The Forefront of Everything

Another summer weekend has come and gone. This was another special 4 day weekend that I was fortunate to have with Emma. We pretty much had all day Friday and Saturday to ourselves and while I experienced a few moments of frustration (because I was with a moody toddler), I really enjoyed the majority of our time together. This brings me back to the ever troubling feeling, the longing in my soul to be a SAHM. I think the warm weather definitely has something to do with it as I did not nearly have this strong of a desire over the winter months (also I was home a lot anyway with a sick baby).  I am very much a get up and go type of person so having warm weather and a person to share it with is the best. Of course Monday came and my magic spell was broken and the reality of trying to support my family has come steamrolling back into view.

It’s still a new sensation to me (being a working mom) and I am still struggling to cope with it. I haven’t felt the urge to stay home so strongly since I first put Emma into daycare about a year ago. I had such bad anxiety then that I pretty much didn’t eat for a week straight and I would go down to see her at daycare at least twice a day. I have thankfully made it past that terrible panicky feeling of a year ago and am left more with a dull aching feeling. It’s more of a small emptiness that lingers within my day to day existence. I am keeping the feeling at bay knowing we have a week’s vacation coming up and I have one more long holiday weekend with her. I am also trying to keep my focus on finally reaching that next career milestone. Another reason I have lost steam on this blog (but not love for it!) is awhile back I made the conscious decision to put all of my efforts into moving my professional career forward. I had at one time thought I would focus more on marketing this blog and developing my product endorsement skills, but after some meditation on it I have come to the conclusion that this space is for documenting my motherhood journey and connecting with others, as well as to have a creative outlet. In that regard, I have come up with a topic for a possible book or short story and I am going back and forth in my head on how to flesh it out. You see, I have been a writer my whole life. I have stories written from when I was 10 years old (I actually wrote a book series back then if you can believe it- in a notebook, not published) and with the birth of my child I have found my written voice again. I am hoping to muster up the courage and sanity to bring something substantial together and submit it for publication. We shall see. 

I guess this is sort of everything that has been currently swirling around in my head; missed moments and career aspirations. The struggle for balancing motherhood is always at the forefront of everything in my life. Sometimes it’s hard to suppress the wounds of the balancing battle so I had to share them this time. Until next time…

What’s that you say? You want a look at our fabulous 4 day weekend because this post needs a pick me up from all my wah wah….well ok…since you insist!

Pics from this weekend: 

We start off on Wednesday, Emma was festive and excited for her 4th of July celebration at daycare!

Then came the 4th of July! We went to hang out with some friends for a bbq and some kiddie pool fun!!

This little girl looooves watermelon! This was her third piece. I love how she is holding onto it for dear life!

 

Loved this dress! 

  

After passing out for the night from all of her pool fun, mommy and daddy shared some adult time and enjoyed out stress free fireworks viewing from in between the trees in the backyard. They looked a lot better than this, my phone did not do them justice.

 The came Friday, my extra day off. I took Emma on a trip down memory lane, we went for a walk on the path I used to take her a year ago when she was just a few months old, when I wanted to get out of the house. This time though she was pointing and checking out all of the amazing nature around her!

Then Saturday we celebrated her uncle's birthday. I tried to style her hair for the occasion but it didn't go to well. 

Then came lazy Sunday. We indulged in some more pool time and hose fun. We ended with a trip back to the creek with daddy in tow! All in all it was a great four days. It was hard going back to work today.

 

Summer Fun and Dropping Balls

  

It’s summer time, the land of laid back fun. Lazy hot summer days filled with lemonade sipping and pool side sitting, and long book reading….or at least that’s how it used to be for me. I remember when my biggest worry was finishing a book after the library was closed and having to wait until the next day to get one.  Now, I feel like my sunblock saturated hands are finding it hard to continue juggling all of the balls of working motherhood. 

Allow me to elaborate; summer to me is a sacred time that comes around for only a few short months each year. I find myself needing to savor every moment of it with my family. Not like this is the only time I ever get to spend with them, but if our winter months this year pan out like last year, we will all be sick half of the time and fun frolicking will be limited, so I am trying to do as much of it as I can now. Not to mention there are so many more magnificent activities in the summer; the pool, the beach, the farmers markets, the fairs, and any other awesomely awesome event I just HAVE to go to. 

So you see, with all of this planning and fun having something ends up teetering off balance and I find myself overwhelmed and exhausted some days. I am sure this is not just a working mom thing but darn it if I didn’t wish I had a few extra hours in the day to get stuff done. 

I’ve been swamped at work for the most part lately, and I have been trying to apply/ interview for other jobs which is a job in and of itself. I also have a household to haphazardly run (let’s face it, I will never have a clean, organized living space) and then the most important of all, spending time with my Emma! I also try to blog a little bit too, but you can tell from my 5 posts in the last month that that has been taking a back seat as well. This weekend the household ball which I have been letting hover dangerously close to the ground, finally came crashing down. I came to the realization that there would be no real salvaging the housework when I washed our beach towels that had sand and salt water on them from last weekend (yes they had been sitting in a wet lump on the floor for a week) only to use them at the pool the next day and notice that they are back in their wet lump state waiting anxiously for the day when they can be clean and dry for more than 24 hours. 

It didn’t help that our dryer stopped functioning again. We have had a love hate relationship with our dryer for the last few months, in which when it works we love it and when it doesn’t we hate it. I spend every weekend holding my breath wondering if this would be the final load. Well, this weekend it happened again, I was finally getting around to washing our sand encrusted clothes from the last weekend’s beach trip and the dryer conked out with approximately 4.5 loads of laundry left to go. Grand! So I am now going to be further behind than I was before and we still have clothes from two weeks ago that are “ocean fresh.” The rest of the house has been hanging on by a thread as well. 

                        Here would be the aftermath of the dryer breaking. We got "creative."

But, to be honest, we have had a blast out and about adventuring every weekend and I have loved every minute of it and we really have no intention of slowing down (although I am looking forward to planning at least one weekend with minimal outings.)  The other new development is that I find now more than before that after an outing which lasts just a few hours, I am exhausted, to the point of not being able to function or get anything else done. On Saturday this past weekend, we went to the pool for about 2.5 hours or so and afterward, forget it I could barely move off the couch. Same thing happened on Sunday after 4 hours at the zoo. I had to just relax on the couch when we got home. Luckily, both times Emma was happy to engage in free play while I rested. I am sure part of my exhaustion has to do with spending the entire time on both outings running after an energy filled toddler. Either way, the household chores ball doesn’t look like it will be put back into regular juggling rotation for a while and the fun seeker in me is ok with that.

Happy Summer Everyone! What has your family been up to? How do you manage to juggle everything in your day?

Our First Road Trip/ Beach Trip

It never ceases to amaze me, this journey through motherhood. You think you have it all figured out, you think you know it all and wham! You find yourself in a new situation with a new set of circumstances that you were not prepared for, although you tried to prepare for but I am slowly realizing that no amount of preparing prepares you for the wayward ways of a toddler.

Here it was, Thursday afternoon and like any Type-A planner, I was packing and checking off everything we would need for our first long(ish) road trip/ beach trip with Emma. I had done what any mother would have done the night before, panicked that we didn’t have enough towels/ sunscreen/ whogeemawhatsits and ran to Target. Half the store in my cart later, I felt a sense of security that my family would be safe from any “I forgot to get that mishaps” because, you know, we were staying in the total middle of nowhere suburbs of Hampton VA (which turned out we ended up across the street from a Target) but I digress.

Fast forward to Friday afternoon, I picked Emma up from daycare to be greeted with a loud cough. Admittedly, she had had a runny nose upon drop off but this was a full blow old man cough. EEK. Without missing a beat, I got her in the car and called the pediatricians office while en route. I figured if they told me they couldn’t squeeze me in I would just show up on their doorstep. As it turned out, they had time for me and upon inspection, I was told Emma had a case of “postnazal drip.” Grand! We had already booked a nonrefundable hotel room and it was supposed to be a trip with Thomas’ twin brother and his family to see our nephew in his MMA tournament and to celebrate the twin’s birthday. With a heavy heart I drove home and informed Thomas of the situation. He was already on his way home from work so we agreed to hash out the details when he got there.

The thing of it is, when he got home, his car would not go into park. The gear shift had malfunctioned. I could not believe it. A sick baby and a broken gear shift, it looked like the universe was grounding us for sure. This lead to hours worth of tools clanking and YouTube referencing and various neighbors stopping by. All the while I was taking a load off thinking we weren’t going anywhere for the night. Believe it or not, sometime after my husband got home from the auto parts store to get the part he needed (he took my car there) Charlie, one of our dogs, started limping! I kid you not a coughing toddler, a broken vehicle, and now a limping dog literally in the span of 2-3 hours.

Panic was not an option (I was too tired). I remained extremely calm and somehow over the next hour, the situations resolved themselves. Charlie’s limp was temporary and YouTube and glue fixed Thomas’ car. As for Emma, I looked up pediatrician offices and the nearest hospital to where we were staying. Trust me I did not take her health lightly. I thought long and hard about the consequences of driving 3.5 hours away with a less than healthy child, but in the end I decided to give it a whirl. (To not leave you in suspense, somehow when she woke up on Saturday, she was 100% better. She didn’t cough the entire time we were there! Her nose didn’t even run at all! I was very grateful.) However, that didn’t mean we didn’t have our fair share of problems along the way.

For starters, we planned the whole trip so we would be driving while Emma slept figuring that would be the logical thing to do. With the car delay we did end up leaving until around 10pm on Friday. We stopped two times, both of which Emma woke up. By the time we got to the hotel she was fully awake thinking it was time to start the day. The next obstacle we had was the play yard. Emma is a picky sleeper to begin with. She won’t nap or sleep if the conditions aren’t just right, so being wide awake and then being laid down to sleep in a foreign environment were two big strikes against us. It didn’t help that mommy and daddy were right there in the room with her which of course meant it was time to get up and party. Two hours later (yup at 3am) she finally went back to sleep (after much protesting.) I felt bad that we had disturbed her routine but I was so tired at that point I could barely think.

Saturday morning came and several cups of coffee later, we were off to see her 7 year old cousin, Justin compete in his second national title event for mixed martial arts. The event took place at a large sportsplex. There were 8 match mats set up in the middle of a large gym. I didn’t know it at the time, but Justin would have 5 matches over the course of a 4 hour period. This ran right through lunch time and nap time and Emma was running on little sleep as it was. Luckily there were a lot of families with young kids, so having an erratic toddler running around blended in with the background more than anything.

 

 

 In fact, the back corner of the gym seemed to be the toddler corralling area. Dads and kids running every which way.

We were goofing off here, but you can see serious business was going on ....just look at the faces in the background.

We ended up leaving early to grab lunch while Emma took her standard car nap. Then it started to rain and I was worried we wouldn’t make it to the beach all weekend, so I did again, what any mom would do…passed out and took a hour long nap. This left poor Thomas to watch Emma which was extremely difficult in a non-baby proofed hotel room. We brought distractions but Emma is in the phase were she only wants to play with things she can’t have which were in abundance in the room. That made anytime in the hotel room stressful for me.

Saturday night, we ended up going to the indoor pool at Thomas’ brother’s hotel. Emma loves hanging out in the pool with her dad! We took her out twice and she would reach over for her dad each time. We didn’t last long at the pool running off of only 3 hours of sleep and all, so it was an early night for us. Once again Emma was not trying to go to sleep in the play yard but we had started the night night routine early so she finally went down at 8pm.

Then came Sunday! Sunny Sunday! The sun was out and we FINALLY got to go to the beach! I am a huuuge beach bum and I was worried Emma might not like the beach. It’s a love I was wanting so desperately to share with her. She was definitely scared and bewildered at first. She did not like that her feet sunk into the sand which didn’t give her enough traction to run. That upset her for a while, until she saw her cousins playing in the sand. All of a sudden, tears were replaced by joy and happy curiosity. She became totally enamored with the sand. I was so excited to see her happy and actually enjoying herself. I am so glad I will be able to share my love of the ocean with her for years to come.

 

 

 

This is how Emma chills in her stroller btw. She is all about the laid back attitude. 

 

This was the rainbow we saw on the way home. No joke fairy tale ending to the trip :)

So that’s it, we made it through the trip, crazy circumstances and all. I am so thankful that we shared in more firsts together as a family.

Our Weekend in Not Enough Pictures and a Look Ahead at Next Weekend

Well friends another amazing summer weekend has come and gone. I am trying to savor every summer moment while I can. I had this past Friday off and I actually dropped Emma off at daycare while I got my hair and nails done!?!?! Me time to the extreme is what I called it and it was amazing. I still felt a twitch of mommy guilt for not spending the whole day with her since those for us are few and far between, but I do have a few extra days off this summer and I fully plan on getting in some quality mommy baby time. This past Friday, after the me time, I picked up Emma after lunch and finished my errands. Then we went on a special trip to Gymboree! She enjoyed having the whole place to herself and loved running and climbing and throwing balls all over the room. She has discovered how to climb on things these past few weeks which is fun and scary all at the same time. 

Then came Saturday and Emma’s crankiness went onto a whole other level. I am coming to the conclusion that she gets bored with the usual toy set up at home pretty quickly. So we switched things up a bit by taking her outside. She got a water table for her birthday from Nana and was excited to get into it! She loved scooping the water out onto her feet. Eventually this too became blasé and she found a secret passage way into the house (aka the dog door)! She kept looking inside to make sure the magical door didn’t eventually take her into a different dimension, one with more interesting things to do.

After a few more entertaining minutes at the dog door, she decided the next logical thing to do would be to run toward the stairs of the deck at lightning speed., where I learned that she has already discovered the sit and shimmy move (also referred to as the swoop and scoot) which had me laughing tears at one point and then crying tears of frustration the next. Unsure about the sit and shimmy…allow me to explain my friend. You see often a child will sporadically decide to flee the premises at unprecedented intervals throughout the duration of the day. Without warning, your child will suddenly take off and you will not react fast enough to stop them initially, but luckily for you, your limbs are longer than theirs, therefore allowing you to catch up to the child and make contact with an arm or hand. Momentarily you will breathe a sigh of relief as the child’s speedy conquest to run off a cliff has come to an end. As you begin to let your guard down, the child suddenly plops down to the ground in a “my body has gone limp” kind of way. The first time this happens and possibly the second, your adult body slowly exhales as it appears you have won the battle of the great escape. But do not be so naïve friends, this child has no intention of going with the flow. As soon as you let your guard down said child will wrench their hand out of your grasp, spin around, shimmy out of your reach and 180 degree it back to their original destination (aka the evil mountain stairs).

I laughed the first time this happened, my clever little girl figured out how to get away from me to get where she wanted to go (or try to). The second time she did it I finally realized what was going on, open defiance. I thought I had a few more months to go before it got to this level and I innocently thought that nothing this devious would happen until she was a teenager, but low and behold, here I was at the mercy of my child’s first real attempt at not only trying to get away from me, but trying to outwit me as well. I quickly schooled the young grasshopper on who would ultimately win in this battle and redirected her impressionable mind back to the water.

After our little tryst on the deck, we came inside so mommy could run around like a mad woman to get everything packed for a 7 hour hang out with Nana. Thomas and I had a wedding to go to, an event that lasted more than an hour or two, which has been our normal outing MO when it comes to babyless romps. I was a little nervous leaving my now defiant child with her grandmother but wanting to see my friend get married won out, and five bags crammed full of stuff later, we were off to Nana’s.

We had an amazing time at the wedding. It was bitter sweet in a way seeing my friend get married. Mostly sweet because he is a wonderful, caring person who deserves to be happy, but also a bit bitter because this is another reminder that my friends and I are growing up, but hopefully not apart. These are my college friends, the ones I used to spend every day with and now we all have careers and families and grown up non-kegger things to do. We really didn’t end up taking that many pictures because our digital camera is dead and my iPhone is about half a picture away from telling me it can’t take it anymore so do your best to imagine us all dressed up here (I know hard to do since we never are).

So the next day was…Father’s Day! Hurah! My husband got to sleep in while I cooked breakfast and did the dishes. Then he got his present…a picture book with pictures from his first year as a daddy. He also got a cast iron skillet that he requested. We had lunch at his favorite place and ended the day meeting up with my dad for a bbq. All in all it was a sweet, low key kind of day which we enjoyed.

Today just so happens to be my husband’s birthday so the celebrating continues! We are planning a beach trip get away this weekend with his twin brother and their family to celebrate. It will be Emma’s first time to the beach and her first time in the car for longer than an hour….dun dun dun! Stay Tuned for how we make it through that one.

How did you deal with your child’s first signs of defiance?