Motherhood

  • Don’t hassle me, I’m local

    Yesterday, Caroline and I went to the grocery store. Now y’all know how I feel about the store and to top it off I waited until the afternoon to make the trip. I don’t want to exaggerate because I want to be credible, so I will be completely honest and tell you that it was 140 degrees outside.

    As we made our way up and down the aisles, Dwayne (the H.E.B. manager) saw us and came bearing the dreaded Buddy Buck. He gave Caroline THREE Buddy Bucks and the news that they have a whole NEW Buddy Buck machine. You can imagine my excitement.

    Our whole trip turned into a barrage of questions such as “When are we going to be done? Where’s the new Buddy Buck machine? When are we going to pay?” At one point I was putting something in the cart when I heard Caroline say “Oh no, Mama! I dropped my beautiful thing.” I had no idea what she was talking about until I turned and realized she had dropped the Buddy Buck. She has lost her mind over these things.

    Finally, we check out and begin the beating that is the Buddy Buck machine. Keep in mind we get THREE turns because we have THREE Buddy Bucks. I’m trying to help her as much as she’ll let me, when all of a sudden I hear myself being heckled by some 8 year old boy in a private school uniform. He’s shouting “Not that way, you need to pick it up there. Move it this way, no this way!” Are you kidding me?

    Finally we get our treasured stickers and it’s a good thing because our milk was beginning to boil and so was my temper. Heckled by an 8 year old? Seriously.

    I called Gulley on the way home from the store to tell her about my experience and she said “Oh I know, they gave us FOUR Buddy Bucks this morning because they want everyone to use the new machine. But the good news is that we got Number 20, so we almost have enough stickers to get our FREE stuffed Buddy Buck keychain!” Apparently, Caroline isn’t the only one who has lost perspective on the Buddy Buck. Of course, me being the savvy mom I am, I didn’t even realize the stickers served any other purpose besides just being stickers. And you know what? I’m keeping that piece of information to myself.

  • Just call me Dr. Dobson

    Caroline has always been an early riser. I can’t tell you how many days we have been up and ‘at ’em before sunrise or as Caroline says when it’s “still darken outside”. Really, I blame her father. Sadly, he too is an early riser. It’s all about genetics.

    I heard Tina Fey on The Tonight Show the other night talking about her new baby and she said that the worst feeling in the world is being up for the day and realizing that The Today Show isn’t even on yet. I feel her pain.

    This summer Caroline has started going to bed a little later, so I hoped that would translate into a little sleep in time for Mom. You know, like maybe 7:00 a.m. But oh no, she is still up before the crack of dawn.

    So last night in a fit of parenting expertise and brilliance, I put an alarm clock in her room with huge digital numbers. I also took a sheet of paper, taped it to her lamp and wrote 7:00.

    I showed it to her and told her that in the morning when the clock looked like the piece of paper, she could call me and I would come get her. I was truly inspired by my own brilliance and I stayed up late last night just relishing the thought of sleeping in until 7:00 (that’s a sad commentary on my life).

    At 6:03 a.m. I hear “Mama, come get me, Mama, come get me”. I gave her a few minutes thinking that my plan might work, but finally realized she wasn’t giving up. I walked into her room and discovered the fatal flaw to my plan.

    When it’s still dark outside, you can’t see a sign above the clock in your room that says 7:00. Feel free to submit this idea to all the best parenting magazines.

  • Mama said there’d be days like this

    Last night Caroline decided that she wanted to spend the night with her Mimi and Bops, which is always totally fine with me. P. and I didn’t have any big plans so I just cooked dinner and we relaxed in the peace and quiet. I made homemade banana pudding and I have to say it was delicious. Best of all, I slept that long, hard sleep that you can only get when you know you’re not going to hear a little voice over the baby monitor saying “MAMA, come rock me!”

    This morning I went to pick up Caroline pretty early because I knew she’d con her way into the swimming pool and after a rainstorm last night, it was way too cold for a morning swim. Thinking I was just running over to pick her up and bring her right home, I brushed my teeth, threw on cutoffs, a Texas A&M 1993 SWC champs t-shirt (it looks as nice as you’d think a 13 year old t-shirt would look), and my flip-flops and headed out the door.

    As I was walking up the front walk at Mimi and Bops’ house, I discovered that I was wearing one hot pink and green flip-flop and one black flip-flop. Nice.

    If you’re picturing how shabby I looked, multiply that image by 1000 and you’ve got it.

    I quickly found out that Mimi had promised Caroline a trip to Shipley’s for donuts so I figured oh well, any place that opens at 4 a.m. has seen worse than mismatched flip-flops.

    Apparently our next promised destination was to an upscale baby store that sells satin pillows. Caroline’s satin pillow had “broken” the night before and Mimi told her we’d get a replacement first thing in the morning. Don’t ask me why I agreed to go there in my mismatched shoes. Lack of caffeine or sense, not sure which.

    Once in the store, Caroline is weighing the merits of each pillow very carefully. As she told the saleslady (who was very nice considering the tacky state of her clientele) “I have a little head so I need a little pillow”. We looked at pink pillows, yellow pillows, and purple pillows and then I looked down and saw a puddle where no puddle had been. Oh yes, the child of the very unkempt mother had tee-teed right on the floor. It was a proud moment.

    I apologized profusely, cleaned up our little mess, quickly paid for the pillow and got out of there with my dignity a little worse for the wear.

    This afternoon I had a meeting that was so boring that I can’t even do it justice with words. There’s an episode of Friends where Joey is telling Chandler how much he doesn’t like Janice and he says “she makes me want to rip my own arm off and throw it at her to get her to quit talking.” That was my meeting.

    But the good news is that tonight P. fried fish for dinner and he does make the best fish in the world and Caroline went to bed without a peep so that’s always a blessing. Who knows? Tomorrow my shoes might even match.

  • You’re no buddy of mine

    Grocery shopping has definitely become a different experience since I had Caroline. When it was just P. and me, we couldn’t have finished a gallon of milk in a month much less a week. So once a week, Caroline and I head to our neighborhood H.E.B. for a big shopping trip.

    H.E.B. has been so kind as to provide all sorts of things to make shopping “easier” for moms. The Wiggles car/cart that you can borrow for $1.00 is a fab idea except that it really holds a very limited amount of groceries which lest we forget, is the reason we’re at the GROCERY store.

    They also have a racecar cart that is the SUV equivalent of shopping carts. Trying to maneuver this thing through the aisles while being directed by a donut eating toddler requires super human strength, dexterity and patience. You can guarantee you’re going to take the skin off someone’s heel before your trip is over.

    Once we’ve loaded up with groceries and go to pay, we encounter the Buddy Buck. The Buddy Buck has quickly become the bane of my existence. Caroline is obsessed with the Buddy Buck. Our whole trip has become a running commentary on when we’re getting the Buddy Buck, how many Buddy Bucks, is the Buddy Buck machine working today.

    The Buddy Buck is a fake dollar with a picture of a grocery bag taunting you with his smug grin on the front of it. The Buddy Buck goes into one of those toy machines with the grabby thing (technical term) that grabs a toy and drops it down the slot. My problem with the Buddy Buck is twofold.

    1. To play the game I have to get Caroline out of the cart and she has to “DO IT MYSELF” which takes forever when you’re looking at a cart full of groceries that are melting in the hot Texas heat.

    2. Eight out of ten times the Buddy Buck machine isn’t working so I have to deal with the toddler meltdown caused by the unfairness of life.

    And just so you know, when the machine is actually working and you get the prize, the “toy” is a plastic bubble thing with a number sticker. Caroline puts that #8 sticker on her chest like it’s an Olympic medal.

    Gulley was at the store last week and she was telling me about how she’d had this epiphany of sorts that she just needs to be patient with her boys, that grocery shopping is a slow process that requires donuts, balloons, and Buddy Bucks. She was feeling really proud of her newfound attitude when she spotted another mom pushing a cart with a little 2 year old girl pushing her very own Little Tikes cart through the store following the mom. Gulley said the mom was loudly saying “Oh, you’re right, we DO need cheese. You are SO SMART” or “That’s SO SMART, we are out of peanut butter”. She said the whole process was unbelievably slow and painful to watch.

    Gulley told me this whole story on the phone later on that day and said she couldn’t believe the patience of that mom. So Gulley asked me “Would you load up your Little Tikes shopping cart and bring it to H.E.B. so that Caroline could follow you around and shop?”

    I thought about it and told her yes, yes I sure would…if it were the Apocalypse.

  • That salmonella will get ya

    Three years ago today, I woke up at 3:00 a.m. with the worst stomachache I have ever had. We had gone to a church dinner at a friend’s house earlier that evening and as I was lying in bed in complete agony I kept thinking that surely I was dying of salmonella poisoning from the chicken spaghetti.

    Because I am so in tune with my body, it never occurred to me, until about 2 hours later, that MAYBE I was in labor, seeing as how I was nine months pregnant. Now granted, it was two weeks until my due date but the fact that I thought I had food poisoning instead of a baby on the way was basically complete denial.

    I waited until 6:30 when I heard P. start to stir, to tell him that I thought I was in labor. His first question, filled with the utmost care, was “do I have time to take a shower?” His second question was to ask what the date was because Gulley had predicted that I would have my baby on August 2nd. When I told him it was August 2nd, he said “That Gulley, how’d she know that?”

    We spent the morning calling our families to let them know that we maybe, kind of thought that the baby might be on the way. P.’s mom was already planning on coming over to help me get my kitchen set up, because did I mention that we had just moved back in to our remodeled house 2 weeks before and had new countertops finally installed the previous morning? My kitchen consisted of thirty boxes that needed to be unpacked.

    My mother-in-law came over and we proceeded to unpack all of the boxes and I would stop every 9-10 minutes to have a contraction. Like a crazy woman, I kept insisting that I would not even CONSIDER going to the hospital until the kitchen was finished. My logic was if it didn’t happen now, my baby would leave for college after having spent a life at home eating on dishes pulled out of boxes, which probably wasn’t that far from the truth.

    Around 4 p.m., P., his mom, my sister and her husband, and Gulley basically forced me into the car so that I could deliver this child at the hospital instead of in my newly organized kitchen which would have wreaked havoc on my hardwood floors.

    Caroline was born at 2:14 a.m. the next morning, so really I had PLENTY of time.

    Speaking of pain, some of you know that I am currently going through the hell that is adult orthodontia. This morning was my monthly visit to my orthodontist who really should just put his foot on my chest so that he can get these things a little tighter.