Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a fantastic December and enjoyed their holidays tremendously!
As is often the case, the new year has spurred me to do a little reflection on my life and look at some places I’d like to make some changes. Most people refer to these ideas as “resolutions”, but I much prefer to think of them as goals. In the past, I’ve had some grand ideas about how I would make change happen in my life — lose weight! spend more time with friends! de-clutter the house! do more creative stuff! — but my follow through on those nice ideas has been less than stellar. Last year I set some much more specific goals and I’m happy to report that I actually achieved (and even surpassed) many of them.
This year I want to get even more granular in my goals. One of the big things I feel like my life was lacking last year was self-fulfillment. My lay-off and the subsequent transition from career-lady to stay-at-home-mom left me floundering a bit. I could write a whole big post about this topic, but for now I’ll just say that I found myself dedicating the majority of my time to satisfying other people’s wants and needs and significantly less time doing things I enjoyed and that made me happy. So this year, I’ve compiled a list of small, achievable goals for myself. Most of them are fun and all of them will make me happy in some way. I’ve grouped them loosely into five categories: cooking, crafts, kids, organization, and personal projects.
There are a gazillion things on the list already and I suspect that I’ll add more from time to time. It’s possible that I won’t complete them all this year (though I hope I will) but even if I only get to half of them I bet I’ll feel happier.
I resisted getting an iPhone for quite a while. “Why do I need one,” I’d ask my husband. “It’s not like I need to keep track of clients or appointments or anything and I already have a regular cell phone to make calls with.” Oh, how naive I was! I finally caved to my desires and now I think I use my phone more as a stay-at-home mom of small kids than I ever would have in my former professional life managing a multi-million dollar website.
Beyond the obvious parental-type things I use my iPhone for (texting my husband to pick up bananas on the way home, calling the day care to say my son will be late) here are some of the ways I use my phone to be a happier mom:
1. I Entertain Myself While Breastfeeding
I love breastfeeding — let’s just get that out of the way right up front. I talk, sing and make contact while I nurse my baby. But after he starts to get sleepy, I need to be quiet and avoid eye contact so he’ll relax enough to go to sleep and at that point I’m stuck sitting quietly in the rocker for another 20 minutes or so. And when he was a newborn I did that 10 times per day! Besides normal web surfing and blog reading, I love to use this time to play games. Some of my favorites include: Wurdle, StoneLoops of Jurassica, Bejeweled 2, CandyMania PileUp and my most recent favorite, Blowfish Lite (sorry, couldn’t find a link). And even though it’s slow going to type on the iPhone keypad, I even use it to write sometimes. In fact, this post was partially written using the WordPress app!
2. I Take Photos of My Kids When We’re Out and About
This one is sort of a no brainer, but as a photography obsessed mom I love being able to take photos of my boys without lugging my big camera everywhere. I use these photos for scrapbooking in general and my Project 365 photo essay in particular and I recently had a “Duh!” moment when I realized I could email these photos to my mom and dad to give them a grandkid fix when they’re at work. No one ever said I was the sharpest tack in the box….
3. I Listen to Podcasts to Keep Myself From Going Insane
So very many of the mommy things I do in a day require that I use my hands and pay attention to my surroundings but don’t require that I be particularly mentally engaged. Housework and driving around running errands are a few examples of these horribly boring, mind-numbing chores. To keep myself from spiraling into a deep depression triggered by mental atrophy, I like to listen to podcasts while I do this stuff. Some of my favorites are the Manic Mommies, NPR’s StoryCorps, Meal Makeover Moms, and I’m looking forward to checking out this list of creativity podcasts Lain blogged about the other day.
4. I Record My Kids Laughing
…and babbling and telling jokes with the voice memo app. Photos are great and all, but those recordings of their little voices take you back to the age when they were recorded in an instant and oh my, they are sweet.
5. I Entertain My (Big) Kid at Restaurants and in the Car
I’m obviously not handing my iPhone to my 14-month-old baby, but my five-year-old is careful enough to be trusted with it occasionally. I don’t often let him use it, so when I give it to him to play with it’s a very, very special treat and he is absolutely thrilled. Some places I let him use it include: doctor’s office waiting rooms, in line at the post office, drives of over an hour and a half, and on airplane flights. I have a number of kid-friendly apps on my phone, but he also likes “playing” the same games I do. I also have an episode of Handy Manny on there for extreme circumstances and my husband has Wall-E on his phone for even more dire distraction emergencies.
I also use it to take notes for my son’s #babybook, but I already wrote about that.
How do you use your phone to make parenting your kids easier or more fun?
May 28, 2009: Thursday, I made Wyatt a dinner bento box to take with him to child watch at the gym, but Augie was having a hard night and I decided to stay home with the kids at the last minute. It was kind of interesting to watch Wyatt eat his bento because I think I’ve only ever seen him do that once before.
May 29, 2009: Friday afternoon I set up a little photo shoot with Augie. These are a lot harder to do now that he’s mobile, because he keeps crawling away from the backdrop. I did get some cute ones though.
May 30, 2009: I spent a great day with my friend, Allison on Saturday. She moved down to the South Bay about a year or so ago and I hardly ever get to see her now, so it was super fantastic to get to spend some time with her. We went shopping for hours and hours and then hit T-Rex BBQ for dinner in the evening.
May 31, 2009: Wyatt was invited to a birthday party and the big treat was a visit from Darth Vadar! Augie and I got our picture taken with him, but even though Wyatt knew it was just a guy in a suit, he decided he needed to keep a good distance away from him.
June 1, 2009: I handed the camera to Wyatt and he took this shot. This is an “M” for “Mama” that he drew on my Etch-A-Sketch. Awwwww….
June 2, 2009: I love looking at my kids sleep. All the day’s sins are forgiven.
June 3, 2009: Augie is officially a “stander” now and I might even go so far as to say he’s a “cruiser”.
April 30, 2009: By the time Thursday rolled around, Wyatt had had a fever for over 5 days in a row and he had developed a bad cough. I wasn’t really worried about Swine Flu, but a little voice in the back of my head started to nag at me, making me think, “What if he actually is a carrier for the pandemic and I just ignore it?” I logged onto the CDC website to look at the list of symptoms and it was like a checklist of everything Wyatt was suffering from. Of course, it was also a checklist of symptoms of a bad cold, but the fever had me pretty worried, so I called into Kaiser for a little peace of mind. The advice nurse decided that a doctor should check him out so we went in. When we got there, his oxygen reading was a little low and after listening to his lungs the doctor immediately sent a nurse in to give Wyatt a nebulizer treatment because he was having an asthma attack. Gah! I hadn’t even noticed! We went home with an albuterol inhaler and Wyatt has been taking it a few times a day since then. You’ll be glad to know that he’s almost completely recovered now, except for a lingering cough.
May 2, 2009: Zach was in Reno for a bachelor party for the weekend, so I was home alone with two crabby, sick kids. (Augie and I had both caught Wyatt’s illness by then and Zach was suffering through it on his trip, too.) I refused to let Wyatt watch any more movies and the energy required to keep him from whining was eluding me so I broke one of my big rules and took the kids to Toys R Us for no reason whatsoever and bought them toys. Wyatt got this marble run, Augie got some fancy see through balls with stuff inside and I got myself a big Lego house kit.
May 3, 2009: There’s nothing cuter than a baby in sunglasses. Except maybe a basket of kittens…
May 4, 2009: Poor Buzz. Wyatt broke his leg off (accidentally) about two seconds before I took this picture.
May 5, 2009: Now that Augie is a super-crawler, he’s exploring all the nooks and crannies of our house. He especially loves hanging out around the vacuum cleaner.
May 6, 2009: Wyatt finished up his lunch for his after school snack.
Wyatt’s been home sick with a fever and a sore throat all week, so we’ve been hanging out around the house a lot. I let him watch a bunch of movies the first few days, but after awhile it got to be too much. The same old toys only hold his attention so long before he starts to get whiny so I’ve been trying to come up with some fun activities that can keep him occupied and give me a few minutes here and there to get some stuff done. Yesterday I was cruising around the kiddie blogs and I saw a suggestion to play make-believe post office. Brilliant!
This game was a fun, three-part activity: making the mailboxes, writing letters, and then pretending to be a mail carrier and delivering the letters.
To make the mailboxes, we pulled a couple of medium sized boxes out of the recycling. You don’t need to make more than one mailbox for this game, but we had two boxes, so we just doubled the fun. I used a box cutter to cut slots in them, then taped a couple of pieces of regular old printer paper over a few sides of the boxes so that Wyatt could decorate them.
He used foam letters to spell out the word “mailbox” on one. I told him which letters he needed and he dug them out of the box and stuck them on. He also wrote the word “YES” because he knows how to spell that by himself and likes to write it. Then he copied the letters from the first box to write “mailbox” on the second box. Extra stickers and doodles were added for decoration and then the boxes were placed in two separate locations in the living room “for convenience.” Hee!
Next we made some mail. I cut a small stack of letter-sized paper in half length-wise and then we folded them over. I showed Wyatt the basics of addressing an envelope, with the name of who it’s for, the “return address” or who it’s from, and a stamp. We talked a little bit about how stamps work, too.
We had a great time writing messages to each other and to Zach and Augie. We drew pictures and unbeknownst to Wyatt, he practiced his writing, spelling and reading. I’m all sneaky with the educational activities like that!
As we finished each letter, we put it in the post office boxes. Then when we’d gathered enough, Wyatt got his mailbag (one of my old purses), collected the mail and took it to the post office (the middle of the living room floor) to sort it. And again, we practiced sneaky reading lessons, looking at the letters and sounding out the names he doesn’t know on site.
Once the letters were sorted, he put them back in the bag and then delivered them to each person. We spent several hours working on this project and Wyatt has revisited it a few times over the last two days. You should try it too!
April 23, 2009: Wyatt’s clothes set out on the table for him to put on. I usually pick his clothes in the morning for expediency, but I try to give him a few choices. Do you want jeans or sweats? Pirate shirt or green stripes? That kind of thing. Once I pull his clothes out I usually need to ask, cajole, and threaten to “count” for about a half hour before all the relevant articles of clothing are on all the right body parts.
April 24, 2009: Augie had broccoli, blueberry applesauce and parsnips for dinner. He decided he wanted to hold the spoon for part of the meal which is why his face looks like this. The smile is because he’s the happiest baby on the block.
April 25, 2009: Augie and Daddy playing together on the bed. They are the two late sleepers in our family, so they usually play together a bit in the mornings before they get up to join us.
April 26, 2009: I subscribed to the Six ‘o Clock Scramble newsletter a few weeks ago and I’ve been using it to streamline menu planning and grocery shopping for the week. When I’m working on a recipe, I stick the print-out to the stove hood with a magnet so it’s easy to see and it’s out of my way. (If you’re interested in subscribing to The Scramble newsletter, let me know — I’ve got a discount code for $3 off.)
April 27, 2009: Wyatt was home sick from school with a fever, cough and sore throat, so the kitchen was pretty scary. Zach kindly took a break from work to do some dishes and help me restore some sanity.
April 28, 2009: You’d never know it from this picture, but Wyatt has been sick (and home from preschool) with a fever, sore throat and a cough all week. He is incapable of refraining from mugging for the camera when he sees it now, though so that’s why my sick little guy looks like he’s partying down.
April 29, 2009: We went to Target to get a new phone, some soap and bigger pj’s for Augie who is growing like a weed. I let Wyatt check out the toy section for an hour to kill some time on the condition that he couldn’t ask me to buy anything. My rule was that if he asked, we were leaving immediately. It worked pretty well. He got some low key entertainment after being stuck in the house for a week and because Target was almost completely empty, it wasn’t stressful for either of us. Augie (who is also sick now) got a nap and I stood around reading magazines. I like this picture a lot because I think that it’s going to be incredibly cool to look at all these toys twenty years from now.
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2010 goals · crafty · family · food · kid · self-absorbed
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