Strategic Serendipity

I am not a purist when it comes to reading. I count books I listen to on audible.com as books I have read.  I encourage my child to listen to books on audible.  We often get the paperback so he can follow along, but it is not required.  In my house reading is for fun and learning. We listen to books together as a family in the car and many nights when we come home, he asks to keep listening to his book instead of turning on the tv.  It is a constant challenge to find books we will both love. We just finished one such book together on audible.   Ben Garrod’s A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs is an amazing family listen!  Don’t be fooled by the title, my seven year-old was completely engaged.  It was easy to listen to in small 15-minute drives and the production quality was good!  The author includes pop-culture references to Jurassic Park for those who only know dinosaurs from there.  We even learned a few things the movie got wrong! If y...

You've seen the tests on Facebook that help you figure out which Disney Princess you are.  Because we want to be a princess, right?  Honestly, lately I feel more like the meme that shows Cinderella running down the stairs at midnight and says "all she really wanted was a new dress and a night out."  Or maybe the one that expresses our discontent that wild animals don't really clean house for me on a regular basis. Don't get me wrong.  I grew up on Disney.  I listened to my books on record of every story they had and would turn the page when Tinkerbell rang her bell.  I watched Wonderful World of Disney every Sunday night.   In high school I had a season pass to Disneyland and spent my 16th birthday there.  I still have the Tigger I got that day sitting in my room.   In college, I had my Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast VHS tapes constantly going while I was studying.   I owned all the VHS tapes, th...

How much alone time do you need? There seems to have been a cycle to my life where I go from a lot of alone time, to next to none, then back again.  When I was six, I was a latch key kid of a single mom who worked three jobs.  When we were together, she was tired in a way I could not understand.  I loved my time alone listening to Disney fairytale books on my record player and following along in the book.  I would turn the page when Tinkerbell made her sound.  I swear it is how I learned to read and to love reading.  But I would also get so lonely. Fast-forward to college and there were always so many people around. You weren’t ever really alone for long.  Summers were as much decompression as recharging my brain. Then I lived alone as a single person in DC. I had friends and volunteered a lot outside of work. But long weekends often consisted of a good audiobook while I worked on a quilting project. There were times that I was lonely and felt...

I ran into a friend who has a newborn last night and she honestly said "this is hard!" I couldn't help but laugh at her honesty and the very mirror of my own daily feelings. Luckily, I was laughing with her. I started thinking about all my amazing mother friends who make one, two, or more look so easy and juggle it with a bunch of things I can't even imagine. I wonder, do they all struggle at one time or another? Judging by the number of popular mommy blogs I have read, I am willing to bet my friend and I are not the only two. But here's the thing, her simple statement made me feel like a weight had lifted off my shoulders. Because it was okay for someone I admire and respect and believe could run the free world if asked to say this is hard. So this is for all those women out there who have struggled at one point in their lives (whether by themselves or with a supportive partner) with that all important "mommy" role. I love you because I know whether ...

When you are childless and go through a break up it is hard.  I remember chocolate ice cream, Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs, and whole weekends spent on my couch.  And then slowly you get back into things, maybe go out for a night on the town with friends or speed dating (preferably combined with a wine tasting).  The entire process is about you and, well, processing what you have gone through. When you go through that break up with a child, however, it is different (still hard).  The process now becomes about making sure your little (or not so little) one is comfortable with the new normal and you are forever tied with "the one that got away" through your child (or children).  What's more, you now are doing most of it on your own (possibly without financial support) and quite frankly, that is draining in a way I can't even begin to explain. No matter what the circumstances of the parting of ways, no matter how amicable or how much of a relief it is, your mi...

"Cause everybody needs to break free, from reality."  Kenny Chesney My toddler son is getting his four back teeth.  Monday night he was grumpy and up every hour crying. Tuesday I took off to take him to the doctor, because such intense pain had to be something life threatening, right?  Nope, they told me he was teething.  They had some great ideas for keeping him relatively comfortable so he went to daycare on Wednesday and evidently had a great day.  And I had a horrible day at work.  I mean the kind where you end up taking lunch at 10:30 just so you don't cry at work.  When I picked my son up at daycare, he proceeded to cry for three hours straight.  (You have to stay ahead of pain and I can't do that if he is at daycare for the full day.)  I literally crashed fifteen minutes after he did. Today was a better day at work but my days are necessarily filled with people asking me questions.  So when I left work a little early, inste...

My 18-month old son is learning tons of words a day and we are constantly talking when we are waiting for a bus, shopping in a store, etc.  I name things and sometimes he'll repeat what I say.  With the things he knows (like train, bus, and puppy) I will often ask him what is that?  What I have noticed is that if someone else is around and my son doesn't answer right away, the adult will answer for him.  Now sometimes he is playing shy and sometimes I am pretty sure he is thinking "I am not a performing monkey mom!" but either way, jumping in and giving him the answer before he has even had a chance to process is not the way to teach him.  And just because he doesn't answer right away, does not mean he is stupid or incompetent.  He knows how, in his own little way, to ask for help if he needs it and I have learned to wait for that indication before jumping in and taking over.  Sounds relatively simple and like the rambling of a mother who hasn't gotten...

I was recently half an hour late to a Junior League of Washington meeting and a when I asked a question about something they had discussed earlier a friend made a joke about getting there on time.  Yes, within no time at all I realized she was making a joke and didn't worry about her.  The reason it hit home and I continued to worry about being late was that I was beating myself up inside about being late.  Her teasing comment was barely heard because of the screaming judgmental voice inside every single mother that says "you can't do this" or "you're doing it wrong." To give you a little perspective, let me give you an idea of what I needed to do to get to my meeting at 7:00 PM.  I needed to leave work at 5:00 PM, walk to a metro station, wait for the right train and take it to my station about six miles away, walk to my son's daycare to pick him up, get the feedback for the day from his teacher, on this particular day we had to find the shoe my s...