The Mommies' Diaries…Parenting, One Blog at a Time.

Celebrating New Year’s Eve can be a bit of a challenge for parents. Family-fying a traditionally adult event isn’t always easy.

There are parents who have special adult-only evenings planned with dining, dancing and a toast at midnight. I envy those who have a reservation at a restaurant that doesn’t have paper placemats and crayons. But there are some others who have reservations of a different sort, and prefer to spend New Year’s Eve at home, or with friends close by rather than venturing too far or too long on the roads. And it is we who will begin the challenging task of kid=proofing the evening for the Baby New Year.

Some will host or attend gatherings with friends in which we serve sparkling cider. I know of some parents who move their clocks ahead for those little ones who can’t make it to the real midnight. If you hear the banging of pots and pans at 9pm, you’ll know why. Still others will gather around the TV playing board games and waiting for the ball to drop in Time Square. We’ll tell our kids that we used to watch Dick Clark just like they are now, and we won’t be surprised if their children do the same. We’ll laugh, have a family dance party to Pit Bull, eat dad’s famous burgers, watch endless Best and Worst Lists of 2011.  Our children will Google “Auld Lang Syne,” and we’ll pretend we know all of the words.

The kids will no doubt be figuring out how half the world straddles one year while the other remains in the past. While we adults make resolutions, they will be calculating their new ages, and try to convince us of the math with new entitlements. While they fast forward in anticipation of their upcoming milestones, we will briefly wish for that pause-button — slowing down time rather than drinking a toast to it. Because this is the moment when celebrating is markedly different between parent and child. Not in the choice of bubbly to ring in the New Year, but the pace in which we march to it.

Because as parents, celebrating the passage of time is a bittersweet occasion. Watching them grow up so quickly, we don’t need pots and pans signaling the passing of the years — we’ve got fireworks every day. And so while we parental types welcome in the New Year with all of its hopes and promises, we can’t help but mourn just a little for the last one. Father Time’s arrival can be a little rough on a mother. For me, family-fying New Year’s means holding on to mine a little tighter.

Chocolate cake, or homemade peanut butter cookies, or candy canes, or gummy worms…..whatever, really.  Whatever stops the crying, gives me a moment of peace, and makes DJ like me, rather than revolt against me with her entire being.  I’m talking about breakfast, and my worn out gauge on what’s appropriate. I’m talking about feeling like a failing mother. I’m talking about being exhausted.

Two weeks ago, I was totally down for the count.  I was the most sick that I can remember being.  I had a double dose of the blahs – sinusitis and either tonsillitis or strep throat.  Because I had already started taking antibiotics when I went in for a throat culture, the lab couldn’t get an accurate reading.  The diagnosis isn’t nearly as important though as the impact that this had on my life.  For one week, I had to depend on others.  For one week, DJ’s schedule went completely out the window.  For one week, I couldn’t bring myself to cook for my family – to do laundry or dishes or even vacuum.

And then, one week turned into two weeks.

As I began feeling better, I lost another week of life just catching up on the life that I had lost the week before.  I spent all of last week catching up on emails, paying bills, doing piles upon piles of laundry and cooking things like steamed swiss chard to try to make up for the many meals of string cheese, strawberries and crackers that I served to DJ while I was sick.  Well into last week, I realized that I was still just trying to keep the peace in our home, and I was pressing the “Easy Button,” over and over and over again.

I don’t know about your toddler, but mine is a creature of habit.  She thrives on routine – right down to the order of the four books we read every single night.  Having mommy in bed for a week totally threw her off.  She was bored, frustrated and I’m certain – disappointed in me.  It was hard enough that I had gone from an aspiring Super Mom with fun outings and activities planned daily, to pregnant mom – exhausted and, well, exhausted.  But now, now I was exhausted pregnant and sick mom.  I am sure she hardly recognized the woman who was making daily promises to turn it all around soon.  She began acting out.  And I began acting lazy.

What will make you happy this morning?  One of the homemade cookies we baked last night?  For breakfast?  Sure, why not.  You’d like to watch Tangled five times today?  Of course we can do that.  Oh, what’s that?  You’d like to open one of your Christmas presents a few weeks early?  Alright.

Yuck – I feel so dirty just admitting to all of that.  But, I have always vowed to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth through my blog.  And, the truth is – I probably pretty fairly earned the “Bad Mom” award these past two weeks.  However, in my quest to get back on track and analyze just how everything went so wrong – I am also going to cut myself a little slack.  I was trying to survive.

A really dear friend was kind enough to text me pretty regularly while I was sick.  She just wanted to check in, offer her help if I needed it, and shower me with lovely words of support.  In one of our exchanges, I told her that I really just wanted to cry as I began thinking about how on earth I was going to raise two children.  I freaked out.  I had a lapse in confidence.  I had an “OH CRAP” moment.

She reminded me that I was going to be a great mom.  She reminded me that just as I had adjusted to life with one child, I would naturally adjust to life with two.  Then she wrote a line that I keep repeating over and over in my little brain….”You’ll look back on this time of being pregnant while trying to raise a toddler, and you’ll realize how freakin hard it was.”  Brilliant.  Insightful.  Wise.  This is freakin hard.

Just like no one tells you that you’re going to poop during labor, or that you’ll need to wear an ice pack in your granny panties, or that your boobs will leak milk when you’re out grocery shopping and hear another baby cry – no one tells you that being pregnant while chasing a two year old from sunrise to sunset is HARD.  Really, really hard.

So, when I got sick, there was a definite interruption in my auto-pilot mode.  While I would have preferred not having a fever for 5 days and feeling like I had jelly beans stuck up my nostrils and razor blades in my throat – it did force me to stop and realize that I needed a break.  I needed to ask for help.  I needed to hang up the Super Mom cape for a little bit.  I needed to just be a worn-out mom.

And while I didn’t necessarily need to feed DJ chocolate cake for breakfast, I did need a few days without tantrums.  I did what I had to do.  Am I paying the price now?  Absolutely.  She’s wondering where her Willy Wonka mom went – but, now I have the perspective and energy to deal with the ever-changing tides of my two year old’s moods.

Long live bribery and the price we pay for resorting to such measures.  And may we cut even good moms the slack they need to feed their kids breakfast cookies without judgment.

P.S. If you’ve never seen this sketch by Bill Cosby, you must watch it!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcVcRMS4ejQ

In the bizarre world of holiday shopping, there is the infamous “Black Friday.” Soon after arrives “Cyber Monday.” Eventually the “Day After Christmas,” is upon us.  But I think retailers are still missing the majority of the shopping population with these minor sales events.

What about “Freak Out Friday?” That day when you realize that you are turning the calendar page to December and you haven’t purchased one gift, decorated nary a bough nor baked a single Snickerdoodle? You can hear the collective scream of panic in every household in America. They say it’s one of the few sounds heard from space.

And don’t tell me you’ve never hear of “At Least Twice Thursday?” That’s the day where you go to the same store you’ve been to at least twice using twice as much gas to scour the same items in the same aisles only to find nothing new but you pay double the original price because you’ve waited so long. I usually end this day with two aspirins and a double shot of eggnog.

And no where do I see ‘Waste a Whole Sunday Afternoon Perusing Outdated Catalogs” day advertised. This is the weekend in which I will leaf through the six foot high stack of catalogs in my bedroom wondering why I’ve dog-eared page 112 in Hammacher Schlemmer in July when I vowed to do this early. Since I will never reconstruct who was supposed to receive the cashmere earmuffs with the LED lit covers or the electric granita maker, I will abandon the exercise after four hours and then mourn those lost minutes when I could have been working on The World’s Largest Wall Crossword Puzzle.

Neimen Marcus should hold a Midnight Madness sale on “What Were you Thinking?” Wednesday. This is that self-deluding day when we attempt outlandish holiday crafts knowing full well we have to time, talent or enough glue sticks for even a fraction of the homespun activities we have planned. I like to pretend to stamp the homemade wrapping paper from raw pulp that I’ll never make, string popcorn garland from the corn I’ve never harvested from the non-existent window box, and not decorate the Gingerbread house that is so far from being a “house” that the building inspector has already condemned it to a dilapidated bread box and evicted the Lollypop Kids. To bring it up to confectionary code would require enough royal icing to frost five hundred wedding cakes. So at 11:45pm at night when all of this has failed miserably into a tear-stained moan of frustrated remorse cried to the tune of “Blue Christmas,” I will eventually find myself at an over-priced department store buying a Duraflame log, white pine scented candles and a can of spray snow.

Shockingly, no one has figured out how to cater to these holiday shopping habits. So unless a traveling salesman stops by bearing squirrel proof bird feeders and monogrammed weather thermometers, I’ll see you all at the Magic shop on “Too Late Tuesday.” Because a magic wand and sleight of hand are the only things that can help me get my shopping done on time and under budget.