From the monthly archives:

July 2010

On absurd displays of mommy/ baby behavior

by selfmademom on July 31, 2010 · 3 comments

Last week I was privvy to some ridiculous mommy and baby behavior. I’m usually not a judgmental mother. Really. But some mommy/ baby behavior needs to be called out. Like the mom who brought her baby and her nanny to the nail salon to … no joke … get her baby’s nails cut and buffed.

At first, I thought the baby was a little girl trying on nail polish for the first time. Fine. Sitting on her nanny’s lap with her mom taking pictures right next to her. Ok, I guess they were excited. When I realized that the baby was a boy, and was only there to get his nails cut, I was perplexed. He was no more than 13 months old. Was this his weekly visit to the salon, I thought?

Yes, cutting a baby’s nails can be one of the more fear-inducing tasks that parents must do to their children. You have to cut their nails to avoid Edward Scissorhands-like face scratching, but you don’t want to cut them too short to the point where you’re drawing blood on the digits.

So, you may ask for help. I remember that my sister-in-law first cut my older son’s nails when I was too afraid to try. After a few practice runs with her, I was like a regular trained nail tech. Maybe you are lucky enough to have an experienced nanny help and she may be assigned the chore. Or maybe you have no choice but to just suck it up and figure it out yourself like every one of our ancestors who didn’t have nail clippers, scissors and filers did before us.

There’s outsourcing your baby’s hygiene maintenance and then there’s OUT-of-your-mind sourcing where you have the hired help to cut the nails but still pay a pro to do it while you just watch on the sidelines idly. I can only hope the edges were a perfect rounded square.

In other absurd mommy and baby news, a bunch of moms in my baby class were chatting about where our older kids were going to preschool. I run in a small, fortunate crowd of people who will be sending our children to a private school next year. My husband and I worked hard to give him that opportunity and I am grateful he will get educated in a place where I think he will do his best. It was a whole, big, stressful process I won’t get into here, but didn’t even think to worry about it until my son was three-and-a-half.

However, I encountered a mom last week in the class who was already stressing about where her five-month-old child was going to preschool. That she already called the school of her choice and said she would put down a deposit TODAY if that meant her son could get in in 3 years.

I’m working on an article about “hands-off” parenting about how we should back off of our kids and let them learn, grow and make mistakes on their own. Not guide them into what we “think” they should do, but what they “want” to do. We all want the best for our kids’ education, but how do you know at five months what kind of child yours will be at preschool age? I don’t fault that mom for being nervous, but I would warn her to not let her nervous energy be transposed onto her innocent baby already. There’s plenty of time to be worried about school and grades and “getting in.”

Let’s leave our kids’ nails and schooling up to nature a little, shall we?

Cross-posted to Second-City Baby.

{ 3 comments }

Commisermom

by selfmademom on July 18, 2010 · 12 comments

You know her well. She always has a story that’s “worse” than yours. She likes to tell you how “bad” it is. She finds pleasure commiserating with you about the sad, bad, ugly, painful, bumpy and awful.

She’s commisermom.

It’s no wonder that NY Magazine could publish a feature story with the ballsy headline of “Why Parents Hate Parenting.” Half the time we’re all just complaining to each other in the hopes that we can find common ground in the brutal reality of parenthood.

I had my first commisermom moment when I was 7 months pregnant with my first son. My dear friend who birthed her first child five months earlier than I was due, sent me a Homer-length story about how bad the last trimester of my pregnancy would be because hers was awful. Sitting at work, I was petrified of the three months ahead of me. Would my ankles swell? Would I endure back pain? The answer was none of the above. As it turned out (besides two weeks of “fake” bedrest), I had an easy, painless and uneventful last trimester. She said she was giving me a helpful reality check. I took it as a moment for her to drag me down with her into bad pregnancy moments. We are good friends and laugh about it now, but at the time, it just didn’t seem that funny.

As moms, we like to find good company in the bad. There’s not a single mom I know (including myself) who hasn’t chimed into a story that starts, “you won’t believe what Johnny did today.” I’m as guilty as heck of that one. There is solace in numbers, to a point.

However, I’m becoming less tolerant of the one-upmanship of pain, dread, fear and self-deprecation and bad child comparisons. I never appreciated those awful and horrid stories that arose after I had that terrible pregnancy. Thoughts of comfort moved me forward, Jenny’s experience from hell, did not.

I’m constantly fascinated and saddened by the collective misery of motherhood. In many ways, the internet brings out the raw truth of what we are going through, the mindless days, the never-ending little wars with little ones, and the exhaustion that it brings. It’s nice to know that when my child goes completely limp in the middle of Whole Foods in protest, I’m not the only one.

In general, I try to be a happy mom. I protest the commisermom who lives in a world where hers is the worst. It’s like a reverse sort of bragging, as my internet crush Ada Calhoun told me in an interview last week. She thinks we, as women, don’t like to brag in a good way, so instead we complain and that becomes the acceptable way to boast about what we do as mothers.

It’s an interesting way to look at it. We are bashful about bragging about our parenting successes, so instead we turn into negative little mom-bots trying to get a word in edgewise about how sucky things got. I never want to win the battle of the highest thermometer reading.

Maybe I’m seeing it all wrong and commisermoms are just here to help. But I know there are times when it would be better to hear “I understand and here’s what I did to help the situation” rather than “I understand and you won’t believe how awful it was here before it got better.”

We can all stand to put our inner comisermoms to rest for awhile, dontcha think?

{ 12 comments }

We done good.

by selfmademom on July 14, 2010 · 4 comments

Before there were endless PR pitches, link contests, product reviews and the feeling that if your blog doesn’t have 72 ad banners and 25 comments per post you’re a complete failure, there was just writing on your blog for fun, meeting up for a good time and feeling that you were a part of something special.

I’ll be honest that as the blogosphere and mom-o-sphere have grown, I’ve had that feeling less and less. Maybe it’s my fault. Perhaps all the personal gains and losses I’ve had over the last four years sent me further away from the blog community when it should have been pulling me toward it. But, whatever the case, I had an experience today that made me remember all the things I love about being a blogger and why I continue to write and post.

I was part of a select group of bloggers participating in a program coordinated by The Motherhood to partake in a day of good deeds: “Do Good Day.” It was sponsored by 77Kids, a new store for girls, boys and babies by American Eagle. I love Cooper and Emily having connected with them in blog years past, and was really excited by the opportunity to work with them.

Led by the mighty Hyacinth and Melissa here in Chicago (there were teams of 7 bloggers in 10 other cities around the country doing good today too), we agreed on a Do Good Day program: Bake for the tenants of the Ronald McDonald House and then pass out $77 worth of $1 bills at random in the afternoon on our own.

Thanks to resident bakers Emily and Michelle, we made a cake and thumbprint cookies for the residents of the RMH. In a conversation with a resident couple before we started cooking, I was told of the hardship families must endure when their kids are at Children’s Memorial Hospital, but the family residence is in another city completely. For these families who are already shouldering the burden of the high cost of healthcare, saving money on meals and hotel rooms is a necessity. RMH pays for 100 percent of their living expenses. Residents can stay there for as long as they want. Soda only costs $0.25 from the vending machine. Amazing.

Also, 77Kids included for each of us a “goodie” box filled with the $77 to pass out as well as goodie bags, an adorable (and high quality) tee shirt for my eldest and thank you notes to pass out at the organizations at which we were volunteering.

Since I brought baby burrito, I was not in charge of baking. Which is a good thing, because there’s nothing I do worse than bake. So baby burrito and I wrote some thank you notes, clipped money and gave all of Theresa’s (count ‘em) SEVEN kids someone to watch and play with. We laughed, shared stories and learned a lot about how lucky we are.

I had to leave early to go to an appointment for baby burrito, but I wish I could have stayed longer to chat and gab with the amazing women in the room. It was that intangible good feeling I had when I left that I had done a good deed and had a nice morning with interesting women that reminds me why I stay connected and committed to the blogosphere.

And it was nice to be a part of a company-sponsored experience that didn’t feel pushy, sales-y. Just Good-y.

Full disclosure: I was compensated to be a part of the 77Kids team and to post and tweet about my experience. However, the mushy, gushy bloggy-love feelings are all mine. You can’t pay for that.

{ 4 comments }

Dad’s Pregnant Too. No, really he is.

by selfmademom on July 13, 2010 · 0 comments

Part of what I love about being a “writer,” is the chance to interview and meet new people. Last week, I got to chat with Harlan Cohen, advice columnist and writer of the uber-touching-and-funny pregnancy advice book for dads, Dad’s Pregnant Too!

You can read my review of the book on my ChicagoParent.com Second City Baby Blog if you like. If you’re starved for time, I’ll tell you up front that I really liked it and wish I had it on the nightstand during my pregnancies. My full interview write up with Harlan will appear in the September issue of CP.

{ 0 comments }

The day we came this close to Venus Williams

by selfmademom on July 10, 2010 · 0 comments

I hardly ever accept invitations to blog events with my kids because it’s hard to convince a four-year-old that it would be fun to hang out with me and my bloggy sistahs. I mean, he bawled his eyes out in hysteria at the first and only blog event I coordinated last month. So it’s safe to say that we stay away most of the time.

But when the kind PR folks of Catalyst Public Relations sent me an email that we were invited as VIPs to their Powerade Play event at Daley Bicentennial Plaza to schmooze with Venus Williams and Derrick Rose and try the samples of the new Powerade Play drink for kids, well, I responded yes faster than Venus’s serve.

We love tennis (okay, and my son likes the Bulls *as a Detroiter I cringe*) in our house.

My eldest and I geared up for the big day yesterday by watching countless Venus/ Serena matches on You Tube. He kept asking about Venus’s sister. I told him DO NOT SAY THAT IN FRONT OF VENUS.

If only he said anything at all.

After we saw MJ (man, she is EVERYWHERE!) at the event, we waited, and waited and waited for our chance to stalk brush hands with tennis greatness.

Here’s the photo play book of what happened next:

We played Bag-O (which, people, is not NEARLY as fun played with little kids sober.)

We got excited when a limo pulled up. False alarm.

We were bummed when we thought this was as close as we’d get.

And when we had the chance for the photo opp, this is what happened…

He chickened out. But Venus was super cool about it.

I should also mentioned the Powerade “Blue” color got a mixed review from the little guy. Maybe we’ll try the “Red” next time.

I was not compensated for posting about the Powerade Play event. I did receive a complimentary VIP Pass to the event, which had no monetary value to my knowledge, but worth a few good memories.

{ 0 comments }

A whole other look at Whole Foods

by selfmademom on July 8, 2010 · 5 comments

I shop at the Lincoln Park Whole Foods almost once a week not infrequently. At first, the store, a behemoth grocery store by any standards, let alone a Whole Foods, scared me. But I’ve grown to love the size, the selection, and especially, the sushi bar. (I even got Cyn to meet me there once.)

Which is why I was appalled and horrified that a local mom, Lisa Portes, was BANNED from Whole Foods for LIFE for accidentally taking out a $15 bottle of chewable vitamins amidst a clusterf*** of epic proportions with her kids. (Full story in Chicago Magazine via Windy Citizen.)

Everyone who has children, babysat children, or watched children from afar can understand how difficult it is to grocery shop (or do any kind of shopping) with kids. Just the baggage and items alone needed to keep them occupied, dry, sanitized and fed is enough without remembering the grocery list, your wallet, and your own, sustainable shopping bags. (Portes gets extra props for those.)

So what, she paid for the groceries, left, forgot another item and went back to get it, took her kids to the bathroom and forgot to pay. Was that worth the shakedown by the security guard in the parking lot, a Whole Foods “mug” shot and directive to never step foot in the store again?

I think not.

I remember fondly when Kristen forgot to pay for the duck that accidentally fell into her shopping cart. Was that worth the $6.95 to take her kids out of the car, go back and pay? Readers were mixed, but I know that I wouldn’t have gotten out of my car at that moment to return it.

We all have our bad moments as mothers. And apparently Chicago does not like when moms have those moments, or moms in public in general (as referenced by the comments to this story and the Stroller Wars story that I was a part of.) Not all of us are a texting, careless, maniacal bunch.

I personally think it’s clear that Portes did not intend to steal the vitamins. It’s also clear that a company has a policy against shoplifting and I cannot fault Whole Foods for adhering to policy.

But where’s the middle ground? It’s not like Portes was a repeat offender. It’s not like she didn’t offer to pay. I’m not sure how the Whole Foods organization works, but most companies I’ve worked with over the years with regards to employee relations give managers the ability to assess the situation of their own store or office and make an informed decision based on that.

Rather, what it seems, is that everyone likes a scapegoat, especially when it’s a harried mom. It’s easy to judge that mom and assume the worst. She was an easy target for the bored security guard in the parking lot. As Portes says, “They didn’t leave the slightest margin for human error.” And that seems exactly like what it was. Human error. We all err as humans.

Even the crazy Chicago mom haters.

Even the manager and the security guard at Whole Foods.

I love the store, the products and the people I encounter at Whole Foods. But I’m not a fan of the way they handled this situation or their inane, inflexible policy. It makes me wonder who’s looking over my shoulder as I soldier on through the vast aisles of the store. I better make sure I triple check my cart on the way out.

{ 5 comments }

Frick of July

July 3, 2010

I’m solo this July Fourth weekend. Huz had to work so I dragged the kids for a six-hour car ride to paradise on the beach in Northern Michigan. If only the baby didn’t get a nasty cold. If only the four-year-old would sleep a smidge past 5 o’clock Central. If only my parents didn’t get [...]

Read the full article →