Tag Archives: parenting

Mothers Day is great and sad. Twosies.

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Even though Sunday was my second officially-sanctioned Mothers Day as a mom, it was effectively my first one. Last year, C was only about five weeks old on Mothers Day and I had no energy or desire to celebrate. No one was sleeping, no one was eating well, no one felt like a human. I was paying my dues in the New Baby Club and stocking up on the experiences that would make me truly relish the return of sleep. If this was motherhood, I’d take a pass on celebrating it.

I had something to toast to this year. I celebrated my survival by sipping my coffee and eating pancakes B prepared for me. I sneaked a Dove chocolate between them. It was melty and perfect. I celebrated while lounging on the sofa and watching C and B screen an episode of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood on YouTube. I celebrated by fighting the urge to call and apologize for my tardiness when I ran long at my solo date to the coffee shop. I celebrated by showing B how to make fish tacos for us all for dinner. He only cut his finger once when he sliced the avocados.

We put C in her crib at 6:45. She woke up around 9:15, crying from a bad dream. She rarely wakes in the middle of the night anymore so I jumped at the chance to see her and be there with her. B and I had been discussing only a couple days ago how nowadays, we simply put her away at 6:45. We go about our after-hours routines and have to remind ourselves that she is indeed in the other room sleeping and living. By the time we turn our own lights out at 11, we have almost forgotten we’re parents.

She cried out and I held her. She nestled into my chest and I smelled her head. She’s a lanky baby but she is still so slight in my arms. Mere months before, it would have taken hours to pull her together and meet her needs. On Sunday night, it took no more than ten minutes. By 9:25, she was back in her crib.

I felt sad. At some point, this all got kind of easy. It made me pine for the days where I was regularly put through the fire and earning my keep as the parent of an infant. It made me sad for my own parents that they know exactly what it’s like to be needed intensely and then, in the blink of an eye, just standing by in the other room waiting for me to cry out. All we want is to be needed longer.

Parenthood is heartbreaking.

Let’s drink mimosas.

I miss this.

I miss this.

Disingenuous Elmo

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Disingenuous Elmo is not the opening act of the opening act of the opening act of MGMT at Coachella. It is the theme to much of my first year of parenthood.

One of the real neat things I do when I get thrown into a situation in which I have no idea what I’m doing is play make-believe that I have control. I put on a $9 wig from Party City and trot around like it’s totally normal and gorgeous. I eventually get swept up in the charade and convince myself that my farce is real, which I guess might be the entire point of pretending in the first place. Playing pretend that we have everything figured out is a coping mechanism. We cling to images and symbols that sound right and we want for ourselves. But when those symbols – take Elmo, in my case –  don’t jive with reality, I have to snap myself out of my pantomime and start living as a real person rather than an actor. My neon blue curly wig is not fooling anyone, and it’s only setting me back from embracing my own graying roots.

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No Elmo in sight in this Season 16 cast picture Source

Elmo was still a minor character on Sesame Street when I was a child. In the ’80s, he was just a minion in the Bird Bird Army. But then, when I was in ninth grade, Tickle Me Elmo came out. Little kids got the Crazy Elmo Eyes and parents became equally possessed with Elmo fever, essentially slitting each others’ throats on Black Friday to acquire one of these toys for their kids. I absorbed the Tickle Me Elmo wars as they were recounted on the evening news. As a side note, just remember the next time you are throwing a shoe at your TV for reporting “news” about skateboarding pigs that this has been going on for years. Fluff journalism is nothing new.

I could not have known it at the time, but observing the fixation that both children and parents had on Elmo in 1996 was shaping my view of parenthood, which I wouldn’t enter myself until 2012. I filed Elmo away as the kryptonite of all crying children, and the vibrating doll became the symbol of parental appeasement.

When my day of reckoning finally did roll around and I pushed C from my loins in a moment of triumph with a splash of what-the-eff-have-I-gotten-myself-into, all those old images of Elmo came back to me like the smell of my kindergarten lunchroom. I clung to them and assumed they were collective parenting Truth. I sincerely believed that if things got really bad one day – like, the baby was screaming from dawn to dusk dawn, totally angered that she had gotten stuck with me as a mother – Elmo was the trick to fix it all. All I’d have to do was switch him on and she’d mellow out.

This is as delusional as it sounds. Obviously. Elmo was the furthest thing from C’s mind when she was hungry, tired, or just frustrated. All my attempts to thrust that little red monster on her were met with contempt and ire. This is no surprise, of course. It’s also not the moral to the story.

I continued to perpetuate this image of her that she just loved Elmo.  Look at my cookie-cutter baby. She is so cute and obsessed with a little red monster. Yes, she is just so attached to him and isn’t that just darling? Thank God for Elmo or I’d never get rest! LOL LOL LOL. Platitude after platitude. It was all fabricated by me because I was panicking that I didn’t know who my kid was. Elmo was this symbol I latched onto and perpetuated in my everyday dealings with other parents and in my writing because I didn’t want anyone to know that even though I loved C, I had no idea who she was. No idea. Some days, she was happy as a lark and then she’s have a Jekyll and Hyde moment and turn into a seething teething monster. Her preferences were fickle. Just when I thought she was developing an attachment to a particular toy, she’d scorn it. She really, really liked that damn Gangnam Style, but that didn’t fit in with my image of things babies should like. So I disingenuously convinced myself that Elmo meant something to her even when she couldn’t give a crap about him. All I wanted was a good, safe symbol.

It has been my experience as a parent that all births come in pairs, even if your child wasn’t a twin. First, you give birth to a little screaming salami. Then, in the bloody, mucousy afterbirth comes another screaming infant: yourself. That person is just as foreign to you as your baby. During your childless years, you were in utero preparing to be pushed forth into a foreign, cold world of parenthood. Just like your baby, you baked long enough to survive on the outside, but surviving is not the same as thriving. You still have to figure out who you are and whether Elmo or whatever you selected as your arbitrary mascot is actually yours. You have to shoot spitballs to the wall and see if any stick. And if they don’t, you have to let it go and forgive yourself for not living up to your idealized version of your parent self. Let that effortless love you have for your baby leak into the dwindling supply of love you have for the parent you, that other new baby. Forgive yourself for not being able to anticipate who you would be.

But then, move on.

It took me a year to realize that Elmo was not ours. More importantly, it took me a year to realize that it’s OK to have moments  - nay, weeks – when I look at her and feel like I’m staring at a stranger. Even though I may feel like she changes every day, there is a thin, strong, invisible fishing wire threaded right through her that makes her essentially her. As her mother, I have the ability to find it better than almost anyone else, but only when I stop looking for it and observe her as a whole.

I’m stripping away the Elmos and finding a relationship with my daughter that is better than anything I could have ever seen on the news when I was thirteen.

Please don’t get C a blanket she can draw on for her birthday.

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This parenting thing is a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants affair for me. I’ve got enough maternal intuition to get me through the day with my child essentially unscathed. For instance, she narrowly escaped eating goose poop yesterday thanks to my stealthy ways. I’m a pro. But when it comes to the details, I am learning as I go and making decisions as challenges arise. I am not a child psychologist, and I am sure I will make some totally intentional weirdo choices during the next 17 years regarding C’s upbringing. In the last year, I’ve learned that you make concessions and just do what works to get everyone to the next nap time without crying too much.

I have caved and bought her Made in China, BPA-laced plastic trinkets from the dollar store against my better judgement. I have given her deceptively sweet Multigrain Cheerios because I didn’t want to cut up something more healthy. On uncountable occasions, I have forgotten to wash her hands – fresh from a trip to the playground – before she eats. These are my confessions.

I will make a lot of mistakes and I am no expert nor a mastermind. But there are some things I don’t think I’ll ever do for the sake of easiness.

Take this product I ran across today: it is a duvet cover that your kid can draw all over. The product reviews were glowing.

“I am for sure going to get this for Timmy!”

“We got it for my daughter and she loves it! Now she can express herself on her bed!”

“What a wall-saver!”

Something about this item left me a little uneasy. It seems like as parents, one of the things we should be doing is teaching our kids boundaries. I don’t have to tell you that I am all for creativity and teaching children to draw, read, color, create, and express themselves with their words. It’s their nature to do so and the best thing we can do outside of loving them and giving them security is fostering an environment for them to explore the world safely. But drawing on the bedsheets? Um, no.

Call me old fashioned, but I think duvets are for sleeping on. They are not disposable. Kids will make messes and some of them will draw on walls, but the idea of intentionally buying something for them to write all over and likely destroy does not sit well with me. I had one comforter growing up. It was purple and frilly. I picked it out at Goldsmiths when I was seven and it was not updated in my room until it was totally worn out when I was 13. I had ceased liking it when I was ten, but I knew that it was my comforter so it would be used to completion. It was my job to keep it clean and neat and not spill nail polish all over it. Our parents expected us to make our belongings last and to understand that the furniture and fixtures in our home were there to stay and not be used for whatever whim we thought up.

I realize I just got a little “in my day” there. But at some point “my day” was phased out. There are many, many advantages C will have by being born when she was, but I’m not too keen on the consumerism that is so prevalent now. It is way too simple to go out and buy a new item that will make yours and your kid’s life more fun and/or easy. But will purchasing your child a bedspread she can draw on boost her self esteem in a real way? Will it give her the edge on getting into art school when she’s older? How much time will it really buy you when your child is driving you nuts while you make dinner and you just need her to have a brief diversion? Is it really worth it to teach your kids that the possessions you work to provide for them can be appropriated for whatever purpose their minds can think up?

This is a tricky one, methinks. Thoughts?

Raising Them Right

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One of the coolest things about having kids is that, at least for a time, you are their window to the world. You show them how to do things. You expose them to music and food. It’s like they are your own little miniature. They’ll reject some of it because they have no class their taste is yet to be refined, but sometimes they’ll surprise you with how fun and cool they are.

Sometimes that music, those games, and those jokes just stick.

And then you’ll be sitting there with them while they’re eating lunch, and “Hey, Jude” will come on. This is how they will respond without ever having heard the song before, and you will be kind of amazed:

Just as you suspected, they are your kid, and they have inherited your sense of cool, man. You are raising them right.

PS: I hope you enjoyed my singing. Don’t worry, I won’t be appearing anywhere near you anytime soon.

How Pandora Made Me Cool It

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Parenting is an exercise in giving up. You thought you were in control? Don’t let your relatively easy pregnancy fool you into believing that you were ready for what was coming. The instant that baby comes into the world, you surrender it all. Not just the restful nights when you think you can turn it all off. Nope. Even if the baby is a sleeper, she still keeps you up worrying. Why is she sick? Does she have typhoid? Why isn’t she sick? She should have had at least eleventy billion colds by now. Something’s wrong because she’s well all the time.

Yes, that last thought was one that I have had.

There is a lot of truth to the statement “I was a better parent before I had kids.” Everything you think you won’t do, you do do. And that do do? It rules your life. But I digress. You said you’d never give them snacks with added sugar, but that was before you realize that it’s really hard to find snacks without sugar in them that don’t cost at least 50% more than the regular snacks. You said that you’d make time for your marriage. There would be dates. But where are those dates? It’s hard to get romantic when you think about the extra cost of babysitters.

That giving up is good, though. Take the Great Pandora Debate that’s been going on in our household for the last week or so. I’d make a Pandora’s Box joke but that just seems too easy. So we have Pandora Internet radio. Not the kind you pay for and have the ads removed. When you look down our list of stations when they are sorted by “date added”, you can easily see when C started really getting into music because there’s a break from “Passion Pit” radio to ”Ella Jenkins” radio. ”Schoolhouse Rock” radio. ”Disney” radio. She likes that stuff. Granted, she likes some of our music too, but she likes that kid music better, and that’s OK by me because I only make stations for her that I don’t mind listening to as well. Do yourself a favor and make a Schoolhouse Rock station. You’ll thank me later.

So we listen to the music throughout the day, and sometimes my husband will just switch the music mid-song. Such a habit can be filed among the minutiae of life that one only notices when s/he has settled into a routine with his/her family. Switching the Pandora station without asking is our family’s equivalent of my own father’s annoying penchant for channel surfing during commercial breaks when I was a kid. Both of these habits just annoy me. Let the song play to completion, dangit. It’s going to be hard enough to instill any degree of patience in C since she entered the world at a time when all she needs to do is Google a query when she needs to know something. I can only image how my own ADD would have been exacerbated had I been born 25 years later than I was. The invention of Twitter decimated all the focus I was able to accumulate during the first 29 years of my life.

But I chose my battles. I give up not out of exhaustion but because doing so helps me keep control of perspective. Pro tip: the only thing you need to control in life is your perspective because everything else is gravy. This is for my own good as well as that of my family. The baby is not going to be scarred for life if B cuts off the end of “Do Re Mi.” She will withstand the onslaught of hearing Grimes instead of Raffi. She is completely aware of how much he loves her, and that is something that she will never second guess. Thirty years from now, she may not remember the third verse to “The Wheels On the Bus”, but she will know that her father adores her and has been doing so ever since she was a baby. And that’s what matters.

Grapes, Balls, Colds, and Love

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I just had one of those moments. One of those moments that I really, really need these days.

First, some background. I have not been sleeping well. I think the last time I slept all the way through the night without waking was about three weeks ago. Let that sink in a sec: my baby is sleeping better than I am. I guess that’s a good problem to have, but the problems and worries that are keeping me up almost cancel them out. B’s job hunt continues. We thought we had some leads, but they ended up being for naught. We are now about a month and a half away from having to re-sign another contract with his school, and I’m beginning to think that in that period of time he is not going to find another, better job. It makes me so frustrated to think that all the work we’ve both been putting into his applications isn’t going to pan out. It also makes me frustrated to think we likely have another entire year left here. I am impatient. I want to get a move on on this hypothetical life that I’ve imagined for us.

We were all sick today. This is C’s first real cold, and even though she’s handling it with a lot of grace, the fact that B and I don’t feel well makes it hard. Our apartment has been a disaster all day. All I did was pick up after the both of them. Since I praise B so much here I think I am allowed to say today that he is sometimes kind of infuriating to live with. He really doesn’t have the picking-up-after-himself skill set. I asked him yesterday if he could kindly show a little initiative and unload the dishwasher if it’s done running, to which he replied that all I had to do was ask and he would do it. I hate being a taskmaster. It’s such a cliche, but there’s a lot of truth to the statement that the sexiest thing a guy can do is perform some household chores without being asked.

So we’re sick. We’re run down. I’m resigning myself to another year here. I am not looking forward to taking C’s bassinet to Babies ‘R Us tomorrow and trading it in for a discount on a big kid carseat*. I don’t care if she slept *maybe* a total of 10 hours in that thing. It still makes me weepy. We already packed her infant swing away this week. This is more than one mama can handle in the span of a week.

*Which, BTW, never happened.

But then – BUT THEN – she makes me put it all in perspective. I’m sitting on the floor with her and we’re practicing rolling a ball back and forth to each other. That’s it. That’s the story. We’re rolling a ball. It’s meaningful to me that my girl can do this. I roll the ball to her and she gets giddy to grab it and push it back to me.

A few days ago C and I were Skyping with B’s cousin who lives and teaches in Korea. He and his girlfriend at the time moved there when we still had about eight months left in our contracts. B’s cousin doesn’t have kids and really doesn’t want them, but he’s interested in the whole transformation of a person into a parent. He was telling me about his friend who had a kid and was freaking out when the baby ate a grape. The baby ate a grape. And our baby rolled a ball. Woo woo.

The thing is, only two years ago this child didn’t even exist. Now she exists and rolls balls. And gets colds. And evidently wakes up at 1:30AM to talk to her nightlight? They are tight.

So when she eats a grape, you had better be sure I’ll freak out in a good way. That little grape grew on a vine to nourish my little grape, which is all oddly reassuring to yours truly, The Worrier.

The Other Side: Notes on the Tenth Month

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Wee Cee 10MOSomething happened over the course of the last month that I am having a hard time wrapping my brain around. I think it must have been around the second week of January that I looked at Wee Cee and noticed that she was turning into a little girl. She is just as much child now as she is baby, which is cool and terrifying.  I woke up one morning and in the crib sat a kid who resembles a person and not just a human hamburger. Her little limbs are getting longer and her head isn’t the perfect circle it used to be. Her bright little eyes say things and she’s not just a prop in our parental charade. I call her my daughter and the word doesn’t seem forced. She is a daughter, my daughter. She’s not just a human with girl parts anymore.

For one, she can communicate. Her babbles mean things and aren’t arbitrary, although they are a lot of fun. A couple weeks ago, B and I were lazing around one Saturday morning in bed when we heard a loud MA-MA come from her room. Normally, she wakes up and babbles around for awhile just for practice, but that Mama had force around it. It meant something. We got up and peeked into her room, where we found her proudly standing up in her crib. Standing in the crib while holding onto the rail was a new feat for her. She knew she had accomplished something and she just wanted us to see! Of course she called my name! She was hitting milestones all over the place that morning. And I cried, obvs. My standing up baby had called me.

And just like that, I’m welling up again.

Source http://www.tovekjellmark.com/otherness/2011/09/animal_human/

Yep. Source

Moving on. Let’s talk about crawling. Get it? Nevermind. Crawling is transitioning into what will soon be walking. She recently started elevating her entire body off the ground when she crawls, placing her weight on her feet instead of her knees. She looks a lot like Mowgli from The Jungle Book when she’s doing it, especially since her dipe covers are very Mowgli-esque. Disney didn’t even pay me to say that.

Side note: Those covers are expensive, so should you actually want to pay me to say something, gimme a holla.

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Redecorating.

Her toys are her friends. She’s got so much personality that she had to give some of it to her stuffed toys, which she loves the most. She nuzzles them and hugs them with an amorous “mmmmmm!”

What else? Oh yes, for those of you who were keeping score, breastfeeding is over. Done and done. I was reluctant to wean her since breastfeeding is highly encouraged for their entire first year and also because it would mark the end of a special, intimate part of our relationship, but she had shown pretty much no interest in it since she was five months old. I had been pumping 100% of her milk for months and I still wasn’t making enough where we could avoid supplementing with formula. So we fought the good fight and when my pump broke three weeks ago, I took it as a sign that we could just stop. Even though I feared the end of breastfeeding, I couldn’t be happier that it’s now over. Not being hooked up to that pump is really freeing.

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Sharing is caring. Notice the Totoro in the left corner. We had to move it into our room because it is apparently the scariest thing in her life right now.

All of a sudden, C is someone who I actually want to be around. She’s my little buddy. It’s like the guesswork is over in her life, at least for now. This is probably more of a reflection on me as a mom and not necessarily her as a baby, but now we can take her out in public and completely relax because we are pretty certain she won’t implode. Even if she did, we’d handle it. She usually eats when we give her food, and if she doesn’t then it’s no big deal because we’ll just try again later.  Now was the time everyone was referring to super early in her life when they told me it would get easier. At this very instant, she’s hanging out in her crib. She’s supposed to be napping, but instead she’s just lying there chatting with her stuffed lion. And do you know what? It’s OK if she skips her nap. I’m all for setting boundaries for her and coaxing her in the right direction when she does dangerous and impractical things, but when it comes to things like naps and the amount of food she eats, she largely knows what’s best for herself.

Wee Cee 10MO2Our daily life is changing. Gone are the nights when she’d fall asleep in my arms and then I’d carefully carry her to her swing or crib while trying not to rouse her. But I’m not crying, at least, not anymore. Now, instead, I hold her close and sing her lullabies. She snuggles back and nuzzles me with the same fervor that she used to nurse. We still have that touch. That touch that makes me her Mama and her my sweet Bebe.

Extremely gross but critical information is in this blog post.

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Take me to the head mommy blogger. I have a complaint I need to voice.

I feel I am owed an apology from the mommy blogger collective for something they failed to tell me. Sure, they told me that the first weeks would be hard. They told me that I should get used to the humbling experience of being essentially topless during the first months of my nursing baby’s life. They told me that I should probably document every single second of my child’s first year because it blows by so quickly. They prepared me for the horror of my child’s first fever.

These mommy bloggers are passionate in their cause to get us all ready for every possible contingency. They’ve done it all and seen it all and it’s their fervent desire to make us all as savvy as they are at this parenting game.

So why did no one ever tell me to think long and hard about feeding my child raisins AND cloth diapering her? WHY WHY WHY? Had I known the unfortunate consequences of giving C raisins and then having to launder her diapers after said raisins had run their course, I never would have offered her those nasty little things. Toxic does not even begin to describe their state at the end of the road.

Oh I'm sorry. I was just throwing up in my mouth.

Oh I’m sorry. I was just throwing up in my mouth.

I deplore raisins anyway. Always have, always will. To me, they look like globules of mashed-up ants that have been adhered together with tar. They have the consistency of snot. And that’s not even describing their flavor. Even though it was 1986 the last time I ate one that wasn’t buffered by a cookie or cereal, I recall the flavor being similar to what I imagine my mouth would taste like after vomiting up gummy worms after smoking a pack of Marlboro Reds. So, there’s that.

However, since C’s brain is not hardwired against raisins like mine is, I gave them to her (after checking with her pedia…gah.) What a mistake that was. Mommy bloggers, why didn’t you warn me? You didn’t have to spell it out and provide details as to why the combo of cloth diapers and raisins is the most horrendous thing ever. I would have believed you without those foul, explicit details. I would have taken your word for it. A small warning would have sufficed.

BUT NOOOOOOO, you decided that I would have to take one for the team and learn the hard way that those things blow through babies like a nor’easter combined with a dinosaur and Mike Tyson. I thought I had the cloth diapering thing down. Since it’s my baby’s poop, I could deal with it. Well, hell hath no fury and all that. The raisin poop is where I draw the line. That stuff could not have possibly been created by my sweet child.

I demand a refund.

I demand a public apology.

You, mommy bloggers, have dropped the ball. I’m mad as hell, and I’m not taking it anymore.

I’m picking up your slack. Here is my advice to those who don’t yet know. I won’t mince words: do not feed raisins to your baby. The end product simply isn’t worth it. Wait until they’re potty trained. Due to my discretion, I’m not going to tell you exactly why this is a horrible idea. You’re just going to trust me on this one.

Why Public Changing Tables Are the Bane of My Existence

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Let’s talk about going out in public with babies.

Let’s narrow it down and talk about changing the diapers of those babies.

Let’s get even more specific and discuss the changing tables provided by establishments when you have to change said babies.

Let’s get tangential and notice that I have selected changing tables as a topic for my blog. Long time readers will recall the fear I had about this becoming a mommy blog. It appears that I am there.

So back to the changing tables and how they make me want to stick forks in my eyes.

They had to use a cartoon because no one has ever been photographed looking so happy after using their product.

They had to use a cartoon because no one has ever been photographed looking so happy after using their product.

Most places will put a changing table in their bathroom. I’m grateful for this because C has reached the age where I’m scared to change her in the car. It’s hard to eventually sell a car with skid marks on the backseat. I’m not even going to dwell on the places that are marketed as family-friendly but don’t have a changing table in their bathroom. Their proprietors will eventually get what’s coming to them when they meet St. Peter at the Pearly Gates and get assigned bathroom duty to all the porcelain thrones. Fact: “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” was written by Belinda Carlisle because she is in tune with the bowel movements of angels.

I can’t even make this stuff up.

So you go into the bathroom – and voila! – you find the changing table. It will likely be of the Koala Bear Kare variety where you pull it down off the wall like one of those beds that the detective from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? had. Random references: I’ve got ‘em.

You pull it down and struggle to find the changing pad from your diaper bag so that your dear sweet baby won’t have to rest her brow on the hard filthy surface of the table. Apparently the child who preceded yours took a crap directly on the table and his mom felt no need to even spit clean it. On many changing tables, you will find a little slot that is supposed to contain paper liners for you to put down, but you won’t see any in there because only Starbucks made of gold on the moon provide them. More facts.

You place your child in the sink while you unfurl your changing pad, which is also spotted in poo because who remembers to clean those things? But at least it’s your own baby’s poo so she won’t contract cholera as quickly as she would if exposed to the previous baby’s poo. You plop her onto the table and search for the ends of the safety straps, which you must use or face certain death warns the diaper-clad koala. The only problem is that the straps are caught in the hinges of the table. And even if they weren’t, a pack of hyenas has previously strong-armed its way into this bathroom to mangle the clasps beyond recognition, rendering them useless. So you hold your baby down with your forearm.

Because you’re a good mom and do not want to place the diaper bag on the bathroom floor and expedite the certain death of your infant, you search for a hook where you can hang it. Some changing tables have hooks, and by “hooks” I mean 1″ nubby protrusions that would not be able to hold up a shoestring. The baby is getting restless so you grab the diaper and the wipes from your bag and get to changing. This is the part where her pacifier pops out of her mouth and onto the poo table and she goes after it by twisting her entire body like a boa constrictor killing its prey. You intercept the polluted pacifier, stick it in your pocket, and wrestle the now agitated child to lie flat.

She is having none of it. She sees through your half-assed attempts to entertain her with the closest thing at hand: a tube of Desitin. She needs the disgusting suck-toy to pacify her. But it touched the table! And the pacifier wipes you purchased for just this occasion are in the car. So you make yet another sacrifice for your daughter and stick the thing directly in your mouth to wash away the foreign nasties and replace them with your own. She breastfeeds, so this should be OK, right?

You’ve now been in the bathroom for about three hours and you’re doing well, until another mom with her kid comes in. Because the designer of this public bathroom is a staunch practitioner of the art of feng shui, he has placed the changing directly in front of the door to the only currently unoccupied stall, which this kid is going to get into without paying much heed to your precarious situation. His mom is just swell and doesn’t do anything to hold him back. But luckily, the last snap of your baby’s onesie is closed right when the kid starts banging the stall door on the changing table in an attempt to get it open. Ah, the stubbornness of impossibility. 

And so it ends. You get out alive. And it’s OK that your baby is naked waist down except for her diaper. It’s OK that you accidentally tossed the $35 clothe diaper you changed her out of into the trash. It’s OK that you have a smidgeon of diaper ointment on your forehead. At least it’s not poo. It’s OK that washing your hands is the furthest thing from your mind. You promptly get your gal a snack and a cup to start the process all over again.

Momming: you’re all over it.