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.

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 picked this shot from our night at a fundraiser because we looked hot that day, didn't we?

To My Valentine,

On this day, 19 years since you proposed marriage, I suppose it’s entirely predictable that tonight, I will once again pull the blankets off of you.

I don’t do it on purpose. I simple pull the blankets with me as I turn away from you in my sleep, effectively rolling myself up like a giant, double thick roll of Bounty paper towels. I don’t think about how this leaves you with nothing but a corner of the sheets and, likely, seething anger. I am asleep and way too busy trying to save the universe from invading Goldfish crackers on mo-peds, or whatever the dream of the night is.

But you got your comeuppance this weekend in the form of a gift card and a phone call. It is a known fact that you often don’t listen to me past the verb. Stay with me…over here. Listen… So it should be no surprise that you heard only part of my request to buy a gift card for Aaron, our son’s friend who is having a birthday party today. Also, that whatever you didn’t know, you filled in with your own information, because you don’t ask follow-up questions. (On your job compatibility tests in high school, were “investigative journalist” and “private investigator” at the bottom?)

While I am certainly grateful that you handled the task so I wouldn’t have to make a special trip, it did require a special phone call from you at the store:

“The Visa cards charge a $4.95 inconvenience fee,” you told me. “What else can I get?”

“Do they have Borders?” I asked.

“No. How about Bloomingdales or Bed, Bath & Beyond?”

“For an 11-year-old boy?” I asked. And that’s when it hit me: You thought you were buying a gift card not for Aaron, but for Erin, our 14-year-old niece, whose birthday is in November. We will see her today for her father’s birthday, and so, somehow, you decided for whatever reason you’d filled in in your head, that Erin needed a gift card.

It’s a good thing I didn’t ask for anything to be monogrammed.

Once we got that squared away, Aaron got his Barnes & Noble gift card, and I got a good (exasperated) chuckle, and so did you. It’s predictable, and yet, interesting at the same time, and it has been since you got down on your knee 19 years ago tonight, and I thought, Did he drop something?

But you hadn’t dropped anything. Rather, you swooped up my heart and have been keeping it warm ever since.

So Happy Valentine’s Day to the love of my life. I’ll try to share the blankets tonight. Thanks for getting past the verb.

Love,

Jen

I love the smell of soccer field in the morning.

Magazine editors always want me to end sweet. That’s why the original ending for yesterday’s “What I Miss Most…”  post here on MommaBlog was “…having an entire day without kids – and not missing them terribly!”

Barf.

I guess it’s their way of atoning for letting me rake motherhood across the coals. Yet every once in a while, I wonder if they’re right.

After I tweeted yesterday’s post, encouraging other moms to join in the scrum and share their own lists of what they miss most now that they’re mothers, one comment stood out. Among the hilarious (”my waist”), the oh-so-true (”sleep”) and the amen, sistah (”not hearing my own voice on repeat for an entire day”) was the sweet I hadn’t posted. My neighbor Grace wrote on my Facebook page:

“What I miss the most about not having babies anymore: 1. buying clothes for my kids without them having their own opinion about what to wear 2. being asked to cuddle at night 3. the new baby smell.”

Immediately, I thought, Awwwww, followed by Grace must be tired of teendom, and finally, Now I look like an ingrateful, whiny mom. Gee, thanks Grace. See if I offer to carpool your kids again.

And then I got over myself. After all, I’d provided a place for moms to vent, because that’s what MommaSaid is all about. A little validation, and attempts to make coffee come out of your nose now and then. But sometimes I wonder if all these light-hearted (and sometimes, rather dark) jabs at motherhood hide my reality:  I’m a better person since I became a mom.  Less selfish, more caring, better at removing stains from the sofa.

That’s not to say that people without kids are somehow not as good people as parents are. It’s that I wasn’t as good a person without kids. And that makes me proud and also, a little frightened.

I love having a backyard full of kids who are sledding, building forts or kicking soccer balls around. I love coaching my son’s soccer team, and I love listening to my 12-year-old compose songs on his tricked-out keyboard just outside my home office door. I love talking to my eight-year-old neighbor, Jacob, about his guinea pig, and hearing about my niece Erin’s birthday trip into Manhattan with a bunch of other 14-year-old girls and my brother. (Sucker.)  I love kids.

But not babies. Not so much. So I couldn’t relate to what Grace misses about her four babies, because I don’t pine for the sleep-deprived, colicky, cranky years. Hence, “What I Miss Most….” And though I sobbed uncontrollably the first time I left my firstborn, then eight-months-old, with my mother-in-law for a weekend, I got over it as soon as I had an entire night of uninterrupted sleep for the first time in what seemed like forever. Sure, I missed my baby, but not really all that “terribly.” It was 48 hours, people.  We all got over it.

Now that my kids are tweens, with one on the cusp of that teendom Grace seems less than enamored over 24-7, I’m more content with motherhood. Now I can look back and see how rushing my son, bleeding from the head from a whack of a hockey stick, courtesy of his little brother, to the ER, made me more capable. How enduring reading plot-less books like “Airport Trucks” again, Mommy! made me more patient. How not having the time to shave both legs on the same day made me more selfless. How worrying that my kids might grow up without me as I battled cancer, more courageous.

Perhaps motherhood made a man out of me. Or, er, you know what I mean. It made me grow up, just as soon as I swore to never again to have my mom come over and watch the baby because I had what amounted to a head cold. (Who was the real baby that day?) Motherhood taught me to suck it up and take charge, and it forced me to put myself last…and that’s the part that frightens me. My entire world, from my work-at-home business to my mini-van filled with camping equipment for a Boy Scouts trip I didn’t even attend, revolves around my children. Who am I without them? What kind of person will I be when they leave home?

A well-rested one with far less laundry, that’s what kind. C’mon. You didn’t think I’d end sweet, did you?

Share, share, that’s fair: What did motherhood do for you?

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.

Order your copy of Jen Singer’s Stop Second-Guessing Yourself — The Preschool Years, available now at a bookseller near you and online.

Share with us your favorite red thing in the comments below for your chance to win this Go Red package from the American Heart Association.

I don’t jump behind just any old cause. Besides, you know my “thing” is cancer, because, well, my thing was cancer. But then this came across my in-box, and I just had to get involved.

• More women die of cardiovascular disease than the next five causes of death combined, including all forms of cancer.
• 90% of women have one or more risk factors for developing heart disease.
• Heart disease is largely preventable. In fact, 80% of cardiac events in women may be prevented if women make the right choices for their hearts involving diet, exercise and abstinence from smoking

So, we’re wearing the proverbial red today at MommaSaid by giving away something red, including:

 • The American Heart Association’s book Complete Guide to Women’s Heart Health: The Go Red For Women Way to Well-being and Vitality
• Go Red For Women Yoga Mat
• Go Red For Women Water Bottle
• Go Red For Women Notepad
• Go Red For Women Signature Red Dress Pin

For your chance to win, post a comment with your favorite red thing by midnight tonight. (Keep it clean, folks. I won’t post the dirty stuff, because my niece reads my blog.) Open to US citizens only, please.  A winner will be chosen at random through random.org, a random number generator, sometime tomorrow when I’m snowed in here. Happy Wear Red Day to you all, even if you go pink instead because red doesn’t look good on your complexion.

Pass it on!