Dad, you probably shouldn't read this

So, when people find out we have four kids, there is usually some joke made about "don't you know what causes this?"  Our standard response is "Eating after midnight, right?"  That's partially cause that answer is a dumb as the question, and partially because it seems like we eat after midnight more often than we do anything that would actually cause pregnancy.  We referred to Will as Bullseye in utero cause it he was the result of a good shot.

It's an age old joke - put a quarter in a jar for every time you have sex in the first year of marriage and then take one out for every time you have sex in every year after and you'll never run out of quarters.  Every newlywed couple swears this won't happen and pretty much every couple I know that's been married for more than five years knows better. 

With four kids under six, it's probably not a big surprise that my libido is a little off.  Besides my hormones being totally whacked, I'm completely "touched out" by the end of the day.  When the kids go to bed, the last thing I want to do is cuddle.  I want to lay on the couch with my crossword puzzles or the remote control and not move, not get anything for anyone, basically be a lump.  I read in a parenting magazine once (back when I read parenting magazines) that women get all their "physical contact needs" filled by their children and should remember that their husbands have "physical contact needs" too.  I think I stopped reading that magazine about that time.  Cause, really, seriously, the magazine wasn't happy just making me feel guilty for not making homemade peanut butter or doing some other sixty-five step craft with my two year old?  Now they had to tell me I should give more blow jobs?

Then another day, I heard a report on NPR about a study that showed men whose wives felt like the housework and parenting duties were equally shared in their households had more sex.  Now that tidbit I passed along to Jeff.  But the thing I got from it was that sex in marriage is a big enough issue that someone did a study about it, most likely a man.  Which got me thinking, Jeff does plenty of housework and we all know that he's the dad with the most, and he's not getting it all that often, how rarely do the "slacker" husbands get it?

I've done a lot of thinking about this problem recently and I realized something profound just last night... though I do get touched approximately 938,837 a day, rarely am I touched in a way that is "giving" rather than "receiving."  I mean, my kids touch me to ask for a snack, to tattle on a sister, so I can lift them up, put them down, help them jump, hold them steady, kiss a boo boo, and even hugging is more like a contact sport than a comforting thing.  So by the end of the day, my touching quota has been met in spades, but I'm emotionally drained.  (I know, I know, I'm supposed to look at my children and feel overwhelmed with love every second of the day.  Newsflash, a lot of the time, I look at them and just feel overwhelmed)  So though I cringe at the thought of more touching, I need to remember that Jeff is the only one who can really fill tathe emotional quota.  So I asked him for a hug last night, and it was the best hug I've gotten in a long, long time.  It was just a hug, with no ulterior "this backrub could turn into a full body" vibe to it.  I can't tell you how much better I felt, and how much more interested I was in that hug turning into something else. 

So ladies, tell your husbands to do more housework, take more time with the kids, but mostly, tell them to give you a hug!

Perspective is a funny thing

I was just looking at the most recent pictures I've taken of my kids and thinking that I don't remember getting that messy as a kid.  Then I realized that's probably not because I didn't get dirty, but because kids don't see dirt.  They look at a mud puddle and see possibilities.  Moms look at mud puddles and see laundry.

Stop it you StinkyBucketSmeller!

Nanny Nanny Nah Nah!   The universal refrain of childhood.  When we embarked on this child rearing adventure, like all first time parents, Jeff and I had a fantasy about what our children would be like.  For the most part, in the early days, Ellie complied with that fantasy.  Ellie was a lovely baby; smiled when anyone smiled at her, rarely threw tantrums in public, and generally pooped before we got in the car.  She was also very docile.  The first time she tried to put her fingers in an outlet, I shouted "No!" and that was the end of outlet curiosity.  To this day, she's very aware of rules and in general, good about following them.  Except for one.  No Name Calling.

I don't know how it happened.  I don't call her names.  Jeff and I don't fight in front of the children.  All the parenting magazines told me that if we limited her TV watching, fed her green vegetables, and only bought her educational toys this wouldn't happen.  Alas, my darling girl has turned into a name calling, back talking, teasing, tongue sticker outer.  Sigh.

Being teased is a right of passage for all kids, I guess.  And those of you that have siblings know that there is no one God's green Earth who teases you more than your sister.  However, I was a kid that was much more likely to be on the receiving end of teasing rather than the giving end.  A pretty shy kid, I wore glasses, had crooked teeth, and bad hair complicated by a bad decision to get a perm in 1986.  My parents moved us around a couple times and we eventually landed in Cumberland, MD, home of the 1984 State Marbles Champion.  This is where I earned the nickname "Batgirl" for my horrendous octagon shaped glasses, that I got cause I read a book in which a shy girl gets octagon shaped glasses and almost immediately becomes popular.  Not so much.

Needless to say, I'm now sensitive to the issue of name calling.  I try to tread a fine line between intervening and letting it go, and I'm afraid that I'm simply going to confuse the issue.  Besides, it's a terribly complex thing to explain to a 5 year old... some names are okay to call people - smartypants for instance.  And something can be stupid, but someone can't?  What if the name is accurate - calling the lady in the too small outfit a fatso is accurate for sure, but definitely not allowed.  They're often extrodinarily creative names; "fartybabycarrotface", "poopydinnertablesitter"... you almost have to give them credit for originality.

A couple years ago, I was sitting at the pool with my friend and we were complaining about how hard parenting is as we watched our kids, all 5 and under at the time, play in the baby pool.  A woman leaned over to us and said "I hate to interrupt, but this is the easy part.  Little kids have little problems, big kids have big problems."  She's absolutely right, and Ellie's still pretty little.  I'm afraid that this is just the tip of the iceberg for us, and I'm bracing myself for the ride.  Wait until school starts!

Summertime memories

When I close my eyes and think of my childhood summers, the first thing that comes to mind is Noxema. My dad is a great believer in Noxema. Sun burns, minor cuts and scrapes, bug bites… there’s nothing that couldn’t be cured with Noxema. Once on vacation, my brother threw me into a pool, almost. I hit the side of the pool with my back and some well intentioned person told my parents, after they dragged my bloody screaming self from the pool that with an injury like that, I may have permanent disabilities. My dad made me walk up four flights of stairs and applied Noxema liberally to my wound. He swears to this day that my unaffected ability to walk can be credited to that creamy white miracle cure.

I remembered...

So, I remembered what I was going to write about last night...  the adventures of my car.   Last week, I was sitting at a stop light, when BAM!, my car gets hit.  I thought that I had been rear ended, so I put the car in park and got out to look accusingly at the person behind me. 

When I got out to look however, the person behind me was far behind me, no way she'd hit me.  I looked around and saw my driver side passenger door and there's an enormous dent in it.  On the ground next to my car was a tire.  Just a tire.  I looked around to find the car that must be pulled over with three tires.  There's none to be found.  I must have had the dumbest look on my face, cause the woman in the car behind me yells out the window that the tire fell off a truck going the other way. 

I got back in the car, after wrestling with whether or not I should take the tire with me, and started towards home.  I decided that it must have fallen out of the bed of a truck, cause surely if it was off a moving vehicle, it would have had to stop.  Grumbling to myself about insurance deductibles, I stopped at the stoplight in front of my development.  That was when I banged a U-turn and went in search of the vehicle with the missing tire.  And about two miles up the road there was a truck pulling a horse trailer pulled over, driver and passenger on the side of the road.  I pulled up behind him and asked out the window, "Did you lose a tire?" They nodded... yay me!  Mystery solved.  The horse trailer had "duelie" tires, two tires on the back and one had come off.  The driver was on the phone, and I lost my temper a bit when he didn't hang up to talk to me.  "You hit me and I have a two week old in the car!  You need to deal with me." I told him.  This got him moving.

Because it's me this happened to, of course there's a weird twist.  The truck and trailer didn't belong to the driver or passenger, turns out they were just driving the horses from Delaware Park for their trainers.  And they didn't speak English.  And they couldn't find the registration or insurance.  I asked the driver for his boss' phone number and he hands me his Iphone with the contact name "Boss" with a number listed.  Skeptical, I asked him to call it.  Sure enough, a nice lady answered and I explained what happened.  She gave me all the information I needed and I went on my merry way, all proud of myself, feeling like Cagney or Lacey (well, I always feel like Lacey I guess) for having discovered the tire's owner. 

Again, because it's me and I live in Delaware, there's another weird thing... I was at swim lessons for the girls when I saw another mommy I know.  She's a horse trainer too and I told her what had happened.  She looked very surprised and pointed at another mom, "That was her trailer." What?  The number I'd called was a Florida number, and the insurance company had confirmed the truck was registered in Florida.  Turns out, the owners live half the year here, and her kid is in swim lessons at the same time as mine.  So I introduced myself and told her that her insurance company was very nice.  It was slightly awkward!

So for a couple days, I got to drive a Chrysler Town and Country - ahh... that's how the other half lives.  Ellie actually offered to give me her allowance so we could buy it.  Keep dreaming honey.  We're driving the Blueberry until the wheels fall off.... wait a minute... I know someone that happened too!

Wait, I had a really good idea... no, it's gone

The other day, an old friend stopped by for a bit.  She has two kids, aged 7 and 10.  I only had Jack and Will with me at the time, the girls were at school.  In the hour and a half she was here, I got up and down no fewer than 946 times.  Well, I may be exaggerating, but it was probably at least 15 times.  I never think about how much up and down and running back and forth I do until I have someone with me that doesn't have to do it. 

Since then, I've been doing a little observation and I realized that I don't have any conversation between the hours of 7AM and 8PM that aren't interrupted.  I can barely get one complete sentence out, forget a whole conversation.  After some unscientific observation, I've realized that none of my friends do either.  The average conversation sounds like this:

Me: "Oh, hey I saw something at Kohl's that I... Put that down!"
Friend: "I like Kohl's but I ususally end up at... don't hit him!"
Me: "I was talking to... yes you can have a snack"
Friend:  "What was I saying?"

It's shocking that any of us know anything about each other at all.  It's even more amazing that, though I seem to never finish a sentence, I feel like I talk all day.  Jeff often asks if I'm mad at him cause I don't want to talk after the kids go to bed, but the truth is, I just flat out don't have anything left to say. 

Recently some helpful person told me that women lose up to 10% of their brain cells during pregnancy.  This means that I've lost 40% of my brain in the last five years.  I have hope that it will come back, but I'm not optimistic.  Just to prove my point, I opened this blog to write about something and then forgot what it was.  So I wrote about forgetting things instead. 

Go figure.

Teacher Maggie

So much of parenting is recapturing your own sense of wonder.  I think it's easy as adults to forget that our kids are exploring and learning all the time, and that they don't have "places to go and people to see".  Every morning, as we try to get everyone ready and out the door, I silently curse the girls "surprise" that I need them to get dressed and fed and combed.  We do this everyday girls, I say everyday. 

Today, I was hurrying Maggie out the door and she was not paying attention.  I started to count, "Maggie, get in the car before I get to 5 or I'll take your toy away... 1, 2" only to be interrupted by her saying in an equally frustrated voice, "I'm getting you a present!" Sure enough, she comes around the car holding a branch from our forsythia bush.  It was beautiful and sweet, and I was reminded that sometimes you just got to let your kids be late to school so that they can learn.