New Jersey Moms Blog

My TIC-ing Child

It took a series of strange behaviors and symptoms that my son was exhibiting over many months to finally figure out what was wrong with him.  One day in April I noticed my son blinking his eyes rapidly. At first I thought he had something in one of his eyes or possibly was having some sort of allergy.  A trip to a pediatric opthalmologist showed nothing wrong and better than normal vision for a two-and-a-half-year-old.  She wondered if this "hyper-blinking" was stress related.  And sure enough, Tyler was actually being bullied by a little boy at daycare who was once his friend.  When things couldn't be resolved we changed schools and within less than a week, Tyler stopped the rapid blinking.  

For a month or so, things seemed normal with Tyler.  Then began symptoms such as sniffing, throat clearing, yawning, and heavy breathing.  I would call the nurse line at our pediatrician's, scared to death Tyler was having an asthma attack or some other breathing difficulty, but other than these symptoms Tyler was active and happy.  They seemed to come on when Tyler was at rest, such as when he was trying to go to sleep or watching television.  

What's for Dinner? How about a nice dish of exasperation.

Not another post about meal planning. That's probably what you're saying to yourself, isn't it?

Well, personally I am fed up with the whole thing. (Ha, ha, ha.)

I feel like I am at the grocery store every other day! In reality, I have been trying to stick to a system; Sunday night I I make a rough meal plan and a shopping list, and try to get to the grocery store at the beginning of the week.

Today we needed orange juice, not a full shop. But I thought, if I am going in for orange juice I might as well shop, right? I consulted the meal plan and saw that after tonight I had nothing sketched out for dinner and not that much in the fridge (or not that much I wanted to cook or eat, since we are trying to cut down on red meat. That canceled out the tacos I could have thrown together.) Also there is the continued need to come up with good lunches for the kiddo. Also I am trying to watch my weight and avoid the Halloween leftover candy bag o' loot (please, send help), which means I need a lot of fat-free snacks around. Also, I should make a soup, right, because the kiddo has the sniffles? I looked at the rotating shopping list on the side of the fridge and it said "bread, onions."

Mandatory Vegas Vacation

I spent the weekend in Vegas. Does that sound like the beginning of a racy post or what? Sorry to disappoint, but there is nothing really scandalous to report (save a frozen shot of whiskey in a bar made of ice-which was actually more tame than it sounds). I did bring something back with me though and it is a theory. I now firmly believe that every mother should spend three days a year in Las Vegas and it will make her better at her job.

Now I'm not  merely advocating a mom vacation, that is too obvious. No, I believe in order to truly get the experience that will enhance your every day life, you must retreat to Sin City specifically and here is why:

Moms' Night In: A cheaper way to indulge, but beware the kiddie conversation

Instead of spending a lot of money going out for wine & chocolate for a Moms' Night Out, I decided to invite my mom friends to my house. Enjoying wine and chocolate is just one fun way to host a Moms' Night In.

My mom friends arrived after they put their kids to bed and we relaxed in my living room with a bottle of wine and chocolate cookies and sweets. My husband was on child duty in case our daughter happened to wake up.

We all had a great time and at least it was a night "out" for them but after they left I realized how often the conversation came back to our children. I'm not sure whether it was the venue (I will have to test this in the future), the nature of the gathering or just our mood but no matter what we discussed, someone always seemed to bring up their kid, or preschool or parenting in general. We'd planned time for ourselves to just kick back and "get away from it all" for a few hours and yet, I was struck by how none of us could completely forget our children.

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.

An Open Letter to My Son on His 16th Birthday

A few days ago you took me for a drive in our car. Just before you backed out of the garage, you spent a moment adjusting the seat and the mirrors so that it fit you. As you fiddled with the seat control, you probably weren't thinking about the fact that the ride ahead would require an adjustment for me too.

For sixteen years now, I have been the one in the driver's seat. I have wracked up hundreds of thousands of miles driving you to music lessons and football, marching band and school. I have driven you to friend's houses and museums, restaurants and recreation. I have always made sure you were strapped in, prepared for whatever we were doing. I have done whatever I could to keep you safe.

Now that you've gotten your permit, you (apparently) are now ready to assume that responsibility for yourself, to literally and figuratively take a new step in navigating your own life. And I want you to know a few things before you take the wheel. 

When you were a child, I often asked you to consider "what happens next," before you made decisions. We practiced that thought process over and over and over and over in countless scenarios. I purposely taught you to think ahead so that the voice in your own head would take over for me. It was my plan that when you were making big decisions, you would have your own internal ability to reason things through responsibly. 

Dropping the Holiday Ball

Here we are, smack dab at the start of the Holiday Season and I have moved into a decorator show house neighborhood. Don't get me wrong, I love everything about this season, from halloween popcorn balls straight through to cold cut sandwiches and football on New Years' day. I love it all, except the decorating.

Oh, I have skills-usually. In fact, I love and embrace interior decorating so much that I have been rearranging furniture and treating walls and windows since I was I was old enough to plaster Teen Beat pictures over my bed-in a creative tapestry fashion of course.

But for some reason, when it comes to Holiday decorating I  have a pronounced deficiency. Some of it may come from my aversion to tchotchke. I fall somewhere near the minimalist side of the spectrum. I do like a knick-knack here and there, but figurines and fake flowers tend to stress me out. I also move, a lot and the thought of packing boxes full of gauzy ghosts and fake spider webs is more than I can handle. So I don't buy the stuff. Therefore, I don't decorate.

Pardon me, is your child a boy or a girl?

Last week, I was faced with one of those situations where I couldn't figure out if a child was a boy or a girl.  The child had long, bouncy blonde hair like a girl.  His or her toddler face could be either - both pretty and handsome.  The child was dressed in a boy-like outfit but the child's name was Skylar.  Before I could get a text response from a number of friends asking the question, "could a boy be named Skylar", my two-year old had decided that this child was a girl.  "Mommy, can I play with the little girl?"  Still not knowing and fearing he had made the wrong gender choice, I ushered my son to another section of the children's museum we were visiting.  I later found out that yes a boy can be named Skylar but spelled Skyler and that indeed this child was a boy.  The situation got me to thinking, should children be called by androgynous names? Should parents bestow on children names like Payton and Dylan that can cause a world a confusion throughout their lives?

When I was pregnant, my husband and I decided that we would not find out the sex of the baby until he or she was born.  So of course that meant making a list of names for both boys and girls.  At the time, one of our absolute favorite names for a girl was Riley.  Miracle of all miracles we both agreed on this name.  However, as time went on and we let the name marinate in our minds, we both came to the conclusion that Riley might not be the best choice of names for gender bender-reasoning.  In my mind, I thought of having my baby girl Riley in my arms in a gender neutral onesie and someone saying, "what a cute little boy!" and me regretting the choice of names.  Though, I do know that "what a cute baby girl, when it was a boy" situations have happened to everyone, I just didn't want to perpetuate the situation for this child I was bringing into the world.  I also know how angry people get when you call a child by the wrong gender.  So lucky for my husband and I, we didn't have to worry about making that decision we had a boy and named him a very male name - Benjamin. 

God's meter is broken

There are times in my life that I thought the world was crashing down on top of me, but nothing - and I truly mean NOTHING - could have prepared me for the period of time between April and October of 2009.  You've heard of the saying that "God will never give you more than you can handle"?  With all due respect, my faith is nil at this point: I think God's "what Dez can handle" meter is broken.

I was working as an Accounts Receivable Rep for an occupational medicine company in Denver when I was released from my duties the day before my 30th birthday.  As a struggling single mom, I was devastated.  How could they do this to me?  Where would I go?  What would I do now?  I walked out that day with a pink slip and some fabulous flowers my parents had been kind enough to send for my birthday.

Am I the Real Cyber Bully?

Last Sunday I attended an event hosted by LeapFrog where the hot topic for discussion was internet safety for kids. I walked into the room thinking that I knew everything there is to know about keeping my sons safe from all the perils of living in the digital age: cyber bullies, identity thieves, internet predators, child porn fiends and the like.  Our computer is centrally located in the house and the boys are never online without a parent sitting next to them, so surely we were covered in the safety department.  Or so I thought.  I left that room 60 minutes later realizing that as it stands right now, the real online threat to my children is me.

New Jersey's Bad Rap: Pass It On

Sure as the sun rising, whenever I'm asked where I live and I respond "New Jersey," the next question is usually "Really? How often do you get into the city?" or some wisecrack about New Jersey. I'm not really sure why Jersey has such a bad rap. From Conan's mock feud with Newark's mayor, Cory Booker, to SNL's chronic obsession with belittling the state, it's ubiquitous. I laugh along, as I'm sure millions of others do as well. Even my four-year-old is in on the joke as he adapts the line "You're on the JERSEY side of this cesspool" from the movie Madagascar everytime we cross the tunnel or bridge to NYC and back. (Though he says "sesame" instead of "cess," and I'm not about to correct him.)

When we moved to the NYC area from across the country, I didn't initially consider NJ as a place to make our next home. I looked around Manhattan, Westchester and CT, but knew next to nothing about New Jersey - and what I did "know" came from TV, movies, and my brief experience arriving or departing from EWR. So, my long-distance impression was that it wouldn't be a place I'd like to raise my son. With that said, when my hubby forwarded me an email from a friend of a friend claiming that his town in New Jersey may have what we're looking for, I agreed to add a day in NJ to our house-hunting trip. "Uhm . . . okaaay . .sure!" Why not? With all of the business and industry headquartered in NJ, I had to imagine that the majority of employees lived near their work, so there had to be job opportunities for me and communities I'd like - right?

Trick or Treat .......OR ELSE!!

I've decided to take our two boys, ages 1 and 3, trick-or-treating this year.  It will be a first for both of them.  So, I've been thinking about the whole "trick-or-treat" idea and I've got to tell you - it puzzles me.  We'll be knocking on the doors of complete strangers.  When they answer, we'll make a demand, "Give us candy!"  And they will comply.  Isn't that remarkable?  They won't argue. They won't make excuses.  There won't be any coercion involved.  We will simply hold out a container and watch as they fill it with something yummy. 

Amazing.

I might be that mom

Growing up I lived in the cool house. Make no mistake, my mom never let us do anything crazy. She had no desire to be our friend.  She was a vigilant parent. There were no wild parties on her watch. What we did have were less restrictions. She was pretty tolerant of kids' stuff and laid back as far as day to day parenting went. As very young kids, we had the sugar cereals and cookies we could help ourselves to after school. We could watch television or have water gun fights (outside of course) all we wanted. My mom raised six kids (and countless neighbor kids) and her motto was always, you knew your kids weren't in trouble if they were in your house. So she kept us close and by default she had a house full of our friends most of the time.

I wanted so badly to be that mom-the one who has a house full of kids (preferably not all my own). I wanted to have the house where everyone gathers after school. I hoped to run the house on the bike route that became the unofficial drink stop.When I decided to work from home to be around my kids more-that is what I envisioned. Now, I think my dream might prove illusive because of one little hiccup. Hiccup thy name is Video Game.

I am not against The Wii or Nintendo as a concept. My kids have been known to spend time on my laptop playing games on Nick Jr or the PBS Kids website. I have even loosened my demand that all games must have some educational component. (You can be sure they are not sharpening their intellect when Sponge Bob chucks a crabby patty at Squidward.)   I don't mind when they go to other people's houses and play. What I am still (trying) to stand strong against is buying an elaborate game system for my house.

Giving the Film Industry the Finger - Now in 3D!

This post is going to make me sound like a cranky old lady, but I don't care. Add this to the list of things that really irk me: the sudden increase in the number of 3D films for kids..

You know what? I don't want every movie I take my little girl to see to be in 3D. First of all, they charge WAY too much for the extra "delights" of  3D. Guess what people - little kids don't need to see meatballs zooming out of the screen at them at 60 miles an hour! Adding insult to injury - they charge an arm and a leg just to get a pair of the cheap disposable glasses most kids don't keep on. You can't opt out, because then the film looks blurry if you don't keep your spectacles in place. Of course, if they made the glasses CHILD SIZED my daughter might keep them on for more than 5 minutes. And you can't save them and bring them back and get a discount. Isn't that wasteful? Some adults have even complained that the 3-D glasses are too cheap.

Don't get me wrong. There is a time and a place for 3D and I had fun going to see Coraline (without my 4 year old of course - that was way too scary for her!). We adults had a good time at the theater. But when we were kids, 3D was an occasional, special treat. Now? It's everywhere and every day. My daughter did see Up this year, with her uncle, and it sounded great. That's cool.