Mom Tired

When you're pregnant, everyone tells you that their best advice is to sleep when your baby sleeps. When you have a new baby, the first thing they ask is how he or she is sleeping at night. With babies, it's just assumed that you're going to be tired. What no one tells you is that it's actually not about babies. It's about motherhood. Yes, it begins with pregnancy and no, it never ends. Moms are tired. All the time. Forever.

I've decided there are levels of tired. There's "dog tired", which I imagine is just a step above plain tired. Then comes "bone tired", meaning you've yawned more than once in an hour. After "bone tired" comes "exhausted". This is somewhere around the vicinity of a car that is getting low on gas and starting to sputter. Then there's "dead tired". At "dead tired" the average human being requires sleep or, ya know, they die. But it keeps going. Below "dead tired" you have the "walking zombie tired". This is where I spend a majority of my life. I'm alive, I'm moving, but there is very little reasoning going on in my brain. And unlike normal zombies, sleep zombies don't crave brains...they crave pillows. And just a tiiiiiiny bit below "walking zombie tired" is "mom tired". "Mom tired" is when you have been "walking zombie tired" for so long that you don't care if the world itself stops turning, you have GOT to have a nap.

Today, I was "mom tired". I wanted that nap. I needed that nap. I knew, in my heart of hearts, that it wasn't going to happen but sometimes you just can't help but dream...oh wait, dreaming requires sleep.

But then, miraculously, it looked like a nap might be in the realm of possibility. Child 5 was napping. Children 2, 3 and 4 were outside playing (in the back yard that is fully enclosed by a six foot privacy fence and pad locked on the outside), Child 1 was playing the Wii and Child 6 was ready to snuggle up and nap with Mama on the couch. This is going to happen! I'm going to do it! I'm going to NAP!

I get comfy on the couch. Child 6 falls asleep. It's peaceful and pretty quiet. Life is good. Until...

The alarm goes off. Not the fire alarm. The child alarm, the one they all have inside of them that goes off when their mother is trying to rest (or pee alone).

All of the sudden, the children who were outside come running inside (loudly) demanding a container for a frog. "What? No! Put the frog back where you found it!" Discontented sighs, a few "but mom"s, heavy footsteps.

It's quiet again...for about twenty seconds.

Then the children come back in and run up the stairs, loudly. This wakes Child 5. Child 5 then comes down and demands everything. A snack, a binky, a rag, a spatula, a walrus, a private jet...oh, and his Mickey Mouse cup. This cup is like a stray dog. It turns up everywhere. It follows us on walks and then waits at our front door. I think I've tried to throw it away like thirteen times but it just keeps finding it's way into my cupboard. And the thing is, Child 5 isn't even attached to this cup. He doesn't even use a sippy cup, we have to take the lid off. But today? Today, right now in fact, he wants the "Mee Mows" cup. JUST the "Mee Mows" cup. And where is the "Mee Mows" cup? Your guess is as good as mine. Under normal circumstances, Child 5 would just accept another cup. But his alarm has gone off. He knows that mom wants a nap. This must.not.happen.

After placating him with a green cup and a popsicle, every other child needs a snack, a drink, and answers to every question that they've ever had in their entire lives. I think they keep a list stored in a compartment in their brains reserved for when I'm "mom tired".

After meeting their requests, Child 4 starts doing the potty dance and completely forgets that he actually knows how to walk the whole five steps to the bathroom alone.

I manage to close my eyes again, just long enough for Child 5 to rip a pancake to shreds on the living room carpet and Child 4 to feed part of a banana chocolate chip bar to the dog because "him love it". Great, now I can plan how to console them tomorrow.

At this point everyone was loud and playing this game where they stack themselves on each other and roll down the stairs or something like that. I was actually afraid to go look.

I finally gave up. I'd say I'll try again tomorrow but I'll probably be busy burying the dog.

This is how we started out. This is how things should look.

This is how things actually looked. See that nice Jenny-shaped spot on the couch? That's where I should be.

Do or Do Not, There is NO Try...

Whoever told men that it was acceptable to pee while standing up should be taken and beaten with a large plank of wood covered in barbed wire. The wood is to smack some sense into them. The barbed wire is to poke holes so the stupid can drain out.

They all think they can do it. Little boys think they can do it. Older kids think they can do it. Grown men think they can do it.

As a mother of five boys, a wife to a grown man and having had the pleasure of cleaning the men's bathroom at Church a few times let me tell you something...THEY CANNOT DO IT!

That is all I have to say right now.

Turning Thirty

This weekend I turned thirty. Thirty is a big number. I mean, think about it. How many things do you honestly need thirty of? If I came home from the grocery store with thirty eggs, my husband would think I'd gone crazy. If I put thirty tic tacs in my mouth at once, I would probably choke to death. My point is, thirty is a big number.

As a surprise for my big 3-0, my friends in Richmond orchestrated a birthday weekend getaway for me. They got me a plane ticket, hosted a dinner, a brunch and an open house. They housed me and fed me and drove me around. It was all pretty fantastic. I imagine this must be how Reese Witherspoon feels on her birthday. My friend and hostess extraordinaire, Carol, even got me a custom cake. It had the state of Virginia on it. Well, we're going to pretend it was the state of Virginia. It was definitely not a big hill with the words "Over the Hill" above it. No, definitely not that. If it were, Carol would have some explaining to do.

The weekend started out with the one negative aspect of my trip...an airplane. I do not like flying. Not at all. AT ALL. I withheld this information from my friends for two reasons: 1. I really, really, really, REALLY wanted to go home. 2. I sometimes like to pretend that I'm a grown up who doesn't freak out over things like air travel. But in real life? I freak out over things like air travel. Every time I tell someone that I don't like to fly they tell me things to try to make me feel better, except their advice is stupid. They say things like, "more people die in cars than airplanes". First of all, now I am freaking out about the drive to the airport. Thanks guys. And secondly, let me just explain the difference between a car and an airplane. Cars are on the ground. Planes, if you haven't noticed, are 38,000 feet IN THE AIR. People also tell me about how people fly all the time, blah blah blah. People also voluntarily stick needles through their body parts. People eat raw fish and pay money for it. People cannot be trusted to make wise choices. I think I scared the girl sitting next to me, who happened to be a 2nd year medical student. The good news? She's well prepared for her rounds in the psych ward.

Once my plane landed I spent a good hour lying on my friend Elisabeth's floor, trying not to die. It worked. I didn't die. Are you impressed? I am.

After hanging around with some friends, we headed to dinner at my favorite restaurant, Baker's Crust. Perhaps Florida's greatest downfall is its lack of Baker's Crust. Well, that and the pants-loving cockroaches.

Let's talk about Baker's Crust. It's actually really about the mushroom and brie soup and the crepes diabolitin. That's what I get every single time I go and I could stick my face in the plate, swim around for a bit and then slurp it up until ne'er a trace is found. I usually have people with me so I try to eat like a human so I don't embarrass them. I'm not cool enough to find new friends. I'm darn lucky to have the old ones and they, for some odd reason, are okay with being seen with me in public. I'm not messing that up. But it's tempting sometimes because those crepes and that soup? Manna from Heaven.

Dinner was great but the company was better. I had good friends from Richmond, a friend who drove up from Charlottesville and my beloved Pediatrician. Yes, my kid's doctor came to my birthday dinner and gave me the most fantastic book (it's like she knows me, which is weird. I mean, it's not like I'm a hypochondriac with six kids or anything strange like that.) and even brought her stethoscope to listen to a wheezy baby Chase. Don't you wish your doctor was as cool as mine?

After dinner we weren't quite done, so we went back to my friend's place and stayed up late doing what we do best...telling hilarious stories and acting like idiots.

The next morning we had breakfast with a few more fantastic ladies and went to Target. No birthday is complete without a trip to Target.

After an afternoon of hanging and watching "Duck Dynasty", which I am now hooked on, thank you Elisabeth, I went to dinner with my "best and dearest and oldest" friend. This friend is days away from delivering her baby girl. We were hoping to coax her out with a nice dinner and our monthly Godiva chocolate but alas, she was not interested. I remember what it was like not wanting to be seen out with your parents. It's okay Mary, I get it.

On Sunday baby Chase and I ventured to Church to see some peeps and then had an afternoon cake party. I like to pretend this weekend was for me. Let's be honest, it was not about me. It was about baby Chase. It's okay, I'm just glad I have mammary glands and therefore get to be his automatic plus one.

After staying up way too late and sleeping through my alarm, I managed to make it onto my plane and again, not die. And now I'm back home with my family.

I've had a lot of birthdays. Remember how 30 is a big number? But this one, well, it was pretty awesome. A huge thank you to every single one of my friends and family members who made this birthday so great!

 

 

 

Can We Pretend that Paper Airplanes in the Night Sky...

My kids are really into paper right now. In my last post I made my feelings about massive paper usage known. Before you go giving me props for my environmental conscientiousness, don't. It has nothing to do with my concern for trees and everything to do with my concern for the $3.73 per 500 sheets. You might think that 500 sheets is a lot of paper, and in the normal world of household paper usage you would be right. But in this house? 500 sheets of paper is child's play...literally.
Usually I get all fussy and hide my paper or lock my bedroom door or tell the kids that they get 3 sheets of paper each, etc. It sometimes works, but usually it doesn't. But lately my kids have figured out that if they use the paper to make "gifts", it makes it harder for me to say no. Kids are sneaky little things and they manipulate in such ways.
So I have been getting a lot of paper "gifts" in recent weeks. So has everyone who steps foot in my house. Child 1 got a Star Wars Origami book from the library (I am seriously considering sending them a bill for $3.73 to compensate me.) so his paper gifts look like this...

Allow me to introduce "Fortune Wookiee", "Han Foldo", "Origami Yoda" and "Darth Paper".

Child 2 is all about paper aviation. So he has been making lots (and I do mean LOTS) of these...

That's a model C189Turbo and it flies quite nicely...all around the house...all the time...including into my face while I breastfeed a baby.

 



Child 3 likes to cool down the family with one, or fifteen, of these...

We keep getting bulk requests from China. The design is patent pending.

 

Child 4 and Child 5 want to play with paper too. They are perhaps my biggest mass producers of paper "gifts". They watch their siblings color and fold, so OF COURSE they want to color and fold too. So we get plenty of these...

 

If you have any requests, send them on over. Ramsey paper gifts a plenty in this house. Please send $3.73 per 500 paper "gifts".

A Typical Day

The internet is a deceptive little twit sometimes. Someone recently made a comment to me about blogging and how do I ever manage to find time to blog with six children? It must look like I just sit around blogging all day. It made me think. How do I have time to blog? I suppose it's a little like having to pee on a road trip. Sometimes you pull over and take a legit potty break. You time it out and you stop and you go. Sometimes you are in a hurry so you just have to hold it until you have some time. Of course, once you have children sometimes something happens, you sneeze or cough or laugh and it just happens. In other words, sometimes you know you need to hold it but you just can't hold it.

That's what blogging is for me. Sometimes I try to schedule time to do it. Sometimes I have to wait until time comes. And sometimes it just happens in spite of efforts to stave it off a little longer.

The only hard part about blogging is finding something "blog worthy" to write about. Sometimes  my kids do something insane and the words pretty much write themselves. But most days are pretty typical. Which is, ironically, what inspired this post. This post is about my typical day.
It usually starts with conversations. Conversations with myself and my husband and my children. They usually go like this:

Myself: Sooooooooo tired...
Husband: Do you need to get a shower before I leave?
Me: Yes
Myself: No
Husband: Okay, well I have to leave in little bit...
Me: Okay
Myself: So if he needs to leave in a little bit, then I can divide that little bit into halves and shower with one half and sleep with the other.
Me: Mmhmmmmmm...zzzzzzzzzzz...
Husband: I have to go.
Me: (sleepily) Uh-huh
Kids 1-3: Mom, we don't have anything to pack for lunch.
Me: I'm coming.
Myself: Funny how they can find a piece of candy hidden in your sock drawer under three layers of foot coverings but they can't find anything to pack for lunch in the entire pantry and refrigerator.
Kids 1-3: Mom, we can't find any clothes to wear.
Me: I'm coming.
Myself: They could always try the closet, okay fine, the laundry basket...OKAY...the dryer.
Baby: WAAAAAHHHHHHHH!
Me: Good morning sweet baby.
Myself: It's a good thing you're cute you little creature of the night.

Then I feed the baby, change and dress the baby, change the Nugget, drag kid #4 to the potty while he screams that he doesn't need to go, give a nebulizer treatment or two, drill the kids on whether they have eaten, packed lunches, packed a snack, gotten dressed, brushed teeth, etc.

We typically leave 10 minutes after we should. We then hit every single one of the ELEVEN stoplights between our house and the school. So then I go in and sign the kids in at the office and make some lame joke about us being late all the time. No one laughs at it and I vow that tomorrow I will not make a lame joke about us being late.

On the way home I start mentally preparing my to-do list and my internal monologue starts up again:
Me: I need to take a shower, get the boys ready, eat some breakfast and then I can nurse the baby, throw in a load of laundry, unload the dishwasher, run to Target, stop at Home Depot, blow my husband a kiss as I drive by his office...
Myself: Sure, you could do that but...
Me: But what?
Myself then gives me a list of alternative things to do...like sit and not do anything. Myself includes lots of great excuses and rationalizations. If we tear a paper towel into pieces we don't really have to have toilet paper right now. We can send husband later. Myself is very convincing.

I usually get home from dropping the kids off at school at about 8:50 am. We walk in the door and the little boys instantly start crying about how hungry they are. I panic for a second wondering if I fed them this morning...or yesterday at all...or ever. Oh my gosh, I haven't fed my kids! Oh wait...they ate cereal this morning with their siblings, a whole 45 minutes ago. I hand them fruit snacks so they will stop yelling at me.

From 9am to 1pm the boys wrestle. Wrestle. Cry. Laugh. Repeat.

They occasionally interrupt their wrestling if I leave the room to do something. Then they follow me. Have you ever been to a dr. and they have someone following them around with a clipboard taking notes? They call it "shadowing". Do you know how these people learned how to shadow? By being children. If I go to the bathroom, they come too. If I go sit on the bed to nurse the baby, they come too. If I decide it's one of those days where I absolutely have to shower, I put baby in the bouncy seat so that I don't have to listen to him scream. (He likes the sound of the water. I may or may not leave the water running while I get dressed just to keep him happy. I admit to nothing.) While he sits in his bouncy Nugget plays his favorite game where he puts his hand on the shower door and waits for me to put my hand there too. It is super cute...until I need to use my hand for something like, oh say, bathing. Then my hand is busy washing and can't play. Then Nugget gets angry and bangs and yells until I play the game.

Usually at some point in the day I beg my children to watch television. Ya know those moms who have to turn the television off and drag their kids away to be productive beings? I am not one of them. Also, I'm jealous of them.

We eat lunch.

Then Nugget naps. During his nap #4 likes to color. I remember in high school, I had a friend with a little sister who was about ten years younger than we were. She loved to color too. It used to bug him that she would use so much paper. One time he said something to his mom about how she shouldn't let his little sister waste all that paper. His mom told a story about how, when she was little, she used to have to color along the edges of a newspaper because they didn't buy drawing paper and how she wanted her kids to have all the paper they wanted. I remember thinking that I wanted to be just like that. Let my children explore their creativity and scribble to their hearts content. Now I have to buy the paper so I hide it under my bed and ration it like it's Elf bread and I'm going to Mordor. Kid #4 draws a bunch of pictures and asks me to draw the characters of "Peter and the Wolf" about 13 times. Oh and snakes..."Draw a snake for me mommy. Now a biiiiiig snake. Now a tiiiiny snake. Now a baby snake. Now a fluffy snake." So we draw while Nugget naps.

Then we go to pick up the kids from school. I answer 17,002 questions on the way home. "What would win, a cheetah or a bear?" "What is for dinner?" "Guess what I saw outside the window at 10:24 am today?" "Do you know what 18 x 84 is?" "Can I have a snack when I get home?"

Then we get home and the big kids evaporate into snack and wii land. They have figured out the glorious mind-sucking powers of television and video games. It's a beautiful thing.

The evenings hold a little more variation than the daytime. Soccer practice, football practice, cub scouts, boy scouts, family night, dinner, prayers, baths, pajamas, bed...

Throw in a couple dozen tantrums, a few bloody lips and lots of baby rocking and that's it. That's my typical day.

I was recently talking to a friend about how, before you have children, you know that it's going to be hard but that it will be worth it. What you don't know is the ratio of hard to good. You think it will be like 75% good and 25% crappy. Maybe even 50/50. But we were saying it is probably more like 98% hard/crappy stuff and like 2% amazing/awesome/worth every bit of it. But we both agreed that there is something about that 2% that overrides the other stuff. I can't explain it mathematically. I mean, in no other scenario does this work. Think about it. If you have a gallon of milk and 98% of it is sour but 2% is good, you don't drink the milk. If you look at a house and you only like 2% of it, you don't buy the house. But there is something about that amazing 2% of parenting that honestly and sincerely overrides the 98% hard stuff. That 2% really is that good.

And the proof is in the pudding, so they say. Here are a few 2% pictures...

It's Raining, It's Pouring...and Pouring

Ya know how sometimes people say things and you think they are full of it? Or at the very least, they are seriously exaggerating the situation?
For example, if someone says, "my kids scream all day long", obviously their kids don't literally scream all day every day, else they would not be standing upright.
Or if they say, "all I ever eat is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches"...okay, that's kinda true for me. But you get the point.
So before I moved to Florida someone told me that they hoped I liked rain because it rains a lot in Florida. I did that awkward thing where you smile and open your mouth just a little bit but you don't actually say anything. Please. It's the SUNSHINE state. Rain. Pft.
When we got here (in December) it didn't rain much. In fact, it rained less than in Virginia. Ha.
But I started to hear rumors...rain rumors. People, actual Floridians, started telling me about how in the spring and summer it rains every day. EVERY day. Every.single.day.
And I thought they were exhibiting those extreme exaggeration techniques we were discussing earlier.
They were not.
It rains every day.EVERY day. Every.single.day.
Not just rain like, "oh look it's raining." This is more like "batten the hatches, get to higher ground, someone round up two of each animal, we're going to need a bigger boat" type of rain.
It is insane you guys.
So I'm going to go eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while my house floats away.

Some Days...

So far today my day has looked like this...

 

If this trend is holding true for the eldest Ramseys, I feel for their teachers. Actually, I lied, I'm just happy it's not me.

 

If you need me, I'll be hiding under a bed with what's left of my bag of mint Milanos (thanks Kelli).