The Trade Off

My apologies for the long pause in writing.  Our son was recently diagnosed with a substantial injury which necessitated a lot of doctor visits and physical therapy.  My "free" time turned into a job as a physical therapist, drill sergeant, and chauffeur, shuttling him from one appointment to another.  He is now on the upswing and I am getting used to my new "normal".  Thanks for sticking with me and for your kind words of encouragement during this time!

After having our first child, we stumbled around, utterly sleep-deprived, not knowing which way was up for months.  It was during this time when we were assured by friends and family the infant stage was the hardest part of raising a child.  Everyone told us as our children grew older, things would become easier.  We clung to that hope through the sleepless nights, countless ear infections, teething, fighting croupy coughs, and the more-than-I-can-count fights over food.

We held on tight to that ray of hope like a castaway bopping along in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean.  For the first couple of years we waited anxiously for the day when our boat would hit dry land and we would be "rescued".  During the long wait, we were so sure we were approaching our smooth sailing days, we even had another baby.

As we clung to our sanity, we made a most unexpected discovery.  Our family and friends, who loved us dearly, were all a pack of liars!  Raising children does not get easier as they get older, you just trade off what you are currently doing for something different, but equally as difficult.

Yes, gone are the days of struggling to strap an infant carseat into a vehicle at just the right angle so it locks into the vehicle's restraint system.  These days I'm trying to get a pack of giggling tween girls into the different rows of my car, without anyone losing part of their toes to a falling backpack which is weighted down with more school supplies than Grizzly Adams would dare pack onto the back of a mule. 

I no longer hear the annoyed cry of a baby who is frustrated over a dropped pacifier or treasured toy just out of their reach.  These days I am bombarded with a teenager screeching "Mom! He/she is touching me!" or "STOP!  You're on my side!  Don't cross that line!".  

I thought having to hear Barney singing "I Love You" five hundred times a day was more tortuous than what some third world countries use as interrogation techniques........ until my children discovered and downloaded the Clash of Clans and Talking Tom apps on all of our electronic devices.  The gutteral grunts of cavemen and of enemies attacking bases has surpassed that dinosaur.  Being awakened in the middle of the night to a weird sounding voice coming from my cell phone telling me he is lonely and misses me, is more disturbing than a purple dinosaur singing and dancing.

I also almost miss the days of changing a baby's dirty diaper in the backseat of a car on a 100° day.  The odor back then was definitely a lot less pungent than what wafts from my son's gym bag these days.

But, even with all of the trade-offs, we would still do it all over again.  Yes, our friends and family definitely lied to us.  Whether it was in order to ensure the procreation of our species or so that we could sing the Dora the Explorer song along with them has yet to be determined.  We have gotten even though.  We told them that there is nothing quite like seeing your children take care of their very own puppy...... and fish ......... and guinea pigs.

Christie Bielss

Wishing Time Away

12 years ago I gave birth to a beautiful bouncing baby boy.  It was such a relief to have that ball full of energy out into the world where he wasn't kicking and punching me for a good 20 hours out of every day.  Ironically, when he was born he was quite the snuggler.  If you held him, he would sleep soundly for hours upon hours.  If you laid him in his crib, playpen, bouncy chair, swing, or anywhere else, he was awake in 20 minutes or less.

In his first year of life, he went to the hospital more times than I can count.  We were there so many times, the ER nurses knew our insurance information by heart.  Between the middle of the night cases of croup, the asthma complications, ear infections, and the capper:  RSV, I learned more than I ever needed to know about an infant's breathing.  Most of the gray hairs on my head now came as a result of having to learn how to pacify a baby enough so he'd allow a nebulizer mask to be put on his face to receive his asthma medication so he could breathe.

I'm not sure how many hours of sleep I actually got in his first year of life, but I'm betting I have more fingers and toes than I did actual sleeping hours.  Many long hours, both day and night, were spent rocking him in the rocking chair, as well as watching Barney's Super Singing Circus every 2 hours so he wouldn't notice the nebulizer in his face.  Oh, how I had a love/hate relationship with that blasted dinosaur.  In those days and hours of frustration and exhaustion, I can't even count the number of times I thought about how nice it would be when he was older and we both could get some sleep.

I wished those days away without even truly realizing it.  Now he is older, and in less than 3 years he'll have his driver's permit.  In 6 years he'll be graduating from high school and heading off to college.  Instead of wishing for the years to pass so I can get some sleep, I really want time to freeze.  I want to have lots of memories I can hold onto when our nest becomes empty and his room stays clean for months on end, or I look in the cupboard and realize I don't need to go to the grocery store 2-3 days a week to restock what he's devoured.

In just a few short years, the quiet I enjoy today while my kids are in school will become a deafening silence.  Now where there is shouting, arguments with his sister, rough-housing with his friends, and Nerf gun battles that take place throughout the entire house, in 6 years time it will all be replaced by quiet........ lots and lots of quiet.

I will be hanging onto these next few years memories with an iron fist.  I may even enjoy every time I have to ask him to make up his bed, pick his shoes up out of the middle of the living room floor, or take out the garbage.  As he enters the teenage years, he may drive me batty with his excessive energy, teenage eye rolls, and attitude, but I'm going to put every single one of his mannerisms in my memory bank.

Just as my mother said would happen, my perspective has changed.  When I hear a mother talk about how her infant sleeps soundly through the night and how wonderful it is to get things done around the house, I think "how sad". We have a lifetime of doing laundry, cleaning, and picking things up, but only a short while to enjoy our children while they are small. 

What I saw 12 years ago as an exhausting, thankless job was actually a blessing filled with hours of snuggling and cuddling with that little bundle of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails.  Yes, I still look forward with great anticipation to seeing the man he will become, but for now, I'm going to relish in the teenager he's about to be.

Written by Christie Bielss

Seeing Purple

Giving birth to my children and holding them in my arms for the first time was the greatest joy I have ever experienced.  For 9 months prior to their arrival, I read books like "What to Expect When You're Expecting" and Dr. Spock's guides to raising children from cover to cover.  I knew ahead of time what changes my body was undergoing and how my baby was developing.  From reading those books I knew exactly what to expect from the day I found out I was pregnant all the way into those first few months after birth ........ or did I?

My husband and I were so excited when we brought our first child home.  For the first few weeks my son slept like an angel and was the best baby ever.  Oh, how the books were exactly right.  Then, when he was about 3 months old he started getting sick and was only sleeping for about 30-45 minutes at a time.  By the time he was 4 months old, the bags under my eyes could've been classified as a full set of luggage, and I'd sweat from so many steam showers due to the number of rounds of croup my son had contracted that I could've been hung from a wind chime.

Nowhere in those baby books I'd read so dutifully did it talk about this part of motherhood.  I was ready to rip the pages out of those books and burn them in a bonfire.  When our son was 5 months old he was diagnosed with reactive airway disease (aka asthma).  The doctor ordered a nebulizer kit (a machine that transforms liquid medication into a mist for inhalation).  The kit even came with a cute little child-sized mask that was shaped like a purple dinosaur.  I immediately thought "Awww!  How cute!  My baby's first Barney item!".

The first time I had to give my son a nebulizer treatment, he tolerated the mask being put on his face because he was interested in the dinosaur mask.  When it was time for his next treatment 2 hours later he was done with that mask and wanted nothing to do with it.  That boy may as well have been greased up like a pig and been born with 10 arms for as much as I had to fight to get that mask even remotely near his face.  By the time the nebulizer vial was empty, I was pretty sure I'd ingested more of the medication than he had.

About that time my best friend called and asked how the treatments were going.  As I wiped the sweat from my brow, I told her that it could've gone better.  She suggested putting a kids show on tv to distract him.  What a great idea! 

At the next appointed time for the nebulizer, I flicked on the tv and found Sesame Street.  What kid doesn't like a little Burt and Ernie, I thought.  Apparently mine.  He cried louder and fought harder with Sesame Street on than when I'd had nothing on tv.  Determined to find a way to make this easier, I grabbed the tv remote and started flicking through the few kid channels available.  Nothing tamed this wild beast of a child.  I was ready to throw in the towel and check into whether they made straight jackets in my child's size when my friend asked if I had a kid show or movie on tape that I'd bought.

YES!  I had 1 VCR tape (yes, that was before the invention of the DVD) for kids.  I dug that video out of the cabinet, plopped it into the VCR and hit play.  My son was instantly captivated by that strange purple dinosaur dancing across the tv screen.

I turned on the nebulizer, put the mask over his face, and wouldn't you know, he was so captivated he didn't even notice!  V-I-C-T-O-R-Yyyyyyyyyyyy........... why, oh why, did I ever think that was a good idea.  For the next 5 years that blasted, grotesquely purple, dancing dinosaur was the only way my son would take his nebulizer treatment.  And only with that same exact Barney tape playing.  Oh how I tried showing him how neat it would be to see something different by turning the tv to a 30 minute Barney episode.  I even bought a different Barney video.  No, "Barney's Super Singing Circus" had indoctrinated my child into the world of Barney and had immediately performed some kind of mind control over him.  It was the only video he would watch while having a nebulizer treatment. What was working so well for my son just so happened to be the very thing which was now sucking my brains out.

I hear parents talk about how difficult their child was with colic or separation anxiety.  There is nothing that compares to the sheer torture of having to listen to the same Barney video every few hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for 5 years straight.  Every time I heard Barney's voice it was like having nails driven up my spine.

If our military used this video instead of other forms of torture, I would bet terrorists would give up every ounce of intelligence information they knew within 5 minutes of that video playing.  I wanted to buy a stuffed Barney just so I could choke the life out of that obnoxious, mind-controlling dinosaur.

Ok, so I know Barney was a phenomenal tool in allowing me to give my son life-saving medication in a relaxed and comforting manner, but I'm pretty sure I lost some of my sanity and quite a number of brain cells to that video.  5 years of the same songs and same characters, day in and and day out, is just wrong on so many levels. 

I have, however, found a great use these days for those songs.  One chorus of a particular song from that video really stuck in my brain.  Now when I'm out in public with my pre-teen children and they start driving me insane with their bickering, or they keep antagnozing each other, all I have to do is break out into song.  Not a Broadway show tune, not Justin Bieber or One Direction.  No, I break out into Barney:

"Boom, boom, ain't it great to be crazy? 
Boom, boom, ain't it great to be crazy?
Giddy and foolish the whole day through,
Boom, boom, ain't it great to be crazy?"

You'll never see 2 children snap-to so fast as when you look at them ever so lovingly, gently stroke their hair and face, and start singing and dancing just like Barney.  Matter of fact, this has become such a good tool and brings me so much enjoyment, just as Barney brought them not so many years ago, that I've thought about trying to find a purple Barney shirt I can carry around in my purse to throw on to go with the song and dance.  I'm sure my kids would really appreciate my singing ever so much more if I just had the shirt.........

by: Christie Bielss