Exercise and not enough sleep and wine out with friends last night makes for a tired mama today. Whew. I’ve been dragging all day.

Thankfully, my girls decided to have a dance party tonight. This is truly one of my favorite things. I love watching them dance.

They were really feeling it tonight.

Their enthusiasm is utterly contagious, and it’s really impossible to not dance with them when they’re feeling it, tired or not.

So we danced.

We busted out our ribbons and twirled and stomped in time.

It brings such joy to my heart that my girls love music and dancing. They are totally un-self-conscious and are so happy to just move to the beat.

Now I’m even more tired, but savoring the evening of laughter and fun with my girls.

Today I wrote a guest post for a lovely blog, 2dayswoman. 2dayswoman is wonderfully written by Raquel, and is focused on providing information, inspiration, and support for women all over the world (Raquel is in New Zealand!). Raquel was kind enough to feature my post in her blog’s section on marriage.

The guest post is called 11 Strategies to Ditch the Anger and Love Your Husband. It a bit different than what I usually write here. I put on my “Couple’s Therapist Cap” for this one, inspired by this guy:

Enjoy.

When I was pregnant with Miss, I read everything I could get my hands on about being pregnant, labor and delivery, taking care of a baby, the necessary gear to take care of a baby, and so on. I joined a support group for breastfeeding moms before she was even born. I extensively researched every baby item I bought, learned all about making my own baby food (bought several “cook books” for this in fact), and obsessed over having the perfect nursery. I had waited a long time to have a baby (I was almost 33 when Miss was born), and I was kind of a fanatic about wanting to do it right.

Then she was born, (after a labor and delivery in which nothing went as I had so carefully planned for it to) and I was a hot mess of anxiety and worry. I got nervous about everything when we brought her home from the hospital. My husband set her car seat on the counter and I freaked out. What if she falls?? I set it on the floor and worried, what if the dogs lick her?

I worried all the time and went through all sorts of possible catastrophes in my head and what I would do to minimize harm to her if they occurred. For example, if I fell down the stairs while holding her, I would simply throw my own body under hers so she would not hit the floor and I would not land on top of her. Seriously. I visualized this every time I walked down the stairs while holding her. Or up the stairs. Or near the stairs.

I was never one to worry before she was born. Afterwards, I could not seem to stop.

As she grew, I continued to worry and obsess. I never put her on the floor without a blanket under her. I didn’t want her playing with plastic toys. I never let her wear socks for nap time in case she took one off while out of my sight and shoved it in her mouth and suffocated (yes, really).

I didn’t let her eat anything crunchy until she was 2. Once when she was about 14 months old, my nephew tried to give her a little pretzel stick at snack time (while I was anxiously discussing with my sister-in-law whether it was okay for her to have yogurt made with skim instead of whole milk; I was that crazy). I screeched, “Noooo!” and lunged across the kitchen to prevent him from handing it to her. I’m sure I scared the crap out of the poor little guy. I don’t even know what I thought would happen if he gave it to her. She’d poke her eye out? Choke on the skinny little thing? Who knows? I was utterly insane in those early days.

I could go on to list all sorts of crazy first-child moments like this. But I won’t (any more than I already have). Because eventually I started to relax a bit. I had another baby, and I began to lighten up.  I had to.

Happily, though some of my decrease in anxiety came from necessity once Lass was born, much of it came from a realization that I sort of knew what I was doing. See, when Miss was a baby, I felt totally clueless. I always doubted myself. I had read so much about every little thing that I was supposed to do, that I was nearly paralyzed in the face of the real life decisions that needed to be made. Okay, not quite paralyzed, though it sure did feel that way sometimes. But after going through that trial by fire, I felt so much less worried when I had to do it all again with Lass.

With Miss, I worried about whether she was getting the right amount of sleep, at the right times, in the right places. Was she on a good schedule? Was I ruining her sleep forever by letting her nap in her bouncy seat? Was she becoming horribly spoiled because she woke often at night wanting to eat, so I nursed her, even after she was four months old and my pediatrician told me she should be able to make it through the night?

With Lass, if she slept, it was great. She napped in her swing for months, and I didn’t care. Well, I cared a little. I still worried a little bit that if I let her sleep there for too long she’d never be able to sleep in her bed. But more important to me was that she was sleeping.

I was learning to just do what worked and worry about the rest later.

Everything did fall into place too. It worked out just fine. I realized that mistakes are not catastrophes and it all turns out okay in the end.

When Sis was born, even more of my uptightness melted away. These days, I really don’t worry about where she sleeps as long as she does it at the same time her sisters do for afternoon naps.

I am no longer worried about feedings. I used to try to nurse Miss and Lass in private whenever possible. Now I nurse Sis while walking around the state fair, the farmer’s market, Target, wherever. With two other small children, I can’t afford to be uptight about where I nurse. In fact, much of the time I can’t even afford to be sitting down while I feed Sis. Quite often I have to do other things simultaneously, like making sandwiches for her screaming hungry sisters, coloring, or adjusting dress up outfits.

I’ve learned that all the things I thought were so stressful and anxiety provoking when Miss was an infant are child’s play compared to trying to figure out the best way to discipline a preschooler. That’s not to say that the anxiety I had with one baby was less real or less important than what I sometimes struggle with now. It was just different. I’ve changed as a mom. I used to feel worried all the time. Now I have less worry and more frustration and fatigue and doubt. So many things that I used to fret endlessly about, I now consider to be no big deal. I find myself worrying now about character development and modeling good behavior and maintaining connectedness with my kids in spite of sometimes temporarily losing my sanity.

I still worry about my girls. I know that I always will (truth is, I still sometimes visualize throwing myself under Sis if I happen to fall on the stairs while holding her).

That worry will always be changing to fit the developmental stages of my kids and myself as a mother.

Motherhood is an ever-evolving state of being.

They grow, and I grow. I do my best to make the most of where I find myself each day.

I haven’t been posting much this week. I was furiously reading “I, Claudius” for a book club Thursday. And I was working on getting my homeschooling area in order.

Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve been up to this week:

One girl really got into watching a deer in our backyard.

One girl got into a big girl bed.

One girl got into everything.

We planted herbs with Daddy,

had a successful trip to the library,

and went to Open Gym.

I made good progress on our homeschooling area (that brown shelf was $10 on Craigslist!).

It’s not quite done, but getting there.

And we have been having lots of fun doing school at home. So much fun in fact, that Miss has asked several times this week to do school or to continue doing school after I’ve told them we were done with our work and they could go play. I think that’s a good sign.

Today we did our mini marshmallow “sculptures.”

Now, I know it looks like they were diligently working on creating masterpieces, but the only “sculpture” we actually ended up with is the small one on the table by Miss below.

Mostly they just ate the marshmallows. At least Lass did stick some of her marshmallows onto a toothpick before eating them.

Oh well. It was fun anyway.

I have some cool blogging opportunities coming up, including a guest post on 2dayswoman I think next week, and one on Hip Homeschool Moms at the start of March.

“I, Claudius” is done. I’ll be back to posting here more regularly.

medium from Motherhood Miscellany on Vimeo.

I have never been a big fan of Play Doh. It’s just not my favorite thing.

My girls, however, love it. Miss was asking to play with it first thing this morning.

So I got it out and searched deep within myself to find some Play Doh love.

Much to my surprise, I did find some appreciation.

In fact, I decided that life is a lot like playing with Play Doh. Really.

Check this out:

1. Sometimes it’s messy. But you can’t get caught up in the messiness or you miss out on the fun. When it’s time to clean up, clean up. Until then, just enjoy the process.

2. Sometimes things just get all mixed up and you can’t seem to separate them again. Roll with it. It’ll all work out.

3. Sometimes people will smash your stuff. You might scream and/or cry for a bit. But then you pull it together and make something even better.

4. And finally, when life hands you a blob of smelly crap, make it into a “delicious cake.”

Voila.

Philosphy of life in a can of Play Doh.

I am a total city girl. I grew up in a suburb of Detroit. You don’t get much more “city” than that.

In the early years of our relationship, my husband called me “City Mouse.” He, of course, was my “Country Mouse” counterpart, having grown up in a fairly rural town in Iowa.

I went camping frequently as a kid, learned to shoot a bow and a gun, and ate venison rather than beef through most of my childhood, so I have a tiny bit of “country” in me. But for the most part, I’m not terribly wise to the ways of the world as far as gardening, farming, and animal habits go.

When I first started going to the Farm with my husband, we’d go on “treasure hunts” with his niece and nephews, and I was often at least excited about the cool stuff we would find in the woods as the kids were. Okay, I still am, but now it’s mostly because I’m excited about my own kids seeing new things…

Anyway, all this about my lack of country sophistication is to lead up to a story about an opossum. As an aside, and to further illustrate my point, I have been calling these animals “possums” and initially started typing this post with that in the title, until I decided to double check my accuracy and learned that possums are a different species of marsupials from Australia. This is an opossum:

Good to know. Back to my story.

Shortly before my husband and I got married, some thugs in our neighborhood shot at our house. This shooting occurred on a Tuesday, and I remember hearing the shots, but didn’t realize what it was. I surely didn’t realize that bullets had  been shot at my home.

The following weekend my hubby had to work out of town. While I was home alone, I decided to do some cleaning. As I was dusting my dining room, I happened to notice what looked like a small hole, high in the front wall of our house. The wheels started turning in my head, and I looked across to the opposite wall of the dining room. I saw a chip in the paint, where whatever had come through the front wall had continued with enough velocity to cross the room and chip the paint on the other wall. My city-girl brain started making connections and I dropped to the floor, where I quickly found a .22 slug. I then remembered seeing a puzzling hole in the door of the closet in our master bathroom a few days before. I raced up the stairs, pulled aside a small shelf holding towels, and saw another hole in the front wall of our master bathroom.

Two bullets had shot through the front of our house. Holy crap.

Needless to say, I kind of freaked out. I was extremely nervous about spending the rest of the weekend home alone. Though my rational brain realized that the shots had been fired several days before and nothing else had happened since, I was still on high alert. By the time it was dark outside, I had become pretty paranoid.

Then my dogs wanted to go outside. I let them out in the backyard, almost immediately calling them to come back in. I was so jittery I didn’t want them out of the house.

Then they started acting strange, like they had found something super awesome and were not planning to come back in the house any time soon. I thought it must be a dead animal of some sort, and I knew that if I didn’t go out and physically drag my dogs away from said animal carcass, they would never come back inside, and would (of course) end up being shot if I left them outside for one more minute.

So, though I was terrified of being shot myself, I marched outside with a garbage bag in hand to dispose of whatever animal parts I might find. To my dismay, I found an opossum who looked only mostly dead. I was horrified that my dog (who had never, ever come even close to catching and killing another animal, BTW) had attacked this thing and nearly killed it on the very day that I was afraid to be in my yard because I just knew someone was waiting to shoot at me again any minute.

In my near-panicked state, I decided that I must get rid of the opossum, who was surely in its death throes and wouldn’t make it much longer anyway after the deadly attack by my oh-so-wimpy dog. So I quickly pulled my dog off the suffering marsupial, scooped it up in the garbage bag, and proceeded to whack the bag onto the ground several times so that the dying animal would just go ahead and die and not suffer needlessly any longer.

I then threw the bag into the garbage, hustled my dogs into our bullet-ridden house, and proceeded to call my Dad.

Me: “Dad! There was this possum, and Jonah attacked it, and it was almost dead, so I put it in a trash bag and whacked it on the ground a bunch of times. Do-you-think-it’s-dead-because-I-don’t-want-to-leave-it-to-suffocate-in-a-plastic-bag-if-it’s-not-dead??”

Dad: “Um, do you think maybe it was playing possum?”

Me: “Oh crap.”

So I risked my life again to go back outside and dump over my trash bin (it was empty other than the bag with the living animal in it) so the opossum could get out. I probably should have pulled the bag out and untwisted it, but once I realized that I was probably dealing with a fully-alive-and-not-at-all-mostly-dead-opossum, I wasn’t going anywhere near that thing.

In the morning I peeked my head outside and saw that, in fact, the trash bag was empty and the opossum had run off, hopefully only slightly dazed from his nightmare experience with the crazy lady in the gun-shot house.

I haven’t had any experiences with opossums since that day, until yesterday.

Yesterday, while reading a book with Miss, she looked up and saw an opossum through our window. He was right up on our deck eating some bread I had thrown outside hoping to lure some squirrels up on the deck so the girls could watch them.

An opossum was much more cool. AND, this wasn’t just any opossum. This was an opossum with just a stump for a tail and only three legs.

When Miss asked me why he was missing one of his legs, my City Mouse-ness reared its head again and I said, “I’m not sure, maybe it got into a fight with another animal.” Later, my husband pointed out that it had probably been caught in a trap and chewed its own leg off. Right. Because we don’t really have any savage and enormous carnivores roaming our little neighborhood that would be capable of chomping off an opossum leg in one bite, while simultaneously leaving the rest of the little guy to wander around alive on his three remaining legs. Duh. And ew.

Poor little thing was so hungry (and blind) that it came right up to our back door looking for more bread.

Miss thought it was very cool, having never seen an opossum before. She wanted to open the door. I, however, wasn’t really up for another up close and personal opossum encounter. I might never be ready for that.

Seeing this little guy naturally reminded me of my previous ignorance in dealing with that opossum almost five years ago. I got a good laugh out of remembering my opossum story.

Now Miss has an opossum story of her own. She watched him until he hobbled away and asked if we could put out more bread so he would come back. We did, and today she scared away a squirrel who was trying to eat it, “To save it for the opossum.”

Last night I asked her, as I do every night, what her favorite part of the day was. She said, “Watching the opossum.”