NYC Moms

NYC: Plea for a Better Aquarium!

Last Saturday, we went to the New York Aquarium in Coney Island.  My son loves that place!  He would go every day if we let him.  However, he sees it through the eyes of a three year old. 

To my cynical adult eyes, it’s in need of major renovation and updating.  The exhibits are pretty tired. 

On our recent trip, most of the water was pretty green.  It’s basically a small collection of buildings cobbled together with less than 5 big tanks.  The asphalt paths that connect the exhibits are all cracked and broken.  The supposed pools outside the jelly fish exhibit are empty and filled with junk.  I know that the economy is bad and cuts have to be made, but the aquarium looks like it’s been in a longtime downward slide.  In this city that has the best and brightest of so many things, the aquarium is a bit of an embarrassment. 

The Great Ice Cream Truck Debate

Every summer, the great ice cream truck debate breaks out in our neighborhood. It rages across the parent listservs with impassioned pleas and hurled insults.  The crux of the problem is ice cream trucks park outside the playgrounds and parks to lure children with sugary treats and at the same time fill these playgrounds with nasty emissions and loud noise from the generators necessary to run the refrigeration units.  The problem with idling trucks has actually gotten so bad in New York that laws are now in effect that limit large trucks to idling no more than 3 minutes in most areas and no more than 1 minute near schools. 

Keeping My Cool

I consider myself to be a fairly calm and patient person.  That being said, somehow, nearly every day, my kids manage to wind me up and have me yelling.  I have never thought of myself as a yeller.  I am more of a quiet stewer or an avoider.  During my career days, I was rarely stressed.  However, in my third year as a stay at home mom, I find myself losing my temper with increasing regularity. 

I am minutely aware of what I say to my children.  I try to never compare them.  I try to praise them for specific actions.  I try to provide positive rewards for good behavior.  I try to cuddle them as much as possible throughout the day.  Yet somehow, I find myself yelling at my three year old as he purposely body checks my one year old, knocking her to the ground and leaving her wailing.  When they both start to scream at the same time, my stress level goes through the roof, and I find myself saying things like “WHAT COULD YOU POSSIBLY BE CRYING ABOUT?” 

NYC School System Nightmares

The New York City school system is giving me nightmares, and my kids aren't even in school yet! I am a year out from applying to the pre-kindergarten system, but it already has me stressed out.  I have actually woken up in a sweat and jumped out of bed before the kids woke up to search the internet for information and ideas about the whole process. 

Like so many things in New York City, the school system is incredibly hard to navigate.  Applying to pre-k involves an online application and a convoluted system of priorities and lotteries to determine if our children can go to public school preschool when they are four (and therefore save our family thousands of dollars).  Of course, the decision for whether my child actually wins a seat comes well after deposits and first payments are due at private preschools so we can pretty much bet that we will lose a couple of thousand dollars even if we do get accepted to "free" public school. 

Next, getting accepted to pre-K does not guarantee we are accepted for a slot at that school's kindergarten so the process starts all over again except this time we have to apply in person at each kindergarten we  would like our kids to attend.  There are no guarantees we will get a slot at our zoned school so we must apply to multiple programs.  Apparently making friends with principals can go a long way, and I have heard that visiting our top school choice everyday can help get us a spot.  WHAT??  I barely have time to get everything done during my days as it is, and I have to add to it getting my child into school?!?!  Just as an added twist, New York City has a gifted and talented programs where we can take our four year old to a psychologist to get tested to determine if he can get into a special programs and schools based on the one day test.  Sigh.

A Utopian Ideal

Many things drive me crazy about New York.

One of the big ones is the distance it puts me from family. When my parents moved us from Texas to the family farm in Iowa, it meant that I grew up far away from my grandparents and any extended family. I didn't think much of it as a child, but when I was just out of college, I thought nothing of pulling up my roots and moving across the country to New York City (in retrospect, I know it must have been youthful stupidity and naivete that allowed me to make such a big decision without batting an eye!).  Now that I have children, I find myself crazy jealous of old family friends who live in my old hometown near their parents. They can easily make plans for a big Sunday dinner together or drop the kids off at grandma & grandpa's house for a sleepover when they want a night out.  Their kids have a day-to-day relationship with a large extended family.  I do have my sister and my husband's sister's family close by, but I have come to believe that having your whole extended family around truly enriches your life.  When it comes to my kids, I want as many people as close by as possible that love them unconditionally and have their best interests at heart.  I look at what my son has learned from my sister and think about what he could also learn from my parents or my in-laws if given the opportunity. 

Imagining Valentine's Day

I hate fighting.  I am an avoider and a stewer – and then I forget what I was mad about in the first place.

However, when our first child was born, my husband and I fought like cats and dogs.  It was a pretty big adjustment for both of us to get used to having a baby.  I remember feeling overwhelmed by the sheer work of having a child.  It felt never ending.  Having a colicky baby didn’t help, but I felt like I was on a sinking ship that was being dragged down to the bottom of the ocean by the sleep deprivation – and I wouldn’t even say I had post-partum depression.  It took me a long time to get used to the drudgery of being a mom.  Cleaning the kitchen.  Cooking a meal.  Changing a diaper.  Folding the laundry.  Repeat and repeat.  No one was asking me to use my brain for a marketing budget or a promotional plan or an opening night party for a Broadway show.  Having a baby was all about following a daily routine that was pretty much the same, seven days a week, twenty four hours a day.  I could switch it up by visiting a different playground or planning a special trip to the Bronx Zoo, but generally it was up at 7am, breakfast at 7:45am, nap at 9am, out the door at 10:15am, lunch at noon, nap at 1pm, out the door again at 3:30pm, home to cook by 5:30pm, dinner at 6pm, bath at 6:30pm, bed for baby at 7pm, cook a quick dinner for us (or order out!), then collapse on the couch. 

For me, having a child, meant giving over my entire life to motherhood by conforming to my baby’s schedule…and, at first, I was frequently angry and resentful about this full scale take over.  Of course, I would never in a million years take out my frustration on my tiny baby, so my husband got an earful about how I was doing everything, and he was doing nothing.  This wasn’t really true, but I think it was all about perception in those days. 

I could only see that my work load as a stay at home mom had consumed my life, while he was breezing off to work each morning.  I realize now he was also going through his own adjustment.  Being pregnant had given me more time to get used to the idea that I was going to be a parent.  However, my husband got his wakeup call on the day our son was born.  I think men generally picture fatherhood as tossing around the baseball or shooting hoops.  It took some time for my husband to wrap his head around the idea that those first few years he had a helpless child that required constant care and lacked the gross motor skills for passing and throwing.  I don’t really recall those first few months very clearly.  Perhaps it’s like childbirth – you forget so you are willing to do it again.  I do remember wondering if everyone else was on that same sinking ship.  Was I the only one contemplating leaving the father of my child who seemed unable and unwilling to save me?  Of course, once I got a little more sleep, I came to my senses and could see with more reasonable eyes that my wonderful husband was doing everything he knew to try to help – and that this was a big change in his life as well.

The Economy & The Mass Exodus

New York has always had an ebb and flow of people.  All kinds of people flock to the city each day, and everyday a few decide they just can't take it anymore.  In the past ten years, it seemed like the tide was rising.  I moved here in the late 1990s when jobs were plentiful, and the New York economy was on the way up.  Friends that had gotten here before me liked to tell stories of how crazy it had been in the past: squatters in Tompkins Square Park, porn in Times Square, crime on the subways.  However, I arrived in the halcyon days when New York was a playground for young twenty somethings looking for a good time.  With movies in Bryant Park on picnic blankets with wine & cheese, and cool bars on the Lower East Side with hookahs and cocktails, the options for fun were endless. You had to have some street smarts (i.e. don't fall asleep on the subway after a night out), but in general, it was a great place for a young woman from the Midwest to sand off her rough edges.  

In the past, families used to flee New York not too long after the first child was born.  Conventional wisdom had parents buying houses in the suburbs where schools were better and playgrounds were cleaner.  Then as the economy boomed and the city remade itself into a child-friendly place, people started to stay.  I can recall Jon Stewart buying a Phil & Ted stroller before anyone had even heard of this crazy new double stroller that allowed you to stack your children.  Then they started popping up on the sidewalks with alarming frequency as families stayed past the first baby, into the preschool years and onto the second sibling.   In the last few years, it seems like Brooklyn has been overrun by strollers and children.  In fact, this trend had the borough nearly bursting at the seams as brownstone prices skyrocketed and morning preschool slots became the holy grail.  

Why Didn't Anyone Tell Me? The Gym Rocks!

I had a revelation today.  I love the gym.  I know this is shocking to my friends and family.  To put it mildly, I am not athletic.  I exercised (no pun intended) a loophole during high school that allowed me to skip gym if I signed up for enough classes to fill every period during the day.  I never played an organized sport.  My mother taught me an important lesson that balls in motion are dangerous and should be treated with respect and fear.  I regularly employed the phrase "I only run when chased."  Fortunately, I was very blessed in my youth with a crazy fast metabolism.  I literally ate like a horse, but still stayed so thin that my teachers called my parents concerned that I might have an eating disorder.

In the past, I joined gyms and went a handful of times before giving up in defeat.  I hated to pay out money every month to do something that I truly despised.  However, we recently installed our first full length mirror in the house, and I got a close look at my post-baby body.  I know it's reasonable that after two c-sections that my body should look a little differently than it did in my early twenties, but somehow coming face to face with it in the mirror made me struggle to sit up and realize that I needed to do something about it.  

One of the Best Kept Secrets of Motherhood

This might be "Too Much Information," but I am going to plunge ahead anyway: I got an IUD!  Normally, I am not one to overshare (I hope!) but this seems to be one of the best kept secrets of motherhood.  I think this is going to be life changing for me.  Let me share a bit of history with you: both my children were pleasant surprises.  I consider myself a smart, savvy women, but somehow, despite a minor in Women's Studies and reading tons of information on birth control methods during my younger years, two things took me by surprise.

Myth #1: Birth control pills take awhile to leave your system.  

I thought after being on the pill for 5+ years that my body would need a little time to get over all those extra hormones in order to get pregnant.  My husband and I got married in November 2004, and the following summer, I decided to go off the pill with hopes of getting pregnant the following year.  I thought a little detox time would ensure that we would have an easy time.  I was very concerned that conceiving would be hard for me after ovarian cyst problems I had in my twenties.  I couldn't have been more wrong: we got pregnant the next month - surprise!

To VP or Not VP: That is the question!

I never set out to be a stay at home mom.  In fact, in the weeks leading up to my son's birth, I told my boss repeatedly to hold a place for me because I would definitely be back.  I asked all my new friends at my pregnancy group what they were doing for childcare since daycare closed at 6pm, and I never got home before 7pm ever.  I felt like I had put in quite a few years in my chosen field and was just about ready to start being a major player (or so I liked to think).  Then Jack was born, and I was completely thrown for a loop.  He was a demanding baby:  extremely colicky with terrible acid reflux.  He never slept more than two hours at a time.  I remember turning to my husband and saying that I knew it would be hard but not this hard!  It didn't help that I was trying to work from home with no childcare.  As my maternity leave was starting to come to an end, I started looking for daycare since a nanny didn't really fit into our budget.  I repeatedly called two that I had heard about through friends and never got a single call back.  I hadn't realized that I needed to put my name on a list when I found out I was pregnant (really!).  I kept postponing my return, paralyzed by my inability to find childcare and overwhelmed by this new little person that needed me nearly every minute of every day.  Three months became six months and my office gently phased me out since they really needed someone that could be in the office and reliably show up for meetings without a screaming baby.  Suddenly I was a stay at home mom.