As I explained in the post "Please Excuse This Brief Interruption," I'm taking some time to be with my family over the weekends, so today's actual post is taking place over at Lifetime Mom's.
In the meantime, I see that a few of you have posted asking me to write a post on sexism. To get the discussion up and running, I invite all of you to leave a comment explaining a time when you felt discriminated against because of your gender, or just about a time when you felt that your gender gave you less of an advantage. I can't wait to hear everyone's opinions and stories!
Before I go, let me catch you up on a week in Eden's life;
Someone lost their first tooth;
I have no picture for this because ew yuck, but we are deep in the throws of potty training over here. I have to say, I suck at potty training a boy. Like, I don't have a penis, I don't know how to pee out of it, and quite frankly I don't want to know. I also don't want to see all the tricks and fun things you think you can do with it because I am your mother and this is scarring me for life, so can we please just get this over with???
In other news, the kids were very generously taken to a local play center with Frisbee Boy's Mom as a belated birthday gift;
On thursday my friends invited me to go Salsa dancing with them. It only cost a couple of dollars and I had a free babysitter, so I figured "eh, why not." I agreed to go however before I realized that Salsa dancing is done wearing heels. Heels.
Heels? Me? I am not one of those girls that can run in heels. I would probably go as far as to say that I am barely one of those girls that can walk briskly in heels. So dancing in heels? Ha. Sure....sounds like a jolly old time, if you're in the mood to break your face...
It didn't really make me feel a whole lot better when I texted one of my friends whom is about as professional as you can get in the "wearing heels" department and asked how dancing in heels went for her the previous weekend, and this is the response that I got;
So I decided "well screw that, I'm pretty sure I'm going to land on my face at some point, so, I'll wear this...."
but under that I'll wear shorts and I'm bringing tennis shoes just in case this whole "dancing in heels" thing does not work out for me.
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| You can't really tell from this pic, but I am wearing the dress and just lifted it up to show the shorts that I did indeed wear under it! (the bottom part is bunched under the shoes) |
No one suspected a thing....
nor did any of the old men that were there that night. Note to self: don't go early on a weeknight.
The only dude that was even remotely my age, dressed in a neon orange shirt, suit pants, vest, and bow tie, came over right away, pulled me out onto the dance floor, and began doing moves that I have only ever seen in the movie "Flash Dance." No, I'm not kidding. I pretty much just stood there with my mouth hanging open while he said something about how he was going to straighten me out (does anyone even know what that means? If so please explain) and then pulled me off the dance floor so that he could show me all the Facebook pictures on his phone. Nope, I'm not making that part up either. I really had no idea what was going on. I have to say though, he was still better than the guy that tried to massage all of my friends hands (mine included) or the random girl that grabbed my ass.
It was a really weird night.
Also, just to add real fast, a lot of you have asked how I am able to go out so much while being a single mom living below the poverty line. Truthfully, around the time that I wrote the post "My Life Is Completely Unrealistic" and the infamous "I Freaking Hate Mother's Day" article over on XOJane, I finally let my friends in on the little secret that I was about to lose my mind. I was so overwhelmed with my multiple jobs, kids, family drama, rape trauma, and just life in general, that I was really struggling to "remain calm and carry on" as the saying goes. With the kids dad being completely absent and having absolutely no family support, I was struggling to balance multiple jobs and 24/7 only parenthood, while having no real break in between.
I have a phenomenal babysitter, but since I can't always afford her I was starting to lose my mind.
My friends, being as awesome as they are, banded together to ensure that a couple nights a month I would be blessed with free childcare. I usually take the opportunity to have a girls night out or to go on a date, always choosing the least child friendly activities that I can think of that will also be little to no money out of my pocket. It has afforded me not only the much needed opportunity to revitalize a few of my stressed out brain cells, but has also made me a more relaxed person, a better mom, and better equipped to be who I need me to be.
Anyways, I miraculously did not fall on my face Salsa dancing, which is especially great since I finally got released from the surgeon! Yay new nose and good-bye having to see trauma reflected in the mirror!!
In other news, the kids got along well, which any mother knows is reason to celebrate. Here they are playing with the girl child's Barbie Pool. Well, the girl child was playing with it, the boy child was "fixing it."
Also this week, there was a local festival a few minutes from my house so I invited my friends and we took our kids. I prepared the kids beforehand that we were only going to ride two rides, we weren't playing games, and we didn't have money to be buying food. I hate having to squish their dreams before we even get there, but I have to stay in budget and no mom wants to be having this conversation once you get there and the kids eyes are already huge with excitement for all they think they are going to do. I really hate that I can't afford let them do more :( Like I REALLY hate that. I just want to be able to give them everything, even if it's just for a day.
Either way, everyone had a great time, my friends were extremely generous and treated my kids to a few things, and in the end I think they were definitely worn out!!
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| If you can't tell, thats my girl child, my boy child, and my friend's child, lying on the ground with their heads hanging off the pavement block. |
Well, that's all for now! Speaking of a night where I stayed home and laid on the couch, I gotta go help a dude who lost his keys in my couch and has been looking for them for over thirty minutes. Dude....it's a couch, not a forest preserve, how hard can this really be?
Don't forget to head over to Lifetime Moms for the real post and also to scroll down to the comments section here and post your feelings and experiences on sexism!
Please excuse any typo's and grammatical errors, I'm swearing off editing for these super fast weekend posts.
How long did it take him to find his keys? They were UNDER the couch, weren't they? :)
ReplyDeleteThey were IN thr couch lol. Like LITERALLY!! I started replying to comments from the bottom up, so scroll down for the story!!
DeleteIt took us almost an hour lol! He didn't end up leaving until like 2am!
Oh, also, you have a pretty nose. :)
ReplyDeleteLove <3
DeleteThanks! :)
My only real blatant sexism story is actually from 30 years ago when I worked for an investment company where 90% of the Supervisors were female but 90% of management above that level were male...I have heard things are not so skewed now at that company as they were then. But as a "stay at home" mom, I also had a bit of my own attitude which kind of screwed me up. I always said I didn't work but stayed home with the kids but from the time I started staying home I always did something to add to our income. First I was babysitting for up to ten hours a day, three days a week plus helping a friend with her small business (painting signs etc for her). Then when those jobs dried up I went to work for a small retail store and worked at least 20 hours a week and when the kids were in jr. high/high school went to a different company for 20-30 hours a week, depending on the season...alll this while being responsible for all the household duties, bills, shopping, kids activities etc (but hubby did the yard work). I guess what I am saying is I had a sexist attitude myself, considered that I did not work because I didn't work full time outside the home and others felt the same about me. I was constantly told how lucky I was to not have to work! But, if a man had been doing what I was, I would not have considered him as "not working"! Sometimes we do it to ourselves, or at least I did!
ReplyDeleteThat's a great perspective and one that I would not have thought of!! Thank you for taking the time to share that with us!
Delete**hugs**
Is the photo contest post coming soon? Could you also write about techniques you use for the women you counsel?
ReplyDeleteI keep meaning to mention that the photo contest was a total flop! I got an entire THREE enteries. Out of the thousands of readers! I was sadly disappointed :(
DeleteI have the enteries saved though and they will be featured in my upcoming "things that make you ask why" post. I haven't seen a whole lot of picture worthy funny things around here lately though, so it may be a few weeks!
I do need to do an update on the nonprofit and the women that I serve so I can try to work that in there as well!
Thanks for reading :)
I'll bet his keys were inside the couch somewhere not easy to reach, resting on top of that fabric that keeps the dust out of the couch underneath (or whatever you call that stuff and whyever its there, everybody knows what I'm talking about, that thin material stretched across the bottom of a couch,) that kept them from falling underneath and kept him from getting to them. Right? (Or, was this a clever ploy to stay and they were really in his pocket the entire time?) ;-)
ReplyDeleteHaha!! You know where they ended up being? IN THE COUCH. Like literally IN the couch. Apparently there was a tiny hole in the inside fabric and the keys fell through it and ended up IN the frame of the couch. We only found this out when he lifted the entire couch up from one side and we heard them slide to the other end. He wanted to rip the bottom off, I was not about to let that happen, and so the two of us had to lift, twist, and finagle the keys back to where the tiny hole was until he could reach them! It was pretty funny actually
DeleteHaha! I have a couch story that beats that one! Back in the day (aka fresh out of college,) my roommate at the time and I (two single gals in tiny apt, etc.,) were snake sitting another female friend's 5 foot long boa constrictor (long story) and it got out of the bathroom where we were keeping it, and went up inside the hide-a-bed mechanism of our couch. !!! We knew the snake was missing (and my roommate impulsively let its meal out too, to try and entice it, so we then had a snake AND a rodent loose in the apt!) Anyway, we looked all over and finally gave up looking for it (kind of figured it might've actually ESCAPED escaped and got out of the place entirely,) and the next day I sat down on the couch, and suddenly this feeling like a seat belt happened, and it was the snake (guess I was warm and he was cold). !! When I leaped up (I was startled, what can I say!), he slipped back inside the couch. My roommate and I couldn't turn the couch over (it was really heavy, the old style iron metal frame hide-a-bed inside) so we asked these two big guys to come help us "move our couch." They were fine with it till we mentioned the word "snake" ("be careful, we don't want to hurt him...") and they both backed up in round eyed panic and LEFT, I mean, they literally made tracks, totally freaked out... (one guy went all the way down the stairs from our 2nd story apt and yelled NO WAY! up at us.) We finally got the boa's head and about 1/5 of him coaxed out, but the other 4 feet or so of him were still up in there, and we were afraid to pull him (all wrapped around the mechanism inside, we thought we might break his back or kill him.) So in the end we just had to wait (and not sit on the couch!) until he got hungry (we had trapped the baby rat in a wastebasket and put it back in the cage, at least THAT wasn't running loose for long) or maybe he got bored or cold (who knows) and came out of it of his own accord. We thought it was hilarious that those two burly guys were so scared of snakes that they ran away like that (and here we lived with the snake lurking in the apt with us for days.) !!! We told that story for a long time (with plenty of HaHaHaHa's!) So hey, I guess this is also a sexism story too, come to think of it... (we stereotyped them as not being scared of reptiles just because they were men! And then we found it amusing when they were, and for that same reason.) Oops, guess we all do it sometimes!
DeleteOH. MY. GOSH. OHMYGOSH!!! How on earth did you SLEEP with that in there!? I would be afraid it would slither out and strangle me in my sleep.
DeleteAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!
Too funny about the guys though and great way to tie it in with the sexism topic!! :)
*HUGS*
Honestly, we were kind of freaked out by it ourselves, but we knew it was much too big in girth to get under the doors, so we closed both the bedroom door and the hall door and sort of holed up in there (when we were home at ALL!) for two days until it came out. It was a strange little apt and it had a tiny square "hall" between the rooms with a door on all four sides. One went to the living room, one to the bathroom, one to the bedroom, and the other was the door to the linen closet shelves. So we barricaded ourselves behind two doors and only went through the living room swiftly and straight to the front door (we never had any food* in our fridge hardly, so we barely needed to go into the kitchenette part, HaHa...) And we never babysat any critter of any kind ever again (technically our apt was "no pets" anyway.)
Delete* (We were broke, not on diets. Or, I should say, our "diet" was our being too broke to buy much food!)
HAHAHA. I am absolutely dying. That is so freaking funny!! Oh my gosh. I'd have just moved out. Abandoned all my stuff and left. I'd sleep on a snake free park bench if I had too.
DeleteYou are one brave girl!!
I'm still laughing at that whole scenerio!
Your friends are so cool! How sweet of them to help out like that :) With all that hard work you do, you definitely deserve a night to unwind.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you have a lovely nose! It seems totally worth the surgeries/recovery time. And your salsa dress is so cute! Also, I'm suuuuuure his keys got "stuck in the couch". Is that what you youths call the kissing and the hand holding these days? You rascals! :)
Hi girly!!
DeleteThank you :) I am very, very, blessed with great friends.
Thank you, I love my new nose! Well, there may have been some kissing and hand holding involved, but there were also some lost keys!
We've had success with Jamie Glowacki's Oh Crap, Potty Training! system. She recommends teaching boys to pee sitting down and a lot of naked time. We started potty training in earnest around Father's Day and my daughter is now 80% day trained. I'm waiting a little longer before tackling night training. Day trained meaning will alert me to her potty needs so that I can assist her or able to convey and manage herself to/at the potty. It is such a relief to be mostly done with diapers, now I just get to teach her how to dress herself.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to check it out!! I was so mean, I dropped him off at daycare with a bag of pants and underwear and was like "Hey, good luck with him, BYE!!!"
DeleteI'm evil. Lol
You should ask them what method they are using there at day care, and then you can be consistent with them (using two different approaches could be confusing, especially since you don't have the same equipment to demonstrate.) Just so everybody will all be together on it and giving out the same message and all! (Figure they probably do a lot of this since it's their profession and whatever they do is what works best or is easiest to get results.)
Delete(I meant your personal parts type equipment vs his, in my last comment, not the day care vs you.)
DeleteYes, absolutely!! I walked in and was like "Ok daycare, show me how we are doing this!" Haha! Good point to make though and I'm sure the other readers appreciate!
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