Top Ten Tuesday was yesterday but I was distracted and forgot to post it. I hope y'all will forgive me. Today I give you a good one, too.
The Top Ten Things No One Tells You When You Become a Mom to More Than One Child:
1. You will cook. All day long. These people never stop
wanting to eat. With that cooking comes cleaning up the mess you made cooking.
Your kids will want more than one meal every day and in addition to all that,
they’ll even want snacks. And they’re sloppy and make messes when they eat. You’ll
have to clean up those messes, too. It will become your responsibility to not
only make the food for your family, but to make sure it is in the refrigerator
and pantry, too. Which means you will come to know the checkout people at your
local grocery store by first name. You will feel the need to justify your choice of Fruit Loops and Corn Pops to them. (They were BOGO.)
2. You will get a minivan. I know, I know, you think it will
never happen now. You’re way too cool for a minivan. But at some point you’ll
realize that this is truly the most economical and practical way to transport
your family. You can fit a hell of a lot of crap in the minivan and it doesn't
take an entire oil field to drive it like that mega SUV your neighbor drives.
Your minivan will have at least one random goldfish cracker meshed somewhere in
the carpet and there will be something sticky in the cup holder in the third
row. Shhhh… don’t fight it.
3. You will only get pedicures when you are going to
weddings and gynecologist appointments. Say goodbye to your pretty toes. Sure,
you might slap some paint on them yourself every once in a while, or even let your
daughter do it for you when she gets into that pre-teen nail polish obsessed
phase. (Electric blue raspberry? Sure!) But you’ll rarely grace the luxurious heated
massage pedicure chairs of your local salon once you have kids. When you finally
do get to the salon, it will feel so amazing that you’ll tell yourself you’re
going to make it a regular thing. But you won’t. I don’t know why, you just won’t.
4. You will get sick. Kids are germ factories. You will get
every cold, flu, and funk that they bring into your home. When they are sick,
they will get to lie around on the couch watching TV and whining that their tummy hurts while you run around the house fetching them things, making them soup
(see #1), and taking their temperature. When you are sick, you will get to
continue to make them food and clean up messes, while they run around the house
making more messes and taking advantage of your weakened state.
5. You will no longer buy anything for yourself. Ever. And
yet you will spend more money at Target on every shopping trip than you can
possibly imagine. Gone are the days when you would frivolously purchase
yourself a nice handbag or a pair of designer shoes at the mall. Now you’ll
hunt the clearance bin at TJ Maxx when you need a pair of shoes for yourself because you have some event you have to go to and the soles of your only good pair of shoes dry rotted from lack of use. You’ll find some that almost, not quite, but they will have to do for
whatever occasion you need them for... and you’ll also find a pair of sneakers for
one of your children because he has literally worn a hole through the pair you
bought him three months ago when school started. His shoes will cost more than
your shoes and he will grow out of them in five weeks.
6. You will totally screw up stuff. You will curse in front
of your children. You will say things you don’t mean and wish you could take
back. You will forget to pay for field trips before the due date and your child
will wear dirty clothes, inside out clothes, and his sister’s clothes to school
because you weren't paying attention. You will oversleep, you will feed them
dinner at 10 pm, you will feed them McDonald’s. These things will happen. More
than once.
7. You will experience judgment. Other moms, your mother in
law, your sister, your best friend. They will say well-intended judgey things
at some point and you will be hurt by them. Everyone parents differently and no one is 100% right or wrong. Take
this experience and try to apply it to yourself so you can avoid saying judgey
things to someone else. But when you do say something judgey and you catch
yourself doing it (because you will), try not to beat yourself up about it.
Apologize if you can and move on.
8. You will hide treats. Not like you hide your kid's
Halloween candy for their own good, no. I mean, you will hide a container of Häagen-Dazs® in
the back of your freezer simply because you want it all for yourself. If they
sniff it out you will get nothing, so you have to hide it if you ever plan on
tasting that decadent chocolate chocolate chip ice cream ever again. They are
like locusts.
9. You will put sleep above all other needs. You will find
that an uninterrupted 8 hours of sleep is the thing you want more than anything
at almost any time. Even when your
babies become children and they sleep for 10 or 11 hours at a time, you’ll find
that you never get a full night’s sleep. You will find that you stay up for
hours after your darlings to go to bed because that’s the only time you can
seem to get anything done. You will have laundry to finish up so they can wear
clean clothes to school the next day. You will have papers to sign so their
teachers think you actually looked in their backpacks. You will try to watch
television shows you can’t watch when they are awake because they’re all either
too sexual or too violent. This includes the news. On an average night you’ll
get to sleep by 1 and wake up by 6 to wake all of them up so they can be to the
bus on time.
10. You will not consider changing it for the world. It’s
funny how that works. Somehow you will become the least selfish person in the
entire world and you will be happy to do it. Sure, you’ll allow yourself the
tiniest daydreams occasionally of what it would be like if you had made
different choices – but in the end, you know you’d never do it differently.
Your children will be the best thing you ever did and your tired, ratty-toed
self wouldn't know what to do with herself if they weren't around.
1 comments:
Its true....and I only have 1!
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