Honestly

These moms who have three or four children and have time to blog amaze me. How do they do it? I really can’t see that they are generally SAHMs making much of a difference, because I know I’d be even busier if I were. It’s already May. This month I’m driving my mom to my grandmother’s house, attending three child birthday parties, a pool party 2 ½ hours away (for an out-of-town friend who will be home), one five-mile run, book club, a Dolphin Exploration boat ride for Mother’s Day and the hubs and I are getting away for a weekend to Ft. Lauderdale.

 

This doesn’t include work day trips, doctor’s appointments for me, my kids AND my mother, making guacamole for a work function, getting new tires on my car … where exactly does one find time for anything unscheduled these days?

 

We are having fun at home lately. I blew up the little kiddie pool and stuck it under the slide and the kids had two hours of entertainment. Two hours! And I didn’t put a ton of water in the pool, so when it got grassy and nasty I just dumped it and refilled. The neighbors came over on Saturday and neighbor-wife and I went through 1 ½ bottles of wine making strawberry and white wine spritzers (and I sent the rest of the wine home with her).

 

We’re fighting a lot over food these days though. I have had it with children refusing to eat anything I make, so I have stopped catering. I never really was much of a caterer, but when I made salad I would make something different, etc. No more. I’m making salad twice a week now, and I load it with enough “stuff” that they can pick through and eat what they want if that’s what they want to do (blueberries, craisins, veggie pasta, etc) but I am not making chicken nuggets on salad days. I’m not making corn when momma and daddy have asparagus. Eat it or not, but I’m not making any separate food, and if you want something different you need to eat what we eat first.

 

Is that too harsh? They eat tons of food all day. If they only eat a bite of dinner, it’s not going to kill them. Yesterday I made chicken with broccoli pesto pasta. The boys both had yogurt and a handful of cereal as a snack when we first got home before going on a bike ride. Henry ate his pasta with no argument (pasta is pasta to him. Will refuse green beans lettuce and spinach, but pasta with green stuff – no problem) but Spencer refused until he decided he was hungry at bedtime and then took half an hour to eat his (very small) bowl of food. I’ve previously subscribed to the “dinner time is when we eat” doctrine, but lately we’ve been giving his food back to him if he’s hungry. I don’t know. I know that most parents struggle with this but I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. Add to that when I get second-guessed by the hubby (“we can’t force a 20-month to eat his vegetables. What if he’s hungry when he goes to bed?”) and then I truly feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. Thoughts?

 

My other general problem these days is Spencer’s attitude. When did my four-year old become a teenager? “I KNOW, MOM” and frustrated grunting at me … man, I want to ground him for all eternity. Time outs only do so much. He’s also developing a stutter. I’m trying to get him to stop and think about what he wants to say rather than wait 5 minutes for it to come out of his mouth, but MAN!

 

BUT OTHERWISE we are doing good. The kids are doing good. Henry says “Shoes” and “Uh Oh”, “Look” (Ook) and “Woah”. He still doesn’t say a lot of things his age group says (dada, any reference to his brother, milk, or anything like that) but car, truck, choo-choo, and various excited expression work for him. As long as he’s slowly adding to his speech I don’t think I mind what he decides to say. He’s also fascinated with a fork and that gets him to eat some things that he wouldn’t normally eat. Spencer’s back to being obsessed with baseball, Hubby is back to being obsessed with baseball, and I’m back to being torn between being obsessed with baseball and annoyed that I’m not getting to watch any of my DVR because of baseball.

 

Hope all is well with the rest of the blogging community! I planned on posting a cute video, but instead I need to start dinner, watch Bones on my DVR and get dressed to go for a run.