We were in the car one early spring afternoon toward the end of Colum’s junior kindergarten year.
“We practiced lockout at school today,” he said.
Lockout? I was puzzled. Like a labour lockout?
“Are your teachers going on strike?” I said, even though that didn’t make sense either.
“No, it’s in case some crazy person with a gun comes to the school. We have to lock the door and hide under our desks with the curtains closed.”
“Oh! Lockdown!”
And then my synapses started misfiring. Why on earth was my four-year-old son being subjected to routine lockdown drills?! This is Toronto, Canada. We have gun control. There has never been a single shooting incident in a Canadian elementary school. The handful of school shootings that have occurred have been at the high school or college level and were almost all committed by students of the school. (In one instance it was a professor.) Surely the fear stemming from the possibility of an attack by a crazed gunman is more damaging than the vanishingly small odds that anything like that would ever happen at our school. Has the whole world become paranoid delusional?
I understand and appreciate having to buzz in and speak with the office staff via intercom before being let into the building. It was an annoyance when I was pregnant, but I also understand why adults aren’t allowed to use the school washrooms. I guess I even get why the kids have to buddy up whenever they need to use the washroom. (Although Irene does tell me, “Mommy, sometimes we don’t go pee. Sometimes we just dance and dance.”) But isn’t this going too far? Lockdown drills? Really?
And then I heard the breaking news out of Connecticut this morning. There was a shooting at an elementary school. An unknown number of children and teachers are injured and dead. It’s still early; nothing is confirmed. It looks like there were two gunmen and one of them (the shooter) was the father of one of the students. It’s an unspeakable tragedy. It’s horrific.
So I don’t know anymore. Maybe these lockdown drills help. Maybe they don’t. Maybe we do these lockdown drills because then at least we’re doing something. At the very least we can try to believe we are doing something to keep our children safe in a world seemingly full of lunatics. Maybe then we can sleep at night.
Maybe they’ll help, too, when I have sit down and explain what happened to my children. I don’t want to do that. I don’t think they need to know. But Colum heard about the Eaton Centre shooting from someone at school and that could very well happen again. So I want to be the one to tell them what happened. I want to be the one to reassure them that nothing like this could ever happen to them. It won’t happen to us, we say.
And then we pray like hell that we’re right.
Post Script: After thinking about it, reading this post by Jessica Gottlieb, thinking about it some more and discussing it with my husband, I have decided not to tell any of the kids about the shooting. We will be prepared to talk about it if anyone (most likely, Colum) comes home from school on Monday with questions. But with any luck, that won’t be necessary.
Special thanks to Maple Leaf Foods for sponsoring this post and giveaway. CONTEST CLOSED.
Our family breakfast. Oops. Too late, they're gone.
My son will eat almost anything I cook with gusto. He’s willing to try new dishes and will even reluctantly choke down bites of things he doesn’t like in the name of nutrition. I should probably brag about this and write a book about how to not raise a picky eater. There’s just one problem.
Breakfast is a nightmare. He won’t eat cereal. I mean, sure, he enjoys oatmeal, pancakes, waffles, french toast, bagels and eggs, so what’s the big deal? Listen, maybe in your family you wake up two hours early to shower and dress and have your coffee and make lunches and cook a nice, hot breakfast before waking up the kids, nursing the baby, changing diapers, getting them dressed and packing school bags. Maybe you do. I won’t judge. But I tend to stay up way too late, basking in the sweet, sweet quiet, and then wind up hitting the snooze bar four or five times too many.
Mornings around here are more of a tropical storm than a peaceful time for nutritive and emotional restoration. “Get dressed! No, pee first! Where’s your sweater? Where’s your bag? What’s this form? What?! That’s due today?! Eat, eat, eat! Forget it, let’s go. Coats! Boots! Hats! Where’s your other mitt? Run, run, run!” It’s really a wonder they aren’t in tears by the time they board the school bus.
Suffice it to say, then, that I love any sort of non-cereal breakfast food that is both fast and healthy. We usually end up doing toast or bagels or oatmeal, but I like variety. So I was super happy to try Dempster’s new and improved english muffins on for size this week. We’ve done english muffins before, but I tend to forget about them.
The Demspter’s come in plain, whole wheat and cinnamon raisin, and are nice and soft with lots of crevices for sopping up your favourite topping. The verdict: cinnamon raisin with butter is a quick-and-easy crowd pleaser. But clearly whole wheat is the healthiest. Spread it with peanut butter and serve with fruit on the side and a glass of milk and I can even feel good about rushing my kids out the door.
For pure enjoyment, though, you’re not going to beat strawberry jam.
CONTEST CLOSED: Congrats to Cheryl and Susan Margaret!
Giveaway: Okay, let me have ’em. What other weekday morning breakfasts (other than cold cereal, alas) am I forgetting? Answer in the comments and I’ll draw two names to win four free Dempster’s product coupons each. Contest closes at midnight on December 23. Canada only.
I have received compensation for this post as part of the MLF Connects program. Opinions and words are still mine, of course.
I know it’s the holiday season and I should probably be blogging about tinsel and gingerbread (or, say, the gazillion PR emails about holiday crafting for the family that I get every day.) But you still need to get through the day during the holidays and I, for one, need a decent pair of jeans to do that.
Clothes are a big challenge for me. First, I have been either pregnant or postpartum for the better part of seven years, so it’s hard to say what my size really is. I’m sure I’m at a healthy weight now, but I can’t help but think that maybe if I watched what I ate at all or exercised even a little that I might drop another pant size or two. It could happen! It won’t happen now, but maybe after the holidays? Maybe?
Even if I did return to my pre-pregnancy size by some miracle, however, would I really want to dress like I did when I was a 26-year-old bartender? I don’t know! Maybe I do. Because I keep trying to dress like a grown up and that’s pretty much what I keep coming back to. Remember I work from home, guys. You’re lucky I even wear pants.
So I’ve been buying one or two pairs of jeans at a time and wearing them until they disintegrate. The only thing standing between my inner thighs and the cold November air for the past couple of weeks has been a few worn out strands of stretch denim and I knew the situation was getting dire.
I looked at the skinny jean options at one major retailer when a salesperson asked if I needed any help.
“I see these are all low rise,” I said. “Do you have anything with a higher rise? Something that would contain a bit of a mom belly?”
“Oh. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this,” she said, “But have you tried the maternity jeans?”
Here’s a heads up for current and aspiring retail clerks: If you don’t think you should say something, don’t say it. I want some pants to contain three kids-worth of muffin top. I haven’t given up entirely. I’m not quite ready to live full-time in buffet pants that are designed to accommodate a whole other human. I bought nothing.
So after the magic of Santa in an office tower the other day, I managed to sneak away for few minutes of shopping. First, I wandered through the Sears women’s department because if I can’t wear pants designed for 14 year olds then I need to start dressing like I’m 57 years old instead. This is how my brain works.
I finally looked around and realized I was the only person in the department without snow white hair and made a break for it. I landed in H&M and sadly noted that all the jeans and pants on sale were “low rise.” I made my way to the jeans section, expectations held in check, when I saw them. “Skinny High Rise Jeans.” Cue the angels singing.
I snatched up a pair in washed out blue and another in faded black and hit the fitting room. The angels were in full-blown party mode by this point. Jeans that were high enough to hold me together, forgiving enough to flatter and stylish enough to make me feel good about myself.
They were $50 and the one of the few things not on sale that weekend. I bought two pairs anyway.
Here they are. The best mom jeans out there as determined by my unofficial survey of two or three retailers:
As pictured on the H&M website.
And here’s what the look like on a real person who has had three babies. (Midriff bared only to illustrate the rise. I’m not that delusional.)
Any other recommendations for post-baby jeans to share?
I dusted off the old black and white serving attire last night and worked a job as a cater waiter. Catering jobs are almost always way easier than working at an actual restaurant. There’s a lot of “hurry up and wait” down time and you don’t have to take orders or deal with money. This one, in particular, was just passing around trays of appetizers at an office holiday party. Still, I worried that maybe it had been too long since I wielded a tray.
But, nah, I still have it. In fact, it was a refreshing change of pace to work on something that was so divorced from actual day-to-day life. The rhythms of a proper servers pace, the pivots and the sideways steps all came back. I could still memorize a menus worth of food descriptions in five minutes flat and, most importantly, I could still read people. I knew who wanted to kibitz a little and who wanted me to blend in with the wall. I knew which people were vegetarians and which people were particularly hungry. I knew who was having a good time and who was hatching a business deal.
My body, however, reminded me this morning that it had indeed forgotten what serving was like. I woke up with stiff arms and legs and even abs. (I still have abs! Woot.) Remember, this job was a breeze, a walk in the park, a lark. Easy peasy! But the very act of moving around for five hours straight and holding a tray just so was enough to remind me just how out of shape I am. Pathetic, really.
And just like when I worked in restaurants full-time, I woke up today with no desire to cook or even put together a sandwich. So Mary and I picked up Irene from the school bus and went to Swiss Chalet for lunch instead. We had two bowls of their soup (which is full of pasta and chicken and veggies) between us and discussed important questions like, “Are ponies real?” Ponies are real, but My Little Ponies are not. It’s an important distinction.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming that was briefly interrupted by Attack of the Vomit-Spewing Zombies. My kids got sick, guys, and I couldn’t find time to write. But this is how you know this blog is for real: inconsistent quality and quantity of posts, blurry pictures of my kids and tea rings on your computer screen.
It started with a string of messages left both on the answering machine at home and on my cell phone’s voice mail. Well, I guess it really started with the text message I got from Ed, because who can be bothered to check voice messages anymore? And why is it that I never miss a call from some other guy’s collection agent, but the one time the school calls my phone goes into silent mode? But I digress. The messages (all of them) said that Colum had been throwing up in his classroom and asked that I bring him home.
So I wrestled the girls back into the coats and boots we just took off and went to get him. I marched right into the office, looked around, but couldn’t see him. “He’s out in the hallway,” the secretary said. And there he was, slumped over on a re-purposed church pew with an industrial-sized garbage can strategically placed within heaving distance.
Flashback to 1990! I was in the sixth grade and in the midst of ultra-serious, private Catholic school, mid-term exams. My teacher reluctantly sent me to the office to call my parents when I insisted that I was sick. Walking through the hall, I realized I wasn’t going to make it home. I wasn’t even going to make it to the nearest bathroom. I bee lined it for a garbage can, emptied the contents of my virus-riddled stomach and then continued to the office.
The secretary was wary. Was I really sick during the exam period? Wasn’t that just a little too convenient? Then she got called out into the hallway. “Rebecca, did you throw up in a garbage can?” she asked when she got back. I nodded and tried very hard to blend in with the office furniture. “Why didn’t you go to the bathroom?” She was relentless. “I, er, didn’t have time?”
And there I sat in a miserable heap until they were able to reach my dad (which was no small feat in the mesozoic pre-cell phone era) and he came to pick me up. But at least they knew I wasn’t faking.
My poor boy. The endless wait in an institutional corridor, the taste of your own vomit lingering in your mouth: I know it well. I collected him and his school bag while his teacher gave me instructions on laundering his coat and his uniform, letting him rest and giving him lots of fluid such as apple juice and chicken broth. I assume that’s because he thinks I am a teenaged mother who doesn’t know any better. It’s very flattering.
We went home to rest and while Colum was still sick, he didn’t vomit anymore. Irene was also under the weather but mostly managed to avoid throwing up. Mary, on the other hand, was in great spirits, had tons of energy and a ravenous appetite. She would demand snacks and run around and play and then calmly puke in the middle of the floor every couple hours. I won’t even tell you about how I let her fuss for a couple minutes at nap time only to discover she had “settled down for her nap” in a pool of her own vomit. For shame.
Pop quiz! How long does it take a family of five to get fed, dressed and out of the house on Saturday morning? Answer in the comments to win my undying gratitude because clearly I have no clue.
The plan was to be at the Eaton Centre for Story Time with Santa at noon and to then continue to the east end for two family gatherings. The kids would get to do the Santa thing and I would get some material for a story about the new mall Santa experience I was hoping to pitch for publication. Win, win. (And, secretly, I was hoping to have time for a little shopping too.) Extra winning.
We instead managed to pile into the car at twenty to twelve with no snacks, sippy cups, pjs to change into or even a spare diaper to speak of. I found street parking a couple blocks away from the mall and had just managed to unload all the children when Ed started yelling, “Everybody back in the car! GET IN THE CAR!!!” What the? “I swear to god,” I thought, “If this isn’t a parking spot then I can’t even tell anymore.”
The parking spot was totally legit, it turns out. Ed was just worried about the half dozen squad cars that had come to a squealing stop right beside our car and the armed police officers positioned around the jewelry store directly across the street from us. The kids were back in the car while Ed and I crouched down behind it like something out of Law and Order.
“So I can park here, right?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “I just didn’t want the kids running wild with this take down in progress.”
He had a point. But we loaded up the double stroller, locked the car and made a break for it anyway. We were there to see Santa, dammit, and I wasn’t about to let a little armed robbery get in my way. We tore along Queen Street and into the mall, various children hanging off the stroller or dragging along behind it.
“So where exactly is this thing?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you know where it is?”
Neither of us knew where it was, but we both thought that we probably knew where it might be. That’s just as good, right? It’s really not. After winding our way through crazy Black Friday-weekend crowds, nary a fat bearded man in sight, we wound up at Guest Services. From there we were directed to leave the mall altogether, enter into an adjoining building and then take an elevator to the 27th floor. This is not your childhood mall Santa experience, friends.
Half an hour late, we missed all of story time. We were, however, just in time for the entire forty-five minute wait to sit with Santa and snap a picture or two. Was it too late, I wondered, to just hunker down in the car amidst potential gunfire? Because Snakes on a Plane has nothing on the new psychological thriller I’m working on: Fifty Kids in an Office Tower.
Ah, it wasn’t that bad. There was a room with juice and cookies and then there was the main Santa in space-themed room. What’s that? Oh, my bad. It was supposed to be the north pole, not space. But, come on, you hang up silver pleather drapes all over the place and I’m not supposed to think I’m in space?
There were also giant walrus and polar bear-shaped, vinyl bean bag sort of things for lounging on. Of course, my kids immediately kicked off their shoes and started jumping on them like they were in a really icy, space-themed bouncy castle or something. They were the only ones bouncing out of control and I didn’t bother trying to stop them either.
But it was all worth it in the end for these faces.
Santa lectured them about getting along and made them promise not to argue. He didn’t ask them what they want for Christmas. Each kid received a nicely gift-wrapped book. It was the same book.
Note that we basically had a good time and everyone else in attendance seemed to be enjoying themselves. The people who were staffing the event were friendly and helpful. All snark and sarcasm in this post is a reflection of my own cynical nature and not a comment on this perfectly nice holiday activity.
I didn’t want to have to be the one to tell you this, but the parenting advice books and websites all lie. To be fair, they tend to run the spectrum from vague generalities to downright lies. Traditionally, parents are supposed to find this out for themselves the hard way. You are supposed to find yourself sprawled out on the floor outside your baby’s bedroom at 3:30am, tears streaked down your face, the sound of a disconsolate infant wailing in the background, while you whip that mother effing sleep training book against the far wall. That’s the way it’s done.
Lucky you for you, though, I am here to help. I can’t do anything about the baby sleep issue, silly; you just have to figure that one out for yourself. But I can tell you that all those articles and blogs and helpful friends who counsel you to “just include your children in the kitchen” can go to hell.
Cooking or baking can be okay as an activity in and of itself. Like, if you want to put aside a three-hour block of time to make 20-minute muffins with your three-year-old, that can be a fine way to kill an afternoon. I mean, it sure as hell beats making crafts or getting down on the ground and actually playing with them in my books.
But if you actually, say, just want to make lunch? “Omigod,” you’ll be thinking, “Can you please just go and sprinkle playdoh all over the living room carpet or take a bingo dabber to the wall or unravel a roll of toilet paper? Can you please just do something that will take less time and energy to deal with than this?”
I tell you this because I, too, listened to those so-called experts. Spurred on by my four-year-old daughter’s love for her play kitchen and an increasingly picky appetite, I encouraged her to help me. We went shopping together and painstakingly picked out ingredients. We wore aprons and I talked her through every step. She was in charge of putting vegetable peelings into the organic waste and chopped up veggies into the pot. She sprinkled in seasonings. She watched meal after meal bubble away on the stove. She oohed and ahhed at the final product. She sat down and, as often as not, declared it yucky. “I don’t like it,” she’d say. “But you helped me make it!” I’d say.
And then yesterday, I was trying to slap together some roast beef sandwiches for lunch and she pulled up her “special stool” (ie. the regular kitchen step stool) to help. Fantastic.
There were two pairs of sliced bread stacked side-by-side on a cutting board.
“Would you like mustard on your sandwich?” I asked.
“Yes, but not that SPICY mustard!”
“Okay, I have some regular yellow mustard here for you.”
I squeezed some mustard on the top slice of bread on the first stack.
“I don’t want mustard on the top of my sandwich!!”
“It’s not going to be the top, sweetheart. I’m going to use this bottom slice of bread on the top, see?”
“No, no, no, NO! NOOOOOO!!!! I won’t eat it! Never, never, never! I’m never going to eat lunch again!”
And that was just the mustard. Learn from my mistakes.
Well, let’s see. I caught up on some laundry and took the kids to the park and, oh yeah, this:
I hung out on the Jezebel home page Friday night and all of Saturday and it was awesome. And when I mean “I hung out,” I’m not just talking about my blog post. There were over 84,000 pageviews on that post last time I checked, but at least 75,000 of them were just me. Don’t worry, after the 11,713th time I stopped actually re-reading the post. I just wanted to see if it was still there because HOLY SHIT, RIGHT?
I was on cloud nine all day Saturday, cleaning out the fridge all the while rehearsing a fantasy Daily Show interview in my head. “Well, you see, Jon,” I said and reached way back to pull out the deep rectangular container, the one with the ice on top, “My period wasn’t always such an voluminous event.” I paused to hold my breath and pull open the lid. Fuzzy blue-green balls in an indeterminate soupy liquid shimmered under the pendant lights. “Still though,” I continued, flinging what I assumed was a low-grade biohazard into a flimsy plastic bag hanging from a cabinet, “I’ve never been especially good at containing the mess.” I cranked the hot water and tossed the empty container into the kitchen sink before reaching for the plastic bag of vegetable matter that was so beyond decomposition that the new life forms growing on it were well on their evolutionary way to taking over my household. “Let me tell you about the time I ran out of money on a three day bus ride out of San Francisco.”
I was a superstar on Saturday and no amount of vile and disgusting household drudgery was going to get me down.
Right, so by Sunday I was curled up in a ball and rocking back and forth in some corner of the basement. Because how the hell do you follow up a post of such epic proportions? All of sudden there were all these new eyes on my blog and all these expectations. And all I did all weekend was clean out my fridge and sneak out of four-year-old’s birthday party! I had nothing.
So let’s pretend this bullshit meta post about how I don’t know what story to tell doesn’t count. We’ll just skip the big expectation post and then it will be business as usual. Maybe I’ll try to make a pot roast or bake some freaking gingerbread later this week. That’ll be good for a laugh.
Just one last thing about the period post before I move on. A lot of people want to know why I didn’t use the diaper. It’s a good point and one I briefly considered. The answer is trifold. One, I was wearing jeggings and still clinging to some blood-stained shred of dignity. Two, I was also clinging to the hope that I might be able to procure an actual tampon fairly quickly. But mostly, duh, remember Mary’s birth story? I’ve already used that bit.
We basically swung into action then. I shoved a size-four Huggies diaper into my pants and called the midwife who said labour was likely to begin in a couple hours and that we didn’t need to forget about the possibility of a home birth just because we hadn’t gone shopping for supplies.
I’m trying to think of the perfect metaphor for that first post-baby period. It’s kind of like an avalanche, or a broken dam or like a gushing geyser except, you know, upside down. Oh, and except bloodier. Of course, that unstoppable torrent of blood is not rushing down a mountain side or up a river bank where you might be able to protect yourself with a wall of sand bags or, at the very least, flee the scene. No, it comes from within your body and threatens to ruin your underwear and drip down your legs and through the jeggings you put on even though you can’t wear a back up giant maxi pad in them because, dammit, you’ve had three kids and the stretchy material is flattering and you just thought you could get away with it, okay? Are you satisfied yet?!
I see now, too, that it gets worse with every baby. And I don’t know if there’s any science to back this up, but it feels like the longer you get to go without a period, the more the period gods curse you. I went 16 months without a period after my first baby, and my, oh my, was that first period bad. I only got an 8 month break after my second baby, but it was still just as bad. This time, though, I had 14 glorious, period-free months. You just know I was going to have to pay.
In fact, I was so sure I was going to have to pay that I’d been walking around with a box of tampons in my purse for three months. I put them there just before my trip to New York City in August and I am still gobsmacked that I didn’t start my period in the middle of the Martha Stewart keynote or while I was stranded in LaGuardia airport for hours on end. If I’d been on the flight ahead of mine, the one that was actually stranded on the tarmac for three solid hours, then I would have gotten my period. If I’d been stuck on a tarmac for three hours with my tampons packed in my checked luggage then I would have gotten it for sure.
But that didn’t happen. And then, two weeks later I thought I had the worst PMS in the history of womankind and was walking around in a hormone-induced rage for two days solid. I was sure it was coming this time. I mean, I’d been away from my baby for four days in New York. I had not been waking up in the middle of the night to express breast milk and I only pumped once on the last day I was gone. Then two weeks later I was so utterly engulfed in a fury that telemarketers were hanging up on me? It had to be, right? But nope. I guess it was just a bad mood.
This is all to say that I’d been expecting it. I’d been prepared for it, even. I walked around with tampons in my purse for three consecutive months and I remembered to stock up on panty liners. I am a grown, adult woman with three children and I was not going to let the unexpected arrival of a menstrual period get the better of me again. Nope. Not again. This time I was ready.
So when my period finally did arrive on Saturday morning, I didn’t panic. I groaned and complained, yes, but I didn’t panic. I went about my life, popping Advil and attending to my feminine hygiene as necessary. The children were a bit miffed by the sudden “Mommy needs privacy in the bathroom” rule, but whatever.
Then, on Sunday afternoon, I changed my tampon for the bazillionth time and took all three kids out to a family dance party at a local club while Ed stayed behind to do some work. It was loud and crowded and we were still getting our bearings at the edge of the dance floor when I felt it. It was like a sudden drop. My vagina was all, “Un-hunh, girlfriend. I don’t think so.” My vagina is very street. “Holding up an empty tampon is one thing,” my vagina continued, “But this is one saturated mother of a super plus o.b. tampon. This shit is heavy and I am too old and worn out to even bother.”
“Just keep it together for one more minute,” I hissed, doing a couple Kegels while I looked around the room frantically. (The Kegel thing, by the way, was the very essence of too little, too late.) I knew several families there but it was dark and loud and they had their own children to attend to. Still, I did try to abandon my children.
“Hey guys, Mommy just has to go to the bathroom, so why don’t you …”
“I have to go the bathroom!”
“Oh. Well … maybe just let Mommy and Mary go in first …”
” I have to GO PEE!!”
“You said the P word!”
“And if you guys can just wait here …”
“Me too! Me too! EMERGENCY!”
And that’s how I wound up in a three-stall bathroom with all of my children, a back-talking vagina and way-beyond-capacity tampon that was practically crowning.
I told the two bigger kids to go into a couple stalls and take care of business. They were on their own. I brought the walking baby into the handicap stall with me and assessed the situation. It was worse than I thought. We had breached the great panty divide and were well on our way to claiming victory over denim as well. I could hear the kids running around outside my stall doing who knows what. Mary kept trying to escape under the door. I knew I had to act fast. I reached for my purse.
The zippered compartment that had housed a box of tampons for three long months was open. There were also two empty ziplock bags that had been full of Halloween treats earlier that day. (Bribery doesn’t just happen at home, people. Be prepared.) I pushed past the ziplock bags, the travel pack of wipes, three diapers, one small picture book, a handful of crayons and my wallet and found the tampon box. Yessss. I pulled it out and the box was empty.
“NOOOOOOO!!!!!” my despair was audible.
I then continued to lament out loud as I rifled around in my bag for another few minutes. Maybe the tampons had just spilled in my purse. Maybe they were mistaken for candy at first, but then put back? Might there not be one solitary, little, applicator-less tampon hiding away in the crevice of my giant mom bag?! Please just let there be one!
Let the record show that I balled up a two-foot length of toilet paper, shoved it between my legs, pulled up my underwear and my jeggings, picked my baby up off the public bathroom floor and waddled out.
I was frantically messaging Ed, hoping that he could rush over with supplies from home. I got no response. I was pacing the bathroom, looking into the pleading eyes of my two children who just wanted to go out and join the dance party with their friends. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” I kept repeating it over and over again. I was actually pulling at my hair. A young twenty-something woman with no kids avoided eye contact and left the bathroom. I can’t blame her. Run while still can, lady.
I considered my options. I could hope the toilet paper would hold out. Yeah right. I could take all the kids with me and go home or to the store. But then we’d miss most of the event. I could man up and ask someone for a tampon. Okay, let’s go with that.
I walked out of the bathroom and saw the two organizers of the event talking to the bar staff. I tried to wait patiently for about 30 seconds. Then I tapped the one who is not pregnant on the arm. She obviously continued her conversation. I tapped her on the arm again because I was a crazed, bleeding woman who had lost all grasp of the basics of civilized behaviour. Finally (like a whole minute and a half) later she turned around and greeted me warmly like I was not practically foaming at the mouth. She didn’t have a tampon but offered to ask the bartender for me. I nodded. But seriously, when you are running an event with well over a hundred people in attendance what you really need is to attend to the minutiae of my fucking menstrual period. Laura, I owe you big time.
The bartender had the gall to serve the people who were waiting to pay her cash money for drinks before rushing off to the staff room to get me a tampon from her personal stash. (I so owe you, bartending lady.) Then a friend I hadn’t seen for a while came over to chat while I bored holes into the back of the bartenders head. Go get the tampon. If there are any dormant telekinetic abilities within me, they should have revealed themselves then. The same friend held Mary for me and kept an eye on the other two when I finally dashed to the bathroom with the tampon. We never did get to chat. I owe you, too, Rebecca.
Locked once again in the bathroom stall, I looked intently at the packaging and was relieved to see that it was an extra-ultra-super-duper-fat-as-all-get-out kind of tampon. God, I love bar staff. I took care of business and returned to fetch my children and to party with abandon.
Ed did make it out to the event, like, an hour later. He had tampons in his pocket that he found in the basement playroom. “So when you said you got your period yesterday,” he said, “did you mean your first period since Mary was born?”
YES. Yes, yes, yes. And this had better be my LAST first postpartum period, so help me god.
This post is part of Mom Central Canada blog tour for Natrel Baboo.
Baby Mary is 14 months old now which puts her well past baby food and on the verge of trading in her bottles for a steak knife. Part of that transition involves switching from breast milk or formula to cow’s milk. Or, better yet, introducing cow’s milk as a compliment to breast milk and a balanced diet.
I remember when Colum turned a year and I pretty much instantly started offering him cups of milk with every meal. Here was a baby who had only ever had breast milk or water to drink his entire life and now I was feeding him relatively large quantities of milk all at once. Looking back, I wouldn’t be surprised if the slow weight gain and loose bowel movements he experienced after his first birthday were related to that. It’s quite possible he had some difficulty properly digesting the milk protein.
I introduced milk a little more gradually with Irene and didn’t have any problems (though she was skinny too) and planned to do the same with Mary. By the time she was 13 months, however, I noticed the same loose stool as Colum had and wondered if it was related to the newly introduced cow’s milk or a recent virus or both.
So it was pretty perfect timing when Mom Central Canada offered me the chance to try out a new transitional milk by Natrel. Natrel Baboo is milk that has been altered to meet the needs of toddlers between 12 and 14 months. It has less protein than regular cow’s milk (woot!), more milk fat and added omega-3 and vitamin C. Head over to their website for even more detailed information about the product.
After a couple days of Baboo in her sippy cup (in addition to breastfeeding and a healthy diet), Mary’s bowel movements returned to being well-formed and regular. Of course, she may have just been getting over a virus that had caused some digestive upset. It’s hard to tell.
I do know that she really enjoyed drinking the Baboo and that I really liked the convenience of the little tetra pak, juice box-like containers it came in. (It’s also available in one litre tetra paks.) They have a shelf-life of four months and do not need to be refrigerated. How great is that for when you’re on the road?
I won’t likely replace her homo milk completely with Natrel Baboo (if only because the homo is so good in my coffee!) I will keep a few of the little tetra paks on hand for trips and outings and for when she’s sick and her digestive system isn’t at its best.
I was quite pleasantly surprised by how useful this product really is. And good news! You can try out a free sample yourself by heading over to their Facebook page right now: https://www.facebook.com/natrelbaboo
Disclosure – I am participating in the Baboo Blog Tour by Mom Central Canada on behalf of Natrel. I received compensation as a thank you for participating and for sharing my honest opinion. The opinions on this blog are my own.
