I'm a better mom than you......

haven't we all thought that once or twice watching another mother "mothering" her child(ren)? I know a couple women who are like this. I can literally see it in their eyes as they watch my boys eat....oh my gosh- COOKIE! Or I can hear them "Tsk, tsk" when I mention that the boys sat and watched a movie in the middle of the day. Oh I can go ON and ON.....but really I just don't care what people think of my "mothering." I really don't. I only hope that our BOYS think that I'm a GREAT mom (ok and Bill, but I know he thinks that already)

I hear some women talk and bitch about how hard motherhood is and how they never have "me time" and all they do is yell at their kids. On and ON. Now, I have days where I feel that all I have done is yell(and maybe I did!!!!!)but I've stopped making myself feel sooo bad about it. If I have a day where I hear myself starting to yell a lot or I have raised my voice a lot then I make a joke of it to the boys and say I'm sorry for yelling, smother their chubby, handsome faces with big kisses and forget about it! I do. I'm trying harder to not stress about the little things and stop beating myself over the head for stuff that I do or maybe DIDN'T do. I look at it this way. The other day I took Drew to school and didn't feel like going home and nothing was open yet at 9am so I looked at Nick and said "Bubba, do you want a muffin?" I took Nicks screams of pure joy and clapping of his hands as a "Yes!" so drove into Sherwood Park and slipped into the Timmy's parking lot and got my little guy out and we walked into Timmys. Nick stood in line holding my hand, looking around and screamed "Donuts Mama, donut!!" Then he wanted up in my arms because people were smiling at him. So I got lots of hugs! Ya, he was cute.

I loved sitting with my baby at a table for 2. Eating muffins, drinking, chocolate milk and a DOUBLE DOUBLE. I told Nick how much I love hanging out with him (as I tell Drew also) he smiled at me so sweetly as he rubbed his greasy hands up and down all over the window. I didn't even tell him to stop running his hands up and down the window. I know, BAD, BAD "mothering". As I was getting his coat back on him and walking to the van I remembered how often my mom took me out for donuts, chocolate milk and coffee. Just me and her. I loved it. well my whole point of the Timmys story is that after Nick and I had our date we headed over to a scrapbook store so I could buy a couple things to buy for a scrapbook page I'm doing and actually spent MAYBE $20 WITHOUT feeling guilty. Bill and I are trying to stick to a budget and have been doing really well. We do the whole WANT or NEED thing. I just didn't worry about it. I had a great visit with Nicky. He was happy playing in the scrapbook store's kid area while I looked around NOT feeling guilty! Then we headed back to pick up Drew AND I wasn't there ON THE DOT as I uaually am. I was there at 11:05 am instead of 11:00 (class gets out at 11:10) AND I didn't even say "sorry" to myself!!!

Why are we so hard on ourselves and other mothers? I know some people believe that once you become a parent they have to become boring, wear granny panties, never have a drink again (OK I'm judging, with a little sarcasim added in) NOT me. I tattooed my ankle (it's a "I'm EMBRACING my large ankles" thing. I have large ankles) I did it really because I have always wanted one, wasn't sure WHAT I wanted and was too scared of the pain. THEN I had two children- boys at that! I figured that if I was able to push out a baby for 3 hours, tear like paper ( sorry dad!) lose large amounts of blood (again, sorry dad) and go through the PAIN of breastfeding for 4 months and then 2 yrs later go through a c-section and get an infection the least I can handle is TATTOO I mean REALLY! The brow peircing, always wanted one so I did it. I deserve it! And I know some people think it is a "reliving my youth" Not at all. It's just me starting to get the nerve to do some thing's I've always wanted to do. Being married to Bill has made become this way because Bill loves to take chances. Sometimes he says that I think "too much" about something and I have to agree. I guess that is one thing being married does to you. It brings out some of the other person in you.I've also want to skydive........

So, do I wish I could get a "me day" no, because I have a husband who pushes me to do it. Often. And then calls me while I'm out to see if I'm having fun. I used to feel kinda guilty doing the "me thing" and now I don't but that just stopped this year. Now I have fun and enjoy it. Sometimes motherhood is challenging and I will question myself but I just don't think it's as hard as some make it out to be at least for me. I do have good boys though. YES, sometimes I DO pop in a movie for the boys while I veg on the couch after a long day of reading stories, playing with play-doh, crafts, laundry, making lunches, reffing fights, nursing wounds and I don't feel guilty.

We had 8 firemen in our house............

last night. Oh yup we did! Bill and I have an alarm that also has a carbon monoxide detector. Well, we have been having problems with the carbon monoxide detector all day yesterday. We were woken up on Saturday morning at about 3:30AM from the alarm company asking if we were alive pretty much, since the alarm was going off. We got it all worked out and went back to bed. Or so we tought.

Last night I was out with the girls until about 11:00 or 11:30pm. I came home and Bill told me he had been having problems again all night with it going off and on and he had been talking to the alarm company ALL night and was pretty much on a first name basis with "Bonnie." Anyhoo, around 12ish in the MORNING she says that now the alarm is saying there REALLY is a high level of carbon monoxide in the house. What should we do????? She tells us to open all the windows and get the kids up and make sure they are OK. Done. We bring them downstairs much to Nicks enormous displeasure that he vocalized on his way downstairs into the FREEZING living room. Once they were downstairs the alarm company said she was going to alert the fire station and send someone over because I told Bill to mention we have 2 small kids thinking it would kick it all into action.....and action we got.......with in 5 minutes we hear a fire truck, sirens BLARING.(For some reason we thought it wouldn't be a big production???) Bill and I look at each other and start laughing. We look out the bonus room window and see 2, not one but 2 fire trucks bouncing to our house with lights flashing, sirens O'blaring. Bill "greets" them at the door as 8 fire men come rushing into our house. Pretty sure it was 8, dressed in their best (and I must add say there were 3 that looked mighty fine) they asked all the questions. I tried to get some free mouth to mouth but they didn't fall for it. Kidding. They checked the house and there was no sign of anything, which we knew there wasn't. We told them about the whole situation with it not working properly and said we were sorry they were called out for literally NOTHING. They were great about it and told us it is better to be safe than sorry. I knew everything was fine when one of the hotty (no pun intended!!!) firemen commented on the baby pictures of the boys and how neat he thought hey were. They were all stunned that the boys were sleeping through all of it. With 8 firemen talking and beeps beeping. I told them how pissed Drew was going to be about being literally in the middle of all the action and missing it all. I woke Drew up a bit and I think he thought he was dreaming seeing all these men in the kitchen/ living room! Well they filled out a report and left.They aalso went hunting for coloring books for the boys but were all out.

By this time Bill and I are WIDE awake. I went to bed to read and Bill on the computer and I hear someone knocking on the door. I look at the time and it's about 1:30 AM. I look out the window and see ATCO.......they arrived to check everything out also......by 2:30AM I said screw this shit and popped a gravol so I would be able to sleep. Sleep I did!

Our house really NEVER has a boring moment. It really doesn't. Anyone who knows us knows SOMETHING always seems to happen here. I'm looking forward to have a bit of a boring next few days until the next big adventure happens and I KNOW it will......

OK this is another ' Michelle has been thinking'..........

I was reading either OPRAH magazine or Chatelaine and they were talking a lot about the complex relationship between mother and daughter the trials and tribulations. How when the daughter grows up and has her own little family the mom likes to butt in BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. It's something I really can't relate to thank goodness because this has never been my case. As a child my parents were my parents, once I moved out and on my own it became a respect on both our sides and a friendship developed. It has remained that way. It got me thinking about not only the mother daughter relationship but also the FAMILY relationship. I don't understand how so many families do not have respect for each other as different people.
As brother and sisters we come from the same blood/parents, we have the same upbringing (in most cases) but that doesn't mean we will be alike, have the same views, have the same religion or even have religion in our lives. We will probably have different views on politics, but doesn't that just make us more interesting and able to have good discussions at the dinner table. I don't know maybe I was brought up in a strange, weird family were my brother and I were taught that we had to respect each other , including our parents. We were taught that it's OK to have different opinions than the next person. We were allowed to disagree with our parents. I remember many times begging them to let me stay out later than my curfew because of a party or whatever and many times they would allow it because I asked and sometimes I would get pissed off at them because they would say no, I would pout and stomp off and think it wasn't fare....My parents weren't interested in being our friend. Might sound harsh but it was true. And I agree with it. I liked my parents ( loved and still do love them ) but even when I was 15 and had a curfew, even when they grounded me I still LIKED them. They were strict. They had rules, but I felt I could always talk to them, I never really felt the need to rebel, OK rebel REALLY bad. I was bad with curfew, really bad. I dated a few guys they didn't like but they never told me I couldn't see them they probably knew I would sneak out anyway. I remember a few times they voiced their opinions on one or two of them but they were always nice to the guy even if they didn't think they were right for me.
My parents knew that I went to parties were there was drinking and that I would be drinking, they gave me a few words and let me figure it out. I know I've made decisions that they haven't liked or have thought it was a bad idea. Sometimes they have told me how they felt. Sometimes I'm KNOW they have held their mouth shut with a lock and chains and thrown away the key as their heart plops into their mouth with things I have done and still do. The times that I have made a bad choice or wrong way it has never been thrown back at me or I've never been told "I told you so."

I don't understand parents who turn away on their kids because of the choices they make. So my child doesn't have the same political views, they choose a different educational path than we were hoping, they take a different view on religion, this one seems like a HUGE one for a lot of families. I personally hope that our boys have A FAITH in SOMETHING it may not be what we have but that's OK (as long as it's not a cult I think I will be OK) or GASP (sarcasm) our child child is gay. We just want our boys to find real LOVE and acceptance and respect with someone how could love be a bad thing even if it is with the same sex. We want our boys to meet as many different cultures and people as possible. I don't want them to be surrounded by white people with blue eyes and blond hair forever. I want them to mix it up. How boring would it be if the whole world was vanilla??? I love that our African neighbour wears her traditional clothes. Beautiful colours, beautiful hair.....she's proud. Our other neighbour plays a lot of Spanish music in the summer and I hear them singing and laughing and using instruments. Were kinda boring, really.....if our boys married a woman of another culture I would LOVE it. I would LOVE celebrating her holidays and including some of her traditions into our family. That's what families DO. You accept each other for who WE are.
I know the boys will make dections that we don't agree with or we don't like and I'll probably have a zillion heart attacks because of it over my LIFETIME. It's what we "signed" up for the day our boys were born. To love then unconditionally. To guide them in what we hope is the right direction. To be there when they really make a shitty bad mistake. We need to be there to tell them that maybe we don't agree with their decisions but we support THEM. We might not like what they DID but we LOVE THEM.
Bill and I will make mistakes and we will screw up I know that, I just hope that they won't be real bad screw ups!!!!! UHHHHGGGG. We will keep saying "sorry" to the boys when we do make mistakes. We say sorry now to them if we embarrass them or give them crap for something they didn't do and we thought they did or didn't say. We try very hard to respect them. Some days I feel like I yelled too much, didn't spend enough of the day with them, some days I feel frustrated. But one thing I know these 2 monkeys know is that we LOVE them, we LIKE them, they mean everything to us and we like to tell them 110x's a day we love them and we give them A LOT of kisses. I hope when they grow up they will see we did our best, we loved them no matter what and there is NOTHING in this world that they could do that would turn us against them. NOTHING.
I've had pretty awesome teachers!

OK. WHY CAN'T I fix my spelling mistakes. Like...polk-dot, and numerous others!!!!!!!??????? Spell check SUCKS! OK NOW IT's fixed and other that I did corect WHILE I WAS editing are no longer fixed.

We were at the hospital today.......

for an appointment for Nick regarding his painful, itchy eczema. It went very well. While we were there I saw this young girl about 13 yrs old or so and she looked really sick. Something was really wrong. She was all wired up with tubes and such and was walking around with someone who I assume was her mom. I also saw a young child who didn't have much hair for reasons I don't even want to think about. On Monday my cousins brother died (she married my cousin)he was 26, a married father with 2 really young girls. As far as I know, he felt good one day and the next. My cousin who is younger than me and has had leukemia 2X's now and was fighting for her life. She's bounced back and is doing good right now. All this has got me thinking about losing a child......sorry to be depressing but like I said in the beginning of my blogging "journey" I'm doing this for my boys so they can read about themselves and their crazy parents one day, not for anybody else. I've heard my parents a few times say there would be nothing worse than out living your child. I feel so sad for my babies when they don't feel well or scrape their knee, but I can fix that. I give a kiss, and put a spider man band-aid on and hug them for a bit and off they go. Sometimes a spider man WONT fix it......circumstances are out of our control. The U of A was the hospital we were at today. The hospital they took us when Drew had his seizure when he was 2. I've been there once before since the seizure and didn't really think about it. It's not something that I think about a lot or get upset when I think about it, but today I thought about Drews seizure and how I thought he was dying in front of us. Bill and I have never seen anbody have one, didn't know what happened. He had a bit of a fever and wasn't himself so we were on the way to the doctor and I heard a bang, peeked around the corner and saw him laying flat as a board next to Nicky who was about 3 or 4 months old and totally rigid AND vibrating (does that even make sense??) and he was purple. I picked him up, ya I know, bad. Ran upstairs to Bill and all I rememeber was screaming that something was wrong. I phoned 911 yelling that Andrew was dying. I don't remember talking to her/him. Bill took the phone, gave our address and started first aid. I do know that I kept YELLING to her Andrew was dying, that he wasn't breathing. I honestly thought he was. I rubbed his hot sweaty face BEGGING him not to die on us. I kept telling him that we loved him so much, he was such a wonderful boy and that he had to be really strong. We KISSED and KISSED him. Bill was doing such a great job at first-aid, talking to 911 and telling me that Drew was breathing until the ambulance came. In those 10 minutes from the time I heard him fall until I heard the sirens I honestly replayed his whole 2 yrs in my mind AND pictured life without him. The ambulance guys were terrific and so kind to Bill and I but so wonderful to Drew. They explained to us that he had a febrile seizure which basically is the childs fever spikes too fast in too short of a time and the body says "OK, we gotta shut down for a bit here!" Knowing NOW that it was a seizure makes the story above look really dramatic, but at the time we didn't know what was happening. All I saw was a purple,rigid,shanking 2 year old that we are maddly, deeply in love with,and very sick. Was he dying? Nope. Did we think he was dying? I sure did, Bill, he said he knew he wasn't dying but he wasn't thinking straight and didn't really know what to think. Bill told me later that he sat down on the stairs and cried after I took off with Drew in the ambulance, he pulled himself together enough to get Nick in the van and follow us. I know my parents were in pure panic because I called my mom and told her that Drew wasn't breathing ( or maybe I said not breathing WELL and the ambulance was on the way) I know it only took my dad 10 min to get from downtown to the north end to pick up my mom. And both my parents were saying prayers the whole way to the hospital.Did our heart break? Absolutely. It has changed the way we parent, in the way that the boys are loved EVERY SINGLE DAY by being told we love them, they make us happy, they are very special and NEEDED in our lives. We listen to them and we respect them as little people. We both hug and kiss them a lot through out the day. Nicky also had a seizure when he was 1 1/2. He had the seizure while I was checking up on him late at night. Febrile again. Again we were heartbroken but I knew he wasn't dying but I was so shaken up that I couldn't rememeber our address. Bill phoned ( we were told to always call an ambulance from the doctors just for safety of the boys in case they did stop breathing) off we went in the ambulance. Nicky was so hot and so scared, he moaned and cried the whole way to the Sturgeon hospital. I sat in some weird painful postion hugging him and not wanting to let him go. I remember standing in the ER room while they took x-rays. If you have ever seen a baby get an x-ray it's horrible. They had me put him in a highchair kinda thing and some plastic cover over his chest with his arms straight up in the air, screaming at me with a look of pure horror as I'm standing to his side tears running down my face not able to touch him. My dad came to the hospital and sat with us to calm us down.

Another hard time for us was the day after Nicky was born. They took him to a different hospital than were I was because he wasn't "eating properly" the nurse told us. WELL, if they had given me a chance to try and breastfeed and not stuck a soother and a bottle down his throat. Our doctor was sooo mad when he found out all the shit that went on, he told Bill he couldn't even talk to me because I would know something was wrong. LOOOONG story that I'm not even going to try to explain.I asked one of the nurses if this whole blood sugar level was serious and she said "well, it COULD be a sign of something serious..." UHHHHH "What do you mean?" I asked "well we will see...." the nut case said.WHY,WHY WOULD you tell a new mom that, whose hormones are ALL OVER. I had my baby sick with 100 illness. Our doctor gave them CRAAP for telling me something they had no idea about. A nasty nurse came and grabbed Nick from me while I was trying to breastfeed and stuck a needle in his foot and there was blood all over his foot, she started to put on his sleeper and Bill asks her if she will clean up the blood and put on a band-aid and she said "No, we don't have time" the ambulance guys came to take Nick to the Mis Hospital. I kissed him good-bye and went into the bathroom and sobbed. One of the men came back and said "I promise we will take good care of him." I could only shake my head. I couldn't stop sobbing. Bill and I had agreed that when the boys were born if for any reason that they had to be moved to a different hospital that he would go with the baby so the baby would't be alone. So it wasn't even discussed. I went back to my bed and called my parents. My dad answered. All I could say was "They took him away!" My parents wanted to come stay with me but it was late and I was so tired. My dad told me later that I had broke his and my mom's heart that night. ( So I guess the heartache that a child can give you lasts a lifetime!)I saw the footprints that they took of his feet the night he was born and lost it again, then a nurse cam in and took away his bassinet and I sat and cried again just as another nurse walked in. She sat on the bed and rubbed my leg as I cried. I don't cry easy. I have never sobbed so much as I did in those days that I was away from Baby Boy Prinsen. We hadn't named him yet. We discussed Nicholas and we both loved it, but hadn't confirmed it. So Bill told the nurse at the Mis hospital that his name was Nick because she told Bill they needed a name besides Baby Boy Prinsen! While I was sitting in my bed in the hospital I was trying to figure out how to sneak out and go see Nick. I had it all figured out. I honestly did. Taxi cab and all! I phoned that night at 11pm to check on my baby and the nurse was so nice. I asked her to tell Nick that I loved him and to give him an extra hug. I was released 2 days later. Bill came and got me at 6am and I was wearing my pink and red-polka-dot PJ's - NO I'm NOT kidding. I had greasy hair and no make-up or decent shoes. Bill gently asked if I wanted to go to wal-mart and get a "nice comfy outfit" he was so funny. Anyone who knows me knows i won't leave the house without some form of make up and NEVER With PJs and greasy hair. It actually makes me laugh now. Just take me to our baby! I hugged and kissed our little miracle. I will NEVER forget the moment of holding him. OH and breastfeeding worked like a charm! HMMMM nasty nurses can go stick their soothers amd bottle up their _ _ _. Bill had stayed with Nick as much as he could the 3 or 4 days that he was in the hospital. Bill took a 100 photos of him for me. He took sweet photos of Nicky lying on his chest. One was of his hand on Nickys back with his wedding ring showing while he was on Billy's chest. Bill took me for lunch, YUP still with greasy hair, pink and red-polka-dot flannel PJ's and not a STITCH of make-up. I could have cared LESS. The nurses said it was great to see a mom who wanted to see her baby that bad. I think they were suprised when they saw me the next day looking quite different.

I'm a mom. My life has forever changed.