People are always gushing about how gorgeous both of my children are and, more often than not, I tend gush back.

“Oh my goodness, I know! Aren’t they?!” I say.

It only recently occurred to me how shockingly immodest this must sound. And it would be had I thought for a second that Scout and Lou’s beautiful smiles, bright eyes, and disarming natures had anything to do with me…

Sure, they have some of my features, but they also picked up Mr.D’s bone structure, build, intelligence, curiosity, and kindness . (All the wild, crazy, and uncontrollable comes from me.) ‘Tis the gamble of DNA, I say. I take no more credit for my children’s looks than I would those of any celebrity walking the red carpet.

If someone were to say to me, “Don’t Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston look stunning?”, I would most likely also respond with “Oh my goodness, I know! Aren’t they?!”

I guess what I’m trying to say is that my children are who they are and I think that’s the most stunning thing about them.

In any case, I finally learned to be a lady and just say, “Thank you” and nothing more.

Here’s a closer look of beautiful baby girl. I look halfway decent too… for once.

…and because Scout looked so very cute for Easter/his 4th Birthday as well, here’s another picture of him blowing out the candles.

Want to join the fun? Come on over!

Hosted by Krystyn, from Really Are You Serious?

On any given day, there seems to be a distinct moment when all the good gets sucked out of it. Everything’s going along at a nice even clip, when suddenly, the earth opens up and ALL. HELL. BREAKS. LOOSE.

Take, for instance, this past Friday. We had had a great day. No  meltdowns. No disasters.  Just a nice, normal, uneventful day. The kids were seated for dinner. Mr. D was on his way home and it was just another hour or so until bedtime. I was in the home stretch. Then, along comes our handyman, Mario.

No relation, I assure you.

Mario and a helper let themselves into the backyard to do a repair.  No big deal, except it completely blew Scout’s mind. He started asking a million questions (or rather, the same question a million times) and jumping in and out of his chair to run to the back door to “check on the workers”.

Then, as if that wasn’t excitement enough, Scout spotted this on the lawn…

It’s the top to the (toy) fire extinguisher he received as part of a whole fire freighter ensemble for a birthday gift last weekend. See, this  is what it looks like intact…

It squirts water, which is why it was quickly relegated OUTSIDE… and outside (and ignored) is where it remained all week. If I had know that it would be the lynch pin to a crazy bomb, I would have relegated it to the recycle bin…

Scout kept asking if I knew where the bottom part was and I kept saying, “No, I don’t. We’ll find it later. Just eat your dinner”. Unsatisfied, he pulled off his pants, shoes, and socks (?) and bolted for the backyard, half naked and sobbing, convinced that the men had taken his toy.

Somehow, I manged to pull “Chicken Little” back into the house. Mario followed behind with a bill for over $600 (!!!) and requested that I pay him in cash. “Small bills, if you have it.”

Uhhh, I barely had 50 cents and that I scrounged from the dryer.

He and I went back and forth on the issue for a while, but I finally convinced him to accept a check. Not a hard sell, since it was that or nothing. Literally.

So, I go in search of my checkbook. I find the cover, but there are no more checks inside. While I dug through the remaining five boxes left to unpack, Mario excused himself to wash his hands. I could hear Scout following after accusingly, “Did YOU take my fire extinguisher? Did you? Did you?”

I’m all, “Dude! Remember five days ago when I specifically asked you to pick up the toys from the backyard and you didn’t do it because you didn’t GIVE A SHIT? Yeah, can we please go back to that?”

Okay, who am I kidding? Of course, not.

I manage to locate the new checks. I pay Mario and show him out the front door. I go out  to the backyard and find the bottom part of the extinguisher. It had just rolled off the deck, and if Scout had bothered to LOOK instead of freak out, he would have found it too.  I put the toy back together, handed it to him, and save humanity as we know it. (You’re welcome.)

Well, you’ll never guess what I found abandoned at the bottom of a closet barely twenty minutes later?

And this is where it will remain, forgotten until the next time he’s supposed to be doing something else.

Photos are deceiving. You would never know that only mere seconds before this one was shot, Scout took the opportunity to beat up his baby cousin…. while everyone was looking right at him… waiting to sing “Happy Birthday”.

You also can’t tell that he used the serving set to eat his cake and then, an hour later, threw up all over my aunt and uncle’s living room rug…

Don’t mind me. It’s my fourth birthday and I can be a punk to whomever I please. I’m the KING OF THE WORLD!

(Lou: “You’re giving Brother FIRE?! I’m new here and even I know that’s a terrible idea…”)

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programing…

I sat on my recent post on second-time motherhood for over a month. I was afraid to post it. Yet, I couldn’t seem to write about anything else until I did. So Sunday night, I just closed my eyes and hit “publish”.

The truth is, for whatever reason, I’m phobic of appearing weak or stupid or lesser than. Not that I think having a tough time with motherhood makes one “weak” or “stupid”. Let’s face it. Raising kids IS tough and anyone who says otherwise, including my extended family, is also phobic.

If someone else had broken down and expelled the previous rant to me, I  certainly wouldn’t have thought less of them. I would have happily listened for as long as it took to make them feel better. I have no idea why I  felt  as if I was imposing by doing the same. It’s silly. I know.

I soaked in all of your words of encouragement yesterday and today. In other words, THANK YOU!

There are times when I feel fine. You could even say HAPPY and resolved to keep moving forward, knowing that life as it is at this very moment is temporary. Fleeting. Any moment, I could blink and my children will be all grown up.

I  wake up, embrace the fact that nothing will be accomplished here today, and simply carry on with other plans. I pack a lunch, head to the park with the kids, maybe even stop by story time or Target on my way. It’s not like I have to rush home to put anyone to bed… Ppfff

Then, there’s the rest of time… the dark moments when I feel trapped, alone, crushed….

Days like yesterday when Mr. D left for work before I could shower and get ready. I was still in my pajamas at four in the afternoon when he called to say that he’ll be going back to working weekends and late nights by the end of the week.

It’s these dark moments which consume me whole.

I should take a moment and recognize Mr. D in all this. My husband is amazing. He comes home never knowing which wife will be there to greet him– the surly, weepy, stabby one or the breezy, happy, funny one.

(Mostly, it’s the ranty one. Never the sultry, “I drugged the kids so they’d sleep through the night” *wink, wink* one.)

He  frequently gets up with Lou at night and tries to give me a “break” as often as possible, but lately he’s been losing it too.

The other day, I found half a load of laundry in the dryer… and no, I don’t mean he didn’t wash a full load. I mean, I opened the washer to find the OTHER HALF of the laundry still damp, possibly moldy.

A few days before, I reached to put a dirty diaper in the pail, only to find that the pail had been relocated next to the front door- – still full of stinky…

Mr. D had moved it there, possibly intending to empty it on his way out the door or maybe, it was an elaborate hint that I should empty it. Who knows? It was just one of the many comical little aggravations in my day that makes me feel more like “ringleader” than “wife and mother”.

I can laugh about it because I know exactly what happened. It’s the same thing that happens to me multiple times daily. I’ll be rushing to finish something. Someone will scream and it’s crisis diverted…

I can laugh about it  because I’m not being completely overwhelmed by it right now.

Over the past month, I’ve made a few changes to make things easier to bear. I hired a cleaning service.  I’ve been trying to overcome my deep-seated trust issues and hire a baby-sitter, too. I gave up on family dinners and afternoon naps. Opting instead to feed the kids earlier (as if Lou could be kept waiting) and put them to bed earlier.

And the biggest and best-est change of all… Mr. D finished his project and went back to normal work hours.

Well, that one lasted about two weeks.

Now, with long nights and zero weekENDS ahead,  I feel like I’m slipping deeper into the crevasse.

All parents have the highest of aspirations for their children.

Doctor, teacher, President of the United States… but the next Kobayashi?

If fate were decided by talent and talent was determined at the age of eight months, then my daughter definitely has a shot at winning international titles in competitive eating.

She greedily gobbles up all of her dinner, grabs a whole chicken leg from mine, and will still eye her big brother’s plate for more…  and she doesn’t even have teeth yet!

Barely over 50th percentile at her last check-up, she’s doing her best to catch up one chubby fistful of Cheerios at a time. Honestly, I don’t even know where she puts it in her tiny little frame!

It’s been tough to keep up with her demands, which is why I was thrilled to be given a chance to write about Annabel Karmel’s Top 100 Baby Purees and Top 100 Finger Foods for the Silicon Valley Moms Blog.

Getting my daughter to try new and adventurous tastes is clearly NOT an issue for me. My biggest problem is knowing what I can feed her… As in, what’s “allowed”?

You’d think I would know all that already, having had an older child and all. Except that my son never had home-made baby food.

Yeah. I’m sure this will somehow play into a future  laundry list of how I loved one child more than the other blah, blah, blah… Homemade baby food or not, he will always have three years and four months of blissful “only child”-hood on his little sister.  So there!

In the throes of new motherhood (and for a short while, working motherhood), I felt like I had enough on my plate.  The last thing I wanted was to spend my Sunday afternoons pureeing vegetables and neatly portioning them out into ice cube trays.

This is not to say that I would have been opposed to the idea. After all, I was pretty strict about which types of jarred foods he ate. And, once upon a simpler time, I did enjoy cooking. Making my own baby food wouldn’t have been such a leap.

However, an allergy scare early on turned me off the idea entirely. A stern reprimand from our pediatrician made me paranoid about trying anything “different” or “new”. So I stuck with what was considered tried and true. (read: safe and boring)

Knowing what I know now, I wish I had at least tried to make Fillet of Fish with Orange Sauce or Tomato Cauliflower and Carrot with Basil for my son. I’m sure he would have loved it as much as his sister did when I served it to her for lunch today. Having hand selected and prepped the ingredients myself, I get much more satisfaction from knowing exactly what goes into my kids’ food.

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I used store-bought baby foods because they were convenient and made my life easier. Scout certainly hasn’t suffered because of it. He’s bright, happy, healthy, and not shy about demanding a hummus-broccoli sandwich instead chicken nuggets. (NOW, Mommy!)

I’m more ashamed to admit that I didn’t trust my own instincts when it came to knowing what’s best for my kid.

Disclosure: I received  free copies Annabel Karmel’s Top 100 Baby Purees and Top 100 Finger Foods to taste test on my kids and write about for the Silicon Valley Moms Blog. The opinions are my own. You can purchase your copies of Top 100 Finger Foods and Top 100 Baby Purees by Annabel Karmel here.