I had a lot of possible titles for this post…”Out of gas”, “Hitting the brick wall”, “Not having fun”.  It hit me at the end of last week:  that this is it.  Mondays with Anna and Theo.  Tuesdays with all three little ones.  Wednesdays with Anna.  Wednesday nights with all the little ones while Jeff teaches a late class.  Thursdays with all the little ones again.  Fridays with Anna.  Weekends, our “all-together” days, a chaotic melee of children, laundry, and an attempt by the adults to catch a nap or two.  This is the new normal.  But it doesn’t feel normal yet, it feels cluttered and overwhelming and just plain hard. I know that I have it very good and very easy compared to most mothers in the world.  I know that I am very fortunate to be able to have a couple of days a week alone with my baby without my older children (although I worked hard and saved to make that financially possible).  And I am sure that someone looking from the outside in would say that I’ve been doing well on my own with the kid(s).  But despite my best efforts I often don’t feel like I am doing a good job.  It feels like at least one someone is always crying or whining, always hungry, always bored, and/or always, needing to go to sleep.  And some of that time, that someone is me.  The constant needs of everyone, including myself are wearing me down.  It all seemed doable for a few weeks; you can do anything for a short amount of time, but when it hit me that my “break” from this new normal wasn’t going to come until I go back to work, in June, I felt like I hit a wall.  I am not particularly sad.  I am certainly not depressed.  I am just acknowleging that parenting three children ages five and under is really hard.  I also want to enjoy the time with my children – I like my children – not just count the hours until Jeff comes home and congratulate myself that we all survived the day.

But here is where this post turns from complaining to action.  Two years ago I would have simply thought to myself “Of course, this is hard, you have a two month old, stop whining and it will get better in a few months on its own.”  I would have heard everyone saying “You’re doing great!” and interpreted that to mean “I think you are doing great, so there must be something wrong with you if you are feeling overwhelmed”.  As soon as I started feeling the force of that brick wall bearing down on me I told Jeff about it.  I then told my sister and  couple of friends and they listened.  We’re making lots of changes.  Some of the changes are small – like me making sure that I get an afternoon snack.  (I have a tendency to turn into a three year old when I am hungry and it isn’t pretty.)  We’re giving Theo a bottle of milk in the morning when he starts to melt down – the kid has basically had a moaning, sobbing meltdown at about 10:30 am ever since he gave up his morning nap a year and a half ago!  Despite a morning snack, cuddling, and reading stories, the meltdowns were just getting worse so we tried giving him some of his beloved “milky” and lo and behold a beautiful calm has descended upon the house during the mid-morning. And I really don’t care if he takes a bottle until he goes to kindergarten.  And speaking of kindergarten, the biggest change of all is that we decided to take a mid-year opening for Thomas such that he will start kindergarten in three weeks.   And just making a few changes and knowing that all I really have to do is acknowledge my difficulties and we will work together as a family is already making life easier.  It only took me three kids to figure it out.

Thomas knows that I keep a journal for each child that I write in periodically.  He also knows that I “do some writing on the computer”.  (Something tells me that he will be a blogger one day; if we aren’t all socially networked to each other by chips in our brains by the time he is a teenager.)  Tonight as I was putting the boys to bed Thomas asked me to write about him (and then added that I should write about Theo too) so I thought I would oblige.

Thomas…

Thomas has consistently been winning the on-going contest of “most challenging child in the family” for the past several weeks.  This week’s bad behavior highlight:  telling me to “shut my mouth” when I told him to put on his shoes for a walk (oh the cruelty of forcing my child to walk three blocks with me to the mailbox in 80 degree weather!).  In return for his disrespect he had all sweets taken away for one week.  And he was treated to learning a new word “grounded”.  As in if he ever says that to me again he will not go anywhere but school for one week and when he’s at home he will not get any TV and will have to go to bed directly after dinner.  I am 100% supportive of him expressing his feelings, but he will do so in a respectful manner – or else.  In another transgression Thomas lost the use of his Legos for a week.  Perhaps remembering the consequences of bad behavior, the rest of this week has been pretty darn great.  He has been incredibly helpful with Theodore – for the most part, playing nicely with him while I comforted the ever-fussy Anna.  At lunchtime yesterday Theo finished eating his beloved Snappea crisps before Thomas (a rare and favorite item in our house) and threw himself a tantrum when I denied him more.  I told Theo that I had given him and Thomas the exact same amount (I counted) but he was not to be consoled.  Thomas sighed and very generously handed Theo his last two Snappea crisps.  Thomas is now reading to Theodore which is utterly adorable.  And during a rare and beautiful half hour where both Anna and Theodore were asleep at the same time I sat down and taught him multiplication which he picked up quickly.

Theodore…

Theodore, my amazing, perfect, sent-from-heaven, sleeper has been waking up the middle of the night yelling about needing help with his blanket.  Because although he is quite capable of climbing into my bed and pulling my covers over his head to play hide and seek he is, apparently, incapable of pulling his own blanket over himself in the middle of the night.  Under the category of awesome Theo has developed a passion for “bake with Mama?”.  I am not sure if it is the one-on-one time together or the opportunity to lick the beater that has suddenly ignited his culinary fires, but I am having a lot of fun with my new baking buddy.  Theodore has also, for a couple of months now, been complaining that he misses me while at school.  So in what might prove to be insanity I decided to pull Theodore out of school one day a week so that he is now home with me three days a week.  (Thomas will still go to school three days a week.)  The truth is I miss him too.  I also know that as my middle child Theodore gets the short end of the stick when it comes to one-on-one time with me.  He is more talkative and creative when he is the only child around and I want to enjoy that side of him.

Anna…

In addition to “Sunshine” Anna’s other nickname is “Fussypants”.  We joke constantly about her fussypants as if they were an actual, pair (or pairs) of attire.  Mocking our baby’s fussiness with rather juvenile humor helps keep us sane when we’re swaddling and walking her to sleep for the tenth time in a day.  I particularly enjoyed this exchange:

Jeff:  How was she today?

Me:  Well this morning was great; she was smiling and talkative for about 20 minutes; her fussypants were in the laundry.  But then they came out of the dryer and she put them on.  Apparently they had shrunk so she was extra fussy the rest of the day.

Jeff:  Nothing’s worse than a tight pair of fussypants.  Why are you letting a newborn choose their own pants anyway…why don’t you just put a pair of happypants on her?

Me:  We didn’t get any.  And they don’t sell them at Target.

We also call Anna “the baby stick” because when she’s all swaddled up tight (which given her fussiness is most of the time) she seems to me like a little stick with a cute baby head attached to the top.  Despite her general crankiness I am actually finding her quite awesome.  When she’s awake and happy she is very chatty and gives me that adoring smile that babies often seem to reserve for their mothers – the one where they look up at you and grin at you like you are a god.   Finding out what my kids are thinking is absolutely one the highlights of parenting older children.  I’m excited at the idea that it won’t be too long before Anna tells me, vociferously I am sure, what her thoughts on life are.

Me…

I love being on maternity leave.  My days with Anna alone are actually very relaxing.  I suspect that Anna might be a night-owl like her Mama and her biggest brother.  Most days after we finally get her to sleep; she sleeps and nurses all night long without much complaint, finally waking at the deliciously late hour of 9:30 am or so.  As long as I stay in bed with her and nurse her on demand she stays happy and content and I am getting eight hours of (interrupted, but hey I have a newborn – I’m not complaining!) sleep every night.  It has also been surprisingly helpful to my sanity that Jeff bought me a one pound box of See’s chocolates for Christmas.  I hid said box in my nightstand and whenever I start fantasizing about running away to a land without children I sneak into the bedroom and eat a chocolate.  And you know what, that helps quite a lot.  Do you have any secret coping mechanisms when life gets rough?  I promise I won’t tell.

]]> http://www.mendolo.com/2012/01/07/thee-kids-one-adult/feed/ 2 http://www.mendolo.com/2012/01/04/new-year-new-resolutions-2/ http://www.mendolo.com/2012/01/04/new-year-new-resolutions-2/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:04:57 +0000 Gina http://www.mendolo.com/?p=1868 I realize that the calendar says that this is the second day of the new year, but here in Pasadena it feels like today is the real beginning of the new year.  You see while Pasadena usually goes all out with the Rose Parade every January 1st, the parade is never held on a Sunday and so this year the parade had to wait until a Monday, January 2nd.  Although the parade is about as far from environmentally friendly as possible, I rather enjoy a ridiculous display of flowers shaped into objects on moving vehicles  along with marching bands and random assortments of people on horses.  I was supposed to be at the parade this morning.  Every year Pasadena residents can enter a lottery for Rose Parade tickets in the official grandstands at the beginning of the parade route.  I’ve entered every year for the past nine years and this year I finally won!  Four tickets, perfect of our little family.  But as I stood up and swaddled and sushed and bounced my fussy baby to sleep again and again this past weekend I realized that I was probably going to have to spent the entire time at the parade walking behind the grandstands with Anna.  And you know what, that’s just not worth getting up at 5:30 am and walking 2.7 miles.  I am a little sad though; Thomas and Theo are so excited.  Theo’s never been to the parade and I would have really enjoyed seeing his amazement and hearing his little voice say “Wow!” over and over again at the sight of the floats; and I am sure he will be dancing to the music of the bands.  But overall this situations typifies my first New Year’s resolution:  to soak up my baby.  Anna is clearly a sensitive soul and completely loses her little marbles in loud, chaotic situations.  (Gee, I wonder where she gets this from says her mother who has a tendency to retreat into a corner with a book at parties).  But before I get ahead of myself with new resolutions I like to look back at the ones I made last year.

1. Make more chocolate mousse:  I only made chocolate mousse a couple of times in 2011.  A big part of that had to do with me being pregnant; as soon as sperm meets egg I lose my sweet tooth.  I’ll just have to make chocolate mousse twice as often in 2012 to make up for it.
2. Take risks:  I thought that this would be the hardest, yet most important resolution for me to keep and I am quite rightly proud of myself for keeping it.  I took a huge leap and started pastry school.  I would have finished too if those running the damned school hadn’t fired and failed to pay our excellent chef-instructors.  Ah well, I got in enough classes to figure out that the life of a professional chef is not right for me.  I also spent many hours over the summer interning for a great start-up, mapping out local farmers markets, photographing markets and farms, interviewing farmers and food artisans, and writing blog posts.  The experience was great and I learned something totally new about myself – I loved taking photographs of the farms and market and beautiful food and animals – and I was quite good at it too.  And the biggest, most unexpected risk of all was adding a third child to our family. A risk that I could not be happier about the outcome.
3. Exercise at least three times a week:  I didn’t keep an exact tally (although I thought about it – I do love a good spreadsheet) I did a good job of fulfilling this resolution.   I kept running on the couch to 5K program until I was 17 weeks pregnant and until and kept going to Cardio Barre twice a week until I was 36 weeks pregnant. I’ve never been more than a few feet away from Anna yet but once we can convince her to take a bottle the first time I leave her, will be to go to Cardio Barre.
4. Go karaoke:  Fail.  I did not karaoke, but I did do some country line dancing at a friend’s wedding.  That was awesome and brought back some fond high school memories of driving to Lincoln (Nebraska) on Saturday nights to go country dancing.
5. Take a college class:  I tried! finding an available class – given all the budget cuts to education and limited classes at the local community colleges and Cal States made this impossible.  While I was accepted to enroll at a couple of local colleges, as a non-degree student, by the time I was allowed to register the classes were entirely full.  This means I am most likely going to have to decide on exactly what program I want to pursue and then just take the plunge!

For this year I thought about simply making the resolution to keep us all alive and reasonably clean and well-fed.  Today was my first day alone with all three kids for the entire day and as much as I love our family three kids is going to be tough, very tough.  It feels like someone is always crying (thankfully it’s not usually me), someone is always awake, and someone is always bored.  That said, Jeff is holding the baby so I can type the rest of this post with two hands (such a luxury!) so I should come up with a few good ones:

1. Soak up my baby:  Anna is almost certainly our last child and just want to soak up every minute of her babyhood.  She is a fussy little thing (I think that I actually call her “Fussypants” far more often than “Anna”) and I think it’s entirely possible that she has cried more in her six weeks that the boys did in all of their first year – combined.  But…knowing that Anna is my last baby makes all of her fussiness so much easier.  I often find myself thankful even for her middle of the night wakings.  I look at her nursing by the light of my ipod and I am just so happy she is here.  I am going to enjoy her babyhood.
2. Find my non-childbearing body:  I have been pregnant and/or nursing since February 2006 and while I expect to be nursing for at least another year – hopefully more – I am ready to find my new, healthy body.  I don’t expect or even want my pre-pregnancy body back, but I do want to be healthy, strong, and to look good.  I feel like I am off to a good start..the first 20 pounds of pregnancy weight are already gone.  Yea for nursing!
3. Learn to use my camera and research digital SLR cameras:  I’ve known since Thomas was a baby that I enjoy photographing and editing pictures of the kids and the garden but I learned this summer that I am actually a pretty good photographer.  I want to develop my skills and see where it takes me.  This resolution will be a challenge for me.  I am generally an old curmudgeon when it comes to technology
4. Spend one-on-one time with each child every day:  This will be easy with Anna (again, yea for nursing!), but perhaps sometimes challenging for each boy.  Even if it’s only five minutes reading a story while Jeff wrangles the other two kids, this is important for the happiness of the entire family.
5. Find a cause I am passionate about and engage politically:  It won’t be hard to find a cause…could be breastfeeding, informed childbirth, maternal/child health, protection of open space, public education reform.  But with three young children I need to find something that I can make a meaningful contribution to that doesn’t take me away from my kids too much (see resolutions #1 and #4).
6. Emphasize experiences over material goods:  I can’t remember exactly what I got each boy for their birthday or Christmas last year but I have fantastic memories of our trip to Disneyland, music classes with Theodore, camping in the Sequoia National Forest, the boys finger painting naked in the backyard.  With the help of some generous relatives we now have memberships to The Huntington, Kidspace, the Arboretum, and the Aquarium – we have no excuse (OK – maybe one named Anna) not to get out and experience life.

Do you have any resolutions for the year?

Learning to love my curly hair

I was born with curly hair and I am quite sure I will die with it, but I spent the first eighteen years of my life hating it.  I was never a “normal” or “average” kid and I felt that my riotous curly hair only made me stand out more.  I can’t count the number of times someone has asked me if my hair was naturally curly or a perm or inquired “have you ever tried straightening it?”.  The summer after I graduated from high school I took some of my graduation money and tried just that.  I sat in a salon chair for more than three hours while the stylist applied, in her own words, “the most straightening creme I have ever used”, and waited for the magic of “permanent” straitening to change my life.  I went out with friends that night and enjoyed all the positive attention that my straight, sleek hair attracted, but every time I looked in the mirror it was as if I was staring at stranger.  A couple of days later I washed my hair and was dismayed to discover that after washing my hair it wasn’t straight at all nor was it curly – it had reverted to some sort of limp wavy form.  I called the stylist and she said that in order for it to regain the salon straight look I would, “of course” have to blow dry it straight after every washing.  In about ten seconds I dismissed the idea of wasting that much time in my life trying to fight my hair and decided right then and there to embrace my curly hair forever more.   This might sound like a frivolous decision to write down on a “best” list, however, I think that accepting and loving one’s physical appearance as it is; is a rather difficult thing to do in our society.

 Quitting grad school in physics

After graduating from Caltech with a degree in planetary science (essentially a combo of physics, astronomy, and geology) I started a PhD program in physics three months later.  Why?  Because that was what did if you graduated from Caltech and had no idea what to do except become an astronomer.  I remember the feeling of resigned boredom every time I went to class in graduate school.  I remember how I hated commuting more than an hour each way to school.  I remember how badly I just wanted to grow up, buy a house, have children, and generally get on with life and yet saw years ahead of boring, competitive, low-paying work.  One night, on a car ride home from somewhere, about six months into my first year as a graduate student I was detailing my hatred of grad school to Jeff when he said simply, “I don’t understand why you don’t just quit.”  I was stunned speechless at the idea – I don’t think the thought of actually quitting had ever occurred to me.  And I immediately felt relief at the thought that I could get off this academic train that I had no passion for.  A couple of weeks later at the end of the quarter I walked into the graduate student office and told them, politely, that I was never coming back.  I remember feeling so happy, so light, with my decision that I think I actually skipped a bit down the corridor on my way out of the physics building.  I will forever be deeply grateful to Jeff for speaking up and allowing me to see the obvious.

Having my children

For years I wanted children, dreamed of them, cried over over a prognosis of infertility and so as soon as Jeff was ready we decided to take the leap of faith into parenthood.  And somehow, I think that Thomas arrived exactly when I was ready to be a mother – not a moment too soon or a moment too late.  Then came Theodore, at one of the most difficult times of my life he was quite literally the light of my existence.  And I think every day of how eternally grateful I am for this baby girl I carry inside me.  I can’t explain why, but I feel deeply that she is the perfect fit for our lives right at this moment in time.  I have heard a lot of women say that they feel like they lost themselves when they had children.  I needed to “get lost”, to get off the path that I was on, to allow myself to leave my thinking brain and go to a more emotional, more honest place.  My children have been the key to being myself and they bring me joy every single day of my life.

Changing Theodore’s name when I realized his original name could never be right for him

I’ve written previously a bit about why we changed Theodore’s name from the original we gave him.  I didn’t write, however, about how much a of a failure having to do so made me feel.  I don’t know anyone who has ever changed their child’s name and after more than a year of feeling fairly crazy about a lot of things in my life, completely changing my son’s name seemed like proof of actual craziness.  But in the end, it was so absolutley the right thing to do.  Theodore is just the right name for our adventurous little boy and I am so glad I got over my fear of publicly admitting my imperfection and just did what I felt was right.

Taking the time to focus on me this year

This has been the year of Gina.  Last September I transferred from my job 2 miles away to one 30 miles distant simply because I wasn’t happy with the job at the nearby location.  Then in January I plunged into pastry school.  I have worked less hours at my high-paying job to take an unpaid internship where my colleagues were college students in their late teens and early twenties.  I put Thomas to bed basically every single night of his life until he was two and a half.  But now Jeff, regularly puts both boys to bed two to three nights a week because I am working late, going to class, or exercising.   I have attended weekend cooking classes, food preservation classes, and food symposiums – even when my kids made it quite clear that they were unhappy with my leaving.  Financially and time-wise none of these were “logical” decisions.  I am, without exaggeration, the most risk-averse person that I know.  But this past year I have taken a risk and bet on myself.  I don’t know where it will lead but I am at peace with that – in and of itself a huge accomplishment for me.

Now tell me, what are the best decisions you have ever made?