Faking it: Housekeeping edition

I am not a good housekeeper. Just a fact. As far as I can tell, all my friends are better housekeepers than me. Based on my research (i.e., my conversations with them), they are good housekeepers for one of three reasons:
(1) they genuinely enjoy cleaning,
(2) they feel guilty if they don't clean, or
(3) they are driven crazy by mess and feel compelled to clean.
Most of my friends are one of the latter. I am none of the above. Don't get me wrong, I much prefer to have a clean house, but I'm never uber-motivated to make it that way. I am more of a wait-till-it-really-needs-it-and-go-on-a-cleaning-binge type than a maintenance cleaner.

On Saturday night, I was out to dinner with some of my hot mom friends (all my mom friends are hot, btw). I mentioned that I regularly let dishes sit in the sink for a couple days before dealing with them. In unison, all seven women at the table made a "ewwww" face. Hmmm. Turns out I am gross. (One or two of them admitted that they might be gross like me if their husbands weren't bothered by messy kitchens. My feeling about this is that my husband has hands and knows where the dishwasher is.)

Anyhoo, this week I have made a concerted effort to maintain a clean kitchen. Each night, all the dishes have been cleaned and/or loaded by bedtime (except when they needed to soak...you know how that is) (or maybe you don't). I have to say, it's fine, but I don't feel amazing about it or anything. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this housekeeping thing.

So I'll keep faking it for a while longer (I do think it makes the hubby happier), but if it doesn't become more intrinsically rewarding, I'll probably just go back to being gross.

Who are you, and what have you done with my child?

Everyone always says that three is a much harder age than two, and I have always believed them. Two really wasn't that terrible for us. Not that it was easy - "easy" is not a word that has ever applied to my child, never never never. He was put on this earth to challenge me. But overall, I still think of him as a good kid. He is more often than not sweet, funny, affectionate, and quite lovable. It is one of my secret mom-fears, though, that maybe my undying love for him blinds me to how he really is, and that everyone else sees a different kid than I see (which of course is true, but I mean that everyone else sees problems that I don't and therefor can't fix). What if I have the bad kid and don't know it?!

Well, all fear is now laid to rest, because yesterday I KNEW for damn certain that I had the bad kid.* Omg, y'all, it was HORRIBLE. So horrible, I can't even speak proper English. We hosted a playgroup at our house, and my kid bullied, tantrumed, refused to share, and generally behaved like a total %&*#$. It was so bad that after our friends left, I just sat on the floor surrounded by a toy-splosion and cried and cried. And then I got a big box, filled it with all the toys he threw at other kids or broke in anger (which, yes, was more than a couple), and put the toys away in the garage. Ask me how well that went over with the tiny terrorist. Ask me if I care.

So I'm having a real fake-it-'til-I-make-it parenting moment now. My sweet two-year-old has become a really difficult three-year-old, and not just yesterday, although that was the worst. It's been a precipitous downhill tumble since his birthday. I swear on his birthday his inner monologue was, "Ok, I'm three now, time to see what Mom and Dad are made of." All of a sudden, I'm flying by the seat of my pants, trying to quickly adjust my parenting to what feels like a whole new kid.

Let's hope we both make it through the threes alive. I need a drink.


* Lest I appear melodramatic (which, btw, I TOTALLY AM), I know my kid isn't really universally bad, he is just behaving badly, yada yada. But dang, y'all, he's killing me.

p.s., Ignore the new look of my blog, I'm still playing with it. What I have now is just placeholder. 

Typical

My son is obsessed with trains, so we have a train track permanently set up in our living room. Invariably, when we ask Asher what he wants to do, he replies, "Um, let's play choo choos."

This is Asher's train:

Derails around every corner due to unmanageable length

 Also these:

Waiting on a turntable. HANDS OFF!

And these, too:

Resting in the shed. DO NOT TOUCH!

This is what Jake and I "get" to use:

"Scrappy," the lamest engine on Sodor

This is some sort of metaphor for parenting, no?

My shame tree

Ok, I confess, it's January 9, and we just took down the Christmas tree today. And all the decorations are still boxed up in my living room, not yet moved to the garage. And I probably wouldn't have finished it tonight, except my father-in-law is coming over for breakfast, and I didn't want one more person seeing my shame tree.

So perhaps 2011 isn't starting off with the big bang of motivation I hoped for. (Not that we should be surprised - this is ME we're talking about here.)

Here's my problem, blogland. My should-do/want-to-do list is long, really long, and I have a raging battle going on in my wee head: do I do the thing I should do, or the thing I want to do? Do I act like a responsible adult, or do I enjoy my life? Such a tough call. The top two things on my list are:

(1) SHOULD DO: Rewrite the article I wrote based on my doctoral dissertation. The original article I wrote was rejected (though nicely) by the first journal to which I sent it. Now I really need to revamp the whole thing and send it out to a different journal. The clock for this is ticking. I am planning on quitting my job this summer, and I really want to get this loose end tied up by then, so I'd need to get this sent in soon to get the ball rolling on the (potentially long and painful) publication process.

(2) WANT TO DO: Slip cover the chairs in my room. The upholstery is wrecked from when the dogs used to sleep on them, and also one dumb dog used one of the chairs as a chew toy...2 or 3 years ago. These are, akin to my shame tree, my shame chairs.

I KNOW the right answer is to get the article out of the way first. Buuuuut, I don't wanna. I just don't wanna. But ok, you've convinced me, dear readers (I can hear you saying, "Just do the damn article!" - especially you, Elena and Erin). I'll do the damn article. Sigh.

My ego can't afford to add a shame article to the pile.

Happy birthday, Asher!!!!!!!

Happy, happy 3rd birthday to my little man!! I might be biased, but I think you are the cutest, funniest, cleverest, most awesomest 3 year old on the planet. 

12 hours old - look at my cone head!

2 weeks old

6 months

1 1/2

2 1/2

Almost 3!

Food boot camp, and a shout out to my mom friends

Before I had a kiddo, I had visions of myself making all my own baby food from locally grown organic vegetables, of my kid enjoying a wide variety of healthy foods, of being a family of good eaters. When Ash started solid foods, he ate one jar of (organic, natch) sweet potatoes and promptly decided healthy was not for him. Food has been a constant struggle for us. Now Ash subsists almost entirely on yogurt, apples, grapes, french toast, Clif Bars, and jelly sandwiches (no peanut butter for this kid). That sounds not too bad, I know, but when that is practically all your kid eats (ok, also french fries and smoothies from the gym), it gets old, and you start to feel like you've perhaps failed in the feeding-your-kid department. Plus, in the interest of full disclosure, Jake and I probably allow too many treats on the side. What can I say - my kid wears me down.

Jake and I have been saying for a long time that we're going to do a food boot camp, where we only put meats and veggies in front of him, and let him starve until he breaks down and eats. But let's face it, Jake and I are softies. Never going to happen. Instead, tonight we instituted a food chart. The deal is, when Ash gets five stickers (like tonight he got one for eating broccoli), he gets a treat (first a trip to the frozen yogurt place, then a train he's been asking for). So we'll see. Keep your fingers crossed.

This food issue is the thing most likely to make me feel like a bad mom if I think about it too much (which is why I mostly avoid thinking about it). In recent days, I also happened to have read several books/articles written by moms who feel like failures, feel completely overwhelmed, feel like all the moms in the world except them have it together. It's the new problem that has no name, maybe? Apparently a major source of this angst is a feeling of competition with and judgment from other moms. I guess I've been unusually lucky, but this has not been my experience AT ALL. I'm surrounded by moms (mostly from my two awesome moms groups) who, despite the fact that they DO seem to have it together, don't make me feel like a loser. When I go to one of my mom friends and say, "I really wanted to leave Ash at the store today," I don't also have to say, "Not that I would, of course, I love him and feel very lucky to have him." They know. So I just wanted to give them a shout out here. I've been feeling very grateful lately to know so many moms who support and inspire me. XOXO to you all!

Ash's birthday cake

Asher is turning 3 (THREE!!!!) on Thursday. Yesterday we celebrated with the grandparents. My mother-in-law gave me a cake pan shaped like train cars. It was super cute, but intricate to the point that I was pretty sure the final product, after I got done "decorating" it, would be a hot mess. Cake decorating is another one of those skills that I would like to have, that I imagine I could do if I just applied myself, but which I have made no effort to actually learn. Unless you count watching those cake decorating competitions on Food Network, in which case I've studied extensively.

Anyhoo, the finished product was NOT a hot mess after all. It turned out quite cute, actually, if I do say so myself:

 Martha Stewart might scoff, but for a first try, I was pretty pleased. So was Ash. Thanks to my mom for keeping Ash distracted so I could decorate it without him seeing it.

If you want to make it yourself, the cake pan I used is available here. (Don't look at the pics that other people posted - they look much better than mine.)

ANOTHER blog? OMG, srsly?

I know, I know. Everybody and their dogs have blogs now. Everybody except me, you mean. And if I'm one thing, it's a sucker for peer pressure. That's not the main reason I'm blogging, though. I'm blogging for purely selfish reasons.

The first is that I've been terrible about documenting Asher's life. I take lots of pictures, yes, but my Asher journal is pathetic. It has approximately six entries in it, all of which are sentence fragments. I always think, "Oh, I'll remember this," but all I remember is thinking that I'll remember. I forget what it was I was supposed to remember.

The second is that I, as you know if you read my "about me," have a lot goals, toward which I take very little progress. In my head, I have all sorts of interests and skills. I'm a regular Martha Stewart/Ansel Adams/pioneer woman with a sprinkling of elite athlete mixed in. In my head. In reality, I get stymied every time I try to pursue a new goal by feeling like there is too much to learn, not enough time, etc. etc. All the usual excuses. But no more, I say! If there is one thing I learned during my 6+ years of psychology grad school, it's that one way to succeed at your goals is to make yourself publicly accountable. So, though I'm no big Oprah lover**, think of this as my online dream board. I'm going to blog about what I want to do/be/accomplish, and voila, it's going to happen.

(** Ok, full disclosure, I USED to be a huge Oprah lover, a few years ago before she became such a know-it-all, and all her interviews became just an outlet for her to talk about her personal quest for self-improvement. Back then, I wanted to be the next Dr. Phil. I was going to find a way to parlay my psych degree into being Oprah's relationship expert. But then she got really, really annoying, and my dream died. It's probably Oprah's fault that I ultimately decided not to be a career psychologist, actually.)

So along those lines, a few New Years resolutions:

(1) Work on my photography. I really, really, really want to be a good photographer. I want to take beautiful, artfully composed pictures of my children and maybe, one day, other people's children. So far, I've upgraded my camera and taken one photography class. What I want to do next is buy more lenses so I can have more control over my shots, but this is one of those situations where I get mired in the information overload and make no forward progress. But I resolve to read my new photography book I got for Christmas and do all the necessary research so that I can have my next new lens by Mother's Day.

(2) Start cooking again. I like to cook, but ever since my husband started his paleo diet (which deserves, and will get, its own post), I've lost the motivation to cook. I'm sure there are lots of delicious, even interesting, paleo-friendly things I'd enjoy cooking if I made the effort.

(3) Run a race. Even if it's just a 5k. Next year, my goal will be to train for a sprint triathlon, but for right now, just one race will do.

(4) Successfully grow some vegetables. My gardening skills (or lack thereof) will also get many posts I'm sure. Suffice it to say, my garden plants have no will to live. This year, though, I'm going to grow enough to can at least one jar if it kills me.

That's it for now, but this list will evolve through the year. I feel no need to keep the resolutions to 1/1, although it's a good place to start.

Thanks for joining my on my long, circuitous journey to become the person I actually am in my head.