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Motherhood
Burnt Pizza in Paradise
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” I think that sums up vacationing with kids pretty well. The highs and lows can be very stressful for us as parents, not to mention all the time and money spent planning the trip and then executing those plans!
We’re halfway through a week-long family vacation to our favorite beach town in Florida, and we’ve had a couple of rough patches so far. But one of the great things about kids is they forgive and forget pretty quickly. Our girls won’t remember that we got locked out of the condo and had to stand around in the sweltering heat for an hour and a half waiting to get in. Or that I nearly had a nervous breakdown when I got the screen of death (“you must reset your device to factory settings”) on my cell phone. Or that we tried to have a low-key dinner one evening and I BURNT the crap out of a frozen pizza (picture in comments). Or that the baby once got so hysterically upset that we had to drive her around town to get her to fall asleep and ended up sitting in the hospital parking lot for an hour watching her breathe, just in case. And if they do remember those things, it will most likely be with a laugh.
To Do: Have a Little Fun
I’m totally a list person. Organization does not come naturally to me, so TO-DO lists really help keep me on track. You know how adulting is. The lists usually look like this:
– pay the bills
– make the doctor’s appointments
– pick up the prescriptions
– send out party invitations
– write thank you notes
– feel guilty about never writing the thank you notes
– go to the grocery store
– get gas
– take the car in for an oil change
– return library books
– file taxes
– etc. etc. etc.
My oldest daughter, a spunky kindergartener, also makes to-do lists. Before having a friend over to play or going to Grandma’s, she’ll often make a list of all the fun things she’d like to do. Her lists usually look like this:
5 Ways Being a Mom is Like Being in the CIA
My two new favorite TV series of this Spring season are Whiskey Cavalier (ABC) and The Enemy Within (NBC). Though they are totally different in style and tone, both feature a male FBI agent and a female CIA operative working together to track down leads, solve crimes, and catch the bad guys.
Spending all this time in the Situation Room got me thinking about how mom life is a lot like spy life. Besides the obvious, which is that we have to sometimes actually spy on our kids to monitor their cell phone and social media usage, here are a few not -so-obvious ways that being a mom is like being in the CIA:
1. You have multiple identities.
…Sometimes Motherhood is Mesh Panties and McDonald’s
I have a new piece up on Her View From Home, originally titled “Sometimes Motherhood is Mesh Panties and McDonald’s.” Tap the image below to check it out!
If You Give a Mom a Meme…
As hard as parenting is – and as hard as parenting in the age of the internet is – it has proven to be an online goldmine of kid-based humor.
Over the past few years, I’ve had the pleasure of writing memes for Disney’s parenting site, Babble. This proved to be a really rewarding side gig: I got to see my ideas illustrated and brought to life, and I hopefully made a few people smile and laugh along the way! (I mean, without memes to lighten things up, social media can pack a serious punch with its unholy trinity of guilt, fear, and mom-shaming, am I right?!?)
Here are a few of my greatest hits:
Swaddles and Bottles: Life with a Newborn (pt. 2)
My husband and I were joking the other day that if we made a rap album about this time in our lives, it would be titled Swaddles and Bottles.
I’m not one to complain – (who am I kidding? yes I am) – but as I said in my last post, this is NOT my favorite stage of parenting. Let’s hit on a few more of the challenges of newborn life to supplement Diapers and da Vinci:
…Diapers and da Vinci: Life with a Newborn
the magic of
precious little baby toes…
Baby B is one month old today! The newborn phase is NOT easy, but it is pretty simple: eat, sleep, poop, repeat. It’s a very primal experience to care for a tiny creature who can’t talk but who must have all her needs met NOW. It’s both mundane and miraculous at the same time: you have this beautiful, unique little person from heaven who has completely captured your heart but whose needs are as absolutely basic as they come. My days essentially look like this: Feed the baby. Change the baby. Hold the baby. Repeat. Here’s some of what is hard for me about this particular stage:
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