It’s two years later and I have twice as many children now.  My darling first son is as about as old as the angry mom’s daughter was when we encountered her at the WIC office.  He stopped cooing a long time ago.  Now he likes to negotiate and say that he’s sorry before he deliberately disobeys me.  My husband and I have tried to start the potty training process, but Austen has been very reluctant to jump on board.  Moreover, he doesn’t even like to take time from his busy day to get his diaper changed.  And he really doesn’t have time to sit on the potty and wait for something to happen.  The other day, I tried to change him and he threw a fit.  He screamed, he cried, he flung himself on the floor (he has a flair for the dramatic).  I had to drag him to his room and wrestle him down to the ground in order to change his poopy diaper.  While I was re-enacting a scene from WWF with Austen, my newborn started crying bloody murder.  I got so frustrated, so flustered and Austen started laughing at me.  He laughed at me.   It irritated me so much that I shushed him.  I shushed him and told him to stop talking because I didn’t want to hear it.  He processed what I had said and then he broke out into to tears.  He cried as if I had just broken his heart. 

It wasn’t until after he had gone to sleep that I realized I had become what I had always hated:  I had become the angry mom. After my epiphany, I starting crying.  I was so disappointed in myself.  I couldn’t believe that I had allowed myself to lose the joy that I had once felt, the pure joy of parenthood.  I tried to soothe my soul with a bottle of Coca-cola, a tub of chocolate frosting, and a taped episode of “Days of Our Lives.”    But those things only provided temporary relief.  I fell into a bit of depression.  The next day I awoke to my two year old jumping on my bed.  He looked at me with his big brown eyes and said, “Wake up, Mommy.”  I couldn’t help but smile.  It was then that I realized that I hadn’t lost the joy of parenthood.  I just had a bad day and I lost my temper.  I wasn’t a bad mother just like that woman in the WIC office wasn’t a bad mother.  We both were just parents trying to cope with the frustrations of the day-to-day. 

You see, parenthood is hard work and sometimes caring for a toddler can make you want to lie down on a set of train tracks.  The truth is we all have angry mom moments.  It’s ridiculous to expect that you’re never going to lose your cool.  The trick is maintaining a balance and making sure that for every angry mom moment, there are a dozen or more “being a parent is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me” moments.

I have been doing some research about Elimination Communication, a method that is gaining popularity in Western Culture.  Basically, instead of using diapers, parents try to tune-in to their newborn’s clues that they have to go and run to put them over the toilet when it’s time.  Now, I must confess I was a little bit skeptical about the whole process of potty training a newborn.  I mean don’t parents of a small infant have enough to deal with?  Can a newborn really exhibit the same control when it comes to bodily functions that a two year can?  Plus, the method requires the primary caregiver to be in constant contact with their little bundle of joy until she is trained.  If you’re like most moms and dads, you have a job or other children and holding your baby every minute of the day isn’t exactly practical.  But then I began to think about those thousands of small little plastic packages of poop sitting in a landfill, not breaking down and I began to reconsider my original perceptions of the theory.  Maybe it’s worth the stress and the inconvenience of Elimination Communication to make our planet a little better for the ones who wear those little diapers.  So am I going to cast off traditional child rearing methods, throw that big box of swaddlers out into the street and give my infant an early preview  of the joys of potty training?  Probably not, because throwing away unused diapers wouldn’t help with the whole waste problem.  But I’m thinking about it.  And I want to know what others think. 

Is this a child care fad that will fade away or is Infant Potty Training the wave of the future?

Check out this website for more information and let me know what you think!

It’s not that I don’t enjoy time with my son.  And it’s not that my son doesn’t spend most of the day chatting away.  He does.  I mean this child will talk about anything and everything and all at the speed of light.  Believe me.  But it’s difficult having a two-year-old as your only source of company.  It’s difficult to try to reason with him when you need to change his diaper and all he wants to do is play with his choo-choo trains.  When I get frustrated, sometimes I need someone to tell me it’s going to be okay.  Sometimes  I just need to talk about the weather and other stuff in the mundane adult vernacular. 

It doesn’t help that lately I get the feeling that I’m raising a two-year-old teenager.  Just today, I tried to give my son his breakfast.  I had to call his name approximately 20 times before he turned around and acknowledged me.  He took the waffle from my hand without saying a word and looked at me with disgust, like I had somehow interrupted something really important.  I was prepared for that to happen when he reached eleven or twelve, but two?  Are you kidding me?

I think I’m scared about having another little baby, being surrounded by the madness of motherhood, and feeling isolated and alone.  And I look at other mothers who look like they have it together and have time to shower and get their eyebrows waxed and it makes me feel more alone.  I just want to scream, “doesn’t it ever get to you?”  But I’m afraid that it’s just me.  That I’m the only one drowning here and everyone else is keeping their head above water level.  I love my son.  I will love my other son – if he ever decides to grace me with his presence.  But I have to say that sometimes, it gets to me.  It really gets to me.

Do you think that by running around like an idiot and encouraging your children to scream and act like a bunch of hooligans, you can recapture your long lost youth?

 Do you think that by racing up the slide – which I always advise my two-year-old not to do because that’s not what they were built for, and pushing past little kids who are younger and not as heavy as you – that you were setting a good example for your kids (who, let’s be honest, look like they are going to end up in a juvenile detention center in a few years anyway)?

Do you think it’s right to take away valuable summer hours from little children by your reckless behavior?

Do you think your kids are somehow going to think more of you for your stupid, ill-conceived stunts?

I have a newsflash for you: your kids are going to grow up to resent you no matter how many times you run up the ladder made of old tires.  They’re going to resent you and blame you for everything bad that’s ever happened to them and spend years in therapy talking about what a negligent parent you were. 

So step aside, stop acting like a jerk, and let my kid GO DOWN THE SLIDE!

AKH

Yeah.  That attitude didn’t last for too long.  You see, I was expecting the terrible twos to look a certain way.  I was expecting him to run around the room like a crazy, pull at the curtains, pee on the floor, all of those things.  Therefore, when he didn’t exhibit any of those behaviors, I assumed I had escaped the terrible two trap unscathed.  Then it began.  THE WHINING.  THE WHINING!

It starts with the pouty lip.  I don’t know how kids know about the pouty lip or the way it makes the cutest kid look ten times cuter than he already is, but they do.  So he starts with the pouty lip and then the “please mommy.”   Only he can’t say the “l” in please so it’s more like “pease mommy.”  Super cute.  I say no.  He says please some more.  I say no some more.  And the cycle begins.  He flails his arms, throws himself on the floor in a dramatic fashion, and continues to whine until I want to stab sharp things in my eyes. 

I could handle the shouting.  I could handle the kicking, the screaming, the demonic  foaming at the mouth.  I could deal with all of that stuff.  I could put him in the naughty corner, take away his toys.  But the whining is unbearable!  It’s as though he’s stabbing me in the heart and punching me in the boob all at the same time.  I would kill him if he didn’t look so darn pathetic and adorable. 

Now as the day of the birth of my second child draws near, my first child is making me reconsider my decision to have more children.  How does anyone survive this phase?  How do you not go crazy when confronted with the pouty lip and the incessant whining? 

I guess the moral of the story is no one is safe from the terrible twos and a tantrum is a tantrum no matter how its packaged.

Controversial Doll Lets Little Girls Pretend to Breast-Feed – Children’s Health – FOXNews.com

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1.  Don’t let your kid order their own meal. While you may think it’s cute that it takes your child five minutes to say “juice,” your server doesn’t. They have things to do.

2.  This is related to my first point: Don’t say you’re ready to order if you’re not. Remember you are not the only customer your server is waiting on. They don’t have time to watch you question your child to find out what she wants. Let’s face it: there are two things on the menu that your child will eat. Make a decision. If they don’t like it, they can suck it up.

3.  Don’t let your kids drink the creamers on the table. This should be common sense, but you’d be surprised.

4.  If there aren’t crayons provided, there is a reason. That reason is that the owner doesn’t have the money to replace the tablecloths or repaint the walls after your little gumdrop vandalizes them. Leave the crayons for the art room.

5.  Don’t rearrange the décor. If your child wants to play with the picture frame and fiddle with curtains, make them stop. That is your job, after all.

6.  Don’t let your child express themselves by tearing napkins into tiny pieces. They can express themselves later, this is lunch time.

7.  Don’t let your child make castles out of the jellies, sugar packets or any other condiments on the table. You may not have to clean it up, but some one does.

8.  Bring something to keep your child occupied (NOT CRAYONS). You may not have noticed this, but children have short, practically non-existent attention spans. If you don’t want them to start racing around the other tables, screaming, and flinging their shirts over their heads, bring them some small toys that will entertain them while they wait for the food.

 9.  Never linger. You may want to sit down for a few hours and catch up with your college girlfriend, but your kids don’t really have the patience for that. So when they start shouting, “I want to go bye-byes” and begin squirming around in their chairs, it’s time to go.

10.  Waiting on people with small children is a pain. You may have thanked your server numerous times. You may have apologized for the mess and even made a pathetic attempt to clean it up, but you should still compensate your server for their efforts. WORDS ARE CHEAP, HIKE UP THE TIP.

Parents are the worst too. You would think that since we know first hand how difficult parenting can be that we’d cut each other some slack. Not so. Other parents are the most vicious, cutthroat critics of them all. When I see some mother or father making what I consider to be a bad choice, I start right in on them. “How can they let that happen?” “Their child has no self-control.” “I would never do that with Austen.” Then I start comparing their child to my son as if he walks on water and knows how to split an atom. In reality, he still pees his pants and licks wallpaper. And we all do it. That’s the thing. I think parenting is so hard and so unpredictable that in order to keep a semblance of self respect, we need to knock down the attempts of others. Most days I feel completely lost and the only thing that makes me feel better is thinking that there is someone out there who is just a little more clueless than I am.

We live in a competitive culture and childrearing is no different from any other activity. It’s a race and a game and we are always trying to get one leg up. We want our child to be the best, the smartest, the fastest, the most socially mature. From the moment they are born we are evaluating them and comparing to one another. We weigh them, measure them, and find the circumference of their head. We feel disappointed if they aren’t in the 95% percentile or if they don’t learn how to crawl as fast as their cousin or neighbor. Even little kids are in on it. The other day my five-year-old niece came up to me and asked me if my son wore pull-ups. Though we’ve tried for a little while, we decided that he wasn’t ready to start the process yet. I told her he didn’t. She looked at me with a superior look in her eye. “Well, my sister does,” she said proudly. However, no sooner had the words left her mouth than her sister peed right through her pull-up and onto the patio.

And we wonder why kids grow up with so many problems. We make them crazy by constantly comparing them to others and making them feel as though they need to progress at a certain level in order to be worthwhile human beings. So they grow up feeling the need to better their peers and become crazy parents who breed another generation of crazy, competitive kids. But I have a solution. Why don’t we take a step off the judgment train? Why don’t we allow for differences in temperament and accept the fact that different people parent differently? Why don’t we stop making our children insane by comparing them to everyone and their mom and accept the fact that each child develops at her own pace? Why don’t we realize how hard it is to care for another human life and give our peers a break? And why don’t we extend that break to ourselves and realize that we’re not perfect. Furthermore, our children are going to grow up and blame us for everything regardless of what we do – that’s what my mom always tells me anyway. So we might as well sit back and enjoy these years while we can.

At no time was this more evident than on Sunday mornings.  The alarm would ring at 8 am and I would press the snooze button until 11 am.  Then I’d jump out of bed, grab some clothes and run out the door and try to make the train.  You see, on Saturdays, I would stay out until all hours of the night, living hard and having a ball.  On the way to work on Sunday mornings, I would make a series of phone calls.  These phone calls were ways to help me retrace and rehash the events from the previous night and I’d end them by reassuring whatever friend I was speaking to that I wouldn’t do whatever embarrassing thing I did ever again.  I’d get to work and spend the whole day drinking coca-cola from a can and nursing my hangover.

One husband and a baby later (two if you count the little one on the way), my Sundays are a little different.  I wake up at 5:45 am after an exciting night of doing laundry and watching house hunters with my beloved.  I work at a busy breakfast and lunch café until 3 o’clock.  And on my way home I pick up the local paper and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.  When I get home, I flip off my shoes, get my scissors out and seek through the weekly circulars for all the best deals.
In a few short years I went from the bar hopping queen to the coupon clipping queen.  Pretty lame, right?  Well, though my childless peers may mourn the death of my social stature and my descent into loser-dom, I have to say that there is something very exciting about saving money.  I used to judge coupon clippers.  I’d discard the weekly circulars thinking that a dollar here and a dollar there wouldn’t make much of a difference.  I used to roll my eyes when the blue haired ladies would whip out their coupon books at the grocery store and add ten minutes to my shopping trips.  A dollar here and a dollar doesn’t make that much of a difference when you’re shopping for one, but add a few mouths to the mix and every cent begins to count.  As our household expenses began to mount, I got to a point where I could no longer ignore the savings the circulars offered and I reluctantly picked up a pair of scissors and began clipping my way to leaner budget.

At first, I viewed the whole process with skepticism.  However, it didn’t take long for the coupon bug to bite me.  As odd as it may sound, there is something quite titillating about clipping coupons.  It’s as though with each snip of the scissors, I am sticking it to the man.  With each coupon that I find, I am telling him that he will not break me with exorbitant prices on groceries and household items.  I loved going to the grocery clerk, handing her a stack of coupons, and watching the price of my purchases drop – one dollar at a time.  I started looking at websites and comparing prices on the same items at different stores.  With a little bit of elbow grease and a lot of enthusiasm, I found the best deals in town and knocked tons off my grocery bill.  A few years ago, I would have dropped around $10 for a sophisticated cocktail.  Now, $10 feeds my entire family.  Does that make me a loser?  No, not really.  It just makes me a mom.  I may not be able to have fun in the same way that I used to, but I find excitement where I can and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that!  And moreover, I challenge my skeptical readers to pick up a circular in their Sunday paper and give clipping a whirl.  You may be surprised by how much fun you can have.

My stay at the hospital only strengthened my delusions about motherhood. After the birth of my son, I would only have to push a magical little button and the kind nurses would wheel my pristine baby into the room. I would cuddle and coddle and stare at him until I became bored. I’d push the magical button again and the nurses would whisk the little boy away to the nursery and I would doze off into a deep, peaceful sleep.

The fairytale ended when I brought the babe home and I discovered that in the real world, there was no magical button. Day and night, night and day, the baby was there – crying, sleeping, crapping, crying, vomiting, crying. I had no time to run a non-profit organization. I barely had any time to shower. My anxiety was so great that I had to lug the infant carrier into the bathroom with me. I’d no sooner lather up one arm when my son would start wailing. Under the spell of the fairylike nurses, he was a calm, tranquil child. However, once he crossed the threshold of my Boston apartment he acted like a spirit possessed. Nothing could soothe him, nothing could calm him from his demonic baby fits. He rarely slept and when he did, I rushed to do his laundry since in a few days he managed to pee, poop, and vomit on every piece of fabric in the household. Maybe motherhood was easy when you had a hundred million dollars and five full-time nannies at your disposal. For women living in the real world, I discovered, it was kind of a train wreck.

After I realized that I’d never be the supermom that I envisioned, I picked myself off the couch, put on my coral velour track suit that I got on the clearance rack at Walmart, and began to laugh at myself and this tumultuous journey called motherhood. I recognized that it wasn’t that I was a failure and every other mother in the world was a smiling image of success. It’s that as mothers there are certain things that we feel we can’t say out loud: “I hate the drudgery,” “I miss my old life,” “I think my child was sired by Satan.” Being a mom is rewarding, sure. However, most of the time, it’s downright ugly. But we never talk about the ugly side – the breakdowns, the meltdowns, and all the other downs that are part and parcel with being a mom. So I’m here to break the silence and talk about the ugly stuff – the nitty, the gritty and all the other unglamorous aspects of motherhood with a little bit of cynicism and a lot of fun. Enjoy.