Years later when my older brother was away at college I called him at his dorm late at night.  I could hear my parents fighting and yelling at each other.  I don’t remember what they were fighting about, I only remember it being loud and me being scared enough to call my brother.  I was so scared because I never heard my parents fight like that so I figured it must be so bad that they were going to split up.

I can think of one other time in my childhood that I remember hearing my parents raise their voices at each other.  This isn’t to say that my parents had the perfect marriage.  They had issues just like any other couple.  Some pretty big issues.  They just always kept their cool around us kids.

I am not my mother.

Almost five years of being someone’s mom and I’m now just realizing how impatient I am and how frustrated I get.  These last week’s I’ve been paying attention to the way I handle situations with Babboo and comparing it to the way my own mom would have handled it.  For the life of me I can’t figure out how she could be in a similar situation and not raise her voice.  Not only am I made up of this woman’s DNA but I was also raised by her.  She was a stay-at-home mom during my formative years and so I would think all of my own parenting skills would have been learned from her.

I get frustrated with Babboo a lot.  A lot, a lot.  He also gets frustrated with me.  It’s not unusual to hear him raising his voice with me.

“You’re not understanding what I’m saying!”

He’s right, I’m not.  I’ll ask him questions to help me understand and that frustrates him which then frustrates me more and we get both get upset.  I’m fighting with a four year old.  And not usually winning.

Last night I was playing “pizza”* with him.  He wanted to use some of my craft supplies and got upset when I told him he couldn’t use my fancy paper and instead gave him some other paper to use.  This set off a whole chain of events.  I tried to think about what my mom would do in this situation.

“I’m getting frustrated so I’m going to go and take a break for a minute.”

I left the room which just made Babboo more upset.  Eventually The King had to get involved and calm the situation down.

That didn’t work out like I thought it would.

And it’s not just situations like this.  Babboo has heard The King and I raise our voices at each other.  He’s seen us fight.  It doesn’t seem to faze him. Which I’ve realized means that he’s so used to it that he thinks it’s normal.

I don’t want my children to think it’s normal to hear their parents fight.  I don’t want them to look back at their childhood and only remember that their mommy was always yelling.  This isn’t your typical Mommy Guilt.  This is me trying to figure out how to be as good of a mom to my little kids as my mom was to me.

My mom and dad are coming out to visit this weekend and I’m going to do something I should have been doing all along.  I’m going to watch them interact with my kids and with each other and try to learn a little something.

So tell me, what positive parenting skills did you learn from your parents?

*Someone pretends to be the “pizza maker” (Babboo) and the other person is the customer (Mom).  The customer comes in and requests a pizza and then the maker quickly makes a pizza, and toppings, out of paper to sell you.  It’s just about as fun as it sounds.

I wrote her back to ask her what she was sorry for.

“That its passed your due date and you’re still pregnant.”

Had to e-mail her back and give her the whole “it’s an ESTIMATED due date, so it’s not like I was expecting to go into labor the second it was my due date.”

ESTIMATED!

And, let’s be honest, as soon as I’m no longer pregnant it will mean I HAVE A BABY TO TAKE CARE OF 24 HOURS A DAY.  Being pregnant doesn’t sound so bad when you compare it to that.

I don’t think I’ve made it to the totally uncomfortable part of pregnancy.  I mean as long as I can still come to work everyday and sit in my cozy chair in my cubicle, surrounded by blowing AC, and listening to my iPod, then I’m just fine.  It’s far more comfortable then being at home frantically cleaning and scrubbing and washing and folding WITHOUT MAKING ANY ACTUAL PROGRESS!  Plus, at work, I get paid to show up.  So yeah, might as well be making money.

I feel like in much better spirits then I should be.  I mean don’t all overdue women have the right to be ornery?  The only thing that is making me ornery is EVERYBODY at work stopping by my cubicle or calling me to see if I”m here today.

I’M HERE.

I told them all along that I’d be working up until the day I birth a child. So I’m not sure why they’re surprised to see me everyday.

I was curious as to how I was feeling around this same time when I was pregnant with Babboo, so I ventured back into the archives of this site and found this post from April 13th, which was two days past my due date.  I was excited to see that it was full of awesome pictures from my youth.  And honestly, I don’t sound too ornery in the post.  So maybe I wasn’t too uncomfortable.

(I went on to give birth 8 days after my due date, and only after being induced.)

(Wow, there are 90 comments on that post.  That is a total record for me.)

(I had forgotten about that post and reading it again made me so happy.  Seeing this picture of my five year old confirmed that Babboo is my child.)

I also had to go back and read my first post birth post, which included this MOST ADORABLE picture of My Sweet Babboo.

Oh my gosh, it seriously is intense to think that we’ll be having another one of these little guys shortly (or in 8 days, it’s hard to tell).

As of last Friday I was dilated to a 3.5, up from a 1 the week before.  I have another appointment today.  And because of his new job which isn’t located anywhere near me in downtown Seattle, it will be the first appointment The King’s been able to go to with me (although he insists it’s the second one).

I hope it’s the last appointment.

But you can never be certain.

And, because I’m sure someone out there cares (maybe Carrisa?) here is the latest belly shot.  It was taken last Tuesday right before I headed out the door to attend the annual Garden Party that the ladies from church put on.  I decided to wear my sassy red wedges in an attempt  to make myself feel less fat by having the focus be my red shoes.

(I’m not sure how well that logic worked.)

———————————————-

And because I forgot to share this before, here are a couple links you might be interested in.  (Again, Carrisa might be the only one interested.)

Remember when I used to write a column about being a working mom over at SeattleMomBlogs?  I recently was given tickets to see a local play with The King and Babboo.  We went, had a blast, and then I blogged all about it.  (Complete with another picture of my big belly…and my cute kid!)

I was recently interviewed for a local site, the Queen Anne blog.  The article turned out better then I was expecting.  I was a little nervous during the interview and was afraid I’d come off sounding like a huge City Snob.

The reality was that we didn’t really need the calendar to tell us what our daily chore was since it followed the same pattern.  My older brother and I each had a set of dishes to wash.  Either breakfast or dinner dishes (lunch dishes were put into rotation during the summer months).  Along with dishes we had another chore.  Wednesdays we each had a bathroom to clean.  Tuesdays and Thursday rotated between vacuuming the front room/hall or the kitchen.  Friday was changing your sheets and dusting.  (We loved Friday.  So easy.)

Saturday morning we’d wake up to a list on the kitchen counter with our name on it.  On this list would be all of the chores we did earlier in the week.  Basically we had to do all of the vacuuming and bathroom cleaning again before we could do anything else that day.  Be assured there was never a Saturday, not one single one, where we didn’t have our “Saturday Chores”.

I’d been doing chores since I was pretty little so this arrangement didn’t seem odd to me.  My mom worked a full time job from the time I was in middle school.  I wouldn’t have thought it was fair for her to do all the cleaning.  There were four of us kids messing up the house, there might as well be four of us cleaning up too.

Pretty much the day I turned eighteen (two weeks before I graduated from high school) I was no longer required to do chores.  It wasn’t discussed it was just understood.  I moved away to college, got married, divorced, and moved back in with my parents.  A chore calendar with my name on it was never again hung inside the pantry door.  I cleaned my own room and did my own laundry, but that was it.  I’m pretty sure I never did any dishes or vacuuming.  And I know I didn’t clean a bathroom.  Maybe my mom felt bad for me since I was 23 and divorced, living with my parents.  Whatever her reason, NO MORE CHORES!

The King never had a chore chart growing up.  His mom didn’t work outside the home and there were only two kids.  While we’ve never discussed it I’m pretty sure he never had to clean bathrooms or vacuum.  And I know he didn’t do any dishes.

What I’m saying is that The King and I were raised very differently in regards to working.

The first few years of our marriage The King and I lived in a studio apartment and slept in a twin size bed.  There wasn’t much to clean.  We didn’t have a chore chart.  We just did our part to keep our little place running.

We knew we had to move out of our tiny studio eventually, and so The King decided to build us a house.  With his own two hands.  We didn’t have any kids at this point so he expected me to help out.  It became clear, quite quickly, that I didn’t know how to build a house.  It was more then that, it became clear that I really didn’t know how to work.  At least not like The King.  Boy oh boy, that man knew how to work.  And he didn’t hate it.  Or complain about it.  Or try to come up with excuses to get out of working.  Nope, he just went and worked on the house every single day after working his full time job.  On Saturdays he woke up at the crack of dawn and started working on the house and didn’t stop until it was too dark to work.

And really, he never complained.

Be assured I complained enough for the both of us.  I didn’t want to go to the house after work.  I definitely didn’t want to go on Saturdays.  Work…blah.

I hated the work.  HATED it.  And I’ll admit that I held it against The King.  I was tired all the time and just didn’t have the energy to do even half the amount of work The King would have liked me to.  He wasn’t asking too much of me.  But it sure felt like he was.

By the time we started to build our second home Babboo was around, so I was given a free pass on working on that house.  I think I only worked on the house one day before we lived there.  Phew.

Even after we moved into the house there is stuff to work on.  Mostly it’s been things outside.  The King continues to wake up every Saturday morning and head outside to dig dirt, or lift rocks, or cut wood.  He also works most evenings around the house.

Thankfully I’ve recently shed The Tired that used to rule my life and have felt good about joining in and working with The King.  We’ve been working our butts off to get the majority of our yard done before Rerun is born.  It’s exciting to see the progress.

I was out with some girlfriends a few weeks ago and, as it does, the conversation turned to them complaining about their husbands.  One woman said she feels like all she does is nag her husband to get stuff done around the house.  She said it never gets done.  Another woman said that the knob on her front door had been broken for two months before she finally just figured out how to fix it herself.

I started to think about my husband and how The King would never let a door knob stay broken for two months.  And I’ve never had to nag him to get something done around the house.  Heck, I don’t think I’ve ever even had to ask him to do something.  He just does it.

I sat there in silence while the other women joined in. They weren’t being malicious towards their husbands or anything.  They just didn’t like how they never got things done.

I had nothing to say.  There wasn’t one single thing I could add to the conversation.  My husband was the exact opposite of all of their husbands.

I realized right then how lucky I was to have such a hard worker for a husband.

I had never really thought before about how much other husbands worked.  I guess I just assumed that most husbands woke up on Saturday and instantly went out in the garage to get the tools they’d need for the day, or made the first trip of the day to Home Depot.

I remembered that while visiting my family in Utah last month The King spent one of the four days we were there installing a new kitchen floor in my sister’s house.  He completed the entire kitchen, happily, in a few short hours.

Last summer he spent most of our vacation out there building my parents a new pergola in their back yard.

It might have taken me a while, but I appreciate what a hard worker The King is.  A damn fine one at that.

And he does it all because he loves me.  He loves our family.  Every nail he bangs into the wall, every shovel full of dirt he lifts, and every push of the lawn mover he does because he loves me.

Happy tenth anniversary baby.

Here’s to an eternity of working together.

Most everyone has a different definition of camping.  Here is the definition my family had of camping:

• Sleeping in a trailer.  (We had a family of six and there was a bed for each of us.)
• Cooking every meal in the kitchen of the trailer.
• Storing all food in the trailer fridge.
• Eating meals off of real live plates with real live utensils that are kept in the trailers cupboards and drawers.
• Spending every evening at the trailer kitchen trailer playing card games with the trailer lights on.
• Eating the same meals we would have eaten if we were at home.
• Taking a daily shower in the trailer bathroom and using the toilet as needed.

I know, I know, most people wouldn’t refer to this as camping and I totally understand.

At some point we did buy a little tent.  But we used it to keep our luggage in.  For reals.

My aunt and uncle and their family would usually go camping with us.   Sometimes even my grandma would bring her trailer and meet us.  We would park our trailers next to each other.  We’d take turns riding bikes and ATV’s.  I think maybe once we took a hike ON A PAVED WALKWAY.  While we weren’t roasting marshmallows and sleeping in sleeping bags, we had fun.  I truly enjoyed all the summers we spent up in the mountains with my family.

(circa 1985)

As a teenager I never really thought about why we didn’t sleep in a tent, pee in the woods and cook over a fire.  I knew my mom had no interest in it and I guess I just assumed I’d have no interest in it either.  And so, I never even imagined camping in a tent.

I was only married to my first husband for a year and that summer we were married we went camping with some of his friends one time.  It sucked.  I didn’t like one single minute of it.  I chalked it up to just not liking camping in a tent, just like my mom.  Looking back I think it was more of “I didn’t like my husband or his friends” and not really “I hate camping”.

After that one trip with the ex, I put the idea of camping out of my mind and never thought about it again.  Until last summer when we got invited to go camping with a group of our really good friends.  The King and Babboo were very excited about going camping and so I put a smile on my face and agreed to go with them.

We borrowed a few camping supplies from The King’s parents and bought ourselves a tent and Babboo a sleeping bag.  The King found some awesome mattress thingys at the REI basement and we were set.

We camped for a weekend with three other families.  All together there were five kids and eight adults.  We slept in our tent, kept our food in a cooler, cooked all of our meals over the fire, went without showers, hiked with the kids, participated in our first geocache, and played in the river.

I had a blast.  (Minus the hike and my fear of falling off a cliff.  Or my kid falling off a cliff.)

(Pictures from our hike last weekend.)

We ended up going camping later in the summer with one of the families.  Again, we slept in a tent, cooked over a fire, hiked, geocached, and went sans showers.  And again, I had a blast.

We’ve been waiting all year for another chance to go camping this year.  Last weekend was our first camping trip of the season.  I was a little nervous about going camping while 32 weeks pregnant.  I tried to ignore my nerves and didn’t share them with anyone else.  I figured I was tough enough to handle a few nights sleeping on the ground in the tent.  The King set us up with a blow up mattress and I booked a camp site near the bathroom to accommodate my THREE nightly trips to the toilet.  The King found a hike that we figured was safe enough for me and my huge belly.

I’ll be honest here.  I slept better in the tent then I’ve been sleeping in my own bed at home.  The weather was perfect.  And I didn’t have to use the potty AT ALL during the night.  And the hike?  Well, it was actually just about perfect.

(Woody and Juggernaut didn’t like the hike as much as we did.  Those silly guys got in a fight while the rest of us found a geocache.)

And let’s not forget the food.

Why is it anything cooked over a fire tastes 100% better.  I mean dude, hotdogs cooked over the fire are AWESOME.  Not to mention s’mores or French toast.

The boys did take a bath in the FREEZING water.  (But not us girls!)

Babboo did end up going sans clothes in the lake.  Or rather, NEAR the lake.  It was just too cold for him to actually get in the water.

Before we left for home we did eight geocaches.  It had been way too long since we’d done them.  I forgot how much fun it is to geocache!

On the drive back to our house on Sunday evening The King and I got to talking about tent camping.  I told him that I loved tent camping way more then trailer camping.  We tried to figure out what it was about tent camping that my mom hated.  And what it was about trailer camping that she liked so much.  We couldn’t really figure it out.  Maybe it was because there were four of us kids and so maybe camping in the trailer was easier.  Or maybe she just hates going without a daily shower.  Or maybe she can’t physically squat to pee.  Although I really doubt it’s any of those things.

Maybe she’s just never tent camped and doesn’t know how awesome it is.

This weekend we’ll be visiting my family in Utah.  During this trip I plan on sitting my mom down and getting to the bottom of this.

So tell me, do you prefer tent, trailer, or hotel camping?  And why?

—————————————-

OH MY GOSH, we’re going to see The Old 97’s tonight.  It’s been almost two years since we last saw them.  We were able to see Rhett Miller in concert when I was about this far along with Babboo, so I think it’s pretty cool that Rerun will get to attend his first Old 97’s concert while in utero too!

The topic?

Telling everyone how boy crazy I am.

Apparently I was 14 in my dream. (No really, I was 14 in my dream.) And back then I was pretty boy crazy.  At the time I think I thought that every girl was as boy crazy as I was.  Honestly, I probably thought all the boys were girl crazy too.  Now that just a few years older (hello, 20+ years older) I’m starting to realize that not every girl was that boy crazy.  And definitely none of the boys were girl crazy.  (Although some might have been boy crazy too!)  I literally spent the majority of my teen years looking at boys, talking about boys, giggling about boys, dreaming about boys, reading about boys, and even writing in my journal about boys.

I wasted a lot of those years.

They might not of felt as wasted if I would have actually talked to an actual boy during my Golden Teenage Years.  Or if a boy would have actually talked to me.  But I didn’t. And they for sure didn’t.

My hair looked like THIS, for crying out loud.

(Oh my gosh, remember before this pregnancy when I was skinny?  Yeah, me neither.)*

And I had a snaggle tooth that insured no boy would ever want to kiss me.

You don’t need anymore proof as to why no boys were ever crazy about me.

(Go figure how I ended up with this blue-eyed hottie.)

Anyway, you may or may not remember, but I work with the 12-14 year old girls in my congregation at church.  (We refer to them as “Beehives”.  Odd, I know.)  (But still, Mormons Rule!)  The girls that I spend my Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings with are super cute.  They hair cute hair and always look nice.  They don’t cover their faces with too much make-up or talk loudly.  They speak kindly about everyone and seem to be sincerely and genuinely nice people.  And they rarely talk about boys.  They don’t chase after the boys in our congregation or show off in front of them.

What I’m saying is they are about 100% the opposite of how I was at their age.

I know they have crushes and think about boys.  In fact every single one of them as told me, in private, that they have a crush on the same specific boy in our congregation.  I don’t blame them. This kid is adorable.  (Think Zac Efron, but with actual athletic talents and high moral standards.)

I’m in on their secret.  I know they all like him.  They don’t even know that they all like him.  They are around him at every church function. And not a single one of them are making a fool of themselves over him.

If it were me I would have been talking loud, so the object of my affection would notice me.  I would have had my bangs ratted as high as I could, so he would see how beautiful I was.  And, of course, I’d have on my best blue eyeshadow and I’d be wearing my best KMart outfit.

The Mormon Version of a Young Zac Efron might not notice my girls at church.  Not yet, at least.  But if they keep up with the way things are going now, I’m quite confident that one of them will date him at some point.  Not like me, who honestly didn’t get any positive attention from any boys at that age.

It makes me wonder if I was an especially dorky 12 year old, or if things have changed in the 20 years since I was in their shoes.   Maybe these girls are exceptional girls.  Especially when compared to me.

I don’t know what it is.

All I know is that I sit back and watch them and wish I’d known what they know at my age.

———————————————————

*and in totally non related to being boy crazy news, here is my first (and maybe last?) official Belly Shot. 32 weeks.  Only 8 left.    (Although my top isn’t maternity, the slacks clearly are.  And they might be a little too “wide legged” for the look I was going for.)