IT IS A FLASHBACK FRIDAY, GANG! I’m gonna be honest, I am so busy prepping for Momz Share tomorrow night that I won’t be able to do a full post.  Hang in there with me, promise it will be back to normal on Sunday…errr… Monday!

THINGS I STILL DO FOR MY KIDS BUT AM ASHAMED TO ADMIT (Originally posted in June of 2009)

When it comes to my kids, I have a secret. Well, actually, I have a couple.

I am ashamed to admit it, but there are a couple things that I do for my kids that are totally UNCALLED FOR.

There is no need for me to do them.  I totally realize that my kids are growing up and that I need to promote their independence.

No need to preach, I GET IT.

But still, I find myself performing some of the same tasks day in and out that I KNOW that they should be able to do by now. For example:

START THEIR APPLES-  This is stupid. But, okay, here it is. When my kids want to eat an apple they still ask me to start it for them. What I mean is, well… they want me to take the first bite for them. They  claim it is too hard.  Yes, I know they are lying through their little Chicklet-sized teeth. I  know what they really need is to “man up” and conquer the apple on their own. I know that it is clearly a toddler right of passage and that my boys are technically the “big kids on the bus.”  Shut up.

SLEEP WITH THEM – I don’t do it all the time, alright? Okay, who am I kidding? There are many a night that you will find me curled up under my (um, I mean THEIR) blue dinosaur covers waiting for sleep to engulf me while my poor husband spends the evening watching Rocky movies shivers all lonely-like and forgotten in the parent’s room.

PUT THEIR SHOES ON- Oh holy moley, people.  Don’t get all shocked on me here. Sometimes it is just easier AND FLIPPIN’ FASTER than waiting for the little monsters to accomplish it on their own. I just want to get out the door, okay? Is that too much to ask? I just want to get out the door and to work on time, or to the grocery store this year, or to the pool before night falls. Am I asking too much?

DRY & DRESS THEM – Now, in my defense, this is purely a survival technique. If I don’t dry them off and dress them immediately after they shower then we will have nothing less than screaming, wet, naked banshees streaking through the neighborhood house for the rest of the night. Boys love to be naked. And they love to scream. And to run. It is the stuff of nightmares.  I have to put the kibosh on it before all hell breaks loose. Really, it is for your protection. Not mine.

So there you have it.

Now you know.

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Do you hear that?  It is a quiet calm settled through the households around the great state of Maryland.

Why?

The Maryland School Assessments are being conducted throughout the state this week.  For teachers, I suppose it is five days of stressful exam situations. But for us parents, it is nirvana.

Well, at least a slice of it.

For me, the working mother, it is a rare slice of serenity in a sea of turbulence.  MSA testing, at least in my school, means no homework. Can you feel my relief?  Not only that but  this week I have found MY VERY OWN OFFSPRING lecture ME about how they need to get to bed early and eat a healthy breakfast. Imagine that!  The school must be really drilling that info in them because it is working miracles in this household, let me tell you.

So for one week, my children come home and the entire family is relaxed and carefree.  There are no homework battles. No papers. No deadlines. It is like a mini-vacation.

I am savoring it.

I’ve always been a working mother.

I’ve just, well, always WORKED. I’ve never had the luxury of staying home full-time.

When the boys were very little I never even entertained the idea of staying home with them.  Financially we couldn’t anyway, but at that time it was more about the fact that my career was my IDENTITY.  I mean, I interviewed celebrities for a living!  Seriously.  My parents joked that I got PAID to go to parties and concerts.  And they were right. My job as bureau chief of Sony Worldwide Networks was essentially to run around the music industry interviewing the Tim McGraws and Shania Twains of the world, talk with them about their latest accomplishments, then head back to the studio and create news stories for radio stations across the country.

Not a bad gig. Was a little challenging on the diet, but overall I wasn’t complaining. You know? (Besides, McGraw was kinda hot and I was diggin’ the free alcohol.)

But the music industry was no place for a young family.  And so my husband and I had to make the first of many tough decisions.

So we moved up North to be closer to the family and times got tougher.  I almost had to begin fresh.  It is a bit hard to translate such an over-the-top job into living-in-the-real-world work (What do you mean, I have no real world experience?  Willie Nelson offered me a joint!  Doesn’t that count for anything?) that pays well.  Especially since I ended up at a non-profit.  Not the most brilliant career move, salary wise, but I had a passion for the work and I was close to the kid’s school.  My boys loved it there though.  (Okay. They were spoiled.  I admit it. They were mini-gangstas and it was their ‘hood.)

When it comes to work, I have moved around a bit since that time, giving up opportunities here, finding my own opportunities there and overall working hard to try to find the perfect balance of family, money and career fulfillment.  Not nearly as easy as it sounds! (Can I get a holla?) Jobs might present themselves but they would be hours away and completely un-doable for our schedule.  (Is that even a word? Un-doable? Did I just make that up?)

It is through these experiences that I have come to realize that it is not about the job or how cool it sounds or the deadlines. (Because in my field, there are always looming deadlines.) It is about how I choose to react to the situations that are presented to me.  As good as the job might be, I have to always take my family into consideration when making a decision.

Not to mention all of those Murphy’s Law “mom moments.”  I can’t tell you how many times I have been perfectly pulled together for a board meeting and suddenly had a kid spill chocolate milk on my white blouse.  Or worse – being hit by a projectile potty accident from a training toddler. (shudder) To this day my little ones still manage to put me back in my place when I am feeling a tad over confident.  I think it is God’s way of making sure that realize that I don’t have any REAL control over my life.  Just in case I happen to have any illusions to the contrary.

It is in those uncontrollable moments, when I have been hit in the leg with projectile urine or I reach into my purse and pull out mysterious green slime, that I laugh at how far I have come.  Yeah, maybe I used to interview celebrities and stay in ritzy hotels, but it is how I deal with the real life “mom moments,” that define me.  And I wouldn’t trade that opportunity for all the back stage passes in the world.

So this is what my front yard looks like right now. (8:30am)  And it is still snowing and snowing and snowing.  I’ll do the follow up Vlog to this tomorrow as promised.

So we are literally STUCK HERE. Nowhere to go. Luckily, we still have power at this point.  I have heard some of my Twitter pals up the road are dealing with outages already.

That would be awful.  (And what if the Internet connection went out?  GAH! THE HORROR!)

So I am going to use this opportunity to tackle two projects – my blog redesign (yippie!) and to write the copy for my new businesses website.  (Which I fully plan to share with you once it is up!)

And can I just say that I have the coolest neighbors in the world?  We are hoping to have a snow party later on today.  We’re hoping to build ourselves an ice bar in the cul-de-sac.  How awesome is that?

This is a rant. Consider yourself warned.

I am tired of people assuming that I can’t cook.  I CAN cook. I really can.  I kinda wish I couldn’t. I’m not kidding. Because if  I COULDN’T cook, then I wouldn’t have to feed people all day long every single day. 

Basically I have enough cooking skills to NOT kill my family and to NOT to force us into bankruptcy from continuous fast food runs.  Which stinks, you know?  I know just enough to get me by and make me the primary chef in the house.  Oh joy oh joy oh joy.

What I can’t do is create a culinary masterpiece or even, err… a pie.  In my house there is simply no need to have ingredients like baking soda, flour or molassas hanging around.  Seriously, I have no idea what would I use those for.  I buy them every once in awhile for a random recipe (usually around Christmas) and then banish them to the back of the cupboard until they go bad.  My sister is always running out of these ingredients because apparently she knows how to use them.  Either that or she is trying to play mind games on me. 

Hold the phone… are you actually SNICKERING at me?  What?! You’ve got some reason to stock baking soda?  Is that it?

People, is is not because I don’t want to do it.  Oh no.  I just don’t have TIME to devote to reading a recipe and experimenting with various flavors and textures of food.  Oh how I wish a were a foodie!  One of my secret (Well, not anymore!) ambitions is to become a tremendous cook.  But I think that family position was filled by my sister.  According to my friends and relatives, I just know how to “warm dough.”

Can’t I just get an “A” for effort?  You know, one of these days I am going to make one hell of a meal and amaze the world.  I’ll have my 15 minutes of foodie fame and never again will people ask me if I know how to boil water.

Let’s get realistic… that is not gonna happen. Ever. (BTW – Contrary to what you may be assuming, this post was not inspired by my husband. Even though he can also cook better than I. Darn brat.)