Tag Archives: kid vomit

Bedtime Will Be Your Favorite Part of the Day: Parenting after Infertility Doesn’t Make You Special

You worked really hard for your children, right? You had to do mountains of adoption paperwork, or hundreds of IVF injections, right? You put in more hours and effort – and, yes, money – than anybody should have to do to bring a child into this world, right? Well, here’s the thing: that doesn’t make you special.

Sure, it makes you special for a little while. But, now that your child (children) is (are) here, you are just like every other parent in the world. And that is just how you want it.

Bedtime will be your favorite part of the day.

You will catch your kid’s vomit in your hands (or, maybe, even in your mouth, like I did recently).

You will have sleep-deprivation so deep that you search the dryer for the frozen pizza and search the freezer for the clean blankie.

You will have to throw away that poopy underwear or cut off that poopy onesie after some horrific accident that isn’t even worth cleaning up properly.

You will sometimes only eat string cheese and animal crackers for dinner, and then you will proudly post a food-porn photo of it on social media to compete with all your non-parenting friends’ fancy dinners.

You will get a letter from the public library threatening to send you to a collections agency for those really really late books that “must be around here somewhere”.

Your kid’s whining will make you want to jump out of your skin – or at least out of your window.

You will one day think, “I would take a bullet for this kid.” And, then, one night when you think you can’t possibly get up one more time, you will realize that you are taking a bullet for this kid.

You aren’t special.

You are just a parent. You are like every other parent throughout all of human history, throughout the entire world, because you love that child. And that is just how it should be.

 

***

 

Would you care to add to my list? What else makes bedtime your favorite part of the day?

 

This article originally appeared on Beyond Infertility, a website about how parenting after infertility is different. I am a regular contributor to their website. You can find the original article here.

 

Advertisement

How I Ended Up on the Side of the Road in My Undershirt with Someone Else’s Vomit in my Mouth (Did I Go Too Far?)

My Mom is Just Okay

Okayest Mom’s Okayest Week

Moms can have REALLY bad weeks. Perhaps especially stay-at-home moms can have really bad weeks, if for no other reason than time. Maybe we are more likely to experience a disgusting event simply due to the amount of hours we log. It’s all about statistics, baby.

Sometimes things happen that may have never happened in the history of the world. Like #1. Sometimes things happen to moms that must happen to every mom in the whole world, but no one ever talks about it. Like #8.

Here are some parenting-fails that happened this week:

  1. Two of my sons were driving matchbox cars ON MY BOOBS during church and I didn’t even notice.
  2. One of my 1-year-old twins shocked my dog. I only knew this when the 100-pound dog yelped and leaped into the air. My son had gotten his fat hands on her shock collar remote and sent her flying.*
  3. One of my 1-year-old twins threw his big brother’s jammies into the toilet. I lifted the lid to pee and found dinosaur jammies in there. Bonus: because the jammies were fleece, they had soaked up ALL the water in the toilet. Try getting THAT to the basement washing machine.
  4. All three of my children have splinters in their hands that I can’t get out. Bad news: Our stupid deck is so rotten that it constantly gives the kids splinters. Good news: Our stupid deck is so rotten that the splinters just dissolve on their own.
  5. We finally left the house and, upon arriving at our destination, I realized that my twins were sharing Crocs as footwear. By “sharing”, I mean that each twin had one black Croc and one blue croc on his feet. Bonus: all four of those Crocs were on the wrong feet. What is the statistical likelihood of that? Bonus: all four of those Crocs belonged to their older brother.
  6. One child pooped ON the deck TWICE in one day. **
  7. One child vomited ON another child.
  8. One child vomited IN my mouth. I’m not talking baby spit-up in my mouth- that happens to everyone. I mean real kid-vomit. I didn’t sympathy-barf because I was too busy telling myself “That did NOT just happen,” while trying to keep the barf off the van upholstery.
  9. The child who vomited in my mouth did so on the side of the road, while I was only in my undershirt. (My sweatshirt had already been ruined earlier.)
  10. I made dinner for the kids and put them to bed in between my own pukes.

Not trying to gross you out here, I swear. I just think that there may be other moms out there who will find relief in knowing that they aren’t alone. Instead of crying, I texted a friend immediately after #8 and begged her to tell me that has happened to other moms. She simply replied, “Yep.” So, if your week was gross and terrible, I am here to tell you, “Yep.”

 

*And, okay, people, I don’t want any hate mail about that shock collar. It was recommended to us by a trusted professional who has extensively trained us and our dog for reasons that you don’t know anything about.

** Isn’t it awesome to have more than one kid, so you can share something as embarrassing as this semi-anonymously? I mean, you will only have a 33 1/3% chance of getting it right if you were to guess. And I am not accepting guesses.

Crocs Fail

Crocs Fail