Cool It!

Are being a mom (or a dad) and being cool mutually exclusive?  There are a lot of uncool things about being a parent says, well, everyone.  There are mom jeans.  There is mom dancing.  There is making your child sit in a car safety seat until they are 14 years old.  There is Will Smith singing “Parents Just Don’t Understand.”  But when I found myself in Orlando last week for our family vacation, initially I felt a little resistant to join in on the wonder and magic.  I was too cool to be excited about Disney and Universal. Afterall, both establishments have teams of people figuring out ways for families like mine to feel good about spending outrageous amounts of money in their respective resorts.  The night before we were planning to go to Univeral, we were sitting in our hotel’s hot tub overhearing a loud twenty-something girl speak emphatically after a couple of drinks about how she was a Ravenclaw (This is one of the four houses at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter series of fictional books) because she was SO unique. She got out of the hot tub, dried off and put on her wizard robe and I judgingly whispered, “Nerd alert!” to my husband.  The next morning, my husband and I both made cynical reference to Holden Caufield and a snarky Fight Club quote when faced with the conceirge at our Hotel recommending we purchace the $45 wand for some extra special-ness at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  Really, we’re already spending a small fortune to get into the park, then we’re going to tack on $45 for a wand?  Right.

Well, as it turns out the wand was too awesome to pass up.  We watched some kids using their wands to make a frog magically squirt water into a fountain and knew we had to have one.  So we ate a little crow about how we’re too cool and found our way into Ollivander’s Shop for our own wand, er, a wand for our kid.

Wizarding Wand

Then, we followed the map enclosed in our wand box to perform magic tricks in Diagon Alley all afternoon.  We are definitely not too cool for Hogwarts School.

Searching for a Timeshare in Diagon Alley

Do you embrace the magic and wonder right away or are you too cool for witchcraft and wizardry school?

Putting Yourself First

As I was flying on a plane with my kids this Mother’s Day and reading the safety card in the seat pocket in front of me, I was reminded: You have to put yourself first so you can be the best mom you can be for your kids.  Have you heard this saying in the mom circles and parenting magazines?  Then, the corollary with a crashing plane and the masks that fall from the ceiling is inevitably unfurled with this theory.

“Please secure your own mask before helping others around you.”  This musing is supposed to lead me to believe that I should put myself first.  I am having trouble extrapolating this metaphor to my own life.  I’m fairly certain it’s a trick.  I read into it, “Put your mask on first because you have to stay alive so you can save those around you.”  Even when pressure in the cabin is lost, we moms are expected to go to work.  Am I to understand that putting myself first is merely not passing out while I care for those close to me?

This mom was so stressed, she got busted smoking on the plane.  I don’t think a metaphor this dramatic is really going to fly with my family.  How about we just call some things a treat and keep our crashing family plane out of it? On the other hand, if my family does buy the importance of me getting my mask on first, my sharp talons that I call toe nails could really use a pedicure to make sure our family plane stays in the air! Happy Mother’s Day, now go make your mom happy!

Sheep Show

Last week while trying to leave the swimming pool, I got in a verbal scuffle with my son and took away TV for the “rest of the week.”  Well, this ended up being the rest of the work week.  I folded like a napkin on Saturday morning and electricity magically returned to the TV.  Though the week wasn’t as bad I had imagined, there were tough moments.  There was a half an hour every night when I was putting the baby to bed that I really missed having everyone in a TV trance.  There was also some whining and a bit of a fit on Friday night and my son was pretty sad too (hehehe).  But, in the spirit of Little House on the Prairie, we did something pretty great.  There is a springtime event at a local sheep farm called “The Running of the Lambs.”  Kids get to feed the ewes and then the new lambs go on a wild romp every night while their moms are having dinner.

Running of the Lambs (Adventure Life)

Farmer John, the owner of these sweet sheep, gives a nightly tour where you get to meet the lambs born that day, feed goats and ewes and learn sheep facts.  “What are some sheep facts?” you ask.  Well, thank you for asking.  These are my top five facts:

1)  Sheep aren’t as dumb as their stereotypes suggest.  They can recognize up to 50 other sheep or human faces and remember them for years.  However, they can only count to one.

2)  Ewes usually have one baby the first year they lamb.  The following years they typically have twins and occasionally have triplets.

3)  Since the ewes can only count to one, it’s important for Farmer John to keep the lambs in mixing pens for the first few days after they are born.  This ensures that both lambs (if there are twins) are getting fed because their mom says, “Ok, one baby is feeding.  I’m done.”

4)  All ewes have different voices.  This allows their lambs to find them.  When you’re listening to them, you can start to discern their unique voices.  Some are high and feminine, some are low and raspy.  It only takes the lambs a few minutes to find their moms after dinner.

5)   Some lambs, for one reason or another, can’t be fed by their own moms.  These lambs are called, “bum lambs.”  They are put in the bum pen with some baby goats and mom goats because ewes will not feed a baby that isn’t their own.  Goat moms will feed a bum sheep.

At the end of the farm tour, we got to go hold bum lambs and baby goats.

Lamb Love at the Sheep Show

I keep raving to everyone that will listen about how awesome the running of the lambs was.  So thank you for reading this post.  While our TV-free week did not result in us giving up TV all together, we all loved that sheep show.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my daytime TV!

Please tell me about your favorite farm tour.  My city kids and I need more of these in our lives!

Don’t Shoot the Babysitter

When you’re a parent, there are so many loving moments and wonderful times shared with your kids every single day.  This post is not about those moments.  Monday, my son and I had a stand-off reminiscent of the “Eat My Shorts” scene of the The Breakfast Club.  In an epic battle of low, public, whisper yelling (by me) and back-talk (by my usually sweet kindergartener), I finished the argument by growling, “That’s it!  No TV for the rest of the week!”  It flew out of my mouth and my regret was immediate.  This punishment really IS going to hurt me more than it hurts my son.  You see, I have loved TV my whole life.  There, I said it.  I know you’re not supposed to love TV and I often pretend that I don’t watch as much as I do.  It’s shameful to plop your kids in front of the TV.  But if I need a few minutes to get dinner on the table, get a load of laundry folded, vacuum up the dog hair, a little PBS-Sprout keeps everyone occupied.  While putting the baby to bed, Kung Fu Panda is just the trick to keep my son out of her room.  With my hot-headed reaction to some bad behavior, I have taken away my 30 minutes of afternoon/evening babysitting.

“Mess with the Bull, You Get the Horns!”

Monday night, when both kids were in bed, I was drinking a beer and sadly recounting the post swimming lesson verbal battle to my husband.  After telling of the horror of no TV for a week, my husband replied, “Ah, it’ll be good for all of us.”  Yeah, says the guy who gets home at six every night.  So, we’re in for some Little House on the Prairie fun this week.  We do have soccer and swimming in the afternoons.  Other than that, maybe we finally need to learn how to can or bake bread.

Ma and Pa Ingalls

What kind of low-tech, Little House on the Prairie, Amish fun should we have this week?

Don’t Judge a Mom Until You’ve Walked a Mile In Her Yoga Pants

Now that I’m a “runner” (let’s take that with a pillar of salt) and a stay at home mom, I find that yoga pants/running tights/leggings are an essential part of my wardrobe.  Speaking of ninjaneermomjeans, these little beauties fit the bill for sure.  I can’t stop singing their praises.  You can wear them as running tights with your tennie runners to channel your inner athlete.  Throw boots over them for a lunch with the other moms.  Yoga pants go nicely under a dress when it’s cool out. They double as long underwear under your ski pants.  I guess you can probably do yoga in them.  The possibilities are endless.  When you’re shopping and the irritatingly tiny dressing room attendant asks what size pants you need, the answer: “Leggings.”   Lycra spandex really is your friend.  Yoga pants do tend to highlight your every insecurity, but fortunately black is slimming and shirts come in all lengths.

Well, here’s where I have to eat a little crow.  There is a mom in my old neighborhood that ALWAYS wears yoga pants.  She has more kids than I have and has been a mom longer too.  Well, because of my judgy-ness, her proclivity for tight black pants, and because I couldn’t remember her name, I started calling her “Buttpants.”  What I didn’t realize when I gave her that moniker was that these buttpants are the new (hot)momjeans:

These pants have everything a busy mom needs: Comfortable elasticized waist (check); fit great even if you ate all the carbs in the house today (check); versatility to go from a soccer game to a night on the town (check); can be purchased in a two-pack at Costco (check); come in capri and ankle lengths (check and check). Alright, but here’s the hook, according to our friends at Athleta, there are some things you can do in the lycra spandex version that you can’t do in the denim version:

Whoa.  So, I’m sorry for the judgy-ness, Buttpants.  You were right to sport these ninjaneer wonder pants all along.  And I’m pretty certain that in the third month of my stay at home mom status, I am the “Buttpants” of my new neighborhood.  Now that I have that apology issued, I can focus on centering my chi and getting my foot stretched over my head….

If you’re having a busy family day, what are your go-to mom jeans or dad jeans?

Running Secrets

Ok, team, something happened yesterday that is inspiring me to breathe life back into Ninjaneeringmomjeans.  My sweet husband needs some inspiration to get into shape, so he decides to sign up for a 5K this summer.  He calls me and says, “Hey, do you want me to sign you up for the Missoula Marathon?”

Me, “Ah, no.”

Sweet husband, “Oh, no, just the 5K.”

“Ok, that would be fun,” I say because I’ve been running and playing soccer, so it’s not going to be such a big stretch to do a 5K this summer.

THEN he says, “So we don’t have to run the race together, right?  We can do it competetively.”

Wait…what?  He thinks he can beat me?  As if it’s a foregone conclusion?  Ok, now looking at it practically, his legs are about a foot longer than my legs so each of his strides is roughly 1-1/2 of my strides because I have the build of a welsh corgi.

Sweet Runner’s Body

However, now I have the power of a fiercely competitive nature and a blog my sweet husband doesn’t read, so let’s keep this between us.  I need all the help I can get.  How do I increase my speed?  Is there an app for this?  What are some good songs for my running playlist?  I think I have twelve weeks to go from corgi to gazelle!

Twelve Weeks from NOW!

Pack your bags. We’re going on a guilt trip!

None of the “What to Expect” books in my home library prepared me for the everyday guilt I feel since becoming a mom.  I’ve always been a bit of a rule follower.  Some may disagree, but I definitely followed a path.  I went to school, then college.  I got a job and husband and a dog.  Then, the three of us bought a house.  I never doubted that I was doing the right thing.  Then came the baby.  Even before he was born I felt guilty about the cup of coffee I drank the morning.  Was the caffeine hurting him?  That was just the warm up.  When he was born the real guilt started.  I took some time off work.  Was it enough?  Was it too much?  Is my baby ok at daycare?  Do I hold him enough?  Did I throw away my career?  Am I making enough money now that I’m working part time?  Where is the instruction manual for kids?  Where is my GPS for this guilt trip?  I have so many questions and there are so many opinionated people in all the forms of media telling me I’m doing this motherhood thing wrong.

Recently, I Googled “mother guilt,” because I had a suspicion my guilt ridden conscience and I are not alone.  Well, Google confirmed my hunch.  There are more than ten pages of links discussing ways to drop the guilt.  So now apparently, I should feel guilty for feeling guilty?  Crap.  There aren’t enough hours in the day for all my layers of inadequacy.  The first article that comes up on Google from the good people at WebMD was by far the most helpful of the two that I read.  On leaving your baby at daycare:

“As long as you have reliable and trustworthy child care and find meaning in the work you do and it completes you and you’re able to maintain and strike a balance, it’s a healthy thing to do,” Samuels says.

Well, thank you, Samuels.  First, thanks for run-on sentence (Seriously, I copied this straight from the WebMD site).  Secondly, thanks for restating the problem in the guise of an answer. But, since we have this story problem, let’s try to solve it mathematically, shall we?

Ok, I think my childcare situation is reliable and trustworthy.  So I have the left side of the equation nailed. It’s the work side of the equation that’s giving me problems.  Do I find meaning in the work I do? Does it complete me? Is this the angsty sequel to Jerry McGuire? Have I struck a balance?  My algebra recollection is the number of unknowns has to match the number of equations in order to solve this problem.  I’m pretty sure I have way too many variables to pose a solution. Perhaps you can’t break an emotion like guilt down into an equation, WebMD. I do know for sure I’ve never been in my office, in Jerry McGuire fashion, whispering to my work, “You…You complete me.”  Should I feel guilty about that?

More Machine Than Woman?

“He’s more machine now than man. Twisted and evil,” this is how Obi Wan described Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker in 1983’s Return of the Jedi. That got me thinking, am I more machine than woman? I rely on so many little machines and quite literally have them on me at all times.   Here’s a quick picture of the pile of machines I typically have on my person:

Machines

In the early ’80s this was considered evil.  Today, it’s standard issue.  In fact, we as a people are expected to keep up with latest advances in machinery or face public ridicule.  Don’t believe me?  Do you know someone that still has a flip phone?  How much do you tease them for not having a hand held computer in their pocket?  Wait, maybe that is “twisted and evil.”  These shamed people carrying their antique cell phones are still doing something we did not think possible at the time of Return of the Jedi.  They have a phone in their pocket for god sakes.  It was not that long ago you had to talk to your boyfriend in the kitchen stretching the phone cord far away from your sister who was trying to snap you with a dishtowel. Hypothetically, of course.  Now, that important romantic phone call can be made anywhere and is probably in the form of a text message (ninjaneer-like).

Not everyone has an insulin pump and a blood sugar tester that they carry around with them, so that might put me over the top for the “more machine than woman” category.  However, I was faced with my own technological mortality last week as I was literally trying to juggle too many things.  In what can only be described as sheer athletic prowess, I was fumbling my phone on the way into daycare to pick up my kids.  It was an epic battle of *got it…don’t got it…got it…spike it into the sidewalk* that resulted in a smashed face of a still working phone.  This phone is provided by my work and not scheduled to be replaced until December.  I was upgraded from the work flip phone three years ago and have in that time become very attached to my technological mobility.  In fact, that phone, which does more than my very first PC, links all of my other machines in the above pictured pile together.  I’m pretty sure if that machine quits working I get even more twisted and evil.  We shall see…

Twisted and Evil Indeed

 Have you had a recent technological failure?  Did it set you free or make you twisted and evil? 

 

 

 

Summertime in Winterfell*

There are great things about living this far north.  The seasons change.  My family likes to ski in the winter.  We like to play at the lake and hike in the summer.  Don’t even get me started on how much I like “camping.”   But the harsh winters really take a toll on our plumbing systems because, after all,  water freezes when it gets cold (this just in).  One system in particular that seems to suffer cascading failures year in and year out is our underground sprinkler system.  The automatic sprinklers were  a big selling point when my husband, Ben, and I were considering buying our house, “We won’t even have to worry about watering our lawn, Ben.”  Famous last words, Gen. Custer.   Recently, we figured out we froze and broke our second backflow preventer, the valve that separates our drinking water from our irrigation water.  This break, the second in three years, rendered our sprinkler system useless.  As the summer temperature was climbing and our beautiful green grass was scorching in the 80 degree heat, Ben and I took to our homeowner job of plumbing.   

I couldn’t get the union to turn that would allow us to replace the valve.  So I had Ben take a whack at it.  And a whack it got.  We fully broke the stem off that connects to the underground piping.  Now matters were worse.  Because I was carrying around a 4 month old baby and an intense plumbing project seemed overwhelming, I decided to get a little help from one of my plumber friends.  I called my buddy, Marcus, my favorite master plumber, to help us come up with a plan.  For the low, low price of 12 Bud Lights, we figured out the original installation was wrong and that’s why the valve was freezing and he helped me with a  parts list for the fix.  After some swearing, digging, getting PVC primer on my favorite shorts and three Home Depot trips, we have a mostly functional sprinkler system for the remaining fifteen minutes of summer.  The victory was only, in part, the functioning sprinkler system but also the  compliment I received from my plumber friend, Marcus, after sending him this picture:

Nailed It!

To which I got the response email, “If your deal over there at M&M doesn’t pan out, Central is always looking for craftswomen like yourself.  Good work.”  Yes!  That’s high praise coming from the plumbing community.  It’s nice to know my cascading failures may present interesting options after all and that something in Winterfell can have a happy ending (Seriously, go watch Game of Thrones!*).  

*If you’re unfamiliar with the reference, please start fake reading (watching on HBO/Netflix) the series  Game of Thrones so we can have a nerdy, spirited discussion about the Lannisters and Baratheons. 

Pumped

One week back at work in the books!  It wasn’t nearly as bad as prison either.  I may have been a bit dramatic about that idea.  I made it through each day.  My baby did not forget who I was.  And, my five year old was super pumped to show his new sister off at pre-school.  Speaking of pumped, there were a couple of changes at work since the last time I returned from maternity leave five years ago. One big change was the universal weight machine I found being stored in the ladies locker room.  My initial response was annoyance at using our locker room for storage of gym equipment that no one likes.  But, as I was thinking about it, I realized, maybe this opens up my locker room time to all sorts of pumping opportunities.  I roll a chair in there and do little breast pumping once a day.  But could I do more pumping than just that?  Should I be in full multi-task mode and really get my swell on too?

Medela Hands Free Bustier + Universal Machine = Wonder Woman

I’m going to need to order that hands-free bustier!