A Mom's Life

Tomorrow is our 12th anniversary but we have been together since September 2011. If you do the math, our relationship is 15 years old. That's right, our relationship is a teenager. We've passed the cute goo goo gah gah of infancy. Our baby marriage shit its pants over and over and we've had to clean up its explosive blow outs. Our infant relationship was needy and we were very dependent on the other. Back then we always had to be held and we co-slept. Our baby relationship needed the bottle as much as the breast and sucked its thumb for comfort. The first stage of our relationship was all about the basics and immediacy and survival. We fell and picked ourselves up as relationship toddlers. This couple has thrown themselves on the floor and tantrummed like preschoolers. We've had many growing pains. We've grown and stretched and grown some more. Somewhere around 2010, the relationship lost its chubby baby fat. We learned the A,B, C's and 1,2,3's of marriag...

I move stuff around our house all of the time. I like to organize and one of my mantras is, "There's a place for everything when everything is in its place." Often, that place, however, is not my place. I very much dislike clutter and being surrounded by stuff stresses me out. A fun Friday night for me is cleaning the house and, when I really need to decompress, I grab a trash bag and fill it to the brim. I am the only person in my house like this. Caroline is just plain messy while Charlotte and Andy are borderline hoarders. Anything that touches their fingertips never leaves their possession and they have a magician-esque manner of acquiring objects. "Oh, look what I just pulled out of this my black hat! (Charlotte owns a magician hat, by the way) Yes, it's 17 plastic toys from McDonald's Happy Meals!" "Oh, what's that behind your ear? A lead soldier! Fancy finding that here!" I'm not sure if I'm just that unobservant or if I...

We have done a ton of traveling since the girls were born. Just four short weeks after Caroline's birth, we traveled to Puerto Rico to attend my best friend's wedding. I'm comfortable with being on the go- all of the time- and with kids in tow. Traveling, and being out in public, with kids, is a learned skill and, in my opinion, is a true art form. When the kiddos are itty bitty, you have to learn how to cart all of the crap with you and be able to distinguish between the crap you really need on the road and what crap should stay at home. Like car seats. Yes, it is worth sticking your body in the car, in the airport parking garage, in the dark at 5 am, and wrestling with the belts and buckles to extricate the ginormous car seat and then clunkily balance it on your luggage while you hussle to the check-in. (Yes, you have earned the right to pay the extra $3/day to park in the garage and not in long term.) Get this, nobody will tell your baby if you use disposable diapers f...