DotMoms

A place for us

By Jessamyn

We are trying to buy a home in Chicago. (We have never owned a home; we currently rent an apartment.)   

We have seen quite a few condos by now, and most of them aren't what we're looking for. Many are tiny or dirty or ugly. Some are in bad or faraway neighborhoods. Some are beautiful but out of our price range (our realtor doesn't take us to those, but we can't help ourselves from looking at listings online). Some are nowhere near an el stop, or don't allow dogs, or have no parking. Some are OK, but nothing special, and we have started asking ourselves, sadly, is special too much to ask? 

There was the second place we looked at, which we loved and were going to make an offer on, only to discover that the condo board doesn't allow dogs over 40 pounds (ours weighs about 65). 

There was the place we saw, weeks later, that we had decided to settle for even though we didn't love it, because it had three bedrooms and parking and was in an OK neighborhood, and we could fix it up (we started researching the cost of renovating kitchens and bathrooms). Then we found out that the condo association had zero dollars in reserve to pay for any repairs or maintenance. 

There was the place we liked so much that I said "Wow" upon first entering it, so much that we had our realtor put together an offer less than an hour after walking through the door. We ended up in a three-day bidding war with several other potential buyers, which culminated in our offer finally being accepted (cue much rejoicing). A half an hour later, the offer was withdrawn. (What?) 

Each of these times (plus a few others now), we have gotten our hopes up. We have started discussing which room will be Katie's, which will be ours. Where will guests sleep? Will we need a sleeper sofa, or will we have room for a guest bed? What colors of paint will look good in the space? What will our new neighborhood be like? 

Each time, when we find out that our plans were all for nothing and that we have to start looking again, our hopes come crashing down to earth and shatter into pieces on the sidewalk. It takes a lot of energy to put them back together again, but we do. It's a roller coaster ride, except a lot less fun.

I'm sure that when and if we do end up buying a home, all of this frustration will be forgotten. But for now, we are tired and stressed and emotionally overwrought. We are wondering if we will ever find the right place. The other night, past my bedtime, I was staring sleepily at the computer, scrolling through new listings, and I caught myself starting to hum "Somewhere" from "West Side Story," and I laughed at myself a little. "There's a place for us...somewhere a place for us..."

I really hope it's true.

Back to (financial) reality

By Kris

Last year, four years after having becoming single-income parents, my husband and I hit the financial wall. Meaning? We couldn't pay our bills.

Even though our income dropped 50 percent when I quit my job, our lifestyle didn't change much at first. We went out to eat often. We bought truckloads of baby stuff. My son went to pricey infant music classes, as well as the YMCA for swimming. When I got pregnant with my second child 10 months later, I even hired a housecleaner for a while. Like idiots, we were living large.

Then we suffered a major financial blow: a car accident. We owned two cars, but already needed to replace one. Our good car got totaled, and suddenly, we needed to buy two cars.

And we needed help. Brian broke a vertebrae in the accident, and I got severe whiplash, leaving him in a back brace and me with debilitating pain. Doctors told us not to lift more than eight pounds, a joke with children ages three months and 2 at home. We hired a babysitter for nine hours a week.

For a while, this seemed to work. But last May, I lost the job that funded our babysitter. Still shaken from my recent miscarriage, we decided to keep the babysitter for the summer anyway, until I figured out what to do next.

That's when Brian started coming out of the office at night with tousled hair and panicked eyes, saying things like, "We have to stop spending money!" and "We are hemorrhaging financially!" The hemorrhage continued until the fall and landed us where we are now: several thousand dollars in debt.

We always used credit cards for everything, from groceries to dining out, clothes shopping to home improvements and, my big weakness, Target. Even when we paid the balance in full, we spent money with no gravitational pull to our bottom line. I floated about the grocery store, buying without a coupon or a sale flyer in sight. When I wanted a book or found treasures at Target, I indulged. Hey, it was only $20!

But while Brian's hair grayed and our financial goals became unattainable fantasies, we started watching "The Suze Orman Show." Her eyes freak me out, but she taught me that I need my own money and a budget for groceries and household items. So I opened a separate checking account and started taking a weekly allowance. I also started a fund for home improvements, our major financial sinkhole.

Now that I have my own money, I can save and spend without guilt. The babysitter is long gone. I cut coupons and shop sales, spending a lot less a month on food. We eat out twice a month, not twice a week. We're not perfect, but we're better.

Bottom line? We've snapped back to reality. And once again, I know we can do anything we set our mind to.

Digging out of the hole

By Emily

Everyone has days in their life that they categorize as "best days." I have a new one to add to my list: the day I turned in my notice at work.

I went back to work in November and quickly realized it wasn't the right thing for our family at this time. However, as an adult, it's sometimes hard to correct a bad decision quickly.

Working the two weeks of my notice were very hard. I was ready to leave, and the days just seemed to drag on endlessly. At 5 p.m. last Friday, I started packing my things and getting ready to leave. My boss made her final plea and I told everyone good-bye. The minute I stepped out the door, a huge weight seemed to lift from me. I had no regrets, and I knew this was the right decision.

I'm now back in the stay-at-home mom category and couldn't be happier to be there. I know I will eventually go back to work, but it will be more thought-out and not something I jump into blindly. It will work for the entire family, not just for me.

Under the messy big top

By Kelly

Life is pushing me into some radical changes, ones that I am pushing back against with every fiber of my being. The impetus for the change is that I'm in the process of putting together a business plan for starting an organic market gardening enterprise. As I'm making my lists, I can see that I will fail if I haven't learned how to manage my regular household duties more effectively.

I need to help my whole family learn to operate like a finely tuned, well-oiled machine. Right now we're operating like a 50-year-old bicycle that's been left out in the rain for the better part of its life, ridden by a drunk, and blind, one-legged clown.

I envy the Type A people who flow from one thing to the next, complete projects, keep their floors clean, their laundry washed, folded, hung, and put away, and even manage to exercise regularly. Their tags are tucked in to the necks of their shirts. Ours never are. Their recycling gets brought to the drop-off center weekly. Ours has been piling up in the garage for 14 months.

How do they do it? I'm guessing they schedule the time, and live by their schedule.

Well, I'm ready for some financial success, and to earn it by doing something that I love, so we're going to try schedules. I have never lived my life with a rigid template to follow, which is why I'm often running late, or missing important materials. I see the same thing happening with Tyler, and I see that yes, his bedroom is trashed, just like my desk, and a debris field follows him wherever he goes, just like it does me. Obviously, I've passed on my counterproductive habits. It's up to me to set us straight.

Maybe it's not too late for us, and with some strict, self-imposed guidelines we can learn some better living habits.

We can take off our clown suits, put the old bicycle on the scrap heap, and retire from the three-ring circus that is our current life.

Any advice?

Farewell, my dear equine...

By Christine

I am struggling with loss. Last week, my daughter lost her favorite stuffed animal, Mormie. It was a black horse with a white star on its forehead, and she loved him so much you could feel the animal vibrate. She carried it everywhere she went. In fact, the horse had nine lives and has prompted me, on occasion, to write about the loss and remarkable recovery of an animal determined to see the world. He's been left in highway rest stops, supermarkets, and restaurants. No matter where he was left, we always managed to find him.

A surefire way to lose your favorite toy is to leave it in an airport bathroom, which is what my daughter did. We had just arrived in Fuerteventura, one of seven Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa. Giddy with our impending week's vacation, I didn't pay attention when my daughter and I went to the bathroom. One minute, Mormie was dancing on her head at the baggage claim area, the next we were searching high and low for him in our hotel room. Mormie was gone.

My husband and I went to great lengths to try to retrieve Mormie. I even begged a security guard to let me into a prohibited area of the airport to take a peek myself. Around every corner, I thought I heard the gallop of his soft hooves. It was not meant to be.

To heal from the experience, I bought my daughter another stuffed animal at the airport upon our departure home. With a tear in my eye, I listened to my daughter tell me it was going to all right. Mormie would forever be in her heart, even if he was no longer with us. In that moment, my 5-year-old daughter was more mature than I.

So why am I so sad?

40 by 40

By Julie

Just after I turned 39, I began making a list of 40 things I wanted to do before I turned 40.

It's the kind of list I'd make if I found out I was dying. In a way I felt that a part of me was -- the youthful part that thought anything was possible if I wanted it badly enough and worked hard enough.

In a burst of optimism before giving up on my fantasies, I started a list that combined the practical and the impractical:

1. Create a last will and testament.
2. Wear a piece of really expensive jewelry.
3. Have my first mammogram.
4. See the place discovered by my son Colter's namesake.
5. Start playing guitar and piano again.
6. Buy a house.
7. Take Colter to Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.
8. Thank my family for their love and support through the years.
9. Hold my dad's hand one more time.
10. Meet someone famous I admire James Taylor.

That last one is definitely fantasy. But I have accomplished a few things on the list. I did have a mammogram and buy a house. We started to plan a trip to see Colter's Hell for my birthday but realized it would be more of an adventure than we wanted.

As the months went by and I crept closer to "middle age," I discovered that there was both too much I wanted to add to the list and too little. It became impossible to complete the list, let alone accomplish everything on it.

I began to feel weighed down by my lack of dreams, desperate to understand whether I was lacking ambition or imagination.

Then someone suggested to me that I reverse the list-making.

I'm doing my house a favor

By Jennifer

Picture this. It's raining. Kate is sick and staying home from school. The twins are... the twins. WE CANNOT GO OUTSIDE. My throat has been sore for 3 weeks, which I've now self-diagnosed as every major disease known to man, and my faithful sitter called to tell me that her father and brother were both ill and she'd be leaving town for a couple of WEEKS. 

So, Mother's Day Out is once again going to become a part of my world. Oh how I've missed my dear friend Mother's Day Out. With such a gentle name how could you not miss it? When Kate went to pre-K this fall, it became our first year without a child at Mother's Day Out (MDO) and I really did miss that place. It's nestled in a little Methodist church on our street and it smells of poo-poo and wet wipes. The girls should be right at home.

There are eight babies in the baby room at MDO and two middle-aged ladies who care for them like no stressed-out, overtired mother ever could. They go for rides in the Stroller of Doom, so named by my husband because it usually contains seven or eight crying and/or sniffling toddlers in it who look like they're being hauled off to market. It's great.

There's a large grassy yard with trees and toys and swings and slides. They have snacks and cribs for the babies to sleep in. They play games -- other than "Put The Whole Roll Of Toilet Paper in The Toilet and Then Play With The Wet Roll on The Rug" -- and make crafts -- crafts other than "Whole Raisin Diapers."

All that and more can be mine for one low monthly fee that is way cheaper than my faithful sitter. It's great.

The kids will be sad, at first, to go and I'm trying not to beat myself up.

The house needs a break from the destruction. It told me so, and I agreed.

Going analog

By Betsy

I'm definitely a creature of the digital age -- I work, play and live online, for starters, and have eagerly adopted technologies that makes our lives much easier, from TiVo to a cell phone for my 11-year-old son Alex to a programmable coffee maker. 

And my kids? They're digital kids, to be sure. We've gaming systems and e-mail addresses galore. My son is an IM maniac, knows every feature on our wireless house phone (including the speaker option, sigh) and regular commenter on my own personal blog. And my 6-year old Zoe? She's already a master of the universal remote, especially when she wants to program TiVo shows to record later (from a pre-approved list, of course). 

Which made last weekend's preferred Sunday activity so intriguing, not to mention atypical.

It started when Zoe asked me to play Old Maid with her after a leisurely Sunday breakfast. And after negotiations that included scheduled laundry breaks and a promised end time, she proceeded to beat me soundly at least three times.

Her resulting shrieks of glee drew her brother away from his GameCube in the other room. After watching for a few minutes, he then threw out a challenge of his own.  "Hey, does anyone want to play Yahtzee?" 

Out came the Yahtzee game. And Alex and I teamed up to help walk first-time Yahtzee player Zoe through the game's intricacies, whooping it up when she finally got her first five-of-a-kind. 

From there? It was on to Scrabble.

By the end of the day, we'd had an amazingly relaxing time together. And while I redeemed my poor Old Maid showing by winning both the Yahtzee and Scrabble games, I'd argue that we all won here in the end.

See, the eventual outcome -- who won, who didn't -- was overshadowed by the fact that I got to watch two normally-contentious kids huddle together over a row of letters while Alex patiently walked Zoe through her word options. And my son, Mr. "it's the letter of the law that matters most, Mooooom"? He benevolently waived some Yahtzee rules in order to let his smaller sister feel better about the game in the end. And we all laughed uproariously at some of Zoe's Scrabble word choices -- she'd triumphantly spell out a word on her own that we'd not realized she had in her vocabulary.   

Hmmmm... maybe we need to 'go analog' more often.

Snow joke

By Terry

As I do every year around this time, I have left the relentless snowbound confines of my home in Connecticut for a week in the warm and loving embrace of my mother's house in Florida. It's great. I understand that we're on vacation here, and that this isn't real life, and that swimming, shopping, and eating in restaurants are simply not as taxing as packing lunches, carpooling, or the drudgery that is forcing a reluctant child to do her homework. Nonetheless, in only three days, this much has become unavoidably obvious to me once again: It is empirically easier to deal with the logistics of children in warm weather than it is in the middle of a New England winter.

My friends and co-residents of the Northern states, our Southern sisters have been keeping a secret, and I'm going to let you in on it. Remember yesterday, when it was time to take your 3-year-old with you to the grocery store, and you put him in his pants and his T-shirt and his sweatshirt and his socks and his snow boots and his parka and his boots and his hat? Remember how it took eight minutes to locate his second mitten, stuffed in between the sofa cushions? Remember how he cried because he didn't want to wear them, and you more or less had to sit on him and put them on with duct tape because it was twelve degrees outside and his hands were already red and chapped from sucking his thumbs in the howling winter wind? Remember how you cursed because you forgot your gloves in the house and the steering wheel was so cold that it hurt to touch it? 

Keep all that in mind as I tell you how your best friend in Miami took her 3-year-old to the store: She put him in a pair of shorts, a tank top, and a pair of Tevas, opened the sunroof on her car, and headed out. Does that sound fair to you? Because it doesn't to me!

So, in the spirits both of fair play and of WifeSwap, I'm going to propose a new arrangement, a kind of antebelleum exchange program. I think it would be only fair if the East Coast women who live south of, say, Nashville, found pen pals north of, say, Baltimore. (Anyone in between is in kind of a neither-North-nor-South no-woman's-land and can just suck it up when it snows every four years and chalk it up to novelty, most of the West Coast doesn't get enough snow to participate in this plan, and I don't know enough about the geography in the middle to propose boundaries, so you all are on your own.) Then, once a year, everyone trades houses with her pen pal for one week. We'll take care of each other's houses and children so no one comes home to a mess, and the kids won't fall behind in school.

The moms from the snow states will get the break they desperately need and deserve. They'll dress light, barbecue, and feel the sun on their faces. And the moms from the sun states? I don't know… maybe they'll discover their Inner Snowboarders. Or maybe they'll think shoveling snow is fun! Or maybe they'll find evenings huddled around the fire with cocoa kind of sweet and fun and quaint. They are. For a week.