Uh, seriously? If you’re that worried about the child to call 911, you can’t wait outside the car while they arrive and risk the mother talking to you? I’m sorry, I have a hard time believing that. If I were that worried about the child, I’d smash the window to get them out.

I did some research and found that it’s 12% of child deaths were circumstances like this…where the parent willingly left the child in the car. While that is really sad, that also means that almost 90% percent of deaths from being left in a car weren’t from parents willingly doing it. These statistics came from over 10 years of data collected. So the chance that the circumstances are serious enough to call the authorities is not very good.

Now, the reason I’m so frustrated with this is not because I don’t think these people were actually trying to help. I’m frustrated because I don’t think these people were thinking it through. If you know that the parent did it willingly, i.e. you saw them peek in the window to make sure they were okay before walking away, then chances are, they are coming back quickly. Don’t you think that the child deserves you to wait before you turn their would upside down? What’s going to happen when the parent comes back less than 10 minutes later and you’ve called the police for nothing? That mom is still going to be arrested, and that little girl or boy is going to have to watch. One of the moms had to miss her daughters first day of school because of the court date, that was most definitely avoidable if someone had decided to check on the kid(s) first and wait a few moments. These peoples lives were turned upside down.

Again, I don’t agree with what these women did. Leaving your car completely unattended with children in it is risky, but is it necessarily child endangerment or neglect?

I have a friend who was threatened for putting her kids in their carseats and walking a cart to the cart return in the parking lot. She closed the doors and locked the car. Walked, maybe, 30 feet tops, and walked back. Is that really something that the authorities need to be involved in? Next time you return a Redbox, do you need to take all 3 kids out, the stroller (so you can put the baby down and maybe look for a new movie) and then go to the machine which is, literally, right in front of the car just so you don’t get the cops called on you? You better start, because our world is quickly becoming a “I know better” world and less of a “Oh, I get that” world. We are parenting out fear of being judged rather than parenting our individual children. What works for one parent might not work for another, and that’s okay. Do we really need to call the police when it’s something we don’t agree with?

Hope is a funny thing.

I have been pondering the concept of hope the last few days. A lot of us, myself included, think that hope is a good thing. It gives you something to look forward to, to pray and reach for. While hope is a wonderful thing and sometimes keeps you going, it can, at other times, completely break you. When you finally feel that things are changing for the better, and then your world falls apart again. It happens. It’s happened to me, as I’m sure it’s happened to all of you. Luckily, in my life, nothing serious has ever happened when my hopes have been crushed. The most recent for me was when I finally ended things with my college boyfriend, whom I thought I was destined to marry. I had a few weeks of random crying, endless trash talk, lots of shopping (which, to be honest, probably hurt the most in the long term) and lots of yummy food that I shouldn’t have eaten. In the end, things went back to normal. I have been incredibly blessed.

For things on the more important side of the scale, the things that are more serious than dumping a loser boyfriend, how do you bounce back from that? Do you have a breaking point? And, if not, how do you keep your hopes up?

For me, it’s my faith. Being LDS has always helped me not lose hope and keep things in perspective. Knowing that something good can always come out of something bad makes me keep going. It’s why I’m an optimist. I believe that our Heavenly Father will be with us through the tough times and be there for us or provide someone for us when we can no longer lift ourselves up. I know that’s how it has worked for me in the past when things have gotten bad, no matter what the issue may be.

Don’t let the world break you. And most importantly, don’t lose hope. While one thing might not be working out for you, focus on what is going well. Something as simple as having happy kids can change your mood. Give them a tickle and find out what a happy kid can do for your hope.

Midnight Cleaning

Does anyone else intentionally stay up late to clean? I almost feel silly doing it. Almost. Not enough to stop. Mainly, I stay up to clean my floors. How else am I supposed to clean them when my toddler just pulls stuff out faster than I can pick up?

Engineer says I should just get up early and clean them so I can go to bed with him. Does anyone actually ENJOY getting up early though? I know everyone has their preferences on whether they’d rather stay up late to get something done vs. get up early to, but does anyone enjoy getting up before you have to? Honestly?

I don’t. I love sleeping in. And I was blessed with a baby that loves sleeping in as well. Lucky, right? I LOVE it. Staying up late is definitely preferable. Engineer is the opposite. He would rather wake up at 6 AM and get things done that he needs to. Shoot me now. That would just make me a grouch the rest of the day. He frequently says I should set my alarm and get up before Monkey so I can get things done. I have refused. Why? Because we are planning on having more kids eventually. This is not going to last and I am planning on taking advantage of it as long as it lasts! Once I have a kid that takes after their father, I’m up a creek, so why not enjoy it?

Besides, when else would I get to write to all you lovely people and enjoy the peace and quiet of the house?

My mother is a night owl just like me. I never understood why she stayed up so late until I became a mother. While I have always enjoyed staying up late and sleeping in, you can’t always do that when you’re a mom. Getting kids off to school is generally an early morning activity and most kids get up with the sun. If she knew she was going to have an early day, why on earth would you stay up until 2 AM? It’s actually rather simple. You’re alone. For the first time all day, you can just be. You don’t have to watch any little humans. You don’t have to worry about lunch or dinner. You don’t have to wait for them to wake up from their naps! I tried explaining this to Engineer earlier today, but he didn’t get it. Sometimes being alone is the greatest gift I could ask for. Or not even alone, just not being followed by my sweet, precious, adorable little Monkey.

I got to go out with some of my friends a few weekends ago, and had a blast! It was the first time I’d left Monkey with Engineer for an evening. Engineer had never even put him to bed before! Am I the only mom that is the sole put-to-bedder (I don’t know what else to call it, haha)? Let’s just say it didn’t go well. In fact, Monkey threw up because he was crying so hard. I found out when I got home that it was only because of the technique used. Monkey puts himself to sleep, but only if he’s already calm. Very rarely has he ever cried himself to sleep because I trained him at such a young age to do just that. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to let him cry himself to sleep. However, when you put an already ticked off kid in bed, which is what Engineer did, he tends to scream a lot harder than normal and if he’s just eaten, will throw up. They had also gone to Lowe’s at some point and when they came home Monkey searched the house for me. 😦 Precious, right? I teared up when Engineer told me, I won’t lie.

Well, now that I’ve gone completely off my ‘cleaning in the middle of the night’ topic, I’ll bring it back around.

It’s the only time I can get some things done, and it’s time to be by myself, which is always nice. Does anyone else feel this way?

Song Birds

When you think of song birds, what comes to mind?

I think Cinderella. Am I the only one that does that? I think of the happy, helpful birds and a good attitude.

With spring approaching (I’d say here, but who’d I be kidding) I feel like all I do is see birds when I look out my windows is see birds. Birds flying, birds pecking at the dirt, birds skipping along. It should make me happy to see them, and it does…until I hear them when I’m trying to sleep in the morning.

You see, I’m a really light sleeper. I sleep with a box fan, on high, and I still wake up to them. Annoying right? I have since started trying to think of them in a positive way in hopes that it will calm my mind and let me fall asleep even though I can hear them. It…might work? I’m not sure yet.

To top it all off, birds poop. Did you know that? I did. I’ve just never had a problem with it because I didn’t park under trees. With our new house, however, that’s all we have on our property. You’d think we lived in a forest with the amount of poop we have on our cars.

Let’s change the mood of this post though. The birds are really only singing at 6:30 in the morning. While my son doesn’t get up until at least 9-9:30 (super lucky right?) 6:30 is a normal time for people to get up. Given they are probably doing it to go to work and not for kicks and giggles, but it’s not uncommon.

And with the poop on the cars…that’s what car washes are for! Am I right? Even better, do it yourself. Get out there with the song birds and pull a card out of Cinderella’s playbook.  Put them to work! HA! If any of you figure out how to get birds to do your chores, let me in on it. I HATE cleaning! 🙂

Have a fantastic day!

Parks and Crying

Parks are supposed to be fun right? Why am I miserable when I go then?

I took Monkey to the park today. You see, when I take him outside at our house, which he loves because now that he’s walking that’s all he wants to do, he just wants to walk into the road. The rather busy road! So I figured, take him to the park. He’ll have a whole playground to play on and won’t be interested in the parking lot. Sound logic. Fun things to climb up and slide down.

Wrong!

He was interested in the other two kids that were there. When they left, shortly after we got there, all he wanted to do was go into the parking lot. I kept trying to steer him back to the playground and would take him down the slides, but he’d just wander back to the parking lot.

After a half hour, I gave up. We could walk outside at our house, so we walked from the opposite end of the playground to the car. Of course, Monkey had to make sure that we walked on the walkway, then through the grass to get to the car. Once reaching the car and opening the door, he realized that I was putting him in the car. He screamed the whole way home (luckily it’s a 5 minute drive) and then cried when I brought him inside and cried as I went to the bathroom. The only time he stopped was when I put him in his high chair to eat lunch. As soon as that was over, he cried again.

I gave up fighting with him and laid him down for his nap an hour early. He went right to sleep, thank goodness.

Once he woke up, he cried again. Gave him a snack, he stopped. Took him outside (AGAIN! Good mom, right?) and he went straight for the road. He then kept going to the door and trying to open it, so I took that as, “Let’s go in.” It apparently wasn’t. Once our shoes were off and sweatshirts off, he cried again.

Later, when Engineer got home, he informed me that I had dog poop on my sneaker.

For real?! All I was doing today was trying to be a good mom. My son likes to go outside, so that’s what I did. TWICE! I don’t even care for the outdoors that much. Don’t get me wrong, I like fresh air and pretty pictures and pretty trees, but I’m just not outdoorsy.

Is anyone else having a rough day? Sometimes it’s just hard to keep up a happy mentality, isn’t it?

Birthday Hat DIY

Since I didn’t have a theme for Monkey’s birthday, I had no luck finding a suitable birthday hat for him. All the hats I found were either ridiculously expensive (or maybe I’m just cheap) or didn’t work with what I was going for. My solution? I made one.

Now, I wouldn’t sell this to anyone. It’s not that good, but I don’t think it turned out so bad either. I didn’t think to take pictures as I went…actually…I take that back. I did. I just didn’t want to! Bahaha. I got my inspiration from this blog, although the more I look at it, the more I realize I didn’t follow her directions well.

Don’t mind the messy table…I work in chaos.

 

First off, I didn’t read the directions very well or at all, if I’m being honest. I saw the card board and knowing I didn’t have a pattern to go by (which you can easily print if you google it and have a printer) I just went for it. I ended up using the cardboard for the hat, which she just uses as a pattern. Oops! Oh well. My hat is sturdier. 🙂

After I figured out the shape, which took about 45 minutes, I laid the cardboard onto the fabric and cut out the shape I needed with about a 1/4 inch extra around the edges.

Once you have the fabric cut, go ahead and hot glue the cardboard together to form the hat. Make sure the glue is nice and hot. Don’t use it as soon as glue starts to come out because it will cool too fast and not lay as flat as you’d like.

This shouldn’t take very long and then you can glue the fabric onto it. Make sure you match up the seams so the “ugly” parts of the hat are all on one side. Take your time putting the fabric on, making sure that the fabric is laying flat and there is fabric hanging over the bottom so that it can be folded into the bottom of the hat.

You can now proceed to hot glue the extra fabric into the bottom of the hat. Start with the front of the hat and work your way to the back. This way if there is an issue with the fabric, such as if it stretches or if there’s too much, it won’t be as noticeable.

Now for the felt. I used a soup can to make the circle and traced around it with a pen. Make sure you use whatever is proportionate to your hat though. You don’t want a soup can size circle if your hat is going to be bigger. I also freehanded the one, again, with a pen, and cut it out. You will want sharp scissors the felt too. It’s much easier and the cuts are cleaner and more presentable.

Once these are cut out, you just glue them onto the front of the hat, making sure the seam is in the back.

And don’t forget the pom pom on top! You can either make one like this or just buy some.

Measure the birthday boy/girl’s head to make sure the elastic you glue on will be tight/loose enough and then you’re done!

Easy peasy!

First Birthday’s

As I’ve been trying to come up with ideas for Monkey’s birthday, I realized that there is no such thing as a low key baby’s birthday party. You know what I mean? Everything on Pinterest is super extravagant. And it’s for a one year old. ONE! I mean seriously! They aren’t going to remember. They are probably not going to eat half the food that you are preparing anyway (or having prepared, if you can be so lucky). I was going through old pictures and saw what my first birthday looked like. My siblings standing around my high chair, trying to get me to look at the camera for pictures. Half naked with cake all over myself. That was what a first birthday used to be.

I felt bad at first when I was planning the party because it wasn’t going to match. Monkey’s party isn’t going to have a photo booth for our guests to take pictures with props at. There isn’t going to be a bunch of food with cute cards saying what it is. There isn’t really even a theme, except that it’s a first birthday. As I felt myself stressing over this and feeling like a bad mom, I realized he didn’t need all of that. There is no where in the mom handbook that says you have to throw huge parties for your child’s first birthday, or any birthday for that matter. The important thing is celebrating it with those that you love and who love your child.

My plan is simple. We are having friends over for dinner. A family of four and a family of three. We would have family over as well, but the nearest family is 9 1/2 hours away. I am making soup for dinner because it’s easy and it’s cold out. Two kinds actually. Sausage potato and chicken bean (kind of like a taco soup, but way better!). We’ll have bread and all the fix in’s that go with the chicken bean soup. And maybe some little snack, dessert type treats and then cupcakes, which I’m planning on putting Monkey’s face on. We’ll see if I get that crafty. And then, because you can’t have a good first birthday without it, Monkey will have his smash cake.

Keep it simple. Keep it fun. Don’t stress about the pictures or anything else. Enjoy the moment in life you’re at. Whether you’re at the stage I am and you have a tiny house that isn’t decorated very well because you want to spend what little money you do have on other things, or whether you have a lot of money and all the time in the world to throw a fancy party and just don’t want to. It’s not about the party. It’s about the memories you make.

No Matter the Stage

My baby is going to be one this week. I can’t believe it. How did it go by so fast? People told me it would go by fast, that I would blink and his baby year would be gone. I didn’t realize how true that was until this month.

I caught myself tearing up earlier this evening thinking about it. How did this happen? I feel like I brought him home from the hospital last week, when my worries were about keeping him alive and all the “what if’s” of being a new mom. Now, he’s going to be one. One! And a year after that he’ll be two. And pretty soon he’s going to be going off to college and then getting married! Holy cow. This just got real.

Have any of you mom’s out there found a way to freeze your babies at the age you want them to stay? I would really appreciate it if any of you have.

While that invention would be nice, part of me is excited to see what happens with my baby. What kind of man will he be? Will he be smart and have a knack for science like Engineer? Or will he be goofy and interested in the arts like me? I was always so curious what my own kids would look like, but what will my grandkids look like? Will they take after their father or whoever their mother might be? There are so many questions that only time will tell, and I wouldn’t want to take those joys away from Monkey. Experiences in life are what bring us joy, and to stay frozen at this stage would eventually be sad.

I can’t wait (and by “can’t wait”, I mean I totally can wait) to see the kind of person he turns into. I just hope that I do my job right and he ends up a fully functioning man. One who treats others with kindness and respect, whether they deserve it or not. A man that doesn’t take everything seriously and knows that sometimes the best remedy is to laugh, but that understands when you need to be serious and handle things in the right manor.

I have many hopes and wishes for my baby boy. And I say baby because he will always, ALWAYS be my baby. Whether he’s one or one-hundred. Whether he’s crawling around after me, or crawling around after his babies, he will always be my baby.

As he attempts walking towards me as I write this, I know that there will come a day that he will have to walk away from me and move onto a new chapter in his life. And now that my sweet boy is standing next to me, I can tell that he’s poopy, and the idea of him being an adult, whom I don’t have to change, doesn’t sound quite so bad anymore. 🙂

Savor the time that your babies are babies and your kids are kids. Maybe even when your teenagers are teenagers. I’m not sure about that one, though. Give me 12 years and I’ll let you know. Either way, time will go by and you won’t be able to get it back, so enjoy it your life, no matter the stage, and know it will one day pass, good or bad.

Potty Talk and Trix

I know I have posted about poop in the past. I promise I don’t do it intentionally, but being a mom now, there seem to be lots of funny things that happen in relation to potty talk. Maybe it’s because it’s one of the few things our children have gotten really good at. Maybe it’s because we have digressed to a child mentality because that’s who we are surrounded by all day. Or maybe it’s because we actually have to look into our children’s diapers when we change them and we see funny things.

Monkey has this tendency to need to poo right at bed time. We brush his teeth, change him, nurse him and I lay him down for bed, only to have him crying within a few minutes because he needs to poo. It’s not that it’s hurting him. No. He just needs to crawl around to work it out or something like that. So I go in, pick up my unhappy baby, and bring him out to play while he poops.

The other night, this happened. He played for 15-20 minutes when my husband (who I think might not be able to smell very well) carries Monkey over to me so I can tell him if he’s poopy or not. How engineer couldn’t tell he was poopy is beyond me. That diaper was RANK. Anyway, Engineer proceeded to change Monkey and as soon as the diaper was off, he says to me, “You need to come look at this poop.” Being paranoid, I think it must be something bad, like blood or something. Not what you want to see in your 1 year olds diaper.

I go over to the diaper and as soon as I open it, I start laughing. It’s blue. Or green. Or a mix of them. I think to myself, How on earth did my sons poop turn green/blue?! It’s not like I feed him tons of food coloring. He didn’t even eat that much today because he nursed so much. Then I remember, Oh…He had Trix. 

Before all the “natural” moms get after me, I normally don’t feed my child so much sugar or food coloring. Normally, I give him baby puffs that are gluten free and healthy. When we were in Idaho, however, I couldn’t find any puffs before we left for the airport, and there was no way I was getting on that flight without something that I could feed Monkey, so I grabbed Trix because they are gluten free (he can’t have gluten until he’s one because we have celiacs in the family). I haven’t given them to him since because I had the other, healthy puffs.

That morning, however, he had gotten into our cupboard where the container was, like usual, and was pushing the container around (they roll well). He rolled it into his room, where the light was still on from when we had been in there earlier, and then shut the door. He played in there for a while. He likes to be alone sometimes, so as long as he’s not trying to get out of the room, I let him play and check on him every once in a while. This time, I knew he was fine because of the sounds. The container, full of Trix, was shaking and rattling. I continued to sit on the couch, where I had a perfect view of the door. Then, there was a sound of flooding. Trix came rolling out from under the door.

Now, normally, I would’ve gotten up and cleaned it all up. Normally, I’m very proactive about messes of this magnitude. The night before was a rough one though. Monkey had thought it was okay to just wake up 2:30 in the morning and be up until 4:30. Not okay. Not okay at all. Anyway, I was really tired. So I just said, “Eh, a little dirt will help his immune system.” And I stayed sitting a little longer. Bad mom? Depends on your perspective.

As I sat there, I could see his little shadow under the door. He was quietly eating. Then…I saw a hand. Apparently he’d run out of Trix on the floor inside the room and was trying to get the Trix on the other side of the door by reaching his cute, little fingers under the door and trying to pick them up. At this point, I decided I better go get him.

I try opening the door, but his little body is blocking the way. As I try and gently push him out of the way, he starts giggling and thinks it’s a blast. Once inside, I look down at my sweet baby and see his face, now a mixture of orange, red and green. I laugh and pick him up, carrying him to the high chair so I can give him a real breakfast and clean up the mess without him making it worse.

Later, he had some more for a snack because I need to go grocery shopping. It’s just that simple.

Moral of the story: Don’t give your baby Trix unless you’re prepared to find blue/green poop in his diaper. And also, be prepared to laugh because it’s funny and you’re allowed to find potty humor funny.

 

Jealousy

I have always loved decorating. My bedroom in high school was awesome. For a teenagers room, who was on a very tight budget, it was pretty good. I even got my parents to redo the main bathroom in our house (which was my bathroom as well as the guest bathroom). It was gorgeous. They don’t live there anymore, but they do still have all the stuff that went in it, and while it’s in a bathroom that’s white now, I still think it looks good. I convinced them to paint their living room too. You could hardly tell it was a color since it was so pale, but it was blue. I remember looking at the swatch.

My second year of college, after I had met girls that I chose to live with and planned on living with for a while, I got to decorate our apartment. Nothing too glamorous, I mean, we were on student budgets, but it was still fun to make it our own.

Now that I have a house, you’d think it would be easy. I can tell you, it’s not.

I have too many ideas. And worse, I keep clashing them. For example, my paint choices for the house. I wanted something that was grown up, but still fun. I love color! I really do. Engineer, however, while he likes color, doesn’t like the same kind of color as I do. It makes it very difficult to chose what to paint. I settled for a nice, mature yellow for our living room. I didn’t want something dark, or even close to dark, because our house is so small. It looks great (if only we’d get our act together and paint the baseboards). The master bedroom, however, does not.

I was going for a calm, soothing grey/blue. As I was painting it, I almost cried…that’s definitely not what I got. It was a bright, baby blue when it was wet. Luckily, it got darker once it dried, but it’s not nearly grey enough. It’s grown on me, but it’s still a little depressing when I think about it. I had such a great vision in mind when I was choosing that color.

Then we painted the guest room/office. This room turned out as expected. I couldn’t help it. I was just drawn to the bright teal. I wasn’t going to use that color at first since I was trying to go for a more mature look, but I just kept coming back to it. I just loved it so much! Monkey is still sleeping in that room, so nothing has been done to it to make it into a nice office, but once his room is done and he can move in, I’ll definitely have fun decorating it!

So the reason this is titled “Jealousy” is because I was watching a video of my friends cute little girl walk through their house and I thought to myself, Wow…she really has her home put together. I looked up at my living room and saw toys sprawled everywhere, baseboards that are half painted with the color of the walls, weird furniture that doesn’t belong, and no pictures of my beautiful baby on our walls.

This design rut I’m in has really thrown me off. I hate not having a plan for what I want to do. A list of things I want do. I went back to my “To Do” note pad, which already has a list of things I want to do/make/buy for each room of the house, and I decided I wanted to prioritize it. I’m starting with our living room. I figure that’s the room that I spend most of my waking hours in anyway and the room that guests sit in. While I would like to completely gut my kitchen, we don’t have the funds right now and that would cost a big chunk of change all at once. Oh well…I don’t like cooking that much anyway!

So now I have a plan. A plan of attack. Attack, in a loving way, on my house to make it a home and one that I’m proud of. That’s the goal at least.

Moral of the story: Don’t be jealous. Don’t be sad that your home doesn’t look as pretty. If it’s something you can fix, work towards fixing it…whatever “it” might be.