We are having nap problems, part of which is totally my own fault – but that doesn’t make it suck any less. A few weeks ago when Caroline started fighting naps, I let her pick which bed she slept in. Sometimes it was her bed, sometimes it was Evan’s bed, sometimes it was the guest bed, and sometimes it was my bed. One day she was up in my bedroom and found the iPad under the pillow. Since she was born in a world that has never been without iPads (OMG flying cars are totally next) she unlocked it, found her app folder and watched Mickey Mouse until she fell asleep. I heard her over the monitor and thought it was funny – “Ha ha ha what a clever baby, how cute that she’s watching her show! And also that nap was so easy!”

You can probably see where this is going. I let her get away with using the iPad before naps as long as she was going to bed with no complaints. It was just so eeeeeeasy to say “Naptime, Caroline!” and have her run happily upstairs and jump into bed to lie down. She never made a peep and would fall asleep really fast. Since it happened RIGHT at the same time Evan stopped napping altogether I just…didn’t have the energy to fight it. Trust me, letting technology put my kid to sleep is LOW on the scale of “Thing I Feel Guilty About As A Mother.”

So anyways, this system worked fine – GREAT even – for a while. But for the last few days she’s been spending longer and longer messing around with the Disney Junior app and less and less time actually sleeping. She does eventually fall asleep – around 3:30 – but then I have to wake her up after an hour so she’ll go back to sleep at bedtime. I thought maybe she was just getting to an age where she didn’t need a nap anymore but AHAHAHHA NO ABSOLUTELY NOT. We tried it on Wednesday and she was a wreck by 6:30. Giving her a bath was like trying to wash a rabid cat and twice as noisy. It took her a full day to recover from missing just one nap. But on the other hand, if she’s basically just going to watch TV all afternoon I could at least keep her downstairs where I can interact with her (or, you know, we could do puzzles or she and Evan can run in circles and try to ride the dog. Again).

I suppose the first thing I should do is just STOP letting her have the iPad, but I’m dreading the screaming. There is already a LOT of angry child in this house and this is one the few things we DON’T fight about. But the current system isn’t exactly working either and I’d rather work on changing it now then a month from now when it would be even harder to stop. Any suggestions for my totally, completely, ridiculously first world problem?

I’d sort of been dreading Halloween. Caroline isn’t the biggest fan of costumes and when she doesn’t want to wear something she ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT WEAR IT. Evan changed his mind 15 times on what he wanted to be, so getting him into a costume we actually had in the house was doubtful. We failed at trick-or-treating at Sesame Place, they had no interest in dressing up for the Seaport or the Aquarium events, and the idea of drag-carry-pushing two kids up and down the hills in my neighborhood was giving me a migraine in advance. I’d been looking for excuses to get out of it pretty much all week, but they managed to behave JUST well enough that I couldn’t take away their Halloween after the Little Einsteins got them so jazzed up about it.

His shirt says “Will Trade Sister For Candy”

It turns out that sometimes lowering your expectations is the best thing you can do. Since all I was hoping for was one block of non-complaining children who said “thank you” after getting a piece of candy, I was blown away by my super polite, super friendly, willing to take turns, willing to walk on their own 2 feet, pleasant, costume-wearing children who made it three blocks before we came home and handed out candy instead, since leaving a bucket with a note that said “Please take 2 pieces!” led to an EMPTY BUCKET after only half an hour. Either we had 200 trick-or-treaters in 30 minutes or some people are douchebags who can’t follow directions.

Since I was pretty much expecting that to happen, I actually saved the good candy for Evan and Caroline to hand out. BOOM. That’s what you get for being jerkfaces, neighborhood kids. Enjoy your fireballs and generic lollipops. Too bad your parents never loved you enough to take you trick-or-treating themselves and teach you how to get whole handfuls of candy from old ladies who think you are absolutely the cutest thing they’ve ever seen.

You know, like my kids:

Caroline vetoed the tutu that was supposed to go under the skirt, but wore the wings all night – which is more than I was hoping for. I’m still ridiculously proud I made her costume.

We only had one person totally baffled by Evan’s costume. I said “It’s from ‘Where The Wild Things Are?'” She said “Oh, my kids are grown up, I don’t know about these shows kids are watching nowadays.”

E made it home in time to come with us, which made the kids super happy

A little flashlight thrown into one of those $1 pumpkin buckets makes a GREAT light for trick-or-treating.

We had a great time. We gave out $35 worth of candy from our house, even to the way-too-old kids who couldn’t be bothered to dress up. At one point, three teenage boys wearing hats and scarves stood on my steps and sang “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”, then asked if I had any candy canes or figgy pudding (they turned down my very sincere offer of a whole handful of candy since I got such a kick out of them). We let the kids eat several pieces of candy and enjoy their sugar buzz for an hour before Caroline went into a trance in front of Mickey Mouse and we made them go to bed.

I hope your Halloween was just as fun! Now please excuse me while I throw myself FULL FORCE into Caroline’s 2nd birthday party.

I have discovered a secret about motherhood that I’m a little worried might not ACTUALLY be a secret. Maybe every single other mom already knows and I’ve just been lalalalaing my way through the past 3+ years.

Having a schedule makes me better at my job.

I was going to say “makes me a better mom” but it’s more than that. I’m better at managing my time, I’m better at feeding everyone healthy food, I’m more interested in playing blocks and reading stories, my house is in better shape and I sleep better at night. A schedule is like the opposite of kryptonite to this SuperMom. Sunlight. Sunlight is what made Superman strong, right?

After I left/lost my job when I was pregnant with Evan, I realized I needed to fill my time with something besides couch naps and daytime TV. I spent hours redecorating the house, painting the entire second floor and third floor. I blogged like it was my job. I baked a lot. But “busy” is not the same as a schedule and giving birth made it worse. At home with a newborn I was just trying to SURVIVE. It took almost 5 months before I could even commit to showing up at a breastfeeding support group regularly. Since then we’ve added a lot of activities and favorite places – Stroller Strides, gymnastics, the zoo, the aquarium, playdates, whatever – but none of those are mandatory and/or took up more than a couple hours a week.

But now we have SCHOOL. And don’t tell me it’s not mandatory – my kid might read this blog one day and I have told him quite firmly going to school is The Law and Mr. Policeman would be very angry if he doesn’t go. It structures our week. It gives me a few hours during which Getting Shit Done is much, much easier so Shit Gets Done. Laundry, check! Cleaning under the couch, check! Setting up the DVR for all the fall shows, check! Organizing the kids’ dressers with fall transition clothes and dropping off old, outgrown, non-favorite stuff at Goodwill! I’ve only got 2.5 hours so prepare for some of the fastest sock-sorting you’ve ever seen. I could win the sock-sorting OLYMPICS.

For the first time in more than 3 years I have to say “Let me check my calendar” before committing to stuff because I might actually have somewhere to BE at 11 am on a Tuesday. My phone is set up with alerts like “bake for bake sale” and “preschool open house” and “switch laundry to dryer” and I love it. When I wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose – especially a purpose that requires me to put on pants and be out the door in 2 hours – I don’t get to 5 pm and think “oops, there goes another day”.

I suspect this is part of why people say being a stay-at-home-mom is so hard. It IS hard to spend your entire day taking care of small humans who don’t appreciate it in any way. It’s hard and thankless and frustrating and repetitive. It’s easy to fall into a “who cares?” pattern when it comes to the state of your hair and your floors and your life. I’m not saying there aren’t amazing, super, awesome, fun moments too. There are. Every day. But if you look at parenting as one big long stretch, those first few years as a SAHM are an endless blob of unstructured time, with days and nights often running right into each other and pants being worn for far too many days in a row.

Maybe I’m still in the preschool honeymoon period and pretty soon I’ll realize all this driving back and forth and remembering snack for Special Helper Day and avoiding PTA phone calls is for the birds, but until then I’m really enjoying only dragging ONE screaming child around Target and mopping the floors more than once every decade.

…Although right now I’m using the time mostly to deal with the Saddest Teething Baby Even In The Whole World Who Is Getting Her Two Year Molars Or At Least I Hope So Because Otherwise She’s Just Turned Into A Huge Jerk.

Don’t let her fool you – she flounced off and pouted under this tree for like 10 minutes because I wouldn’t let her eat a rotten apple off the ground. WORST. MOTHER. EVER.

I impulse-bought Evan a bike yesterday at Goodwill. It was outside the doors on the sidewalk and he fell instantly in love. After we got inside, Caroline melted down because I wouldn’t let her climb the display of Halloween knick-knacks while Evan stood quietly and angelically next to me declaring “I not naughty, Mommy! I a good boy!” I felt like it was $7 well spent in the scheme of positive reinforcement.

Evan is totally convinced he’s going to take off on his little bike at any second, despite the fact that he’s never ridden one before. He’s barely mastered forward pedaling on his tricycle, but that hasn’t stopped him from hopping right up on a two-wheeler and hurling himself at the floor repeatedly. Don’t worry, he keeps breaking his fall with his face.

I spent most of the day hunched over with one hand on the back of his seat and one clutching the handlebars, trying to help him steer and balance and move forward at the same time while shouting “NOT BACKWARDS. BACKWARDS MEANS STOPPING!”

It was sort of like getting kicked in the face with a metaphor for motherhood, sore back and all.

I put training wheels on the little blue bike last night after he went to sleep so today is another metaphor for motherhood, only this time it’s about letting go to see what he’s capable of on his own.

I only wish I still had a 3-year-old’s exuberance for falling on my face instead of the fear of failing I carry around as a grown up. What if I can’t do it? What if I look foolish? What if I get a boo-boo on my knee or my elbow or my heart? I’m too old for training wheels but I’m still unsteady enough to wish I wasn’t. All I can do is keep moving forward and learn as I go.

Being three years old is really hard. Parenting someone who is three years old is also really hard. Yesterday was one of those days where “hard” turned into “damn near impossible” and I considered just letting my kid grow up to be a selfish, inconsiderate jerk. It would be so much easier.

By 9:30 am Evan and I were both grumpy and whiny. Ten minutes later I was hissing at him to START LISTENING and FIX YOUR ATTITUDE or we would leave gymnastics immediately and he would go home for an extra-serious-in-your-room-full-10-minute-time-out. Ninety seconds later I had to follow through with my threat and drag him kicking and screaming out of the building.

Literally kicking and screaming. Barefoot, since he punched me in the face when I tried to put his shoes on. I pinned him under one arm and led a very sad and confused Caroline with my other hand to the car, where I briefly considered just LEAVING Evan so his sister could finish class. I did not leave him in the car, but I did stand behind the van for 90 seconds taking deep breaths after I strapped him in. Getting punched in the face by your kid is the kind of low point that requires deep, cleansing breaths. They don’t do much to improve your day but at least you can feel in control of SOMETHING, even if it is your own lungs. Take that, lungs! You’re not the boss of me!

The rest of the morning was just as bad. We both used our angry voices. He threw things. We both cried. He asked for a hug and I said no. It was not my proudest moment. After we both calmed down and had a snuggle and said we were sorry we talked about his feelings and why he was upset. He wasn’t really sure, but was worried Daddy was going to be mad so I assured him we still loved him even if he sometimes acted naughty. We talked a lot about being angry and how to express those feelings without hurting people. We agreed using kind voices was much nicer and that we would be friends and love each other forever and watch Little Einsteins during quiet time.

Then we had lunch.

“Mommy, I don’t feel empty anymore!” says Evan.

“Empty?” says Mommy.

“Yeah! I was empty and sad. Now I FULL so I happy!”

*FACEPALM*

Hungry. My kid was HUNGRY. He melted down because I didn’t feed him enough breakfast. HOURS of fighting that could have been prevented with a bowl of fricking cereal.

Sometimes being three years old is really hard because your mother is an idiot.