Questionable Choices in Parenting

Laughing at life as a parent so they don't commit me

Silent Nights? Singing My Kids to Sleep Make Me Ugly Cry

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When I’m driving in my car and singing along with the radio, I’m often shocked at how I am note for note and tune for tune with the singing ability of Adele.  I mean really, my singing is amazing. Sometimes I wonder why someone hasn’t just thrown a Grammy at me.

OK, I just snorted from laughing so hard. That may be the biggest lie I have ever told; I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Apparently when they were handing out talented vocal cords, I was standing in the sarcasm line.

Never one to be deterred from a lack of talent, I belt out tunes all day long, much to the chagrin of my kids. Mimi usually tells me “Shhhhhh, no,” but the older and more verbal kid says “Mommy, stop.  Your singing hurts my ears.”   My bad singing isn’t what embarrasses me (although it should), it’s the fact that I am so crazy I can’t sing them to sleep without crying.

Silent Nights

I am probably traumatizing the kids and will need to pay for their sleep therapy bills someday because I have special songs I sing to each kid, and I can’t get through the first verse without weeping. Even if the kids have been really bad, my nerves are shot, and I am moments away from selling them on Craigslist, the minute I start singing “their” songs—it’s a waterfall and I am weeping uncontrollably. Should I just pick different songs to sing to them?  Probably, but, like I said, I am crazy.

I even create little scenarios in my head when I sing to them. Sometimes I imagine dancing with my grown children cheek to cheek at their weddings. Of course there are details like I am looking gorgeous in my dress, my kids have never been happier, and the crowd keeps remarking I look the same as on my wedding day and that having such an amazing waistline at my age should be a crime.

If you’re crazy and you know it, clap your hands!

For your listening pleasure, here are some slow jams—or the songs I sing to my kids.  For Monkey, Bruno Mars’ Count on Me–please note, I burst into tears while searching for it on YouTube.

And for Mimi it’s my singing soul mate Adele’s Make You Feel My Love. It’s too much for me. I am going to start the ugly cry.

Great songs, right? Did you cry when you were listening to them? Don’t lie, you did.

Just when I was coming to terms with my nighttime crying spells, I caught someone else in this house getting emotional when signing a few tunes to the kids.  It would seem that Hubby has my kind of crazy.

From the minute Monkey was born, Hubby has sung John Denver’s Country Roads to him. Since we are both WVU grads, that song is a rite of passage and probably one of the few songs (besides some Pearl Jam crap) that he knows all of the words to.  Sometimes I think Hubby is imagining taking Monkey to his first WVU football game, showing him around campus, wiping a tear when he passes the old frat house, and puffing up his chest when he points out the hot spots where he picked up chicks (gross). Every night when you ask Monkey what he wants to sing, it is always Country Roads, and I die a little when I hear that little boy sing “Almost Heaven…..”

When Hubby dances and sings with Mimi to The Lumineers “Ho Hey,” his eyes get all glassy as he sways his little lady back and forth. She squeals when he sings (why don’t I get that reaction?). I’m pretty sure the line “I don’t think you’re right for him” is his secret prayer that Mimi will always think he is the most wonderful man in the world and never, ever leave him.

Maybe he is just singing to his kids, but I like to think his delusions and crazy run deep like mine. After all, I shouldn’t be the only one to screw up these kids, right?

Share the songs you sing with your kids and we can cry together!

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Sharing My Bed Used to be Easy…

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This past week Hubby was on a “business” trip, and I use the term “business” lightly because a week of sleeping in a hotel with no kid duty sounds like pretty sweet “business” to me, but I digress. While he was away, I thought it was the perfect time to get another man into my bed. It was this handsome devil…

Handsome DevilYou were nervous there for minute, weren’t you?

I know a lot of people who co-sleep: some by choice, others well….not so much by choice but necessity and exhaustion.  I’m not big on co-sleeping because I really hate sharing my sleeping space with anyone. If Hubby tries to wrap an arm around me, he usually gets an elbow to the gut as a warning shot. Your space and my space, buddy. Don’t cross the line.

Mimi takes after me and has no interest in an all-night snuggle fest. She has a precise system of sleep that she doesn’t want interrupted.  If we play our cards right and get her system down, we don’t hear from her for 12-13 blissful, sleeping hours.

So when I had an itchin’ for some baby love, I knew Monkey was my man. I envisioned snuggling with him all night and breathing the sweet smell of his head (don’t act like you don’t love the smell of your kid’s head) and being lulled to sleep by the sounds of his soft snores. Ahhhh bliss….

Silly me, I forgot this kid is the WORST person to share a bed with.

Sharing my bedFirst, I couldn’t get the kid to settle down. He was like a crack-head all jazzed up and ready to party. He spent a good half hour practicing his forward rolls over and over in my bed.  Then he started singing a rousing rendition of the ABCs while jumping up and down, and it wasn’t until I bear hugged the kid into submission did he simmer down.

When the sleeper-hold I had him in finally put him down for the night, I realized it was only 7:30 and I really needed to pee. But Monkey rolled over and wrapped his arms in a death grip around my neck. I tried to sneak away, but he pulled me back. I tried to unwrap his limbs from me, but he squeezed harder. Finally I just resigned to snuggle down even though I was wide awake and praying I didn’t pee the bed.

I’m not sure, but I think the kid might be part furnace because heat just seeps off of him at night and sends me into hot flashes that make me wonder if early menopause has struck. The only way I got out of his death grip hold on my neck was my perfuse sweating that gave me enough slide to wiggle out of his clutches.

He also talks in his sleep; actually it is more like ramblings of a man who has lost his mind. At one point he said “I just want to dance to the doorbell. We have to get to our rocket ship.”  Then he would just burst into giggles, fart and roll over. What the hell is going on with this kid?

When I would catch a few winks of sleep, I would wake with his hard head pushing into my shoulder-blade or a quick jab of his toes into my kidneys.

I tied pushing him to the other side of the bed, but he would wiggle back over to me, wrap his sweaty hands around my neck and say “I got you, Mommy.”

Since I clocked about two hours of solid sleep that night, I prayed the Sleep Gods would take pity on my, but oh no, they laughed in my face and Mr. Hot-Crazy-Talker was up bright and early ready to talk about buffalos being brown and having four legs. Oh listen to that, Rip Van Winkle is up in her crib and demanding milk and Doc Mc Stuffins.

Someone pass the coffee, cause this is going to be a loooonnnngggg day.

Where did you sleep last night?

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So this happened last night…

 

Yes that would be my three-year-old passed out on his ottoman in the bedroom he trashed in the dark. So where were you, Mamma, while your sweet boy was running around his bedroom, tearing the place apart? Oh, just reading a romance novel, and by romance novel I mean the really dirty kind. Where was your husband, you might add? Watching football. Questionable Choices in Parenting–man this blog can write itself in this house!

 

After hours in the car to and from our multiple Thanksgiving destinations, we all needed a break from one another. Mimi decided to sleep (she was my favorite last night), but Monkey was all jazzed up from missed naps, interrupted sleep, and too many hours on the Ipad. He was strangely quiet while he stealthily disassembled his room and finally lost his battle with the Sandman. So is this a new phase we have entered? I showed him the picture this morning and asked him happened. He said “I fell out of my bed.” Seems logical…

Will my nightly check-ins of the boy become sort of a Where’s Waldo? If so, this could be a new section of the blog (until it isn’t funny and sorta annoying). So tell me, where is the strangest place you have found your kids sleeping?