Mommy Fail.

I'm pretty sure I have at least 2-3 "Mommy Fails" a week.  It used to really bother me.  Now it's almost a challenge.  "What am I going to do to emotionally scar my daughter today?"  No no...I don't do it on purpose, at least I don't think I do.  I guess in all my plotting planning, I didn't factor in that Maddie would want some say in this as early as 2 years old.  How dare she have her own little personality!  Well, I'll share with you an example and I'll start with background.  I love starting with background  :)


When Dieter and I decided that we were going to try for a baby, I was pretty pumped.  I had all these plans and ideas for what I was going to do!  It got even worse when we found out we were having a girl!  SQUEAL!  Little girl things?!  Umm yes please!  Visions of tea parties danced through my head.  I thought of all the things that I did as a little girl and all the things I WANTED to do as a little girl (but didn't get to do because of *gasp* my evil parents :) ) and planned accordingly.  I was going to be this amazing super mom.  My daughter was going to be dazzled at all my ideas and be in awe at my parenting greatness.  In my mind's eye, I guess I saw this:

Then reality reared it's ugly head and life became more like this:



I think my first major parenting fail came early on when Maddie was a little over a year old.  I was tired all the time, but I still had these grandiose visions of parenting greatness.  One day, I decided that the activity of the day was going to be finger painting.  Not only were we going to be fingerpainting, but I WAS GOING TO MAKE MY OWN FINGER PAINT!  Because....well I'm awesome like that.  Maddie was going to love it.  It was going to be educational because we would talk about the colors and Maddie would LOVE being messy and the texture part would be fun.  Stop laughing!  I'm not even to the "good" part yet!


So I googled.  Because that's what parents of my generation do.  We google.  Everything.  I just now tried to find the site I used (so you could get the full experience) and I can't find it.  I can't even find the recipe I used.  It involved flour and boiling in a saucepan.  Now all the ones I see don't even involve "cooking" it.  Jerks.  


Anyway!  I went shopping and bought the ingredients and the food coloring (regular and neon because let's face it MY baby needs all 8 colors to choose from) and paper to paint on.  I even bought little containers to store my paint in because this was going to be so much fun that we would be doing this multiple times.  I printed out the recipe, put on a Baby Einstein DVD to distract Maddie, and got right down to it.  This was going to be AWESOME!  After all there were only like 4 ingredients...how hard can this be!  *snort*


I've kinda blocked out the details, but I remember it not going well.  I do remember the result being this horrific, thick, gummy, sticky, substance from hell.  I probably should have just cut my losses and thrown that hot mess straight into the trash can, but at this point I still have unrealistic ideals of parenting and just know that this is going to be an AWESOME idea.  So I sally forth and separate this congealing horror into my newly purchased containers and added the food coloring.  


Icky part over!  Now time for the fun part!  Add child!  **even in my memories Current Renee is screaming at Past Renee....NO NO YOU CAN STOP THIS!!!!!**


I blocked this part out as well.  I do remember the screaming as my daughter refused to touch the "fingerpaint" (I use quotes because the shit I made was NOT FINGERPAINT) that I had just spent the last 45 minutes trying to make salvage make.  Not that I can really blame her, that crap was gross.  It was pretty, but it would not spread nicely on paper.  I think the activity lasted all of three minutes before I cleaned my daughter up, gave her a MumMum cracker, and apologized profusely.  


Now, I have a college education and I pride myself on being moderately intelligent.  You would think that this experience would have taught me something.  Nope.  In the span of 6-7 months, I attempted this activity 2 more times (using the same horrible fingerpaint recipe......just keep on laughing...I know I was a moron).  It got a little better as Maddie got older.  At the very least, we did actually make a few pictures that the Grandparents could ooo and ahhh over.  I also have those cute toddler pictures with Maddie in her diaper covered in "paint" but that is about it.  


I did eventually learn from this experience.  I am now okay with the fact that my daughter is content in wanting to watch movies and play Plants vs. Zombies with me.  It's not educational, but they are much safer activities and don't mentally scar either of us.  We both enjoy it and enjoy doing it together.  What more can a parent ask for?


This also taught me to just buy the freakin play-doh  :)


**These pictures are not mine.  I randomly found them on the internet to suit the purpose of my blog  :)

Before We Continue......

I need to get somewhat serious for a minute.  I'm only going to linger on this for a few minutes and then we can move on and get to some more fun stuff, but I really feel this needs to be said.


If you are reading this and expecting to get some rose colored view of parenting, please go elsewhere.  If you expect me to only say how my life has been enhanced and enriched by parenting, delete your bookmark and clear your history.  You will be disappointed.  You might get pissed off.  Let me give you a few reasons why.


1.  For all intensive purposes, I'm parenting on my own.  Now, let's make this very clear.  This is not a dog at my husband.  It is not his fault that he is gone.  But the fact is, he is gone and he is gone quite often.  Even when he is not gone, he is working around the clock.  That's what happens when you lead a group of guys whose main purpose is to disarm bombs.  When he is not at work, he is often at home making training aids because they do not give him time at work in order to train his men properly (which as you could imagine would result in death if they were in a real life situation disarming REAL bombs....so not training them is pretty much out of the question).  More often then not, he is off on training missions or even doing VIP bomb sweeps somewhere.  He can be gone for a week.  He has been gone for a year.  There is ALWAYS talk of him going somewhere.

With that being said, I feel like a single parent with a sugar daddy.  I don't get a lot of breaks.  Which means my "batteries," if you will, are bordering on empty almost all the time.  One of the ways, I deal with this is I vent.  I vent using my Facebook statuses.  Usually this warrants a bunch of advice on how I could be "fixing" the situation.   This is all fine and good and sometimes I do get things that help.  Most of the time, I think "Wow, yeah I could do that if I wasn't exhausted beyond belief and at the end of my proverbial rope."  When I'm not getting advice, I get the "Oh enjoy these moments" comments that are anything but helpful.  I already feel like a shitty parent because I want a break from my kid but now I'm supposed to cherish these moments and do it with a smile.  Pardon my rudeness, but those people can take a trip on the "go fuck yourself" train.  People like this (rose colored glasses people) are the reason mothers like me (very tired, just need to vent mothers) drown their children in the bathtub.  :P


I find myself jealous of working mothers.  Not that I really want to have a job, but they get a break from their children.  I don't.  I'm with my children 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Some times I don't even get a break from my children at night because my daughter likes to sneak in our room at night and sleep in our bed.  Yes, I realize that is what parenting is.  However, I don't have to enjoy it all the time.  Imagine being handcuffed to someone.  You have to sleep with this person, eat with this person, shower with this person....hell take a shit with this person.  Even the most patient, out-going person would flip out after a few days and scream "Just leave me alone.  I need 5 minutes just to breathe by myself."  Well this is my life. Only shrink the person and add a lot more whining.  If you are a normal person, then you can understand that sometimes I vent on Facebook in order to not lose it completely.  If you can't.....you belong on that train I mentioned earlier.


2.  This one is linked closely with number one.  Not only is my husband not around, but we also live about 2000 miles from family and friends we grew up with.  If I'm stressed out, I can't just call my mom and have her take the kids for a weekend.  My mom would be there to give me a break in a heartbeat, but she can't....thus I deal.  Also, it's not like we live in a place where we know everyone.  Every time we move some where, it is a scramble to find someone to hang out with.  It's like one of those 20 dates in a hour situation.  You hang out with a bunch of people, trying to quickly find someone that you are a good fit with and hope to God that you don't find out later that they think that watching their children getting a contact high is funny or something equally as horrendous.  I thank my lucky stars every day that so far my judge of character has been amazing and I haven't been burned yet and even if I do....well we will probably move in 2 years so I really won't have to deal with it for long.  Even then, I don't really ask these people to watch my kids so I can "have a break."  It's not that I don't trust my friends.  It's that most of them are in the same situation I'm in.  They are all just as stressed out and tired as I am.  I can't fathom making someone more stressed out so I can just sit in my house in my underwear and enjoy silence for 2-4 hours.  So I do what adults are forced to do......suck it up and deal.


3.  I blame no one but myself for this.  God help me, I have a VERY STRONG WILLED little girl.  Every day, I fight about 3 million battles (This is part of the reason I'm so tired.  It's more a mental exhaustion then a physical one).  I fight to get her to eat.  I fight to get her to nap (without tears).  I fight to get her to pick up her toys.  I fight to get her to play things with me.  I fight to get her to wear clothes.  I fight her to get her to take a bath.  I fight her to get her OUT of the bath.  I would say about 75% of these battles, I lose.  So as most parents before me, I pick ones that are the most important.  The rest I try to humorously share on Facebook.  I would say about 60% of people understand that I'm joking.    The other 40%, well you can join the rose colored glasses people on that train ride I mentioned earlier.  :)


So...........are there days when I just throw crayons and play-doh at my daughter and hope to God we can make it through the day without maiming each other?  You better believe it.  Are there days when I just throw poptarts (because that is the only thing she will eat lately) at my daughter and keep a constant stream of cartoons on the tv so I can just sit and veg on the computer?  There sure are!  Am I going to feel bad about it?  Hell no.  I need those days for my sanity.  My children are clothed (well my daughter doesn't count as she is training to be a stripper it seems) and fed (for the most part...my son still enjoys eating, but he's only 3ish months old) and are usually happy (at least in the moments when my daughter is not on the floor having a tantrum that closely resembles an epileptic fit).  I accept the fact that my parenting is far from perfect, but I refuse to take hell because I admit this.  I refuse to lie and say that parenting is this magical, wonderful journey that I enjoy every single moment of.  I don't.  When I'm up to my elbows in play-doh and shit, I'm not thinking "Wow, I really need to cherish this because some day my kids will be grown up and then I'll be sad and alone."  I'm thinking, "Dear God please help me to not put my children in a basket and set them on a random doorstep."  This is reality folks and I'm a realist.  So don't try to make me feel bad about myself because you are living in parenting denial. 


If I can still make jokes about a shitty situation, then I consider myself winning.  Honestly, if I stop making wise ass remarks on Facebook....well that's when you should start worrying that my children have been gagged and tied up in the closet  :P :)

Someone else's depiction on how they feel about parenting :P  I tend to agree with him!

Here Goes Nothing!

Believe it or not, quite a few people have privately messaged me and told me that I need to have a blog.  Apparently, I'm funny  :P  Although, I feel that I can in no way live up to "Big Metal Chicken" standards, I will try to be entertaining in my own right.  I have made no secret of my desire to become a stand up comedian.  However, I'm realistic in knowing that this will mostly likely never happen.  I am content to entertain my friends (my mom being my favorite audience and probably biggest fan, but she is pretty biased) and family with my witty Facebook statuses and hopefully my random rantings on my shiny new blog.

I really have no goals here other then to maybe make someone smile if they are having a rough day.  This will also be a way for friends to stalk me as I move quite often.  I will probably vent alot about my husband and my children.  No surprise there :)  You will get a sneak peek into the struggles and snuggles (Awwwww!) of a military family.  I might share/comment on an article/current event if I feel strongly enough.  I love all those funny pictures that have been showing up on Facebook and Pinterest so you will be subjected to those.  You will be witness to my battles with food and weight loss.  Hopefully, you will be able to grow with me as a person (yep....I can be deep....sometimes...usually when people aren't looking.).  Isn't it funny?  I'm 29, almost 30 (yikes!), and I'm still trying to find out who I am and who I want to be.

Anyway, I suppose I better close for now.  My daughter is having a conniption fit and might throw the xbox controller at my head if I don't put on a show.  :P  

*huggles*

Reeneebear