on raising a have enough child

My husband has lovingly (I think?) joked with me for a while now that one day technology would swallow me whole and I'd be left, clueless, trying to figure out how to function in a modern-day society. This is probably true. I'm always the last to upgrade anything and my favorite feature of my car is the fact it plays cassettes. It's not all just being reluctant to change, but what I like to think is as an acknowledgement that everything that came before isn't necessarily bad. When I play some of my dad's old vinyl records that I have stored in my closet, I am hearing the same static, same music that he listened to when he was just a little boy. When I download an MP3 of a song that I liked back in the day, it's still saturates me in nostalgia and memory but it lacks some authenticity. Finding the original cassette or burned Memorex CD with all of it's age spots, scratches and flaws always feels a little more like home, like it's a little more of value. Or I could just be crazy, because I'm not at all ruling that out.

But the definite thing is that the world is changing faster than even I, at not even thirty years old, can wrap my mind around. Small toddlers with their own smart phones or tablets is a reason to boast, to aww, to laugh with unaffected glee. Here is where I'd say "but it makes me cringe" -- except for the fact I honestly and truly don't care how other people choose to spend their money, or how other people raise their children. The "are you a bad parent if you do this?" argument is boring, it's old, it's redundant and it never goes anywhere good. A good parent loves their children and finds solace in their smiles, and does the best that they can -- even if it's not exactly what you would do. So what do I do as this electronic age follows me, striking down aisles in our favorite bookstore to be replaced by shelves of gadgets and beeping, blinking light-up toys? I cope, and do so by throwing every single battery-operated toy Ethan has (except for one) into cardboard boxes and shoving them into the garage.

I think I declare "I just can't anymore" daily -- a white-flag in reference to so much. We live in a place that I love, a place that is part of me and the only place I would ever want home to be, but a place that ranks nauseatingly high on the cost of living spectrum. It's easy to get lost in the glitz and the glamor, I think, when something as supposedly luxurious as a Bentley is merely commonplace and you can think of at least three or four you see on a daily basis. But I've never been into glitz, and I've certainly never been into glamor, and so I embarked on this crazy train way of raising my child to manually push wooden cars around and make his own vrooming sounds. My husband, who has long since been pushing for simplicity and finding the beauty of more in less, was on board with this definitive switch, even when it means starting up an argument with my mother that, no, Ethan cannot have a train table at home because then it will ruin the thrill of spending our magical mornings together at the bookstore playing with the one there. It means you're automatically given a side-eye when you start telling people you are accepting charity donations in lieu of gifts at your son's birthday party. It means that my toddler sits happily on a floor covered in wooden puzzle pieces for forty minutes while I make dinner and hasn't even noticed that the blinking, beeping toys he's never played with are gone, making more room for the blocks we can never get to or the dress-up clothes he's helped me make himself. It means that, no, I really don't care if your child has fifteen favorite TV shows but I don't even know where I'd find the time to let Ethan watch TV, even if I wanted to. I mean, there's a reason why our DVR is always backed up for weeks at a time -- we're just not television people. Right now Ethan thinks the TV is something that plays movies of his Aunt Megan's dance recitals that he dances along to, and I'm fine with that.

The other day at the splash pad, a little boy had brought an arsenal of beach toys: pails, shovels, dumptrucks. Ethan watched longingly as the boy and his mother sat there, acknowledging more than once that these toys belonged to that boy and no one else. Yesterday, I made sure to bring Ethan's bag of beach toys to the splash pad and made it clear that everyone at the splash pad was able to share them. It backfired. Some little boy grabbed Ethan's truck away repeatedly as he was playing with it, refusing to give it back and leaving poor Ethan to stand in the water crying "Ethan's truck!" Eventually the stolen truck was recovered, but during the entire ordeal the boy's mother just sat there with a blank expression, half-watching, half-checking her phone. I give up trying to pretend like I can keep up with the attitudes and the politics of even something as innocent as an afternoon at the splash park, where Ethan has decided today he doesn't want to go because a "baby boy drive Ethan truck." So there's that. Or the fact that within my first two minutes of being at the splash pad, another mother asked me what city I live in and when I told her, asked if I was really going to send my child to the "repulsive" school district he was set to go to. I mean, yeah, I think I'll let him tough life out a little in a school ranked in the top one percent of the country. Bad assery, and whatnot.

My husband and I have fought a lot of good fights together during the eleven years we've been together. If we can survive the melodramatic teenage heartbreak of a long distance school year and falling asleep with a phone receiver shoved against our clavicle and the stereotypical pillowcase soaked with tears and (way too much) mascara, we can survive raising Ethan to be as Kumbaya as his little art-making heart desires. Because this boy blows me away with his imagination, with the way he can line up some wooden spoons and drive a sweet potato "choo choo" across them, with the magic he still finds in a park he's been to ten million times. Growing up, my dad would make some tired joke about letting kids play in the dirt with sticks and I'd roll my eyes -- we all did -- but now that I'm a parent, the whole sticks-in-the-dirt thing doesn't seem so bad. Because, really, there's something to be said about the outdoors and bright sunlight, about exploring nature, about little hands slathered in shaving cream, about sticky hands and blue fingerpaint stained eyebrows. This morning on a walk, my mom's neighbor declared that her four year old had "played enough" and needed to be trained at a highly competitive, academically intense preschool so he can be "prepared for Kindergarten."

So there's that, and the fact I don't think a four year old can "play enough." Or the fact that I think play-based learning is the most vital gift I can give my child who, I'm fairly confident, will still be prepared for Kindergarten and all of the subsequent years of classroom learning even if we're rolling into age two still going on nature walks and collecting rocks to paint. But these "aren't you worried he's going to be delayed?" comments -- too well-meaning to be jabs -- are just another thing I'm going to have to get used to as the oddball parent I always figured I would be, hoarding cardboard boxes and empty jars and egg cartons, toting around an almost-two-year-old with the words "tie-dye" in his vocabulary. Because that's life, our life, and one I'm willing to measure based on his smiles and laughter.

the one in which i step out of my comfort zone, big time

Ethan is going to be two next month. The party invitations are stamped and addressed, waiting to be placed with ridiculous care into the mailbox. As my mind darts across my mental Pinterest to-do list with all things Curious George there at the forefront, I'm quick to admittedly forget there are a lot of other things going on before Ethan's second birthday party next month. Like, you know, my wedding anniversary on May 23rd. Not that I haven't thought about it. My husband and I have already been playing an apathetic verbal tennis game of "what do you want to do?" "I don't care. What do you want to do?" for the past couple of months. Neither of us said anything we wanted to do, but it was already obvious the winner was going to be a quick dinner out at one of our favorite usual restaurants and maybe a movie on Redbox from the comfort of our couch because, well, we really suck at leaving Ethan. See? Even the way I phrased that -- "leaving Ethan" -- is drenched in guilt and slathered in "oh, hi, horrible parent, how are you today?" I can't help it. We can't help it. Guess how many date nights we've been on since Ethan was born? One. Last December.

It's not that I don't trust my parents to babysit Ethan. It's not that my mom doesn't have a room set up for Ethan that he's never used. It's not that Ethan doesn't beg, plead, tantrum that he wants to go to Grandma's house on the regular. It's not even that I don't value my marriage, relationship or husband. It's just that we like to do things as a family and because my husband's job is so demanding, we rarely get to have uninterrupted family time. Even though Ethan is almost two, something like a family dinner out or a walk around the block is still sort of new and exciting. I mean, I will completely bypass how I'm embarrassingly neurotic and will likely be walking my poor child to his classroom until he graduates college and skip right to the fact that we just didn't have that "a-ha! The world won't end if we go to dinner without a toddler in tow!" moment that I'm pretty sure every parent gets at some point, on their own schedule, at their own time. For some people, it happens a little earlier than for others, I'm sure. I'm also sure that somewhere out there, someone is reading this and is unsure why I'm stressing about not having been on more than one date night in two years since their child is seven and they still don't feel right seeing a movie on their own. This "it will happen on it's own time" attitude always made sense to me until the day my husband won a week long all-expense paid trip to Hawaii at work and we turned it down because neither one of us wanted to leave Ethan behind to fly a few time zones away from a toddler who neither of us can bear to be away from for fifteen minutes. Not that I'm invalidating our desire to not leave Ethan behind on this Hawaii trip as, for us, it wasn't even close to ever being a reality at this point in our lives. But it did make me see that, you know, dinner wouldn't be so bad once in a while. Dinner and a movie? Well, I could try living on the edge.

And so the "I don't know, what do you want to do?" game was ended early when my mother booked us a hotel room at our wedding night hotel for our anniversary. One night away at our wedding night hotel, on the beach. Twenty minutes from home. Twenty minutes from home. I keep repeating that last part to myself, reminding myself of how even if I wanted to, I could run home and kiss Ethan goodnight or tuck him into bed. And then Ethan keeps reminding me how excited he is to have a sleepover with Grandma, Grandpa and Aunt Megan and asks every single night at dinnertime if tonight is the night he gets to do so. Rather than lose myself in a puddle of "do you love Grandma more than me?" irrationality, I've taken these little toddler-dropped cues to get a little more excited about our upcoming miniature getaway. And, as Ethan lets me know on the regular, he's pretty excited about sleeping at Grandma's house, too. So while Ethan is looking forward to celebrating a weekend of Grandma-approved toddler delinquency, like eating doughnuts and watching television, I'm honestly looking forward to spending a night away at the beach celebrating the love and marriage that made this whole parenthood thing possible.

may is for moms

I'm a little late to the link-up party due to an unexpectedly chaotic past couple of days, but I'm excited to be participating in the May is for Moms link-up! It's a fabulous three-part series to celebrate motherhood and this first series is an interview with myself.

1. Before you ever even had children, how did you feel about being a mother? I always wanted to be a mother, but it wasn't ever at the forefront of my mind like a lot of other people I know. It was always something distant that I knew I wanted to do at some point, though it was always something I wanted to do way in the future until I was in my early twenties. It was after trying and quitting, trying and failing, or no longer having the interest in so many of the other things I thought would be an essential part of my life that I realized how much being a mother was a part of me and how badly I wanted to do it. I wasn't one of those little girls who dreamed of one day being a mother but now, as a mother, the idea of being anything else is absolutely unfathomable.

2. Since becoming a mother, what is something that has happened that you never thought would? Everything. It really gave me a heavy dose of reality since I've always been a planner. And not just a laid-back planner, but an "I've got every detail taken care of, don't worry about it" planner. My entire pregnancy which was difficult at best, followed only by an even rougher delivery and recovery, and it taught me that you can't plan everything and sometimes you need to just let go and learn to adapt. When I think of future pregnancies down the road, I can honestly say my "this is how things are going to go" list is finally empty and I'm finally accepting that some things are okay to just wing it and take it as it comes. This spontaneous way of thinking coming from my brain? Well, I never thought it was possible.

3. Is being a mother less difficult, more difficult or exactly how difficult you imagined? This is a hard one to answer. Even though I was almost eleven years old when my sister was born and therefore the struggles and chaos of child-raising was never a secret to me, I could have never guessed how truly crazy some days can be or how daunting some tasks can be, or how fragile your heart becomes. I could have never imagined the sheer physical pain I feel as a mother when Ethan falls and scrapes up his knee, or the way I completely ditch my pacifist mantra the moment someone without kids asks "shouldn't he be doing such and such already?" It's a journey that consumes so much of you that by nighttime you're exhausted but at the same time, I have to say it's way less difficult than I could have imagined. Being Ethan's mother has been the first thing that has felt totally natural to me, where I feel in control and confident in being the kisser of boo-boos and knowing exactly what to do even when it's not a situation I've been in in the past. When I was pregnant, I worried how I would know when he was hungry or when to change him or what he needed when he cried. From the first moment I held him, I just knew and that just knowing is such a natural part of being a mother for me. Of course, there are those difficult days where my husband comes home from work to find dried split peas across the kitchen floor, a half-chewed apple rotting on the couch cushion, a puddle of drinkable yogurt across one of our cats, Ethan laying on the floor in a deafening protest against bedtime and me huddled up in the corner sobbing -- and those days are hard, so very hard, but the crazy part about motherhood is how the next day, they're not even a realistic memory.

4. What is your fondest memory of being a mother (so far)? This week, freshest is my mind is the way Ethan brings his "boo-boos" to me ("Ethan boo-boo knee," "Ethan boo-boo hand") -- many of which are sporadically staged, some of which are actually real -- and asks for a kiss. When I kiss them, he says "Ethan no more boo-boo" with the biggest smile on his face. The first time he did this, a result of a real boo-boo when he fell down at the park, I was a sobbing mess. "No more boo-boo, mommy," he said, as if this should have been the most obvious thing in the world. There was also the time at Target when the cashier asked Ethan where he learned all of his colors and he shouted "TOT SCHOOL!" with such excitement that every bit of my heart melted while the cashier sat confused. Or the first "love you, mommy" that came during a rare moment of uninterrupted snuggle time under the covers in my bed after what was a particularly rough afternoon.

5. If your children only learn one life lesson from you, what do you hope it is? My wish for my children is that they set out in the world knowing what it means to love with whole, pure, beautiful hearts and that they don't allow the outside world or society to lessen the value of the love they will learn growing up. What I mean by that is, that they know who they are is perfect, that they know I will love whoever they love. That they see people as people, not as religious beliefs or the lack thereof, not as skin color, not as any kind of orientation -- but people. That they know when you truly do your best and love with your whole heart, you can never really fail. That they are worth it, whatever it is they have their heart set on, no matter what is in their way.

summer skin care, toddler edition

Seeing as how we live in "sunny" South Florida (that's in quotes, because it most definitely downpoured for a good five hours in a row this afternoon), proper skin care is a big deal. After all, we spend a big chunk of our time in the company of the brutally bright sun.

As the temperatures continue to get warmer, I thought I'd share my favorite products for keeping Ethan's skin soft, safe and healthy.

Episencial's Sunny Sunscreen is my absolute favorite. This SPF 35 sunscreen is gentle, non-greasy and gentle on sensitive skin (it's safe for all ages!). It's long lasting, not having to be reapplied for 80 minutes, and is made up of soothing organic green tea and zinc. It's fragrance free and moisturizes Ethan's skin while protecting it from the harsh sun!

Episencial's Cheeky Salve is a must immediately following sun exposure. I carry this in our pool/beach/park bag and slather it onto Ethan's face, lips (it's edible!), ears, arms and legs when he's finished playing in the sun. It's made up of raspberry butter, organic sunflower and probiotics to keep skin healthy.

The only lotion we've ever used on Ethan -- Erbaviva's Baby Lotion -- is a must. It's lightweight and non-greasy, but does an amazing job at keeping Ethan's skin moisturized. We aren't fans of artificial fragrances, and I love the subtle scent of this lotion's organic mandarin and chamomile essential oils. We apply this lotion to Ethan immediately following his baths, and diligently in the hot summer months.

Chances are, Ethan's going to be sporting his beloved Shaun White hat in most outdoor pictures you'll see of him these days. After months of trying to convince him to keep on all of the cute hats we've picked out for him (are hats on little boys not the cutest thing ever?), he picked out a Shaun White hat on his own one morning at Target. Since then, he refuses to leave the house without his hat. I guess all it takes is finding the right one! I've worked hard on teaching Ethan that we always wear a hat when outdoors in the sun and he definitely knows the drill by now. He points out if it's "nunny" (sunny) and if so, he runs to get his beloved Shaun White hat (which lives in the car these days just so we don't forget it).

the accidentally good day

I'm sure by now you've all seen Reasons My Son Is Crying. All I know is by nine o'clock in the morning yesterday, I was mentally composing an e-mail to my husband with a subject the same as the blog's title. Reasons like, he asked for a blue Curious George shirt and so I put it on him, or I didn't like it when he whacked wooden cars into the wall, or he asked for blueberries and I gave him blueberries but on the wrong side of his pancake. It was more than just his age or a phase, but something otherwise amiss. Something, I decided, like having been sick last week and cooped up in this house for more days than either of us would like.

You see, I'm a do-er. I love downtime as much as the next person, but in very strict moderation. I'm in my happy place, my comfort zone, running around town with an overwhelmingly long list of errands to be run and an even longer list of projects to be made, playdates to be going on, parks to explore. My husband is very much the opposite. He is a homebody who considers the day a wrap after maybe a trip to the park followed by a trip to the grocery store. It appears that Ethan has inherited my need to be out and exploring the world outside of these confining walls. A week stuck indoors isn't good for either of us, so it was time to seek out some fresh air.

Yesterday was what I call an accidentally awesome day. It didn't begin as such. We spent the morning at Ethan's favorite park and on the drive home, we passed by a couple of people riding horses down the street. Ethan noticed the horses first. "Horse! Neigh! Ethan, horse! Ride!" I thought of a local park with a carousel and told Ethan to hang on, that if he gave me fifteen minutes we'd go find him a horse to ride. Of course, five minutes after entering the park, the blue sky turned gray and the skies opened up. The lightning detectors were blaring. Park goers scurried into their cars, dragging behind them protesting children. We sat watching the carousel, lights turned off, music muted, a padlock put in place around the gate. The park has an accompanying indoor science museum and I figured we could spend a few minutes hopefully waiting out the storm but instead we spent almost two hours having the most fun we've had in some time. Ethan babbled about "bobots" (robots), flew balloons, learned about pulleys and dinosaur fossils. He laughed and ran around the science museum until his little eyelids grew heavy, little fists rubbing tired eyes. "Mommy? Nightnight." The rain was still pouring down outside, but we were almost two hours into what naptime usually is.

The sun finally came up late in the afternoon. Ethan and I sat on the floor, putting together puzzles. He was still muttering about horses and "nonies" (ponies), and it was hard not to notice the sunshine beaming through our windows. I slipped his shoes on and made the same promise, about getting to ride the ponies at the carousel. He laughed as he bolted down the driveway and we sang The Shins the entire way to the park. We heard the music of the carousel as soon as we parked, saw the glimmering, flashing lights. "Ooh! Nonies!"

We rode six times. His smile never left his face. As the evening grew later and the park grew quieter, I don't think either of us quite wanted the day to end. As I carried Ethan to the car, his hair damp from rain and an "accidental" stroll through the splash area of the playground, I couldn't remember the last time my heart felt so full.