I live in what some would term a hoity-toity area.

Lots of very prim and proper yoga-practicin’ ladies with perfect hair and Bugaboo strollers.  They tend to have roughly the same type of hair style, roughly the same clothes, and roughly the same manerisms.  I don’t think most of them actually come from here, but there’s more of them than me.

Erm, it’s safe to say that I don’t really fit in all that well.  I’m a little too opinionated, a little too heavy, and I’ve never been the cookie-cutter type.

The other day I took my kids to the park nearest our house, and it was surprisingly empty.

Oh sure, there was one other mom (or maybe nanny, because she sure was chipper with that little boy) with a boy a bit younger than my daughter, but that was about it other than some people playing on the basketball courts on the other side.

So when my daughter wanted to climb UP the slide instead of going on top of the play equipment in the traditional manner, I let her.  I figured that since there was no one else on the play structure other than her, it wasn’t a big deal.  If there had been other children on the structure, I probably wouldn’t have allowed it.

Anyhoo, up she went on the slippery slide, with my hand hovering protectively over her back, but not touching it because I want her to do it by herself, if possible.  When she reached the top, she slid back down with a happy screech.

The other little boy saw my daughter do this, and asked his mom/nanny if he could go up the slide as well.

“Oh no, honey,” she said in a voice loud enough for me to hear and dripping with something akin to condescension.  “There are RULES about climbing up the slide.  We don’t do things like that.” And she primly took him to an entirely different section of the playground.

I looked around to see where the rules prohibiting slide climbing were posted.

There weren’t any.

I don’t really think of myself as a rebel.  But apparently I am.

Sigh.

Parenting is hard, y’all.

Today was one of those days when the end of the day sees me wanting to run down the block tearing my clothes off and screaming.  Well, perhaps not the clothing part, but definitely the screaming.  Or taking an endless shower where the hot water never runs out and I don’t get tired of standing there.

It was one of those days where it seemed like nothing got done, nobody was happy, and I kept trying to contact people that I needed to contact and I was completely out of luck.

We recently took my daughter to a speech evaluation because along with her (improving, thank jebus) sleep situation, is also not much of a talker.  Well, it seems the speech therapist agrees with our concerns and she has officially been diagnosed with a speech delay.  She was given a “good” prognosis, although I wondered to myself why it wasn’t “excellent.”  Do they even give excellent ones anymore, or is that too optimistic for our lawsuit-happy society?

The fun times never end.

Has anyone else gone through a speech delay diagnosis?  I am a bit out of my depth on this one, although the one thing I am great at is being an advocate for my children’s well being, so I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it soon enough.  There was so much medical jargon in the evaluation that I’ve asked for clarification on some points.  I’ve swanned my way through Dostoyevsky, but this report was too much for me.

I’ve not mentioned my daughter’s speech problems before on this blog because I was almost ashamed to admit that she had a problem.  I’ve got a gifted son, but my daughter can’t speak?  It sounds weird to me, and I’ve had a hard time wrapping my  head around it.  But I’ve come to realize that there is nothing for anyone to be ashamed of, that early intervention will be key to her future success, and the prognosis WILL be excellent, damnit.

As a mother of two who had a HORRIBLE time producing breastmilk despite trying like the dickens, I’m not pleased that there is a group asking all hospitals to forgo giving new mothers free samples of formula.

If I hadn’t had those sample bottles, both of my children would have gone very hungry in those first few weeks.  My son didn’t want to latch on at all (despite the help of a lactation consultant) and my daughter might have been a good latcher, but I’ll never know because I had a hell of a recovery from my C-section.  She did fine in the hospital, but once I got home, I could barely move, much less get in any type of optimal breastfeeding position.

After three months of trying to get my son to breastfeed and pumping, my milk supply, which was never great to begin with, dried up completely.  We now know that it was most likely due to undiagnosed hypothyroidism, but who woulda thunk?  Instead I felt like a huge failure.

For my daughter, I bought into the whole guilty breastfeeding is best thing, and I chose to pump for a full nine months, which was probably a big mistake.  Waking up every three hours at night when all you want is to grab as much sleep as possible probably turned me into a horrible mother.   And even though I was on medication to alleviate the hypothyroid symptoms, I was never what you would call a champion at producing milk.   In fact, the last few months saw me supplementing with both previously frozen milk and formula, despite spending a lot of time being hooked up to the pump.

I think that if you can breastfeed, you are entitled to embrace it as fully as you like.  Go ahead, pop the girls out in public when needed!  I support your right to breastfeed! But I also think that there are circumstances where breastfeeding exclusively is just too much for some women (read: many working moms) and the judgey-McJudgersons should shut it.

Today was not a shining example of my best mothering.  In fact, it might rank amongst my top ten worsts.

Things that went through my mind today:

I now see why people run away to the circus.

Is my neighbor really trying to one-up my thyroid surgery with a self-inflicted gash to the hand while cutting pineapple? Really?

If I leave in the middle of the night, no one will see me.

Yeah, buddy, some days I wish you went to school, too.

How do you survive the day eating ONLY things made out of carbs?

Is division with remainders that complicated?

Can I join you on the floor in your temper tantrum? I bet I could scream louder than you.

But you used to LOVE pears!

I didn’t think anything could be more annoying than banging your head on the floor until you started spitting your food everywhere.

Be careful what you wish for.

Of course you allowed our daughter to touch the soil where the cats in the neighborhood have been pooping.  OF COURSE you couldn’t stop her in time.

Seriously, I KNOW I could cover my tracks well enough that nobdoy could find me.  

42% you take only a half hour to 45 minutes to get out the door, and an impressive 21% take only 15-30. 15% of you were split evenly between less than 15 and 45-60. I’m going to count myself in that last cohort due to the fact that I have a toddler. She’s a convenient excuse for almost anything.

A friend and I were recently at a party, and we briefly discussed allowing our same-aged sons to walk to a nearby park (she lives in the neighborhood).  We went back and forth for a bit, but eventually decided against it.  Then we started talking about how it seems in our memories that we had a lot more freedom way back when than kids do now.  Is that pretty much a given? Or are we just old and our memories are faulty?

1. Be angry.

2. Be momentarily glad that at least she didn’t lock herself in the room.

3. Banish the thought that at least you could have had some alone time if she had.

4. Be upset that she also closed the sliding glass door that you had previously opened and would have allowed access in less than one minute. IF she hadn’t closed it. And locked it, also.

5. Bemoan the fact that you do indeed have to use the bathroom sometimes.

6. Attempt to open door with credit card.

7. Be angry when it doesn’t work.

8. Be angry that you don’t have the key (and in fact, have never had the key to open the lock).

9. Attempt to open door with paper clip.

10.  Be really angry when that doesn’t work either.

11. Call your husband and calmly ask if he has any suggestions, scoff at the idea that waiting until 9pm for him to get home and open it is a good idea. This is specifically because this is the room said toddler needs to fall asleep in at 7pm.

12. Search the whole of the internets for various McGyver-y solutions, all of which fail miserably.

13.  After spending a solid hour and a half trying to unlock the door, give up.

14. Stop being angry because it really isn’t doing you any good.

15. Suddenly realize that there are such things as locksmiths and give one a call.

16. Be momentarily embarrassed that you have to borrow some cash from your nine year old.

17. Not regret spending $65.00 for the locksmith to take two minutes to open your door. Not even for a second.

The United States has the highest teen birthrate of any developed country.

I’m sorry, but that’s inexcusable.

I’m going to lay a lot of the blame at the feet of the woefully inadequate “abstinence-only” programs that are basically a waste of everyone’s time and money.

Teenagers have sex.

Get used to it.

Give them all the tools they will need, including access to birth control, knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases, and you’ve got a pretty good shot at keeping someone from getting pregnant.

In the article linked to above, a quarter of the teens said that their partner did not want them to use birth control.  Say what?

Teach your kids that if their partner doesn’t want them to use birth control, then that partner isn’t worth being with.

Humans are sexual beings.  That includes teenagers.  That ESPECIALLY includes teenagers.  It’s like nobody ever remembers being a teenager.

What is wrong with people, anyway?

I think I have called my daughter by her actual name less than twenty times in her entire (albeit so far brief) life.

I have a couple of nicknames, with one in particular being heavily used, and it isn’t a play on her name at all.

This is partly because I realize that the name we chose for her does not really fit her at all.  That is something I have no idea how to fix, and I blame my husband because I wanted to name her something that would have TOTALLY fit her personality but he vetoed it for NO GOOD REASON.  He says we can change her name and she would never know the difference, but that just seems wrong.

The problem is that when her relatives call her by her name and she doesn’t respond, they tend to get a worried look on their faces.   They ask me if she has a hearing problem, and does she always ignore people like that?  Well, yes she actually does ignore people like that, but it has nothing to do with her hearing.

I never really called the Munchkin by his real name either, though, and he seems to know what his name is.

Most of the time.