I asked for suggestions on what you would like me to post about this weekend, and Mimi asked a bunch of really good questions. She wants to know what kind of mischief my boys get into, since she has two boys herself. And I wish I had a good answer, but the truth is-hard as it may be to believe-my boys don’t get into mischief. They really don’t! We have always stressed to our boys that being in a family means being part of a team, respecting and helping each other. They know what they are and aren’t expected to do, and at least for now, that is a sufficient deterrent to any misbehaving. Okay, Ryan sometimes turns his reading lamp on after he’s supposed to be sleeping, and Nathan sometimes sneaks an extra cookie out of the kitchen, but that’s about it. So Mimi, all I can advise is, make the rules clear, and let your boys know that they are a vital part of your family, and hopefully that will keep them out of trouble!

Mimi’s next question was, did I ever do anything crazy or daring, or take a road trip and get into trouble? Oh……boy. A couple of things spring to mind, because unfortunately, my parents didn’t treat me like a valued and vital member of a team, and therefore I didn’t feel like I had anything to lose by breaking the rules as much as possible.

1. Crazy/daring deed number one: I turned 16 in January of 1983, and a few months after that, my boyfriend Bill and I decided to lose our virginity to each other. You know, “get it over with”. So romantic. The thing was, we didn’t have anywhere to go. Bill’s Mom was home during the day, and even though I went home to an empty house, my Mom had me convinced that she had a neighbor watching out the window every afternoon to make sure no one else came home with me. So, we decided to sneak out of our respective houses and meet up to do the deed. If memory serves, it was APRIL. In MICHIGAN. And our genius plan was to meet at the elementary school in my neighborhood, where we would bring blankets and “do it under the stars”. In APRIL. In MICHIGAN.

So on the designated night, while my parents were in the den watching TV,  I changed into my nightgown and then snuck back downstairs and put my clothes in the cabinet under the sink in our half bath off the kitchen. I set my alarm for 2:00 a.m. When it went off, I tiptoed downstairs, got dressed, and left out the sliding glass door in the den. There were no fences between the yards in my neighborhood, so I walked through our back yard and the neighbors’, and then walked about four blocks to the school. At 2:00 a.m. In APRIL. In MICHIGAN. It was FREEZING.

I get to the school and there’s Bill, standing in the grass off to the side of the school. He has what looks like a bedspread with him. We sit down on it, and…well, let’s just say that as first times go? It was pretty much TERRIBLE. Afterwards I walked the four blocks back home, let myself in through the sliding glass door, put my nightgown back on, and tiptoed back up the stairs and got back in bed. As far as I know, my parents never even knew I was gone.

Do I know how lucky I was that nothing happened to me? I do now. I could have gotten hurt walking home, I could have gotten kidnapped or worse. I could have come home to find my house on fire and my parents frantic thinking I was still in the house. The stupidity of the entire thing is mind-boggling.  Not to mention the fact that for the rest of my life, the memory I have of losing my virginity is of freezing my ass off outside.  Hell, it was so cold, there’s a good chance I didn’t actually lose anything and didn’t even know it. Heh.

COMING UP: MORE CRAZY CONFESSIONS FROM MY YOUTH, AND MORE BABY PICTURES! I FOUND THREE PHOTO ALBUMS FULL OF THEM!! 

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Actor Brad Renfro is the latest celebrity to enter Drug rehab, which conveniently kept him from being arraigned on charges of heroin possession. It’s always a shame to hear that someone’s addiction has become that serious; and it’s also too bad that I had to Google Brad Renfro because I couldn’t remember who he was (he starred in the movie The Client and had parts in Ghost World and The Jacket).  I hope he gets the help he needs; whether he goes back to acting or not, anything is better than him living his life addicted to heroin.

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Hee hee, bet THAT got your attention in your feed reader, didn’t it? This is a very special post that I am doing at the request of two of the nicest ladies in the blogosphere, Catherine and Julie. Three of our mutual Mommyblogger friends, Christina, Liz and Tammie, are either due to give birth in a few weeks or having their babies as we speak (go, Tammie!) Catherine and Julie organized a virtual Baby Shower with games, and prizes, and links to posts where we can tell the three of them what the dumbest piece of advice was that we ever got before we had our kids, and what the best advice was.

For Christina and Liz, who are each having their second child, I would say that what people always said to me was “oh, your first child is going to be SO jealous. Your first child will feel JEALOUS of the baby. Your first child will try to SMOTHER THE NEW BABY IN HIS SLEEP.” Okay, not that last one, but you know what I mean. I don’t know what prompted multiple co-workers and friends of my Mother’s to tell me this, it was far from supportive and just made me worry unnecessarily. I realize all children are different, but when Nathan was born, Ryan was not at all jealous. They were 26 months apart, so Ryan was still in diapers, drinking out of a sippy cup and all that, but when Nathan cried, Ryan ran to get pacifiers, blankets, toys, whatever he thought would help. They slept in the same room, Ryan in a regular twin bed and Nathan in the crib, and they have grown to be each other’s best friend! If your daughters are jealous of the baby, you’ll know it, and you’ll deal with it. But please don’t worry about it. And if someone says that to you, I suggest ignoring them.

As for the best advice I ever got regarding having my second child, it would have to be  to remember to treat them like individuals. It is soooo tempting to compare, to say “well gee, the first one never did that, why is the second one doing it, why, why?”  Every child is different. Even if you parent them exactly the same, there are going to be differences in how they eat, how they cry, how they nap, how they sleep through the night. Be prepared to roll with the punches, so to speak, and embrace the differences that is this new member of your family.

For Tammie, I would first like to ask everyone to visit her blog and leave her a comment for her husband to pass on to her. She is having a hard time with childbirth, and it’s a little scary, and I’m sure some comforting words would help.  Sweetie,  I’m not even going to tell you about bad advice, because you have enough to worry about. I want to share with you the BEST ADVICE I ever received, and it’s the same advice I give to every woman I meet having her first child, and it’s really simple:

TAKE TURNS STAYING UP WITH THE BABY AT NIGHT!!!!!

For the first, oh, two weeks at LEAST, your baby will not have what you will think of as a normal sleeping schedule. They pretty much sleep all the time, but there will be moments of wakefulness, and they often occur around midnight, and again at two a.m.  Someone is going to have to stay up, and even if you are breastfeeding, you should take turns being on baby duty. When it’s Jeff’s turn, each time Myles cries, it will be Jeff who will get him up, change his diaper, bring him to you to nurse (which you will soon learn to do WHILE you sleep!), burp him, possibly change his diaper again, and then get him back to sleep. That way, if you got in bed at 10:00 p.m., you could sleep a solid four or five hours before having to completely wake up. You will not BELIEVE how rested you will feel after only four hours of sleep! And yes, your husband will go back to work tired. People expect new Dads to be tired. But I really believe that this taking turns thing absolutely helps keep the sleep deprivation to a minimum.

I am SO EXCITED for all of you! I hope you have enjoyed your baby shower, and I will be keeping you all in my thoughts these next few weeks. There is nothing more amazing and miraculous to me than the birth of a baby. Rock on, sister Mamas!!

Love, your Mommyblogger friend,

Elizabeth

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I just found out about this new site called WhoGets.com. It is really unique in that you enter contests to win prizes, and the winners are decided by how many votes they get. I entered to win three prizes: a $20 Target Gift Card, a basket full of Aromatherapy Products from Bath & Body Works, and a GameCube game which I would give Ryan for his birthday.

This is NOT a sponsored post, by the way, I really do want to win this stuff! I am at Target for one thing or another several times a week, and $20 would buy a large pack of diapers and some wipes with a little left over for me to treat myself to something nice ( I have a bit of a lipgloss addiction, if you must know).  The Aromatherapy Products come with a basket of moisturizing body treatments, plus a sponge, a candle, and CHOCOLATE! And the GameCube game is just that.

The way it works is, for each contest, seven people who have entered are randomly chosen to be finalists. I had to write a little essay for each contest saying why I want that prize. If I get picked, my essay gets posted and people can comment on it, and discuss it, and then decide if they want to vote for me! So, if I get picked for any of them, you bet I’m going to ask you all to go over and vote! I deserve some pampering, don’t you think? Somebody’s gotta win, and it should be me

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I think every new parent thinks that they will NEVER fill their house full of plastic, mass-produced toys that do everything but actually play with your child for you. Fortunately, as children get older, they lose interest in flashing colored lights and pre-recorded snippets of classical music, and start wanting something more interesting to play with. I found a website that sells educational science kits that are fun to play with and will help reinforce what your child is learning in school.

I had my boys look at the website, and they each zeroed right in on their favorite kit. Ryan, who is ten and a half, spotted this Sound Reversing Car that moves forward until the voice-activated microphone detects either physical contact or a sound like a clap. It then moves backward and to the left and starts forward again until it detects the next sound. He and I discussed why it would be fun for him to play with-he says because he could run it into things (!),

Nathan, who is 8, wants me to buy him the Our Amazing Volcanoes kit. After painting and labelling his own volcanoes, he can use a dual-chamber volcano bottle to create up to a 6 FOOT fountain of “lava”! Nathan says it would be fun to watch it erupt, I suggested that it would also teach him about chemical reactions and gravity. He just wants to make a mess with it, of course.

Now that they are older, I’m glad that there are kits like this that are fun as well as educational to give them as gifts. Hey, I just did my shopping for their birthday presents!

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