What is Happening?

Sometimes K will stop in her tracks, look around, and say, "What is happening?" There's usually no (obvious) outside impetus, and she quickly goes back to whatever she'd been doing. (Today, for instance, the question came in the middle of a rousing session of "let's hit the clock reset button on the radio hundreds of times in a row.")

Lately, Fridays have become my cleaning days. (Well, cleaning along with everything else days. I *try* to finish my Work work early on Fridays so I can focus on taking care of my family and not just clients.) Floors, bathrooms, kitchen, get caught up on dishes, etc etc. And do you know what? I'm kind of diggin' it. I kind of enjoy Cleaning Fridays, even.

What is happening?

I guess I should add the "my 'clean' may not be what you consider 'clean'" disclaimer, because even after a full Friday of cleaning, no one is going to walk through the door and say, "Wow, this house is sparkling and spotless!" My goal is more humble: as long as they don't walk through the door and say, "Excuse me, I need to call CPS now," I'm happy. 

The "clean" never lasts very long. Boots come in and leave pools of melting snow in the kitchen. K decides she wants popcorn for a snack (is there a way to eat popcorn without little pieces of it getting everywhere? I really want to know). I decide that baking with a toddler and letting her measure out the flour is a good idea. Just as I was writing this blog entry someone spilled a cup of pop all over the floor that I finished scrubbing not 45 minutes ago. But! I know that it was recently clean, and that it can be clean again, and that it's not such a lost cause. And that's a good feeling.

Motherhood does strange things to a person. It makes you ask yourself tough questions like, "What might be the best cleaning tool with which to get dried-on splotchy mounds of red jello off of the hundred year old hardwood floor?" (Hint: it's not your fingernails. Trust me on that one.) 

Is there a "mom job" that you find yourself enjoying these days, much to the surprise of your pre-parent self?

Other Names

The three of us were hanging out this weekend when K referred to me as Kathryn (her actual name, though I bet you've already figured that out).

It wasn't the first time she'd done that. It seems like, while she realizes that I'm mommy and she's baby, she thinks we both share the "other name" of Kathryn.

"K," I said, wanting to prod at this a little more. "What's my other name?"
K: "Mommy!"
Me: "Yes, but what's my other name?"
K: "You!"
Me: "Yes, but what's my other name?"
K: [thinks] "Friend."

<INSERT MELTING HEART HERE>

We played a few more rounds of this game, and I told her that my Other other name was Karinya, and -- my name is not an easy one to pronounce, but she just about nailed it! It was the first time I'd heard her say my Other other name, and it was . . . one of those amazing motherhood moments that sort of cancels out things like last month's Desitin-on-carpet-and-favorite-chair incident.

Names are something we've been thinking a lot about lately. When we started the blog, I asked Bob what he wanted to be referred to as in posts, and after some deliberation about what labels to apply to ourselves in relation to each other and our family, we decided to just use our real names instead of "mom" or "dad" or whatever. Parenthood is all-consuming and life-taking-over enough (not that it's not worth it) but it's nice, sometimes, to remember that we have "other names," too.

*For those keeping score, K usually calls Bob dad or daddy, even though he didn't come into our lives until she was twenty months old. She started doing it on her own (there was no goading on either of our parts to encourage her to apply that label to him; it just happened organically. This thrilled me beyond belief) but she still sometimes rotates Bob or Bobby into her daily speech.

I'm a little tired and birthday partied-out, so I can't come up with a smooth way to tie this into the rest of the post, but: Unlikely Origins now has a facebook page! If you like us (and I hope you do?), please consider "officially" liking us on facebook. If you really like us, perhaps use facebook's handy "suggest to friends" tool, too? (Don't make me play the birthday card, folks. I TOTALLY WILL.)

Happy Halloween!

I had really grand plans for Halloween. Weeks ago, things looked wonderful: I had plenty of time to put together creative Halloween-themed crafts, someday after storytime my mom friends and I would coordinate when/where we would meet to go trick-or-treating, K and I would paint lots of little pumpkins and put a few out in front of both our now-house and our new-house for decoration, and we'd send one to work with Bob to put on his desk as a cutesy reminder of how much we like him ;-). This weekend we were going to go out and let K pick a pumpkin, then set up shop at the new house and help her carve her first jack-o-lantern. At one point I had even entertained the idea of a homemade costume, like my mom used to sew for my sister and me. It was going to be awesome. 

That's not how it happened. No crafts were made that weren't planned by someone else (thank goodness for K's absurd schedule of extra-curricular toddler activities! She did make the requisite number of themed crafts thanks to her multiple library activities and yoga classes that she attends every week). My mom friends and I all got caught up in our own lives and didn't get to coordinate any Halloween meet-ups. We did, actually, paint a number of small pumpkins -- but they never made it past the top of the microwave cart where I had set them to dry. And the actual pumpkin carving? Yeah. Nope.

Instead, today after leaving Bob's house I made a 30-second pit stop at my house to frantically search for the black pants and top that went underneath K's costume, I chugged Diet Coke on the drive to my grandma's farm to stay awake (. . . it had been a long day) so we could quickly show her K's Elmo getup before heading back to town for trick-or-treating, I threw a bag of old suckers that had been in my basement for a month or two into a big mixing bowl and put it on my porch, and K and I hit the streets to go "treat-treating" by ourselves.

And it was fine. It was fun! K ended up with an almost-full plastic pumpkin bucket of candy, we got a ton of compliments on her (store-bought!) costume, we actually ran into a number of our friends while we were out anyway, and she gleefully shouted "treat-treat!" at most of our neighbors. The bowl-o-suckers that I had left on my porch wasn't emptied by the first greedy middle-schooler that came along, and when we got home almost two hours later it was still half full! (Humanity, I'm impressed and award you two points.)

I think that's one of my biggest parenting challenges: reconciling the differences between the kind of parent I want to be (organized, pro-active, something-close-ish-to-perfect?) with the kind of parent that I actually am (overwhelmed, seat-of-pants, hey-she-probably-won't-remember-anyway-so-this-is-good-enough.) The logical side of my brain knows that K is only two and it's unlikely that she'll someday end up in therapy as a result of not having carved her first pumpkin until the ripe old age of three, and that the fact that we walked around the neighborhood without an entourage of friends probably won't lead to a lifetime of social anxiety or chronic loneliness. I know that. But that annoying other side of my brain is tsktsk-ing me and saying, is "good enough" really good enough for K? Is it?

I don't know. To be honest, it's almost midnight and I'm tired and I can't even begin to think about forming an answer-answer to that question. But right now she's happy, sugar-buzzed and staying up late to watch an OnDemand Dora marathon, so we'll call this one a draw.

Happy Halloween, fellow imperfect parents of the interwebs!