I'm gonna miss sleeping in...

Whatever that means to a mother of two preschoolers. Sleeping in changes meaning with each new phase of life. So, with a three year old and a four year old, sleeping in really means refusing to get out of bed until I can't block out the spanish speaking cartoon characters who are literally yelling at me through the neon glow of the TV. Especially with the early rising summer sun, the kids wake up at about six thirty a.m. Lucky for me they are just cuddly enough in the morning to climb into my bed and watch cartoons until I am ready to get up. I can get even more snooze time with the recent addition of our new babysitter, they call her iPad. I just need an app for making breakfast and I'm really in Heaven.

Buying some time in the morning is worth the cost of an iPad. I might even buy two to occupy both kids and maybe double my snooze time. But, even with this kid-friendly gadget, my current version of sleeping in is really only eight o'clock. Goodbye sleeping in, it's Back to school for this mom and her kids. And going Back to School means that I have to wake up, get out of bed and get ready to leave the house by eight. I might even have to set an alarm clock! Something I have never had to do since I had kids.

I will be missing my lazy summer mornings where all I had to do was:

Wake up to whiny child staring at me and peeling my eyelids open.
Grumpy child pulls me to the bathroom by my finger to help with potty.
Climb back in bed and get whacked in forehead by remote for TV.
Hope that the first thing to come on is a cartoon,
But not Dora or Barney.
Slowly drift back to sleep for approximately 1-2 minute intervals,
In between breaking up fights
And explaining why this TV doesn't fast forward like the one downstairs.
Repeat for 30-60 minutes, or until I give up and get up.
Once I go downstairs I clock in to my mommy duties:
breakfast, dishes, floors, wiping counters, wiping bums and on and on.

Oh, but those days are gone with the 100 degree temps of summer, and my life will begin each weekday with:

Wake up to sleepy child pulling my arm out of the warm blankets.
Snuggle squirming child for five minutes before declaring, I'm up, and making it so.
Do a quick face wash and makeup to force myself awake.
Scramble downstairs, eyeballing the roman numerals of large black clock on the wall
Counting down the minutes I have to feed the kids, pack the lunches, get them dressed, dress myself, wipe the spilt cereal, run back in for sunglasses, run back in for the inevitable last minute potty break then load the car, fill up with gas,
And go to school.

Drive for forty five minutes in the throes of freeway congestion
With kids who refuse to stop talking and watch the DVD player.
Pass my exit for school to reach the preschool, keeping an eye on the car clock's digital numbers
Counting down the minutes until class starts.
Figuring out how many minutes I need to sign in the kids and drop them off
In classrooms on opposite ends of the building (15-20 minutes)
Backtrack to the student parking lot (5 minutes)
Park (5 minutes)
Walk briskly to campus (15-20 minutes)
Take off my cardigan since I'm sweating from the walk (2 minutes)
Hit the bathroom to freshen up and so that I don't have to go after I buy food,
Because I don't want to take food in the bathroom (5 minutes)
Grab a bagel and fresh oj for breakfast (10 minutes)
Make it just in time for my first class!

So, if you read my summer mornings and wondered what could I possibly miss about that??? You can see what I'm in for with Back to School and that first description starts sounding pretty good, huh?

Fall Signals...New Shoes?

A cool foggy morning following Labor Day surely signals Fall is here, and Back to School is around the corner. After a hot, lazy summer of flip-flops and tank tops it's time to put on the socks and sneakers and dress to impress for the new batch of preschoolers. With two kids now attending the University preschool, many people will think they are twins, I'm sure. I'll get the questioning looks, disguised as sincere smiles and flattery about how young I look. But with the potty training in the past I look forward to the kids' new routine, even though it means I am going back to school too. My rigorous schedule of classes will be a challenge, but I just have to make it to Spring then I will finally be a college graduate!

So, back to school. I always get excited and anxious. I look forward to being productive, creative, busy. I also know that it means sacrifice. Drive thru dinners, looking past the pile of dishes and wearing outfits twice before washing. Ignoring the kids, or worse...yelling at the kids, while I try tirelessly to read 300 pages the night before midterms. But even with procrastination I get it done, and it feels good. I like pushing it to the deadline, the pressure, the rush of working obsessively to type the words out into some well-thought analysis, the realization that I can do it when I finally set out to.

Fall is finally here. We all have new shoes. Tristan has some white sneakers with navy velcro straps, Ashlyn has silver ballerina slippers also with velcro strap, and I have bronze ballet flats with flowers embellished on their toes, no velcro. We are ready to face a new crowd. I will be excited until I am actually sitting there in my first class, but then I can look down at my new cute shoes and smile.

By the way, we all can jump higher and run faster now, too.

Do I Love Summer? Let me count the ways...

Ahhhhh summer at last. After a crazy quarter of going to school 5 days a week and dragging the kids around to and from preschool it has been unbelievably relaxing to finally snooze in the morning. And by snooze I really mean that I refuse to get out of bed until 8 and try to drift back to sleep even when the kids come climbing into my bed at 6:30 or 7 am and I put cartoons on to hypnotize them but never really quite go back to sleep. I think it really just postpones the inevitable crawl downstairs followed by breakfast, dishes, laundry...which of these am I dreading?

Let's see, breakfast (and every other subsequent meal) has become an hourlong struggle to force feed my children. I am not trying to make them fat, but every other parent will understand the desire for their picky preschoolers to simply eat...without making it a battle.

Dishes really aren't that bad since I have a dishwasher, although my dishwasher is getting old and can rarely fit a whole sink full of dishes in one load, so what should be a quick clean up is actually 2 loads of dishes, and my dishwasher takes what seems like 3 hours to cycle, which cannot be very energy efficient, and still there are food scraps in the forks.

Laundry, oh laundry, my arch nemesis. I have finally come to the horrific realization that my everyday chore to "finish laundry" will never ever ever ever be complete...as long as my family gets dressed each day there will always be dirty laundry. This is eternity....laundry. I can get into a good groove with the washing and drying and even the folding most of the time. However, the putting away is what loses me. And get this, when the laundry is put away, we are always whining about having to run upstairs to get the kids clothes when we are used to them being conveniently on the pool table in the front room. I know, decorating at it's finest. The pool table, of course, was purchased before we had kids, and this much laundry! I must say, it is quite a nice laundry table, but it does create quite a "wow" when people walk in the front door to be greeted by piles of clothes stacked 4 feet high and covering any kind of sign that what is underneath used to be a pool table.

Ah, lazy summer, breakfast table showdowns, dishes out the wazoo and drowning in piles of clothes. Is it any wonder I am ready to go back to school? I am already tired of all this "free time."

On my way to school today...

The typical Thursday approaches and I am dreading the long day ahead, classes until 6:30 at night that puts me home at 7:30 after leaving for school at 8 am....whew long day! But the bright side is that once it’s over I only have one short class on Friday and the whole weekend ahead....yay! Of course this enthusiasm for freedom is really the knowledge that once the school week is over the housework begins. After turning my head away from the tower of dishes overflowing the sink and the heaps of wrinkled clothes and leaning stacks of laundry that blanket the pool table, Saturday and Sunday transform me into a cracked out housekeeper, busily trying to mop and dust simultaneously, and I’m lucky to get laundry done, folded and crammed into a basket in the right person’s room...the whole concept of putting laundry away is just a lost cause at the rate we go through clean clothes.

But this day we were running late, Tristan slept in until 8, and I hate waking up such a sleeping angel, especially since when I wake him up he is already resentful at me for being awake (hm, can’t imagine where he gets that from) and the mood of the morning is already set to stress level: yellow. We pack up the car as if going on a road trip out of state for a week, but this is the baggage that goes along with having kids. I’ve got their jackets, pull-ups, wipes, sunscreen, spare clothes, travel-potty, and a lunch bag for their picnic dinner with my friend who babysits them on campus for my last class of the day (since the daycare closes right as that class begins and if I don’t take that class it will postpone my graduation until the following Fall).

Almost there....we exit the freeway, make our way to the daycare/preschool when Ashlyn says she’s sick, and I dismiss it somewhat because this girl is a drama queen and always feigns illness as part of her character study. But the strawberry-banana yogurt vomit that spews down her chin and slimes her entire front side, even finding a way to get in her strawberry curls of hair, makes me feel like mother-of-the-year at reacting to my child’s sick cues. At least I am only half mile from parking and not stuck in the sticky traffic that began our journey this morning, turning a five mile stretch of freeway into a twenty minute study of bridge construction and impromptu preschool lesson about cranes and diggers.

After using an entire package of wipes to bathe Ashy, I wring out the carseat and soaked straps while the kids hang out in the back of the SUV blowing bubbles and coloring in their coloring books as I hold back my own urges to vomit at the stench of the mess that’s now absorbed into my skin like lotion. I guess the thing that makes me a real mom now is how I don’t rush home and hop right into the shower, but just spray some Victoria’s Secret Vanilla Lace body spray on me and rub antibacterial gel all over. Good as new!

Back at home now when I should be in class, but I haven’t missed one yet this quarter so I will be forgiven...and it gives me a chance to start and finish the midterm essay that’s due tomorrow morning...and then I have the whole weekend to relax.

Doing Homework

I am in the kitchen simmering soup, stirring mashed potatoes and buttering rolls when I look at the kitchen table that needs to be set. As I look at the open laptop and books and paper scattered about, amongst play-doh and Lucky Charms, I realize that I was right in the middle of doing my homework...so how did I suddenly appear in the kitchen making dinner?

Well, I remember my two year old princess asking me to put on her Belle dress, and her crown (her shoes she put on by herself) then scurry away only to appear moments later with the inevitable VHS of the classic Disney movie Beauty and the Beast. I admit that I am very proud inside that this is her favorite princess movie (since Belle is the brunette princess who loves books!) So of course I am pulled into the playroom to put the movie on for her, hoping that it would also provide me with some quiet time to finish my homework. Of course I have to rewind it first, (blast you VHS! although DVDs are almost as bad with their unskippable menus!) as I patiently rewind it I realize that many of the other VHS tapes are in need of rewind, so I que those up in my special VHS rewinder.

As I do this the Belle song comes on and Ashlyn (princess) just lights up and begins to sing, with basket and book in hand just as Belle does (well, a halloween bucket from Jack-in-the-Box and the Book of Mormon, which really does resemble the book Belle carries). Soooo sweet! So I call in my husband to see our little starlet in action. In the middle of her performance he discovers a heinous smell that is almost immediately recognized as our dog pooping in the house! I am fairly strong when it comes to changing a bad baby diaper, but this dog poop just instantly hits my puke reflex and I have to hold my breath ‘til I think I’m going to pass out.

Going back into the playroom, where the smell was least pungeant and after a thorough spray of Glade Apple Cinnamon Air freshener all over the house twice over, I see my little princess now with her basket on one arm and book in her other, she is totally mimicking Belle’s character and acting out her own performance. I almost cry in slightest hopes of her living out my childhood dreams of becoming a star, and am not sure if I want to cry out of excitement or fear. I really don’t.

Looking at the clock it is almost six, and the dinner hour. That means I need to get my butt in the kitchen and figure something that is easy and won’t cause too much guilt on my motherly conscious that makes me feel complete responsibility for the health and well-being of my family through the groceries I buy and meals I make. And here I am, making mashed potatoes out of a box, a can of chunky soup and hawaiian rolls. Tah-dah! That’s how I do homework.