Mother For Life

7:30 am and already the crying and whining has started. I’m down and out right now with a nasty chest and sinus cold, so the volume of boys fighting really got to me. What could be so darn important to argue about this early you say? Ah yes it was that nasty little box, the one that calls to them: the game cube. As soon as I stumbled back into the living room, I grabbed it up, pulled the plugs and started giving “the look”.  I asked if lunches were packed; check. Were teeth brushed; check.  Fine, so far rules have been followed. I then asked what all the crying and yelling was for. I get the following:

“He won’t…*sob sob*”

“But I told him…*sob sob*”

“All..*sob sob incoherent speech*”

There is a very important rule in my household, when the games stop being fun, when the crying begins, it’s time to shut it off. If a child is stuck on a hard part of the game,  and it becomes something they have to do instead of something they want to do, it’s time to save and turn it off. I don’t allow temper tantrums when it comes to games at all, there is a zero tolerance in this household. If there is any fighting over whose turn it is, games get shut off. Yes, I’m that cruel.

It stems back to my ex-husband and his extreme need to win. Whenever he would play against my middle son on a video game, if my son was winning, my ex would get angry and do his damnedest to make my son lose concentration. When that wouldn’t work, he would get up and just turn it off in the middle. Or many a night of drunken video game playing where my ex would throw the controller if he lost a round or a character died. On those nights, it was best if none of the children were in the living room during game time, I of course had no choice. So, now that we are away from that I cannot and will not stand for seriousness when it comes to games. Games were made for us to enjoy, to make us laugh. Not for children to sit and cry, or brothers to hit another when they won’t share.

One more rule of game playing I don’t allow is the whole “sore winner, sore loser” mentality. My daughter used to have a bad habit of quitting a board game right in the middle if she wasn’t ahead in the game. The same went for card games. If she couldn’t win, she didn’t want to finish playing. Or when she did win, she’d rub it in her brothers faces, badly. Again, another reminder of my ex we don’t need in this household anymore. To break her of that habit, I stopped letting her play for months. I wouldn’t include her in any of the family games. Then when I did let her start playing again, if she showed any attitude at all, she was kicked out of the game. She has improved extremely well lately I am proud to report. She also stopped dancing and laughing in her brothers faces when she won after mom pulled the same on her, just louder!

As I remind my children constantly, video games are a privilege and if you cannot use them right, you lose that privilege. I’m just waiting for spring and warm weather so I can kick them outside to play. I might even do a crafts night tonight to keep the games off.

For those of you who are parents like myself, you have to sometimes ask yourself “where would I be in life if I hadn’t had children?” Well I think I met my other self today.  She was quite pretty, no wrinkles yet, no visible stretch marks or baby pouch. She was wearing designer clothes, and chatting on her cell phone a mile a minute. She came into my store today with her nurse sister, and I got to hear about an hours worth of conversation.

She talked about her recent vacation, her job as a defense attorney, her latest boyfriend, and how her maid was late this morning. Her complaints were about the lack of a good hair dresser away from New York City, and her brand new car needed an oil change already. She was loud, obnoxious, and yet seemed perfectly happy that way. I am ashamed to say I had a moment where I thought “that woman stole my life!”

Until she had to hold her sisters 3 month old baby that is. This other me looked at that sweet child with such longing in her eyes. She started cooing at the baby, and laying kisses on her tiny cheeks. As I helped the younger sister try on nursing scrubs for her new job, we both glanced over at the picture those two made, then glanced back at each other and grinned. We know what it’s like to hold those tiny bodies in our arms daily.  The other me joined us, and we all carried on conversations about our children, and her lack of.

Turns out she cannot have children, from an accident as a teen. So instead she decided to embrace the single life as she has, and spoil the kids her sisters have. No matter where she is in the world, she never misses a birthday, or holiday. She sends outrageous gifts, and silly cards. She also loves her nieces and nephews with all of her heart.

I felt like a heel almost as she held that baby. I have been a mother for so long, I think I’ve come to take it for granted. I don’t remember what life is like without children. But listening to my other self today, I’m glad I don’t. Now I know where I would be without children. I’d be a semi rich, young looking, successful attorney, just as I had planned. I would also be a very lonely woman.

Everything we go through in life helps shape us, and even through the good and the bad, I’m glad I had it all. Now excuse me while I go hug and kiss my children, and thank them for being mine.

As many of you know, my children come home from school, and take care of themselves for the few hours I still work. We have been doing this since school started, and surprisingly it has gone well. There are little spats now and then, but we have those when I’m home too. There are many rules to this setting though. No phone calls, no friends over, doors locked, check up calls, etc. etc. So it gets very irritating for me when other children show up at my house knowing my kids cannot come out. They will then sit on my outside doorstep and simply wait for me to get home, calling out to me and asking if so and so can come out and play.

My problem with this is: where are their parents? Why does it seem like I am the only mother in town who doesn’t let my children run the town, especially when I am not home? One example of this is a friend of my daughter. Her mother works two jobs as a single parent, I give her credit she works like crazy. Yet while she is gone until late at night, she lets her two daughters run around with no supervision until all hours of the night.

I have let my daughter go to evening basketball games, gone to pick her up, and there is her friend and her sister just wandering around. I tell all the girls “let’s go”, and I walk them home. Of course five minutes after I leave, the girls are back out the door. At least my conscience is clear on that score though.

As a single mother, I understand having to work, trust me I do. There has got to be structure to that though.  I’ve written my rules here before. It hits home now again as the weather gets colder and colder here, and there are children running around. There are so many more dangers with the snow plows that can’t see them, the severe temperatures, the white outs, the icy lake so many think its safe to walk on. *Shivers*, it makes my stomach queasy just thinking on all the things that could go wrong.

Of course toss in the fact that in this small town there are at least ten registered sex offenders, and its a mothers nightmare come true. So I will stick with being known as the mean mom, the one who won’t let her children out to play. At least I will know they are safe and sound when I get home.

It’s starting again, the war between my daughter and myself on her eating habits. It is bad enough that I noticed none of us are eating as healthy as we should again. We go through phases like this. Of course this time I don’t have excuses, but causes. Such as the fact that my local store doesn’t carry many healthy fruits and veggies; without a vehicle this makes it more difficult. Add in the lack of money factor and there you have another cause. Again, not excuses just reasons behind it. So today I will be pulling out my recipes and looking for my cheaper healthy ones. I know I have them, I collect them all the time. However, that still leaves the fights between my daughter and myself.

She is 11, almost 12 now (although at times she acts like she is 17), and at that age where she feels like too much food and she balloons up. We have discussed so many times that meat on a girl is a good thing, that when your pelvis bone sticks out, this is a bad thing. However, it’s become a double edged sword for me. All of her life up till a year ago, she was the skinniest kid around. She had no bottom, and at age 10 was still wearing size 7 or 8 slim pants. So I was constantly reassuring her that she would fill out, but that she was perfectly normal at that size. Of course now that she is filling out, getting my past comments to her tossed in my face is making me crazy.

We’ve had the puberty discussion, we had to go buy training bras last year for her. (Why is it that I never filled out like that when I was younger?) So she starts skipping meals, no breakfast; she leaves her lunch here half the time; and she gets stingy about her dinner. Which in turn leads to her being moody as all get. Of course add in the fact that she will start her women’s time any day now, and you have a girl who goes from one extreme to another. Her friends are all the same as well. Some are still in the too thin range, while others are starting to fill out. Each one of the fillers are trying to stop it, the word fat gets tossed around all the time.

So this morning I took things to the extreme. I had written here before about a pro-Anna site, a place where young girls went to learn the tricks and trades of being anorexic. Well they have pictures on that site. I signed into my fake profile this morning and showed my daughter the most dangerous of cases. I’m not sure how much of a difference it will make, but for her to see girls her age with all their bones showing, barely able to walk, and then reading the health problems, all made her pause.  I even noticed one girl that I saw on there weeks ago. She posted a new picture of herself. It was so bad it almost made me cry, and my daughter noticed this. She asked me why it made so sad and I explained to her that I felt if this girl didn’t get real help soon, she would never make it to her 18th birthday. I told my daughter I never wanted to see her get that way, it’s not natural. We were made to have curves, to have meat on our bones.

Some mothers will look down on this approach, but arguing wasn’t working. Force feeding isn’t going to help either. Perhaps the threat of dying will. That is what will happen to these girls who are anorexic, the ones that don’t get help. I think I have to stay away from that site for awhile, otherwise I might end up doing a bit of googling and try and find these girls. I would call up their mothers and tell them exactly what was going on. I’m sure that wouldn’t go over too well. Besides, that site makes me sad for the girls, and angry at every older woman that signs in there and gives them advice to stay thin.

As a mother myself, you can see how nosy I am already on my daughter’s eating  habits. It’s what we do as parents, or at least what we are supposed to do.

My children came back last night from their “daddy weekend” full of new phrases and information about mom (aka me). Of course, once I heard the new information, I immediately informed all three children if I ever hear any of those phrases come out of their mouths, it’s a soap bar in the mouth for a week!

Let’s start with phrase one: jack me off. I’m not exactly sure what context this was used in, and really don’t care. It’s simply not something you teach children to say. Of course, it was left to me to explain in part to my ten year old son what it mean and why we don’t say it.

Phrase two: my daughter wouldn’t finish her milk, so my ex told her the following “A cow had her udders squeezed for that last bit of milk for a girl who won’t even drink it. All girls who don’t drink their milk should have their udders squeezed“.  Of course, my son worded it a bit different, but either way it’s yet another thing we don’t say to children, especially an 11 year old girl just coming into puberty.

Now this last part, well lets just say the man and I will be laughing for years on this one. Apparently my daughter turned her nose up at a generic snack or food. At which point my ex told her “You’re getting to be just like your mother, a gold digger. Someone should warn that boyfriend of hers that she’s just using him for his money. She’ll suck him dry and throw him away, because that’s what she does”.

That was just too funny not to share. If I am a gold digger, then I am horrible at it! I didn’t get anything in the divorce but my children. He was the one who got the house, the furniture, and no paying alimony. As to my boyfriend, well I love you hun, but you aren’t exactly rolling in the dough yet. The man says it was a jealousy comment, I say it was just another way to try and put me down to my children.

It’s one thing to dislike your ex, most of us do. There is a line however, and this wannabe man keeps crossing it. So please, for all of you divorced or even never married parents, try and keep your evil hateful thoughts to yourself. Your children will grow up and realize the truth on their own, they don’t need you to try and influence them.

Hopefully karma starts catching up to him soon, I’m running out of patience.

Well, it’s been a few days since my last post. Let’s just say things have been quite hectic here, and leave it at that. Right at this moment, we are frozen again here. The temperature is 1 degree, add in the wind chill and its -14. Of course with the temps the way they are, there go our water pipes yet again. I can honestly say thank goodness the kids are going with their father this weekend. It will give me time to hopefully unfreeze the pipes.

I am irritated at the schools as well as I sit here. It’s funny how when the temperature was 4 and 8 degrees, my kids still had school, and yet they had Friday off for that teacher in-service. Funny how that works isn’t it? I kept the boys home, but unfortunately my daughter had mid terms and had to go. We have weatherman on the news warning us if you don’t need to go out, stay home. Yet there I am, arguing with the school about the fact that I kept my boys home. Nice job Mr. Administrators for dropping the ball.

I wonder at what point the schools here decide its simply too dangerous for a child to walk, yes I said walk to school. They close when there is a heavy heavy snowfall, but apparently negative degree windchill does not count. I heard another parent comment that we should expect and be used to the frigid temperatures. Yes we should, but we also should expect the schools to be concerned about a child’s health as well.  All children walk or are driven to the schools in our town. Granted its a small town, one mile wide, one mile long, but it’s still a walk in horrible coldness for some.

I am sure the schools will be full of sick children in the next few weeks. I’ve started pumping the Vitamin C in now, hopefully I can ward off some of those germs for my children. Well, that’s enough cold talk for now, I’m off to the basement armed with my hair dryer to try and get this water running again.

I have a question for all you other parents out there in blogger world. This isn’t only for the single parents, as I know plenty of you two parent families are struggling just as hard. My children are getting older now, at 11, 10, and 6 each has their own chores. The older two are watching each other and the youngest for the two hours I am not home after school. My daughter brought up a point tonight that they should be getting an allowance for doing their chores, or even getting paid for the babysitting.

Now, she did it in a very un-bratty way, which for her lately is a miracle. However, as much as I would love to give them money, right now I am so hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck, that it isn’t even funny. There are days where I literally do not have that dollar or so to spare. Money these days is so precious, I have to watch nearly every dime.  Don’t get me wrong, on one hand, I don’t want to bribe my children, as I was raised that having chores was part of being a child. These kids for the most part do a wonderful job. I have almost no worries about them while I am at work, they are so very responsible about it.

I would like to reward them in some way. With gas prices the way they are, it’s not like we could take alot of the road trips we used to, in fact none really. So I wonder, how do some of you do it? The parents out here who are like me, with no extras at most times. I know there are plenty of you out there. So toss some ideas my way, I’m literally drawing a blank slate.

I have a whole new pet peeve to share. Well, I suppose it isn’t new, I have felt this way since my children first started school. I cannot stand parents who do their child’s homework/projects for them. There is nothing worse than watching your own child work for hours days on end on his own project, then bringing it in to the school and looking at the other projects, just knowing a parent did that.

My middle son is in the honors 4th grade program at our elementary school. So at any given time, he has multiple large projects in work. He just got done with a clay Indian village that he built himself. It’s not perfect, the clay isn’t cut and molded to perfection, but its quite impressive.  He takes it into school and comes home to tell me all about the fabric village another kid had built. Simply from the description, you know a mother worked that project.

It bothers me that so many parents feel the pressing need to make their child seem smarter, more artistic, and more creative than they really are. I’ve seen blogs and postings from mothers who swear they will do what they can to make their child get that grade A, even if it means the mother stays up hours sewing a fabric pattern for them.

I will NOT do my child’s project, ever. I will buy the supplies necessary, I will help with research, showing them how to look. I will even let them know different ways of doing something by showing them. But it is all on them to complete it. That’s why they were given the project in the first place, to learn by doing. Not by having mom do it for them just so its perfect.

That’s just as bad as parents who do their child’s homework for them. Stop it already, you are helping no one by this. Why parent’s feel the need to have the perfect grades for their children is beyond me. Yes, they need that grade point average to get into a good college or job. But does it really count as an A if you did it for them? To me, that really equals nothing but cheating. You have now taught your child to cheat by doing his project for him. Nice parenting technique there.

Maybe it’s just me, maybe I am too hard on my children. I don’t feel that way though. I help them with what I can, I make them think about the answers, how to hunt for them. But I graduated school a long time ago, my shining days are over. It’s all about them now, or at least it should be.

So parents, let your child be a child. Let them get that F if they don’t finish a project, but also let them earn that B for at least an honest attempt. Let them learn there are not only consequences, but rewards for jobs. Otherwise, I’m sure I’ll be seeing your child at the local McDonald’s twenty years down the road, still trying to figure out how to spell “project”.

Whooo hooo so it’s that time of year again. The time when people spend hours searching for last years receipts, long lines at the post office for those procrastinators, and all the muttering and cursing at stuffy old people in tiny cubicles. That’s right folks, it’s tax time!

I do my taxes a few different ways, I’ve been doing my own since I was 17 and actually making money. I thought I would share a few tips for the easy ways to not only do your taxes, but do them right. Now, I’m not an expert, so any advice you take from me, do so at your own damn risk.

For those of you with no deductions, such as kids or school expenses, file either on the phone, or do the IRS e-file. It’s fast and pretty self explanatory. Those with deductions, such as children or other expenses, you can still file online, just not the phone version.

If you file your taxes yourself, make sure you have everything you need first. Gather up your last pay stub, your W-2, a calculator, pencil and paper. Even if you file online, go to your local library and get the book and forms you need. This is for your practice run. I always fill out a paper form, then keep it with my printed out tax returns. It not only gives me an estimate of what I either owe or get back, if ever you are audited, a paper filled form will show you and the IRS where you went wrong.

Now, as to how to file. I either fill out my paper forms and take them to H&R Block, then go for the rapid refund check. Or I fill out my paper forms and go turbo tax, getting the direct deposit. For my state, I still end up getting a paper check mailed to me.

Here’s a few links to keep in mind and to help you out a bit. The IRS site is a great place for all those questions you cannot get answers to over the phone.

www.irs.gov

www.turbotax.com

Now one thing many of you might not know, is that most filers can do so for free. Turbo tax has the free federal version, as does the IRS site. I then go to my own states tax site, and file for free there. As you do all this, think on it this way, the next time your child irritates you, simply remind yourself of that little rebate check they help you get at the end of the year. Then wait until they are 18, and you are no longer getting it before kicking them out…LOL

This morning I was woken up twice. The first when my daughter came home from her sleepover, on time for once. The second time was one hour later, when she woke me up screaming that Butters was dead. I jumped out of bed, and there laying in the hall was our beloved cat. He passed away this morning, and life will not be the same.

My children have had to learn some hard lessons about their friends passing away. I say friends, because they weren’t just our pets, they were their friends. First were my daughters parakeets. These were two rescue parakeets we received for free. We had no idea of their ages, where they came from, or any other information. The only thing we did know, is that the two birds had been together for most of their lives, at least ten years. When the male died of unknown causes, I warned the children that the female would most likely not last, and she passed away two days later.

Then came the dog my ex had picked out. I never did agree with mix breeding, and in this case I was right. We had a puggle, which is a mix between a pug and a beagle. This dog was fine for almost a year, and then suddenly became mean, moody, and refused to eat. After a high vet bill, and countless hours mixing his food trying to come up with something, Brownie passed away on Halloween of 2007.

Now we have Butters. Again, this animal was a rescue. My cousin found him in a ditch on the side of the road when he was maybe 3 weeks old. They gave me the cat when he was 5 weeks old, and my children loved him on site. Butters was so scared of strangers, yet so loving with these kids. He laid with each one of them at night, never picking a favorite. He’s been acting strange for 3 days, but I put that down to it’s breeding season, all the animals are acting up. He was still eating just the same, drinking just the same. The only difference was he was noisier and easier to get riled up.

I feel horrible for my children, to lose so many animals in 3 years is a hard life lesson. It’s also part of having rescue animals as pets. I wish the man were here right now, he could explain it better to them than I can. For now, I’m calling off work, whether I lose my job over it or not. These kids need me to stay home today, and that’s where I will be.