From the category archives:

letting instead of making

When the Glamour Is Gone: How a Pregnant Mother of a Toddler Watches the Oscars

February 24, 2009

Like Kate Winslet, I, too, used to practice my Oscar acceptance speech in front of the mirror when I was eight years old.
But I don’t any longer.  Instead, last night I propped my swollen ankles up on a few pillows, threw an old baby blue blanket over my wriggling belly, and polished off the organic [...]

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Am I Completely LOST or Would Any Mother Choose the Husband She Thought Was Dead over the Three-Year-Old Child She Knows Is Not?

February 12, 2009

Is it just me?  Am I the only one who’s still in a state of disbelief over what the writers had Sun do?
Maybe it’s the pregnancy.
Normally, I don’t get too wrapped up in the motivations of television characters (unless they appeared on The Wire — oh, Randy, I still mourn for you).  I mean, I [...]

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The Road to Potty Training Is Paved with Good Intentions

February 11, 2009

Potty training is a big subject in our house these days.
Not because Mike or I have decided it’s time — Jake’s just 25 months old, after all.  But because Jake has shown an interest in it.  At least, he’s shown an interest in: getting our hopes up, testing my theory that all I have to [...]

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Who Won This Round of the Battle of the Bath?

February 2, 2009

There comes a point when you must put your foot down.
Mine came after an astonishingly patient 3 1/2 weeks during which the closest Jake came to taking a bath was wading in some warm tub water while I used a funnel to rinse his privits, as I like to call them.  That’s 3 1/2 weeks [...]

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Why It’s a Blessing to Find Out the Path Is Bumpier than You Expected

January 6, 2009

Jake started crying before I so much as moved toward the door to leave him at school this morning.
Real tears. Not the almost-obligatory yells of faux abandonment he would throw my way when I dropped him off at his old pre-preschool.  No, these were the kind of tears that a parent feels right where her [...]

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Can a Sense of Self Come with Pink Polka Dot Boots?

December 9, 2008

Jake has been wearing his beloved pink polka dot boots pretty much non-stop for over a week now.

We have engaged in successful negotiations about removing them for bed time and bath time (for which he even removed his swim diaper the other night, suggesting he is finally over the traumatic poop-in-the-tub incident).  But otherwise, on [...]

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Just Let It All In

November 19, 2008

I experienced a whole new way of thinking at the end of yoga class yesterday.
I’d spent the past several days mulling over how I wanted to approach writing about continuing toddler-inspired sleep interruptions; guilty, crying morning-afters; plummeting four-season temperatures; and that frustrating in-between period where the choice between too-big maternity clothes and too-small normal person [...]

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Travels with Toddler (Low Country Edition)

October 14, 2008

“Elmo!” Jake crowed the second he saw the portable DVD player set up in the back seat of the car.  Plainly, he was ready for a driving trip, as long as we had Elmo’s Big Outdoors at the ready.
As was I.  After a year of living in the mountains, I was craving some beach time [...]

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Let the Comparisons Begin, or How Much Control Do I Really Have?

October 6, 2008

We had our anatomy-screen ultrasound last week, and, inevitably, the comparisons began.
“This is an active one,” the technician commented, as she tried, unsuccessfully, to snap a picture of the wiggling baby’s heart before it shifted out of view again.
I told her about the time Jake wouldn’t wake up for his ultrasound.  And about how everyone [...]

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Forget My Mind — I Lost My Cell Phone

July 24, 2008

Actually, “lost” is mother-of-a-toddler code for, “I left my cell phone in the pocket of the shorts I wore to the pool with Jake and ran it through the washing machine.” Raz-r phones, I probably don’t have to tell you, do not like being run through the washing machine.
When Mike first announced that he [...]

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MIA Part Three: Not Doubting Your Path

July 11, 2008

Sometimes there are good reasons you don’t have time to, say, write a YogaMamaMe post for two weeks. And I don’t mean “good” in the “eat your spinach, it’s good for you” sense of good. I mean good, like good for my soul, happy, fun.
I mean, to get to the point, Coon Dog [...]

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MIA Part Two: Learning Who You Are

July 9, 2008

So another reason I was missing in action for two weeks (even though, I say again to the empty echo-chamber of a deserted readership, I don’t think anyone really noticed): a visit to Louisville for my grandfather’s funeral.
Sad as this sounds — and much as the past couple of posts might, um, bring the [...]

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Mothers, Daughters, and “The Eye of the Tiger”: How a Bad Song from 1982 Moved Me Closer to Stillness

June 16, 2008

On Father’s Day morning, when I started the car in the parking lot of EarthFare (Asheville’s local Whole Foods-ish place I love to shop for groceries even though we really can’t afford it), I had one of those delicious moments that happens when I hear “Eye of the Tiger” on the radio.
Immediately, it was 1982. [...]

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Driving with the Brakes On

June 12, 2008

I had a Very Bad Moment walking Jake home from school yesterday.
We were strolling down a moderately trafficked street — the kind of residential road motorists use inappropriately as a through-way, inducing the residents to have cement traffic calmers installed which end up acting only as a challenge to the faster drivers but at least [...]

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At Least Now I Can Eat Dinner at a Normal Time, or Something I Actually Can Control

June 10, 2008

Most people probably consider it an obvious choice to eat dinner with your child. It is, after all, the foundation of all those sitcoms we grew up with, isn’t it? Remember Richie Cunningham … eating hamburgers at Arnold’s restaurant with The Fonz. Or … the hijinks taking place in the otherwise [...]

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Is There Such a Thing as a Graceful End to Vacation?

June 9, 2008

I can’t say I remember ever having had a graceful end to any vacation in my life.
I tend to be the type who gets stuck somewhere between the utter relaxation that is, to me, the whole point of a vacation (soldier on, you exploring, traveling, learn-something-on-vacation types, but do it without me) and the pressing [...]

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Letting My Child’s Inner Beauty Shine Past the Tests

May 20, 2008

At Jake’s school this morning one of his teachers showed me the developmental evaluation they had filled out for him. It was a standardized list of questions — a la “Can the child pick up a Cheerio between his thumb and forefinger?” — in such categories as Communication, Gross Motor Skills, Fine Motor Skills, [...]

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Breathing My Way into Feeling Good About Who I Am

May 18, 2008

We went to a party yesterday! A real, live, social, people-who-speak-adult block party.
Granted, I spent the majority of the festivities chasing an increasingly bold and energized Jake down the hill, into the yard where he found the prize of a whiffle ball half-buried in rotting leaves, in front of the band to whose rendition [...]

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Fixing Everything, Even When You Can’t, or How I Learned to Diffuse My Energy

May 7, 2008

Today my acupuncturist spent a lot of time diffusing my energy. And it got me thinking.
I was probably not thinking what you are — Acupuncture! Therapy! Yoga! This gal spends an inordinate amount of energy searching for the mindfulness in motherhood! And is maybe a little bit crazy to boot. But, [...]

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Jake and My Heart Free Me From a Scary Rat’s Maze

May 5, 2008

I had one of those moments yesterday, the kind where suddenly everything feels completely wrong.
It begins with a weird sense of displacement — in my case, sitting on the floor of my yoga room/office in the middle of my asana practice. “What am I doing here?” or something like it started the internal conversation. [...]

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