A Whiny Mom

Dear Blog readers,
I am ranting to you today and avoiding facebook, where I would undoubtedly be christened the "overly long, boring, whining, ranting, status updater" Here I know only my friends will come and read it and everyone else can easily ignore!  So read on to find yourself on set of the newest tragedy drama to hit a theater near you, or, if this already sounds like it's not for you- plug your digital ears!
 First off: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!! Okay, I feel much better. Maybe now I can relay my day without using profanities every other word. ;) Act one, scene one of this day begins at 7am when everyone in the whole house is awake and every one needs something different. All of you who have children know exactly what I'm talking about- Oldest "I can't find clean underwear!" Youngest "waaaa!(feed me) waaaaa!" Middles "Can we have pancakes for breakfast? With chocolate chips? Syrup?? Do we have butter too?!"  "Mom, Steven won't get out of the bathroom and I have to poooooop!!" "Mom, I think Steven plugged the toilet with too much paper AGAIN!!" Okay I'll stop giving examples, or THIS could take all day!
After trudging through getting diapers changed, kids wrangled downstairs, read everyone's two favorite books, get a voted on consensus for the breakfast menu and begin cooking, I remember that we have an appointment in town at 9:30am. Well, we have five kids to get ready and live 30-45 minutes from town on a good day. I call the office and sure enough (as is always the case) the appointment can't be moved. So....we turn the grill back off, shove the bowl of pumpkin pancake mix into the fridge, I throw outfits at kids and scramble to jam the littlest two into the shower with me, because there was NO way late or not that I was making a public debut with hair fashioned into a grunge faux hawk styled by grease. I don't know about you, but being late and having to scramble my jets in a hurry makes me a monster. I'd like to say I mean that metaphorically, but I'm pretty sure I really do grow tusks and become feral.  I'm a planner, I love to fly by the seat of my pants, but each component of the flight needs to have some semblance of structure to it...make sense? It doesn't to anyone else either. Call it my adult ADD mixed with a wandering personality glitch.
We are all in the car, finally. I am making muddy water and gravel fly as I break the sound barrier squealing out of my driveway and onto the highway. I do a mental check as I always do: "Diaper bag, check....though I'm not 100% that there's wipes in it" Crud. "Appointment folder, check. Ohhh except it has some baby food spilled on it." Crud. Maybe they'll give me a new one? I have to go to the store after the appointment to get groceries and a few other things too. " shopping list?" No. Double crud. I hate shopping without a list!! Everything gets forgotten!
I was told by the secretary that if we were more than ten minutes late we'd likely have to reschedule. As in another month from now, and this was a REALLY important appointment. Looking at the clock....9:32am and we still have a 10-15 minute drive ahead of us. Also, the fat bald guy in front of us that is obviously picking his nose in his cream colored Toyota pickup with the home made wood pallet sides is driving 35mph on a 55mph road. Oh dear, here come my tusks again. Sorry children for the clever and witty new traffic phrase lines you learned from Mommy today. FYI, don't repeat this please!!!
It is absolutely pouring rain and is 40 something degrees at this point, and I've made sure all the children have coats but forgotten one for myself. Lovely. We slide into a parking spot nearly 20 minutes late to our appointment and I jump out to get the double stroller out of the back, directly into the mother of all mud puddles. Could possibly be called a pond. I am soaked to my knees, and now that my pants are five pounds heavier after sucking up all that water they begin sagging in the back. Just fantastic. So I look like one of "those" moms now. A whole brood of unruly children, my hair plastered to my head and my butt crack hanging out. If I had the option of just going home right at that moment I would have. But alas, we have worked too darn hard to get here so we are not turning around yet! Babies in the stroller, older three given feral barkings to stay with Mama hog or else, we march soggily in.
This building has two options, a tiny ancient and extremely stinky elevator or the stairs of ultimate doom. Obviously, with a stroller and no ramp options we choose the elevator. Did I mention it was tiny? My three older kids cram in against a corner while I push and pull and have to keep hitting the doors with my butt to keep the automatic door closer from crushing us as we work hard to maneuver. We make it in and begin the slow decent to the second story. When the doors open there is another crowd of people waiting to get in, giving us no room to get out. Also, the stroller is stuck, with three kids pinned to the back wall. After my face flushed to shades of red previously unheard of and I'm pretty sure everyone has seen my entire butt, I get the kids out of the elevator. You'd think this story was nearly over now, but honey, it's not. The dietician graciously meets me in the main waiting room and accepts me into the appointment even though we are ridiculously late at this point. Bless her heart! The kids drive me the normal amount of crazy during the appointment running in and out of the room, asking too many questions, getting into her things, but overall nothing earth quaking or story worthy.
I think maybe I've finally gotten into the swing of the day and we pack back up into the soggy slush and into our van. We are all like aldente noodles swirling around in cold stew water about now, and we've still got two stops to make and eventually, we must eat lunch since breakfast had been skipped entirely. I swing by and drop off my husbands rented tux without a hitch, and then, we head to Walmart, the one stop hell shop. Believe me, if there were other options for places to shop in our area, I'd do that instead. I'd like to hate Walmart more, but admittedly, I still occasionally go there on days like this, when I need to go to the bank, feed the kids, get groceries and a long list of other items and really really really, don't want to have to go to seven different stores with five kids to achieve all this.
Once again we all slog into the nasty weather and brave our way into the store of wonders. We deposit the check and head to McDonald's. After we receive our five waters (imagine the glares) eight cheeseburgers with no pickles no onions (double the glares for this) and one large fry to split, we spot a seat. Before we can even sit at it, the antagonists begin their work. I must have a burning beacon on my forehead, because they come after us like zombies after the last piece of roadkill on earth. With their "My, your hands are full" and "Woweee lady, don't you know what causes kids?!" comments. Then, they want to stand in our way and stare at us for a while, because, we're that awesome. So my children begin (of course) their normal banter with these strangers who love to talk to us, straining my patience and making life's lingering moments even longer. The kids have mostly to completely finished their food after almost an hour of pushing and prodding by me and we are ready to reload and begin the shopping palooza. Four year old and infant in the stroller, toddler on my back in the Ergo, four year old being pushed my seven year old in the cart. Here. We. Go!!
We make it to the produce section with only three people interrupting us to make rude comments. Believe it or not, this is nearly a record! We gather what we need, minus all the things my fried brain has forgotten due to not having a list, and head, bulging arms and overflowing cart, to the checkout line. Baby is screaming now because it's been nearly three and a half hours since poor little bitty has eaten, and the toddlers, are all losing patience faster than me. So, clearly, we were in desperate need of teller who's brain had been so fried by the bleach she used to color her hair that she most likely can no longer do simple math with a calculator. Okay, that was cruel, cash registers are similar to calculators, and with the help of a manager four separate times and 45 minutes later, she completed our transaction.  Yes! Freedom was ours! We had made it in and out of Walmart alive! Home James!! Well, except for the stop at the preschool to drop off the twins since we'd overstayed our allotted time in town and had now missed the bus....but it was still a bright prospect.
Have you ever had those days riding with a car load of kids who were fighting so badly that you adjusted the music to the rear speakers and blasted them with heavy bass just to get their attention to tell them to be quiet, and quit killing each other or you'd beat them to it? That was today. Eventually, we were at the preschool, and I ran the twins inside and signed them in after explaining my way out of their tardiness, and wondering how crazed I must have really looked over the silent stares I received,  then dodged back out to the car...where my oldest had decided to make the toddler stop crying by getting into my purse and giving him my chocolates. Awesome. I'm seriously beginning to wonder just when this day is going to end.
Once we were home I unloaded babies, fed them and put them to bed for a nap, and gave my oldest instructions to begin unloading groceries. All was quiet and lovely and peaceful until I discovered that he had become distracted, and had left the bag with the toilet paper and the yarn in it on the sidewalk. Where it was pouring. There's a chance he won't live until the end of this story. Have you ever heard of harder won toilet paper?! You better bet he received the whole lecture in full!
In conclusion, before you become bored to tears by a profound lack of care for what happens next, I will say, I still forgot to buy a new phone while I was at the store, so I didn't get to call my best friend and tell her all of this, and in sparing facebook the world's longest status while simultaneously sparing my children their lives, you're welcome, for a page out of my life on a very very bad day.
Great love and blessings will befall all who read this, amen!  

MamaDonna <3

Potty training...or...

     Sometimes our need to control our lives and our surroundings makes things get so out of control that we stop to wonder, was there ever any control there to be had? Most of the time, no. At least that's my own experience with the world, after I had kids, amplify that no times ten. My desire to write this blogacle (blog article, tee hee)  was sparked today after reading a link to a little article off of the Cafe Mom webiste that a friend of mine posted to facebook. You can read the article yourself here:
 http://thestir.cafemom.com/toddler/135107/potty_training_is_not_a?fb_ref=post_bottom&fb_source=home_oneline 
   My article is primarily about my son Steven. He just turned four this month, and the only thing consistent about his potty training is that he consistently progresses and then regresses over and over. I have mostly just given up, and let him decide what to do. We just try and make good consequences when he chooses to go in the toilet...or bad consequences when he goes elsewhere. I'd like to say that he is still in diapers, heaven knows that would actually be easier, but he has been out of diapers since he was a little over eighteen months. In fact, I was just looking in his baby memories book the other day and remembered about having to cut the feet out of all his footie pajamas so that we could turn them around backwards, that way he couldn't take them off to get to his poopy diapers. Unfortunately even that didn't stop our little Houdini for long, he figured a way out of the pajamas and got to the diapers anyway, always ending in a "poo-tastrophe". So, we thought maybe he was ready for potty training. Makes sense right? The kid takes off his diaper after it has any poop in it at all and smears it around, so he must want it off his body, and what better place to put it than the toilet!? Uh, wrong. He apparently just really enjoyed smearing poo. We did what lots of parents do, and what we were given plenty of advice to try- worked on introducing him to the toilet by letting him run naked and rewarding him with candies or stickers every time he actually went in the toilet or the training potty. Which worked, kind of. He'd go pee in the toilet quite often (we were pumping him with fluids to try and get lots of positive affirmation in during the day) We tried putting him back in diapers at night, but he'd already gotten the idea in his head that he was a big boy now, so he didn't need them. I just washed lots and lots and LOTS of sheets and pajamas...and carpets, and sofas, and stuffed animals... When we made him wear pull-ups he regressed even further and started to get really destructive with his pooing, smearing it all over windows, toys, furniture, all the clothes in his dresser, down air vents...yes, it is as gross as it sounds. He'd never eat it fortunately, but had no problems whatsoever with touching it. SO, obviously, it was hurting his mental psyche, self worth, or whatever you want to label it that we would dare put him back in diapers or even pull-ups, and since washing some wet sheets was exponentially easier than scrubbing whole rooms, we caved. (Ask me how MY psyche was doing!!)
     After riding this merry-go-round for over a year, he had made some serious progress- he no longer pooped his pants in public, he'd tell you most of the time when he had to go pee in public, mostly I think because he wanted to play in a variety of toilets, and he was no longer wetting the bed at night or nap times as long as you were there the instant his eyes opened to whisk him to the bathroom. As previously mentioned at the beginning of this article, he only consistently progressed as often as he regressed. Every time he was sent to his room for a time out or a mandatory nap, he'd smear poo. Yes, yes I know, this is the part where you say "Ohhh, he's reaching out for control of his own. Give him control of other things and he'd stop that." I really wish it would have been that simple. We read parenting books, and absorbed all the advice we could get. We followed Love and Logic's advice of giving him choices in everything, giving him control over every little thing we could think of. We followed To Train up a child's advice of taking away sugar or some other thing that he loves saying that he needed to quit going potty in his room and we'd give it back. We followed so many other people, and so many other online info sites, and so so many parenting books advice that I think mostly my husband and I wound up dizzy and dazed in the corner...cleaning up poop. We even went so far as to take him to the pediatrician when he turned three and was still doing this to see what we could do. She said that he was ADHD and said we might try some trial variations of medication to help him out. Now, I am majorly against medications, but my oldest son who was in the same year also diagnosed ADHD and had struggled so severely in school that he was not able to function publicly was given some brand new medications, not at all like the scary ones that are stereotyped for ADHD, and he was doing beautifully in school and was a new kid altogether. So, we gave the meds a whorl. Oh dear. THAT only lasted a few weeks before we decided that it was the dumbest thing we'd ever tried. He'd go from manically happy to a puddle of tears in five minute spans. Clearly, this was not the medication for this kiddo. Instead of trying other medications as the pediatrician recommended, we decided that whatever we did would be medication free,  since we were trying to potty train, and not teach math or reading to this kid, we just felt that medication couldn't be justified.
    Onward went our journey- Whew! We started relaxing about the whole thing the longer time marched on. We'd just have him help us clean up when he made horrible messes, and then at mealtimes or treat times say 'Sorry, boys that poop in their rooms and smear it don't get ......' fill in the blank with whatever special treat we were having. Don't get me wrong, I'd definitely still have meltdowns of my own. Day seven in a row of scraping poop off walls and furniture happens and it's bed time and you just discovered another pile hidden under the bed ...with your foot...see if you can keep your cool! He'd cry and I'd cry and he'd say he'd try harder tomorrow (to make Mommy not cry I think, not to make it to the toilet) Anyway, by the time he was three and a half he'd made some more major progressions, like not peeing or pooing his pants or people's potted plants when we were out and about for starters, making it to the toilet 98% of the time during the day at home and during nap times. Mostly he was only still peeing in every bleeding thing in his room during the night and ugly hours of the morning. So, life was dramatically better for us- we just had what we called the "pit of doom" (the boys room) to contend with. I think the biggest thing that made this major progression occur was that we discovered we were expecting another baby so we moved Steven into our oldest son Samuel's room to make room for a nursery- and primarily to see if older brother could play watchman to younger brother. This almost completely stopped the room pooping, which was fantastic, since it took excessive sanding, four coats of paint, two boxes of baking soda, three bleach water moppings, and still about three months of sitting empty with just air fresheners hung sporadically to repair the room Steven was previously in. Samuel complains about the peeing, but he's a great big brother that puts up with a lot and he's pretty awesome about telling us all the time when Steven has peed. Their room smells, but I can at least fix it with a good mopping, soaking the toys in baking soda water, and opening up windows on nice sunny days. It sounds crazy that getting to this point is my definition of living the good life, but delve back into the terror years and you would understand.
     Steven now at four years old still has his regressive moments, peeing his seat in the car the other day for instance, pooping in his underpants and then wiping his hind end with his brothers blanket a week ago, and getting caught peeing out the windows down the screens a time or two just to name a few, but overall he is on the path to success. I still don't consider him "potty trained", but I have learned not to be bothered by that. I think when it comes time to potty train baby brothers Griffin and Cohen I am going to be the worlds most chillax mama. Maybe it was Steven's purpose in life to beat me into submission and give up my stubborn controlling urges on the world. Goodness knows I'd be in a mental institute if I hadn't learned to let go! Now the questions are, what about preschool? How long exactly is it going to take this kid to be really and completely potty trained? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that as long as he keeps trucking along so will I, and I'm no longer concerned about the answers or other peoples' opinions on the matter. Which brings me to my last fiat: leave the poor potty training mamas alone for pete sakes! This is NOT a competition! I'm sure that after reading my page you can say that you've heard of the worst case, and you can find more articles online in bulk telling the tale of the five minute potty training wonders, all of which should tell you that each child is so different and in need of different time spans to complete the same tasks. This doesn't make them dumb or smart, slow or quick, it makes them human. Have lots of good advice? Fantastic, share it when it's asked for- with humility please, just because you were successful doesn't make you wonder mom, it makes your child wonder kiddo. You really weren't in control no matter how badly you'd like to think so. Okay! Soap box is put away now! :)
     Finally- no matter how many miserable moments he's made for me, this little guy is my love, my hero, my little buggin', and every time I look at his face I know he deserves my patience and endurance. Don't you think so?