More than a number

Once upon a time in 2009 I wrote a guest post for this blog titled Rockin' the Stretch Marks . In it, I wrote about my recent struggles with my post-baby body image, and how I was overcoming my issues by focusing on the strengths of my body, and feeling gratitude for what my body had recently done. 

Five years and two additional babies later, I feel like a fraud for the words I wrote, and the feelings I’ve had as of late. I still struggle, daily, with my body image. 

It's no secret that our culture is obsessed with body image, and women especially face intense scrutiny. According to DoSomething.Org approximately 91% of women are unhappy with their bodies and resort to dieting to achieve their ideal body shape. Unfortunately, only 5% of women naturally possess the body type often portrayed by Americans in the media.

In an ideal world, I would be able to not only accept my body for what it is, but I would love it. I’d be proud of it. When we really think about it, the human body is an incredibly amazing thing that all too often I’ll measure its worthiness based on a number.

When I was pregnant with my son, Samuel, I realized at some point, probably around 20 weeks when I was no longer sick and exhausted every minute of the day that I’d never felt more attractive. I was gaining weight, yes, I was an odd shape, yes, but for some reason, I felt beautiful. I don’t know the reason why, but I felt like I was absolutely glowing. For much of my pregnancy I felt this way, and it was a wonderful, empowering feeling. I’d hear my friends who were not pregnant count calories, exercise like mad, and complain about their perfectly average bodies, that to them were so unsatisfactory. For the first time in my life, this felt so foreign to me. I listened to these amazing women complain about these bodies that had created children and it made me incredibly annoyed to hear them talk in such a disrespectful way about themselves, and their post-baby bodies. I vowed I would never be that way again.

Now here I am, four months later and I’m totally that woman. I’ve grown impatient with my body, and the ten extra pounds causing me grief. Even now as I type, I realize how stupid it actually is, ten pounds causing me so much sadness and self-loathing. Would I be perfectly happy with my body if I lost that ten pounds? I wish I could say yes, but I know that isn’t true. I know I’d find something else that I don’t like when I look in the mirror. The reason I know this is because I know it's not about the pounds, it goes much deeper. Those ten pounds represent my dissatisfaction with my self, all my flaws physical, personal, emotional, etc.  

What makes me so sad, is that I see parts of myself in my daughters. My five year old has my same legs. My three year old has my arms. Will they grow up to resent those parts of themselves? I hope not! I hope they see how beautiful they are. I hope they can love themselves as I love them. I will say, in all the struggle I face I internalize everything. I’ve vowed to not let my own warped view of my body shape my daughters’ feelings about themselves, and I never speak my insecurities out loud to them. 

Yesterday, on a particularly bad day, my three year old came up to me. “Oh Mommy, I love your ponytail!” She’d exclaimed. She loved my ponytail. My hair was sticking out in odd places, my short bob pulled sloppily in a ponytail and she loved it. She loved it not because it was cute, because it wasn’t, but because she loved me and I belong to her and I take care of her and I make her safe. She, more than anyone else, tells me how beautiful I am. All. The. Time. Because to her, beauty isn’t the model on the cover of People magazine. To her, beauty is the way that I make her feel when I’m around her. Beauty is the smile I give her when she writes a letter or does a puzzle. When she says, “You’re beautiful, Mommy,” it is her way of expressing love, more than remarking on my physical appearance.

So when my three babies had gone to sleep last night, I decided to take care of myself. I took a long, hot, lavender oil infused bath. I gave myself a facial, I painted my nails, and all while doing one of my favorite things: listening to an audiobook. Those things made my tired body feel good. It was good for my spirit. I took a good two hours to myself, and then I went downstairs and ate a cookie without worrying about the calories or the self-doubt that usually accompanies a treat because I am not defined by the number on the scale. I am more than that number. Coincidently this particular video started making the rounds on my Facebook newsfeed last night. It made me cry. 

I know I need to change the inner voice. I know I need to appreciate who I am now, instead of hating myself for who I’ll never be, and don’t need to be. I know it’s a struggle I might face for the rest of my life, but I hope it isn’t. I hope five years from now I can write another post about how my nearly forty year old self is beautiful, and marvelous, and spectacular, and amazing, and really, truly mean it without giving it a second thought.    

How to Spot the Mother of a Little Boy

In two weeks I find out the gender of my second baby. And it is safe to say I am terrified. Terrified of having a girl that is. Spending the last two years with my wild, rambunctious, energetic boy (seriously energetic, even total strangers feel the need to comment on his "energy") has made me feel like an expert in all things little boy and therefore a total amateur in the girl department. I know nothing about children who can calmly sit and color with crayons. My son has never even sat in a chair, not even while watching TV (which he watches upside down through his legs.)

Yes I am very clearly the mother of a little boy and this is how I know.

I own a toddler leash.

I know all the names of every construction vehicle ever made.

I've had two debit cards and one wedding ring stolen and hidden so well in my own house that I still haven't found them.

I know, for the first time in my life, the names of all the dinosaurs.

I know how to burp on command to make my son laugh in the middle of a tantrum.

I haven't sat down in a year and a half.

I know that crayons are not digestible and come out whole on the other end.

I know how to explain to TSA why my son was running onto an airplane without a boarding pass. (It's because I forgot my leash sir.)

I know that it's ok to eat up to two cups of fertilizer.

I know how to dodge multiple balls thrown at me in rapid succession.

I know how to apologize to an elderly person when my son rips the oxygen mask off their face.

I know exactly when the garbage truck will come to our house every week. I also know the screaming that will ensue should I forget to take my son to see the garbage truck.

I know how to get blood out of multiple surfaces.

I know how to get rocks out of nasal cavities.

I know what to do when someone swallows a worm.

I know how to stop a bloody nose. (My son has a penchant for throwing tennis balls at me while I'm asleep.)

I know how to navigate every grocery store in my town without letting my son glimpse the ball display.

I know how to "'tend you'rea choo choo."

I say things like "it's not nice to toot on other people on purpose."

I know that everything can be made into a car ramp. Furniture, church benches, my belly while I'm trying to do sit ups...

While this list highlights the high energy, dirtiness, and chaos that often accompanies little boys, I do acknowledge that my son also loves baby dolls, the color pink, and especially Hello Kitty. And I also acknowledge that if I do have a girl she might also be a ball-throwing, dirt-eating, garbage-truck-enthusiast as well. But maybe, just maybe, she'll sit and color with crayons.

Rainbow Rowell, will you be my best friend? (A love letter)

Dear Rainbow,

May I call you Rainbow? It's such a beautiful name, and although I know you don't know me, after spending several weeks binge reading your books I feel like you are a dear friend. Is that creepy? Gosh, I hope it's not creepy. Now I'm feeling like a stalker. I promise you, I'm a fairly lovely person. At least that's what my mother tells me.

Last year at some point I went on a John Green binge and when I ran out of books he'd written I turned to his tumblr (by the way, I don't actually know how tumblr works or why it's spelled without an e before the r but it's all I had). He raved about your book, Eleanor and Park, saying :

"If you read a lot, you can get jaded. You can forget how a reader has to be generous to a book as much as a book has to be generous to its reader. You feel like maybe everything worth doing has been done, and nothing will ever blow you away ever again.

And then you read a book like Eleanor and Park, and you are shocked out of your complacency and grateful to be alive. As you can tell from my review in the New York Times Book Review, I really love this book. Months later, I’m still thinking about it."

Not hesitating for a moment, I purchased the ebook for a whopping $1.99 and dove right in, expecting great things. Because John Green. Unfortunately, my expectations were too high and I quit reading within the first chapter. Mostly because I was turned off by excessive profanity. I'm an old fashioned kinda gal, Rainbow. 

Flash forward to a year later and there is this nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me to try it again. I probably stopped and started three or four times, never making it past the first chapter, and then I read a review of Fangirl, so I decided to give it a try. I was hooked by the first page. If you knew me, Rainbow, you'd know that I am a Harry Potter Fangirl, and I connected with Cath's passion for Simon immediately. I devoured the book, and then I plowed through Attatchments, followed by Eleanor and Park, and then I started over again while I waited for Landline to be released. 

Occasionally I come across an author that really resonates with me.  Their ability to create a world that I could become so wrapped up in it that, for a while, I abandon my own, astounds me. You are a master at the character driven novel. I tend to gravitate towards contemporary realistic fiction, and you do it beautifully.

The thing I love about your characters is that they are unapologetically real. So many times I wanted to reach in and give Eleanor a hug, or nudge Lincoln in the right direction, or talk some sense into Wren. You give a voice, a story, to the powerless. You give strength where society would otherwise say there is weakness.

Here's the thing: I'd love to go out to lunch and pick your brain. And while we are at it, since you are well entrenched in the publishing world could you also invite John Green, Kate Morton, Jojo Moyes, and Melina Marchetta? I ask nothing more than a lunch. And a few dozen more novels. And I'd love it if we were friends. Best friends, who wear those heart necklaces split in half. I mean, I already have a best friend, but if you say yes, Rainbow, I'd drop her like a hot potato (kidding, she'd love you too). 

Love, 

A devoted Fangirl

*If you could be best friends with an author, who would you pick? 

A Beginner's Guide to (the perils of) Peach Jam

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a half a bushel of peaches. I am not entirely sure why I did it, but they were cheap and freshly picked and I figured that I had a couple of weeks until they were delivered to figure out what exactly I was going to do with half a bushel of very ripe peaches.

They were delivered this week.

So there they sat, attracting every fruit fly in the state and tempting my one-year old to attack the box and take a single bite out of every single peach. Obviously, something had to be done. We are a family of three people right now, and one of those people eats very little. Simply bingeing on fresh peaches until they are gone wasn't really an option, so canning it was! Peach jam? Sure! Even though I have never made jam before in my life? Sure!

Well, I have now officially made jam for the first time. I have decided that if any of you are thinking about making jam for the first time yourselves, you might benefit from a little "Jam for Dummies," written by one who is, quite often, actually a dummy.

Ahem. Strap in, because we are about to get jammin'!

1. First of all, you need to pick a recipe to use. You can find about a million of them online, but keep in mind that due to incompetence and a really bad memory, you will end up mixing up about three different recipes you looked up while narrowing it down, so it doesn't really matter which one you choose in the end.

2. Gather your supplies. If you do not have everything you need, never fear! You can always make two trips to a grocery store and three trips to your friendly neighborhood hardware store- all in one day. That is not only acceptable, but highly encouraged when making jam for the first time. Bonus points if it is pouring rain all day.

Supplies you will generally need:

• Fruit of some kind. Preferably fruit that is extremely ripe so that you get a cloud of fruit flies following your every move. It's the mark of a true canner*.
• Sugar. A lot of it. Apparently jam uses a lot of sugar. Who knew?! Not me.
• Lemon juice. Ignore any recipe that calls for "fresh" lemon juice, because by the time you get around to adding the lemon juice to the jam, the last thing you will want to do is actually cut up a lemon and juice it yourself. Trust me on this one.
• Pectin. Any recipe that tells you that it is possible to make jam without pectin is spewing fiery lies of LIES and as penance they need to come to my house and wash every dish I used to attempt to make their recipe of LIES.
• Jars. 
• Every single pot, pan, and kitchen utensil you own.

*I made that up. I have no idea what the mark of a true canner is, because I am most certainly not a true canner.


3. Peel and dice your peaches. You might as well strip down naked now because by the end of this you will have a sheen of peach juice from head to toe. I only wish I were exaggerating, but my hair may never be the same again. I'll let you know if peach juice turns out to be some sort of miracle hair conditioner.

It all started so exciting and delicious-looking.

4. Put diced peaches in a pot and add the sugar and lemon juice. If you come up about half a cup of sugar short, you might think that you can just roll with it. You can't. Then again, maybe it wasn't the half a cup of missing sugar that did me in on that particular batch, but the accidental scorching. Those one-year-olds can be so dang distracting!

Now you know what burned peach mush looks like. You are welcome.

5. Bring to a boil. Don't let it burn. It seems so simple, and yet...

6. If needed, throw out your first attempt. Make your first trip to the grocery store to buy more sugar. Go back to step 3 and repeat.

7. Add the pectin. If, like some other first-time-jammers, you realize at this point that you forgot to buy pectin, never fear! You have all day! You don't have a life! All you have to do is push pause on the jam-making, make space in your fridge for a large stock pot of peach mush, clear a space on your counters and stove to make dinner for yourself and your one-year-old, feed yourself and your one-year-old, head out to the hardware store for the second (or was it third?) time that day, discover they are all out of pectin, head to the nearest grocery store for the second time that day (bonus points if you hit up the same cashiers as the previous trips!), buy the only kind of pectin they have there (bonus points if it isn't the kind your recipe calls for, but you could care less at this point!), head home, put the baby to bed, discover the second batch of jam is no good and START ALL OVER AGAIN! FOR THE THIRD TIME! AT EIGHT O'CLOCK IN THE EVENING!

(Step seven was pretty much my favorite step of the whole process.)

8. Go back to step 3 and repeat.

9. Admit to yourself that you wish you had never started, but now that you have you have to have something to show for it.

Something other than a kitchen that looks like this.

10. Call everyone you have ever met who has ever successfully made jam and ask them why your jam isn't thickening even though you added the pectin that you moved heaven and earth to obtain.

11. Decide you don't care if the jam is thick or not- you have had enough. It's time to end this.

12. Fill the jars using any combination of spoons and measuring cups you can concoct, since you apparently do not own a funnel. Ignore the fact that your "jam" is basically diced peaches in light syrup.

And there are loads of uses for diced peaches in light syrup, right?

13. Place jars in the rack of your borrowed canning pot.

They almost look like actual jam. Deceptive little buggers.

14. Realize that you forgot to boil water for the very large canning pot and proceed to fill it and boil it. This will take a while, so feel free to find something to watch on Netflix and try not to think too hard about whether or not this delay will interrupt the jars' sealing process.

15. Place the rack of jars into the boiling water and boil for however long it says in one of the many recipes you consulted that day. This varies according to the altitude of where you live, so take a moment to go Google that. My city is a whopping 75 feet above sea level. I was hoping for a bit more altitude than that so I could claim a lack of oxygen as why I am so bad at canning. This is sadly not the case.

If you were wondering how hot your house is after all this boiling of various liquids...
The answer is HOT.

16. Sit down to write a blog post about the utter failure that was your first attempt at jam-making and in the process forget about the jars you have boiling on the stove. Figure that boiling them twice as long as you were supposed to can't have done that much more damage than everything else you've done to those poor peaches, so....meh.

17. Remove the jars, place them on a towel to cool and try to ignore the strange popping sounds they make. I'm new at this, so I'm just going to ahead and pretend that popping is a sign of success, not complete and utter failure*.

*Update: popping or no, my "jam" was a complete and utter failure, in that it in no way resembles jam.

Diced peaches, anyone? I've got plenty.

18. Do whatever you need to to recover from 12 hours* of jam making.

*Allowing pauses for two meals, half a dozen snacks (for you and the baby), several diaper changes, five minutes spent extracting your son's leg from a hole in the peach box, fifteen minutes for putting the baby down for naps (twice), and ten blessed minutes when you let yourself ignore the peaches for a bit and sit and eat ice cream.

Have at it, kid. I'm not about to do anything with those peaches any time soon.

How to Offend a New Mom in Ten Easy Steps

A follow up to my post about how to offend a pregnant woman. The good news is that you can still be really offensive once the baby is actually born, not to worry.

1. Comment on how bad she looks.

You know who's not going to win a beauty contest? A new mother. They're sort of busy, you know, keeping a tiny helpless human alive.

Neighbor: Are you getting any sleep?
Me: Oh you know newborns, not really, but that's ok.
Neighbor: Yeah I can tell, you look terrible.

2. Tell her to read a parenting book.

You know what new mothers need to be doing in their small amounts of free time? Sleeping. Eating. Maybe showering. End of list. If you want to give parenting tips fine, but please don't make someone read a 300 page novel to go along with it.

3. If this were olden times you and your baby would be dead right now.

My first baby was born via emergency c-section once the doctor discovered my pelvis was too narrow for my son's melon head. I so appreciate the medical knowledge and technology we have now but maybe the delivery room is not the right time for relatives to remark on how 100 years ago me and my new baby would have been toast.

4. My baby slept through the night at ______ days old!

Good for you. Your baby must be one of those special babies that don't need to eat. Also, maybe it's not the best thing to brag about how much sleep you're getting to a sleep-deprived, hormonal lady.

5. You named your baby what?

Insert comment of your choice here:
I had a dog named that! (According to how often I got this comment, every single dog out there must be named Cooper, just in case you meet a dog at the park today, its name is most likely Cooper.)
Have you considered this name instead?
Laughter.
How unusual...
Staring with your mouth open.

6. Insert weird irrelevant parenting advice here _____.

Tips on how to discipline your newborn.
Tips on how to get your three day old to sleep through the night.
Tips on how to make your newborn's hair grow.

7. When are you going to have another one?

Ask me again when I'm not wearing pants with an elastic waist.

8. Didn't you already have the baby?

Yikes. Never ask. Just smile politely, speak of the weather, and hope she says something about it.

9. Are you breast feeding?

Now this question is acceptable coming from your child's pediatrician or a good friend, but not really from a total stranger in the grocery store. Due to some personal issues my son grew up happily on Costco's finest formula. And in order not to discuss those personal issues with the breastfeeding police I simply lied and said yes ma'am, he nurses all day long and I'm the president of the la leche league, now can you tell me where the doughnut aisle is?

10. Your new baby looks like Gollum.

Courtesy of my husband who said this to his sister upon meeting his new niece. She must have still been slightly sedated with medication or surely she would have punched him in the face.

Tuning out the Stupidity

Sometimes the world just makes me want to pound my head into my desk repeatedly. Not over anything big or important. Mostly over stupidity. And that’s when I remember that I need to step back, unplug from the internet and all the stupid things people post, tune out the awfulness of the local and national news, pretend that email doesn’t exist, and remember to live. It’s amazing what simply taking a breath can do. It doesn’t fix the world’s problems, but it does help me remember to be a person. I can start to think about real things like goals, the future, the people I love. That doesn’t mean I ignore everything all the time, but even just 5 minutes away can help.

What helps you step back from it all? What are the important things that come to the surface when you’re able to tune out all the stupidity?

How to throw a retro birthday party

Disclaimer: I truly am in awe of mothers who have the time, talents, patience, motivation, and money to throw extravagant, themed birthday parties. I am not one of them.

My daughter turned five this year, and like every other girl born between 2007 and 2011 she requested a Frozen birthday party. Fortunately, in the age of Pinterest, I found literally hundreds of ideas to make her birthday party a success. Unfortunately, I found hundreds of ideas that made me feel like a failure before the invitations were even sent out. Here were some of the birthday parties I found on Pinterest. Keep in mind that these parties were being thrown for CHILDREN between the ages of one to seven.

Admittedly, these are LOVELY parties, but personally, I don't have the patience or the will to throw a Pinterest worthy party. I can't even fathom the cost of these parties. Unfortunately for me, my children have been attending parties like this, so I have to say things like, "I'm sorry Hannah, I don't really have the energy to fill balloons with helium and confetti, along with a handwritten invitation to your party, and personally deliver them to nine different houses. I know when they pop them the invitation will fall out, along with lots of confetti which seems lovely and whimsical but also I don't want their parents to be vacuuming confetti out of their carpet for weeks."

So, if you are wondering how to throw a perfectly fun party for a fraction of the cost of a Pinterest party, look no further. In fact, it may take you back to days gone by to birthday parties of the 80s and 90s, when the object was to celebrate the kid by eating cake that looked and tasted mediocre at best.

1) Buy pre-made invitations, or better yet, print them off the internet. That's what I did. It takes between thirty seconds and five minutes and it will hang on the fridge of the invited for the same amount of time as those extravagant invitations that take three days to make.

2) Cakes can be expensive... unless you buy a mix in a box and make your own frosting. Sure, it might not look like much, but, like the invitations, the cake will be devoured by the five year olds in about thirty seconds and it might taste even better because fondant doesn't taste as delicious as cheap, old fashioned frosting. I thought about doing themed food for about six seconds, but then I remembered I had a one month old baby and I decided cake and ice cream would suffice.

Don't mind the chunks of frosting I tried to smooth over after my two year old got her hands on the cake. The five year olds didn't seem to mind. 

3) Keep the decorations simple. Streamers, balloons, maybe a cardboard cut out? Preferably something you can use for your next kid's birthday (which, in my case, is five weeks later).

My husband made this Olaf by hand. I think he did a pretty good job. Olaf is going to live in my daughters' room now. 

Note the store bought table cloth, plates, cups, and napkins. 

4) Play games. Keep them fun. I went to a gorgeous birthday party recently. It was Pinterest worthy with a capitol P, but there was nothing for the kids to do, so all the lovely decorations and themed food meant nothing for fifteen five year olds who had nothing to occupy them. At Hannah's party we played pin the nose on Olaf, we made snow globes and cut out snowflakes, and we had a snowball fight in July with snowballs purchased from our local Bahama Bucks. Party games are awesome.

5) Do favors, or not. My best friend feels very strongly about party favors, and she always does beautiful, generous favors. My daughters still have their Tinkerbell wings, wand, and jars of glow in the dark pixie dust and they love to play with them. I went to the great effort of going on Amazon to buy prepackaged Frozen favors, and Hannah was happy, so I was happy.

The birthday cost a grand total of $35 dollars to throw, the biggest expense being the mason jars for the snow globes, and the snowballs which cost me a whopping twelve dollars for sixty snowballs. It took a total of two hours to plan and execute, and five minutes to clean up the mess.

While Pinterest parties can be fun and memorable, so can the retro parties of our youth. I think I'll stick to keeping it simple for the birthday parties, and saving my energy and money for her wedding day. 

TBT: Forgotten memories

My Dad is the father of six girls and no boys. Yes, yes, get it all out of your systems now - poor him, right? Poor him my foot! He has had such a good life and give us all a couple decades and he is going to be the most well-taken-care-of cranky old man. Even he admits that!

I will admit, however, that with six daughters, everything hasn't been always been rainbows and sunshine. Six daughters, six young women going through puberty (some at roughly the same time. Shudder). Six daughters, six emotional first dates. Six daughters, six wardrobes to fight over. You get the idea.

Six daughters, six birthdays to forget...

When I was about 8, I had a father/daughter party at church. We ate food, we played games, it was fun for all. To be honest, I probably wouldn't remember much about that particular party it weren't for one game we played. It was one of those games where you ask one half of a pair questions about the other half and see how many they get right. The dads were supposed to be answering questions about the daughters and they threw in a couple of what I thought were slow pitches. What color are your daughters eyes? What is your daughter's birthday?

My dad had five kids at that point. That's a lot of birthdays to remember! Our family isn't known for our good memories. He was asked what my birthday was. He answered October 8. My birthday is October 9.

THE HORROR.

I think I have been holding it against him for twenty years, despite the fact that I still to this day have to double check with my sisters that I remember the right date for his birthday every year. But, like the patient man that he is, he has let me hold my little grudge and give him grief for it whenever I get the chance.

That is what I remember that event for. I remember that my dad forgot what day my birthday is. Then the other day I was going through a packet of loose pictures that my mom had stuck in the back of one of my photo albums. For the first time in years I found a couple pictures from that father/daughter party and I remembered something else about it:

Did I mention that my dad is a wonderfully patient man? Six daughters, a lifetime of submitting himself to events that asked him to do things like be wrapped up as a toilet paper mummy, much to the delight of those six daughters.

I forgot all about that part of the party and I am sure there were so many more moments that were so much better than the moment when he forgot what day my birthday is. Especially when, twenty years later, I find myself in love with and married to a man who also can't always remember what day my birthday is on.

I stuck the toilet-paper-mummy picture up on my bulletin board after I found it the other day, just to remind myself that my past isn't all forgotten birthday memories. There are many, many more toilet-paper-mummy memories out there, ready to be remembered and enjoyed.

Goals: Keeping it Simple

Even though the summer is coming to an end (sadly), fall can be a time for new beginnings. Some friends and I recently carpooled up to another friend’s wedding, and, as car conversations tend to do, we hit on a lot of topics.

On the way home from the reception we began talking about goals. I posed these three questions to the group: What is one goal you have professionally, one goal personally, and one goal that falls in another realm (whether it be spiritually, otherworldly, energy you put into the world, or some other realm I don’t yet know, etc.)?

So often we have these internalized goals or expectations for ourselves. Sometimes it is easy to get overwhelmed, set too many, and have things turn to negative self-talk. Or even simply have those goals fall away because they’ve slipped your mind. By verbalizing just 3 goals (that’s it--just the 3, no more), and discussing them with friends, it made it seem more achievable, more real, and it just might make us all more accountable as we move forward.

What would your 3 goals (professional, personal, and spiritual/other) be?