when is this class going to end?

I met a woman last week who went on and on, (and on and on), about how much she loves being a stay at home mom. She has three young kids and, according to her, she spends every waking moment with them. And, also according to her, she loves every waking moment of it. Every. Waking. Moment. And I do not believe. No one can possibly love every waking moment. No one.

When I was a young girl I always pictured myself staying at home, being a good wife and loving mother, supporting my hard working husband by keeping the home fires burning. Maybe I saw my future this way because my mother didn't work outside the home. Although my mother never really worked inside the home either, so I certainly didn't grow up wanting to be like her. Where ever the dream came from, I always thought that was what I wanted. Until I was a stay at home mom, I mean.

I needed to be home. And I wanted to be home. I loved taking care of our new 24 month old. Changing diapers, cooking, cleaning, oh my god, the cleaning. Reading books and cuddling at nap time, hanging out with him on our bed, hiding under a blanket and giggling. Teaching him what he needed to know to catch up to the other toddlers. Yes, I loved it. But every minute of it?  No way!

So many times I felt like I was back in school, being forced to listen to a boring lecture on something I couldn't possibly be interested in, and certainly would never one day need. So many times I would watch the clock. When is this class going to end? When is this day going to end?

And I don't think it was all because it was, to be perfectly honest, very hard work. My tiny toddler was often angry. He cried a lot. He wouldn't let me put him down. He hit me. He was a handful, to say the least. So I every day occasionally, OK, frequently watched the clock. When is this class going to end?

So how does one maintain their sanity when trapped  happily staying home to raise children?  Here are a few of my well used go to moves:

• make the baby wear mismatched socks. say it was "his choice" when older women shower you with disapproving looks in the grocery store.
• give baby numerous baths a day while you lay on the bathroom floor with your head next to the tub and your feet in the hallway. allow baby to toss plush bath toy/finger puppet at your face repeatedly.
• sit on living room floor and teach baby how to throw cheerios into your open mouth.
• allow baby to tear apart older brother's bedroom while you draw mustaches on models in magazines. (this is a trick I learned from my older sister. she was a pro at mustache drawing, although I think she used fingernail polish.)
• pretend both you and baby don't speak English while wandering the aisles of Target.
• wander the aisles of Target. often.
• play fetch  toss a favorite toy into center of room for baby to retrieve. this allows baby to work on motor skills.
• take baby to indoor play place and place on (very safe and secure) trampoline. allow baby to jump to heart's content while wistfully staring at the woman behind the counter and restraining yourself from running over and offering to answer her phones if she would just play with your baby for 10 minutes.
• pretend stairs are a train and "take a ride" every day around the time Daddy comes home from work. Slip off train when you hear Daddy's car pull into the driveway so that Daddy walks into the house and sees baby, first thing. Immediately hide in bathroom with door locked so Daddy and baby will leave you alone  bond. Daddy surely thought Mommy had some horrible intestinal troubles that hit  every day at 6:00pm.
• play hide and seek with baby while reading your kindle.

OK, so mother of the year I clearly will never be. And I am thrilled to have found the perfect stay at home/working mother balance. oh my god am I thrilled. But for a while there, it was touch and go.

Gotta run- Daddy will be home soon and I have to go pick up all those cheerios off the floor...

As you all know, I became a mother of two this year. My big four and a half year old was, well, four and a half years old, so he was starting to get past some of the weird and clingy  sweet and cute baby/toddler behaviors just in time for us to bring home a new baby/toddler. And the cycle started again, only this time it was a little more intense.

Being a mommy means...

you will learn eye/hand signals that rival the military and that allow you to converse, silently, with your husband. Eye contact, head jerk towards the hallway, fingertip to the lips in that universal "don't make a sound" gesture totally tells my husband my plan to sneak away from the children and lock myself in the bathroom. and if I flash my cell phone at him he knows I am not sneaking away to answer nature's call.

you will make three variations of each meal, despite your pre-children mandate that you would never do this. grown up mommys cannot live by chicken nuggets and applesauce alone! if creating child friendly versions of the grown up meals we like means extra work for mommy, it is so worth it. besides, I have yet to find a wine that pairs nicely with chicken nuggets...

never leaving the house on time. at any given moment one of your little monsters  angels will lose their hat, refuse to leave the house without their stuffed monkey, decide to use to the bathroom after the heavy coat is zipped and buttoned, or need a major diaper change.

someone is always hungry.

your view of "clean" changes. Pants that were thrown onto the bottom shelf of the changing table are certainly clean enough to wear again. Socks that were shoved into shoes and are the only pair you can find are clean enough. if the living room floor only has three matchbox cars, two stuffed animals, a handful of fruit gummies and one sippy cup half filled with pear juice you declare it clean enough.

your kitchen cabinets become storage for all those things you need to keep out of little sticky hands. Simply placing your cell phone and sharp scissors on the counter will not keep it away from tiny toddlers with super human strength who are capable of moving heavy kitchen chairs and hurling little bodies up onto counters.

you are never clean. at any given moment you have peanut butter, chocolate, glitter, snot, or something even worse somewhere on your clothes.

you eventually get to the point where you have changed so many poopy diapers that you begin to smell poop when there are no children around. this results in your looking like a maniac as you smell your fingers and try to finger out where the hell the smell is coming from.

you are never without children. even when they are not physically with you you are thinking about them.

you will never eat a snack or drink a drink you prepared for yourself again.

you can sense the fight brewing between your children in the living room and you choose to stay in the kitchen and turn up the radio.

you become a pro at "backwards math". if little johnny needs to be at school by 8:30 then we have to be in the car at 8:05 which means breakfast has to be done by 8:00 so we have to be dressed by 7:40 which means the kids need to be out of bed by 7:25 which means I need to be out of bed by 6:45 although if I don't wash my hair or put in my contacts I can sleep until 7:15. and you still wind up driving them to school in your pajamas.

every so often you realize, usually in the  middle of the crowded grocery store, that you forgot to brush your teeth/put on deodorant/comb your hair.

you are simultaneously thrilled and terrified when your kids sleep past 7:30am.

you need at least a week's notice for any "spontaneous" outing with your spouse or friends in order to secure babysitting and prepare yourself for a night out. (i.e. shave your legs.)

you have driven, alone in the car, for at least 30 minutes before you realize your son's Laurie Berkner Band CD has been playing and you continue to sing along.

you are always at least a little tired. always.

you are amazed at what you can do with a bottle of white glue, yarn and one googly eye.

your lap is never empty.

you can read your kindle/phone/laptop screen through the fingerprints.

you know what love truly is.

"100 Days to Christmas" ebook review

Christmas is only a little over four months away. Four months! I don't know about you, but between Fall tee ball and flag football, Autumn Moon Festival, Halloween, apple picking, Thanksgiving, writing, working full time and managing the household, my time is somewhat limited. If you have been reading my blog for even a minute you know how I like to plan. I enjoy laundry that is clean, folded, and usually, put away. I enjoy a toy cluttered but overall clean home, with bedrooms and bathrooms that are worthy of sudden visits from the in-laws. I enjoy preparing healthy meals for my boys. I enjoy not having to tell my boys "we can play after Mommy finishes ________________. (fill in the blank with any typical household chore.) And I especially enjoy sitting in the quiet living room with my husband at the end of the day, relaxed because my life is in order. Not perfect, but at least very ordered chaos. And I am able to enjoy all of that because I like to plan.

If you are like me and you like to plan ahead then you have got to read "100 Days to Christmas" by Jennifer Tankersley. This ebook is chock full of motivation, ideas and family traditions and includes all the planning lists and guides you will need to pull off your most organized and budget friendly holiday season yet. The writer is the creator of http://www.listplanit.com/, an online community where users can share planning tips and lists for any occasion, from what to pack in the diaper bag to how to plan for a trip abroad. (both of which I have checked out...) I have been using ListPlanIt for a few years now and I would have to say that the site has been very helpful to me. The down loadable membership allows for the lists to be manipulated, which I really enjoy as I am never, ever, happy with the original list. I customize everything!

The "100 Days to Christmas" ebook is the offspring of http://100daystochristmas.com/, a holiday planning website also created by Jennifer Tankersley. The ebook is set up as a guide to be used daily, with motivation and advice culled from years of honing her holiday planning skills. After reading the ebook I am super excited about starting my holiday planning and I have already put together my holiday planning binder, using the instructions in the ebook.

I enjoyed the fact that this planning guide includes the seasonal activities and holidays leading up to Christmas, with suggestions for Fall family fun, Halloween activities, and Thanksgiving opportunities, all while sneaking in small Christmas related tasks. I appreciated that this guide mixes in every day activities like making a hearty Fall soup or taking a walk with your family to enjoy the colorful leaves. When it comes to actual holiday planning this guide is very comprehensive, covering how to help your children shop for gifts for each other, how to promote compassion and philanthropy in your family, how to create a holiday budget, and how to determine if home made gifts are right for you. The guide even includes those small tasks so many of us forget like buying stamps for all of those Christmas cards you'll be sending!

This ebook contains links to every list and planning guide mentioned, which is very helpful. While reading this book I found myself totally engrossed in the links, often staying on the linked site to read further information. This approach may have taken me a bit longer to read the book but was very educational. Plus, most readers probably won't be reading the entire book in one sitting, as it was designed to be read in small bits, day by day.

The only thing I found missing from this book is a list of events and activities for each month and or season. This ebook does discuss the importance of planning ahead to assure that no family tradition, both new and old, gets missed during this very busy time of year. It even provides links to calendar pages, which is useful, certainly. But I plan my family's seasonal activities a little differently. I list everything we want to do each month on a piece of paper, complete with seasonal clip art, and prominently display the list on a kitchen cupboard, crossing off each activity after we have completed it. I do this so that we don't forget any of the seasonal fun we had planned. A calendar just won't work the same for me, since when I plan the list I don't usually know which day of the month we will do each activity. For example, my September/October list looks like this:

wilkison family fun for september & october

• apple picking
• fall leaf hike
• pumpkin farm
• high school football game
• high school band competition
• halloween costumes
• grove city harvest market

Overall, I found "100 days to Christmas",  by Jennifer Tankersley, to be useful and motivational. This ebook is a well thought out balance of family traditions and traditional holiday tasks, laid out in an easy to use daily guide. It is available at http://100daystochristmas.com/  for $4.99. It is available in three formats; Kindle, Nook, or PDF. You can obtain the book for free with a paid membership to http://www.listplanit.com/.


Make this your best holiday season yet and get organized, today!