Rocky Mountain Moms Blog

I still wear my retainer at night

I had braces for three and a half years.

Three and a half torturous, awkward, often painful, but very necessary years.  It began as a junior in high school and finally ended, at my insistence, the summer before my sophomore year at BYU.  There was major surgery involved, more orthodontic visits than I can count, weird torture appliances spreading open the roof of my mouth, rubber bands going all different directions, a lot of excess saliva, countless containers of yogurt and enough mashed potatoes to keep the Idaho economy running at full tilt. 

Let me tell you this, wearing braces through high school is normal, most kids do it at one point or another. Wearing braces through college is a whole different story. Being a girl and wearing braces through college is even worse.  It's hard enough being a girl as it is, add braces into the mix and life gets a whole lot more awkward. 

Sleep Tight Sleeping Beauty

Dear Prince Charming,

Do not lean over my sleeping body.  Take those princely lips and run along.  Do not dare plant them anywhere near my reposed face.  Can’t you see that I am finally catching up on my sleep?   Why don’t you go away, fight some dragons or something. You can come back in about a hundred years.  Maybe then I’ll be in the mood for something other than sleep.

Oh how quickly one forgets.  How easily I colored the past with the Technicolor brushstrokes of babyhood.  Indelibly etched in my brain is the delicious scent of my babies’ necks.  My fingers remember vividly the impossibly smooth skin of their silky backs.  My arms still bounce with the sighing lump nestled deep in blankets in my arms.

Hang on there, Princie.  I know what you're thinking, and you can forget it. Sure I’ve been pining for those days, aching to hold a baby once again, but I am over it now.  You see, I’ve had a chance to think about it (what with my being awake so much lately) and I’m not looking to rock another cradle.  I’ve got it pretty good.  My princesses sleep through the night. They pee by themselves and they dress themselves and they read to themselves.  So rarely do they come in for a morning snuggle that I leap at the chance to desert sleep for their warm hugs.

Really? In this day and age?

My son and I are driving along today, happily singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" as I see a man going for a walk with a stroller.  It was a double stroller that looked really cool.  That's actually what got my attention at first.  Oh how times change!  It was the stroller, not the dude, that I noticed first!

In this cool double stroller is an infant carrier and a toddler.  They are waiting to cross the street; I'm at the light.  As I'm checking out the stroller configuration, I notice that the dad is smoking.  Yes, smoking. His hand is on the handle, thus, the cigarette is about a foot away from the infant carrier, thus about a foot away from the infant.

It's hard for me to get my head around it, that in this day and age, people still smoke near kids.  I remember back in the day of my childhood when everyone smoked.  I have vivid memories of an occasional cigarette burn because I moved in too quickly for a hug from my Dad.  No big deal, just brush it off, then get the hug!

We have neighbors/friends at our cabin who have never held our now 19-month old son.  They epitomize the definition of chain-smokers.  They smoke when they have a cold.  They smoke in the morning.  They truly smoke all day long.  We don't go in their house anymore - we won't take our son inside.  We visit with them in the great outdoors.  They understand and respect our wishes to not have our son in a smoky environment.  

Behind the Scenes at the Snow Day

Snow is one of those things that seems like it should be more fun with kids. Like holidays, wrapping paper, or the beach. I mean, what better way to get your inner child on than to climb into five thousand pieces of clothing and head out for a day (or *cough* thirty minutes *cough*) of sledding, fort-building, snowman-creating, angel-making fun? Also, that magical shock (that I had this weekend for the THIRD TIME this SEASON KILL ME NOW), when I wake to that strange shining-on-the-ceiling light, and part the curtains to find the trees laden with snow--for a few seconds I can be entirely in the whispery present, like a five-year-old, before I start to think about things like where did I put the windshield scraper and how much earlier will I have to leave in order to get to work on time?

Only, like holidays and wrapping paper, the magical things of childhood are different when you're a sweat-stained stage hand instead of a rapt member of the audience. Yes, it's fun to wrap a bike in two rolls of wrapping paper and smile through gritted teeth as your eight-year-old rips seven dollars of wrapping paper into unuseable streamers. But it's not the same as actually doing the ripping yourself. Or getting the bike. So on snow days, even as I faithfully move the sets back and forth for every scene change (outside! inside! outside! inside! hot chocolate! dry mittens! zipped coats!), I'm always sort of wishing I were at a different show. Mom At Home Alone on Couch, perhaps. Or Freakishly Dry Fall Causes Holiday Season to Run Absolutely Smoothly.

Food for Thought

The other night I went to hear the "Erin Brockovich of Food" speak.  She was visiting our valley to talk about her new book, The Unhealthy Truth:  How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About it.  The information she shared was jaw-dropping.

Organic food is a passion of mine.  I wasn't always this way.  But just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from, on April 7, 2004, my youngest son was diagnosed with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL).  We'd fiddled around with some organic eating prior to his diagnosis, but once we heard the words, "Your son has cancer," we realized we needed to stop messing around with our children's health and get serious.

So after five and a half years of looking for answers by eating organically, baking my own bread, drinking raw milk, buying eggs from farmers, removing chemicals from our house in any form, reading everything I could get my hands on about nutrition and spending countless hours trying to convince our local school district to stop serving chicken nuggets whose first several ingredients are chemicals and preservatives as opposed to, you know, chicken, I thought I'd heard everything.

I hadn't.

It's a schedule, not a chore chart

You may know by now that I am the mother of four children ranging in age from 12 to 2. While parenting children with a gap between ages has its difficulties (I wrote a whole post about it on I Never Grew Up), it does have its benefits. The two oldest are able, though often unwilling, to help around the house and with the little ones. We are all about everyone chipping in to help the family but how to get them to do it and do it consistently, that's the question.

We've tried so-called chore charts in the past and even The Chore Board, a board-game version of a chore chart, but no matter chart or game, the newness wears off quickly. As a mom with a long to-do list I can totally sympathize with my kids when they whine and complain about vacuuming or doing laundry or heck, even making their beds. I constantly remind them Mom is the only one who gets to have a bad attitude around the house so they better change theirs and change it quickly!

The Stuff You Don't Need

There I was, 9 months swollen and frantically searching the isles of Babies R Us, bumping all products, all people in my path.  If I’d heard of it and hadn’t gotten it at a shower, I threw it in the cart.  Tubes of nipple cream?  I’ll take five.  Butt-wipe warmers?  Yes, please.  Singing clock, indeed, I need.  Play-mats, play-pens, and more. “And” I shouted towards the 16 year old male store clerk, “isn’t there some kind of belly band that makes you skinny again?  ‘Cause I’m gonna need one of those.”

My poor husband stood there in a daze, mouth open, eyes wide and watched the debauchery unfold.  I saw the look in his eyes.  In my head, I could hear him saying “Do we really have the money for this junk?” and “Is all this stuff really necessary?”  But it was no use.  I had lost complete control. 

SV Moms Group Twitter Party - Sunday, November 15th from 4-7pm PST

SV MOMS GROUP TWITTER PARTY!!!  Sunday, November 15, 2009 from 4 - 7 pm PST!

Join us as we give TONS of great stuff away - including a HP Photosmart Premium with Touchsmart Web All-in-One printer, a single-serve TASSIMO hot beverage system from Bosch, tickets to the fabulous Wicked musical in San Francisco and much, much more at our Twitter Party that is going on in conjunction with our SV Moms Group / Chevrolet Holiday Party this Sunday.

Check out SV Moms Group Holiday Coupon and Product Guide to view a list of ALL our party sponsors!

Sunday, Nov 15th
   4 - 7 pm PST

Follow us on Twitter at

@SVMomsGroup

Hashtag #svmomschevy

See you at the party!

The third time is definitely not a charm

This is the third time that my husband has been in complete and total control of my son's care. Don't get me wrong, he's watched him during the occasional mani/pedi appointments, hair cuts, massages and quarterly girls night out.  But he's been Mr. Mom since 10:30 Friday morning. 

I woke up with a scratchy throat, but figured, mind over matter.  So, I put my son in the stroller and we went on with our ritual of a morning walk.  About halfway home, I started to feel as though I was on the last leg of a marathon.  Total exhaustion.  By the time we got home, I felt as though I was wearing a lead suit and walking against the ocean current.  In the sand.  After running a marathon.

I put my son down for his morning nap at 10:30 and there I was, thirty six hours later, still in bed.  I had broken more fevers than I could recall and lost count as to how many ibuprofen I'd taken.  My nose was raw and I peed a little a lot every time I coughed.  Lovely.

Sounded like H1N1, given my symptoms (and based on my what my Mom's doctor told her when she called him about my symptoms).  Guess she forgot that I'm 38.  Oh well.  Always her little girl!

TV Time Trouble

I am a hypocrite. It's true. A few months ago I wrote this post about Toddler TV time and it's relation to ADD. Did you know that their chances of having ADD and trouble in school increases nearly 10 percent for every hour of television they watch before age three?! I had all the good intentions and was really trying to keep my son's Television time to 30 minutes per day. My little one is already super active and kinda crazy to keep entertained and quiet when needed. I had these horror stories running through my mind about how letting him watch TV would cause him to act out in the future and how he would struggle in school.

I was doing great limiting his TV time and was so proud of myself, for like a month. Then, cooler weather set in and things got busy and I got lazy. It is just so much easier to turn on Word World so that I can get a blog post written or get dinner on the table. Am taking the easy way out? Yes, but it's so...well, easy. So much easier than having him wrapped around my leg begging me to write an "A" or build a boat out of blocks.

Explaining the Ft. Hood Tragedy

Cross posted from our sister blog, DC Metro Moms Blog.

I grew up in a military family.  My father was a career Air Force officer, as was his father.  My brother joined the Army a few years after high school and served two tours in Bosnia before he got out.  Of course then he gave my mother a heart attach by turning around and joining the Ohio National Guard.  Thankfully, he returned from a tour in the Middle East late last year. My husband spent 20 years in the Navy - 3 on active duty and then 17 in the Navy Reserves.

I also happen to live in the Hampton Roads area of Southeast Virginia, home to one of the largest concentrations of military and veteran families in the country.  I'm actually hard pressed to think of a close friend in the area that isn't associated with the military.  

In my professional life, I'm the New Media Director for Blue Star Families, a non-partisan, non-profit dedicated to empowering and supporting military families.  My community, online and in "real" life, is the military community and my community is hurting right now.

We don't know what caused Major Nidal Hasan to open fire in a soldier readiness facility on the U.S. Army's largest facility.  I don't want to speculate.  Besides, the reason for Hasan's actions is largely irrelevant to the Ft. Hood families affected by the tragedy.  For them, and for many of us, the tragedy is incomprehensible. 

But what I do know is that military families across all of the services are stressed beyond belief.  While I no longer have to deal with the threat of activation and deployment, I've watched friend after friend try to hold things together for 6 months, a year or 18 months at a time, only to do it all over again a few months after a service member's return.  Deployment after deployment is hard on a family, particularly families with children.  And when a soldier, sailor or airman (or woman) comes home, nothing is immediately easy.  Families have to readjust, learn new routines, and all too frequently help a service member cope with injuries.  Families also deal with the unseen wounds of war such as post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, and even secondary PTSD, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder that can affect care givers (such as spouses, nurses and doctors) constantly dealing with the trauma of others.

Read the rest of this post at the DC Metro Moms Blog.

Raising Grown-ups

At bathtime last night, the kids were goofing around as I dried them off and got their teeth brushed and the ear wax rubbed out of their ears. First four-year-old Helen and then, reluctantly, eight-year-old Silas asked for an extra clean q-tip to suck on, something they've always done for reasons mysterious to me. Helen can still be absolutely unselfconscious about it, but Si chews on the end of the q-tip a little like he's deliberately taking on a pleasure he's outgrown. He's been doing this a lot lately--I can see a new, considering adult self standing beside his usual enthusiastic childlike self. It's so grown-up that it startles me sometimes: who IS this guy? And WHAT is going through his head?

What was going through his head last night apparently involved bad adult habits. He started pretending to inhale from the q-tip and then blowing out, waving the imaginary ashes off the tip like a miniature Hollywood mogul. All that's missing is a silk dressing gown and a dapper little mustache. "I'm smok-ing," he singsongs, giggling. In a flash, Helen's doing it, too. YIKES.

"Where'd you see someone smoking?" I say. Maybe a TRIFLE nervously. I'm suddenly remembering that some kids start smoking at seven, eight years old. What if--

"Oh, in a car," he assures me. "On Belleview."

H1N1 Vaccinations and the Ensuing Paranoia

I waited in line bright and early this morning to get three tickets.  I wish I could say they were for some fantastic concert or at least a good movie but I can't. 

No, instead they were tickets for the H1N1 vaccine, tickets I have to return on Thursday morning at 8 a.m. to redeem for 1 stick in the arm and a system full of who knows what in the hopes that me and mine might avoid this porcine plague.  It seems kind of ironic to me that in general we are being counseled by health organizations to avoid large gatherings yet here we were packed into close quarters at their bidding, all sharing the same air not knowing who's potentially carrying what and all just to get our stupid shots in the first place, but I digress.

A Day Out Shopping with the Terrible Twos

I'm sure you have all done it. Traipsed out with gleeful ideas of the errands you were going to run and the angel your toddler was going to be while you doled out your coupons and debated between brands. Then, reality sets in and you find yourself struggling with one arm around your wriggling kids waist, the other full of boxes or bags and someone giving you "the look" for making a disturbance. Ya, well, here's the latest in Toddler Mommy diaries...

As many of you probably know, last week Oprah gifted us with a code to get half off a purchase at Payless shoes. If you are a bargain girl like me, this was like an invitation to a wonderful party. I received my text code coupon and gathered my little son set out for a shopping day feeling like a VIP. I arrived at the store to find it bustling. This was to be expected,I mean, half off people! Shortly after arriving, whilst standing before the myriad of choices in my size another mom came hurrying through, three kids in tow and asked to the general public, "So, how many pairs can we get?" I looked at her unknowingly and said, "Uh, I don't know, One?" "One?!" was her reply. We soon came to find out from another shopper that it was off your entire purchase. Oh dear, this was going to get me in trouble with the hubs, yet again. 

I still wear my retainer at night

I had braces for three and a half years.

Three and a half torturous, awkward, often painful, but very necessary years.  It began as a junior in high school and finally ended, at my insistence, the summer before my sophomore year at BYU.  There was major surgery involved, more orthodontic visits than I can count, weird torture appliances spreading open the roof of my mouth, rubber bands going all different directions, a lot of excess saliva, countless containers of yogurt and enough mashed potatoes to keep the Idaho economy running at full tilt. 

Let me tell you this, wearing braces through high school is normal, most kids do it at one point or another. Wearing braces through college is a whole different story. Being a girl and wearing braces through college is even worse.  It's hard enough being a girl as it is, add braces into the mix and life gets a whole lot more awkward. 

Sleep Tight Sleeping Beauty

Dear Prince Charming,

Do not lean over my sleeping body.  Take those princely lips and run along.  Do not dare plant them anywhere near my reposed face.  Can’t you see that I am finally catching up on my sleep?   Why don’t you go away, fight some dragons or something. You can come back in about a hundred years.  Maybe then I’ll be in the mood for something other than sleep.

Oh how quickly one forgets.  How easily I colored the past with the Technicolor brushstrokes of babyhood.  Indelibly etched in my brain is the delicious scent of my babies’ necks.  My fingers remember vividly the impossibly smooth skin of their silky backs.  My arms still bounce with the sighing lump nestled deep in blankets in my arms.

Hang on there, Princie.  I know what you're thinking, and you can forget it. Sure I’ve been pining for those days, aching to hold a baby once again, but I am over it now.  You see, I’ve had a chance to think about it (what with my being awake so much lately) and I’m not looking to rock another cradle.  I’ve got it pretty good.  My princesses sleep through the night. They pee by themselves and they dress themselves and they read to themselves.  So rarely do they come in for a morning snuggle that I leap at the chance to desert sleep for their warm hugs.

Really? In this day and age?

My son and I are driving along today, happily singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" as I see a man going for a walk with a stroller.  It was a double stroller that looked really cool.  That's actually what got my attention at first.  Oh how times change!  It was the stroller, not the dude, that I noticed first!

In this cool double stroller is an infant carrier and a toddler.  They are waiting to cross the street; I'm at the light.  As I'm checking out the stroller configuration, I notice that the dad is smoking.  Yes, smoking. His hand is on the handle, thus, the cigarette is about a foot away from the infant carrier, thus about a foot away from the infant.

It's hard for me to get my head around it, that in this day and age, people still smoke near kids.  I remember back in the day of my childhood when everyone smoked.  I have vivid memories of an occasional cigarette burn because I moved in too quickly for a hug from my Dad.  No big deal, just brush it off, then get the hug!

We have neighbors/friends at our cabin who have never held our now 19-month old son.  They epitomize the definition of chain-smokers.  They smoke when they have a cold.  They smoke in the morning.  They truly smoke all day long.  We don't go in their house anymore - we won't take our son inside.  We visit with them in the great outdoors.  They understand and respect our wishes to not have our son in a smoky environment.  

Behind the Scenes at the Snow Day

Snow is one of those things that seems like it should be more fun with kids. Like holidays, wrapping paper, or the beach. I mean, what better way to get your inner child on than to climb into five thousand pieces of clothing and head out for a day (or *cough* thirty minutes *cough*) of sledding, fort-building, snowman-creating, angel-making fun? Also, that magical shock (that I had this weekend for the THIRD TIME this SEASON KILL ME NOW), when I wake to that strange shining-on-the-ceiling light, and part the curtains to find the trees laden with snow--for a few seconds I can be entirely in the whispery present, like a five-year-old, before I start to think about things like where did I put the windshield scraper and how much earlier will I have to leave in order to get to work on time?

Only, like holidays and wrapping paper, the magical things of childhood are different when you're a sweat-stained stage hand instead of a rapt member of the audience. Yes, it's fun to wrap a bike in two rolls of wrapping paper and smile through gritted teeth as your eight-year-old rips seven dollars of wrapping paper into unuseable streamers. But it's not the same as actually doing the ripping yourself. Or getting the bike. So on snow days, even as I faithfully move the sets back and forth for every scene change (outside! inside! outside! inside! hot chocolate! dry mittens! zipped coats!), I'm always sort of wishing I were at a different show. Mom At Home Alone on Couch, perhaps. Or Freakishly Dry Fall Causes Holiday Season to Run Absolutely Smoothly.

Food for Thought

The other night I went to hear the "Erin Brockovich of Food" speak.  She was visiting our valley to talk about her new book, The Unhealthy Truth:  How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About it.  The information she shared was jaw-dropping.

Organic food is a passion of mine.  I wasn't always this way.  But just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from, on April 7, 2004, my youngest son was diagnosed with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL).  We'd fiddled around with some organic eating prior to his diagnosis, but once we heard the words, "Your son has cancer," we realized we needed to stop messing around with our children's health and get serious.

So after five and a half years of looking for answers by eating organically, baking my own bread, drinking raw milk, buying eggs from farmers, removing chemicals from our house in any form, reading everything I could get my hands on about nutrition and spending countless hours trying to convince our local school district to stop serving chicken nuggets whose first several ingredients are chemicals and preservatives as opposed to, you know, chicken, I thought I'd heard everything.

I hadn't.

It's a schedule, not a chore chart

You may know by now that I am the mother of four children ranging in age from 12 to 2. While parenting children with a gap between ages has its difficulties (I wrote a whole post about it on I Never Grew Up), it does have its benefits. The two oldest are able, though often unwilling, to help around the house and with the little ones. We are all about everyone chipping in to help the family but how to get them to do it and do it consistently, that's the question.

We've tried so-called chore charts in the past and even The Chore Board, a board-game version of a chore chart, but no matter chart or game, the newness wears off quickly. As a mom with a long to-do list I can totally sympathize with my kids when they whine and complain about vacuuming or doing laundry or heck, even making their beds. I constantly remind them Mom is the only one who gets to have a bad attitude around the house so they better change theirs and change it quickly!

The Stuff You Don't Need

There I was, 9 months swollen and frantically searching the isles of Babies R Us, bumping all products, all people in my path.  If I’d heard of it and hadn’t gotten it at a shower, I threw it in the cart.  Tubes of nipple cream?  I’ll take five.  Butt-wipe warmers?  Yes, please.  Singing clock, indeed, I need.  Play-mats, play-pens, and more. “And” I shouted towards the 16 year old male store clerk, “isn’t there some kind of belly band that makes you skinny again?  ‘Cause I’m gonna need one of those.”

My poor husband stood there in a daze, mouth open, eyes wide and watched the debauchery unfold.  I saw the look in his eyes.  In my head, I could hear him saying “Do we really have the money for this junk?” and “Is all this stuff really necessary?”  But it was no use.  I had lost complete control. 

SV Moms Group Twitter Party - Sunday, November 15th from 4-7pm PST

SV MOMS GROUP TWITTER PARTY!!!  Sunday, November 15, 2009 from 4 - 7 pm PST!

Join us as we give TONS of great stuff away - including a HP Photosmart Premium with Touchsmart Web All-in-One printer, a single-serve TASSIMO hot beverage system from Bosch, tickets to the fabulous Wicked musical in San Francisco and much, much more at our Twitter Party that is going on in conjunction with our SV Moms Group / Chevrolet Holiday Party this Sunday.

Check out SV Moms Group Holiday Coupon and Product Guide to view a list of ALL our party sponsors!

Sunday, Nov 15th
   4 - 7 pm PST

Follow us on Twitter at

@SVMomsGroup

Hashtag #svmomschevy

See you at the party!

The third time is definitely not a charm

This is the third time that my husband has been in complete and total control of my son's care. Don't get me wrong, he's watched him during the occasional mani/pedi appointments, hair cuts, massages and quarterly girls night out.  But he's been Mr. Mom since 10:30 Friday morning. 

I woke up with a scratchy throat, but figured, mind over matter.  So, I put my son in the stroller and we went on with our ritual of a morning walk.  About halfway home, I started to feel as though I was on the last leg of a marathon.  Total exhaustion.  By the time we got home, I felt as though I was wearing a lead suit and walking against the ocean current.  In the sand.  After running a marathon.

I put my son down for his morning nap at 10:30 and there I was, thirty six hours later, still in bed.  I had broken more fevers than I could recall and lost count as to how many ibuprofen I'd taken.  My nose was raw and I peed a little a lot every time I coughed.  Lovely.

Sounded like H1N1, given my symptoms (and based on my what my Mom's doctor told her when she called him about my symptoms).  Guess she forgot that I'm 38.  Oh well.  Always her little girl!

TV Time Trouble

I am a hypocrite. It's true. A few months ago I wrote this post about Toddler TV time and it's relation to ADD. Did you know that their chances of having ADD and trouble in school increases nearly 10 percent for every hour of television they watch before age three?! I had all the good intentions and was really trying to keep my son's Television time to 30 minutes per day. My little one is already super active and kinda crazy to keep entertained and quiet when needed. I had these horror stories running through my mind about how letting him watch TV would cause him to act out in the future and how he would struggle in school.

I was doing great limiting his TV time and was so proud of myself, for like a month. Then, cooler weather set in and things got busy and I got lazy. It is just so much easier to turn on Word World so that I can get a blog post written or get dinner on the table. Am taking the easy way out? Yes, but it's so...well, easy. So much easier than having him wrapped around my leg begging me to write an "A" or build a boat out of blocks.