Archive for the ‘Days Like This’ Category

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’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…)

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.

by Jen Singer

1. You found three mittens in the toy box – and they’re all lefties.
2. After a month of constant play, your kids’ Hokey Pokey Elmo can no longer put his whole self in.
3. You wrestle the baby’s snowsuit on, and then he fills his diaper.
4. You’re flipping through the TV channels, remote in one hand and credit card in the other, for a fundraiser to cure Cabin Fever.
5. You’ve spotted two of the missing right-handed mittens — on the neighbor’s snowman.
6. The sun goes down hours and hours before your kids do.
7. You wish the stroller had four-wheel-drive.
8. Don’t worry. The groceries stay nicely refrigerated in the car, right where you forgot them.
9. Your socks are now starring in a puppet show with no plot.
10. You’ve heard the two words that put fear in the hearts of all parents: Snow Day. Again…

Parts of this list appeared in Parenting magazine, back in the day, and yet it still applies.

Share, share, that’s fair: If there’s one word to describe MommaSaid’s fans, it’s “clever.” Please share your signs of winter and we’ll all giggle into our hot chocolates together.

by Jen Singer

For the newish moms out there:

What I miss most is…
…using my tweezers on my eyebrows, instead of using them to retrieve Barbie’s shoes from the heating grate.

…dreaming long enough to find out whether George Clooney wears boxers or briefs.

…having an entire conversation that has nothing to do with poop. Aw, geez! There it is again.

…accessorizing with jewelry and scarves, rather than marker and what appears to be butternut squash & corn.

…dashing out with my car keys and some Chapstick, instead of packing up like the traveling circus just to go to the mall.

…showering without someone opening the door and handing me the phone while saying, “Some lady wants to talk to you.”

…to read a book anywhere but my car, because the baby naps only in her car seat.

…reaching the bottom of the laundry pile. For days.

…my purse, which I haven’t seen since I bought the diaper bag.

…non-animated television programs.

…sauntering through parking lots, supermarkets and Target without having to shout, “Stay by Mommy!”

…sex.

…uninterrupted telephone conversations. And, did I say sex?

Share, share, that’s fair: Tell us–What do you miss, Mom?

Need more giggles like that? There’s plenty of them in Jen Singer’s Stop Second-Guessing Yourself parenting series. Filled with helpful and funny quotes by MommaSaid.net’s fans and loads of advice and humor by MommaSaid’s founder, Jen Singer, you’ll get what you need — just as soon as you can hide in the bathroom long enough to read a few pages.

For more information on where to buy them, visit My Books.

Don’t. Yell. Through. The. Glass.

Don’t be that mother.

Don’t be that coach.

Just shut up, sit down and enjoy the off-season. Read that book you brought along. Text your friends. Dig up a quarter for a jawbreaker. (more…)

1. You no longer know the TV schedule from 2-6 a.m. by heart.
2. Your doctor gives you the “green light” for sex, but you ask for a flashing yellow.
3. Your toddler is using your postpartum donut as a hat – and you don’t care.
4. Baby lotion commercials just aren’t the tearjerkers they were a few weeks ago.
5. You’ve stopped calling the baby’s bouts of colic, “The Devil’s Visiting Hours.”
6. Your sitz bath is under your husband’s car, full of motor oil.
7. You can see your ankles again, and boy do they need a good shave.
8. You’re wearing shoes. And pants – with pockets!
9. The baby finally smiles – and you smile back.
10. It’s midnight and you’re spamming baby pictures across the Internet – again.

Coming in May! Preorder now at Amazon:

 Jen Singer’s “Stop Second-Guessing Yourself books have a thank-goodness-I’m-not-the-only-one tone while also offering practical advice for whatever parenting challenges may arise.” — Baby Center

“Jen has bestowed us with the rare parenting guides that actually give parents the shot of confidence we need to survive another day. ” — Cool Mom Picks

Momma went away. Momma went away without the kids, without the husband.  Momma almost went away without the plane (or rather, vice versa), but I didn manage to make it to the gate on time nevertheless.

It’s not like I’d never traveled before, like I’d never been to Newark Airport. Excuse me, “Newark Liberty International Airport.” And yet, there I was, missing my turn for the off-site parking lot and heading toward Port Newark, which would have been handy only if I was planning to board a petroleum tanker. But they don’t sail to Kansas City, and that’s where I was trying to go last week. (more…)

I wrote this six years ago for Parenting magazine (which is why it ends sweet.) Now that my kids are tweens (and — gasp! — one’s almost a teen), I’ve updated my list accordingly below.

10 Signs it’s Winter, Mom

1. You found three mittens in the toy box – and they’re all lefties.
2. After a month of constant play, your kids’ Hokey Pokey Elmo can no longer put his whole self in.
3. You wrestle the baby’s snowsuit on, and then he fills his diaper.
4. You’d gladly send money to help find a cure for Cabin Fever.
5. Your toes have finally healed after a summer of being stepped on by your toddler.
6. The sun goes down hours and hours before your kids do.
7. You wish the stroller had four-wheel-drive.
8. Don’t worry. The groceries stay nicely refrigerated in the car where you forgot them.
9. You’ve heard the two words that put fear in the hearts of all mothers: Snow Day.
10. Hugs are warmer when they’re wrapped in feety pajamas. (more…)

The summer I was 40, I longed to be 43. Not 39. Not 18. Not pre-baby, yet post drinking age. 

(more…)