The Circle of Cute

I spent most of my 20s responding, when asked about babies, that I would have kids *just* after I lost my figure, so I could blame it on them. And that's pretty much the plan we followed - my daughter was born a month or so shy of my 33rd birthday. I wasn't unattractive or even fat, exactly, but I was pretty sure that I'd crested the Pretty Hill and was on the downslope.

And then I had a baby. Then I had another! Mission: DestroyAbs was completed. But I got to blame it on the babies. What freedom! If someone says I'm fat - even if that someone is me - I can respond "I sacrificed my Hotness on the Altar of Having Babies" and they would be baby-hating jerks to even think that something as paltry as hotness measures up against the continuation of the species. It's like a Get-Out-Of-Being-Fit card.

This has actually taken a lot of the pressure off, and allowed me to be less critical of my own flabdomen - it's like I'm fooling even myself. Except I'm not. I'm *convincing* myself. I actually think it's worth any downgrade in my appearance (lack of time/energy/etc) to have participated in the creation of the two perfect-in-their-own-way beings that have earned the names Luna and Sol - my crazy beautiful tidal girl and my sunshine and warm-fuzzies boy. I look @ these tiny humans, and back at myself. And sometimes I may really feel that they've somehow leeched my own youth and beauty. But they wear it so much better. They should keep it.

I appreciate the thought, but your shirt is lying.

Mommyworld Problems 1.0

Every once in a while DM lets me use my tablet.  Sometimes I draw things on it.  This will be the start of a series of crappy free-app touchscreen drawings I call Mommyworld problems.  The art will NOT be good, because I'm never allowed to use the playbook for more than 2 mins, and as aforementioned only have the crappy free apps to draw with.  :)

I call this panel Noise Rays & Stinklines Version One.

Two under Two: Mommy Guilt

I am one of those people who always wanted my child to have a sibling, and for them to be close in age.  I've loved having three brothers - two years older, eleven months older, and three years younger than me.  Because of the age-closeness, my two older brothers and I were inseperable until the pretween gender divide happened, and I wanted my daughter to have a built-in playmate.

So, when DM was about six or seven months old, we started trying for a second, knowing that it would likely take months and we wanted them less than two years apart.  We hit the jackpot first time, instead, and so DM wasn't even 1.5 years old when her brother arrived.

Parenting two children is hard (duh!).  Not only is there the issue of carefully dividing/sharing your attention so no one feels left out, there's trying to co-ordinate -- please oh please coordinate JUST ONE -- naps, there's spending your entire day either breastfeeding one or spoonfeeding the other, the double-diapers, the she's-crying-because-he's-crying ...

There is also the Guilt.

I did not expect the Guilt.  The Guilt comes with The Professor, and it has many aspects.  But it really boils down to one question that hooks its claws in and perches on my shoulder: Is the Professor taking my time/attention/love away from DM?  And vice-versa?

The first time I had to decide which baby was going to be left to cry while I tried to comfort the other one, my brain did the equivalent of a blue screen of death.  I stood there and started crying and that just made everything worse.  Trevor wasn't home to help me with one while I tended the other.  I had to do this on my own.  It really really sucked.

Thankfully the Prof is a pretty easy baby.  Not *the* Easy Baby - that unicorn of silent snuggly sleep-through-the-night grins and diaper-contained poops, but the cousin of that baby, perhaps.  He's like ... the Griffin of Babies.  Less OMG rare and sparkly and perfect, more ... eagle-headed and lion-bodied?  I'm not good with metaphors, OK?  He's happy by nature, resonably quiet unless he's overtired and/or being bugged by his sister, and he sleeps pretty soundly, most of it by night. 

Darth Molly, however, is aptly nom-de-plumed.  She is a tempest of wants that feel like needs and needs that feels like OMGNEEDITNOWs.  She needs to be handled like a celebutante or she explodes into toddling Rage.  So I've gotten used to walking on eggshells with her when she's upset, and she's grown used to it.  Spoiled, maybe.  Things have had to change.

Now I know that neither child is going to dissolve into an actual puddle of tears if I can't answer him or her within the first minute.  In fact, I've learned that a lot of DM's toddler-tears are alligator in nature, and quickly left off when they don't get the result she wants.  I'm reminding myself that it's OK that I have to share myself between the two of them.

I try to spend real time talking and singing and dancing and playing with both kids.  I try not to fawn over The Prof while DM is not entertained by something or someone else.  When The Prof falls asleep and DM is still awake I follow her around and basically obey her whims and act the dancing monkey for her amusement.  It's the two-under-two equivalent of being an every-second-weekend dad.  I try to compress a whole day's worth of fun into that one hour nap, even if I'm tired or would really like to shower instead.  On the rare occasions that The Prof is soundly asleep already, I try to put DM to bed.  I often feel like I'm still not doing enough.  I remind myself that I wasn't scarred by my parents having to tend four of us at once, so why should my kids be?

I can't help it.  It keeps coming back, no matter what I do.  The Guilt is a ninja that strikes when my guard is down, and I have to fend off the shurikens of doubt and just do my Mommy job.

I guess in a few months The Professor will be crawling, then walking, and the two kids will have each other as playmates, and no one will feel unattended to.  And then they'll have each other for life.  And that's gotta be worth a few months of agonizing mommy-guilt, right?

I hope they don't hate each other. 

Raising NerdBabies

I am a self-proclaimed Nerd, married to a self-identified Geek.  We've got some mainstreamy aspects, but in general we're both a little march-to-your-own-drummer with leanings towards the absurd.  I like us both this way, but it's caused us both problems at one point or another.

Now we have two kids, and I have so many opportunities to influence them, to direct them gently down one path or another.  And of course I want that path to involve tiny Jedi costumes, is that so wrong?

Well, is it?  I'm trying to decide.  I know that pushing them into an activity or hobby would be wrong, but is it wrong to simply...restrict/engineer which activities they're exposed to, and encouraged to enjoy?
And is it wrong, from another angle, to encourage nerdish tendencies that can separate them from the "average" or "normal" kids?  Surely it's not wrong to encourage self-expression, but @ what point does encouraging your children to be like yourself become self-indulgent?  These are questions I'm just starting to ask myself, as my oldest child is just getting to that small-person stage where she sort of understands me.

Ah, screw it.  Tomorrow we have Star Wars pancakes for dinner.  May the Fourth be with you.

Popstars & Superspies

I have a confession.  (OK, I've got dozens, but this is the one you get today, world!)We go to McDonald's sometimes for dinner, and I buy my toddler happy meals.  It takes her two days to finish the chicken nuggets, and some fries sometimes go to waste (because leftover fries?  neh.) but the toy is ALWAYS the first thing to come out of the box.  She knows to look for it when she sees the happymeal box, and goes for it no matter how hungry she is.
The toy is, really, the reason we get her the happymeal.

My beef is with McDonald's toy selection.  More specifically, I have a problem with their happymeal toy gender division.

The first time I got a happymeal I was a bit surprised when they asked "boy or girl?" in response to my order.  But I said "girl" and we got a super-sweet My Little Pony.  In all honesty, that was why I started getting the happymeals for DM - I had dreams of a vast MLP collection that we would spend hours playing with.
Of course the next time we went, the toy was something less impressive and much more painful to step on barefoot, but that's another story.....

Yesterday I managed to look at the toy selection display that they have in the restaurant (we usually go through the drivethrough because the children are about to explode) and saw the most-recent toy DM had gotten - a little fake MP3 player that plays a clip of popsong from a nickleodeon show (she LOVES this one-button musicplayer and carries it around and dances to it.)  I looked over the rest of the collection - all merch for this show, but most of it was...shiny plastic princessey crap.  Gaudy toy necklace-type stuff.
Then I looked at the "boy" toys in the display.  The boy toys were all things *I* would want, let-alone a toddler with a taste for adventure.  The toys were SpyTech.

We've been cheated out of spy toys by gender stereotyping and I didn't even know it!  By not asking what the toys were, I allowed this system of toy-dispensing to not only keep me in the dark, but pimp chunks of pink plastic to my child, while denying her night-vision goggles.  For shame! 
I'm not saying I'd *always* go for the boy-toys, but I would like to know what the options are.  And how problematic would it be, really, to stop calling them "boy" and "girl" toy selections, and just refer to them by whatever licensed merchandising tie-in they're attached to?  If asked "would you like a toy affiliated with a musical show for pre-tween, or faux spy-gear?" I know which one I'd choose.  But "boy or girl?" that's just too universal and vague and ready for misinterpretation.  That sort of thinking denies us tiny parabolic mics.

The moral of the story?  Make sure you see what all the toys are, and get ALL THE MY LITTLE PONIES BEFORE THEY DISAPPEAR. 

Edible cutlery

DM wants to feed herself but can't master fork-stabbery.  I've come up with a temporary solution: pre stabbed-in pretzel fork-thingies.

Mine vs. Hers - Breakfast

My Toddler (let's call her Darth Molly) is a willful little dark-sider.  She used to be an easy eater who would try some of whatever food you offered her.  However, in the last couple of months - I suspect as part of Project Little-Brother-Based-Attention-Getty-Madness - she's started rejecting foods, willy-nilly.  Getting weirdly specific about what she'll eat.  It's one more way she's decided to make my life...interesting.

And I don't have time to argue with her, these days.  I don't even have time to shower - I'm going to spend my day in a series of conflicts with the shouty equivalent of an angry drunken oompa loompa?  No.  She still drinks some milk so I've been sneaking toddler formula into her bottle to supplement, and just watching for signs of jaundice or other archaic diseases.  She eats from a selection of less than 10 things, generally.  Her menu is pretty limited.  Every day she eats scrambled eggs and cheese-penguins, for instance.  She is happy with this arrangement, apparently, and frankly the best I can hope for these days is for one or two family members to be happy @ the same time.

Me, I hardly get to eat.  I'm all about maximizing nutrition and eating efficient/easy foods when the babies let me.  Also, to be honest, I eat some foods because I can eat them one-handed while nursing the boy (who we call the Professor) without dropping a *whole* lot of crumbs on his head.  I am friends with Boost, Protein Bars, and random homemade slurries of tuna, vegetables, cheese and mayo.

Anyway, this is just a preface to a photo segment I like to call "My Breakfast vs. Hers."  (and yes, that is a store-brand can of "Freedom Cola.")