A Year Later...

This week marked the one year anniversary of me ending maternity leave and being back at work. I have been working for as long as I was at home….working with a baby.

I am often asked if I like working, and I don’t lie: I do like it. I feel like being at work is time I can focus on my work without little hands grabbing at my pants saying “up”, or “mama! Toons!” (cartoons). I have made quite a lot of progress in the past year at my job, including an opportunity to go back to school part time to pursue an education in marketing. I may be crazy for taking this on. It will definitely be a challenge, but I think I’m up for it.

Every day, especially mornings and evenings are hectic; even more so in the summer time when my husband, who is a golf professional, is required to work long hours and we can go an entire week without having him at the dinner table. Some days I find myself thinking that I've mastered this whole working mom thing and then there are other days when I know that I’ll have to do the whole mundane routine over again tomorrow, and it has brought me to tears.

I’ve made a huge effort to get back to working out and eating ‘clean’, and have actually gotten myself down to my wedding weight. I have 2 windows of opportunity to exercise each work day; either at 5 am at home, or during my lunch hour at the gym. I have learned some great lessons in organization and preparedness as well as making my workouts as efficient as possible. I have two great resources to thank for this: the Nike Training Club app on my iPhone, and the girls of Tone It Up who offer nutritional advice and workouts.

Working out and being healthy benefits me and my family in so many ways. I find I have so much more engergy to get through the day. Mostly, it helps with my depression. If I go a few days where I’m eating like crap and not exercising, I really feel a difference in my attitude and outlook, and in the way I treat people, especially my family. I can have an explosive temper, and there have been a few times where I have regretted lashing out at, or in front of, Nikolas. I don’t want him to ever be scared of mommy getting mad. I have come a long way in controlling my temper, but still have to work on it. Working out definitely helps me have a positive state of mind and I’m better able to control my reaction to stressful situations.

I often wish I had more time to write, because I really love looking back at my stories and seeing how far I’ve come. One of the things that bother me is the name of my blog. “Is That Baby Puke On Your Shirt” isn’t really applicable to my life anymore, so I’ve been brainstorming some new names that would be a better fit to my crazy life. Anyway, I hope to increase the amount I write, and if you have any suggestions for names, pass them along!

Who Cut the Cheese?

I am about to go there. I am going to tell a fart story. This is your warning.

It’s inevitable. Fart jokes become the norm in a person’s household. Especially when there are boys involved. Well, now Nikolas is in on the joke.

Of course, since he was a little baby, we’d always stick out our tongue and make raspberry noises at him. It caught on quickly, and has become one of his favourites. In fact, it’s often how I’m greeted in the morning.

Me: “Good morning sweetie! Time to rise and shine!”

Nikolas: “BBBllllttthhhhhhh”

Or even more recently, on a 3 hour road trip to a family event, I was desperate to entertain the little guy. So what did I pull out? That’s right...I pulled out the “pull my finger” joke. Nikolas, by the way, thinks this is hilarious. He will now randomly run up to me, and pull my finger, just waiting for that sounds that makes him giggle so much.

Well, tonight topped them all. I was putting Nikolas down to bed and as he was settling in, lying on his stomach, he let loose a huge, loud FART. Never ever before has this kid ever acknowledged the fart. This time, he immediately looked up at me, and giggled like crazy.

What a milestone. My son and I laughed together over a fart for the first time. I am confident it won’t be the last.

Work It...

 Last week, I finally got myself a membership to a gym that is super close to my office so that I can use my lunch hour to work out. I’m planning to start with 3 days a week, and see where that leads. Once summer hits, I plan to do a lot of walking at lunch in the nearby ravine, but still will hit the gym for resistance training. I also have an elliptical machine at home, which needs to be put to use more often!

It’s definitely time to lose this “baby weight”. I’m at a weight that I was at long before I got pregnant and struggled then to get rid of, but now, it’s a different kind of weight. Things have shifted and even though the scale shows the same number, my body is certainly different. Either way, I’m not happy with my fitness level, and it’s time to get serious about improving it.

Over an hour-long lunch break, between driving and changing, I end up with 40 minutes of actual exercise time; 10 minutes are dedicated to a warm up, which leaves me with 30 minutes of resistance training. I need to find a good routine that can be done in that amount of time, and hit all the body parts in 3 workouts.

Soon, it will be time to start shopping around for a chariot so that I can go for bike rides again and bring Nikolas along with me! I’m so looking forward to winter being over and spending lots of time outside!

This is My Life….For Now and Forever?

This week I started working full time. Luckily for me, it’s a short week. Oh and I’m taking Monday off for a pediatrician appointment, so next week will be a short week too. Okay, so two weeks from now, I will have finished my first full week of (paid) work since before I went on maternity leave.

I have to say, I now fully understand the “supper time rush”. When your kid goes to bed at 7:30, you do as much as you can and as quickly as you can so that if you’re lucky, you’ll get 30 minutes of quality play time before night-night time.

My husband, on the other hand, doesn’t comprehend the rush. He gets home a full hour before Nikolas and I do. I’m not sure what he does with that hour, but I can say for certain that the dog is not getting walked, and supper is not being prepared during this “free time”. What a treat that must be! To come home and put your feet up for an hour!

I digress…

My days now look like this:

5:30 am: first alarm goes off. SNOOZE.
5:40 am: second alarm goes off…..wishing I could SNOOZE but instead I drag my ass out of bed and into the shower.
5:40 – 6:30: get ready and my act together before Nikolas gets up.
6:30 – 7:15: Matt and I tag-team getting Nikolas ready to leave the house. I’m leaving it mostly up to Matt right now. In a few short months, he will be gone to work before sun rise, and I’ll get to do it all on my own…..Yippeee!
7:15 – 8:00: Get Nikolas and I bundled up and in the truck, drop him off at the day home and rush to work.
8:00 – 4:30: Work. Check Facebook. Work. Check email. Work. Run errands at lunch time. Work.
4:30: RUSH to the day home to make sure I’m there before 5:00 because that’s when it closes, and she starts to charge by the minute. RUSH home.
5:15: RUSH to get supper made by 6:00, while trying to entertain a toddler, a husband and a dog.
6:30: Supper should be done by now. Clean up Nikolas and hunker down for some quality play time.
7:00: Get Nikolas ready for bed. Bottle, a story, and it’s lights out. I don’t even get cuddle time anymore. He just doesn’t want to be rocked to sleep, or held. He wants to be put down IN HIS BED.
7:30 – 9:00: Creep out of Nikolas’ room and clean up supper and toys. Get supper for the following evening prepared. Walk the dog. Do laundry. Get coffee ready for the morning. Try to get as many errands done as possible before I fall over from exhaustion.
9:00: Fall over from exhaustion.

And then we do it all again the next day! Right now I feel as if I’m staring down years and years of this routine and it’s a little depressing.

Logistics

I am a planner. Always have been, always will be. I need to go into a situation knowing what to expect when I get there and to make sure I am as prepared as possible for any given situation. You should see THE LIST I have for when we go camping. It’s all organized and pretty on a spreadsheet and everything. You should have seen me that one day years ago when Matt sprung a surprise camping trip on me and packed everything himself. I was so unnerved and anxious about “did you remember extra toilet paper” to “do we have all the condiments we’ll need to eat” and “what about the bear spray? You packed the bear spray...right?”

So one question that always comes back and bugs me is “how will I do this [insert activity name here] with Nikolas, where will I put him so I can do [insert task name here]”. Taking him to the swimming pool for the first time when he was only 10 weeks old almost sent me over the edge. Where would I change him? What would I do with him so I could get changed? How do I get everything shoved into a locker while also making sure he’s safe? Luckily, I had a good friend, and mother of two pre-teens with me to help.  And despite the crappy “family” change room at the local pool, we got it all accomplished. (Note to parents who haven’t done this before – just use the bucket car seat for small babies, and strollers for older ones. Some facilities will let you bring your stroller right out onto the pool deck, better pools will even provide strollers and will have playpens by the showers).

Now that I’m back at work, I am still amazed that people go on to have more than one child. HOW do they do it? Literally? HOW???? Right now, I rely on Matt getting Nikolas up and ready to go in the morning while I drag my ass and somehow manage to get out the door.  I am dreading summer (isn’t that shitty?) when Matt will be gone by 5:00 am and home after 9:00 (due to his wonderful job in the golf industry – note the sarcasm) and I will have to do it all by myself. I know I will figure it out, but I right now I just don’t know HOW.
Other questions that commonly bother me:

HOW do you manage to prepare meals for your family when another new born enters the scene? It took me months to be able to put Nikolas down long enough to prep and cook a meal. He was feeding like a beast and I was STARVING.

How do you travel with two kids?

How do you take two kids to the pool?

How do you do anything with more than one child???

How do you keep up with a toddler’s schedule (nursery school, play dates, etc) and still make sure a newborn gets their daily naps in?

Parental Advice

Have you ever found that the best advice about being a parent comes from those who don’t have kids?

I have to admit; before Nikolas came along, I had no idea what parenthood was all about. When you have kids, you suddenly become part of a secret club. People who are in the club can try to explain to outsiders what it is like, but unless you get in, you really don’t know.

So for people who have no kids and no responsibilities beyond themselves to give advice on how to be a parent, well, I guess it would be like a cave man teaching a pilot how to fly a plane. It’s kind of funny.
Matt came home a few days ago and shared with me that his brother (who has no children) told him that having kids is easy, you just have to be organized and plan. When I heard this, I really did laugh out loud. Oh, I can’t wait for this guy to have kids of his own so he can eat his words!

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is to let go of control and just go with the flow. No matter how much planning and organizing I do – and trust me, I’m a planner; I am the queen of lists– things rarely go the way I anticipate. And not that this is a bad thing...unless I let it get to me, which I used to when I was still adjusting to this whole parenthood thing, I’ve just learned to accept the situation and do what I need to do to keep going on my course.

Great example  of this was this morning. I was getting ready for work, Matt had gotten Nikolas up and dressed and given him a bottle, and he was off to play. I was in the kitchen, noticed that Nikolas was playing in the mud room. On a quick glance, I took note that he was not eating the dog food, so I wasn’t too concerned about what he was doing in there. A few minutes later, I go in to get my jacket on, and find Nikolas has been experimenting with stepping into the dog’s water dish in his socks, and his feet were soaked! Really, it was cute. However, I had to rush him upstairs for a quick sock change and get out the door. This isn’t something we could have planned for...it just happened, and we deal with it. But putting socks on a 14 month old takes some good wrestling technique, and a few extra minutes.

This doesn’t make parenting easy or hard. It just annoys me when people who don’t have kids think it’s easy and if only a little planning went into your life, it would be a piece of cake. And when comments are made that we’re late for events, I just smile to myself and think “your time is coming buddy”.

Snow Job

Well, it’s official: winter has arrived in Edmonton. And winter doesn’t tip-toe through the door. She barges right in, interrupts anyone who may be having a good time, and decides that she is going to wreck the party with her bad behavior and snotty attitude. Wait…am I talking about myself?? No, really, winter sucks. I hate everything about it. I hate the cold, the snow, the ice, the shitty roads, being locked up inside for months at a time because I’m not into winter sports. I could go on and on.

Today, I should be productive at work. I mean, that’s why I’m here, right? Instead, I find myself feeling nostalgic for a time gone by. 2 years ago, around this time, we were planning our 3 week honeymoon to Thailand. We knew we’d be escaping this hell-hole for a brief respite and enjoying the best beaches (and food) in the world. I was shopping for bathing suits, flip-flops and sun screen. Today, I’m finding myself heading over to http://www.flickr.com/, and searching for Thailand beaches so that I can find a pretty photo for my computer desktop. Something that will remind me that warmer places do exist in this world. One day, we will be back. We won’t be alone next time, but we will be back.