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Archive for the 'vacation' Category

When the Vacation Ends and You Still Have 2,500 Miles to Go. With Kids.

Published

on February 18, 2010

in change, expectations, letting instead of making, the bigger picture, toddler tantrums, traveling with toddler and vacation

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My approach to the end of a good vacation is to panic.

My stomach twists into a little cherry-stem bow at the very thought of resuming a regular life. I see the piles of laundry arranged almost neatly in the suitcases as mountains of unsettled-ness to be scaled before I can breathe again. I feel like a small child clinging to the idea of having no responsibilities, coddled, cared for, and carefree. (Never mind that I seldom felt care- or responsibility-free in my actual childhood.)

If this is the way I feel after a merely mediocre time away — say that late fall weekend we spent in Hilton Head shuddering at the suburban-ness of it all, mourning the fact that we managed to book only two of our three days at the hotel with the good indoor pool, and reduced by unending rain to the playground at the outlet mall — imagine how sick I was to leave Los Angeles after days of 80-degree weather and the excitement of my sister’s wedding.

[A mea culpa here to all my LA friends who are just now discovering that I was in town and didn't bother to call them. We were consumed by wedding, which merely intensified my fantasies about a three-week visit to Southern California where we can properly see everyone we love. And then, I promise, I will call.]

Even if the only time I ever want to once again live in my old bedroom at my parents’ house is when I wake up in that bedroom the morning before getting on a plane home, the fact remains that I very much wanted to stay. Did I mention it was eighty degrees during the wedding weekend?

My mother-in-law was visiting as well, making the full-time childcare that usually renders me twice as exhausted at the end of a vacation as I was at the start of it much more of a breeze. “Do you mind if I leave her with you for a little while?” I would say, handing my fussy baby over to her grandmother’s eager hands as I rushed off to a yoga class.

And then there was the elevator drop of a let-down after the big wedding for which we’d been planning, the weekend of seeing relatives and friends. My mind was set for a Big Event and couldn’t quite settle into the concept of quiet, daily rhythms again.

And yet, as much as these feeling swirled me in circles of rising anxiety, it all paled in comparison to the task ahead: ferrying a three-year-old and an eleven-month-old to LAX, onto a plane for a four-and-a-half hour flight, and then into a car for another two-and-a-half hours to Asheville. Thank goodness for Backyardigans DVD’s.

Continue reading ‘When the Vacation Ends and You Still Have 2,500 Miles to Go. With Kids.’

When a Fresh Perspective Requires a Fresh Perspective (Don’t Look at Your Butt Redux)

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Melissa

on January 14, 2010

in aging, change, chattering mind, compassion, expectations, grace, inner beauty, inner peace, respecting your body, the bigger picture, vacation and yoga class

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You’d think I’d have learned my lesson when I looked at my butt in a mirror at my sister-in-law’s house while four months pregnant.

You would, in fact, not be expecting too much to think after that shock I would be smart enough not to look at my butt in a changing room mirror at a Nordstrom in Charlotte when I am ten months postpartum. When I am forty-three years old. Or ever, for that matter.

Some explanation is required.

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Lily Goes Full-Time

Published

Melissa

on January 4, 2010

in Mommy time, being connected to everything, being in the moment, breathing, centering, change, daycare, following your heart, sense of self, structure, the bigger picture, too much to do, trust, vacation, work and yoga class

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Today is Lily’s first day of full-time daycare.

Just writing it is making me cry again. (As is wandering past my bedroom and the empty bed on which she is not napping and knowing that I will not have that unspeakably joyful moment of my day when she first wakes up from her nap and grins at me and I lie next to her pulling her still-sleepy body against me and kiss every part of it I can find.)

It is, I know, time.

I have been spending months injecting little veins of longing to return to the things I have put on hold in my life into the warmth of our mornings together, like the marbles of fat that add richness to those pieces of red meat I have eschewed for the majority of my life. Maybe that’s why it’s not taking — because I don’t eat red meat the bits of fat that are my longing just aren’t sticking in my gullet. Instead, they hover out there as a concept that I don’t feel right now. Time for my own life? Pshaw. Who needs it?

And yet I soldier on in a direction I know in my core is right even if my surface emotions — the ones that made me start wailing when I put away a carton of formula this morning in a house empty of her — can’t bring themselves to agree.

I dress her before breakfast. I pack up lunches for both her and Jake. I unload on Jake’s teacher in a babble of still-postpartum hormones how I am freaking out about her starting full time. (”You have to do it,” she says kindly.) Even when Jake begins to scream and grab onto my leg, even as I walk stoically down the hall away from him abandoning my older child as I prepare to abandon my younger one, I stay on plan.

I drop Lily off with a smile spread across her pudgy cheeks. When it is time for me to leave, she looks at me for a moment as if she is going to cry, then turns around and gives a shriek of pleasure to the line of doll people her teacher has set up for her and never looks back. I have to turn off the radio on the drive home because my mind is feeling cluttered and unhinged. “Just make it home,” I tell myself. “Write about this. Start that legal project you’ve been putting off. Go to a yoga class.”

Now I’m home and I’m writing. And — I can see the humor in this, like a mediocre romantic comedy — I am still running from my desk to grab a box of tissues, the muscles in my jaw pulling the corners of my mouth into a clown frown as I cry in a hyena-like warble and whine to no one in particular, “I miss my baby!”

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Retreat of the December Mom

Published

Melissa

on December 31, 2009

in balance, breathing, centering, chattering mind, expectations, grace, intentions versus goals, letting go, letting instead of making, motion, practice, stuck at home with a child, too much to do, vacation and you can't control everything

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I’m still ashamed, even though I now recognize it was a December Mom thing.

There’s simply no excuse for being — I can still recall the out-of-body experience of watching myself do this — the mom screaming across a crowded coffee shop at her child. “Jake! Jake! JAKE! DO YOU WANT A BAGEL?” As if no one sits hunched over a laptop trying to experience a little peace and a nice cup of coffee between her and her child.

Yep, that was me.

On that early December Saturday afternoon, I became someone I never thought I’d be. The mother all us peaceful coffee drinkers hate. The woman oblivious to the fact that others do indeed occupy the somewhat inappropriate space to which she has spirited her children.

The one who is finally shamed by the sweet older man passing her as she gathers compostable forks and napkins and cups of water simply saying, “Quite a handful, isn’t it?”

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New Places, New Faces, New Records for Lack of Sleep

Published

Melissa

on October 23, 2009

in change, discomfort verus pain, motion, sleep, structure, traveling with toddler and vacation

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Nursing my daughter in the back seat of the Honda as we left town for the weekend — me kneeling over her with a hand braced against the window as if to wave (or perhaps hold out a big STOP!) at passersby — probably should have been a good clue that I would be facing some unique challenges on our travels.

You’d think I would have chosen this moment to consider the other adjustments my children would demand of me while we visited my sister-in-law’s house in West Virginia. You’d think I would have pondered how a seven-month-old might respond to a new setting, new faces, and the absence of the hound dogs with whom she is so fascinated. (No worries on the last front, as Pete and George made their houndness roundly accessible to her.)

I am sorry to report, however, that the only thought running through my mind as I leaned over Lily’s car seat while we idled at a traffic light was how glad I was that no one was waiting at the bus shelter at which my position required me to stare as if looking forward to a chat with whoever was sitting there ogling me.

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Labor Day Indeed

Published

Melissa

on September 9, 2009

in bed time, being in the moment, expectations, grace, letting go, potty training, social life, stuck at home with a child, too much to do, trust, vacation and you can't control everything

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As you may or may not know, Labor Day is a celebration of workers — a “yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country,” according to the Department of Labor.

What I want to know is who figured giving people a day off from work was a break from their labor. More particularly, I would like to invite anyone who thinks Labor Day is a nifty holiday to spend it with me. Especially Mike’s bosses, who deemed that he had to actually go to work on Labor Day, thereby increasing my parental labor exponentially.

Yes, yes, yes, I know that my children’s caregivers deserve a day off from their work. I’d deserve a day off too, if I actually had the kind of work where I had to wait for a day off to not work.

Nor do I mean to undermine the ideological underpinnings of the holiday, even though a good 80% of the country — including some recent Presidents — would if they knew it was created by the nineteenth century labor movement, which owed more than a little bit to socialism.

All I’m saying is that sometimes, when you have young children, a day off from work ends up being far more work than a day on. Toss in an Apple Festival and the last day the JCC pool is open for the summer, and you have just the right elements to reduce a mother to a puddle of tears.

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Everything Grows Faster in the Summer

Published

Melissa

on September 1, 2009

in being in the moment, change, chattering mind, daycare, expectations, friendship, motion, school, social life, structure, stuck at home with a child, vacation and you can't control everything

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I have acquired yet another in the growing number of items on my list of Things I Know Better Than to Do But Do Anyhow.

I have just finished sorting through Jake and Lily’s outgrown clothes, putting them away in anticipation of the spring kids’ rummage sale at the Jewish Community Center to which I will donate them. This newfound desire to pass my kids’ old clothes on to the JCC as a way of indirectly giving yet more money to my children’s preschool is born, no doubt, of my questionable decision to become a PTO rep for Jake’s new class.

One might logically assume my decision to become a PTO rep for Jake’s new class is what belongs on my list of Things I Know Better Than to Do But Do Anyhow. But it’s not. Or maybe it will be. Whatever pangs of PTO regret and stupidity may ring through my brain shortly, they will have to wait in line.

Because not only did I sort through my kids’ old clothes, I sorted through my kids’ old clothes as soon as I arrived home after dropping Jake off for his first day in his new class, his screams of “I want my Mommy!” still reverberating in my head as they reverberated down the hall when I left him. As I held each precious item up, trying to imagine its owner fitting into it, then remembering just what it was like when he did, I felt the distinct oof of my breath leaving me with the realization that — sniff — my children are growing up.

And not so suddenly, I found myself moistly whimpering, “I want my boy who wore these tiny tees!”

Continue reading ‘Everything Grows Faster in the Summer’

Are We There Yet? (Part Two: Preschool Version)

Published

Melissa

on August 18, 2009

in Mommy time, awareness, being in the moment, change, daycare, following your heart, grace, gratitude, letting go, partners, practice, sense of self, social life, stuck at home with a child, surrender and vacation

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Today was the end-of-the-school year potluck in Jake’s preschool class. Same summer-ish excitement that I recall from the end of my somewhat-older-than-two-and-a-half-years-old school years. Same excuse to eat ice cream instead of lunch. Same sense of happy displacement at having parents on the playground in the middle of the day.

Plus, as a mother, a little something more: Brwaaaah! My baby’s growing up! sadness.

I am not, I’m proud to say, overwhelmed by the sadness. In fact, it’s sitting comfortably beside a more solid sense of excitement. Jake’s moving into a new classroom! Jake’s nearly potty trained! Jake pontificated this morning on the progress of the garbage trucks as we stood on the front porch with Lily watching them make their way down the block!

“I think it’s across the street,” he said thoughtfully as we watched one turn around. “I see two lights,” he added, as if by way of explanation.

“Those red tail lights?” I asked, actually interested.

“Yes, the red tail lights,” he confirmed as if teaching me an important lesson about garbage trucks.

It thrills me, then, to watch my boy grow up, even though it makes me sad to know that these hefty thoughts of his will cease to be so all-consuming cute when they come out of an older mouth.

At the same time, it makes me sad to see the graduation bags in one of the preschool classrooms and to realize how quickly the time will arrive when Jake is the recipient of one, although I’m feeling pretty happy about his progression to an older class.

And then I have my comforting moments when I know that he can be growing up without being quite so grown up.

Like at the potluck today when he took Wendell’s ice cream.

Continue reading ‘Are We There Yet? (Part Two: Preschool Version)’

Traveling with Two: An Ode to My Generous Little Spirit

Published

Melissa

on May 12, 2009

in Mommy time, being connected to everything, compassion, expectations, following your heart, grace, gratitude, inner beauty, opening your heart, partners, practice, traveling with toddler and vacation

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Last week, Lily was awake during my acupuncture appointment.

Her newfound alertness was one of those developments you look forward to in theory, only to realize once you get there that it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sort of like when I used to stay up half the night anticipating a trip to Disneyland only to get there and find more in the way of crowds and heat than personal audiences with Mickey Mouse.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the way Lily and I now make my already favorite chore of folding laundry into a game where I wave each item of clothing in front of her rapidly darting blue eyes on its way from basket to drawer. I cherish the puckered little smile that blooms across her face when I bluster, “B-B-B-B-B,” to her. And I’m pretty proud of how I cobbled together parts from two partially functioning mobiles to make one under which she kicks and coos in wonder.

But what you gain in moments of unexpectedly woozy love when your infant approaches two months you lose in sleep time. Hers. My own is, thank goodness, increasing. Which is a good thing because I’m reduced to a pretty complete state of exhaustion at the end of a day spent trying to cram just as much dish washing and cooking and, yes, writing into the shrinking hours during which she now naps.

This cramming includes acupuncture.

The first time I brought her with me she was sound asleep in her car seat by the end of our ten-minute drive there. The most stressful part of my appointment was worrying that she’d awaken as I lay there full of needles, forcing me to tug at the ones sprouting from my wrists as the acupuncturist had advised me to do in just such an event.

This time, however, she proved her new prowess at staying awake by — quite amazingly in the context of our new world together — staying awake during the car ride there. And then sitting in her car seat in the waiting room gazing suspiciously about herself as she decided whether I was going to release her or she needed to complain. And, when we settled into the treatment room, finally letting me know it was most definitely not okay to leave her in the car seat stationed in front of what I took to be some lovely shadows.

Whether it was my anxiously fluttering pulse or his own worry that he wouldn’t be able to fit a proper treatment around a fussy infant, the acupuncturist was as nervously creative as I at suggesting things that might — one could always hope — placate her for long enough to make a difference. We moved the car seat around. I took her out of it. I swaddled her. I rocked her. I spread her blanket on the floor and assured her that we were in a very safe place. He offered another blanket to put under it as if to prove how safe and welcome she was.

Lily settled back cautiously. “Pretty comfy,” she seemed to say, still reserving judgment on the larger situation.

She looked around. “Decent shadows up there,” I could hear her say to herself as she gave a few experimental kicks.

“Okay?” I asked.

She kicked again and ignored me. “Okay,” was her answer.

And, true to her promise, she didn’t utter those first clicks of I-might-cry-ness until the acupuncturist started removing the needles.

“You are a generous spirit,” he told Lily graciously.

And thus defined her and my good fortune in a few short and honest words.

Continue reading ‘Traveling with Two: An Ode to My Generous Little Spirit’

“Mommy, Go Work.”

Published

Melissa

on January 2, 2009

in awareness, ayurveda, breathing, change, letting go, school, sense of self, surrender, too much to do, vacation, yoga class and you can't control everything

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“Mommy, go work.”

Jake said these words gently, with a firm hand on my knee as if to steady me for the blow of his very first (but, oh, I know, definitely not his last) leave-me-alone-already.

We were in his new classroom, on his first day at the “big kids” preschool across the street from his former pre-preschool. I had been in the room with him for something over an hour, slowly but surely coaxing him away from my lap, suggesting he interact with the other kids, gently edging my way toward the door. Proving, in other words, what a great mom I am to anyone who might be watching. Which was, approximately, no one.

Except Jake. Who, after a while, felt he had to coax me out of his hair with a gentle “Mommy, go work,” that assured me he was, indeed, okay without me.

I was thrilled.

I mean this in a pure, completely thrilled, not the least bit traumatized by my son’s step toward adulthood way. After all, I had been far more nervous about his transition to the new school than he was. He had already visited several times and knew there was a gym with basketball hoops, which is about all he really needs in life. I, on the other hand, had been struggling with a random comment from a parent I recently met whose son had been through the same class; the teacher, he told me, “is tough.”

Tough on the kids or tough the parents? I wondered nervously.

I had no worries about Jake. He doesn’t bite or push and apparently follows his teachers’ directions consistently even if he sometimes has something better to do than following his parents’. In other words, he had nothing to fear from a take-no-nonsense teacher.

No, I was worried about me. In particular, I spent most of the long drive home from our holidays in St. Louis imagining scenarios in which his new teacher would chew me out for unconscious infractions of the many, many rules a North Carolina preschool apparently must follow to receive state accreditation. Was I, in fact, worthy of sending my child to preschool?

My hour with Jake in his new class assured me that I was. His teacher, in fact, was quite kind, and not nearly as tough as some of the ones who had trained me at the pre-preschool. And so, finally, I found myself able to return my attention to Jake’s well being. And felt nothing but pleasure when he told me his being was more than just well, thanks very much, and he preferred I leave him to do what two-year-olds do in school.

I should have known it was too easy to last.

Continue reading ‘“Mommy, Go Work.”’

YogaMamaMe.com

Archive for the 'vacation' Category

When the Vacation Ends and You Still Have 2,500 Miles to Go. With Kids.

When a Fresh Perspective Requires a Fresh Perspective (Don’t Look at Your Butt Redux)

Lily Goes Full-Time

Retreat of the December Mom

New Places, New Faces, New Records for Lack of Sleep

Traveling with Two: An Ode to My Generous Little Spirit

“Mommy, Go Work.”

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