One of the things I despise about my job is not having control over people and what they do or don’t read on our sites. 

Because we actually care what our customers think about their buying experience with us, we send out survey requests a week or two after their order ships.  And three times (out of 1,000s, so not bad), we have had people post downright nasty reviews of our site and products.  Is it because the product is bad or defective?? NO. It’s because they DON’T READ. 

How much more clearly can I state that a nap mat isn’t padded other than bolding it and saying “THIS NAP MAT IS NOT PADDED AND DOES NOT COME WITH A BLANKET OR PILLOW”?  That seems pretty clear in the description, no?  You can imagine my surprise when a customer complains, in a review, that they didn’t realize the nap mat wasn’t padded and didn’t come with a blanket or a pillow.  I don’t get mad when people order something and want to return it. What makes me mad is when they post nasty reviews without even calling or emailing us, asking us to make it right or begging forgiveness for their inability to read basic English.  I for one check site reviews frequently, and if the testimonials or reviews are decent, it makes me more inclined to buy. This is why I get very offended when people post reviews like the one I got today. 

It particularly chaps my butt when they post downright lies in their reviews. One lady said there was a tiny hole in the blanket where the embroidery was done.  She said that she paid $75 to have it shipped to her (she paid $5).  I immediately contacted her and asked her to let us send her a new one, with a prepaid label to return the defective one.  She never even bothered to respond.  If I was that upset about kid’s nap mat, you bet I’d be calling and complaining about sub-standard embroidery or other issues.  In all the cases where we’ve had negative reviews, we’ve offered to do whatever it takes to make it right. And 3 out of 3 have never responded.  I just don’t get that. You take the time to write a review but you don’t want to get your problem fixed?  Whatever.

Anyway, I’m crabby because we work so hard to make sure everything goes smoothly. I can’t even begin to explain all the ways we go above and beyond and I can say honestly that I don’t think any retailer has the kind of customer service we do.  Who else answers the phone on Sundays and makes a trip into the office to ship your nap mat so it goes out by 6 AM Monday? We can’t be 100% perfect all the time, but how we respond to problems is what sets us apart.  I am choosing to respond to this by venting publicly on my blog. 

The top 5 reasons I’m cranky:

1.  I need more babysitting help.  Seriously. I am not going to survive nap mat season without more time in the office.  Can someone please save me?  Why do colleges start mid-August?  Do they not know that I dealing with nap mat season and it doesn’t end until SEPTEMBER?!?!?!  And that all my babysitters are college students? 

2.  Our SassyOnesies.com site’s order function is “broken”.  This means people can order, but I can’t do anything with the order - like process or ship it.  Yeah, that’s going to be nice.  3-5 days, says Yahoo Tech Support in terms of when they will get back to me.  In the meantime I’m on hold with Verizon Business trying to convince them it’s their problem and to fix it.

3.  I had my butt kicked from here to there in Super Circuit this morning, and I’m so sore I can barely sit down. 

4.  Arden and Lily have weird rashes. Lily has one on her back, Arden’s is on her chest.  When there is something unidentifiable on my children, I get cranky.

5.  4 hours a day is not enough time to get all the work done that needs to be done.  Wait, I think that relates to item 1.  Whatever. 

Help. 

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.

I admit it - Arden won today.  She reduced me to tears. In the car, no less. 

The day started with Arden throwing a fit because I had no clean dresses for her to wear. Lily, always helpful, says to Arden: “Are you wearing a skirt like me?  No? Oh, so sad Arden!”  I wanted to duct tape her mouth shut and hide her in a closet. She LOVES to rub things in while playing sweet angel.  The fit went on for 45 minutes. It included a lot of kicking, screaming and hand waving.  I even took away her pool outing scheduled for this afternoon. When she finally let me cuddle her, I ruined it once again by touching her cuddle cloth.  “YOU MADE MY CUDDLE CLOTH HOT MOMMY!!! I wanted it COLD!!!” More hand waving and screaming commenced.

I missed my boxing class at the Y this morning due to the tantrum, so I decided to just work out on the elliptical machine instead. I listened to loud, angry music the entire time and tried to drain all the frustration and anger away from me.  I was trying to find my happy place.  If I couldn’t find my happy place, I would have settled for my physically exhausted place.

After the Y, we had to run some errands, so I bribed the girls into patience by offering the play area at the mall and lunch at Chik-Fil-A.  We got gas, dropped off nap mats, and squeezed in a phone call to Jess in St. Louis for sanity (she has a very, um, tempermental child herself, so we enjoy swapping horror stories - like the time her child disrobed completely in the middle of Target).  We headed to the mall, ate an uneventful lunch, and even rode the train at Short Pump for fun.  As we walked back through Dick’s Sporting Goods to get to the car, Arden played her very favorite game:  run away from Mommy.  I managed to keep Lily contained with one hand as I tried not to knock over displays going after Arden. I caught up to her just as she began to sprint through the automatic doors.  While doing so, I spilled Starbucks on my shirt and dropped my purse.  I grabbed her wrist and gritted my teeth in an exemplary imitation of my mother and said, “GET.IN.THE.CAR.  NOWWWWWWW!”

Arden cried. Hard.  She managed to land one kick on my leg - still can’t tell if it was intentional or just because she was flailing trying to get away.  Once I got her in her seat, I realized she’d used crayon to draw all over inside of the car door and her pants.  So that’s what those mysterious green stains were.  I buckled her in, still not speaking.  Once I got in and began to drive, Arden let loose.  So did I.  I hate when I yell, but I had to drown out the noise. I said mean things.  I told them I was going back to work, because at least “work” appreciated me (still not sure what I meant by that).  I told them I was tired of doing nice things for them and from now on we were going to sit inside staring at the walls instead of playing and riding trains and doing art projects and going for walks.  I told Arden to be quiet.  Then I begged her to shut up.  Then I threatened both of them again with not going to the pool.  Then I cried myself as I drove out of Short Pump. 

As soon as the tears started, I knew I’d lost. My 3 year old won. I allowed her to ruin my day, my peaceful mind, my zen. She freakin’ harshed my mellow in a big way. 

I know that I need to find a better way of dealing with her hairtrigger temper.  Yelling doesn’t work. Ignoring doesn’t, either.  Sometimes I feel so bad that we couldn’t afford to keep her at Rainbow.  Mike keeps telling me it’s not my fault, but she has definitely gone backwards since we pulled her out of school.  I try to keep the days structured like they were at Rainbow but it’s not the same, I know that.  Today I just feel like throwing in the towel. 

Delilah, our 14 year old mutt, woke Mike up this morning at 3 AM.  I had fallen asleep upstairs, so I heard none of this. She was throwing up and couldn’t walk down the stairs.  It was like watching a very drunk person try to stagger - it was heartbreaking.  Sometimes her legs would all work, but not in conjunction with each other, and she kept falling on her right side.  Unfortunately Mike had a hearing this morning in Northern Virginia and had to leave, so I loaded up the girls and Delilah in the back and took them to preschool.  I immediately took Delilah to her vet and dropped her off, and waited for the call.  I had to carry her into the vet because she couldn’t walk, and once she was in there, she kept falling on her side and panicking. 

I just heard from our very nice vet, Dr. Z.  He probably should have started the conversation by saying that she was going to be okay eventually, but instead he told me that Delilah had Geriatric Vestibular Disease.  He explained how its origin is unknown, and they have no idea why it happens. There is no cure other than to nurse the dogs through it.  Apparently it’s like extreme doggie vertigo, and the spinning makes the sick and they can’t walk or eat.  They’re going to keep her overnight and hopefully we can take her home tomorrow. Dr. Z explained that normally they only need nursing care for about 3 days, but it could take up to two weeks for her to fully recover and she may always have a right-sided head tilt. In the meantime, they are checking for things like brain tumors or other things that could have caused it, but for now, it appears she will be fine.

I was a complete wreck when I was listening to Dr. Z. He had a very serious tone and the sound of the symptons seemed very dire.  I was crying so hard 5 minutes in to the conversation I could barely speak. 

I’m slowly calming down.  Delilah’s been around since 1994 and she’s a great dog (yes, I know her breath is horrible).  The girls love her and she’s been a pretty healthy dog for her life.  I used to take her rock climbing with me, in my much younger and healthier days, and she’d act like a mountain goat and scale the walls with me. Or wait patiently below, occasionally barking at me.  She’s been through a number of relationships, and moved more times than I can count with me.  When Mike and I met, and fell in love, he “adopted” Delilah. She loves him more than me now, and the two of them used to run errands together on the weekends, or he’d sneak her into his office when he still worked downtown.  After we had the girls, Delilah’s priority status dropped, but she’s still our doggie and we love her a ton.  Today was the first time I was faced with losing her.  I know that she probably doesn’t have a long time to live - she’s old, and she’s getting cantankerous.  Still, the reality of it hit me hard, and I’m reeling from it.