Motherhood

This weekend was all about catching up on some much needed rest. By Friday, I had a raging case of PMS combined with sleep deprivation, due to the fact that Caroline likes to call me into her room at all hours of the night to play a game I like to call “Find It”. I hear her call over the baby monitor, I stumble into her room in a sleep stupor to make sure she’s okay, and discover the only issue is that she would like her pink bunny and can I please find it.

Oh sure, Mama wasn’t doing anything except trying to get in a REM cycle. The pink bunny is much more important.

She has a special knack for picking things that are invariably at the bottom of the toy box. I think it’s all part of some big master plan to cause me to lose my mind due to lack of sleep, so that by the time she’s a teenager, I’ll just sit in a corner and mumble incoherently.

And I know many of y’all might say I shouldn’t go in there, but I’m a sucker for the nighttime calls because I was the original bad sleeper as a child. I’m always afraid that maybe this time something will really be wrong, and she’ll need something other than Squeak E. Mouse from the bottom of the toybox.

Mercifully, she spent the night with Mimi and Bops on Friday night. I’d like to tell y’all that I actually stopped the car to unload my child and her suitcase, but truth be told, I think I just came to a rolling stop and tossed everything out the car door. There is only so much patience for someone who keeps you up all night and then spends the next day telling you that she’s not going to be your friend anymore, “not at Easter, or springtime or nothing”.

And really that’s fine, I have plenty of friends. I’m also willing to bet that I’m going to hear that phrase many times throughout her life, because the bottom line is I’m supposed to be the mama, which by default means I often won’t be her friend.

Anyway, Friday night I went to bed and slept for ten glorious, uninterrupted hours. I woke up and actually got to sit and read the paper. It was like heaven.

Then, P decided to take Caroline to the ranch for the day. Oh merciful God in heaven, do your blessings ever end?

They left and I spent the rest of the morning cleaning up around the house, tossing a few Happy Meal toys in the trash, reading a book, and taking a long, hot shower without anyone waiting for me outside the shower door and asking me a barrage of questions to monitor my shower progress. I blew dry my hair, I put on makeup, and I started to feel like a real, live person again.

Later that afternoon, I went over to P’s sister’s house to celebrate P’s mama’s birthday. P and Caroline met me there and she came running in, excited to tell me what a great day they had even though they didn’t shoot anything. Then, that night, after she was bathed and in her jammies, I held her close to me as we sat on the couch and told her “You’re the light of my life” and she said, “Oh Mama, you’re my best girl”.

And the best part was, the absence had made our hearts grow fonder and for that moment, we were friends again.

This morning, I woke up and stumbled into the bathroom to wash my face. As I looked in the mirror, I saw my reflection staring back at me. Braces on my teeth, a huge pimple on the end of my nose impeding my peripheral vision, and hormones raging inside.

This is why you never hear anyone say “Man, I wish I could be 13 again”.

Since becoming a mama, I have realized that very few things in life can lower your self esteem like being the mother of a toddler. Not only do you have those moments where you wonder if you have anything to talk about other than the horrendous stomach flu we had over the weekend, but you also have a three foot tall person living in your home who feels free to say whatever enters their mind.

Most of y’all know that I named this blog Big Mama due to the fact that Caroline began calling me “Big Mama” last spring. The thing is, her perception of my largeness continues to grow.

Or, in all fairness, I may have put some weight on over the Christmas holidays.

At least once a day, she’ll point to one of my body parts and say “Oh Mama, I can’t wait to have big, big hands like you” or “Mama, when will my nose get HUGE like yours?” or my personal favorite that never fails to make feel like I’m enveloped in a ray of sunlight, “Mama, I want a big, BIG booty just like yours”.

It’s starting to make me feel a little bit like some freak GIGANTOR woman.

Come on kids, gather round for a peek at GIGANTOR woman.

Combine all of this with the abomination, that some would call a wrinkle, that etches itself from my eyebrow to my hairline every morning, and it’s a enough to make a girl wonder if she’s still got it. At all.

On Friday night, Caroline and I were on our way to eat Mexican food with Mimi and Bops when Mimi mentioned that her best friend, who lives out in California, had just gotten over a really bad stomach flu. And because I am an idiot who likes to spit in the face of fate, I remarked, “You know, I’ve been amazed that we haven’t had the stomach flu this year. So many people around us have had the stomach flu and we’ve avoided it.”

In all fairness, after I emitted that foolish statement, I did mention that I should probably knock on wood. However, since I was driving us to dinner in my Ford Escape, there wasn’t any wood or even faux wood grain, to knock on. The Escape, which we pronounce as Es-CAH-PAY in tribute to Dory’s pronounciation of “Escape” in Finding Nemo, ( if you have no idea what I’m talking about, then obviously you haven’t watched the movie 152 times and you have a life) is a company car and they don’t believe in splurging on extra features like real upholstery and the aforementioned wood grain details.

Later that night, after Caroline and I were back home, I put her to bed. I was catching up on all my DVRed shows ( Friday Night Lights, how I love thee) when I heard Caroline wake up crying. I could tell it was a serious cry, not the kind she uses when she just wants me to come in so that she can verify my existence and and ask if it’s morning yet, so I went in her room only to be overwhelmed at the horrendous smell.

I changed the foulness that was her diaper, tucked her back in, and went outside to throw the diaper away. I walked out on the back porch to discover the largest, black spider I have ever seen crawling across the porch. Honestly, it was so big that I didn’t even attempt to squash it with my shoe because I was afraid it would just pick me up and throw me off the porch. I searched for a suitable lethal weapon, decided on a large piece of firewood, and killed that spider dead. Then around midnight, Caroline woke up with another round of diarrhea and it was official that mine was a household cursed with both pestilence and the plague.

I put Caroline in bed with me and at 6:30 a.m., I woke up to the sounds of a gagging cough, which I realized was the sound of Caroline throwing up. I got her out of the bed before it joined with all the sand on my sheets (see, it totally paid off that I didn’t change those sheets) and she proceeded to throw up all over the hardwood floors.

To make the situation even better, I had hit the stomach flu trifecta. Home alone, throw up on everything, and completely out of laundry detergent. I’m telling y’all you can’t hit odds like that in Vegas.

Thankfully, it seems to be a short lived bug (much like that enormous spider on my porch) and she is doing better. As for me, let’s just say that if there is even the slightest chance you might acquire a stomach flu from your child, it really would be best to eat something for dinner other than chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes from Luby’s washed down with a Corona Light.

That may seem like common sense, but apparently for me, it’s not.

Today is the first day of my vacation. One of the benefits of working for the bank is that I’ve been there long enough to accrue some serious vacation time, so I am officially done for the rest of the year.

WHOO HOO!

There is no limit to what I might get done in the next week. The house might get clean, some presents may get wrapped and some laundry might get folded. The mind boggles.

Please note that everything is prefaced with might. No point in overextending myself.

Of course Christmas vacation isn’t quite what it used to be, which was basically a chance to sleep until noon, catch up on Days of Our Lives, followed by a trip to the mall and maybe a movie later that night (which would explain why I saw Pretty in Pink 67 times).

Now vacation means I’m still up at some unfortunate hour, because for me anything before 8:30 a.m. is just sad. Oh, I’ll try to get Caroline to get in bed with me and watch a movie or something while Mama sleeps, but since she takes after her Daddy she has this peculiar way of greeting the day with joy and a tenacious can-do attitude. She’s a little like Matt Foley from SNL.

So, we might catch up on some crucial Noggin programming because heaven only knows what Dora has been up to, although it’s a safe bet that she’s still searching for the chocolate tree in the peppermint forest where her abuela used to live.

Then later we could head to the mall, but that just means we’ll end up in Pottery Barn Kids or The Disney Store where Caroline can whine about how she needs every piece of inventory in the entire store and Santa isn’t coming soon enough so we should just buy it today. And then I’ll drag her by the hand into Banana Republic to look for a few gifts and allow the well groomed salespeople wearing cashmere that has never been defiled by toddler hands to give us everything they have in the once over department as they have a spiritual holiday moment by thanking God that they don’t work at Pottery Barn Kids.

As for a movie, we could check out Happy Feet or whatever other animated movie is out there, but the problem with that is first of all, Caroline is completely opposed to loud noises that aren’t coming directly from her and secondly, sitting in a movie theater burns absolutely no energy which is a must for a child hopped up on candy canes and Pottery Barn Kids desire.

Ahhh yes, vacation. At least once I go back to work on January 2, I’ll get a chance to relax and unwind.