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I had a bit of a day yesterday.  I sort of want to explain and I sort of don’t, so I guess I’ll just say it’s a money thing, where I feel like we’re being hit, and hit, and hit again.  And yesterday’s hit was a big one, followed by two bills in the mail – one unexpected and the other one simply bigger than expected – all with the knowledge that we have a surgery to pay for next week and a shit-ton of hail damage to pay for on our car.  (Too late to back out of that last one, as I filed the claim two days ago.)

There is surely a way out of our difficulties, but yesterday I was too caught up in the being distraught to be interested in forming any kind of plan.  I was distracted for a while by my pseudo-sister-in-law, who came over with beer and her own tale of woe, for life is kicking her a little bit at the moment, too.

It’s weird when this stuff happens and all you want to do is wallow in it, but you can’t because you still have kids, and they still need their dirty diapers changed and they still need their snacks and they still need you to give them hugs and keep them entertained.  Several times, I’d be lost in my thoughts, worried about credit cards and the mortgage and all the shit that comes with being a grown-up, and suddenly Kaylee would walk up to me and do something silly, reminding me that I have something more important than money.

But always, always, the money issues pop right back into my head, and at the end of the day I stood in the kitchen and hung my head, while Rob wrapped his arms around me and told me everything would be all right.  Then we went upstairs to get Kaylee ready for bed, and as usual she stalled by insisting on playing a game.

In the game she chose last night, she stood at the end of our bed and waited, and Rob’s and my roles were to surprise her by suddenly putting out a hand and shoving her down.  It sounds cruel, but it makes her laugh her head off.  She gets up, we (gently, carefully) push her down.  She laughs.  We laugh.  We do it again.

I love making my daughter laugh.

But also?  There’s something uniquely cathartic about knocking a toddler over.

I don’t know what that says about me, but it can’t be good.

I’m sitting in the cafe at my gym, slowly sipping a Diet Pepsi and tuning out all of the ambient noise around me.  People are chatting, a young woman is nervously wading through a job interview at the next table, someone is dribbling a basketball off in the distance, and once in a while the ice machine behind the counter clatters, but I’m not really listening to any of that.  Instead, I’m trying to appreciate the fact that it is the middle of the morning, and I am alone.

True, I am surrounded by people.  But none of them want anything from me, and I don’t want anything from them.  We are coexisting, and that is all.  It’s wonderful.

I’m trying to appreciate the next 45 minutes, because they are among the last minutes I will have the luxury of sipping a Diet Pepsi in the middle of the morning without my kids.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m trying to remind myself that my kids are fun, and our time together is a time to be enjoyed rather than endured.  What I neglected to mention is how imperative it is that I fully embrace that attitude, and soon, because this lovely gym membership ends on Saturday.  I’m going to miss this noisy little retreat from my responsibilities, but we simply can’t afford it anymore.

I’m not saying all this to garner sympathy from anyone, because that would just be stupid.  Poor me, not being able to shove my kids off on strangers while I ride a recumbent bike with a TV attached to it!  Oh woe is me!  How will I ever survive?  Yeah, no one is going to feel sorry for me there.  I know that.

I guess I’m saying it with a bit of wistfulness, because I’ll miss having the ability to take a breather from being a mommy a couple times a week.  But hopefully it will be motivation to go to the park, take walks around the neighborhood and visit our wonderful zoo.

And I feel like a horrible mother for admitting this, but I’m kind of nervous about all this TIME I’m going to have with my children now.  When I lost my job a year and a eight months ago — whoa, I can’t believe it’s been that long — I immediately joined Stroller Strides, and after I left that I immediately joined this gym.  So now I’m finally adrift, without any regularly scheduled activities to fall back on.

Now I have to come up with things to keep us all occupied, and Internet, I’m concerned.  The gym has been an excellent way for Kaylee to burn off some of that overflow of three-year-old energy, and I’ll have to come up with more ways for her to burn it off at home, instead.

If only she weren’t afraid of the vacuum cleaner, I could put her to work.  Isn’t three years old about the right age to start earning your keep?  Robbie already does his part by attempting to lick the floors clean, so surely she could make herself useful.  Are there rules against putting a preschooler on poop-scooping duty?

Um, an image just popped into my head what Kaylee might look like in the aftermath of poop-scooping chores.  Never mind.

We went to my parents’ apartment on Saturday to celebrate my dad’s birthday and swim in the pool — an activity that I usually both enjoy and kind of hate.

Because, see, while I do love to swim, these days it can be fraught with drama and enough toddler tears to make the damn pool overflow. When I go swimming, it is with my beautiful, wonderful, amazing children … who weep beautiful, wonderful, amazing tears every single time we go swimming.  (I’m not being fair.  Actually, it’s just Kaylee who cries, but I didn’t want to single her out.  Ruined that just now, didn’t I?)  Because, when we go swimming, I am not allowed to put Kaylee down for the teensiest fraction of a second.  Ever.

And that’s ok, because we have fun pacing back and forth along the rope that divides the shallow end from the deep end.  I have fun holding her in front of me, teaching her how to dog paddle to the stairs.  I have fun letting her leap from the concrete edge, into my arms.

But on Saturday, Rob was with us.  And Kaylee thinks her DADDY! IS! AWESOME!

The two of them had a fabulous time together, and after carrying Robbie around in the water for a while, I handed him off and found myself paddling around in a pool by myself, with no real adult responsibilities other than to help keep an eye on my adventurous niece when she wandered into the deep end.

Before long, my brother Jamie and I were doing cannonballs and racing each other back and forth from the edge to the rope, while the kids laughed.  I practiced somersaults in the water, and occasionally held my nose and sank to the bottom, just for the hell of it.

In short, I acted like a kid. And when I did return to Kaylee, holding her while her dad took flying leaps into the pool, I enjoyed holding her tiny little body in my arms as it shook with laughter.

I’m not sure at what point going swimming became a chore, rather than an event to giddily anticipate.  When did going down a slide lose its luster?  When did I become such a grumpy adult?

Oftentimes, when Rob and I are invited to join friends for this gathering or that evening out, we grumble about how much trouble it is to get someone to watch our kids, and how we don’t really want to go because we’re not very social beings and arglebargleblah.  After much bitching and complaining, we usually decide to force ourselves out the door anyway, and without fail we find that it was worth the effort.  We know this is going to happen, and that’s why we force ourselves out the door.

Um, I’ve lost track of my point.  I guess it’s that I need to get in touch with my inner child a bit — although pretend I said it in an eloquent way, rather than using the “inner child” cliche — because I think it will help me be a better parent.  I have to remind myself that my children are fun, and not just little dictators who do nothing but demand my attention.

I need to take the kids to the park more.

I need to take advantage of our zoo membership more often.

I need to color with Kaylee more often.

I need to play in the backyard with my kids more often.

I need to take them for walks around the neighborhood.

I need to have fun with them more.

Because we’re in for a long ride together, and we might as well spend it smiling.

This week, I will be counting the minutes until Friday.  Weekends don’t normally mean much to me, except that I get to see Rob a bit more – other than that, it’s kind of the same old shit, because I’m always home with my kids.

But this coming weekend?  I’m going to (I’m getting all giddy just preparing to type this) spend two days without my children.

Whew.  I almost need a cigarette after typing that.

I almost feel guilty for being so excited about this.

Rob and I are going to spend a couple of nights at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, for no particular reason except to get the hell out of our house and away from our kids for a couple of days.

Because, Internet, we’re going crazy around here.

Rob and I are coming to realize our home is usually in utter chaos.  The toys never get picked up, we can’t walk across the living room without stepping on dried bits of Play-Doh (oh, and we never vacuum), we don’t get anything done on the weekends, bedtime is often a struggle, Kaylee won’t eat and she growls at us all the time, and Robbie is on some sort of napping strike.

As you would expect, we are happy to run away for a bit.

The hope is that we will come back refreshed and ready to tackle these problems with logical solutions.  (Assuming we come back at all…  I’m joking!  Of course!  Sort of.)  This is the last week of business as usual, and starting next week we’re going to instill sanity into our house if it kills us.

It might kill us.

But anyway.  Yay for a vacation.

Completely by coincidence, Jay and Grant from Ghost Hunters will be at the Stanley on the Sunday we’re leaving.  If I see them, I will try to get an autograph without mentioning that I haven’t seen their show in a season and a half.

Thanks to Jake Jabs’ weird obsession with large, wild cats, Kaylee has a near-life-sized stuffed tiger in her room.  (My parents found it for a bargain price at American Furniture Warehouse and bought it for the grandkids to climb around on.  They gave it to Kaylee when they decided it was taking up too much space in their living room, and that it was too creepily lifelike.)

So now he hangs out on a plant shelf near Kaylee’s vaulted ceiling, surveying the room with those eerie tiger eyes.  His companion is a large monkey that I won for Kaylee at Elitch Gardens, and we now refer to the two as Sam (tiger) and Dean (monkey) Winchester.  The reason behind that involves a long explanation that only “Supernatural” fans would understand, and which caused Rob to wonder aloud whether spending all day alone with just Kaylee for company is really good for my mental health.

Anyway, the point is that Kaylee loves Sam.  He’d sort of become a background fixture in her room until recently, when her cousins visited and asked to play with him.  Once he was brought down to the floor where he could be climbed on, have his tail tugged, and be kissed on the nose, Kaylee realized she had found a new friend.  And so I’ve been taking him down for her every day, in a process that involves jumping up and down until I can get a handful of tiger paw, and then hoping he doesn’t hit a lamp or a baby when he plummets to the floor.  (I’m too lazy to walk the 20 feet to the dining room to get a chair to stand on.)  So far I’ve only pulled one neck muscle, which I consider to be a triumph.

Sam now spends about half of his life on Kaylee’s bedroom floor, being pounced on by a toddler.  She’s still too young to articulate her thoughts, but I imagine that Kaylee’s pretending to ride Sam through fields of candy and popsicles.

The thing about Sam, though, is that he looks very real.  Like, a lot.  When Kaylee is bouncing around on him, sometimes she’ll hit him just right so his head jerks up suddenly, making me want to knock my daughter to the ground and cover her with my body to protect her from an impending tiger attack.  Sometimes, when she’s squashing his head with her whole body, his face almost seems to say, “Look at me.  Look what I’ve been reduced to.  I will find you one day, Jake Jabs, and I will eat you.”

I have become convinced that Sam secretly comes to life at night and prowls our house.  Maybe sometimes he gets Kaylee out of bed and they go off on adventures together, with her riding her magic tiger’s back.  Maybe they lope off into a land of fairies and unicorns and team up with hobbits to defeat Lord Voldemort.

Or maybe, just maybe, I need to get out of the house more.

Because of this wonderful, witty, insightful (right? RIGHT?) blog, I’ve been invited to join a Stroller Strides class tomorrow morning. As I understand it, Stroller Strides is an opportunity for new moms to get some exercise with their babies while socializing with other moms. It sounds like a great concept, really.

Now that the date is almost here and I’m trying to figure out what to wear for an exercise class — I seriously never exercise, so these are the things I think about — I’m finding myself feeling rather nervous.

See, it took this invitation to make me realize that when I tally the number of young mothers in my social circle, that number comes to exactly … zero.

I have no friends in Colorado Springs who have young children. Off the top of my head, the closest friend I can think of who has a baby is 122 miles away. We don’t see each other much.

So even though I am a mother of a young child and there are young children all over the place, I’m still the only mother I know. All of a sudden I’m faced with the idea of spending an hour with mothers of kids Kaylee’s age and I’m feeling like I’ll be completely out of my element.

How weird is that? I will be surrounded by people just like me and that idea scares the bejeezus out of me.

When I’m in my own little world where it’s just me, Kaylee and Rob starring in our own little show, I don’t worry about whether I measure up to anyone. And I guess that’s the core of my anxiety here, that other mothers will undoubtedly notice that I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m just hoping that they don’t know what they’re doing either.

Although I failed in my attempt to come up with an excuse to post photos of Kaylee playing in the water, I do have something to talk about today.

Today is Kaylee’s first day at a new daycare, and I had to drop her off for the first time this morning.  I was prepared for tears and heart-wrenching sobs, and a desperate attempt to cling to the familiar.  It turned out that none of those things came from Kaylee, while all of them came from me.

When we arrived this morning, the toddler room at the new daycare was in chaos — the kind of chaos you expect when you put 10 toddlers in the same room.  Kaylee watched the action but wasn’t exactly angling to be put on the floor.

When the time came to hand her over to her new teacher, I was expecting the screaming, shirt-clinging scene that I’d come to expect at the old daycare.  But today, she just went quietly, only looking mildly concerned.

I, however, was a mess.  I’ve been singing the praises of the new daycare, but that doesn’t mean I’m not worried about how Kaylee’s going to adjust to her new surroundings.  And the thought of her spending several days in misery just … well, it makes me cry a little bit.

So I did my best not to tear up while I was still inside the daycare, and then I went ahead and cried once I got back to my car.  I spent most of the morning convinced that Kaylee was miserable and sobbing hysterically, and that I’m the worst mom ever for inflicting this change on her.

Then I called the daycare a couple of hours ago to check on her.

You guessed it: She’s fine.  Perfectly, wonderfully fine. She even took a longer nap than she usually took at the old daycare.

So I figure I need to come away from this with a lesson.  I guess it’s that Kaylee’s a tough kid who can handle a lot more than I give her credit for.

And also that I’m probably going to need therapy when she goes away to college.

Kaylee and I attended her daycare buddy’s first birthday party on Saturday, and now I can feel myself slipping into the suburban-mom-competitive-birthday-party mindset.

I’ve been very blasé about planning Kaylee’s party — which is this coming Saturday — mostly because she’s only a year old and she’s not going to remember this anyway. My approach has sort of been to take lots of naps and assume the details will come together on their own. Food? Yeah, there will probably be some. Cake? Oh, I should probably remember to order that. Balloons? There are supposed to be balloons?

Then we went to the buddy’s party, and I’ve learned that my party-planning skills are completely inadequate. I left the party having realized that Kaylee’s party is only a week away and I HAVE NOT PURCHASED A SINGLE STREAMER. I have no “Happy Birthday” banner. I have no serving dishes, and I have not reserved an inflatable bounce house for the neighborhood kids — who I’ve neglected to invite anyway.

At the very least, I have now been spurred to order a cake (after work today, for sure) and think about what food I’ll be giving people. But I still can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just awakened from a year-long slumber to realize that I’m getting married in a few days and I need to go ahead and get that wedding planned.

But now that I think about it, Rob and I managed to pull together our own wedding at the last minute, and we were 100% successful at not sweating the little details. Our goal was to make sure we were married by the end of the day, and what do you know, it worked. Even though my wedding dress had a couple of wrinkles in the skirt, and even though wind and rain kept people from mingling outside like we’d planned, I consider my wedding to have been a perfect event, full of nothing but happy memories.

And I guess that’s the point. Saturday will be a day of happy memories and lots of photos of Kaylee with cake smeared on her head — no matter how many streamers are hanging from the ceiling. Guests will either enjoy that or they won’t, but I’ll still get lots of adorable pictures.

Assuming I remember to order that cake.

Kaylee seems to be going through some sort of Mommy Phase, in which I am the only person who can keep her happy for more than 84 seconds at a time. She’ll be happily playing with Rob, and then she’ll suddenly realize that not only am I not right next to her, but I’m ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE ROOM. And that’s just unacceptable.

In a way, this phase makes me feel kind of awesome, like I’ve been crowned “Favorite Parent” and can expect to receive my major award within the next five to seven business days. (I hope it’s money. A lot of money. And maybe a pepperoni pizza.)

But in another way, I’m looking forward to when she moves on to a Daddy Phase, because all of this attention is starting to wear me down. If Kaylee could talk, here are the kinds of things she would have said over the past few days:

“Noooo! Mommy, how could you abandon me to go to the bathroom?? Don’t you love me anymore?”
“Hahahahaha, Daddy you’re hilarious! But where’s Mommy?”
“Mommy, I know you’re trying to eat your ramen noodles, but do you mind if I claw my way up your arm and lick your shoulder? That’s not a problem, right?”

I wonder how long this phase is going to last. Because I’ll be really embarrassed if I have to accompany her to prom.

When Rob and I started planning our family, I knew I wanted to go back to work after the baby was born. There was no question in my mind that I’d be a saner person if my daily life included adult conversations and accomplishments that existed outside of my roles as a wife and as a mother.

And then Kaylee was born.

In the first three weeks or so, I was desperate to go back to work. This motherhood thing was a lot harder than I expected, and the idea of handing the baby to someone else and spending my day in a place surrounded by people who didn’t demand to be fed every two hours was the happiest idea in the world.

By the end of my seven-week maternity leave, though, I’d settled into deep pit of mommy guilt, and I couldn’t even think about going back to work without bursting into tears. (I was a joy to be around, let me tell you.) I felt like I was going to miss everything — her first word, her first step, the general joy of seeing her grow and learn. And I was inconsolable.

But staying home wasn’t an option for financial reasons, so I reluctantly started taking her to daycare. By the end of the first week, I was able to leave her there without crying. By the end of the first month, we’d developed a predictable routine and I’d settled into the role of a working mom.

BBC News recently published the results of a study that found working mothers to be happier than stay-at-home moms. (Kate discusses the results today in the Pikes Peak Parent News blog.) The number of hours worked outside the home doesn’t seem to matter, just that they’re working.

I can’t speak for all moms out there, but I can say this about myself: I’ve come to realize that I was right about myself, way back in the beginning before Kaylee even existed. I cherish every day that I get to take a vacation and hang out with my daughter, but I don’t think I could manage it every day of the week. She’s wonderful and I love her, but I can’t spend all day every day retrieving toys that she just chucked across the room and searching for pacifiers that she hid between the couch cushions. I have to spend some time doing things for myself, or I will simply go crazy. (Or more likely, get very depressed.)

That said, I don’t think our current situation is ideal, either. I spend about nine hours a day away from my child, and I only see her a couple of hours a day when she’s awake. All the “experts” say that Rob and I should plan a regular date night to keep the romance alive or whatever, but that means handing Kaylee off to someone else AGAIN. It’s hard to convince myself that a date night is worth it when it means that the only time I get to see my baby is when I kiss her sleeping head at the end of the night.

So, in case anyone wants to do me a big favor, here’s what I need: A part-time job making just as much money as I make now. I could work either four hours a day or two full days a week. And just to make it easier on this imaginary employer, you could pay me a little less to offset the slight savings in daycare I’d receive for only using it part-time.

Any offers?

Hello?

Anyone?

I didn’t think so.