Laugh With Moms

My sister texted me about 2 weeks ago to see if I have read the “Twilight” series.  I had heard about it at that point, but really had no interest in reading it as it had to do with teenager vampires and wasn’t really within my areas of interest.  She said she had spent the last week or so reading all four books and was obsessed with them.  My sister is 3 years older than me, has a full-time job as an emergency room physician in a very busy children’s hospital, has 4 children under the age of 8 and a full social calendar.  When does she have time to read?  She told me to read them, but warned me that “you will get nothing else done, you will neglect everything else once you start to read them”.  What?  How can a book about teenage vampires do all that?  I read the first book (400 pages) in 2 1/2 days.  I probably could have read it in a matter of hours if I didn’t have kids.  I had to reason with myself to do some housework (in small amounts) before I could sit down to read it and to put it down at night so I could actually get some sleep.  Amazing.  Last night, my husband came home at 8pm and I had to run out to get book #2.  Crazy.  My husband looked at me like I had 5 heads when I told him I had to go get the book.  Even today, I am trying to figure out some time to read.  I am officially obsessed and I am full throttle into the Twilight craze.  Does anyone want to go see the movie?  Or better yet, does anyone want to babysit my kids and clean the house, so I can read?????

This past Saturday as we are preparing for hockey, my six year old son said, “mom, I don’t like hockey anymore”.  To this I said, “that is totally fine with me, but the only problem is that I paid for you to play hockey this year and you need to finish.”  To this he gave me a sad face and said, “mom, I really don’t want to play today, I have a birthday party to go to”.  I said, “the birthday party is after hockey and you will be done in plenty of time to go the birthday party.”  At this point, his little sister is nicely and quietly putting on all her hockey gear while he just sits there in his pajamas.  After about 5 “reminders” to get moving or “we are going to be late”, he just looked at me with a stubborn look on his face.  So I said,” if you don’t want to play today, you don’t have to.  But you will get your clothes on and sit there for an hour while your sister plays hockey”.  To this, he smiled, got dressed and moved out the door.  I intentionally left his hockey pants home, so that if he decided to change his mind once we got there, he still wouldn’t be able to play.  So once we got there and got his sister on the ice, he looked over at me and said, “mom, I really want to skate today”.  “Sorry bud, but you should have made that decision earlier and now you must sit here and watch your sister”.  Unfortunately for me, I had to endure about 30 minutes of whining and “I’m hungry, can we go get a snack?”.   Finally I relented for the snack and when we came back, his little sister is standing at the door to the rink gesturing to me.  She said, “mom, I am tired  I really do not want to skate today” as she is eyeing my son eating his snack and drinking his gatorade.  She is only three and is an amazing skater and loves to go out there to “play hockey”.  My internal right and wrong was going into overdrive.  She is only three once again, do I let her come off the ice and move on with the rest of our day? Do I need to teach a lesson about finishing things we start and “quitters never win”?  There was this internal struggle about what was the right thing to do at this point.  I have had the opportunity to observe a lot of parents during the last two years of hockey.  I did not want to be one of those crazy hockey parents whose dream of a world class hockey player is their own and not there 5 year old little boy’s dream.  So I made the decision to let her come off the ice, but let them both know that when you decide to go out there to play hockey and mommy and daddy pay (a lot) money for you to play, you have to finish.  You can have an off day and be tired once in awhile, but if you want to play and get that trophy at the end, you have to finish the season and skate for the whole time.  With that they were both worried they weren’t going to get that trophy.  Needless to say the next day when it was hockey time, we got no complaints and they both skated for the whole session.  It is hard to be a parent all the time.  There is always a lesson to be taught.  I want them to be out there because they want to be and they love what they are doing, not because I want them to be out there.  There were so many little lessons to be taught in that one moment in time and I am always second guessing whether I made the right decisions in the first place.

Not sure if that is even how you spell “om”, but that is how I started my day this morning.  My good friend called me last night to see if we wanted to try a 5:45am (yes that is “am” as in morning) yoga class that we had gone to a few times last year.  Well, at 4pm on a Sunday night that sounded like a great idea.  But as Sunday wore on, I contemplated my answer to that question.  As I was setting my alarm for 5am, I contemplated my sanity.  Anyhow as it was, I was awake at 4:45am before the alarm went off.  On most mornings I would roll over and try to go back to sleep, but this morning I slowly aroused myself from a nights slumber and put my two feet on the ground to ready myself for early morning yoga.  At promptly 5:15am my good friend stealthily pulled up to my house and we started the 25-30 minute drive to the yoga studio.  I know, now you are thinking we are completely insane.  Not only did we agree to go to a 5:45am yoga class, we have to drive 25-30 minutes to get there.  To defend ourselves a little bit, this yoga studio is in a beautiful setting (on the water), with radiant heating through the floor, only costs $5 for an “hour of power”, and is an affiliated studio for Baptiste Power Yoga.  Did that help??  Anyway we arrived and put our mats down after signing in and retrieving a block and “torture” strap (that’s what we call those little straps that they hand out for those of us who lack in the flexibility department).  As soon as the class got started, we were in and out of “downward” dog at least 20 times in the first 5 mintues and working up a major sweat.  Nothing like a quick wake up.  The class went this way for the whole hour, hence the term “hour of power”.  The class ended with shivasana and three hearty “OMs” and we were on our way at 6:47am.  Despite all of what I just said, it was an awesome way to start the day.  We could see the sun rising up over the water as the sky started to lighten, not too often we get to appreciate that.  We topped that off with a nice coffee at the local Starbucks and we were off to tackle the rest of the day, each of us having 3 kids to care for.  Today that yoga “practice” and the “OMs” stayed with me into early afternoon, giving me more patience than normal to deal with the little nuances of my kiddos.  I could use a nice quiet nap about now, but we know how likely that is to happen, absolutely zero.  I have already agreed to do it again tomorrow, definitely contemplating my sanity right now.  I really do need to get less dedicated friends who would never even entertain the thought of early morning yoga on consecutive days.  OM and Namaste.

I just popped on to AOL and noticed this story about the four oldest Jolie-Pitt children.  They are just like us and it is nice for me to know that.  Sometimes they look so well behaved and I think, how is that possible?  They have 6 under the age of 7.  Imagine though, for them, everytime your child misbehaved or were rambunctious for that matter, it was printed in every news outlet.  Yikes, that would be awful and I fear we would be in the news a lot.  Here is the link:  http://www.popeater.com/movies/article/jolie-pitt-kids-hotel-room/336313

My two oldest children are taking skiing lessons this year at a small, local ski slope.  My daughter is in the youngest group and is doing a great job skiing down the hill and seems to love every minute of it despite the cold weather.  My son is in the next age group and thus skies after my daughter.  So one day a week we rush to the ski slope after school where we sit through 2.5 hours of skiing lessons.  Luckily for the parents they have a nice place (aka bar) where we can sit and watch our cherubs ski down and ride up the slopes.  This past week, my son went up the rope tow with his instructor once, skiied down with her and headed right back into the line to do it again.  The next time up, he decided to go up the rope tow on his own and skied down as fast as he could, at the last minute making a sharp turn right back into the line for the rope tow.  He continued this way, getting in about 20 runs up and down in a matter of 10 minutes bypassing all of the other children waiting patiently for their instructor to bring them up.  About 1 hour into the lesson, the sun went down and it became very hard to see him going up and down.  After awhile I couldn’t see him, but assumed that he was going up and down like before.  About 45 minutes later, the lesson was over and my son’s instructor came over and said, “I don’t have your son, he went up the chair lift with another instructor because he was skiing so well”.  Ok, gulp…. At that point I tried not to panic, but scenes kept flashing in my head that I tried hard  not to acknowledge.  One being that he had been abducted by an imposter ski instructor and was well on his way to Florida by now.  The other being that my little boy was riding up and down the ski lift, not sure what to do or worse had fallen off halfway up the hill and was lying somewhere hurt.  About 10-15 minutes went by, his regular instructor came back over and said, “he still isn’t back yet?  I will head out there to try to find him.”  I was already panicked but this just bumped it up a notch.  As I started to walk over towards the farthest lift, I heard his instructor say, “oh, here he comes”.  Thank god!!!  When he came skiing around the corner, his face was lit up like a Christmas tree, with a smile from ear to ear.  His new instructor Mike said, “great job, see you next week”.  I gave that little guy a huge hug and started peppering him with questions.  “What did you do?”  “Did you ride the chair lift?”, “Who did you ride up with?”…etc.  He replied, “yeah, I rode the chair lift alone.  I was a little scared and I lifted the safety bar before I got off.”  First of all, I was glad that I did not witness one second of the last 45 minutes.  The thought of watching my little 6 year old, riding up that chair lift alone would have put me over the edge.  But he did it and he loved it.  I asked him, “what did you like the most?”  and he replied, “I love to go down the hill as fast as I can”.  I would have never probably brought him on the lift at this point and I certainly would have never let him go by himself.  But it just proves to me, that sometimes they may be ready to do more than you think they are capable of.  My little Alberto Tomba will ride again this week with a smile on his face as he gives me heart palpitations and grey hairs.

My middle daughter will be turning four soon and it seems like there has been a huge shift in her personality.  She has always been considered quiet, shy, sweet, even-tempered and mature for her age.  She is all of those things on the outside, but when she is here in our house where she feels most comfortable, watch out.  She continually fights with her older brother giving him big huge whacks to the back and constant kicks.  He likes to bring it on, but she has no problem joining in.  She can definitely hold her own, but 9 times out of 10 she ends up crying.  For the past month, she has been in time out at least 2-3 times per day and she doesn’t know when to stop.  She will march up to her room for time out, the only place in our house that is an effective time out spot, slam the door and yell things.  Today she yelled, “I am a winner, mommy is a loser”.  Nice.  She gets this stuff from her older brother who is learning some really nice words in school.  She also decided it would be a good idea to throw her Playmobil Circus that took me about 2 hours to put together on Christmas morning, breaking it into multiple pieces.  With that she decided to add, “I just threw my circus, how do you like that???”.  Well, I didn’t tell her what I thought of that, I showed her and I packed up that Playmobil circus into a garbage bag that I think she thinks I threw away.  I did not, but I hid it in the basement for later use, maybe when her little sister is old enough for it.  She just keeps going and doesn’t realize that she is in trouble and she just needs to stop and start over.  I try to get to the root of all this, by talking to her about her feelings (she is the middle child and so am I) and spending extra special time with her.  But none of it is working, I think it is actually getting worse.  I just want that sweet, quiet girl who is so extremely helpful and loves spending time with her “mama” back.  Will I ever get her back or is this just the beginning of little girlhood that leads to the tweens and teens.  Just now, my son had inadvertenly knocked my youngest daughter with his XBox controller and who was most concerned about the baby, my little sweet almost four year old who immediately went to comfort her little sister.  She is still in there, I can only hope we can pull her out a bit more before I pull my hair out.