MommaBlog

Okay, so I’m a little ahead of myself, and the season. But after the winter we had around here, we could all use a little spring.

1. The dust-bunnies start hop-hop-hopping across your living room. 
2. The tips of your kids’ bikes sprout through the snow.
3. Your vacuum sucks up the last of the 137-piece toy Grandma gave the kids for Christmas.
4. Your snowman is now a big snowball with eyes and the scarf you’ve been looking for since Valentine’s Day.
5. The days are longer. (They just seemed longer during the winter).
6. The sun rises earlier. And so does your son. And daughter.
7. Your kids bring home a spring school project — lions made from yarn and lambs made from cotton balls — which immediately join the dust bunnies in the living room.
8. You finally get the snowsuits on the triplets.
9. Your toddler, who just got over her fear of the Santa Claus at the mall, is traumatized by the sight of a giant rabbit in a floral vest waving to her outside Sears.
10. For the first time since November, “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” DVD is available at the video store.
11. The baby finally learns to crawl – right through your freshly planted flowerbeds.
12. The sun streams through the window, melting the Ho-Ho someone left on the recliner.
13. Mud coats the rock salt in your mini-van’s door runners, allowing them open more smoothly.
14. It’s time to sign the kids up for summer camp and fall sports.
15. Spring Fever replaces the low-grade fever your pre-schooler had pretty much all winter.

Portions of this list originally appeared in Parenting magazine.

Check it out: Jen Singer’s Are You Ready for Toddlerhood? is in the March issue of American Baby magazine.

"I want to play in there!"

“I’d kick it, but then coffee would get all over my pants.” And mine, so thanks for not kicking the coffee…Mom.

You may think this was a mature decision made by a seven-year-old, except it’s what my septagenarian mother said to me Saturday morning upon spotting a Starbucks cup sitting upright near my car in the parking lot at Kmart.

This is the world my mother lives in, and it’s a lovely place filled with childish deeds and happy thoughts. 

For example, when I showed my mother (whom we call “Hommy” because my niece wasn’t able to pronounce “Grammy”) this photo of her grandson playing in the snow fort he made in our front yard after Snowmeggedon 3…

…which of the following do you think was her response?

a. “My, he is a clever boy.”
b. “Wow, that’s a lot of snow.”
c. “I want to play in there!”

(For the correct answer, see: Starbucks cup, kick.)

This is the woman who, upon being dared by my high school BFF Diane to do a back-flip off the diving board at her pool, she did it. Of course, that was a quarter century ago. She doesn’t do back-flips off the diving board anymore, though I suspect that’s simply because my parents no longer have a diving board at their pool.  Instead, my mother jumps in the pool in her clothes and attacks us with her Super Soaker, affectionately entitled “The Hominator” by her grandchildren.

Her ability to see the bright side of things is unsurpassed, except perhaps by cartoon characters on PBS Kids. When I took my mother one rainy morning to her doctor’s appointment in a windowless office in Manhattan, she exclaimed mid-appointment, “I’ll bet the sun is out now!”

“Yes, Mom,” I mimicked a super-enthusiastic announcer from Blues Clues Live. “And the birds are singing, and the roads are paved with gold!”

Her chief complaint for her doctor that day: She could no longer dance the Charleston anymore. Pardon me, I forgot to mention it was her Parkinson’s doctor, who confessed to never hearing such a complaint before. But then my mom had moved on complaining that she gets tired after she plays paddle tennis in 20 degree weather. Her doctor, who is maybe half my mother’s age, answered wide-eyed, “I probably would be, too.” But by then Hommy was demonstrating her inadequate Charleston.

We can’t keep up.

Next visit I’ll point out that though my mother can no longer dance the Charleston (which was in vogue before she was even born, so what’s the issue? Never mind…), she can kick cups of coffee and climb into snow forts. At least, she wants to, anyhow, and that’s more than I can say for most people her age — or my age, or any age past puberty.

My mother’s world is a wonderful place to visit where no one ages, and everyone drops by to say hello. While we were out on Saturday, she ran into three friends on three separate occasions, all who were thrilled to see her.

In my mother’s world, she stumbles upon an entire aisle of books at Kmart exclaming, “I just finished my book last night, and here’s one I want to read!”

In my mother’s world, the glass isn’t half-full, it’s overflowing.

Look out, she might kick it.

Share, share, that’s fair: Got an optimist in your family tree? Or maybe a pessimist? Tell us a story about him or her.

 Next week is National Sleep Awareness Week. We at MommaSaid want you to be aware that there is sleep, even if you’re not getting any.  At the end of the week, we will spring forward our clocks for Daylight Saving Time – and lose an entire hour of sleep.

Sigh.

THE FREEBIE: 

WHAT’S THE PRIZE?
A free Good Nite Lite (www.goodnitelite.com), valued at $34.99. It’s a behavioral modification device that features a friendly, glowing caricature face that changes from a Moon to a Sun at the programmed “wake-up” time, and from a Sun to a Moon at the programmed “bedtime. Plus, signed copies of Jen Singer’s books, “Stop Second-Guessing Yourself — The Toddler Years” and “Stop Second Guessing Yourself — The Preschool Years,” 2010 gold Mom’s Choice Award winners, both with chapters on finding that elusive sleep.

CoolMomPicks.com reviewed Jen’s books, saying, “Jen has bestowed us with the rare parenting guides that actually give parents the shot of confidence we need to survive another day. Or sometimes, just another five minutes.”

WHY THAT’S COOL:
The Good Nite Lite can help parents and their kids make the transition smoothly, learning healthy and acceptable sleeping habits. With the help of their parents, children rapidly come to associate the moon image with the knowledge that it is still bedtime and the sun with the idea that it is the correct time to wake up. During the day, the Good Nite Lite automatically shuts off to eliminate any distractions and to conserve energy. Created by a father after his children would wake up at 5:00 a.m. every morning, regardless of what time they went to bed, the Good Nite Lite is available at www.GoodNiteLite.com for just $34.99. While the Good Nite Lite was not designed to aid children with special needs, it has also been a great tool for assisting individuals and families who have been affected by poor sleep (autism, hearing impairment, etc).

 And Jen’s writing has been known to make coffee come out of moms’ noses on occasion.

HOW YOU CAN WIN: Post a comment under this blog telling us which you’d rather do, lose an hour or gain one, and why.

DEADLINE: Noon ET on Monday, March 8th. A winner will be selected at random by Random.org. Good luck!

I’ve got a bucket of Smencils.

The scented pencils come in root beer, bubble gum, watermelon and so much more. Individually, they smell like manufactured childhood, like a pack of bright colored gum or a handful of candies in clear wrappers. Together, they smell like a pillowcase full of Halloween loot left in the back of your car on a hot day.

We will no doubt wind up keeping this bucket of Smencils, minus the few that my son will sell for his fifth grade fundraiser, just like his brother did last year. The problem is that the target audience for a Smencil is decidedly under age 14, and yet the kids aren’t allowed to sell them on the school bus or at Boy Scouts meetings or other places where children congregate. He can’t very well bring them to soccer practice, anyhow, to sell to other fifth graders who have their own buckets of Smencils at home, and he’s not supposed to sell door-to-door. So the bucket sits on our kitchen counter, bringing back vague memories of getting sick at a birthday party in kindergarten every time I walk by it.

And that’s fine with me. In fact, it’s downright wonderful. More…

For years, MommaSaid ran a series called, “Just a Minute!” featuring stories of funny things kids do (and also, say). Here are some of the classics. Please share yours in the comments!

Naming Rights
Thanks to Angela Johnson of Mission Viejo, Calfornia, for this story:

Angela and her son Eli, 4, were visiting a snack bar at a baseball field. Eli asked the mom running the grill if he could have a hot dog. The mom studied the grill and said, “Sure Eli. There’s one right here with your
name on it.”

As Eli and Angela walked away, he slowly turned his hot dog around and around on the bun. Angela asked him what was wrong. He looked at me and whispered, “Mrs. Heppert gave me the wrong one. My name’s not on here!”

Uh Oh!
Thanks to Amanda Chase of Albuquerque, New Mexico, for this story:

When Amanda brought her premature newborn home from the hospital, her two-year-old daughter noticed how tiny he was, and started to count his fingers and toes.

Then she ran to her room to get her favorite baby doll, which she laid next to her tiny brother. She proceeded to compare the eyes, nose, mouth, etc., as if she were taking inventory of all his parts. When she got to his, uh, you know, she shouted, “Uh oh, Mommy!”

Better call the doctor, huh Amanda? He’s got an extra part! More…

We spent a good part of the weekend shredding our past. Bank statements from 1998 went into the shredder. So did credit card statements we’d received during the Clinton Administration, pay stubs from before the kids were born and airline ticket receipts to my friend’s wedding in Atlanta in 1996. But it was the calendars that made me nostalgic.

My husband, Pete, brought me three of them, all from the late nineties. Big desk calendars with brown faux leather covers embossed with gold ink. He opened one of them, and began to give me a tongue-in-cheek tutorial:

“Now, here’s a system for keeping all of your most important information in one place,” he instructed. “You’ve got your month-at-a-glance, a map with time zones in case you forget yours, and a space for notes.”

I started giggling.

“Okay, so say you have an event that spans more than one day,” he said, pointing to a conference he had attended in February of 1999. “You indicate that it lasts from Tuesday until Wednesday by drawing an arrow across the bottom of two boxes, like this. Very effective,” he nodded.

A text came into my Blackberry, so I answered it. But Pete wasn’t done with his tutorial.

“If you have to cancel an event, you mark the entire box with an X, like so,” he said, pointing to an X-ed out entry with accompanying telephone number scribbled in. “And here, you write in all of your contacts, including, of course, their fax numbers, because everybody needs a fax.”

I started laughing so hard, I let out a snort. I closed out Twitter on my computer so I wouldn’t accidentally tweet half a word — or a snort — to my followers.

“Then next year, you just copy it all down again into your new calendar, along with the items you’d put on the pages marked for the year 2000,” he informed me, as though he was leading a computer course, minus the computer.

Now I was in a full-out belly laugh, and totally incapable of even glancing at my e-mail. He finished his tutorial, and chucked the calendars into the garbage can behind my desk, along with the right paw X-ray of my cat, who’d died in 2005. Then he went back to shredding our past, so we can make room in our file cabinets for our future.

I pulled one of the calendars out of the garbage can and felt a pang of nostalgia — not for anything that was written in them, though my brother-in-law’s wedding couldn’t have been 11 years ago already, could it? Rather, I was nostalgic for the simplicity of it all. Well, except the part where you’d have to transfer everything by hand. (And I don’t miss typewriters, either, having worked one summer in high school for a lawyer who made me type and retype and retype letters until they pretty much ended up like the first draft.)

No, I longed for its passivity. For life before texting, Twitter, Facebook and Blackberries, even though I use all of them and I wouldn’t want to run my business without them. But seven years ago when I started MommaSaid, if I’d e-mail an editor on a weekend (because that was often the only time I could get to work when the kids were little,) I wouldn’t hear back from them until Monday. Sometimes, Tuesday. Nowadays, they answer me within hours, sometimes minutes, even though they’re not in their offices. Even though they’re watching their kids’ basketball games or pushing a cart around the supermarket.

Nowadays, everyone expects instant response, and it feels like there’s nowhere to hide. If you don’t post anything for a few hours, don’t make your move in Lexulous for a day or so, don’t “Like” anything on Facebook, people wonder where you are, what’s wrong, where you’ve gone. With social media in particular, you cast your net wider, staying involved in the lives of friends and family, yes, but also the boy who had a crush on you in eighth grade, your cousins’ best friends, the new acquaintance you made at a conference and people who do the same thing as you do for a living. And it’s both wonderfully connecting and awfully exhausting at the same time.

As Pete shredded our deposit slips from 1994, I checked my e-mail again to find an message from my bank, alerting me to a new statement online. I clicked through, and read over our purchases, withdrawals and deposits for the month. Then I closed it out, grateful that there was at least one sheet of paper I won’t have to shred a decade from now.

Next up: tweeting this blog post. Naturally.

It’s Friday, so it’s time to give away cool stuff. This week’s giveway is courtesy of Care4Hire.com, online database for families and caregivers, dedicated to helping families find their perfect match:

THE FREEBIE:

WHAT’S THE PRIZE?: You could win an annual membership to Care4Hire.com valued at $69.99!

WHY THAT’S COOL: Not only can you find babysitters, but you can also search for housekeepers, tutors, pet sitters, companion/eldercare, personal assistance, gardeners and other miscellaneous help. As a registered member, you will have access to contact the thousands of caregivers in the database. Whether you are needing someone for 1 day or a permanent basis, you can find it at Care4hire.com.

HOW YOU CAN WIN: Post a comment under this blog telling us what chore you’d like most to have someone else do.

DEADLINE: Noon ET on Sunday, February 28th. A winner will be selected at random by Random.org. Good luck! More…