Arden:  Mommy, how did you know I was in your tummy after Lily?

Me:  Well, I started to get a big belly!

Arden:  Ummm.  Okay.  So how did the baby get there? Like, ummm, how did you make it? Can you just make one by yourself?

Lily:  Someone at school told me that your daddy carries half of it, and the mommy carries the other half.

Me:  *chokes/snorts* Trust me, girls, daddies do NOT carry babies.  Only mommies.

Arden: So can you make one by yourself?

Me:  No, you need the daddy to help.

Arden:  So what do you need to make love?

Me:  *freaking* - my child just said ‘make love’!!!  !!!!

Arden:  I mean, what are the ‘gredients in love?  How do you make it?

Me:  *ooooohhhh/laughing* Well, there are no ingredients.  You know how you feel about Thora, or me, or Daddy, or Lily?  That’s love.  It’s natural.  You don’t have to mix it, there are no ingredients - you don’t even have to bake it.

Arden:  Okay, well, then I want to make some when we get home. Without ‘gredients.  Can we do that today? 

Lily:  I knew that boy was lying about daddies carrying half the baby.  That just makes no sense. 

On the days when I think my kids are really badly behaved, all I need to do is go to our neighborhood pool for a little dose of reality.  Inevitably at least one child (normally barely able to swim, I might add) is left unattended in the pool.  That same child is usually ill-behaved.

Today, I took Lily and Arden to the pool around 3.30.  It wasn’t very crowded.  We all got into the pool and started splashing around.  Lily decided to get one of the pool toys out of our beach bag - it’s something that looks like a bat (the winged kind, not the baseball kind).  You put it under the water with your foot, release it, and it “swims” away from you.  As soon as she started playing, a boy about 5 years old came over and started grabbing at it. I didn’t interfere - I like to let the girls fight their own battles, and imagine my pleasure when I heard Lily say, “You can share it with me!”  They began to play with it, but then I saw the boy push her head underwater when it was Lily’s turn.  I moved closer.  He was demanding to take the toy and not give her a turn.  Arden of course wanted into the fray (she probably wanted to scrap with him), and asked for her turn.  I sat in the middle of them and handed the toy out to each of them in turn, but the boy kept getting louder and more obnoxious. He started yelling at me:  “YOU CAN’T HAVE A TURN!!! GIVE IT TO ME!  NOW!”  complete with grabby hands in my direction. I had had enough, so I handed the toy to Lily and asked her to put it away because it was causing “problems”.  As I swam away from him, he swam after me screaming, “NO FAIR!!! It’s MY TURN!  GIMME MY TURN!!! WHY??? GIVE IT BACK!”  I answered, “I took it away because you were fighting over it and not sharing.  It’s our toy, and it’s time for it to go away.”  I think I was pretty mean when I said it, but it didn’t settle him down.  He just yelled more loudly.

Where, pray tell, were his parents?  No idea. I never saw anyone talking to him, but I did see him attacking random children in the pool, ripping their water toys away, dunking their heads underwater, and generally being obnoxious. 

A few weeks back, Mike was in the pool with Arden and Lily, and a small girl, maybe about 2-3 years old, was clinging to the ladder like her life depended on it.  Turns out, it did. She couldn’t swim - at all.  She had to be helped out of the pool, after her sister got her mom’s attention.  She was busily stuffing her face while texting.  She took her daughter out of the pool, but immediately resumed the texting and her non-aquatic daughter was back in the pool within seconds.  Drowning, anyone?  Apparently they assume the lifeguards are there to rescue kids who can’t swim Why bother with swim lessons when you have lifeguards? 

Ugh.  Just, ugh. 

I love Chantal’s “Bullety” posts, so I’m totally stealing from her. 

• Lovin’ Love and Logic:  Jennifer turned me on to this book.  I’ve made no secret of my struggles with Arden and her willful and strong spirited personality.  I really, really don’t like yelling at either of my kids.  In fact I hate yelling, period, but as Arden has gotten older, I’ve found that my yelling has increased.  Additionally, when Lily picks fights with Arden or vice versa, the more annoying the fight the exponentially louder I yell.  I picked the book up when we were in DC,  and I’m through about 3/4 of it.  I can’t explain it well, but the directions are fairly simple and common-sense.  If your kids feel you are out of control, prepare for the worst.  If they feel you are calm and IN control, they will react accordingly.  The specific techniques seem to work wonders on Arden, at least right now.  They involve playing goofy “choice games” - like, “Would you rather roar like a lion or meow like a cat?” as well as more important choices:  “Do you want to put your coat on now, or see if you get cold and put it on outside?”.  You give them lots of choices you can live with, which makes them think and reason through the answer, and lets them feel like they have some control and independent action. This way, when you do have to lay down the law, they are more pliable.  I’ve also been using the calm “non-sarcastic” approach to problem solving, like today when I picked up Arden at Rainbow and found out she’d been mean to one of her classmates and had refused to speak to any of the teachers.
  
  Turns out her normal teacher is on vacation this week, and I knew she was upset about that, but unable to express it.  She told me she was mean because she didn’t have a nap yesterday, so I told her she’d be taking one today.  This caused a huge meltdown as we walked to the car, complete with some seat kicking.  I never lost my cool or raised my voice.  I simply said, “How sad that you were mean to Cameron today.  I KNOW you are a nice and kind person, but we all have bad days.  Tomorrow will be better, I’m sure, but today, you need to take a rest.”  Eventually she calmed right down and said, “I can’t be good unless Ms. Rey is there. I can’t do it!”  It was pretty awesome, even though it broke my heart to hear her say that.
  
  I also am SO tired of yelling, “QUIT WHINING!!!” all the time.  The book has a great suggestion - when the whining starts, I say “I can’t hear little voices. I can only hear big, grown up voices.”  When she whines, I say, “I can’t hear that little voice - sounds like something squeaking - maybe there’s a bug in the car?”  This sometimes leads to her laughing, or she gets it together and asks me in a mostly-normal voice.
  
  The best part is, since I have a guide to how to handle these situations, I don’t feel out of control and I don’t get frustrated as easily. Sure, it’s embarassing having a screaming 4 year old, but less embarassing than me screaming along with her.
  
  
• Easter:  I forgot to write about it.  We had a great Easter.  Weather was gorgeous, we spent some more time in the yard, and the girls bought some pretty flowers to plant with their new gardening gloves. They loved planting flowers with their grandmother.  Since neither my mom nor I wanted to cook, we had a delicious dinner out at Cheesecake Factory.  It was heavenly and I hope that not cooking becomes our standard Easter routine.  The Easter Bunny, and Easter Grandparents, were both very good to the girls this year.  Watching them egg hunt was hilarious.  Mass chaos.
  
  
• I often forget how rampant eating disorders are.  Once you get into your thirties, it’s not cool at all to have one, even if you aren’t actively participating with the instructions that sick voice in your head gives you.  I had lunch with a friend today, and as we talked about weight gain after childbirth, she mentioned she’d had a bad eating disorder for about 3 years.  She’s one of the luckier ones - she managed to self-heal and hasn’t fallen back into the psycho groove.  I don’t often talk with my friends or acquaintances about it - not because I’m embarassed, but because it doesn’t come up.  However, when I do, about 80% of the time the woman across from me ends up sharing her experience. It’s rare I talk to someone who hasn’t had anything to do with the big, bad, ED.
  
  And by the way, sometimes I think my family wishes I was embarassed, that I didn’t blog about it.  For me, writing about it openly keeps me honest.  I know I’m not the only 37 year old woman who still struggles on a daily basis with the annoying voice and the desire for the quick fix, and most of all, the desire to control the one thing we actually CAN control.  It’s also good for me to note that so many other people with perfectionist tendencies fall into the ED trap.  It’s been said before, but bears repeating:  eating disorders are less about food and more about controlling when we feel the least in control.
  
   
• Weight Watchers Day II is going fine.  I had lunch at Panera, and they offer some really good options.  Yet another reason I love the internet:  online menus.  I planned my meal so I didn’t have to worry when I got there. 

Lily inherited my old iPod . . .and you’d think we gave her a castle made of marshmallows, a pony, and a prince.  She loves it!  She only got one, in all fairness, because her new bed came with a docking station, and since I got an iPhone with a lot of space on it for music, she got my hand-me-down.  She especially loves this song:

She and Arden also both love Nirvana’s “Lake of Fire”.  Rock on chickies.

Her cute little dockin’ station:

The weekend was alternately good and bad.  I had two different people freak out on me, which was a bummer - but thankfully they both live far away and I don’t have to deal with them much.  I have to say, since I left Maya’sMom.com and the site eventually closed, my life has been so peaceful and drama-free. I don’t know what it is about large groups of women hiding behind their keyboards, but I really didn’t need or want that kind of stuff in my life.  Unfortunately, some of them are now on Facebook and within literally minutes of them joining my own network, it was the same old crap again.  Partially I’m so incensed because I spend far too much time thinking about what other people think and feel, and trying to ensure no one feels icky, left out, or bad - and inevitably, I end up causing them to feel icky, left out and bad.  So I wonder, why bother even trying???  Apparently I could have avoided all of this if I had just invited you, internet and Facebook, to all come stay with me this weekend because by NOT inviting the universe and the web of world-wideness, I’ve excluded someone who is now very unhappy with me.  I didn’t realize that Richmond in January was such a fabulous place to be, but note taken.  (Seriously, the entire internet is NOT invited to my house this weekend - 5 internet friends is enough, unless Amanda and Kristin change their minds). 

I’ve spent years being a personal punching bag for people who drop their own insecurities on me.  I must be an easy target, and that needs to change in 2009.  It started on Friday with a pushy lady at Starbucks who felt I wasn’t moving fast enough with my 4 year old for her liking, and shouted in my ear, “ARE YOU ON LINE?”  I had no idea what she meant - did she mean, like, did I have internet access?  No, apparently she meant “in line”, and I hadn’t paid fast enough and she was telling me to get out of her way. I let her cut in front of me and then ended up paying for my drink about 5 minutes later. The people behind the counter baristas were cracking up - they couldn’t believe this woman.  Right before this, someone jumped two lines, two different times, to cut in front of me and Arden.  I can understand why some people just snap.  I’m feeling pretty mean right now, so that’s all I’m going to say about it.

Kimi’s baby took a turn for the worse today, and there are other issues in my family right now, and I am a big ball of stress and worry.  I’m not a religious person - at all - but I do believe in the power of positive thinking. So if you feel like sending positive vibes out toward Kimi and Baby Carter way over in Hawa’ii, I’m sure that side of my family won’t turn it down.  For those not in the know, Kimi is my brother’s wife’s daughter.  She had her baby earlier last week and he ended up aspirating a TON of meconium, and suffered pneumonia and a collapsed lung and has been in critical condition since.  We thought he was doing better - and hopefully he WILL get better soon - but today was not a good day. 

Arden’s eye looks worse so I’m going to pester the surgery center tomorrow morning first thin about getting her in on Tuesday instead of waiting another week. Wish me luck.  I don’t have high hopes but maybe if I break down crying and act like a freak, I’ll get my way. It seems to work for others in my life. 

On a happier note, I got to spend a ton of time with my kids and Mike this weekend, which was lovely.  It’s easy to remember, when spending time with them, that all the rest of this life is sort of just for show and to keep us from getting bored. My resolution for 2009 is to spend more time with my family - especially my extended family - and my true friends.  Life is too short to spend it with people who make you feel like crap.  You’d think I’d have learned that lesson by now, wouldn’t you?

I realized today, in the middle of a blinding headache, that I’ve been withdrawing gradually from my friends - both real and online.  It was a day of epiphanies for me, which means I should get a headache more often. 

The morning started out with Lily complaining about her stomach. She’s a big hypochondriac, so I generally ignore it so as not to feed into it.  However, she actually did have diarrhea today.  She had a few rounds before we left the house this morning, but I figured it was out of her system.  I was wrong!  While I was sweating and grunting during my On The Ball class, she had a little accident and was mortified.  She was especially mortified when Arden announced, at the top of her lungs and in front of about 15 kids, “Lily pooped in her pants, Mommy!”  I thought Lily was going to deck her right then and there.  Yes, this is how important to my life the Y has become - I take my squirting 5 year old to child care there so I can work out.  I felt really bad on the way home.  Ooops. 

We got home and we all settled down to watch a movie together. It was pouring rain out and no one seemed to want to do anything, so I figured some tv wouldn’t hurt us.  Unfortunately, Arden ended up slugging Lily over not having enough room on the couch, I began to yell, and the television was turned off.  Arden had one of her epic fits - this one lasted 52 minutes. I know because I timed it.  That was even with me checking in on her and trying to calm her down halfway through it.  At one point, I started to cry but at least had the sene to go into the bathroom and get it together.  Lily put her hands over her ears and sung to herself.  She already has her own ways of dealing with Arden, and I must say, they are healthier than mine. 

So I was reflecting, during naptime, on what was so different about working. I had lots of really bad days at work - why was that easier for me to handle?  Then it dawned on me.  When I worked full-time, I knew I was good at my job.  I sometimes even felt smart, and I got a lot of good energy from being able to help other people succeed in their careers.  I’ve been doing marketing, in one form or another, since I was 20.  If I hadn’t been good at it, I probably would have stopped long ago.  The reason my bad days at work were bearable, whereas my bad days a home are not, is because when I worked, I knew that I could rock the marketing world.

Here at home, I don’t seem to be rocking much of anything, other than myself, in fetal position, on the floor.  This job I’ve got now is really freaking hard.  I approached being Lily and Arden’s full time mommy like I would a project at work. I scheduled, I arranged, I planned, I executed.  However, Arden isn’t in a place right now to be “arranged”.  My strictly planned days have fallen apart at the seams since I got back from Vegas.  Why? Because I am becoming more and more afraid to leave the house.  Arden’s temperment, her embarassing behavior in public, has put a serious damper on what I’m willing to do with both of them. With one child, you can manage.  The two of them, though . . . .different story. Yesterday I went to Ashland Berry Farm to figure out why all the fish in my pond had died, and the two of them were like wild animals, running around the pond displays, falling INTO a pond (Arden, thanks), grabbing tadpoles, being kids.  I realized that I had become “that” mother - the one with the out of control kids, the one who interrupts the salesperson to scream “GET DOWN FROM THERE JOEY!!! We don’t SWING from the RAFTERS!”

I’m doing a lot of reading on rages and tantrums.  I bought John Rosenmond’s New Parent Power - and it reinforced to me that at some level, I am doing things right. He had an interesting suggestion for kids that scream (Arden has probably hastened my hearing loss by at least 10 years).  He had a “Scream Room” for his daughter, and every time she went nuts, he put her in the half bath and let her scream it out.  That at least is better than listening to it bounce off the hardwoods and high ceilings.  I know what I shouldn’t be doing:  yelling, spanking, pulling my own hair out.  So I just wake up every morning and breathe deeply and hope that Arden will crack this phase soon.

It also pains me to write this.  I don’t want to hear anyone talk about my “difficult” child.  I want things to be easy and calm and sweet, but right now, they aren’t, and I am not about to start lying on my blog about motherhood. Why start now?  Talking to my sister has helped a bit - she has had plenty of good advice for me and I have a new understanding of some of the things she went through with her own son.  A couple of days ago, someone mentioned to me that another parent I know saw Arden crying, and said, about Arden, “That child is always having some issue or another. What is it this time?” It cut me to the quick.  This same child can be the funniest, kindest, most endearing child.  To have another parent (and one that knows me, and my family, fairly well) say that about her made me want to crawl into a hole.  Other than my sister, I have really pulled away from everyone, including Mike, probably.  I don’t like to greet him every night with, “It was a rough day.” I don’t want to lie to my husband, either. I just want to be good at this mothering thing, dammit!

So that is the first part. I have distanced myself from people right now because I don’t have a lot of nice things to say, and I don’t want to be negative or down.  So I don’t blog as much, and I’m consumed with figuring Arden out while making sure Lily gets enough attention.  I have also gotten used to being lonely, which is not a good thing for me. I am a highly social person.  I have suspended, for now, any hopes of finding other moms to hang out with. I just can’t deal with making new friends right now.  Between the mothering thing, learning how to work the online businesses without killing myself has been another challenege entirely, and something I’ll explore in a different post.  There isn’t much left at the end of the day for anyone.

The second part is that after I returned from Vegas, talking to my online friends became increasingly difficult.  I was so bummed out about none of them living here. I got spoiled with the immediacy of conversation - being in person, being able to read body language, or just sit quietly near one another.  After Vegas, keeping those friendships up felt so entirely difficult.  I didn’t want to just talk to Amanda on the phone - I wanted to have lunch with her, or go to the pool with Ava and my girls.  I didn’t want to send Jess a stupid card when she had surgery - I wanted to take care of her boys for her.  This went on and on.  I used to pick up the phone a lot and call - I don’t now as much.  Jess was going to come out this summer but for a variety of reasons she can’t, and it made me really sad.  I’m still planning on visiting Alicia in June, but I have to get off my butt and make the reservations and get my head around travelling all the way by myself with two girls, one of whom I can barely control at home.  I’m not even going to apologize for how much I miss my online friends, and in some ways, it would have almost been easier had we not met. Or, met, and realized that we all hated each other in real life.  Unfortunately, we got along fabulously.  These are people that, if they lived near me, would become like family to me.  In the meantime, I have to make due with phone conversations and IM. 

That is where I’ve been lately.  I know I have neglected my friends, and I’m sorry.  There has been a lot of change for me over the past 6 months, and it’s finally hitting me.  I am writing all this down in an effort to force myself to stop isolating, and reach out more - get out more.