ISO: Invitations, sanity

While I laid awake this morning, unsuccessfully trying to go back to sleep, I started working on my response to Melissa's tag for the six word memoir. After all, it was a great thing to get accomplished until I could get to that greater thing of sleep. Okay, not a good idea. After two hours lying awake, I finally got up, only to realize that in my sleep deprivation I'd forgotten all the great six-line memoirs I'd come up with. Truly, there was a whole progressive series, of which I have no solid recollection. So I guess it's back to the drawing board.

I obsess. Is that response okay?

There. No, I really will come up with something more representative, but after spending the entire week neurotically hunting K's first birthday invitations, it's the one that seems most apt. For one, it's not even a big party. The big party, the one with all her little friends, comes several days after her birthday and is thankfully a joint venture with someone significantly more well-balanced than I. This is the family party. You know, the one for all the people you could just call on the phone to invite. But I want invitations, cute invitations, something that will end up in her baby book. So I obsess. I shop. I research. I think I like the ones at the first store better, only to go back to the first store and find I actually liked the ones at the second. "These have caterpillars," I say to myself, "which are kind of creepy. These other ones have bears, which K likes, but they're a little too purple." This brings me to point number two: K doesn't care. She has the focus of, well, a one year old. Her memory is about as reliable as my recollection of history. Maybe even worse. This is the girl who just moments ago looked up at me after nursing, nearly asleep, only to suddenly discover that I have a mouth! And teeth! What fun! (Weren't we going to bed, dear? Oh, apparently not now, not when there are teeth involved).

So why the obsession? Who knows? It probably has something to do with the fact that my baby girl is turning one, that I want to make every moment/memory/opportunity perfect in every way possible, that I want to do it right just one last time. And when you know you can't ever achieve such perfection, when you know that whatever you do won't change the fact that your last baby's first birthday will come and pass in a month's time regardless of every stalling technique you can drum up, well, you end up obsessing over stupid things like little cards of paper people will only inevitably discard. It's a heck of a lot better than just sitting around crying.

I really will get back to that memoir. Just as soon as I get those invitations.

But even with all that to do...

The room is dark, cool, and quiet. The house has reached that restful point at the afternoon's warmest when lunch has settled in and the weight of the morning's activities is resting heavy on our lids. There's only one problem.

"I all done nap."

M is decidedly awake, through his own force, since I can tell by his grump that he's actually very tired. He moans and I sympathize. It's hard to fall asleep, hard to let go of the morning and whatever might await. I sit on the edge of the bed and rub, talk, soothe. He wants me to lay down and it would be so easy. In fact, I'm nearly asleep already. Five fifteen seems eons ago and ten fifteen a distant goal. But there is sweeping half-done, exercises half-finished, and a book due to book club next week. I only get one hour now that nap time had taken so long to get going, and I'll have to make the most of it to get done even half of what I had mentally noted to do. Still, it's so warm, and quiet, and peaceful, and M has nearly drifted off. But it's the principle of the thing, the precedent it sets for every nap from here on out.

I drag myself from the bed, slowly, and give him one last pat before leaving him to his rest. It's about him, of course, but even more so about me. People really are capable of so much more than they give themselves credit.

Look here, it wasn't so bad

After all...
... M ate everything he ordered.
... nobody peed or pooped on anything that wasn't already asking for it.
... the sun was shining and a nice breeze kept it cool.
... I managed to turn a nightmare situation into something productive.
... everyone stayed awake until nap time, when they promptly fell asleep (2 out of 3, at least).

But before you start wondering where Miss Pollyanna sprang from, I'll confess that the original title to this post was "Ten Reasons Why I'm In A Pissy Mood."

It was honestly one of those mornings where nothing goes irreparably wrong, but it certainly isn't fun either, where everyone seems to be on the edge of a very narrow precipice. And then I start thinking, well, I don't have a brain tumor like my one friend, and my children don't have Down Syndrome like their cousin, so I can think of two people off the bat who have loads more to complain about than me. Except that really make me feel any different about a tension-filled morning. It just adds guilt on top of the mix. Which, really, kind of makes things worse.

On the bright side, I guess all this means that I wake up each day thinking it's going to be fabulous. Pretty cool, when you think about it like that.

One side of self esteem, en flambe

As part of a couple mom groups, I get regular forwards for cute videos, quizzes, and anecdotes that I usual ignore. However, I got one this morning asking "Which Celebrity Mom Fits Your Style?" and couldn't pass it up. I so wish I had. Instead of the wholesome Jennifer Garner or hip Kate Hudson, I fell in with Nicole Richie. You know, the newbies. The newbies? Apparently I'm so clueless about parenting that I haven't figured out my parenting style yet: "You haven't thought much about your ground rules and may not know the difference between a time-out and crying it out." I feel like the lamest mom ever.

Truth is, I know I'm not this mom. I have my parenting philosophy down, or at least generally honed. I can waver on details and morph as I mature, but I've read enough books now that as I read more (and yes, I still read more) I know most of the tricks already, and pick/choose accordingly. I have two children who are generally well-behaved, who know what a healthy food is and what foods we don't touch (usually), who know about time-outs and crying it out but rarely see either one in use.

What's more, I know why I ended up in the "clueless" category. I'm just not that particular of a parent. I don't need to have professional pictures, fancy vacations, or lots of upgraded items. I'm good with what we have. I'm good. Period.

So why does this bother me so much? I don't know. Maybe I just really can't stand being set-up next to Nicole Richie. Because, really, all due respect here, I'd like to think I'm more than a little different. Maybe I'd like to think that it's not ignorance that makes me like what I have. Maybe it's just satisfaction. Or maybe I really want to be like Reese Witherspoon, because, gosh, she's just so darned cute. Whatever the reason, I'm taking a sabbatical from quizzes. I clearly don't want to know the answer anyway.

Holy Holistics, Batman!

Lately I feel like I have spent every waking minute on Skin Deep. It's starting to feel like a never ending quest just to find new lotion or makeup or bubble bath. I'd like to stop, but I just can't seem to make myself ignore what I ironically paid no attention to in the past.

I'm in no way a granola mama. But I know some, respect them, and often wish I had the gumption to be more like them. The more that I move in the direction, the more I find myself mired in anxiety over the multitude of chemicals, toxins, and miscellaneous crap already in our house. M's sip cup = PVC leaching, plastic toys = phthalates, Burt's Bees baby lotion = unspecified fragrance, Joe's O's = sugar, etc. Everywhere I look, I find something else to feel uneasy about, because I'm more cheap than granola, and I can't stand the idea of just tossing out perfectly good (cancer causing! allergen filled!) products just because I made a poor choice in buying them.

I waffle between the following extremes:
1) How in the world can I leave these things in here for one more second? I need to scrap them all, right now, and start from scratch.
2) Scrap them all? No thank you. If that's the real solution, I'm just giving up right now.

Lots of other moms don't worry about these things, apparently. They don't walk out of Target in disgust because there are no lotions without fragrance. They don't agonize over how to translate a good recipe into one without refined sugar or white flour (but still good). I feel like I'm in a constant tug of war between those people around me who seem blissfully normal (but you know what they say about bliss) and those who seem holistically superior (but almost unattainably so). I don't really want to be either, really. I want to be conscientious but not obsessively so. But when I pull out the wrong snack at the wrong house, I just feel like I'm never going to be good enough for one friend, and never relaxed enough with the other.

The answer I try to stick to is that every step I make is one less chemical in the house, one step closer to a cleaner and simpler lifestyle. But when I feel like everyone around me is already at their destination, the road ahead seems lonely and long.

One step forward + one step up = two gray hairs

Over the past few days, K has begun to take a few steps. We will stand her up and gingerly remove our hands, at which point she will quaver, sometimes lower and rise again, then step forward once or twice before dropping to crawl. This is all very exciting, albeit bittersweet. She is our baby, after all.

However, she has also discovered that she can climb. Chairs, step stools, couches, play structures, etc. Once up, she likes to stand and even take those steps, apparently assured that I will somehow manage to launch my aging, adult body to her rescue should anything unpleasant come her way (such as, say, concrete or wood. You know, floor.) This is not exciting at all. I tell her "NO" and whip her away, but this doesn't seem to be making a lick of difference.

We are in so much trouble.

The Fine Li(n)e

One of my parenting philosophies is that I try not to lie to our kids. I know that sometimes even the littlest of white lies can make things more simple ("Kids can't eat that") or avoid tantrums ("I'd take you but it's closed right now"), but that really seems to me only a technique to avoid a real, possibly difficult, explanation. And since we also have a philosophy not to talk down to our kids, I have good reason to feel uneasy when these little lies try to make their way out.

The funny thing is, though, that I seem to have no problem referring to foods by alternative names so as to make them more appealing. Examples:

Ice cream = homemade, no sugar peanut butter and banana frozen yogurt
Bear cookies = organic animal crackers
Apple = almost any fruit, including peach and pear
Bear chicken = used to refer to orange chicken but regularly applies to any sort of meat cut into small pieces
Strawberry milkshake = fruit smoothie with berries, banana, yogurt, and wheat germ

They're not really lies, just creative titles. But when I think of what other people must think when they hear me offer M "ice cream" for an afternoon snack, I get that uneasy feeling all over again. So where is that fine line between creativity and outright lying? Because the truth is, I'm just calling them by these names because they're more appealing to M that way, thus avoiding the same tantrum that other parents might avoid with the "they're closed" line from above. Maybe I'm already off my parenting high horse, gallivanting with the rest, without even realizing that lying and my sneaky creativity are really one and the same.

It feels like there's some smart explanation here about the intention behind the lie/creation, but I seem to have used up all my thinking cells renaming our weekly menu. Sigh...