A mama’s life is a full one – full of love, laughter and laundry. Normal daily activities become opportunities to grow and laugh with little ones around, as any mama can attest. These are some brief snapshots into my everyday mama life.
Bathing
I haven’t showered in a couple of days, and I will be doing something historic today: Leaving the house! … Maybe. If all the planets align, the atmospheric pressure is just right, and there is no spiritual warfare working against me. But just in case it does work out, I need to look like I know what hygiene is.
Since my daughter sleeps in my arms, I normally shower in the evenings before her bedtime while my husband watches her, but our schedules have not been synchronized enough for that to happen in a couple of days. So now I have to get creative.
My daughter loves to take baths, as do I, so perhaps we can simply bathe together. She will love having free access to her milk anytime she has a craving throughout our bath. It’ll be a fun experience which will go perfectly smoothly, I’m sure.
I begin to realize the inefficiency of this idea as I’m trying to ensure my toddler doesn’t slip under the water by supporting her with one leg while keeping her hands away from my razer as I shave my other leg.
That this idea is a complete fail is evident when we emerge from the bath (my daughter taking advantage of the open milk bar all the while) with my hair still full of poorly rinsed shampoo and conditioner and my daughter shivering from being wet for too long.
I feel her skin expecting her to be freezing but instead she feels warm. Fever. Like her daddy, she has gotten sick as a result of being cold for too long with wet hair from my brilliant co-bathing plan.
Necessity is the mother of invention as they say … And sometimes, just plain dumb ideas.
Sickness
I don’t even want to move my aching, chilled body, let alone chase a toddler around as I am overcome by the virus my daughter generously shared with me. My husband hugs me and makes me some hot tea to warm me up.
I watch with deep agony as he gives my daughter an apple to chew on, knowing I do not have the energy to enforce my usual rule of keeping food in the kitchen and dreading a worsening of our bug problem fueled by bits of apple littered throughout the house. But alas, I do not have the strength to object.
My husband (who was kind enough to watch my daughter for an hour during the afternoon so I could take a nap) asks if I need anything and then heads down the stairs to work in the garage, hollering up at me, “Let me know when supper is ready.”
“Um … I might need some help getting supper ready …” It is a lie. I intend to fully rely on my husband to get supper ready.
I am feeling miserable from my head to my toes and have no desire to do my typical pre-dinner workout wherein I juggle a baby/toddler in one arm and with the other get out plates, utensils, and containers of food, dish and heat up everyone’s food, cut up my daughter’s food, gather bibs and rags, clear off and wipe down the table and pull out all the accompaniments and condiments for the meal.
My husband comes back upstairs to pull something out of the freezer and defrost it in the microwave.
“Okay, once that is done in the microwave, all you have to do is put it in a pot on the stove … ” His instructions are interrupted by a foggy voice in my brain telling me this sounds like a lot of work for a sick woman trying to keep an eye on a toddler.
“You mean I have to finish getting it ready?” Apparently the vision I have in my pounding head of him bringing me a bowl of steaming soup is being telepathically miscommunicated to him as him handing me a plastic container of frozen soup from the freezer.
My husband changes his plans and finishes getting supper heated up for me and our daughter before heading back down to the garage.
A few hours later, it is bedtime, I am extremely tired with drums rocking out in my head, and my tired daughter’s reflux is being aggravated by the virus she is still recovering from. She is miserable, needing desperately to sleep but too uncomfortable to do so. I nurse her, rock her, walk her, bounce her, hug her, but she constantly cries and writhes in pain.
I know she will not be able to sleep until she is completely exhausted and I am already exhausted, so we take a break and head down to the garage to spend some time with Daddy. We all sit in my SUV parked in the garage as my husband shows me the backup camera he installed and my daughter looks at all the pretty wires Daddy gets to play with.
As we sit, the three of us enjoying a rare chunk of quality time together, I am grateful that a stressful situation provides us with an opportunity to do something we would otherwise miss out on.
Laundry
“I am doing some laundry.”
I look up from the dishes in the sink I’m attempting to wash without getting a bandage on my finger wet. I blink at my handsome, sweet husband knowing he probably thinks he’s doing something really helpful.
“Okay,” I reply, feeling a little guilty about not thanking him, but at the same time thinking about all the laundry I will be unsuccessfully trying to fold the next day as my toddler – also thinking she is helping – pulls folded shirts and underwear off the couch to carry them around the house calling for “Da-da” because she is apparently worried her daddy left for work without his undergarments.
Later in the evening, as I’m getting my helpful toddler ready for bed, my helpful husband states once again, “I’m doing laundry.”
Realizing I need to acknowledge how he contributes to doing the housework, I thank him and ask what he’s washing, wondering how on earth we go through t-shirts and underwear so quickly. I make a mental note to buy more underwear. Perhaps that will satiate my husband’s incessant need to wash our clothes.
Later on, as I’m doing some last minute things in the kitchen before bed, my husband brings up the laundry subject again.
“Where is the basket of clean clothes?”
I look at him wondering why laundry is suddenly becoming the theme of every conversation. What is this obsession he has with keeping our dirty laundry basket empty?
Knowing he will be utterly shocked by my words, I respond that there are no clean clothes in the basket because I put all of the previously washed laundry away the day before.
This is truly a miracle since we normally have trouble finding a place to sit in the living room due to the mountains of clean clothes piled on the couches from the loads of laundry my husband keeps washing before me and my helpful toddler get the previous load folded and put away.
I want to be grateful – at least he’s getting the first step out of the way for me which is helpful – but when my husband announces he’s doing laundry, I always feel my world darken with dread a bit for the next day. Another thing to add to my to-do list for tomorrow that is already too long to be humanly possible to accomplish while taking care of a toddler.
But at least I’ll have my little helper to assist in folding the laundry …
Naptime
As I sit rocking and nursing my sleeping toddler daughter, I pull out my tablet to get some online work done as I generally try to do during her naps in my arms. She has only been asleep for about five minutes when she wakes up, arching her back and crying out as she refluxes.
I sigh, hating that she may have to live with this pain and discomfort for the rest of her life and feeling the frustration of being unable to sleep train her until her reflux is “under control.”
Screw this, I think to myself. If she’s not even able to sleep in my arms, we may as well try the crib.
Knowing she definitely will not sleep without her milk at this point, I devise a plan that just might work. Setting her in the crib, I kneel down and try to direct my crying child to lay down so she can nurse through the slats. After about twenty minutes of struggling to figure out how this new positioning works, she falls asleep in her crib – for the first time ever!
I am quite an awkward picture of motherhood at this moment as I sit smooshed up against the crib slats. But she has not stayed asleep in the past when I have tried to transfer her to her crib after nursing her to sleep, so this is my only shot at a few minutes to get something done that I can’t normally do with a toddler.
I am ecstatic when she stops nursing and I’m able to pull away and exit her room successfully. I know I only have about 40 minutes until she wakes up, so I make it count: I fold laundry.
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