Yes, Master!

Today the kids and I semi-gussied up and headed to The Club for R's promotion ceremony. He made MSgt last year, but (and I'm a little vague on how this works) when you 'pass' the test you are assigned a number. That number determines when you actually get promoted. So R was in the low 3000's and as of tomorrow, April 1, he'll officially be the Master - if not of the universe at least of his own little corner of this base.

The kids and I are so proud of him! And in turn, R and I are proud of the kids. We had to be there 30 minutes before the ceremony was supposed to start (no comment on whether it started on time since I don't wear a watch) and I'm sure it lasted at least an hour and the kids were relatively still, very quiet, and extremely well behaved. We went up to 'tap' his new rank on and S ran up the aisle and gave him a big hug - it was so really sweet and I'm grateful for my wonderful family and husband. Unfortunately, I didn't get to take any pictures of the ceremony but I'll post some if anyone that did take them sends them our way.

Let it spray, let it spray....

Alrighty. One out of diapers, one to go. It was a long road, lemme just tell ya. But, as I thought, T took a page from Elvis and Frank and did it his way. Of course it was always going to be when he was good and ready and not one second before. Glad to see that I had a handle on the reality of the situation. LOL.


Yesterday morning we were downstairs and he goes into the bathroom. No big deal. A few minutes later, I go in and I'm like - what is that smell? And then it hits me - it's hairspray. Which, since I never wear it, was an odd thing to smell down there. Odd, but maybe it's from 80's night a couple weeks ago since I used a LOT of hairspray that night. I take a quick shower, get out and there is T - spraying hairspray. What the heck? Then it hits me - he thinks it's air freshener. This winter our house stayed so closed up that I felt it smelled stale, so I bought air freshener for the house. Plus, with all those diapers around, you never know when you can no longer smell them but other people can. Actually, I didn't realize it until Mom visited last year and SHE walked around spraying air freshener, but that's neither here nor there. So then I take a good look around and I realize..it's EVERYWHERE. We have a bidet and what I thought was just a coating of dust I needed to take care of was actually dust + hairspray. It's all over the sink and the floor and the walls. Luckily, the entire bathroom is tiled. So I started to wipe it up and realized that this has been going on for a while. Water is the universal solvent, and hot water can clean most house related things, so I started the clean up process. Yeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. That particular brand of hairspray, when being cleaned up with water (hot or not), turns into a type of....slime. Good to know I've been putting that on my hair. Remember Aqua-Net? It was way worse than that. All things considered, it took several attempts to get what I hope was most of it cleaned up and I was smart enough to put the hairspray somewhere T can't reach it. Fun stuff. At least he didn't coat his sister in hairspray, right?

How much is enough?

I should be doing schoolwork. I should be cleaning the kitchen, vacuuming the floor, getting a decent night's sleep, filing almost a year's worth of paperwork, and about a million other things. I realize I'm not the only person to feel this way.


So why don't I do it? Dunno. Probably because I don't want to, which leads me to think about an aspect of my personality I'd really rather not...my secret tendency to rebel. I think it's an internal war of have to against want to, and I'm still childish enough to mentally stamp my foot and silently scream, "NO! I DON'T WANT TO!"

Today, I got my issue of Good Housekeeping (I think it was the March issue) and I was reading Geneen Roth's monthly column. Geneen deals with emotional eating and related issues. In this issue, she was talking about how she counseled a Mom who was concerned about her daughter's weight and eating habits to completely fill a cabinet in the kitchen with chocolate. The Mom was to tell her daughter she could have any and everything in the cabinet whenever she wanted. The Mom was to keep the cabinet full without any comment or judgement for three weeks. The Mom, understandably, was not thrilled about this but did it anyway. At the end of three weeks, the Mom was surprised that her daughter had stopped eating the chocolate. Not because she got sick or ate too much, but because her daughter felt that her Mom was okay with however much chocolate she ate or didn't eat and loved her the same anyway.

Huh!!!!!

I feel like I am always worrying about the potential psychological damage I'm doing to my kids. I don't want them to inherit my issues - food or otherwise - but I also know that kids are pretty darn smart, and they pick up both the said and unsaid that they live with. So if the key, then, is that they feel accepted and loved no matter what, I might just have a fighting chance of not ruining them completely.

Since I've been putting consistent, every day effort into remaining calm and not flying off the handle, I've noticed a HUGE change in T. HUGE! Reading Geneen's article was like a smack in the face - the kids don't care how clean the house is, whether I'm trying to beat a deadline with a paper or assignment for school, they just care that Mommy loves them and thinks they are great. Which they are. Even when they have days like today at the grocery store where R had to stay in the car with them while I did the shopping because they were fighting over everything - probably even the air they were breathing.

Mine!

No! Mine!

It's MINE

NO, MINE

You get the idea - I can talk all day long about working out problems, handling conflict, expressing anger in an appropriate way, and blah, blah, blah. But in two and four year old land - they could care less. It will eventually sink in, it will eventually get better. And I have to admit that there are days when I'd love to throw in the towel and tantrum along with them.

I NEVER want my kids to feel like they don't measure up, aren't good enough, or can't ever please me. Despite my best efforts, it might happen anyway because I'm battling demons of my own in those areas, but I'm going to take my best effort and then double it to prevent it from happening in our house. And if it takes a cabinet full of chocolate to prove it, so be it.

It's raining, it's pouring....

We've had a lot of snow and rain this winter. Last night, it started snowing/sleeting as it was getting dark. By late last night, the road conditions were changed to red, which means mission essential only (I snark at that term, but that's another post). So the phone tree was activated last night to tell everyone to check road conditions before heading to work in the morning. When I headed to bed around 1, there was a light, freezing rain falling.

During the night, the temperature increased and by 5 am, road conditions were changed to amber which means, haha! you have to come to work anyway. Poor R - he said it was a nasty drive. By 10 am, all the snow and sleet had melted and it had actually stopped raining. I had a movie to return (Fireproof - highly recommended!!) so I muscled the kids into the car and off we went. By the time we got back, we had about 30 minutes before the bus came for T, so we played outside.

T immediately got on his bike and rode through the puddle. S decided to stop through the puddle. I thought about trying to force her boots in her feet and decided that I wasn't up for that particular fight today since she'd already thrown a fit about waffles, juice, and outfits. So I just let her splash around in the water.

As I was thinking, 'I sure hope she doesn't fall' guess what she did? She fell - SPLAT - belly flop into the puddle. (I keep saying puddle, but it's more like a teeny weeny pond. I'll try to take a picture.) She got soaked from her bangs to her toes. Her coat, which is a kind of Berber material, absorbed a ton of water. She got up, dripping wet, crying at the coldness and shock of it all. I grab her and dash inside to change her wet clothes. It all has to come off - from coat to socks. All soaking wet. Poor S, her lips are turning blue. We get her clothes changed and trooper that she is, she wants to go back outside. Okay. I get her into dry socks and clothes and a coat. Problem is, she needs to wear her boots but the last time we tried that, she pitched a 30 minute fit and refused to move. So, I carefully pull out her boots and say - want to wear these? Holy crow! She nods. We put the boots on her feet and I hold her hand as she starts to walk in them. Yay S!!!!!

So we are back outside. T gets off his bike and holds her other hand and we walk her through the puddle. Water! she shouts gleefully. Water!!! Soon she's stomping (albeit more carefully) through the puddle like a champ and then she gets on her little scooter and rides through the water like her big brother. I'm so glad that she's wearing boots while secretly wondering why it took a belly flop to get her to do it. And while I don't have the answer, I know that Miss S, resident diva, is more than likely only going to do things when she's good and ready. Lord help us all.

I'm out of my league already

So, two weeks ago, I had a serious conversation with God. I found myself yelling at the kids way more than I was comfortable with, and it was having the opposite effect of what I was trying to achieve. Instead of making them listen or behave or do what I wanted, it just made them louder and more defiant. So in this talk with God, I admitted all the things that I knew of that I was doing wrong and threw in a miscellaneous category for anything I had not realized or had forgotten. I asked for help because I'm obviously not doing great on my own.

Since then things have slowly but steadily gotten better. This morning, however, the kids are not listening well and I've found myself struggling a couple of times to remain calm and act like the grownup I should be instead of the teenage brat I often feel like. The kids have both been in time out at least twice before 10 am. That's usually not a good sign.

So after they had lunch, we were in the living room playing and T reaches out and kicks at S. This has to be the 15th time I've caught him doing this this morning. As I put him (calmly) in time out again and explain that we don't kick, hit, pinch, punch, slap, smack, push, shove, head butt, manhandle, or commit any other type of physical aggressiveness or bodily harm, S saunters over to T in the time out area to aggravate him. (sigh) As I'm removing S from the situation, T looks up and says, "Hey, hey, hey....this isn't your problem." I have to bite my lip and turn away to keep from laughing.

The many uses of Cheerios

Most kids eat cheerios. My kids...sigh...decided on Friday to dump an entire box of them on T's bed and stomp them into oblivion. Interestingly enough, crushed Cheerios resemble sand - it gets everywhere and is nearly impossible to completely remove.

To my credit, I did not lose my temper or yell - which has to be a first for this level of destruction - but I did make the kids clean it up. S, of course, refused on principle so she got put to bed early for her nap and for bedtime. Poor T...but he knew better. He's so tall now that he can reach the stuff on top of the fridge if he stands on a chair. I'm not ready for that, especially since that's where we put all the stuff we don't want them to reach and they know it.

Just keeping it interesting...

Last week was a crazy kind of busy. By Thursday, the kids and I were tired of errands and each other. There wasn't a spot in day care for them on Wednesday, so I tried to space out the stuff I needed to do over a couple of days. No matter how good your kids are, there's a limit to how much they can take. That's true of me too, come to think of it...


Anyway, I had an Executive Board meeting with the MOMS Club Thursday night at 6:30 so R and I planned that I would meet him at work, we'd have dinner with the kids and he'd head home with the munchkins and I'd go to the meeting. Which actually reminds me that I need to make some phone calls and send some emails (making a note to do that first thing tomorrow). The bus drops T off right around 3-ish. I usually give him a snack, spend about 15 minutes just with him, then we wake up S from her nap and the normal chaos resumes.


The challenge Thursday was that I had to get the kids into the car and to base in time to do a few errands and then meet R when he got off work. The reality was that nothing went according to plan, but what else is new? I needed to have the kids in the car ready to hit the road by 4 if I was going to get any errands done. So what time did I get the kids in the car? Oh...around 4:30ish. On the way out the door (and I will never understand how I can take a shower, dry my hair, slap on some make-up, get dressed and be in the car before the kids can manage to get down the stairs, put on their shoes and coats and out the door). I know it was close to 4 when we headed for the stairs. I'm sure it went something like this:

Me: Come on. Coats, shoes, hats and gloves. Let's head for the stairs!
S: AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
T: Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy!
Me: What is it?
T: S is screaming.
Me: Yes, I hear that. Come on, let's go. We're going to be late.
S:WAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Me: Come on, S. T, go down and put on your shoes and coat.
T: Put on my shoes?
Me: Yes, coat and shoes please.
T: Put on my coat and shoes?
Me: Yes, please. Hurry up.
S: (loud shrieking)
Me: S, stop that! Let's go.
T: I want to take my ______________.
Me: Fine, but you have to carry it.
T: I don't want to carry it.
Me: Then don't take it.
T: No,YOU carry it.
Me: Lookit! I've got the diaper bag, S's shoes, my bag...my hands are full. If you want to carry _____, then you will have to carry it yourself.
T: I don't WANNA CARRY IT!
S: (more shrieking)
Me: (now sighing loudly) If you don't want to carry it, then leave it here.
T: NO!!!!!!!!!! I WANT IT.
Me: Then bring it but you have to carry it.
S: Mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy
Me: Come on, S, T. Let's go. (I'm actually at the top of the steps now) See, I'm going down the steps. Let's go...
T: WAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT WAIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
S: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIT
(the sound of me trying not to stomp down the steps)
SMACK! (whatever T wanted to bring is now dropped over the stair rail)
Swoosh! (I slide it under the steps with my foot)
Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, T comes thudding down the steps.
S: Waaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh Wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Me: Come on S. You can get down the steps yourself.
S: (screaming and crying)
T: Leave S alone!
Me: Put on your shoes, please.
T: I WANNA WEAR BOOTS!
Me: Okay, put on your boots then.
T: OH-KAAAAAAAAAAY
S: still crying

five minutes later.....

Me: T, don't go outside until we are all ready to go.
T: I'm hungry!
Me: Yes, I know. We are going to meet Dad for dinner. S, sit down please so I can put on your shoes.
T: She doesn't want to put on her shoes.
Me: Well, that's too bad. I don't want to go insane, yet here I go anyway.
T: Gone sane?
Me: something like that
T: Oh, yeah, yeah. Sane.
Me: Okay, let's go get in the car.

Open door, kids scatter... five minutes later....

T: Mom! I got juice!
Me: Umm, thanks. (Pokes the straw into the juice box and hands one to each kid) Buckle your seat belt, T.
T: Okay.
(I go and close the door to the fridge and the house)
Me: Okay, everyone ready?
T: Yes!
S: more shrieking
Me: Okay..here we go!

I put the car in reverse and look over my shoulder to see T dumping out the remnants of his juice over his seat and the floor of the car.

Me: What?!?! What are you DOING?!?!
T: (jerks his head up in a jock nod and winks at me) Just keepin' it interesting....
Me: (momentarily stunned speechless)
Me: You know what's interesting? You cleaning up the car when we get home.
T: Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

He's not even five.

Sigh.