Man's best friend

Those who think that a dog offers the ultimate in companionship have never met my son's imaginary friend, Tooby. Allow me to introduce you.

Tooby is a reformed hitter who just one short year ago was not apt to heed his parents' instruction. Upon first introduction, I feared that my son had fallen in with a bad crowd at the ripe old age of 2 1/2, as we only heard about Tooby when we were correcting one of our kids or sharing a "learn from my mistakes" story. Just like my husband, for example, Tooby once failed to heed his mother's warning not to stand up in his chair at the table and took a nasty tumble as a result of his disobedience.

Over the course of the past year, Tooby has celebrated birthdays ranging from his 10th to his "90-12th", though he has seemingly settled into being 19 "like Austin", my oldest nephew.

Tooby is a vagrant, having lived in houses mere blocks from our own all the way to an impressively large stucco number at the corner of 16th Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard.

Tooby is an animal lover, having assembled a menagerie in one of those above-referenced backyards that included a hippopotamus named Sarah Bates. I appreciate the shout out, Tooby.

Tooby is an unobtrusive guest, so I don't mind when he arrives unannounced for dinner or a playdate. Last night he unexpectedly accompanied us to my husband's basketball game, and since he's 19 he enjoyed the privilege of riding in the front passenger's seat (after I moved my diaper bag to accommodate him, that is.)

My daughter once accused Tooby of being imaginary, which infuriated my son. So you can imagine my surprise when one day, during a discussion on creation (Did God make mountains? Did God make horses? Did God make ice cream?) my son pointed out that God made everything "except Tooby, because he's not real. I made him."

Tooby has been busy lately, or at least I assume he has because we've heard less about him in the past several months than we had in the previous year. I guess college and part-time jobs and all the other things that occupy a 19-year old's mind have made it tough to keep in touch with almost-four-year old friends who don't text.

I admit that I have enjoyed having Tooby around (once he got his act together and stopped hitting people, that is) and will be sad when he takes his final leave, as I guess most imaginary friends do. I suspect that time is drawing near, but before it happens I'm going to make every effort to meet my namesake hippo. Wouldn't you?

Cinderella gets schooled

My husband and I are going to a fundraising gala on Saturday, and since I haven't worn formal attire since our 2003 wedding I decided it was time for a dress and all the trimmings.

Having accompanied my husband to the high school "prom ball" that he chaperoned last spring, my five-year old is a veteran of such affairs and immediately volunteered to pick my dress. While I wasn't willing to commit to the possibility of wearing a hot pink sequined number, I did agree to take her along for the ride.

So off we set this past unseasonably beautiful Saturday morning, me with a vision of something long and chic and her with a backpack full of lunch and lipgloss. In the time it took her to eat her turkey sandwich, Sun Chips and pear, we hit four boutiques (two of them of the consignment variety, a new concept to my daughter, who blurted out incredulously  in one of them, "So all these things someone else has worn before?") and came up empty.

A bit dejected, I headed home to clean the bathroom. Cinderella, indeed.

Determined to find something (anything), I headed out for round two yesterday afternoon and quickly confirmed my hypothesis that there were no long gowns in the city of Louisville that were a) in my price range and b) not fit for a 17-year old "prom ball go-er" or a mother of the bride. Further dejected but growing a bit desperate, I grabbed a few cocktail dresses from a rack and headed to the dressing room, where one of them proved acceptable if not the long, chic vision I'd been entertaining since I first received the invitation to the event.

As difficult as it had been to find a dress, I had absolutely no problem finding lots of other things I loved, from red leather Frye boots to chunky beaded necklaces. Unfortunately, with private school and a new vehicle on our horizon, we have even less disposable income than usual, so I left all those things right where I found them. Yet I continued to think about them, long for them and pout about the fact that I couldn't  buy them.

I was acting, I realized, just like my three-year old, who begs for a new toy everywhere we go. He's so automatic, in fact, that my response - 'You don't need a new toy. You have don't even play with all the toys you have' - has become the same. Talk about not practicing what I preach.

I don't need anything. I have shoes and clothes and cookware and furniture, all the things that turn my head in magazines and on shopping binges like the one I went on this past weekend, in excess of what I actually need to exist comfortably. But, just as my son always finds a newer/bigger/better dinosaur or car that he "needs", I constantly see newer/better/more stylish things that I think I "need."

Ironically, our minister's sermon yesterday was on the topic of sin. In it, he reminded us that Jesus suggested it would be better to cut off your hand or gouge out your eye if either caused you to sin than to continue sinning. I'm not sure if Jesus really intended for people to start lopping off appendages or if he was going for dramatic effect to emphasize the danger of sin. Either way, I see the application in my life.

Lusting for material possessions is sinful. That may be uncomfortable for some people to read - it's uncomfortable for me to write, like I'm standing up in an AA meeting announcing an addiction - but that was another pivotal point of the sermon yesterday: People don't call a spade a spade when it comes to sin. Too uncomfortable. Too harsh.

My love of things distracts me from what's important and makes me dissatisfied with all the good things that I do have.

So while I have no plans to gouge out my eyes (I could barely stomach removing a splinter from my cuticle recently), I can take steps to starve the beast. Step one will be abstaining from multi-stop shopping marathons. Step two will be letting a few of my four magazine subscriptions lapse. And step three will be declining the Pinterest invitation that I finally received from Ben and his cronies.

Pardon the interruption

As a mom of three young kids, I have resigned myself to the fact that for the next, oh, 18 years or so, my time and money are not my own. Any parent can identify with that. But only nursing mothers, or those who've been down that road in the past, can fully appreciate the idea of your body not being your own for what can feel like the same period of time.

After spending the better part of the past five years with one of my children attached to my breast, my expertise in the area has ballooned in direct correlation to my rapidly disappearing sense of modesty. You simply can't be shy when there's a hungry baby demanding that you feed her. Cling to decorum, and you'll spend a lot of time in public restrooms and eat countless cold meals. 


Those of us who commit to the American Academy of Pediatrics-recommended one year understand that you make some sacrifices along the way. Of course, you also lay the groundwork for a healthy child and reap your own physical and emotional benefits, but perhaps more importantly you create "memories" that help sustain you when your dedication wanes.

For instance, I'll always remember the first time my husband walked into the room while I was pumping. Or, more scientifically, expressing breast milk. He's a dairy farmer's kid, so he quickly made a very graphic (and, I can't lie, accurate) observation about the similarities between milking a human and milking a cow. I've been to the milk parlor, and I think the only process deviation is that I don't dip my teats in iodine before I hook myself up to the machine.

I'll also always cherish the memory of the first time my almost-four year old son crashed the same kind of party. He stopped in his tracks, cocked his head to one side and asked, "What's that tooting sound?"

And then there's the time my eldest daughter paid me a visit in our upstairs bathroom, where, after settling the kids down with their bedtime snack and show, I'd slipped away to pump in private. Three minutes into the process, she bounded up the stairs and into the bathroom.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I'm getting milk for your sister," I replied.

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she studied the pump. Then she crowded in for a closer look.

"Your boobies are going in and out of there! In and out. In and out," she chanted, keeping rhythm with the motor.

"Yes," I replied. "They sure are."

"Why are you up here," she asked.

"Well, I usually like to do this in private."

She gave me a blank look and then proceeded to pepper me with a dozen or so additional questions about who knows what. Maybe the life cycle of a possum.

Finally, and most recently, I was taking care of business in the lactation room at work yesterday when midway through a fire alarm started blaring. My initial thought was, 'I wonder if it's a false alarm?' Since I hadn't quite reached my quota, I considered waiting it out but then thought better of it. I may have surrendered all modesty, but I still don't want to end up a story on the 6 o'clock news: Woman found topless and unconscious from smoke inhalation. Firefighters puzzled by mechanical apparatus found next to the body.

So, I aborted my mission, stuffed my hardware into the fashionable black tote bag that male colleagues have confused for everything from a briefcase to a lunch box (seriously - I eat a lot, but I don't eat a tote  bag's worth of lunch) and hurried out the door, tucking my shirt in as I walked.

Four seconds after I exited the room, the alarm stopped blaring. Turns out it was, thankfully, a false alarm.

Just another memory-making day in the life of a mom.

The Proposal

With Valentine's Day right around the corner, media outlets galore are sure to be featuring proposal stories - from the most romantic to the most outrageous - from now until February 14. I'd like to submit the following, overheard during bathtime this evening, in the category of "Best Hypothetical":

Daughter to son: "Do you want to marry me? I don't have a husband."

Son to daughter: "Um, yeah. I'm a pizza maker."

Daughter to son: "Okay. You can make us pizza to eat."

Simple, straightforward and just edgy enough (how many women really do the asking, after all?) to make it a contender. Plus there's that whole livin' on love, or pizza, element that's sure to sway the voters in its favor. All in all, a solid proposal.

Good things come to those who wait

I just got waitlisted. By Pinterest. I didn't get waitlisted by Vanderbilt University when I was applying for colleges, but I sure did just get wait-listed by a virtual pinboard that everyone and their mother keeps talking about. The kicker is, a friend of mine sent me an invite at least two months ago. Reasoning that I already had plenty of distractions in my life, I never accepted it. And now I'm on the waitlist.

Whereas most waitlists serve the very practical function of making room for you (at a restaurant table, in the dorm at your coveted college), I suspect this particular waitlist is merely an ingenious marketing tool designed to whip the waitlistee into a clock-watching frenzy as she anxiously awaits her invitation to create her own personal board. Worked like a charm on me.

After recovering from the surprise of being notified by Ben and The Pinterest Team of my status, I went back to the homepage and started surfing through the featured pins. In mere seconds, I was hooked. I culled the selection down to just those pins focused on kids and was immediately transported to a page of pictures featuring everything from a cute DIY glitter headband that my daughter would love (but that I'm confident I couldn't DIMyself since I'm more than a little deficient when it comes to crafting) to gorgeously styled bento boxes featuring sandwiches tricked out like fluffy little sheep. (p.s. Those had to be done by a professional food stylist for some parenting magazine. Any real mom would know that if you have the time it takes to turn turkey and baby carrots into a barnyard tableau it would be much better spent on something with a richer ROI. Like showering.)

From there, it took two clicks for me to land on etsy and spend several minutes debating the purchase of a fabulously clever dress to commemorate my younger daughter's first birthday. Which is in July.

Since a quick tally of our budget board reflected a few, um, overages this month, I knew better than to fetch my AmEx. Stepping away from my laptop, I took a deep breath and assessed what had just happened in those 10 minutes (honestly, it happened that fast.)

First, I was right two months ago. I don't need any more diversions. In the time I wasted from my position on the waitlist, I could have folded the towels that are in the dryer, started a load of brights in the washer and scrubbed the plastic Hello Kitty sandwich box and thermos (oh, how I loathe non-dishwasher friendly items) that are still sitting in the sink from yesterday's lunch.

More importantly, have I already said that the budget board revealed that I hadn't exactly adhered to the budget this month? And have I ever mentioned that our tiny little bungalow is already stuffed to capacity with, well, stuff? Stuff falls into the category with distractions as something I definitely don't need more of. We can neither afford nor accommodate it within the four walls of our home.

We have stuff galore - clothing, toys, kitchen gadgets, DVDs, stuff, stuffity, stuff, stuff, stuff! We don't need one single thing in this world that money can buy. And Pinterest, for me, bears the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It's a temptation to spend money we don't have on stuff we don't need.

So thank you Ben and The Pinterest Team for waitlisting me. My husband thanks you too.

Perception is reality

If you ever have the opportunity to eavesdrop on a child's game of pretend, I highly recommend you take advantage of it. The odds are spectacular that you'll hear the funniest or most insightful (sometimes both) phrase of your day.

For example, during one particular game of house my daughter, in one sentence, revealed to me that the division of labor in our home perpetuates the age-old gender stereotype of woman as caregiver:

My son: I want to hold the baby.

My daughter (fully embracing her role as me and employing appropriate spousal nickname): No, hon. I'm the mommy, and mommies take care of babies. Daddies are their assistants.

On a more recent occasion, during another game of house, my son let his interpretation of personal liberties slip when he rebuffed his sister's request to do something (probably hold that baby he'd wanted to hold three months ago) with a matter-of-fact, "No, I'm a grown-up, and grown-ups can do whatever they want."

If only.

Let me assure you that neither my husband nor I have ever told our kids that daddies are only assistants in the child rearing process (though my husband might actually be in favor of that approach) or that grown-ups can do whatever they please whenever the mood strikes them, which obviously means that's how they perceive the world operates.


But isn't perception reality for everyone, including we self-indulgent, autonomous grown-ups?

I've written a few articles from a parents' perspective for our church newsletter. Hoping to be a voice of encouragement for other moms, I was very honest about my short-comings and insecurities as a parent.

In complimenting me on one of the articles, our minister remarked, "I was surprised to read that you felt that way. You always look like you have it all together."

Unfortunately, his perception is not my reality, and if I were a gambling gal I'd wager the same is true for most women who appear to "have it all together." So for those, like me, who often feel a twinge of envy when you see one of those on-the-ball moms who seems to have time for everyone and everything in her life, take heart. She probably had to stop at Walmart on the way to school to buy clean underwear and juice boxes for her kids because she hadn't gotten around to washing their undies or thermoses the night before.

And for those rare moms who do actually have it all together, consider investing in a method to bottle that mojo. You could make a fortune.

Survivor: The Last Frontier

A friend of mine has 2-month old twin granddaughters who joined their 19-month old sister at home a little over a week ago. When I asked how everyone was doing, my friend advised that they were in "survival mode." If I had three kids under the age of 2, I might be in an inpatient therapy program, so in my opinion "survival mode" is worthy of applause.

Experts aplenty write about this phenomenon in pregnancy and parenting magazines in an effort to a) prepare new parents for the inevitable and b) reassure them that this phase won't last forever. While five years is by no means "forever", it's a heckuva long time to be in "survival mode." I know, because that's where my husband and I have spent the past five years of our lives. I'm not sure if that means that our learning curve is steeper than most or that our children are more high maintenance than most. Either way, if we were being graded on our ability to emerge from "survival mode", we wouldn't be at the top of our class.

For those who aren't parents, or for those parents whose children's medical school graduations have eased the sting of "survival mode", let me paint you a picture of what it's like to live there.

In "survival mode", sleep deprivation is Enemy Number One. Despite the fact that infants allegedly require a ridiculous amount of sleep, most seem to prefer to indulge that need on a first and second shift production schedule, spending the overnight hours regaling their bleary-eyed parents with endearing feats like pooping with such force that it necessitates a full linen change before you could even consider returning the kid to his or her bed.

We have friends whose babies slept like little logs from day one. We envied those friends. We resented those friends. Sometimes we considered making voodoo dolls of those friends. (Just kidding.)

I will admit that we compounded our sleep problems by having our second child just as our first was starting to get with the program. Our son woke up for a 4 a.m. snack every morning of his life until I finally employed "tough love" (another concept with which I was not previously acquainted until having children) a few short months before he turned one. I think my husband and I enjoyed approximately six months of decent sleep before No. 3 arrived this past summer. True to our DNA's form, she seems to despise sleep.

The second indicator that you're in "survival mode" is the state of affairs in your kitchen and laundry room. If you have to eat dinner off of a bread plate and dry your body with a hand towel, then you're either living in a fraternity house or "survival mode."  I consider myself a success if our clothes are clean. I award myself bonus points if they're folded and tucked into laundry baskets. On the rare occasion that they actually make the leap from laundry basket to dresser drawer, I treat myself to a day at the spa. Or, I would if I could find the time and money to do so.

Which brings me to a third key feature of "survival mode": neither the clock nor your bank account are on your side. If you have the fiscal means, you'll pay for help - a nanny to diaper, bathe and feed the tot; a cleaning service to dust, polish and disinfect the house; a personal chef to shop, chop and serve the meals. If you have any one of these, you can't be in "survival mode." Parents like me who have none of those won't allow you to stake a claim to our pain.

But while money may buy you help, and thus free you up to indulge in luxuries like exercise, sleep and bowel movements sans an audience, it won't buy you more time. And when you're in "survival mode", time is a scarce commodity. People who don't have kids but would like to someday should heed the inherent warning in the words of any parent they hear lament, "I used to waste so much time before I had kids!"

That ain't no joke. So figure out your favorite way to waste time, and waste away! Savor every moment of your reality TV show. Rejoice every time you run a quick errand, because "quick errand" becomes an oxymoron once you add a kid or two (or three) to the trip. And, hey, if you don't have anything else to do, consider volunteering a couple of hours to a good cause. Like babysitting for your mother-of-three friend who is in desperate need of a nap/shower/latte.