Lately I have started to become interested in who else is lurking out in cyberspace with blogs similar to mine. And where does anyone start when searching for things in cyberspace? Google of course. Today I stumbled across MommyBlog. I read around on this site for a while - the author writes quite well. From what I can gather, she is the mother of a 2(ish) year old boy, and very soon expecting another baby. She is a stay at home mom, and they have a dog. It didn’t take me too long reading this blog, to feel completely inadequate. The amount of content here is amazing. She keeps up with their adventures as a family, her son’s progress, and she gets all kinds of free stuff to review - from maternity clothes to kids books. I have no idea how she does it, but I’m impressed! On top of that, she manages to find time to run every day, has activities set up for her son 4 days a week to make sure that he gets social interaction with others, and she is of course beautiful. When I look at my make-up less face, and think about my over-flowing laundry hamper at home, and how when we get home from work/day care, I won’t have the energy to take Xander to the park or do much more than hide inside with the air conditioner in the 94 degree humid heat. Then we’ll try to get laundry, dinner a bath and into bed before 8pm.
I found one interesting response to a post about people calling day care “school” and from what I can tell, this mom didn’t think that was a very accurate description. I couldn’t find the original post, so I’m not quite sure what she actually said, but I know that we often refer to day care as “school” when talking to Xander. Not school in the sense of a place of learning, but school in the sense that it’s an easier word to to say than day care, and it provides a similar social interaction. I got a bit of a vibe from this blog that this mom felt that staying home with your kids is better than subjecting them to the potential horrors of day care - missing out on a big chunk of their lives, them missing out on that one-on-one interaction. As I thought about it, I realized two very important facts about my particular situation. First, those women at day care know a hell of a lot more than I do about raising kids - they all have a few of their own. So if Xander spends his days with them, and comes home knowing the “I’m a little tea pot song” I’m all for it - I don’t know that I would have thought to teach him that one. I could go on and on about the things that they teach Xander that I think “huh, I never would have thought to do that”. Secondly, although I thought I wanted to be one of those relaxed and organized stay at home moms - the ones who have play dates and lunch dates and book clubs, it turns out I’m way more stressed when I stay home - my house is messier (of course it is with Xander trashing it 12 hours out of the day), I get less stuff done, I have less adult interaction, and I run out of energy much more quickly. It turns out that I suck as a stay-at-home mom. In our situation, it’s much better for both Xander and for me that I work outside of the home - we have a great time when we’re together, and we enjoy our weekends, but I think that we both do well with the time apart.
I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but the point of the post was to say that this is a pretty interesting blog, and the reviews on here are good - they’ve got some great suggestions for new and interesting products. However, if you’re at all like me, and worry some days that you aren’t exactly a perfect mom, then this site is apt to give you a big helping of mommy guilt when you read about this woman, and try to fathom how this very pretty size 2 pregnant mommy manages to get everything done, and still has time to blog.
I recently decided that it would be fun to start teaching Xander to tell us how old he is. For some background context, we had been reading a counting book quite a bit, and Xander surprised us when he could tell us what the next number would be (we’d say one… he’d say two…, three… four… five) only up to five, but it was pretty funny. This only lasted a little while before Xander became fixated on the numbers four and five. Now when he “counts” it’s “four… five… four… five… etc.”