-When my kid won't eat breakfast because he doesn't like the four different varieties of cereal that we have, one of which is supposedly his favorite, but I made the tragic error of buying the Aldi brand, and he can't eat pancakes because "those are for school days", and "anyway, I want a smoothie from the cafe at church".
-Only the parents of a picky eater would understand why, when you are unloading groceries, a statement like the following is for real, and it makes you look at the clock and wonder if it is too early for a glass of wine.
"Those are the wrong kind of fruit snacks. I can't eat that kind because they make my liver hurt".
-Jesus and I got a lotta front porch sittin to do when I get to Heaven so He can explain to me the mysteries of life. Like, how does a kid you struggle to pull ten sentences out of all day suddenly turn into a Greek philosopher at bedtime?
-Having both OCD and kids means that you have to find a balance so you don't go insane. Like, the glass on the front door looks like it was licked by a camel, but the pillows on the couch are all aligned, so I am okay.
-If you're not as far along in your parenting journey as I am, and you're looking for some hope in the following, let me bring you down to earth by telling you that it takes the exact same amount of time to get out of the house with a teenager as it does a toddler. With an added complication in that you can no longer pick them up and toss them into the car.
-I have spoken before on the similarities of parenting t(w)eens and toddlers. One of them is their ability to instantly and inexplicably go from content to pissed off like they are a cat that has just been put on a leash. The difference is that, if you are a Toddler Mom, your only hope of escape is to lock yourself in the bathroom and buy yourself maybe five minutes. For the Mom of T(w)eens, you can ditch everyone and go to Target. Peace out, kids.
-When my single friends ask me what it's like to be a mom, the best way for me to give them a comprehensive view would be to bite their nipple, drink all of their beverage, spill it when they fill it up again, ask them what the opposite of Wednesday is, take all of the cash from their wallet, drive their car down the center lane with them in the passenger seat, and then hand them a necklace made of pasta and tell them they're pretty. Ironically, a lot of those also accurately depict what it's like being married.
-It is quite enough having a child who is a hypochondriac and dealing with life with them on a daily basis. When he passes out at school.....Oh. My. Word. (He's perfectly fine by the way.) I think at this point he is torn between what he should do first; start a Go Fund Me page for his recovery, or deciding whether or not to play himself in the movie. Rushton peeps, from now on if you hear a walkie call that I am needed in the nurses office and you see me head for my car instead, you will know why.
-You know how we all know That Mom whose kids seem to always get along and like, write haikus about how much they love each other and stuff? Yeah, I'm the type of mom that has to step out of a meeting to take a phone call from one kid complaining that the other one locked them out of the house. Nobody slugged anybody though, so I'm pretty much calling it a win. Haikus suck anyway.
-The last time I was able to walk across my kitchen floor without stepping in something sticky, Destiny's Child had the number one song, we had dial-up Internet, and a "selfie" was something you accidentally took when you were changing the batteries in your camera.
-One of the ironies of parenting is that, if you have kiddos who are involved in a lot of school activities/sports, May is a month that you spend a lot of feeling incredibly proud, while also quietly weeping every time you look at the amount of stuff on your calendar.
-If you ever happen upon a woman sitting at a picnic table and muttering to herself at a rest stop, pray for her. She is probably a mom who has legit lost her mind and hit the road after being asked one too many times by her family, "What's for dinner?"
-When you're the mom of an eleven year old boy, school picture day struggles include trying to get him to wear something other than an athletic shirt (fail) and convincing him to actually brush his hair (win). Life is all about compromise, baby. Parenting isn't any different.
-For all of the Boy Moms out there whose lil darlins are younger than mine, allow me to inform you that when the time comes that "someone" decides to take smoke balls left over from the Fourth of July and smash them with a hammer to see what's inside, and then attempt to clean the mess up with their bedsheets, the residue will indeed wash out of the linens. Unless your son is under six months of age, you would not dare ask yourself after reading this, "why would I possibly need to know something like that?". You simply store it away in your mental file of Boy Survival Tips, Tricks and Hacks and carry on with your day.
-How, in three simple steps that do not involve yelling, to get your child to engage in their responsibility to take out the trash:
-Only the parents of a picky eater would understand why, when you are unloading groceries, a statement like the following is for real, and it makes you look at the clock and wonder if it is too early for a glass of wine.
"Those are the wrong kind of fruit snacks. I can't eat that kind because they make my liver hurt".
-Jesus and I got a lotta front porch sittin to do when I get to Heaven so He can explain to me the mysteries of life. Like, how does a kid you struggle to pull ten sentences out of all day suddenly turn into a Greek philosopher at bedtime?
-Having both OCD and kids means that you have to find a balance so you don't go insane. Like, the glass on the front door looks like it was licked by a camel, but the pillows on the couch are all aligned, so I am okay.
-If you're not as far along in your parenting journey as I am, and you're looking for some hope in the following, let me bring you down to earth by telling you that it takes the exact same amount of time to get out of the house with a teenager as it does a toddler. With an added complication in that you can no longer pick them up and toss them into the car.
-I have spoken before on the similarities of parenting t(w)eens and toddlers. One of them is their ability to instantly and inexplicably go from content to pissed off like they are a cat that has just been put on a leash. The difference is that, if you are a Toddler Mom, your only hope of escape is to lock yourself in the bathroom and buy yourself maybe five minutes. For the Mom of T(w)eens, you can ditch everyone and go to Target. Peace out, kids.
-When my single friends ask me what it's like to be a mom, the best way for me to give them a comprehensive view would be to bite their nipple, drink all of their beverage, spill it when they fill it up again, ask them what the opposite of Wednesday is, take all of the cash from their wallet, drive their car down the center lane with them in the passenger seat, and then hand them a necklace made of pasta and tell them they're pretty. Ironically, a lot of those also accurately depict what it's like being married.
-It is quite enough having a child who is a hypochondriac and dealing with life with them on a daily basis. When he passes out at school.....Oh. My. Word. (He's perfectly fine by the way.) I think at this point he is torn between what he should do first; start a Go Fund Me page for his recovery, or deciding whether or not to play himself in the movie. Rushton peeps, from now on if you hear a walkie call that I am needed in the nurses office and you see me head for my car instead, you will know why.
-You know how we all know That Mom whose kids seem to always get along and like, write haikus about how much they love each other and stuff? Yeah, I'm the type of mom that has to step out of a meeting to take a phone call from one kid complaining that the other one locked them out of the house. Nobody slugged anybody though, so I'm pretty much calling it a win. Haikus suck anyway.
-The last time I was able to walk across my kitchen floor without stepping in something sticky, Destiny's Child had the number one song, we had dial-up Internet, and a "selfie" was something you accidentally took when you were changing the batteries in your camera.
-One of the ironies of parenting is that, if you have kiddos who are involved in a lot of school activities/sports, May is a month that you spend a lot of feeling incredibly proud, while also quietly weeping every time you look at the amount of stuff on your calendar.
-If you ever happen upon a woman sitting at a picnic table and muttering to herself at a rest stop, pray for her. She is probably a mom who has legit lost her mind and hit the road after being asked one too many times by her family, "What's for dinner?"
-When you're the mom of an eleven year old boy, school picture day struggles include trying to get him to wear something other than an athletic shirt (fail) and convincing him to actually brush his hair (win). Life is all about compromise, baby. Parenting isn't any different.
-For all of the Boy Moms out there whose lil darlins are younger than mine, allow me to inform you that when the time comes that "someone" decides to take smoke balls left over from the Fourth of July and smash them with a hammer to see what's inside, and then attempt to clean the mess up with their bedsheets, the residue will indeed wash out of the linens. Unless your son is under six months of age, you would not dare ask yourself after reading this, "why would I possibly need to know something like that?". You simply store it away in your mental file of Boy Survival Tips, Tricks and Hacks and carry on with your day.
-How, in three simple steps that do not involve yelling, to get your child to engage in their responsibility to take out the trash:
1. Politely inform them that pushing down the top of the trash to avoid taking it out is no longer an option, and it is time to be dealt with.
2. When step one fails, leave a note on the wall next to the can that reads "TAKE OUT THE TRASH"
3. When step two fails, tell them that if they do not take care of it in the next five minutes, you are just going to empty it yourself. On their bed.
2. When step one fails, leave a note on the wall next to the can that reads "TAKE OUT THE TRASH"
3. When step two fails, tell them that if they do not take care of it in the next five minutes, you are just going to empty it yourself. On their bed.
Mom win.
-These are the random questions I ask myself every single weekend when I clean house and do laundry:
-How do boys manage to get one leg inside out and one leg right side out on each pair of pants/shorts? (Every. Single. One.)
-Uhhh, whose socks are these?
-Is there interpretive dancing while tooth brushing and that is how paste gets on the walls?
-Whose shorts are these?
-What are the odds that the hose will get clogged if I attempt to vacuum under the boy's bed?
-Seriously? How do you not notice you left your shoes at my house when you went home?
-Does every kid that goes in and out of my house open the front glass door with their face?
-Now that I'm done, how long will it stay noticeably clean?
-Was that the front door opening? *sigh*
-Uhhh, whose socks are these?
-Is there interpretive dancing while tooth brushing and that is how paste gets on the walls?
-Whose shorts are these?
-What are the odds that the hose will get clogged if I attempt to vacuum under the boy's bed?
-Seriously? How do you not notice you left your shoes at my house when you went home?
-Does every kid that goes in and out of my house open the front glass door with their face?
-Now that I'm done, how long will it stay noticeably clean?
-Was that the front door opening? *sigh*
But I gotta say, I still living in the Monkey House. Just please, if you visit, leave your judgments about the state of it at the door.
-A sociological observation. As the calendar comes closer to the start of school, the utterance increases tenfold each week by children of the phrases "Stop it!", "(S)he started it!", "(S)he hit me first", and of course, the quintessential "I'M TELLING!". A researcher might reasonably conclude that the primary purpose of formal schooling is not to educate, but to separate siblings for seven hours a day.
-An example of the difference between being a Girl Mom and a Boy Mom. If your daughter is given balloons, she will place them on a table to admire and enjoy them. Your son will see his as vicious invaders that must be engaged in a series of epic battles throughout the Seven Kingdoms of your home until each one has met their death and the Iron Throne has been captured. I think it may be a while before we patronize Red Robin again.
-If someone who has effectively raised teenaged type people could write a manual called "How to Allow Your Teen to Expand Their World While Successfully Balancing Parental Vigilance With Not Freaking the Freak Out", that'd be great. It's just a working title.
The Girl Child is off on her first sleepover ever at someone's house who is not family or people we have known at least since she had all of her baby teeth. First time meeting a parent was at drop off tonight. Hamina, hamina, hamina. Shout out to me for acting cool about it and not asking the mom for a tour of their home and to use the bathroom so I could get the lowdown on the medicine cabinet and kill time while the Hubs was in the driveway on the phone with a law enforcement friend having the plates on their car run. Yes, this is the first place my brain went.
Seriously, parenting? Hardest. Thing. Ever.
-Very rarely are the four of us together in the bathroom in the morning at the same time, but when we are, it is a chaos that I actually enjoy. Snippets of convo below from this morning. Should not be hard to figure out who said what.
"Brush your teeth please"
"Ooo, Baby. You look like a librarian. C'mere"
"Brush your teeth please"
"My eyebrows are on fleek this morning. I should be in a pageant"
"Seriously, brush your teeth, Jack"
"I wonder what deodorant tastes like"
"Brush. Your. Teeth."
Dang, I love my family.
-You know it is probably time to cut your Saturday morning errands short and head home when you get a text from one kid about the other saying, "Whatever she is texting to you right now, she is lying". *sigh*
-Rules of Boys: It matters not that it is 19 degrees outside. Tag team wrestling on the trampoline is ALWAYS in season. Coat wearing optional, but not favored.
-There really needs to be some sort of a union regulation that the Tooth Fairy cannot be required to work in the same calendar week as Santa or the Easter Bunny.
-Me to the kids:
"There will be no playing with friends today until all of your responsibilities are taken care of"
Thirty minutes later when no movement from the couch has occurred:
"There will be no breakfast until your responsibilities are taken care of"
Thirty minutes later:
"No more electronics until your responsibilities are taken care of".
Aaaaaand they're off. Nice to know gaming ranks higher than human interaction and bodily nourishment
-Every year I have very mixed feelings about parent/teacher conferences because I have two VERY different children. I always schedule the Boy Child's first and, depending on the time of day it takes place, resist the urge before I leave the house to add Bailey's to my coffee or Belvedere to my green tea. Cuz I don't want to be "that" mom. Then I go to the Girl Child's to talk to her teachers, and I heard phrases today like "born leader", "extremely compassionate", "highly intelligent", "very well liked by her peers", "natural problem solver", etc, etc. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for blessing us with two children with a lot of gifts. And thank you for giving us nine more years with the Boy to make sure his are just used for good and not evil. Amen.
-Every time my daughter comes out of the fitting room in whatever ensemble she has put together, I start to open my mouth. Then I remind myself that all of my own tween/teen styling took place exclusively in the 80s. So I close it.
-You know you are just completely fried when you send this as a text reply to your kid, who is ratting out her brother for shooting Nerf darts at the TV. "Tell him if he does not get off of my last nerve I am going to give his happy meal to Caleb".
-Math fact: if there are six boys running in and out of your house over a two hour period of time, there is a 100% probability that your toilet will get clogged.
-Anyone who says lying is wrong in all circumstances has never been asked by a nine-year-old if they have seen his whistle anywhere.
-There comes the painful day in every mother's life when she realizes that for the first time, no matter how much she wants to, she is unable to help her child when called upon. After a twenty year reprieve, algebra bites me in the butt once again.
-Parenting Fact: It will take your child five times as long to recount a dream to you than it will take them to actually have it. This number automatically becomes ten if the discourse occurs in your bed in the middle of the night.
-Overheard in the front yard: "Dudes, all we need is a couple of shovels and a ladder!". This bears further investigating...
-I love my children with every fiber of my being, but when they dress themselves, their outfits look like they were styled by blind trolls.
-Dear Teachers,
I love doing shoebox diorama book reports with my child.
Signed, No Parent Ever
-You know you've been PTA president at your kids' school for a long time when you start having parents call their child in sick to you.
-"Mommy, quick!! Come in the backyard and help me catch this peacock!"
Now there's a request you don't hear every day.
-Kid Fact #39: The level of excitement over something your child wants to show you is directly proportionate to how closely they hold it in front of your face.
-I have found that the quickest way to ensure that your child will spontaneously stop eating a particular food is to stock up on it in abundance.
-A quick lesson in how to prevent an epic fail in the Tooth Fairy Visit parenting arena. You wake in the morning when you hear your kid getting up, and in that instant you realize the "Tooth Fairy" forgot to do her thing before she went to bed the night before. You grab the present "she" was supposed to leave under his pillow and open your door to find The Toothless One on the other side of it looking sad and forlorn. You shove the gift in his face and say, "Look what the Tooth Fairy left under MY pillow by mistake! She must have had a lot of stops to make last night and been super tired to get the bedrooms mixed up like that!" You then watch his face break into a jack o' lantern grin. As he happily exclaims over the gift, you recover your maternal grace, grab your glasses and stumble to the coffee pot to start the day.
-My happiness at seeing my kids after school quickly deflated when one of them walked through the door and said, "Hi Mommy! What are you making that smells gross?"
-Alarm clock, fail. Two kids at my bedside waking me by shouting, "It's 8:01! School starts in nine minutes!" My feet hit the floor, and I go into Army Ranger mode and start yelling, "Bathroom! GO! GO! GO!" Six minutes later they are dropped at school, and the Rushlings perfect "No Tardies" record is safe. My adrenaline rush will soon crash, so call me now if you need any furniture moved.
-For those parents who are wondering, you do not, in fact, get a prize for the 1000th time you say, "Why don't you just TRY it?" at the dinner table.
-If you're ever missing a safety pin, marble, battery, marker or coin, have a two-year-old come over, and he will find all of the above for you and keep them for you in his mouth.
-Sometimes the day's biggest satisfaction can be measured in what seems to be the smallest of feats. Being able to prove to your family once again that clean clothes come out of drawers and not laundry baskets can be one of those feats.
-Parenting question of the day: does making my kids eat cupcakes outside because I just vacuumed make me a typical mom or a neat freak? Note: your response will not in any way affect the outcome of future post-vacuuming cupcake consumption practices in our home. It's my OCD, and I own it.
-One of the most disconcerting feelings you can have as a parent is to have an absent-minded exchange with your child that ends with him saying, "I can? REALLY??" while you have no clue what you just agreed to.
-I am constantly amused by the differences between my two kids. Without being asked to, the Girl Child spent the first morning of summer break unpacking, sorting, organizing and neatly putting away everything she brought home from school. When I asked the Boy Child about his school stuff, he dragged an overstuffed backpack to me and said, "Here you go" and walked away.
-Need a quick test of your Monday reflexes? Walk barefoot across the basement floor without turning on the light and then step on your son's squishy toy frog.
-I have always honestly tried to be one of those Pollyanna moms who uses a snow day from school to gather her cherubs, don an apron and make homemade scones and pinecone bird feeders while singing show tunes together. Usually I end up holed up in my room instead with the laptop, a stack of People magazines and a box of Girl Scout cookies. Who are you to judge me?
-When we've officially been on Christmas break for 30 minutes, and my kids are already fighting, if you find them on your porch, rest assured that I will eventually reclaim them.
-It's a sad commentary on my housekeeping skills when I start to straighten up the family room, and the kids simultaneously ask, "Who's coming over?"
-My Dearest Children,
If you invite me over for dinner when you are grown and have children of your own, and if, when the meal is served, I suddenly push back from the table and bust into my best Cabbage Patch dance, it will be because the whines of "Ewww, gross!" and "I am NOT eating this!" coming from your kids made me do it. What goes around most definitely comes around my little liebchens.
Kisses,
Mommy"
-Did you know that the amount of red lights you hit on the way home is directly proportionate to how badly the preschooler has to go to #2 and how hard the baby is crying because he wants out of the carseat?
-Ever wanted to test your resistance to cursing in front of children? Bend over in the kitchen, stand up and hit your head on the corner of the upper cabinet door that was open. I passed with "Bingo BALLS!! That hurt!" Yeah, I don't know where that came from.
-Deckside four-year-old reaching out + pool toy bobbing enticingly = Mommy in the pool with her clothes on. Ain't that always the way it goes down!
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