As my oldest daughter grows out of her clothes, I fold them into labeled jumbo diaper boxes and stuff them into a storage area over our garage. They share the space with other infant products that seemed essential but whose use was short-lived: extra baby gates, a swing that all of my children hated, a bouncy seat and a Bumbo seat and a potty seat. When the next child is ready for a new clothing size I pull the boxes out, sort through them to find seasonally appropriate attire, and swap out the stuff in their drawers. It’s an incredibly annoying job, but someone has to do it, and it certainly isn’t going to be my husband.

A few days ago I was up there, looking for 12-month clothes and packing away the size 6-month things, when one little romper caused me to pause. It was one of the few items that I’d purchased just for Alex, my youngest, and it looked brand new: pink-and-white stripes, ruffled short-sleeves, an elephant on the front. I held it in my hand, some emotion rising in me.  The cotton was still soft, washed how many times? A dozen? And now she is done with it, moving on to her sisters’ well-worn items, each of which carry their own memories. The pair of jeans Maggie refused to put on, the sundress Ceci wore for her one-year photos.

They’re just clothes, I try to tell myself every time I go through this, but the truth is, they’re not. These boxes, scrawled in black Sharpie with 2T Summer or Bibs/Burp Cloths, are physical evidence that I can’t keep them little. They are reminders of all the things my children have outgrown, that they are even, in some ways, outgrowing me. Recently I met my five-year-old’s preschool class at the mall, where they had gone to meet Santa, then have lunch. “I don’t want you to come to Chick-Fil-A with me,” she said. “I want to sit with my friends.” Meanwhile Alex, at nearly nine months, is standing on her own, will soon be walking. And I think: Am I ready to leave babyhood behind for good?

Matt and I have never settled on exactly how many children we want, but three always seemed like a good number. He’s one of two; I’m one of three. More than that would be uncharted territory. It would mean a radical reevaluation of our lives: What would four mean? A bigger house? A bigger car? Less time for just the two of us? Let’s be honest: grandparents- even the really fantastic ones our kids have- don’t really want to watch four kids for more than a couple of hours. I’m not sure I would want to watch four kids for more than a couple of hours. And yet…

I do know that I’m not ready NOW. But a few years down the road, when things have settled a bit, when all of them can wipe their own butts and put on their own socks, maybe then? How will I know for certain that my family is complete, that it’s time to drop the proverbial curtain on all this baby making talk and take more permanent measures? Will I know when I hold that tiny pink romper in my hands and feel nothing more than a mild nostalgia? Perhaps I’ll know when Maggie starts school for real and I am bombarded with papers to sign and spelling words to call out and science projects to help with. Will I know in a year or so when it comes time to decide: keep the high chair or donate it? Will God speak to me in a dream? Send a sign? How will I know for sure? Will I know for sure?

It’s a question for another day, a distant day, for a woman whose children are a little older, who has a little more information about what the future holds. By then, I may have outgrown the idea altogether. Or not…

A few weeks ago I sat down to write a blog post. It began like this: Today they woke up sweet.

Then something happened, I can’t be sure what. Ceci wasn’t cooperating with her big sister’s grand Lego-building plans, or Maggie kicked Ceci in the head while attempting to do some sort of indoor acrobatics. Ultimately someone hit someone, which was followed by much crying, at least one time-out, and sour moods all around. The unfinished post was forgotten in the drafts folder. At any rate, I no longer felt like writing about how cute my girls could be with one other.

At two and five, they argue more than I thought they would. (The baby is a non-issue, for now, unless she’s pulling their hair or barreling through a board game or eating their toys.) As the oldest, Maggie is usually the instigator. She’s used to taking the lead, being the winner, making the rules as they play, and she doesn’t deal well with non-compliance on the part of her little sister.

For instance: On one occasion not too long ago, the two of them invented a tiny imaginary friend named Lainey. She was supposed to be Ceci’s age, and Ceci dragged her all over the play set in our backyard. “I’ve got Lainey right here,” she told me, holding out her two cupped hands as I lifted her into the baby swing. But apparently sharing even an invisible friend can be hard for a five-year-old. Swiping the air, Maggie closed her fist around Lainey. A chase ensued. Lainey was thrown into trees, imprisoned on top of the monkey bars. I used magic to free her and return her to Ceci. The whole thing was completely crazy and ridiculous. The lengths to which Maggie would go to keep this imaginary girl away from her sister were impressive, to say the least. Lord help us all if they ever have a crush on the same boy.

The thing – which I don’t acknowledge nearly enough – is that really, most of the time, they are sweet with each other. When they aren’t getting along, they take turns running into the kitchen every five minutes to tattle on the other one: “Maggie called me a noo-nah!” (It’s always some absurd made-up word, and I can’t bring myself to engage. “That doesn’t even mean anything. Just go play.”) But when they are, I can complete whatever chore I’m doing without interruption, so my attention is elsewhere. When they are getting along, it’s just background noise.

I’m trying, though, to notice the sweetness. Like how, when she wakes up before everyone else in the morning, Ceci turns on the light in the room she shares with Alex, sits next to the crib with a pile of books and “reads” stories to her baby sister. Or the time I came downstairs and Maggie and Ceci were kneeling together in the rainbow glow of the newly decorated Christmas tree, quiet. Just looking at it. Possibly my favorite moments are when Maggie gets proud of the other two. They’ll be coloring at the kitchen table and she’ll exclaim, “You’re coloring in the lines, Ceec!” with real excitement in her voice. Or, “Alex just said her first word!” (Which was “mum-mum”. As in the teething wafers called “Baby Mum-Mums”.)

I come from a family of three girls, as well, all born in about a four-year span. It’s a special gift to watch my daughters interact and be reminded of my own experience growing up. We weren’t always kind to each other either: my oldest sister and I would gang up on my middle sister – who has somehow forgiven us for telling her she was adopted – or they would gang up on me, singing a song they had made up about me over and over until I cried. I was the youngest; for me, being a kid and being a sister were one and the same. My siblings created lush imaginary worlds and I was lucky enough to be invited along to inhabit them, whether it was in the basement with our Barbie dolls, in our backyard fort underneath low-hanging trees, or riding Big Wheels in the street outside our house, pretending to be runaway child rock stars.

They don’t always wake up sweet, it’s true. But it’s good to know that even when my girls fight, they are still doing what my sisters and I did, writing the story of their childhood, together. That despite calling each other “noo-nahs” and stealing imaginary friends and engaging in the occasional little girl brawl, there’s actually a lot of love there. My husband and I made a choice to give them that, knowing that we would be outnumbered, knowing that the wrath of three girls when they band together is something to be feared. We fear it. But we wouldn’t change a thing.

We are three days away from Christmas. As my checklist grows shorter – presents purchased, cards sent, cookies decorated – I’m able, finally, to get into the spirit of the season. For me, this means letting myself sink into a warm well of gratitude for all the of the gifts God has given me. My health. My family. Fulfilling friendships. Everything I need and more, far more. I thank God, too, for words, for a passion to write, for a voice and a story to tell. Please don’t think me vain or presumptuous; I call these gifts not to say that I am “gifted” but to convey the extent to which they have enriched my life, the intensity with which I treasure them. 

In my life, I’ve written for a lot of reasons. As a kid I wrote to be like my older sisters. When I was six or seven years old my family stopped at a restaurant after a day of downhill skiing. We composed poems on white paper placemats while we waited for our food. It was the first poem I can remember writing; it was about winter. I think I drew a picture of a bunny in the corner.

A few years later I bought a diary with a lock and a picture of a gumball machine on the front.I filled it with hideous insults about my fourth-grade teacher. It was the year I discovered curse words, and I used them liberally, if not always correctly. She’s such an asshole. I hope she fucking falls in the ocean and gets eaten by goddamn sharks. It was the same year I started writing horror stories, one about a killer doll (titled “Hug Me”), another about a gun that flew around on its own, shooting people. My “asshole” teacher always gave me an A++ and a smiley face.

In 6^th grade my boyfriend, whatever that meant at the time, gave me a journal. He didn’t last, but the journal did. When its pages were filled I replaced it with another, then another. Throughout high school and into college, my journals were a place to put my darkest thoughts, the things I didn’t want anyone to know. Also, they served as a catalog of the names of all my crushes, which I believe will serve as important historical documentation one day.

I majored in English, with a focus on creative writing, so I wrote constantly. I was- am still, I suppose – a person who loves academics for the sake of academics. I would highlight and highlight every text I was assigned, then pore back through the pages looking for a common thread to all the neon yellow. I knew my thesis statement was in there somewhere. I also started writing for the school paper, the Tripod. My weekly column was a tongue-in-cheek examination of party life at the school, and probably should have been titled, “Underage Moron Finds it Unnecessary to Disguise the Fact That She Routinely Breaks the Law”. Luckily my editor’s insertion of the word “hypothetically” saved me from arrest and utter disgrace.

The pen, the page, the keyboard: whatever the tool, they were all extensions of myself, and I’m lucky they were, because I needed them. A few months shy of my 21^st birthday I watched one of my friends die. He was ejected from his car when it was struck by a tractor-trailer on our way to the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee. We were caravanning, and I was in the car in front of his. Needless to say, I was broken. Having flashbacks, sobbing myself to sleep, hysteria triggered by any reminder of anything related to the accident- broken. (Read more about this experience in my post “The Transformation of Loss“.)

Thank God for writing. Thank God it was something I knew how to do and that I did, twice a week in an advanced poetry workshop taught by a grizzled Quaker named Hugh Ogden. Each day he wore a red bandanna around his matted white hair and sat on the stoop of the English building between classes, smoking. When he grinned, he looked like a maniac. The first time I workshopped a poem about the accident, the room stayed silent after I finished reading. “Oh Jen,” said Hugh, with more kindness in his voice than I could bear, “Thank you.”

I wrote a lot that year, poems that honored Sean’s memory and sought to give his death meaning. “What beauty can be salvaged out of pain?” I wrote. “Life lives, and brings me to myself again.” I wrote poems for his mom, for his girlfriend of six years, who thought that he would one day be her husband. I wrote a poem for the driver of the tractor- trailer that killed him, expressing something like forgiveness.

I healed, mostly. I moved forward. I moved to St. Louis, where I volunteered with AmeriCorps for a year as a mentor in an inner-city middle school. I got interested in teaching, and was hired at a private school to teach 7^th-grade English. I met the man who would become my husband. I was happy, and busy. I would try to write, but it felt stupid and hard. I didn’t like any of it, so I stopped.

It wasn’t until I became a mother that I realized how much I needed the written word again. I was working about thirty miles away at the time. Each morning I woke my daughter up, nursed her, and then got in the car and left. By the time I picked her up from daycare I had time to feed her one more time before putting her to bed. I was miserable, exhausted. I truly felt that I was failing as a mother, a wife, and a teacher, that spreading myself so thin couldn’t possibly be the answer. I wanted to scream, but I wrote instead.

I started my own blog. (You’re reading it!) It was only for me, a place to voice my frustrations so that they wouldn’t consume me. After posting once or twice, I included a few of my close family and friends, and eventually I felt comfortable enough to share on Facebook. I know it shouldn’t matter what people say, but positive feedback is encouraging. People I barely knew have become part of this amazing support system of mothers who have all had experiences similar to mine.

And now, at Christmas- and really, every day of my life, I’m thankful for that.

 

If I had the time, which I don’t, I’d go back to all of my previous posts and count how many times I used the word “principle”. As in, I am a person of principles and so here is an example of an excellent parenting choice I’ve made based on those principles. I’d guess the number is somewhere in the vicinity of a crapload.

I have to hand it to myself, I got at least a solid A- in principled parenting for a good while. I watched what my daughters ate, steering them away from refined sugar and processed foods. Not wanting them to always expect flashing lights and robot voices, I controlled what toys they played with in our home. And I pledged, I vowed, that even if she had to spend years two through five in time-out, my kid would learn how to act without having to be spanked.

But then a day arrived (today, actually), when I found myself… BUYING OREOS. And bringing them into my home. And letting my children eat them. Earlier this week, I bought Pop Tarts. I don’t know what’s come over me. It’s like I suddenly don’t care AT ALL about my children’s welfare. Apparently I’m not the kind of parent I thought I was; the proof is in the pudding … in my refrigerator. (Just kidding- things haven’t devolved THAT much.)

What kind of parent am I? Apparently I’m the kind of parent that does, in fact, threaten to spank her child. And, occasionally, does. However, this does not occur very often, because I don’t believe in spanking out of anger. And, apparently, I’m the kind of parent who lets her kids’ bratty behavior get to her. So yeah, only a little spanking. Principled discipline with a side of spanking.

I am also, apparently, the kind of parent who does sneaky things to avoid being interrogated by her children. Like buying ice cream and forgetting to mention it to the kids, or burying their pre-school worksheets in the bottom of the recycling bin. Unfortunately, my children seem to have superhuman powers of observation.  This morning, when my five-year-old opened the freezer to get out a waffle, she shouted, “Hey! When did we get ice cream in this house! Can we have it for dessert?” And today- this was stupid of me, I admit – this same child came with me to the recycling center to empty our bins. Upon finding her The First Thanksgiving booklet in a heap amongst Target receipts and toilet paper rolls, she looked up at me accusingly. “Why are you throwing this away?” It is now back on my dining room table, and will apparently be in my house for some time to come.

At some point I apparently became the kind of parent who adheres to the philosophy of, If you are playing quietly, I am not even going to check to see what you could possibly be doing that would result in such desirable behavior. If said behavior allows me thirty minutes to fold laundry, shower, or blog in peace, then you go right ahead and empty the contents of your dressers into a pile on your bed and then pretend that they are a swimming pool. Then go do something else destructive, quietly, so I can put the contents of your dressers back in.

When I first embarked on this journey I envisioned myself being the FDR of motherhood: solving problems creatively, leading my household with confidence, taking the necessary steps even when circumstances seem impossible, and earning the devoted love of my constituents. Turns out I’m more like Herbert Hoover, and people are going to start referring to their messy houses, full of grimy children, as “Prayvilles”.

So this, apparently, is the kind of parent I am. I’m a parent who bends, a parent who changes. I’m a parent who recognizes, now, the difference between idealism and reality. I’m a parent who keeps a sense of humor about the poop-show my life has become. (Did you like how I creatively avoided cussing there? Maybe I do have a tiny bit of FDR in me.) I’m the parent I have to be in this particular place and time of my life. And, apparently, that’s good enough.

For more information about this series of posts, click here.

December 3, 2015. 11:30 p.m.

I wake to one of my children crying out for me, but I am deep in a dream. She’ll go back to sleep, I think, or come into my room; they always do. I nuzzle my head deeper into my pillow, but the cries persist – shrieks of panic, I realize, so I give myself a metaphorical slap in the face and dash across the hall.

I take in the scene. It is straight out of the book of parental nightmares: My two-year-old is sitting upright in her bed, covered in vomit. She has woken the baby, who sleeps sometimes in a crib in their shared room, sometimes in a pack-and-play in our master bathroom, depending on what is most convenient. Both children are beside themselves. I do the first thing I can think of, which is to call for backup.

The baby is contained, but the mess needs to be dealt with. My husband gathers the bed sheets, pillows, and stuffed animals while I usher my middle girl into the bathroom and into the tub, where her tiny frame shivers as I try to spray her clean. Her face has lost all color. It is a moment when everything inside of me reaches for her. I want to hold her and enfold her and lift her up and make her well. But first I need to make sure there is no more unchewed macaroni in her hair.

My husband takes over putting her back in bed while I take care of the baby. She’ll be in the pack-and-play for the rest of the night, obviously. As I nurse her, I hear more retching from across the hall, and another round of changing sheets and pajamas. I think of something a former colleague told me years ago. I was only recently out of college and he was maybe ten years older than me, with two young children. One of them had been sick with a bug just like this one, and he said to me, “Since becoming a parent, I’ve done things I never thought I would do.” He didn’t elaborate.

Once the baby was asleep again, I relieve my husband of duty. I make myself a nest on the floor by my sick darling’s side and listen to her breathing. I can tell from the speed of her breath when I need to gather her up and hold her over the tupperware receptacle we have placed by her bed. Every time, she tries to push me away. “I done! I done!” she mumbles. But my job is to be there, even if she doesn’t want me to be. Even if I don’t want to be. We do what we must do when it must be done. This is what it means to parent.

By morning, she is nearly herself again. She chatters and smiles, upset only by my refusal to let her have a cup of milk. I tell her we need to wait until her tummy is ready, but it’s probably me that isn’t ready. I don’t like  thinking of her hunched in the tub, white and shaking, wet and afraid. We will both need some time to recover.

For more information about this series of posts, click here.

December 2, 2015

She is in her high chair, which I’ve pulled up to the counter so she can be closer to me. She’s eating puffs. This is a new development, her picking things up and eating them independently. She’s seven months old, soon to be eight months. I don’t remember when my other two started being able to feed themselves.

This time of day, mid-morning, when the others are at preschool, is when I “get things done”. Right now that means washing dishes. I realize, after several minutes of scrubbing, that I haven’t looked up and out of the window, even once. Or at my child, whose high chair tray needs refilling. I often have this problem; I can focus intently on one task at a time, but I have difficulty dividing my attention. This can be problematic, as parenthood is never one thing. It’s one eye on the clock, one searching for a lost shoe, hands occupied zipping up a jacket when they’re also needed down the hall, where the baby just got stuck crawling over a pile of Duplos.

Now, with the other two at school for three hours, I have only one child here to demand my attention, and she rarely does. (Even now, hours after I first started writing this, the other two are in their rooms for nap and quiet time, and Alex is crawling on the floor below my stool, pushing around a marker and a Barbie. When I look down at her she scrunches her face at me and smiles.) She’s a third child, like me, an observer, a tag-along, thrilled when one of us shows her special attention. I’m thankful  she understands that I’m only partly hers, even though it breaks my heart.

Still, this is more than I was ever able to offer my first two, when they were babies. Alex is still exclusively nursing. I was supplementing with formula by the time Maggie was five months old, and with Ceci, I just couldn’t face the thought of pumping in my classroom during my planning periods, and I gave up. She was eight weeks old when I went back to work. So there’s something to be said for making it this far, and for my relationship with my youngest. In a way, she needs me like the others didn’t.

The time we have together goes by quickly. When I’ve finished the dishes there is dinner to prepare and place in the crockpot. The laundry needs to be switched. She’s tired now, and I can check off those tasks while she naps. When I set her in the crib she doesn’t make a sound, just rolls to the side and sucks on her middle and index fingers, her way of self-soothing. I tell her I love her, I love her, I love her. Forty-five minutes later I wake her. It’s time to go get her sisters. Unsurprisingly, she makes no complaint.

 

For more information about this series of posts, click here.

The way our day begins.

Mornings are the least structured part of my day. Ever since Alex was born in April, sleep takes precedence over anything else that might occur early in the morning: a workout, a shower, a quiet cup of coffee. I get up when I hear one child crying or another one crawls into bed next to me and starts feeling my face like that girl in the Lionel Richie video.

Today it’s a hungry Alex first, then Ceci, who drags in two blankets, a pillow pet, and a copy of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Pretty soon the three kids have taken over our bed and are being way cuter and happier than they normally are at this time. They take turns sitting in each other’s laps with their arms wrapped around one another like a much less awkward version of a prom picture.

During breakfast, Maggie wants me to read them books. This request always annoys me; I really don’t want to. I already need to feed the baby and myself, and reading The Berenstain Bears and the Prize Pumpkin in between bites feels like a little too much. At the same time, I don’t want to kill the happy mood, so I oblige. Maggie wants me to wear a tiara while I read, but Ceci wants the tiara too, and in the end I end up taking it from my two-year-old and placing it on my own head. Mom wins this time; it doesn’t happen that often.

Ceci starts complaining that her teeth are hurting her. I don’t doubt it. Her molars are working their way in, making my girl miserable. I grab a teething ring from the freezer to humor her. “Is cold!” she keeps squealing, holding her hands out for us to feel. Of course Maggie wants one too. They listen to me read with the pink and orange rings hanging out of their mouths like door knockers.

I tell them that it’s time to brush teeth and head out to preschool. They beat me upstairs. They have a new hiding spot, in Ceci and Alex’s closet, where they climb into Huggies value boxes full of clothes that they’ve outgrown. All I have to do is follow the giggles.

While I finish getting dressed (Yoga pants, obviously. It’s possible I might get to work out at some point today… ), the older girls play a game of their own invention that involves tossing the teething rings onto my bedroom floor, which is lava. At one point Maggie screams, “Mom’s a can so we can eat her beans inside her!” It’s not the strangest thing she’s ever said, but it’s up there.

Next year Maggie will be in kindergarten, and we’ll have to get our acts together. Alarms will need to be set. Outfits will need to be laid out ahead of time. Lunches will need to be made. We won’t have as much time for reading or playing or hiding.  This is what I tell myself when the crazy starts to get to me. Just let it happen, mama. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

 

About the series: Everywhere you hear it: how fast it goes. How one minute you’re griping about “Seriously, is this kid ever going to be potty trained?”, and the next minute she is, in fact, potty trained, and you’re at Target shopping for furniture for her college dorm room. How all the minutes in between have somehow vanished, and the only details you can recall are the ones in the stories you’ve told or the photos you’ve kept. Already, I feel it. My oldest is five and I find myself reaching for memories of the days when it was just the three of us. What did we do? How did she look at me? Was I the same mom to her that I am now, to all three? I can’t stop time, but I want some of it to stick. So I’m starting a new blog series about the moments. The details. The little world I live in. I hope that in my day-to-day you can recognize a bit of your own family and that we can continue to make this journey together.

November 30, 2015. Lunchtime.

Today I made macaroni and cheese. It’s a treat for the kids, something we reserve for dinner on nights when we’ve made a meal we know they won’t even attempt. But peanut butter gives Ceci eczema and I don’t have anything in the house to make a different kind of sandwich. While the noodles boil, I let all three girls play in the playroom. Maggie is circling toys in a catalog that came today in the mail. Ceci has just abandoned a magnetic dress-up doll and asked me to put a fairy princess dress on over her black and silver Star Wars shirt. She tops the look off with a firefighter hat. Wook at my hat, mom. Alex is sitting in the middle of the mess, though I’ve scanned the radius around her and scooped up all the small pieces I can see. She is always happiest near her sisters, regarding them with eyebrows raised, equal parts surprised and in awe of everything they do.

When the noodles are ready, Maggie wants to put in the cheese. I point out the hot burner and let her pull a chair up to the stove. She and Ceci take turns climbing up to stir. Alex clutches the bottom rung of the chair and gazes upward.

The older girls choose to sit next to each other at the table, which Maggie points out, because usually we stagger them as a method of crowd control. Maggie eats ravenously, dragging macaroni up the sides of the bowl with her fingers. I worry sometimes about her manners, but she’s five. Other kids are probably grosser. At least I hope so. Ceci is still wearing her pink crushed velvet dress and eats with tiny bites. Alex has finished her first bowl of squash with applesauce; I get up to get her more and put a few sweet potato puffs on her tray. When those are gone Maggie takes it upon herself to give Alex more, but first she checks beneath the high chair and in Alex’s lap to see if she’s dropped any. These, Maggie eats.

This is lunch. Next is nap. Dishes are abandoned as Maggie and Ceci race upstairs. I give them a head start. They like to hide from me, and while I know their hiding spot – behind the crib, the same one every time – I still play along. There is one spoonful of macaroni remaining in the pot. This, I eat. Then I heft Alex on my hip and head upstairs to join the others.

This post may seem untimely; it’s not Christmas yet. I know. We have to do the whole Pilgrims and Indians thing first. But for me, Thanksgiving and Christmas meld together into a month-long megaholiday, a bonanza of family and gluttony and gratitude and travel and stress and spending and peace and eggnog. It’s all in there.

I love Christmas, I do. At the same time, I hate a lot of the things that have come to be associated with it. I mean, consumerism in general gets to me. I feel slightly ill when I allow myself to think about the volume of goods contained in the box stores up and down my town’s commercial main drag: enough, it seems, to feed and clothe just about everyone, everywhere.

And here, in my own home, my two- and five-year-old are hard at work compiling their Christmas lists from items in the catalogs that have begun to fill our mailbox. “Can I circle this, mom?” Maggie asks, pointing to a blow-up slide and ball pit. “You can circle it,” I say, “But it doesn’t mean that’s what you’re going to get.” (Which really means, circle away, but if you think you’ll be playing in a ball pit in our living room on Christmas morning then you’re not as bright as I thought you were.) “Ceci! We’re getting this for Christmas too!” she cries, as she scribbles a huge circle around it and marks it with an “M”.

When I was younger, I had no issue with the way we do Christmas. Heaps and heaps of gifts under the tree, many of them toys or  games or clothes for me, that was just fine. Santa was this amazing guy who spoiled me rotten every year, and my parents were alright too. I’m sure that in some way I was involved in the act of giving as well, but I honestly can’t recall. I guess my memories of all the Christmas gifts I picked out for others were immediately replaced in my brain by the robotic voice on my new Electronic Mall Madness game, which I can still hear clearly saying, “Ooooohhh, long line. Try again later!”

But bringing three little beings into the world has caused me to closely examine my ideals. I don’t take anything for granted anymore as “just the way we do things”. So I guess it was becoming a mom that made me think twice about Christmas and the way I want my children to experience it.

My husband and I, thankfully, were on the same page about this. We sat down early on and went over some Christmas rules that we would abide by and share with both our families. Here they are, in a nutshell:

• Santa will bring each child three presents. If our kids ever questioned this, our response would be, “Oh, so you think you’re better than Jesus?”
• Each child will receive one gift from mom and dad. Ideally, this gift will be the coolest ever and will totally eclipse anything that old elf-labor-exploiting Santa could come up with.
• Each family member that wants to give our children gifts may give each child only one gift. Note: In the years since making these rules, both grandmas have tried to get around it by wrapping up a whole bunch of stuff in one package. I’ve realized there’s only so much I can do to control a grandma, and this year we’re giving this rule up as a lost cause.
• Santa fills the stockings. Grandmas may not try to get around the one gift rule by cramming lots of little toys into the stockings. Note: See above note.
• We highly discourage toys with batteries. This isn’t because there’s anything inherently wrong with battery-operated toys, it’s because all of the battery compartments on kids toys need to be opened with a screwdriver, and mom and dad are way too busy (or possibly lazy… nah, we’ll go with busy) to be fetching a screwdriver every time Baby Cries-a-Lot runs out of steam.

Why the rules? Why can’t we just let our kids enjoy being showered with capitalist goods and bask in the glorious light of their dozens of new battery-operated gifts as a way of celebrating the birth of Christ the Savior? Why do I have to be such a big bah humbug Christmas meanie?

Because raising kind, generous, unselfish, grateful people is no joke. I’m not even sure I’m doing a very good job at it. I do know that I want to steer my children away from the “What do I get?” mentality.  And in the end, I want them to understand this one thing: Christmas is not about you.  That’s right. I love you, but you already have a birthday.

Here are some things that Christmas IS about:

• Jesus, if you subscribe to the belief that the whole holiday is based upon
• Peace on Earth
• Good will to all people
• Heartfelt giving
• Quality time with loved ones (When we celebrate with my family this comes in the form of watching Point Break after the little ones go to bed)
• Good-naturedly mocking the fact that the priest gives the same Christmas homily EVERY YEAR
• Electronic Mall Madness
• Eggnog

And on that note, I wish you all a very Happy Thanksgivstmas.

 

 

Last Friday I set out on a girls’ weekend to Boston to visit some old friends.  To make the trip a more attractive sell for my husband, I proposed that I bring our youngest child along with me, leaving him with only the two- and five-year-old, as opposed to all three. (I assume this means that he will bring at least one of the children along with him on his next boys’ trip, and will remind him of this whenever the topic should arise.)

Anyway, it had been a while since I’d flown by myself with a baby. I did it when my oldest was little, but as the size of our family increased, the kids generally came as a package deal- all or none. While I was looking forward to seeing my friends in Boston, I did have some anxiety about the long journey: a two-hour drive to the airport in Charlotte, a parking shuttle from the long-term lot, getting all of our crap through security, and then the flight itself. I just wasn’t thrilled about putting my emotional well-being, as well as that of anyone within hearing range, in the hands of a seven-month-old.

But guess what? There’s something to be said for letting your infant tag along when the need to fly arises. Here are a few observations I was able to make during this weekend’s installment of The Adventures of Mommy and Alex!:

1. Show TSA agents a baby, and suddenly they are the most pleasant people in the world. And who are you? Aren’t you the cutest person I’ve seen all day! Look at those big, beautiful eyes! I have literally never heard a TSA agent speak in exclamation points before. Or baby talk. Or, come to think of it, display any signs of human emotion.

2. When you have a baby with you, strangers help you do things like get your stroller folded up at the end of the jetway. They call your attention to the spoon that baby just dropped on the floor. They offer to hold things for you. The young woman I sat with on my flight up to Boston told me to let her know if there was anything I needed. She let me set my ginger ale on her tray table to keep it away from little baby hands that might want to knock it over. Imagine if I were infant-less and I tried to set my drink on someone else’s tray table. They’d be like, get your drink off of my tray table, you freaking weirdo. Babies make people nicer. It’s a proven fact.

3. Babies are a good conversation starter, a way to connect with the people around you. It generally starts with someone asking how old she is, then we talk about some baby related to them, then we talk about traveling with babies, where we are going, the weather where we are going, and then we settle into an awkward silence because we have nothing left to say and we are trapped in a small space together until the plane lands.

4. Luckily, babies are an even better conversation ender. I could just turn from the person I was talking to and start speaking to Alex instead, and they wouldn’t find it rude at all. What do you want to do, honey? Do you want to look out the window? Do you want to bang on the back of the seat? Do you want to wipe drool all over the arm of the person sitting next to us? You can, because you’re a baby, and everyone likes you! If the nearby conversationalist didn’t get the hint, I always had breastfeeding up my sleeve. Oh, looks like she’s hungry! I find that strangers have a difficult time chatting up someone who has their boob out in a public place. Which I don’t recommend doing unless you are traveling with an infant.

5. First dibs on overhead storage. Try to gate check my carry-on now, beotch!

6. Have you ever arrived at your destination when flying solo and said to yourself, Wow, I handled that really well. No one on the plane hates me and I don’t have any poop on me! I did a great job sitting in a chair while being transported from point A to point B- go me! Add a baby to the mix, and a totally passive act becomes a giant accomplishment, and a reason to celebrate. I think I deserve a drink!

I’m sure when my husband reads this, he will be convinced of the merits of traveling with small children and will want to immediately begin planning his next trip. Where to next, honey? Want to bring all three?