Stranger Danger

I don't know how many mommy readers I have going on here, but I have a question to put out to you (or non mommy readers who have some input from their own parents method and timing of broaching the subject to them). If this is something you have considered and maybe come up with a plan, or are still trying to figure out how to broach the subject, or if you are seasoned mom and have been through this conversation with your child already.

When and how do you start the stranger danger conversation with your kids?

I have recently been grappling with this after having read this article on human trafficking as well as being randomly approached by a childfind advocate, and just general scary news stories constantly bombarding me with the atrocities, too too much.

So? Any suggestions or stories?

Parenthood, the Musical

It is all my fault. I would like to say that it started, for me, around the time that I birthed my first child, but that would be a lie. This is something that has been a part of me from day one. My siblings would constantly sing my praise (tell me to shut up), my friends and random strangers would sit back and listen with rapture (hide their faces in embarrassment). I just can't contain myself, I just have to let it out of its cage, I just have to sing!

Once I had children, this affliction has become something that is totally excepted and considered normal. AS LONG AS IT LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE DOING IT FOR THE CHILDREN. This problem would not necessarily be considered an affliction if it was brought forth in a beautiful harmony. It would be welcomed with open arms. However, with my off tune mono melodies, it is terrifying to say the least. I can't help it though. It is mostly subconsciousness. I will be doing something. anything, and I will break out in song. Not a specific, played on the radio song, but a made up song with a made up tune, explaining my activities.

Example:

(picture musical notes to go with this, I am not quite at the level of computer wisdom to put little cool pictures, such as smiley faces on here yet)

'I am putting Avery down to sleep, it's time for Avery to go to bed right now. So good night little Avery gooooood night, I'll see you when you wake up frooooom your naaaaaaap. Close your eyes you little monkey, I can't stand here foreveeeeeeeeeeeer. My back is sore and my feet are tired, and I would love it if you could just gooooooo toooooo sleeeeeep little monkeyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Rohan if you keeep, making noise you will be in big trouuuuuuuuble mister because I am trying put your brother down to sleeeeeep' etc etc,

No Rhyming necessary, just words and a nice melodic off tune!

So this is my thing, it hasn't stopped, I can't help myself. But now it has spread. I perk my ears up to listen to what Rohan is saying, and it it is a little song about him being a Robot/dinosaur/giant/dragon, or singing about his train set or lego or food, or how he doesn't want any more to eeeeaaattttttt. So the kids got it, totally reasonable, it could be hereditary, I understand that. But wait, there's more.

I have heard the faint, but undeniable sound of Colin singing. It isn't loud enough for the untrained ear to understand, but as a seasoned professional, I can spot it out from a mile away.

We have officially become a real life musical. A reality show musical. It ain't pretty, there isn't too much in the way of good singing skills or attractive costumes, but dang, we (I) love it!

Geek Store

I have raised the bar for my now elevated levels of geekdom. It happened so suddenly I didn't see it coming.

I have walked by this section in many a library and bookstore and second hand store, always vowing 'not for me'. I will never never pick up a book that calls me a dummy without even knowing me (though once you get to know me you find that the rumours are so very true).

Then it happened, one fateful day. I was perusing the book selection at our local second hand shop (our family has an insatiable addiction to books) and there it was winking and smiling at me, begging me to pick up it's fine black and yellow cover, just take a peek, just heft the weight of it, JUST BUY IT. With the price of under a dollar singing in the back of my head, I could hardly resist.

And so I bought it. And so it sat on my book shelf, just waiting for me to finish all my trashy fiction novels and get into something a bit more informational, a bit more heady. It drew me. I couldn't stop myself. I did it for you my 6 followers and my secret readers. I wanted to make myself into a better, more informed blogger, I wanted to keep your interests high, to keep up with your demand for more and more interesting and insightful posts.

You may see some new and magnificent changes to this here blog (or not, you know, whatever). Now that I have purchased the Dummies Guide to Blogging, I will have hundreds of followers hanging on my every word, wanting desperately to find out more and more information about my crazy adventures of diaper changing and cleaning milky vomit from my clothing/floor/sheets/face. People will just not be able to get enough of my constant flow of witticisms and amusingness (I claim that word for my very own dictionary). The demand will be so high, I will have to write a book for all of my faithful follows to read, and read again, like poetry, but blog posts.

Or Not. Whatever.

Condiment soup

Rohan eats butter. Not the typical toast and butter, or steamed vegetables and butter, though he feigns interest in said vessels. What he really wants is that butter. In fact, when we let him spread the butter on his own toast/vegetables, he takes a bit for vessel and the rest he just sticks directly into his mouth.

This is an occurrence, in fact, for most condiments. He will lick from the spoon that was dipped in mayonnaise, eat, with his fingers, the mound of dipping ketchup on his plate. In fact, such a fondness for dips has brought him to the point of eating hummous and peanut butter directly from the container with a spoon .

I know that this isn't a conundrum my child alone is a part of. I have heard many horror stories from other alarmed and disgusted parents. In fact I have heard similar stories involving myself and other family members who were afflicted by a similar condiment loving problem as children.

Pre-mamahood, I had only seen this first hand on the rarest of occasions. It is disturbing to say the least. But now I that I live this EVERY day it has gone from slightly repulsive, to pure disturbed amusement. In fact, one time, when we were dining at a restaurant and I was looking the other way, Rohan grabbed one of the butter balls and shoved the whole thing in his delighted little mouth. Everyone at the table was trying to hide the retching noises from escaping their mouths. Barf. Kids are pretty icky sometimes!

Real life tears

I never thought in all of my days as a mother that I would relish in putting either of my children down to sleep. Though the initial stages are generally enjoyable, the cuddling, the stories the giggling, talking, just generally enjoying each others company. Bliss. Until the actual sleep part of putting down to sleep starts. In my experience so far, it includes battles, screaming, crying, throwing things.................and ROhan get's kind of upset too! har har.

Given my track record of sucking at the sleep thing, I just could not see myself not dreading the experience. And yet here I am constantly looking forward to putting Avery down for his naps and down to bed for the night. It is like a dream. My anxiety levels are at an ultimate low. I just lay back (literally) and go with the flow.

My method may change once Colin goes back to work and isn't around to watch Rohan for me while I tend to the infant child. Okay they will definitely change. But for now, it is pure luxury.

I make the boys give Avery his good night kiss, take him upstairs, turn on the music (uncomfortably loud just how he likes it) give him my good night shpeel (good night Avery sweet dreams mama loves you I will see you when you wake up from your nap/in the morning), tuck his little blankey all around him in his bassinet (yes he is still in a bassinet and there he will remain until he can physically get in there himself, I LOVE the bassinet!), than I lay down on my bed to read my book du jour.

I don't bother him in his happy little sleeping place if he is making fussy, slightly unhappy noises. I just lay back and dive into the world of the ancient caveman fantasizing about being a cavewoman goddess filled with knowledge and wonder. If I hear the sound of infant rise above my fantasy land, I pat his little diaper and sing, or shush. That's it. Usually though I don't bother with the pat and shush, and just let him ride it out for a while waiting for the sweet sound of his thumb hitting the vacuum suction that is his mouth.

I feel better about being in the room during this process, just in case it gets to a panic stricken scream, I can go in with a pat and a shush or song. But I also stay in the room during this process because though it can get noisy, I very much enjoy these few minutes of just reading by myself (ish).

This proves to me the fact that I am a 'me time' hog. I will take it anywhere I can get it!

So anywho usually during these slight crying episodes, it is all noise and no action. That is until a couple of days ago. Hysterics were high so I peaked my head into the bassinet to see the very first Avery tear roll ever so dismally down his reddened cheeks. This DEFINITELY raises the bar in my sympathetic reflex. Crap. So I may have rocked the bassinet a bit and fought the urge to lift him out of his vessel of torture and into my loving arms. This time. It is going to take some serious nerves of steel to tune out AND turn a blind eye to the salty wet sobs of my little infant child.

And yet I still relish................glutton for punishment non? Or really truly a hog for my very special me time!

The weight is lifted from my shoulders

I am terrified of confrontation of any kind. In any case where I am confronted I can feel my pulse race, my hands get clammy, my eyes bug out of my head, I stammer, I sweat, it is not pretty. Whether I am innocent or guilty of whatever I am being confronted about, I ALWAYS feel guilty. I act guilty, my body language is that of a person that is oozing guilt. I can't help it.

So this terror is the reasoning behind my putting off speaking with the collection agency that has been dealing with my student loan debt. I am a total wimp. I had a conversation with them many MANY years ago in order to come up with a payment plan to pay it off. I am not a bad person, in fact more often than not, I can be pretty reasonable. I don't want to have a debt hanging over my head, I would like to pay it off, but I never ever have 4-5 thousand dollars just laying around waiting to be used to pay off a collection agency. Nor do I have a rich relative that I can borrow the money from. Sorry guys, it is payment plan or nothing.

Those guys are pretty ruthless, they don't want payment plans, they want money NOW. So, after being made feel like a total dirtball for not having large sums of money, I decided nothing was exactly what they will get. Except of course come tax time when all of my return goes to my debt. Oh that money would sure have come in handy, but whatever, I thought to myself, at least I am paying off my interest for the year.

Finally, in my desire to grow up and settle my debts I decided to call these dreaded collection agents. Face the fear, confront head on......here we go. It wasn't exceptionally easy getting a hold of them, which I found strange, but once i did I received some interesting news indeed. Apparently I owed a total of $51.18. That's right, not the original $5118 that I was expecting to hear. It turns out that all of those years of giving up my taxes actually payed off my student loan. Holy shit!

Idle lifestyle, Idle parenting, avoiding confrontation at all costs. It pays off my friends, big time. The only thing that made these couple of day better was finding a used VHS video of Garden State pretty much my favourite movie ever. Yes, I am lame. damn, I wish I had taken a picture of that cheque before I mailed it.

Even after a bit of phone calling and investigation, am still a bit skeptical, but optimism shall reign supreme right now, it is just making my wine taste so much better!

Fallen in love for a second time

I can see now that you will be assuming that the second coming of this love affair I speak of would inevitably be, of course, my second child. That would make sense wouldn't it? That is, in fact, not even close to what I am talking about. Sure, the infant child is pretty cute, and he has quite the smile, and even his chin full of drool can make a heart swoon.

My renewed love, however, is not a living breathing person, but an inanimate, yet kinetic, object. This object of my affection has been inert and partially molding in our basement for the last couple of months. Sad and lonely, it sat in a dark corner, with ne'er a glance in it's general direction.

That all came to change with the impending trip to Montreal that I have been begging for FOREVER and that Colin finally relented on. To make this trip sound more appealing, I brought up the possibility of bringing this said object with us on our mini family adventure. It worked!! Shit yeah, the power of nagging! haha

Hello double Chariot, your children await!

So I went out and purchased this addition to the stroller so that Avery can enjoy the ride as well. Oh how they loved their first spin on the cougar 2, oh how the Chariot enjoyed the comfort of little giggling children sitting on it's extremely uncomfortable looking bench.

I LOVE YOU CHARIOT COUGAR 2 WITH INFANT SLING ATTACHMENT. So worth the $400 I had to pay for you used! No really!

Idle mom

So often, over the last couple of months, I have felt like a super lame mom. The guilt was just overwhelming. I spent the last legs of my second pregnancy avoiding anything that will have to make me sit down low (such as in the infamous sandbox that Rohan just could not get enough of) so as to avoid the arduous task of getting back up again. I was tired, and felt oh so lazy. It took all the effort I had left in my body to just prepare to leave the house. Okay, it wasn't that bad, but I WAS tired and I WAS a pretty lazy mom.

Fast forward to birthing this infant child that made me drag my feet for so long, and there I was, still dragging my feet. It turns out, having an infant child can be a little tiring (see pure, sleepless exhaustion). So, there I was, once again, lazy, boring, unfun mom. Guilt oozing out of my every pore.

And as I gleefully come upon the 5th month of infant childs life, I realize, I still don't seem to have an abundance of energy. It could be something to do with the weather, (these Quebec winters are ridiculous!) the fact that we live a bit in the country so to go for a stroll, we need to pack the kiddlets up into the van and drive to go for a walk, or it could just be good ole fashioned lack of solid sleep at night. Whatever the case may be, tired and boring I still tend to be.

With all of this hanging over my head, I had started to question how good my recent parenting skills were, that is until I read this article.

Now that I have been offered the understanding that my parenting skills are not only good, they are exceptional, I can hold my head way up high (see- lay my head down on my arms for a short after breakfast nap at the kitchen table) with the realization that my new found style of parenting totally rocks!

Nocturnal

We have reached the critical WHY stage here at the Mckittrick/Peters household. Everything that we say is now answered with a resounding why mama/daddy? Often we know the answer, but as we dig deeper and deeper into the why's of things, I realize how very little I actually think about why most things do/are the way they are. Heck no, I don't have enough room in my barely functioning brain to analyze every little thing, and yet upon that wagon I shall leap.

I heard rumours of this stage in toddlers lives, but I just never thought it would happen to us!

So along with the why's of things, we have started to actually teach Rohan things. Not just this is a ball and this is how you throw it kind of stuff, but real life information. Colin has started on the rotation of the the earth/moon and what happened to the dinosaurs, and the both of us have started to talk to him about nocturnal animals.

Is this talk a bit early? Heck yes it is. I was very sure he had no idea what the what we were talking about, I mean these topics can be pretty tricky even for us to understand. But it turns out that we are actually breeding genius children!! Rohan has sat down and explained to me that the earth moves around the sun which creates day and night in two separate spots on our planet (which he tells me is earth). He then explained the many theories on how the dinosaurs became extinct, such as explosion, nothing left to eat, arrival of the ice age, etc etc.

Finally, last night, we asked him to name a few nocturnal animals, and he totally rocked it. In fact he named some animals such as the fox, that WE didn't even realize was nocturnal. Oh shit, Rohan has already surpassed me in knowledge. I may need to brush up on my schooling before he hits kindergarten!

Poop

It happens to all of us. I never really thought about it too much, it was always an uneventful event. It wasn't pretty, but the job had to get done, and so I did it. It has never really been a topic of discussion in my life, no sitting around with the girls drinking wine and spilling giggled confessions of said events.

And now? My life has flipped upside down and the ladies and wine and giggles have been replaced by large strong dark coffees, hysterical, sleep deprived laughter and ridiculous discussions about our children's BM's. You know, bowel movements, the yellow liquid mustard that manages to ooze out the sides of their diapers smearing all over their "one nice outfit for the outing' staining it forever. That is the moment the child gets changed out of awesomely cute outfit and into the only spare thing we keep in our diapers bags, the sleeper we put in there a month ago which we have to squeeze the poor little squirming infant into because they grow like CRAZY!

So poop. Might as well throw it into a blog post right? This is as honest as it gets, parenthood in it's purest form. We get sprayed by it, our hands/fingers/arms/legs (see all other exposed body parts in the lethal direction of bum and or soiled diaper) get smeared with it, some ladies I know stick a finger in the diaper to see if there is any of the yellow stuff in there. Yuck. I think I used to do that with Rohan. How disgusting is that? We must really love our kids! I prefer the bum sniff test. Again, yuck. In public too, we have no shame!

With Avery (lord my kids are going to hate me when they get older and get wind (pun?? a bit??) of these posts about their bodily functions!), I am starting to actually record his diaper dirtying incidents. Why? Well, He NEVER poops. I mean, I remember changing ten poopy diapers a day, soaking these nasty, yet fairly unscented, diapers in a big bucket of water and baking soda. These days, I don't even bother putting water in the bucket at all. It has, in fact, been ages since I have had to soak a dirty diaper.

I could be rejoicing, enjoying this easy life of cleaning already clean diapers, saving some cloths from getting over used on stinky bums. I have saved outfits and time with this lack of crap in my life. And yet, here I am, checking his diapers with abated breath, hope beyond hope that it is stinky. Denied, over and over again. Damn. I am going to have to look this up...........

Pajama Rama

The boys and I spent the entire day in our Pajamas. TO be fair, Avery is almost always in a sleeper unless we are leaving the house for a special occasion (note, going anywhere that consists of us leaving the house is considered a special occasion in my books!). Also, Rohan had a few change of pants due to some *accidents*. But, overall, pajamas all day long.

This day of lack of clothing change came about due to the 15-20 cm of snow that had dropped the night before and part way through the morning. After our last (hopefully) major snowfall came the rain that was creating the perfect packing snow throughout out the nature created ski hills scattering our front 'yard'. In fact, not only did I wake up with the tragic discovery of a major 8.9 earthquake in Japan, I also notice that there is still a major rainfall warning here in Wakefield. Flooding, Tsunami's, that is a whole heck of a lot of bad news to be reading at 4 o'clock in the morning.

Needless to say, yesterday was an inside day. It can be trying, coming up with activities to fill an entire day inside. For a good portion of the day we did some spring cleaning. I (finally) cleaned out my closet, dresser, hall closet and came out of the ordeal with a very frustrated and sadly ignored toddler as well as a couple of boxes of goodies to send to the local second hand store.

I have to say, I very much dislike inside days. I need to leave the house at least once a day to maintain some semblance of sanity. Inside days create, in me, a maddening cabin fever feeling that in turn makes me irritable and anxious. But on the plus side, I finally got some cleaning done, so, not a total loss!

What to be when I grow up????

There is nothing like having children to really force you to look deep within yourself. What kind of values and morals provide me with enough conviction to instill them in my children as well. Do I want them to know the realities of life from the get go? Do I want to hide some until they are 'age appropriate'? Should they know where meat comes from, whether there is or is not a Santa Clause, God, Tooth fairy? Do I really have enough facts about these topics to be teaching them?

But, what is dominating my mind over everything else these days is, what am I going to be when I grow up? I feel as if I am doing this all backwards. The career and marriage should already be in the bag. The kiddlets should be the icing on my already established and focused self. The kiddies should be the reprieve from my amazingly busy and demanding career/life. I should be contemplating and discussing with my employer/partner/self when I shall be returning to my optimal job as they beg for me to come back.

I am not there. I am so far from there that I have been taking some career assessment quizzes on line to figure out where there may be. I still don't know. I have this undeniable, burning need to be somebody special. For myself, for finances, for confidence, for a better established sense of self going beyond just 'well traveled mom'. But also for the kiddlets. I want to be someone they can look up to, to be proud of. To say 'my mom does so and so for a living' and watch pride glisten in their eyes. In my eyes. I want to be able to answer that 'what are you, what do you do' question that survey 's always have, I am a doctor/lawyer/astronaut/mom with no positive prospects to become anything else worth mentioning.

I can not believe how many options are out there, how many things I could be. A lot are vetoed. I can't decide to become a doctor this late in life, too much work, too many years, too much necessity for intelligence (I just want to insert here that I had to spell check intelligence...........doctor hey, ummm not a chance missy!). Money, time, transportation..........only one of these things are on my side, and not for long as Colin is on his way back to work soon.

So my lovely followers..............do you have any ideas for a career that will take a minimum of schooling at a minimum cost in order to do something i love, something that is going to do something helpful to someone(s) out there, and for a maximum rate of pay..............anyone??

What in the world Am I going to be when/if I grow up!