by Amy on January 28, 2010
I have, at times, struggled with being both a feminist as well as a stay-at-home mom. I’m not one that likes labels and while I never had any plans to stay home with the kids, on the verge of Harper’s first year of kindergarten, I know I made the right decision.
One day last week or the week before I was going to get a snack for the kids or something in the kitchen and I turned on the TV and Dr. Phil was on. Now, I don’t normally watch Dr. Phil. I used to really like him, then he went kind of ghetto and I stopped watching. But before I changed the channel, I caught a little of this particular show.
There was a couple with some marital troubles and he was trying to help. He asked them to look each other in the eye and list three things the other one could do to work on their marriage. The wife said things like “be more affectionate” and “make me feel good about myself.” The husband’s top two were 1) be more organized and 2) keep the house cleaner.
I think I still might have a bruise on my jaw from where it hit the ground. Really, he thinks the problem in his marriage is that his wife isn’t neat enough? Your RELATIONSHIP problems are because she’s not vacuuming as often as you’d like?
I was floored. I cannot even imagine being in a similar situation. If a Doug came home and told me something like that, I’m pretty sure I’d respond along the lines of, “If you don’t like how I clean the house, then get up off your lazy ass and do it yourself. I am not your mother or your maid.”
I’ve never fit the mold of a house wife. I don’t feel like it’s my “job” to clean the house. My job is to keep the children alive. If Doug gets home at the end of the day and the children are breathing and reasonably happy, then I have been successful. Anything else I do is gravy. Perhaps I’m the exception and not the rule.
I have a feeling that the man on Dr. Phil had some other problems, if he thought his marital problems were because of an untidy house. I’m willing to bet he could hire a maid to clean the house, and his marriage would still be in trouble.
I realize I’m incredibly lucky to be married to a man who doesn’t expect me to cook and clean and pick up after him. I do the lion’s share of the housework, but that’s more because Doug doesn’t clean to my standards than anything else. I still make him do his own laundry. I cook, but that’s because I like to.
I’m lucky that in my tenth year of marriage I’m still as happily married as I was on my wedding day. But I wonder about people who are married to men who expect them to clean and cook and who don’t feel like helping with the children is their job. And I’m not sure if I just got really lucky, or if I just chose really well. Probably both.
Or maybe, I just expect more. People tend to live up to the expectations set for them.
Either way, if I had that guy from Dr. Phil in front me, he’d get an earful. Roar!
by Doug on January 23, 2010
Being a Dad is cool in a lot of ways. One of them is that you can disappear with the kids for the day doing something fun and get all kinds of brownie points. I took the kids down to the Children’s Museum today. Amy was appreciative and apparently some of her Mom friends are jealous. (Dad doing air travel alone with the kids earns more brownie points, however. Probably a level of difficulty multiplier or something.)
Cole, Harper, & I had a great time. We started in the dinosaur section, doing some “fossil” work, then made our way up to the dragon subsection of the dinosaur section. One of the points stressed was how people not knowing much about fossils and finding a dinosaur fossil might start conjuring up dragon myths. They had a little group activity where someone would describe a mystery fossil only they had been allowed to see. Cole volunteered to be the one who described the fossil – then everyone came up with different drawings based on the one description and then the mystery fossil was revealed. Kind of like a paleontology sketch version of “telephone.”
After that, we just generally wandered around. Being a parent is a lot easier when you can pretty much let the kids go where they want knowing that there will be an activity that’s reasonably fun, active, and educational just around the corner. Eventually we made our way to the Power of Children exhibit. This one is not all fun and games, to say the least. It contains sections with Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges, and Ryan White.
They are tough subjects for kids, but I’ve never had any intent to hide these sorts of things from my kids. I think they need to be aware of the dark side of the world, I think they’ll be aware of it anyway, and I think they are more durable than we give them credit for. Still, it’s awfully tough to explain Nazis to a six year old. (I’m singling out Cole because I think he pretty much grasped the situation. Harper’s still young enough that a lot of it went over her head.) He just can’t fathom how and why people would be so mean to other people. I know the explanations, but I’m not sure I really understand it either. Maybe it’s common to all kids to one degree or another, but watching him grapple with the subject, it felt like he was every inch my boy. I can still remember wrestling with the question of why people can be so horrible to each other when it’s so utterly easy to be nice to one another.
There were pictures of a Nazi gathering with a lot of people with their hands up saluting Hitler. He asked if they were all bad guys. I told him that there were only a few bad guys and a whole lot of people who were too afraid or too unaware to stand up to the bad guys. He observed that the Anne Frank story was a pretty sad story. I agreed, but pointed out that it was important to learn about these kinds of stories so that maybe the next time there were bad guys getting control of things, we’d remember what happened before and stand up to them before they got a chance to do such horrible things. We also talked about how people who are mad or angry or scared sometimes blame their problems on people who are different.
The Ruby Bridges section was about a girl who integrated a New Orleans school. There was a short live performance where an actor from the Children’s Museum told the story, then took questions. Sure enough, Cole volunteered a comment to the effect that Martin Luther King had solved that problem of people being mean to other people because they looked different. The boy certainly is not afraid to share his thoughts. The actor told him that the problem wasn’t entirely solved but Dr. King had done a lot to help the situation.
After that, we moved on to happier places at the Museum. They said they wanted to stay for the end of business parade, but that was about an hour off. The kids were still behaving themselves, but were starting to look a little vague. I was tired too. So, we left at about 4 and headed home. Both kids fell asleep before Zionsville. A very nice day.
by Doug on January 22, 2010
Cole has his first loose tooth, and he’s very excited. He and Harper went to the dentist, and the dentist noticed it. He’s been wiggling ever since. Actually, Amy tells me that when they got back home, the first thing he did was take a big bite into an apple and was a little disappointed when that didn’t take out his tooth. I can’t remember if that trick is in a Caillou episode, one of our Berenstein Bears books or something else. Just another sign that he’s growing up.
Harper made progress as well. This was her second trip to the dentist, and I think he was actually permitted to look in her mouth.
by Amy on January 4, 2010
Harper has the best one liners in the house. She is constantly cracking us up with her comments and advice. It helps a lot that she has such a great vocabulary, she whips out these words that have us rolling. I should set up a twitter account for her, and then start tweeting the things she says. That would be quite amusing.
Some recent comments:
“Mommy, did you know that air is the enemy of freshness?”
“The trash is furious!”
“My brain thinks I need to hear Dixie Chicks right now.”
“But I just wanted to spend some time in my underpants!”
There was one recently that had me and Doug both rolling, but I can’t seem to remember what it was. She’s hilarious though, and quite the charmer.
The other day she was at grandma’s house and I called on my way to pick her up. She got on the phone and her little voice sounded so different, so childish. She speaks so well, I sometimes forget that she’s just four years old. But hearing her on the phone, it brought it back that she really is just a little girl.
I love my Harper.
by Amy on January 1, 2010
One decade ago today I was newly engaged and about to start planning my wedding. It’s been a good ten years, and I’m looking forward to the next ten years.
Progress continues on the “let’s sell our house” extravaganza. The home staging is going to suck the life out of me before too long. Did you know that it matters what kind of shower curtain you have in the bathroom? And what color your sheets are? And what your bottle of hand soap looks like? Seriously, HAND SOAP!
I know, I know, I’m not selling the soap, I’m selling a “feeling.” People need to feel “at home” when they view the house. So I will do what they tell me to do. Which apparently includes making 11 trips to storage, 16 hours of painting, and basically making my house much less comfortable for us. I guess if the reward is that our house moves fast, then I can live with it. If my house doesn’t sell quickly, I think I’m going to sue the world.
We finally had to break it to the children about our plans. I didn’t want to say anything until we had some sort of agreement on the house we want, but since we can’t really work that out without the sale of our home and I needed to start hauling out furniture, we had to tell them. The initial reaction was pretty typical. Cole, Mr.-I-Love-Everything-just-how-it-is was quite upset. He cried a lot about how he’d miss this house so much. Harper was ready to pack up her boxes and go, and even tried to console Cole by telling him, “It’s okay Cole, I’ll just remember this house.” Cole’s feeling better about the whole process and didn’t freak out when he came home from Grandma’s and found half our furniture gone, rearranged, and the Wii moved into a closet. So that’s good.
In other news, Cole and Harper are now on Facebook, thanks to Grandma. She introduced them to a game that I refuse to play called Farmville. After spending two lovely days with Grandma during which time I moved furniture, painted, and majorly rearranged my home, they came back wanting to play Farmville. Excellent….
by Amy on December 26, 2009
So, I’ve been twittering lately, leaving people wondering if perhaps I’m losing my mind. That’s certainly possible, but I thought I’d go ahead and put some answers here, even though I’ve practically stopped blogging and am the worst blogger ever.
We’re putting our house up for sale. There. That’s the news.
We have outgrown our house. We need more space. Doug needs a basement to decorate terribly and be lazy in. The kids need bigger spaces to play in. I need to have a place where I can escape and our house is just not it.
I’m always looking at what’s on the market. I’m constantly on top of what’s on the market, occasionally looking at houses if I think it may be good. One day, while hunting, I saw one that might work. A little higher priced than I wanted. A little dated. But with lots of room, a finished basement, and a location that I love.
Long story short, we need to sell our house to buy this other one. So we’re working on it. I’m hauling stuff out to storage, bringing in other furniture, and I hired a professional stager to make it work. Hopefully we get an offer fast.
I have a lot of work to do in the next 10 days. House goes on the market January 5th.
Wish me luck!
by Amy on December 17, 2009
The year before last, when Cole was in afternoon preschool, I would make up games on the way to school to keep Harper from falling asleep in the car. If she fell asleep on the way there, then she wouldn’t take a nap when we got home. One day, as we were driving, I was doing the whole, “What’s a horse say?” routine. The kids were answering each question I’d ask and it was fun. I was running out of questions, so I blurted out, “What’s a mailbox say?”
To that they didn’t have an answer, so I answered for them, “Put mail in me! Put mail in me!” They thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard and laughed themselves silly all the way to school.
Since then, occasionally we’ll play that same game. “What’s a house say?” (live in me) or “What’s a tree say?” (put leaves on me) etc.
Today, Harper and I were goofing around and we started playing that game and I said, “What’s daddy say?”
Harper’s response: “Give me hugs and kisses! Give me hugs and kisses!”
I almost didn’t ask, because I was afraid of what the answer might be! But I did. “What’s mom say?”
Harper’s response: “I love you! I love you!”
That made me really happy – I wasn’t sure what to expect, and certainly “NO! NO!” would have been a fairly truthful answer.
