Oh the joys of a sink and dishwasher that drain!! My counters are finally cleaned off – no more drying rack or stack of dishes waiting in reserve for the dishwasher to work again, no more science project bubbling up from the depths of my rotting, cast iron pipes, no more washing my dishes in a bucket.

I just had to share the good news. I hope you all have had a day filled with similar wonder.

I have not meant to neglect this space for so long. But I’ve had a bad case of dish-pan hands.

Our ancient cast-iron plumbing is hopelessly clogged in our kitchen so our sink, our dishwasher, our disposal all won’t drain. Fun, fun, fun. The plumbers come to rework our kitchen plumbing tomorrow, but I’ve been washing dishes in a bucket since Saturday, using paper plates and trying to creatively use one pan when cooking. All of this has brought to a head my constant struggle to keep the perfect house while raising a head-strong and accident-prone child.

I swear I’m not as anal as that sounds. Trust me, my house is far from perfect and even on its cleanest days it is still a lived-in house with a stray cobweb probably in the corner, stacks of papers/books/clutter on the desk, floors that probably haven’t been washed in the last six months, toys everywhere and please, please don’t open my oven.

I struggle with the unrealistic June Cleaver vision of a stay at home mom yet at the same time holding myself to that standard. I mean, sure, I want to emulate June in her ability to care for her family while still looking put together and in heels no less. But that stereotypical “housewife” raises the hair on the back of my neck. So why do I feel like a bad mommy when I realize I’ve stepped over the same pile of books in the bedroom for three months?

I guess I still feel like because I’m home I should be more “with it” than I am when it comes to household chores. After all, working moms have to handle the cooking and the cleaning and the mothering on top of being at work for most of a day. Maybe it has more to do with the fact that without a job, the status of the house is really the only measuring stick to my daily performance, or so it feels some days.

I’m working on it. I’m learning to accept my imperfections and make friends with the dust bunnies. Luckily, I have a kid who thinks the Swiffer is a toy!

And it’s all your fault anyway, dear reader…I probably could have washed a bucket of dishes in the time it took me to write this. Oh well.

Peanut has figured out shaking his head. I’m not sure if he completely grasps the power of his new gesture (he mostly employs it when he’s done eating and wants out of the high chair), but it’s entered his arsenal and provided us a glimpse of the terrible toddler “no”-fest to come.

I think I’ll enjoy his ignorance while I can. Whoever coined “ignorance is bliss” most definitely was a parent.

It’s hard to know what to write today. I have honestly started this post several times and nothing feels quite right. I could write about what it felt like in Washington, DC that day. How the sky was so blue, how we gathered around the television sets in our offices confused about what was happening in NY, how everything suddenly changed when we realized the Pentagon had been hit, how quiet the bumper-to-bumper traffic was leaving the city – no horns, no cutting people off, just thousands of cars with their windows rolled down all listening to WTOP and watching the huge black plume pour from the Pentagon into the sky over the Potomac – how we cringed at the sound of every military plane overhead when we knew one of the flights was still unaccounted for, how we will always consider the passengers on United Flight 93 heroes because we knew that flight was coming to DC, how quiet the streets and the airports were, how we gathered in churches.

I could write about how our world changed, how fear came home. Or I could write about how, slowly but surely, our lives did get back to normal and it seems surreal that it’s been six years.

But I’d much rather write about how there was joy this 9/11 anniversary morning, how I was tickling my 13 month old peanut on our bed listening to his belly laugh and relishing in his four-tooth grin, how we snuggled under a blanket to read a story before his morning nap, how he giggled when we got to a page with frogs on it.

So today, under a similarly clear, blue sky, I remember those who sacrificed their lives in NY, DC, Pennsylvania and subsequently in Afghanistan and Iraq. You are not forgotten. You are present in the safety we no longer take for granted, you are present in the joy we are privileged enough to experience on these anniversaries, and you are present in our prayers. We remember.

I’m officially wrapping my child in bubble wrap and keeping him locked in his room. There is just too much danger out there – speeding cars, toys made in China, child predators, coffee tables.

Peanut somehow slipped while banging his drumstick against the coffee table (something we do several times a day) and hit his mouth on the way down. The blood was dark and immediate. He rebounded relatively quickly, but he split that little thing that connects your upper lip to your gum on the inside. The pediatrician took a look and all is well ($15 co-pay, $4 parking fee, 2 minute doctor’s visit, mommy’s piece of mind…priceless), but I’m still recovering nearly 24 hours later.

I didn’t handle the situation well at all. Oh, sure, I was at his side in a heartbeat, paper towel in his mouth to stop the bleeding from going down his throat, trying to get ice on it, murmuring reassuring words and rocking him gently…while I was balling like a child myself. I called the hubby once I knew peanut was not seriously hurt and he said all the right things (“I’m sure he’s fine”, “Why don’t you call the pediatrician’s office to be sure”…), but what I really wanted was for him to ditch work and come straight home to take care of it, okay, take care of me. Even at the pediatrician’s office this morning, the doc cuddled peanut when really I wanted to ask him to give me a hug instead!

If I’m this much of a wreck now, what happens when he really starts hurting himself at football practice, at camp, on the playground, whatever? Although, I suppose wrapping him in bubble wrap isn’t realistic – he’d probably get a rash or the hubby and I would have too much fun popping it. Plus, he’s apparently already at risk from the bottles I gave him. And to think I remember learning to ride a bike without a helmet, roller skating down big cement hills with no knee pads and playing for hours in the woods behind our house. It’s amazing I survived!

I guess the moral is to just let kids be kids. They’re gonna get hurt. I can’t wrap him in bubble wrap…

…but I could wrap the coffee table in it!

I never thought I’d say this, but I miss my commute. Okay, maybe not the hour drive-to-the-park-
and-ride-get-on-a-bus-to-the-
train-station-then-ride-into-
the-city-and-walk-two-
blocks-commute, but 20 minutes of downtime after a day of work…yeah, that would be nice.

What’s a stay-at-home-mom to do? We go straight from afternoon playtime to dinner prep to feeding, clean-up, bath and bedtime routine not to mention trying to sneak in a bite ourselves at some point. I realized how much that affects my evening sanity when the hubby came home last night and found me totally frustrated trying to get dinner on the table while attempting to keep a fussy one-year-old occupied and stationary. When he left for the gym after getting peanut in bed at 8, I finally had a chance to breathe, to take a second and regroup…but then I was alone in the house with no one to talk to. Contrast that to the hubby willing to chat when he came home at 5:30, wanting to know about our day and what fun things we did together.

The difference? He had time to turn off part of his day and focus on something new. I was still in the trenches, changing laundry loads after our weekend away and emptying the dishwasher for the second time in 12 hours.

So ladies, how do you make the switch from mom to just you at the end of a long day chasing/playing/cleaning/feeding the little ones? What’s your stay-at-home-mom “commute” back to you?

Now that peanut’s a year old, it’s also been a year away from work from mama. Granted, this time last year I was on maternity leave and struggling with the decision about whether to go back or not. I suppose I always knew I didn’t want to go back since I never really seriously researched day care options. My excuse at the time was that I worked from home anyway and would have some buffer time to figure it all out. The truth – I was completely daunted by it and too enamored with the little guy to even contemplate the reality of leaving him for more than five minutes.

Now that I’ve been away a year, it seems I finally have some clarity of mind to even think about whether I want to work or not (don’t even get me started on how the U.S.’s policy of 12 weeks UNPAID leave after the birth of a child is ridiculous on so many levels as it pertains to women in the workforce). And the fact of the matter is, I don’t really miss it that much.

I do miss my colleagues. I miss my clients. I see stories on the news and wonder if it’s one I would have worked on if I was still at work. I miss the “free” lunches/drinks/dinners. I miss the challenge of finding the right answer to a problem and then watching it implemented to successful results. But the day-to-day grind, the office politics, the dreaded sales goals, the struggle to get ideas heard, the presumption that I needed to be available all day/night every day/night (sorry, I just don’t need to feel that important)…can’t say that I miss it.

All of which makes me stop to think was I even doing the right job for me after all? PR is a vast field and I think if I could find the right firm with the right clients and the right schedule for me, I’d be all over it. At the same time, I think maybe it’s time for a career shift, time to explore different options and outlets for my skills. What a wonderful gift peanut has given me — not just the honor to be in his presence everyday, but the opportunity to explore the world with him and rediscover parts of myself that I had put aside because I was so busy being a grown-up.

And what a wonderful gift the hubby has given me. Not only by financially supporting our current household arrangement so I can be home with the peanut, but by also encouraging me to find my passions and providing the emotional support I needed (um, still need!) while adjusting to several new roles (and honey, I know this hasn’t been easy to do!).

So a year later, I still don’t know where I’m headed, but I finally feel mentally and intellectually prepared to actually think about where I might want to go and how to get there. I feel confident that I will return to some sort of work at some point. A year ago, that type of vague comment would have sent me over the edge (as my sister recently pointed out, pre-peanut, I was a lot more high-strung. I’m glad to see he’s mellowed me A LOT!) A year later, simply knowing that “someday” is out there is enough.

In the meantime, I’ve got a pretty fantastic day job to keep me going!

This has been the week that peanut has decided napping in a normal routine is just too predictable (of course it doesn’t help that I keep trying to trick him into napping in the afternoon by taking him to the pool in the morning which, apparently, wears him out to the point of zonking out on the way home and sleeping for about an hour and refusing to nap again later in the afternoon…I really should know better by now) so I haven’t had my normal “downtime” to not only write, but to actually think about what to write.

It came to me during lunch, appropriately, that I had several small tidbits floating around in my head that all had to do with food. So consider this my tapas of posts:

• iMac – What were you thinking? The new super cool, super thin all-in-one iMac computer was recently released. Along with the hardware, their new ad campaign: “The new iMac. You can’t be too thin. Or too powerful.” The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness was on this quickly and the ad copy has already been changed. Do I think this ad or slogan would have resulted in eating disorders, no. But do I think that it was an appropriate or responsible ad? Nope. It seems that everywhere you turn you hear people lauding the “real” woman physique and yet in magazines and in Hollywood, thin is still in. When it comes to advertising, we’re still being sold the same old image…and there are only so many Dove products I can buy. I’m quite frankly surprised that this ad made it out the door – I would think somewhere in the Apple marketing chain a woman would have looked at this ad and had the guts to say, “we might want to think twice about this.” But that’s just one gal’s opinion. What do you think? Was the ad cute/insulting/inconsiderate/stupid/insert own description here?

• How is it that PB&J with Lay’s potato chips tasted SO good after a morning in the pool with the smell of chlorine and sun block still on my skin? Felt like summer – you know, when summer used to mean no responsibility, summer when you were 7. Mmmmm, tasted good.

• Why did I make myself a PB&J because it was “easy” and then made my child a chicken and cheese quesadilla with sliced avocado on the side. When did I become a diner?

• My mama friends and I agree that eating food off of our kids’ plates should be considered empty calories. We’re just trying to instill good eating habits after all by demonstrating how yummy the green bean/noodle/banana/quesadilla is. And sometimes peanut wants to share, and isn’t that something I should encourage? Would someone please tell my metabolism that only the PB&J should register, not the “extra” chicken and cheese quesadilla pieces?

• Peanut could eat dairy all day long – loves milk, loves cheese, loves yogurt. See, all that ice cream I ate when I was pregnant was for a good cause!

Sorry it wasn’t a four-course meal of a post, but sometimes a few appetizers make a nice dinner.

The everyone–I know-is-having-babies-this-summer club expanded by two members yesterday! Amy Jo and family welcomed little Lucille and Cousin K. couldn’t wait until her due date and brought another boy into the family with SeanTyler. CONGRATULATIONS!

I think this is it for babies until November (so Ms. M., you’re next!).

As I lay in bed last night with a case of “the Sundays” — you know, that can’t sleep cause another week is starting and it’s the end of another weekend. I don’t get them nearly as bad as I did when I was working since mamahood usually means every day, whether it’s Tuesday or Saturday, look basically the same. But every once in awhile, the Sundays rear their ugly heads at bedtime, holding me captive to some VERY RANDOM thoughts.

Last night’s random thought, Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” really sums up motherhood. Let’s take a look, shall we?:

• You got to know when to hold ’em — Pretty obvious, but one of the first things we learn as mamas is when certain cries mean feed me, change me or just hold me.

• Know when to fold ’em — This is all about laundry for me. If I fold it when I can’t put it away, then it’s a given that peanut will find the clean laundry and proceed to strew it about the floor, begin chewing on it and hide it (like in the hamper with the dirty clothes so I can’t remember what’s clean and what isn’t). Timing the folding is a science around here.

• Know when to walk away — Sometimes you just need to put a fussy baby in a crib and walk away so you can pee, take a breath, grab a cup of coffee after an all-nighter with a fussy baby or call your husband at work proclaiming you’re the worst mom ever (or maybe that last one was just me when peanut was still in his first “trimester” on the outside).

• Know when to run — Because he’s hurt or scared or about to pull down an entire Sunday paper from the coffee table onto his head.

• You never count your money, when you’re sittin’ at the table — Babies are all about budgeting in ways I never imagined before I had one, but typically my budgets are done on the fly as I contemplate how to pay at Target (where I magically spend $100 every time I walk in — how does this happen? I just went in for a birthday card and shampoo!?!).

• There’ll be time enough for countin’, when the dealin’s done — I’m sure you all heard the same mantra from veteran parents that I did that time just flies by and to enjoy each little milestone and moment while you can. So true – and I’ve only got a year under my belt. But it explains all the nostalgic looking back when your kids are grown and gone and about to have little ones of their own (oh Lord, I need a glass of wine. Peanut’s going to leave me one day? Ack!).

So what do you think? What random songs describe parenthood for you?