Because I'm the Mommy

Because I'm the Mommy I'm Amy Gulli -- a journalist mommy trying to do it all. And the results of that are usually entertaining and not at all what I intended.

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Dear World,

Please stop so I can get off for a while.

Not forever. Just for a little bit. Like, maybe somewhere between 20 minutes and 60 days.

Thanks,

Amy

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sheslump:

HA! Yes, ^ this.

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A real ceiling? Someday ... maybe

So I went away from the InterWebs for three days -- no Facebook, no Twitter, no Tumblr, no bill-paying.

The first of those days was my Samantha's 8th birthday. Her summation of the day? "Best. Birthday. EVER."

The following two days? Working toward making the construction site that is our living room closer to a real, livable room. Like, for example, preparing to put a ceiling back up.

When's the last time I had an actual ceiling in my kitchen or living room, you ask? Why, that would be about five years ago. The electrical wiring is quite lovely -- and, thanks to hard work last weekend, now much safer than it has ever been -- but I must say that it's hard to decorate a room around black wires that look like snakes ready to leap down and bite your head.

I might get a real ceiling soon. *fingerscrossed*

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I'm dying from laughter. You've gotta read this. *wipingtears*

thejonesfamilyfive:

Last week my mom took my boys downtown for lunch. She watches them for me every Wednesday while I go to work and sometimes she’ll take them out for treats and special meals. This weeks meal was at Berryland Cafe, which is the epitome of a small town diner. Everyone knows everyone and it has actual...

[addelburgh]

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I'm not a big reblogger, and this photo has nothing to do with parenting -- although Lord knows my cat has worn his share of hats and shirts stuffed on him by my kids -- but this is just too cute!

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Night and day

For the following post, "day shift" = 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (except for Saturday, when it = 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.) and "night shift" = 3 p.m. to 1 a.m.

So I worked a day shift Saturday, night shift Sunday and I'm working night shift tonight. Then it's day shift tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday.

If you're keeping track, that's day, night, night, day, day, day.

The upside?

I just found out I have nine vacation days left. NINE! VACATION! DAYS!

Which means I promptly whacked off that last day shift this week. Buh-bye, Thursday. Hello, time home on my daughter's 8th birthday!

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Here's what my kids are doing today:

And where am I?

At work.

I suck. Royally. *sigh*

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You're nice, but ...

My 3-year-old, Noah, got to hang out this weekend with one of his best-ever friends, an almost-4-year-old girl named Piper.

Since Noah and Piper were about a year old, they have LOVED each other. We get together with their parents about twice a year, and Noah and Piper spend those times glued together, playing toys and kissing each other.

This weekend, at a Fourth of July picnic, Noah and Piper were sharing a can of soda after an intense play session in a huge sand pile.

As Noah handed the can back to her, Piper said, "Y'know what, Noah? You're a really good sharer. But you have really little feet."

I spit out the drink of water in my mouth. Noah said, "Thanks."

And then they spent the next 10 minutes giggling as they connected random words with the word "poopy" (as in, "Poopy in a rock! Poopy on a dog!") .

Piper definitely won that game when she blurted out, "Poopy-grass-station!"

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Camping out -- NOT

We set up a ginormous tent (that we had completely forgotten we owned) in our backyard this weekend for our first-ever Gulli family camp-out.

I live along a creek that runs out of state gamelands, so we had a beautiful setting. Water flowed over the rock dam that some neighbors built. We roasted jumbo marshmallows over a fire set right at the water's edge. We read library books by flashlight. We played Connect Four (which is quite a feat when you have a 3-year-old "helping" you).

The kiddos even went to sleep easily. Noah put his two fingers into his mouth, sucked on them about four times and started snoring. Samantha made shadow puppets for another 10 minutes or so, then turned off the flashlight, closed her eyes and zonked out.

It was glorious.

I lay there, looking at the stars through the mesh of one window, then dozed off to the sound of gurgling water.

And then Sam cried.

It was somewhere around 1:30 a.m. At first, I did that middle-of-the-night, mostly-still-asleep Mommy patting: Ssssshhhh, there now, sweetheart, it's OK, you're fine, go back to sleep.

More crying. Approaching sobbing level.

So I had to wake up a little.

"Whaswrong?" I mumbled in her ear.

"Ihaveabugbiteandit'sreallyitchy," she mumbled back, getting snot on my cheek.

"ItsOK," I murmured, trying to scratch it for her.

She snapped up in shock, scaring the crap out of me. "Don't scratch it!" she sobbed. "That'll make it WORSE! Then it will spread and get real big and I'M NOT ALLOWED TO SCRATCH THEM!"

*Note to self: Sometimes, what is sound parenting advice at one moment bites you in the ass at another moment.

I'll spare you the details of the next hour, which involved traipsing into the house with a flashlight, a cold cloth on the bug bite, more sobbing, and some more sobbing.

After much coaxing -- and some unfortunate yelling -- on my part, Sam finally admitted that she wasn't crying about the bug bite. She was crying because a bug bite meant there was a bug in the tent that had crawled on her, and she couldn't bear the thought of going back out and lying back down in a place where there were so many bugs running rampant and, therefore, likely to creep across her skin at any moment.

So our camping adventure ended about six hours early. That'd be about 2:30 a.m., when everybody grabbed their blankies and pillows and went inside to their respective beds.

Maybe I should've forced her to face her fear. Maybe I should've just zipped her butt into the tent, rolled over and covered my head with a pillow.

To be fair, however, she might have had a point.

When I went out Monday afternoon to tear down the tent, I encountered a rust-colored spider roughly the size of Alaska -- OK, that's an exaggeration; it was more like Texas -- that I had to beat to death with my thankfully-handy flashlight.

*Shudder*

I hate bugs.

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I didn't make the list

Parenting magazine recently put out a list of the top 100 cities for families.

I'll ruin the surprise for you: Washington, D.C., came in first.

The commenters largely rip the list to shreds, saying that whatever 84 criteria were used to rate these cities must have been created by drunken Smurfs.

I've not been to most of the cities on the list (I've been to D.C.), although I'd certainly be willing to go to Honolulu to verify whether it deserves its No. 7 ranking.

But New Orleans as No. 16? New York City as No. 24? Philadelphia in the top 50? Not so sure about those.

And how big must a city be for consideration on this list? Was my city of Harrisburg, PA, for example, too small to compete?

Thoughts?

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What were they ON?

Somebody jacked my kids up on crack this morning. Or maybe they injected Pixie Sticks into their veins. Either way, MAN, were they high-strung and annoying! I couldn't get them to focus on anything: eating breakfast, getting dressed, putting on shoes, not poking me repeatedly in the back, not tying things around the cat's fat body. Thank goodness I got to take them to day care.

How do you handle times when your kids are like that?

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Warning: Doll At Work

Samantha specifically requested this morning that I bring her newest doll (gotten this weekend from Pop Frank, who's my dad) to work with me today.

This is the note Sam scribbled and put on top of the doll in my car to make sure I remembered her request:

So I've got this flame-red-haired doll in a multi-toned-pink iridescent dress on my desk. Here she is emulating what I do at work:

Yes, I stand around on a tissue box and do nothing.

And here she is being victimized by the alligator head a co-worker bought for me on her recent trip to Florida:

The poor groundhog in the back was going to intervene, but then he realized he likes all his stuffing where it is.

Yes, I'm wasting time. I've got a three-day weekend coming up, and my best friend is getting married. So maybe I needed a doll at work today.

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Ack!

I'm pretty sure I've got a bug crawling around in my shirt and biting me in random places.

I'm totally freaking out. And I can't really go into the work bathroom and rip my shirt off, can I??

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OK, glad it's not just me.

I've had to work out a relationship with my dad since I became an adult, but it's still not great. I spent WAY too much time in bars with him as a kid, during what was supposed to be his time to visit with me and my brother. And when he showed up to take me to softball practice and pitching camps, he was always embarrassingly drunk.

For some reason, nobody makes a card that says, "Gee, Dad, thanks for trying your darndest to screw me up. It only partially worked." greenerie replied to your post: Father's Day, in all its glory

Don’t get me started! My handsome father is quite the handful as a parent. He thinks the world of us, but not enough to remain gainfully employed, not addicted to alcohol, or out of trouble with the law. I love him anyway, but it ain’t always easy.

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Father's Day, in all its glory

Anybody else have a crappy dad? And feel like this holiday brings back too many bad memories every year?

For the record, my husband is an awesome daddy. And we got him exactly what he wanted today: two giant bags of Pretzel M&M's.

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Like a pterodactyl

Took the kids swimming yesterday for a bit (this is them resting their tummies after having some majorly yummy ice cream).

Here's my favorite exchange of the day:

Noah, in the baby pool: Mom, there's fish in there!

Me: Are you gonna catch one? Be like a bear and grab one out of the water?

Noah: No, Mom, like a pterodactyl!

"Pterodactyl" sounds so cute when a 3-year-old says it ...

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Interesting articles

In case you've got a few minutes to kill, here are some interesting links I've come across in the last two days.

This one is by Lisa Belkin, who writes Babble.com's No. 1-rated mommy blog. She writes about whether some parents are too involved in their children's lives and are, therefore, preventing them from developing coping skills so they can function as adults.

It made me think of a rant I go on sometimes -- usually only inside my own head -- when I encounter parents who are still letting their 25-year-old child live in their house without having to work or pay rent or go to college. I'll spare you that rant for now, however, because I don't think I'm allowed to type most of the words I want to use on my work computer.

And this one is by Madeline Holler, who asks why American women should have to be less ambitious in their careers to find a healthy work/life balance.

I struggle with trying to balance my job and my family EVERY SINGLE DAY. It's tiring. It's frustrating. When I'm at work, I'm thinking about my kids and feeling guilty about not being with them. When I'm with my kids, I'm thinking about what I forgot to do at work. And I often have to remind myself that every member of my family likes to eat, which is a big part of why I go to work in the first place.

Your thoughts?