Lightening my load...

"There's a really cute, hot pink, Kate Spade diaper bag I'm looking at. Mother's Day gift?"

This was the text I sent to H as I wandered around Buy Buy Baby, helping a friend register for her baby shower. This bag, pictured left, was so cute and so me. It was the antithesis to the camouflage diaper bag I bought in a fit of pride upon discovering my last child was male. H's reply?


"Maybe, if we still used, you know, diapers. I think what you carry now is called 'a purse'."

Huh. It really had not dawned on me that I have, in fact, moved out of the diaper, and therefore, diaper bag, phase of my life. I have, on occasion, still dragged out the camo bag for particularly long, or dirty, outings, like to the zoo, not wanting to sully my fake Tory Burch with sunscreen and juice box straw wrappers, but on a day-to-day basis, I have actually been carrying a purse. When did that happen?

Then I began to realize, without any great pomp or circumstance, I have reached a lot of parenting milestones for the last time and didn't blink an eye. The biggest one, as H mentioned, is diapers. Little Man still wears one at night to sleep, and to take a massive shit in while he lies in bed in the morning, the consummate male, too lazy to get up, lounging in his own filth, rather than use the potty two feet away from his bed or coming to get me once he has unloaded in his pants. But other than that, he is potty trained during the day. A jumbo box of diapers gets us through almost three months (and no, I won't buy Pull-Ups. Twice the price of diapers, four times as hard to get off, and ten times less absorbent, LM can do without the fancy Cars and Toy Story logo, thank you). At Target the other day, I realized I do not, for the first time, need to buy swim diapers - which are really diapers in the academic sense in that they prevent any solid waste for causing a baby Ruth situation at the town pool. Although I've seen enough brown-streaked toddler legs to make me gag. Regardless of the type of fecal containment system it is, I don't need one during the day.

The list goes on and on. Sippy cups, for example, used to come tumbling out of our over-crowded cabinets in an avalanche of character themed plastic, and now we only have four or five of them that are used in the morning at breakfast, when I really just can't handle any spills without turning into Mommy Dearest. Those adhesive plastic table liners you use to stop your kid from eating finger food directly off the filthy Friendly's table are a thing of the past, as are the need for a booster seat at restaurants. And now that LM is hell on wheels on his new Cars 2 bike, I think even my stroller days are numbered.

Out to dinner with last night with avid reader, turned new pal, A, she showed me the lovely clutch she had just bought as her new everyday bag. Having preteen children, she was able to get all of her vitals into a bag the size of a large sandwich. I stared in wonder, but really, I am not that far off. Taking inventory of my own emergency supply list, I realized, the necessities come down to a bottle of water, a bag of pretzels, a spare pair of tighty-whities and shorts, and, having a son, Band-Aids. Lots and lots of Band-Aids. A small hobo** would do nicely.

In the end, the bag I wound up buying this spring was a hot pink, monogrammed, LL Bean tote. Big enough for the supply list above, but small enough to prevent me from overloading it with crap. This bag is a baby, or should I say, big-kid step, toward the new phase in my life. I'm not ready to commit to a bag not big enough to lose my phone in on a daily basis. Someday, will be able to buy an every day bag that is not machine washable, and when that day comes, the bag department at Nordstrom had better be prepared.

*And thank God I only buy fakes, since during Mother's Day brunch, #1 dropped a full glass of ice water, glass, and all, sideways into my purse.
**The style of bag, not a homeless midget

Take the hall pass...

On this beautiful, early summer day, I decided to pick #2 up for lunch and take her out. Being my middle child, she often gets short shrift in terms of alone time with me. #1 stays up later, so she and I get to watch Gilmore Girls, and Little Man is only in school mornings, so we get the afternoons to hang out. There really isn’t any time when #2 isn’t competing for attention, so every once in a while, she and I have a clandestine lunch date at a café on main street in New Town, where we get to talk about what sounds koalas make or how she wants to go to Hawaii.

In order to make time for this lunch, I ran around like a headless chicken all morning, resulting in a very full bladder once I reached the school.* Knowing I wouldn’t make it to the café without wetting myself, I ducked into netherworld that is the girl’s bathroom and was instantly transported back to my own school days.

The bathroom at school is more than just a place to take care of business. It can be a quiet refuge from the pressure of the classroom or the schoolyard. Getting a little fed up with this morning’s fractions lesson? Raise your hand and you’ve bought yourself five to eight minutes of peace – provided you haven’t abused the privilege. Never a trouble maker, my third grade teacher called my parents to see if I was suffering from any health issues when I began to asked to be excused several times a day, rather than accuse me of skipping out on lessons. My response when my parents concernedly inquired about my frequent trips to the loo? “I’m bored.”

After being in a loud, active classroom, the bathroom is eerily quiet. You can hear every breath and tinkle – a fact that contributed to my never, EVER, going #2 at school. You can stare at yourself in the shatterproof mirror, or read the scandalous graffiti left behind by 5th graders, that usually involves the word “Poop” or “Pee”, and be secretly thrilled to read the rare one that involves a real swear word. If a friend or acquaintance happens to wander in, you’ve hit the jackpot. Having a chat in the bathroom in primary school is equivalent to standing around the water cooler at the office. You can roll your eyes about the boss ranting about late homework and bitch about your co-workers hogging the purple marker.

The bathroom can also be a scary place if you happen to walk in on a gaggle of older kids solo. Hoping to escape any ribbing, you duck into a stall, hoping they’ll be gone by the time you have to wash your hands, which you will avoid doing if they are hanging out by the sink. The bathroom is Notre Dame for bad kids, “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” Teachers and the principal are rarely going to invade the bathroom to see what some kid is doing, In my day, it was just an inappropriate feeling that kept the adults out, now it’s the fear of being labeled a pedophile** which allows frustrated ne’er-do-wells to clog the sink with industrial-grade brown paper towels, that were as effective at drying hands as construction paper, and lock all the stalls from the inside.

Not wanting to ruin the one place kids can get away from adults for five friggin’ minutes, I exited quickly and made my way down the hall to #2’s classroom, chuckling to myself as remembered my own walks back to class. So today, to honor that, I walked slowly, examining the hallway billboards, stopped to get a drink at the fountain, that still tasted like a handful of nickels, and generally took my sweet time. It just didn’t feel the same without a fraction lesson waiting for me.

*The number one cause of UTIs in women ages 25-40? Raising children.
**That was me today, as I startle three 2nd graders having an in depth discussion about iCarly.

Johnson & Johnson - Propaganda machine

Summer is almost upon us. I celebrated Memorial Day by being vomited upon by both the girls all day Sunday, while H took the girls to a birthday party at his brother's house. Had it not seemed odd for me to show up instead of him, I sure as hell would have allowed him the opportunity to watch, one right after the other, Ice Age, Sharpay's Fabulous Adventure, and Cats and Dogs 2, while running back and forth between the bathroom and the girls to empty bowls of puke. Little Man has not gotten sick yet, but the fact that he is taking his first nap in six weeks does not bode well.

We did, before the tsunami of effluvia began, manage to get a day in at the pool Saturday, which is where the girls probably contracted this plague. I don't care how much chlorine they put in that water, just watching the spluttering that happens while some braces-wearing ten year-old gets dunked by his mates, and knowing how reticent kids are to leave a body of water to get ice cream, never mind urinate, makes me want to gag as well. But at the time , I was not paying much attention to the public health hazard that is a public pool, and we just enjoyed a glorious day in the sun, which, of course, requires sunscreen. And once sunscreen season begins, so does bathing-every-night season.

Yeah, I admit it. In the cold weather months, I don't bathe my kids every night. They all get some pretty dry skin, and as you ladies know, washing your hair every day is actually bad for it, so I take that as nature's way of telling me to take it easy. But once sunscreen and chlorine is involved, you go back to the back-breaking work of cleansing your offspring after a full day of (exhausting) summer fun. I remember fondly, the days pre-children, when H and I would come back from the beach, grab a cold drink, to shower and relax. Now, we face the Herculean task of getting three cranky, hot, children, who an hour before were swimming like fish, but now have the water affinity of a hairless cats, into the tub.*

It's not just in the summer that bathing your kids sucks. It pretty much stinks all year round. Those of you without kids think me a monster. You imagine yourselves, just like in the Johnson & Johnson commercials, bathing your adorable, chubby baby in the baby tub over the kitchen sink, as he splashes playfully and giggles - and that is an accurate interpretation...for the first six months. By that time (or sooner if you have gigantic babies like mine) you've had to move your behemoth to the regular bathtub and, after already spending the day bent over cleaning up toys and changing diapers, you now get to crouch painfully on the bathroom floor, trying to wash dried peach puree out of your little one's thigh folds. This is made infinitely more difficult by the bath seat your kid has to sit in to keep him upright, making it nearly impossible to wash your progeny's business end. At this point though, you still enjoy bath time, letting your kid play with the eight hundred squeaky toys and the puppet washcloths you got at your baby shower.

Fast forward another kid and now you truly, officially, hate bath time. It's a logistical nightmare. When the younger on is tiny, you have to wash him in the baby tub and the older one in the regular one, trying to placate the baby in his or her bouncy seat that you have managed to squeeze into the bathroom with you. Your oldest, accustomed to ample aquatic playtime, vehemently disagrees with the abbreviated version of this game when you haul him out after five minutes. Then, once the little one is old enough to be bathed together with his older sibling, what was once a idyllic, peaceful end to your day, has now turned into a stress-inducing, parent soaking, filthy, kid-soup. You want it over with as quickly as possible. There are no more washcloth puppets, they grew raggedy after so many washings, and you are no longer participating in after-dinner theater anyway. The kids each have one bath toy that does not have a squeaker. Who the hell designs those anyway? Someone without children who does not understand that, despite your religious squeezing at the end of every bath, any toy with a hole will eventually grow mold inside and begin to shit out a black sludge when you empty them.

If you think about it, the concept of a bath is really pretty disgusting. You lie there in your own filth, and if you are my son, drink some of it every night while your mother screams at you. I use this idea to make myself feel better when my children's baths last all of four minutes. Again, I harken back to Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had to bathe in her older sister Mary's leftover bath water. I'm sure she wasn't asking Ma where her Polly Pocket boat or Toy Story squeakies were. She got clean and got the hell out. Why have we turned bath time into a party? There are too many products prolonging children's time in there and creating a nightmare for parents, most of them purchased by grandparents. Do they not remember going through this hell themselves???? In my mother in-law's defense, she did save the water-coloring tablets for her own home, but I don't need any bath time art products. I have made it through my whole damn day and now I'm supposed to let my kids paint with colored soap, or draw on the shower walls with soap crayons, so I not only have to wash them, but them clean my bathroom as well? Are you high?

And the bath safety products, like the aforementioned seat, are handy and do help prevent accidents, but again, do they need to be so jazzy? That protective spout cover does not have to make my tub look like Sesame Place, with Ernie's grinning mug on it, just make, plain, cushy plastic to prevent my kid from cracking his noggin open on the spout. But then again, maybe that would drive them out of the water. It's just too comfortable in there. There were no padded spout covers for me as a kid. My mother would have me tilt my head back under the faucet ,since rinsing out my ridiculous mop of hair wit ha cup was not happening and if I got clonked, it was my own damn fault for not paying attention.** They even sell bath goggles and foam visors for washing kids hair. Have we become that precious that our children can't take some non-animal tested, tear-free shampoo from getting in their eyes?

Thank God #1 is showering herself, cutting my workload by a third and buying #2 and Little Man a few minutes of play time. Not that independent showering is any walk in the park. She takes twenty minutes, soaks the entire bathroom, but still manages to come out with dirty hair clumped with blobs of conditioner, requiring a do-over. As long as she winds up clean through no work of my own, I don't care how long it takes.

The worst part is, I feel no guilt about the fact children in institutions must take longer baths than my kids. I refuse to buy into the hype, not everything has to be a game. When your day has been filled with school, and enriching activities, I am not providing you with the opportunity to do a water ballet. Get clean, get out and get to bed. If you don't like it, it's summer, I have yard, and a hose. Your choice.

*Never mind unpacking all of their crap. It's like Patton's 3rd army went on vacation.
** The best Mother's Day card I ever bought my mother read, "Let's relive a beautiful mother/daughter memory...You hold my head under the faucet and I'll scream"
***Yes, that is Little Man. I wanted to prove I have actually taken at least one photo of my third-born.