Unwanted Superpowers

We all have them; things we are really good at that we'd rather not be. My unwanted superpower is the uncanny ability to know where almost every item in the house is located, within a 3 foot radius.I guess it is somewhat like a photographic memory, but only within the confines of my home. This is good and bad. I rarely lose things unless someone {read my 2 year old} has moved them from the last place I saw saw them. The obvious drawback is the fact that the other 3 people living in this house rely on me to find all of their crap.

For instance, I was on a business trip in Colorado a few years ago when my phone rang at 6am. Even though I had to work, it was the first time I had been away from my son overnight since he'd been born. I was REALLY looking forward to sleeping until at least 7am. When the phone rang that early, I was sure someone was bleeding or my house was on fire.

Me: {Groggy as heck and slightly scared} "Hello."
Hubbs: "Do you know where my sunglasses are?"
Me: "On the credenza. Oh, and if you wake me up again tomorrow to ask where something is, I will kill you."

I kid you not. This kind of thing happens all of the time. Luckily with the girl child starting to act like a future bag lady (more on that later), and repositioning just about everything in the house, others are having to pitch in on the search efforts. What is a talent you have, but wish you didn't possess?

If it wasn't attached....

I really think I might forget my own head if it wasn't securely fastened on. The last 2 weeks have been awful. Here, in no order of importance, are the things I have forgotten in the last 14 days:

• My purse at home
• My work laptop at home
• To feed my kids breakfast before we left for daycare
• My daughter's lunch on the seat of my car 
• That I had a doctor's appointment
• Where I put my keys...twice
• To add events into my phone calendar resulting in a couple of crazy over-scheduled weeks coming up
• To buckle Arielle into her seat after putting her in the car. (Luckily I only got 2 blocks before she reminded me)
• A load of towels in the washer for 2 days (ewwww)
• To put a check in the bank almost resulting in a very unbalanced account!

I'm sure there are other things I have forgotten but I can't remember them right now. I don't know when I have been this bad! I think I need more sleep, to reduce the amount of activities we are all doing and to get myself more organized so I don't leave the house without the stuff we all need for the day! I'm going to start by making a framed dry erase list that I will check off before I leave the house each day. What are your tips to stay organized and keep track of everything going on in your busy lives??

Penchant for powder

My daughter is obsessed with baby powder.  No matter where it is, she finds it and promptly dispenses as much as she can before she is discovered. I think we all remember this post. At least she was courteous enough to wait until I had gone out for the night that time. The funniest part is, she doesn't just pour it out. She will take off her pull-up and "squirt" it at her bum. I have found her standing on the toilet, on the bathroom counter, in her room and once in the van.

You'd think I'd get smart and just get rid of it by now. The problem is, it is summer and we go to the beach. Baby powder is my go-to for getting the sand off the kids. It is pretty much on the top of my list of miracle worker must have products, right below the magic eraser. Which I obviously don't use on the kids.  I suppose I will just have to get better at hiding it...or follow her around with the vacuum.

Lego Madness

My son turned 5 last month. I guess 5 is the magic age where kids get real and true Lego sets. Truth be told, I think 5 is still too young. My son is practically a genius yet he still can't put these elaborate sets together on his own. Gone are the days of getting a bin of multicolored blocks of various sizes and using nothing but your imagination to build things. Now they come in 200 piece sets with giant booklets of step by step instructions. Let me share something with you. My son has the attention span of a gnat. Even if he didn't, these sets take a LONG time to put together, but I figure it will be some nice mother son bonding time, right? Yeahhhhh.

Enter 2 Transformer Kreo (knock-off Lego) sets that he got for his birthday. We open the first box  and I take one look at all of the pieces, some as small as my son's attention span, and I balk. Unfortunately his eager face tells me I am not getting out of this, so we begin to sort. This is where my OCD comes in. I make him sort all of the pieces by color. I think it is way easier to do it this way and he agrees. Thank God. I have no idea how long we took to build the first one, but it ended up that he had a hard time snapping the pieces together so he would hunt for the pieces and I would help him snap them together. Of course after we finish Optimus Prime, he needs his friend, so we open the next box.

I almost fell over at the discovery of how many pieces this one had. I decided that, for the sake of time and my sanity, Nate could play with Optimus while I put this one together. I'm an adult who can easily follow step by step directions, how long could it possibly take?

50 minutes. That's right folks, it took me 10 minutes shy of an hour to assemble Mr. Prowl and the two little guys that went with him. This kid better never doubt my love for him. I used to think I would throw his long labor that ended with an all natural birth in his face later in life, but honestly I think I will use this instead. Oh, and the first person who tells me the stickers aren't on straight might lose an eye.

Stay tuned for my post in which I find some way to contain the millions of microscopic and other  Lego pieces. I will conquer them...before they cause me to scream any more expletives while walking through my son's room in the dark!

Motherhood...it's not for the weak

On Friday I went to see Motherhood the musical with some lovely ladies I met through a local blogging group. If you are local to Rhode Island or Southern Mass, or even if you're not,  you have to check out Rhody Mamas. They post the best deals on shopping and host amazing mom's night out events!  I hadn't read about the musical before we went, but I assumed it was a comedy. I mean, it is about being a mom which would have to be a comedy. My thought is, you have to be able to laugh about  the ridiculous situations you deal with as a mom. If you don't laugh, you will find yourself crying. Of course they covered the hilarious topics of incessant cries of, "Mooooommmmmyyy" from little ones,  becoming bulk shopping obsessed (Costco anyone??), going on a cleaning strike and getting a mini-van. I found myself relating to just about every character at some point. It also had some very touching moments mixed in with the laughs. I was relieved to see I wasn't the only one tearing up.

It was so nice to have a night out, watching a musical about my existence as a mom, and knowing that I am so not alone in this crazy thing called motherhood. The best part was not the show, but a text I got about half way through from my hubby. Of course he was on solo bedtime duty since I was out. I don't have a fancy iphone like the rest of you so I re-created my own text bubbles!

I love when art imitates life...and I'm not the one who has to clean it up.



The end of an era

This pretty much sums it up. My son has finally given up his nap...one month before his 5th birthday. I realize that I am lucky. Some kids decide to ditch the daytime sleep way earlier than he did, but I will still mourn the loss of my 2 hours of solitude on weekends. I guess I could just give in and let him watch TV the entire time his sister sleeps, but then I'd feel bad. Now I need to figure out my new strategy for getting things done on the weekend without feeling like I am ignoring him.

Old Wives Tales

I'm not a huge believer in many of the old wives tales floating around. I don't think that you can tell the sex of an unborn baby by the way you're carrying. I know for a fact that going outside with wet hair is NOT how you catch a cold. I am also pretty sure that chocolate doesn't give you acne or my face would look like a hormonal teenage boy's. That being said, when you are at the tail end of 2 weeks with no sleep because both of your children have been waking up multiple times a night, either coughing or because they couldn't breathe through their nose, you are willing to try anything to get some rest. Enter my MIL.

My hubby told his mom that the kids have been really sick and we are dying over here from lack of sleep. She gave some advice that I was sure had to be one of these old wives tales. She said, right before we put the kids to bed, we should rub Vicks VapoRub on the soles of their feet and put cotton socks on them. This is supposed to stop their coughing and let them sleep through the night. I admit I was skeptical but willing to try ANYTHING short of voodoo to get Nate to sleep. He was coughing as we were getting ready for bed and I didn't hold out much hope for this trick to work, but I did it anyway.  Ten minutes after I put the Vicks on his feet he was out like a light and sleeping soundly. He did not wake up 1 time last night!!! I wish I could say the same thing for baby girl, but she wasn't waking up coughing. Her sinuses are so stuffed up that it is coming out of her tear ducts.  Poor pitiful baby.

I have to say that I am a firm believer in this trick and will do it again tonight. I'm pretty sure Vicks doesn't endorse this application of their product, but I work for a pharmaceutical company and know that off-label applications of some products are often more successful than their originally intended use! Case in point, I have been rubbing the Vicks on his chest for days with no improvement in cough or sleep. It just goes to show you that not all old wives tales are bunk!


*Not a sponsored post. Do not use regular Vicks on children under 2 years old. Use Baby Vicks instead*

No use crying over spoiled milk

Unless that milk is 12 ounces of breast milk taken out of the fridge and left on the counter for way too long. Yes, this was the situation in my kitchen on Saturday evening. I went to grab some milk to mix with baby girl's cereal (yes we started solids on Cinco de Mayo, pics to come) and couldn't find the little cooler that should have been sitting on the middle shelf, plain as day. I glanced to the counter and, there it sat, for how long I had no idea. I opened the cooler and felt the bottles hoping it was a recent occurence, but they were completely room temperature. DH probably took it out when he was looking for something behind it, but he has "no recollection" of that happening. I, on the other hand, appreciate the value of said liquid gold and know I wouldn't have left it out.

Who was responsible was neither here nor there, what was done was done. I had to check it out to see if I could still use it. I smelled it, but couldn't really tell if it was bad. What's a mom to do at this point? Ok, here's the part where I lose like 10 followers who are too grossed out to read this blog again, but what was I supposed to do? I made the ultimate sacrifice...I tasted it. It was bad. I had to throw it out.

If this had happened with Nate, I probably would have cried, yelled at Aaron and made a huge production out of the fact that it took me 90 minutes of uncomfortable pumping to get that milk. I did none of those things. I simply sighed as I poured it down the drain and got frozen milk out to send to daycare today. Maybe I'm growing up or giving up; I'm not really sure which one.

Be Prepared

I think I have to blame my mom for not letting me be a girl scout. If I had the opportunity as a child, I might not be quite as spacey as I am today. I would always be prepared. I might always have a stocked purse with every item known to man in it. I might remember to bring a diaper bag with me on outings. That's right folks; I forgot the diaper bag again. This time there was no turning back. We were already at our destination when I realized it was missing...15 minutes away from home.


I took the kids to meet up with our friends at a park that is a ways from our house. We arrived and, as I pulled the baby out of her seat, I smelled it. The unmistakable smell of a poopy diaper. No biggie, I'll just change her before we head into the park. I reach into the back seat where the diaper bag should be, but there was nothing there. {Thank you honey for being such a helper and bringing the bag in the house} Oh and thank you laws of the universe because, this time, we had a blowout. A leaking diaper, no wipes, no clean diapers and no change of clothes. CRAP!! (literally) Luckily my friend's son isn't fully potty trained yet and she had wipes and a diaper. It was a size 5 diaper, meant for a 2 year old, but hey it was a diaper! I improvised. I got her changed and cleaned her shirt off as best I could. I pulled her pants up to cover it, put her in the Ergo and off we went.

I'm glad this wasn't my first rodeo or I might have started crying and just gone home. You get wiser with each kid, and maybe a bit more relaxed. The moral of the story? Always have friends that are more with it than you (oh and hide the damn diaper bag in the back of the car so your husband STOPS bringing it in the house!!!!!!!)!