I am the sleep czar in my house. I believe in bedtime routines, long and frequent naps on a schedule, and lots of sleep. My children can even recite Weissbluth’s “sleep rules” by heart. As we have had more children — and those children have gotten older — things have loosened up, but only a bit. Bedtime was at 6:30 for my son as an infant and is 7:30 now that he’s in elementary school.

This recent study shows that children who get more sleep function better. Duh.

But I take issue with this little quote:

“Going to bed one hour earlier, that’s not a lot to ask a family, can make a big difference in terms of a child’s daytime behavior,” says Dr. Meltzer.

Not a lot to ask a family. Huh? Really?

Let’s look at my kids’ evening routine:

• 5:30 Full-on sprint mode. I make dinner; the 5YO and 7YO watch something on PBS; baby hangs on me or them.
• 6:00 Dinner time. The kids and I are eating by the time my husband gets home at 6:22.
• 6:45 Our 1YO is melting down and we scurry him off to a 7:00 bedtime. Big kids hit the bath or their evening routine.
• 7:00 Baby is in bed. Begin reading to the bigs.
• 7:30 Big kids in bed. Sometimes smooth, sometimes not.

And they wake up at around 6:30am on school days. So, how could we possibly back that up by one full hour?

What’s it like in your house?

My life is pretty darn good. I don’t have an iPhone or a personal chef, but my days are full of family, friends, interesting work, healthy children, and enough money to pay for a weekly date night. So it’s possible I have little understanding of what it feels like to be painfully jealous of others, because I can usually come back to the place of reminding myself that I have everything I need.

When I recorded this video, I had just read a few blog posts and comments elsewhere from people who described feeling so unhappy when they read about the successes and good times of their friends on Facebook, that they have to stop reading. I was feeling unsympathetic towards people who allowed a stream of enthusiastic status updates to tell them that everyone else’s life is better than theirs.

Despite what I said above, I can think of one particular thing that might drive me away from the constant stream of news and pictures from my friends. And that would be infertility.

Twice I struggled to conceive exactly when I wanted to. Though I was able to get pregnant about a year later in each case, I got a taste of the frustration and sadness that some women face for years. Since one of the main topics of conversation in my Facebook environment is children, their births, milestones, and silly moments, I really would understand if someone in my social circle who wished to have children but couldn’t decided that Facebook was giving her more bad feelings than good, and that it was better for her mental health to stay away.

What do you think? Does Facebook make you green with envy? Do other people’s vacation pictures bum you out? Or are there deeper issues surfacing that I haven’t considered?

Before you heed my warning, let me provide a little context. I have seen the original PIXAR Cars movie dozens and dozens of times. When my sons, now 4 and 6, can’t agree on anything else for family movie night, we watch Cars. I took my then 18 month-old to see Cars in the theater as his first toddler movie-going experience; that was a bad idea for other reasons, but the movie is sweet, simple, not scary, and has a positive message of friendship.

Ummm, why are they running for their lives?

So, why not take your toddler or young preschooler to see Cars 2?

1. Guns. Lots and lots of guns. Shooting. Killing. You don’t want your kiddo to see gun violence, stay away from this movie. You don’t care so much? Read on.
2. Complicated plot. Way too confusing. If you replaced the animated cars with human actors, this could be a regular semi-decent spy thriller. Children do not understand the difference between Big Oil and bio-fuel nor should they have to.
3. Lacking all charm and positive messaging. Actually, if you are an adult really looking for these things, you will find two different throw-away lines about standing by your friends and being yourself. But those lines are buried. Buried by guns.

I took my sons to see this movie on the first Saturday matinee showing. They said they loved it but didn’t understand lots of it. My four year-old had nightmares for two nights after.

Don’t take my word for it. As of this writing, Cars 2 has scored 33% fresh on RottenTomatoes.com, the worst score for any Pixar movie. According to Commonsensemedia.org, 74% of parent-reviewers say that violence is an issue and they recommend it for ages 8 and up.

So, if you saw Cars 2 already, do you agree with my assessment? If you haven’t, did I sway your opinion?

Last week I was invited to lunch by the folks at Stonyfield Farm yogurt. We are big consumers of their products in my house and I was happy to go. The guest speaker was Robyn O’Brien, and her story moved me.

Robyn talked about how a couple of years ago, as a busy mom of four kids, she felt that just feeding her clan was hard enough and that she didn’t need to beat herself up over what they actually ate. She tried to keep their grocery bill in check. Blue tubes of yogurt were frequently on the menu.

One day, her daughter had a frightening allergic reaction to eggs. As she started researching food allergies, and discovered the lack of free information, she decided to create a resource for families who face them, and a few months later AllergyKids was born.

But wait, there’s more.

Robyn kept learning more and more about what exactly is in our foods and discovered a bunch of unhealthy and upsetting truths. A self-described patriotic Conservative, she felt devastated to discover that the United States permits a whole bunch of ingredients in our food that are not allowed in other countries. Even nations that rely on the U.S. for food assistance do not allow some of these ingredients because they are not proven safe. It’s no wonder our little kids are demonstrating allergies at rates unheard of when we were growing up.

I am half-way through Robyn’s book, The Unhealthy Truth, and it’s kinda rocking my world. I am glad to have met her and heard her story straight from her mouth, a mom who was moved to action because of a gut-wrenching journey she experienced. She said that to realize her child had suffered from food that she herself had prepared and offered her was simply heartbreaking.

To make it real for you, let me share this example that I came across on Healthy Child Healthy World. It’s a US vs UK: Mac ‘n Cheese Smackdown. Basically, in the UK, Kraft makes a different, safer Mac and Cheese formulation. Take a look:

U.S. Version of Kraft Mac & Cheese:

Enriched Macaroni Product (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Ferrous Sulfate [Iron], Thiamin Mononitrate [Vitamin B1], Riboflavin [Vitamin B2], Folic Acid), Cheese Sauce Mix (Whey, Modified Food Starch, Whey Protein Concentrate, Cheddar Cheese [Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes], Salt, Calcium Carbonate, Potassium Chloride, Contains Less Than 2% of Parmesan Cheese [Part-Skim Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes, Dried Buttermilk, Sodium Tripolyphosphate, Blue Cheese [Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes], Sodium Phosphate, Medium Chain Triglycerides, Cream, Citric Acid, Lactic Acid, Enzymes, Yellow 5, Yellow 6).

U.K. Version of Kraft Mac & Cheese:

Macaroni (Durum Wheat Semolina), Cheese (10%), Whey Powder (from milk), Lactose, Salt, Emulsifying Salts (E339, E341), Colours (Paprika Extract, Beta-Carotene)

When a discussion of using a housekeeper exploded over on The Happiest Mom, I was taken by surprise. More than a hundred women commented on Meagan’s post about outsourcing housecleaning. Many felt too guilty to consider it and more than a few took a stand against it.

My husband and I have a cleaning person come to our house twice per month, and we also have someone who mows our lawn and tends to our landscaping every other week. When Meagan’s commenters started accusing women who outsource household labor of spending their time and efforts on the wrong things, I started making a mental list of all the things I outsource that I could be doing myself.

I could grow all my own vegetables, but I buy them at the grocery store.

I could change my own oil; I’m sure my dad would be happy to teach me how.

I could hem dresses that are too long for me, but I take them to a tailor. Heck, I could sew the dresses myself, but it would take so long, they’d fit poorly, and buying the fabric and notions would probably cost as much.

But I don’t do those things, and I don’t feel guilty about it.

About every two months, I get a pedicure. And if less time has gone by, say six weeks, it’s possible that I will have not cut my toenails in between visits to the nail salon. It is then that I laugh at myself and think “Who am I that I outsource the cutting of my toenails? That’s just plain weird!”

(Yet I outsource my eyebrow maintenance, and I don’t feel uncomfortable about it.)

I know I might get blasted on this post for confessing these behaviors, as a commenter on The Happiest Mom wrote underneath my comment

Because you have soooo much more pressing things to do with your time (making your own notepads–good grief–and going to mommy “summits”) it’s great you have “Maria” (gee, I wonder, could she be latin/hispanic?) to clean your house. Does nobody else find this nauseating?

I don’t feel I have to defend the way I spend my time to a stranger, so I won’t go there.

I actually have made a handful of articles of clothing for myself with my sewing machine. Once, I made a potholder.  I went through a beading phase and made necklaces. And now that I have kids came along I make things for them. Because it’s fun.

Usually, however, I buy things for myself already made. Isn’t this outsourcing? And usually I take my car to a car wash. (And when I am working, another woman puts my child down for her nap.)

Somehow, outsourcing housecleaning and childcare are the hot buttons. I’m guessing folks aren’t judging each other for buying bottled lemonade instead of making it from lemons.

When I hear people express guilt over hiring help, whether it’s for cleaning or childcare, I want to relieve that guilt for them. But we can’t tell each other how to feel.

So tell me, do you cut your own toenails?

I grew up the daughter of a butcher. As a consequence, I’ve always been a meat snob. So much so, that people often mistook me for a vegetarian because I wouldn’t eat whatever crappy shrink-wrapped meat they purchased at the grocery store.

But I was just picky. As a kid, if I didn’t want pork chops for dinner, my dad would shrug and make me a filet mignon. (Now that I’m a mom, I can see why that was easier than picking a fight.)

Fast forward to college and I was an Industrial Engineering major. (What is that, you ask?) It means that I love nerdy factory efficiencies; solving for X and finding the shortest possible route between several destinations. It also means that as an adult, I’ve become an avid meal planner, DVR user, and list-maker.

But, back in college, the lust for efficiency meant that I applauded the factory farming techniques that bring us industrial agriculture as progress.

My path away from factory farming has been slow and deliberate. It was my book club reading of Fast Food Nation that put me off my weekly McDonald’s burger and our subsequent reading of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that turned me into a label reader intent on avoiding ingredients that are not real food.

Oh yeah, and becoming a mom has changed everything too.

Earlier tonight, I caught wind of a corn syrup storm brewing on twitter as I was hustling to prepare a 30 minute dinner in about 47 minutes. Mom-101 was being accused of being a mindless borg (the other night it was a douchebag, she just can’t win!) for criticizing those who would defend the fake sugar people corn-processed artificial sweetener lobby.

Now, I wish that I could sit around the family dinner table with my dad (who died in 1998) and grandfather (also in the meat business his whole life, died in 2006) and really discuss factory farming, grass-fed meat, high fructose corn syrup, and the genius of Michael Pollan. Would they argue that “corn-finished really is better” or would they agree that chickens and cows are made to eat grass? Would they laugh off organic produce or embrace it? Would they tease me about being a chicken owner?

Since my extended family of die-hard Ohio republicans voted for Barack Obama in the last election, I suspect that they would see things my way.

But they would probably tease me about the chickens.

You know what’s probably really good exercise for a mom? Sneaking out of a toddler bed six times in one night. Slowly lifting one’s head from her sleeping daughter’s pillow, raising chest to the ceiling, wiggling arm out from under said child, keeping that core steady, holding a side plank position while taking a deep breath. Next lower legs to the floor, contracting abs so that feet do not make a sound as they make contact with the rug. Push through the heels, working those glutes as you come to a stand. Walk slowly to your own bed.

Do not fall asleep. Listen for over-anxious child to wake again and pitter patter into your room. This takes about twenty minutes. Pretend to be asleep when you hear your name, “Mommy”. Get out of bed. Take child firmly by the hand and bring her back to her own bed. Deliver quiet reassurance, followed by threats, pleas of desperation.  Stretch out next to child and wait ten minutes or so to hear heavy breathing, while making a mental list of things to use as bribes. Then, repeat exercise described above, alternating turns with partner to ensure maximum workout time for both parents.

I was reading an article on SF Gate yesterday called Ten tips for becoming a happier parent because I’ve been a bit grumpy since reading the New York Magazine article All Joy and No Fun. (Why parents hate parenting).

The original New York article catalogs the joys (intense) and the sorrows (frequent) of parenthood. Upon reading this quote: children are “a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit,” I started nodding in agreement. Before I finished reading, I had tweeted and facebooked my solidarity.

But was I a hypocrite now cheering on the opposite sentiment from my book and website? Moms having more fun is my schtick, right?

So, is it really true? Did my children steal everything I loved doing before I became a mom? I have to admit, during that moment of doubt, I needed a little extra help finding the bright side of parenting.

Self-portrait by Jessica Todd Harper, shown with her son.

The happier parenting tip (from the SF Gate article) that I’m loving is this: Hang out with childless friends. These people don’t want to wallow in your mind-numbing chatter about sleep battles or comparison shopping on strollers. These people are still a good time!

Right after you have a baby, you avoid childless friends like the plague…at least I did. I’m not sure why. Maybe I feared that I’d feel jealous of their freedom or maybe I was afraid they couldn’t relate.

That was a mistake because once I started reconnecting with those friends I realized that they are the best cure for parenting overload. And no, it’s not because they can drink more wine. My parent friends are actually heavier drinkers than my kidless friends (wonder why that is?). It’s because they know how to talk about things outside of kids. They actually read the “New York Times” beyond the homepage, see movies in theaters, listen to the latest music, and have travel plans beyond going to Hawaii and Tahoe.

And if you want to talk about your kids, these childless friends listen and admire you for trying to be such a good parent, rather than giving you the name of a great child psychiatrist or telling you that you should read such and such parenting book.

You might need to find some stuff to talk about, but we know you can do it!

Read more:
Activity #107: Have some adult conversation
All Joy and No Fun. Why parents hate parenting.
Ten tips for becoming a happier parent.

Let me start out by saying in no uncertain terms that I love the Toy Story movies!! Just so we’re clear.

I enjoyed them in the theater back in the day. And I recently screened a DVD at home for my two- and four-year old boys with great success for family movie night. My big boy tends to scare easily so that’s saying something. Even the great minds at Common Sense Media agree that four is not too young.

Ok great. You get it. I love these movies.

But.

But. A double feature? For little kids four and under? You can’t pay for them as separate movies, only as a package deal (LAME!). WTF?!

But. Enormous 3D glasses? For little kids? Not so much.

These are not improvements.

Milo was ready to leave before the first movie was over (and this was a movie he’s seen before and liked). Lucky for all of us in the theater he was pretty good-natured about it. We cut our losses and left at intermission.

We returned the next day, just me and Holden, to watch the sequel. But because many of the children were leaving for their own attention-span-related reasons, we easily found seats.

I was relatively optimistic because the story and characters were fresh in our minds and we didn’t have the baggage of a two-year old. This time, Holden tried to leave before it was over (too scary!!!) but I negotiated that he watch the rest of the movie from my lap. During the aforementioned flip-out (“Mommy, mommy please can we leave!!!”), his 3D glasses fell to the floor never to be recovered.

My husband says we can look forward to many many 3D movies in our future, but I’ll warn all the parents out there that you’re better off buying Toy Story 1 and Toy Story 2 for your home collection.

For the price of a family of four heading to the 3D show (about $53 in our area!!), you can watch these gems over and over and over in your own sweet time (with bathroom breaks! and rewind!) with the candy popcorn at home. The 3D is no improvement for kids this age range.

Little ones in need of a fun outing? Skip it.

Older kids? Parents who love Pixar? Enjoy!

We made it through the Winter like champs. The boys didn’t get sick, I worked my part-time hours. Life as a working mom was as good as it gets (And by “good” I mean that I worked 25 to 30 hours outside of the home for a paying job where people say nice things once in a while, my kids enjoy their preschool situation, I’m responsible for 80% of the cooking and 100% of the laundry, and my husband does a ton to pull his weight at home while also balancing his full-time workload). *

But this Spring has kicked our asses.

Today, one hour after getting to work, I got the call from LOIS. When Lois calls you during the day, it is never good. Best case, she is calling because you forgot a pacifier or a sun-hat, but usually someone is sick. Usually someone needs to be picked up ASAP. Come to think of it, I really ought to give Lois a special ring, like a siren.

This time, it was Milo: crying all morning and 102 degree temperature. I joked that it was her fault, that he was perfect and cheerful when I left him. Lois laughs but I still have to flake on the whole rest of the workday, get back in my car, drive back across the bridge to pick up my sobbing, drooling, bright red kid.

But c’mon kid, we just had a four day weekend! (Yes, four because their school which hardly ever closes and is geared toward working parents had a rare teacher work day).

And last week, it was Holden. Holden had a one day school week (he’s in for all the days, people!) because of a fever that just wouldn’t quit. His temp was between 101 and 102 from Saturday through Tuesday, and because his school (wisely) has a “24 hour rule” (of being symptom- and fever-free), we kept him home Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. This is a great time to mention that my husband, Alec, is a fantastic and equal partner. He stayed home with Holden on Monday and Wednesday because we already knew I’d be home on Friday. Love that man.

The week before it was Milo. He punctuated Mother’s Day with a vomit spree, so I kept him home on Monday.

And, the week before THAT it was Holden again. A high fever, chills, flu-like body aches, and some pink eye right before I had to leave town for a family funeral (my favorite Grandma died, thanks for asking). Another 3-day work week.

Wah wah wah, right? It’s just so flipping hard to be taken seriously as a professional when ever time a kid gets sick, all bets are off!

Today hit me especially hard because I couldn’t reach my husband to see if he’d pitch in and he has a conference tomorrow and Thursday. Did I already mention, “Wah wah wah”? I know I did. I can’t help but feel like a big slacker when I schedule meetings and then have to bail out. I like being efficient and responsible.

So, I just gave Lois and the entire school staff the “ALARM” ring, so next time we get the call, my whole office will know it. And they’ll know it’s real. Right?

—–
* And don’t get me started in my musings and amazement about how two parents manage to work full time. That is an exploration for another day!

In order to carry less luggage, we have rented a carseat on the other end of our trip a couple of times. We have not had an issue… yet. After reading the scary story that Debbie just published on Delicious Baby, I think I will never rely on a rental carseat again. READ THIS!

Yeah yeah, everyone thought we already did it. Holden told his preschool teacher in March that the Paci Fairy came and took his pacifier away and gave him a toy. Whitney thought we took it away months ago too and was amazed that Holden still naps so well.

Not exactly.

Earlier this week, we took Holden to his first dental appointment and the dentist told us to get rid of the paci. Holden promised he would but then — as evening drew near — he panicked. I said, “ok, one more night and we’ll say goodbye to it in the morning.”

When morning came, I brought in a small box that said “GOOD BYE PACI” and put the paci in. He thought I was pretty funny. Since nighttime was a full day away, he didn’t care at all. When dinner time came, I put the box in the middle of the table and we SANG TO IT: “Happy goodbye to you. Happy goodbye to you. Happy goodbye dear Paci. Happy goodbye to you.” And we celebrated with a tablespoon of ice cream.

…stay tuned for the rest of my story.