March 30th, 2010
I believe that we parent our children in trimesters. Similar to the trimesters of pregnancy, each phase of parenting is characterized by unique developmental stages for both mother and child.
Parenting Trimester 1: From birth to full-time school-age, ages 0-6.
During this phase, as our children grow from infants to toddlers, and from toddlers to school-aged children, we, too, grow. At first we simply try to find our legs, dedicating ourselves to something small and precious in a way that we never have before, and adjusting our identities from woman or wife or partner, or however we previously defined ourselves, to mother. Many of us set aside years of education and hard-won careers to learn to function on three hours or less of sleep each night while seldom, if ever, going the washroom uninterrupted. We are blown away by the sheer power and force of mother-love. We believe that this is both the most challenging and rewarding time in a parent’s life, but we are wrong.
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March 29th, 2010
I am lying awake in bed in the early hours of morning, my husband lost in dreams beside me while darkness shrouds the spring-time day soon to explode outside my window. I am sleepy-eyed and cozy and still in that blissful, transformed state that occurs only when you’ve just woken from a deep and restful sleep and the details of daily reality have yet to flood back into your consciousness to shock you stupid. That’s when I hear it. Like a phantom menace from my daughter’s bedroom emerge the sounds I have come to dread most: Cough-cough, sniffle-sniffle, cough, sniffle, cough-cough. “Please God, please,” I silently pray, “Please, don’t let her be sick again.”
My prayers fall on deaf ears. By the time I reach her bedroom the coughing is intense. Her child-cum-young-lady’s body is convulsing in rhythm to the spasms in her lungs, her cheeks, flushed and warm to the touch, and her face contorted in an expression that screams “Help me, Mom.” She is twelve. I am not new at this. I should be able to keep her healthy. I should be a better mother.
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March 28th, 2010
For those of you just getting to know me, my life as a mother has not always been quite as straight-forward as it now seems. Rather than reinvent the wheel, or in this case re-write it, follow the link below to an essay I recently published on HybridMom.com to learn more:
http://www.hybridmom.com/articles/features/my-guilty-heart-one-most-emotional-choices-moms-face
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March 23rd, 2010
My Little Miss Know It All has, for the first time, posted her thoughts.
To read her response to my March 23 post, Getting Started, click http://theknowitallmom.com/thoughts-from-little-miss-know-it-all/.
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March 23rd, 2010
When I decided to build a blog I thought, rather naively, Hey, I can do that. If that Julie-lady featured in that Meryl Streep flick can blog with such success, why can’t I?
I will tell you why. Because I am functionally technologically illiterate. Over the past several years, working from home as I have to “be here” for my daughter, a basic understanding of Word, Power Point, Excel and the Internet, combined with the ability to string sentences together into cohesive thoughts and some communications savvy, got me through the work day. But take note: A technological revolution has transpired while I was writing newsletters and volunteering to make cupcakes for the school staff appreciation lunch.
I spent yesterday trying to set up my RSS feed. What the @$*%! Today it was Twitter. Tomorrow, plug-ins and widgets (as soon as I find out what these are). It never ends. I am drowning in a sea of terminology and jargon and links and programming protocol that leaves me breathless, frustrated, and, on more than one occasion, sobbing over my keyboard into a computer monitor strewn with words I’ve never seen.
But stay tuned. I am nothing if not stubborn and I shall overcome! The fact that you are actually reading this is a triumph in itself. Next post: More about my life as mom, less about the challenges of playing technology catch-up.
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March 3rd, 2010
Getting started takes longer than I thought, but “soon” is now just around the corner. It looks like I know a lot about very little, and absolutely nothing about how to make a blog work the way I want it to!
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