Dreaded Monday mornings

January 14, 2013Leave a comment

I really think there should be a two-hour delay every Monday morning. We are never prepared for Monday morning. You’d think we partied all weekend by the way we sluggishly rise and mope around the halls looking like we just lost our favorite puppy. And god help the one that actually tries to be upbeat.

“Hey there sourpuss! Put a smile on your face!”

“Ahhh! Get away from me!”
“Stoooooop. Ugh!”

Or just the dreaded stare of evil. It’s safer to just be quiet and move on. Get the day started in silence.

We have gymnastics on Monday nights now so the day ends on a much more lively note. There are smiles and pleasant conversation and even wild laughter as they exit the car and head to class.

So, on second thought, maybe we just need to sleep through Monday mornings and afternoons and start the week at 6pm with gymnastics and smiles.

Surviving the dentist

January 11, 2013January 11, 2013Leave a comment

Jon and I just experienced one of the most disturbing incidents in our parenthood.

Mario getting a cavity filled.

Horrid and nightmarish.

This is Mario pre-filling.

Sweet, charming, calm.

Even if I could have gotten a picture of Mario during the procedure, I would not post it. People would believe that he was being tortured. He pretty much psyched himself out as soon as the dentist walked in the room. He looked like he was facing the firing squad. I just wanted to wrap him up in my arms and shoot out of the office.

The dentist began by looking into Mario’s mouth with the typical little instrument that has a mirror at the end. Mario cried and would not open his mouth more than a grimace. And it went downhill from there. We had to hold him down for the numbing gel and the shot took him over the edge. Screams of pain, giant tears that could have filled a bucket, hyperventilation.

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!”

We stopped. I held him. He begged to leave.

“I can’t take this anymore! I can’t do it anymore!”

More soothing from me and Jon. As soon as we got him to lay down again, he wailed and begged to tell me “one more thing.” By the time the dentist started drilling, the novocaine had worn off and when the doctor drilled, Mario writhed in pain.

We went through the process again with the same crying and soothing and hyperventilating and begging until the numbness settled in. Mario sat fairly still as the dentist finished the drilling and seal clenching my hands and asking “are we done?” every three seconds.

When we left, I felt like I had ran a marathon. Jon was even worn down. Emotional trauma. Mario would only get a picture with me and when I smiled he stopped me. “You can’t smile, mom. This was not fun.”

Grandma Lolo called as we were heading out and told him he earned his $20. She had promised him that if he acted brave through the process. Not quite sure we’d call it “brave” but he got the filling and reached the end goal… Kicking and Screaming.

Jon took him to Target to get a Wii game. He called me when they got home and reported that Mario was back to Mario again – playing Wii and laughing. Glad he’s back to normal but I am still recovering!

Serious lesson learned for all: Brush your teeth after every meal! I think Mario may listen after today.

They’re back

January 8, 2013January 8, 2013Leave a comment

Three days of a quiet, peaceful home seem like a galaxy away. The munchballs returned home yesterday and set the house ablaze with commotion and loudness and activity. We had our first Wendy’s gym session for the Winter – we haven’t been to the gym for a year and a half. The kids loved it. Mario directed all of the boys around the equipment giving them advice on how to do cartwheels and how to balance on the beams. Ri listened intently to her instructor – she’s like her dad – it will take her a few sessions before she opens up to her classmates.

We got home and ate dinner. Maria has gotten into the phrase “no offense.” At dinner, she must have said “No offense, dad, but…” five times. Mario even chimed in at one of her final comments saying “I knew you’d say “no offense, Ri” and raised his fingers to do the block quote sign.

These two munches keep us laughing but I am keeping with my promise to institute a Quiet Zone in the house for an hour each night. It’s a lot easier for Ri than Mario. Is it because he’s 5, a boy, or got too much of his mom’s crazy energy?!

Fun at the farm and quiet in the city

January 6, 2013January 6, 2013Leave a comment

Ri and Mario went to Peepaw’s and Mama Meg’s house on Friday afternoon and spent the weekend with them. As a result, Jon and I had the entire weekend to ourselves, which always feels like we are in an alternate universe. We went out to Polaris Mall this morning to fix my phone at the Apple store (and left right after the Apple store – we couldn’t get out of the mall quick enough). On the way home, we picked up Jersey Mike’s for lunch and as we left the store, we both thought of the times pre-M&M when we’d have nothing to do on the weekends but this: head out on errands, grab lunch, go to the coffee shop…. It’s nice to live that life again for a couple of days but we miss those pumpkins and want them home… tomorrow.

Meanwhile, they are living the farm life with their grandparents – shoveling horse poop, loading hay, and making abstract snow figures.

It is supposed to be a horse. They also got some sledding in on inner tubes and plastic sleds. Peepaw showed them how it was done first. Mario nearly got a concussion from going down one of the hills Sarah and Jorge made over New Years but they loved it.

Ri reported to me this morning that she read an entire Magic Treehouse book last night. Not sure what Meg and dad needed to do to make that happen but that’s one great thing about the farm – no 500 channel cable tv and lots of books!

That brought on another New Year’s resolution – unplug the tv before bed and get out a book. Yes, Jon, that means you too!

Heading out on the town

January 2, 2013Leave a comment

Mario has been dreaming to go out on his own the past few nights. This has been an ongoing desire over the last few months that has manifested itself with admonishments from him to me whenever I get too close to him. At the library, he went up to the second floor by himself to look at Wii games. I followed him stealthily so that he would not see me. I watched him look at the Wii games and then head over to the counter to ask the librarian whether they had the Rise of the Guardians Wii game. She was having trouble understanding him so I butted in to clarify. Mistake. Mario became irate and embarrassed. “Mom, I told you I would do it myself. You are so embarrassing! Go away!”

Last night, we were drawing pictures, and Mario asked Maria how to spell “I’m Going Somewhere.” He then walked over to me and gave me the picture. I couldn’t read it at first and then I got it. I asked “you are going somewhere? Where?” Mario’s response: “Don’t know yet but I will figure it out. I will wait until tomorrow.”

mariojeans tattoo Tonight, he asked Maria to go upstairs with him. Ri ran back downstairs and breezed past me. I asked her what she was doing and she quickly replied “Getting some cool shoes for Mario.” They both came back down ten minutes later and Mario looked too cool for school with his double layered oxford shirts, new jeans and sweet man-watch on his wrist. Maria grabbed the body crayons and drew tattoos on his arms.

“I’m heading out tonight, mom.”

“Where you going?”

“I may got to the bank and then I may just take a walk.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I am not going to any girls’ houses but I may not be home until tomorrow.”

door Jon told him that he was free to go (the mom in me could not let him leave even though I knew Jon would sneak out and watch over him). Mario put on his coat and hat and gloves and he said goodbye to Ri. Ri bawled and begged him not to go because he could be stolen by someone in the night. He told her he’d be fine.

He walked out the door and stood on the porch in the 15 degree cold. He looked back at me. He walked back to the door.

“Mom, will the police stop me if they see me?”

“Yeah, they won’t let you walk by yourself until you are fifteen.”

He walked back out on the porch. He stood on the step for a minute. I stepped back so he would not see me.

He walked back to the door and peeked inside.

“Mom?”

“Did you decide to come back to your mama and sis?!”

“Yes, I will come back just because the police are out. I will go out later when the police get off work.”

I agreed knowing that Jon would explain to him that the police never get off of work. I am sure he will think of some other way to get out of the house in the next few days. Probably use a disguise or something. He is jonesin’ to get out on his own at age 5. Ri, on the other hand, is perfectly content with me following her everywhere and has no desire to leave the roost. I imagine that will change when she hits her pre-teen years especially with her brother’s influence.

2012 Wrap-up

January 1, 2013January 1, 20134 Comments

2012 Highlights:

1. Playing in the ocean and collecting seashells.

2. Petting an alligator (and Ri kissing it!).

3. Hiked the sand dunes in Michigan.

4. Playing lots of putt-putt.

5. Ri and Mario flew on an airplane for the first time!

6. Took a boat ride on Traverse Bay.

7. Visited Louisville, Kentucky for Miles and Taylor’s wedding, and spent the night at a hotel with Grandma Meg and Peepaw.

8. Celebrated Ri’s 7th birthday!

9. Mario turned 5!

10. Headed to Kings Island and rode the Beastie!

11. Rode the COTA bus to downtown.

12. Swam at Fort Rapids water park for Zach’s birthday party.

13. Ate at Perkins for my birthday!

14. Ri went to her first horseback riding camp!

15. Mario played his first season of football and baseball.

16. Maria cheerleaded!

17. Mario learned to ride a bike!

18. Ri started the second grade.

19. Mario and I raced at the track while Ri timed us.

20. Ri and Mario got to see Uncle Jack play in his band.

21. Riding rides and playing games at the Ox Roast.

22. Ri got to see Big Time Rush in concert.

23. We made lotsa pancakes!

24. Mario got to go hunting with dad!

25. Ri got to make wine with dad.

26. We ate lots of Orange Leaf yogurt!

27. We had a decade party at Grandma Meg’s and Peepaw’s!

28. We went to President Obama’s rally at OSU.

29. We went to the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Cincy.

30. Mario went to the dentist for the first time.

31. We visited the dog shelter to walk the dogs.

32. We walked Willie and Butters in Cincy.

33. We ate rocks at the river (ha, just wanted to see if you were awake!).

34. We celebrated Easter with our cousins playing out at the farm!

35. We found Easter eggs at the Heile Easter egg hunt; didn’t win the $5 egg but got lots of coins and candy.

36. We played at French Park like I did as a kid.

37. We swam at Grandma and Grandpa Ionno’s country club.

38. We swam at Grandma Lolo’s pool.

39. We rode Grandma Meg’s and Peepaw’s horses.

40. We hosted Maggie’s graduation party!

41. We caught fireflies.

42. We saw Aunt Sarah and Jorge more because they live in Pittsburgh!

43. We watched fireworks at Wyman Woods for the 4th of July.

44. We learned how to roll into a sleeping bag sandwich thanks to David!

45. Robert began at OSU and Laura came to visit.

46. We jumped in leaves!

47. We participated in the Heile Olympics.

48. We hosted Thanksgiving for the wild Heile clan and made our first Grateful Tree!

49. We went sled riding all week of Christmas break!

50. We spent the last day of the year with our Ionno cousins and built a huge snowman!

51. We hosted Christmas for the Ionno’s and Menkedick’s and Grandma Ionno got to see all her grandbabies!

52. We loved playing Three Little Pigs card game.

53. We still managed to ride in the stroller all year!

54. Elfie came to live with us until Christmas day and wrecked havoc on our house.

55. We went to the zoo with Alana and Gio.

56. We visited with my best girlfriends from Cincy and their kids.

57. We worked in our garden.

58. Mario and I went to Darby Creek with Gio.

59. Maria had more sleepovers and play dates than in 2011.

60. Lou came into our life!

And for 2013, our resolutions:

Maria – eat healthier (good job, Ri!)
Mario – to be able to shoot fire
Jon – to not make resolutions
Mary – to cook more (or I guess it’s more honest to say, “to cook”)!

Compassion and Febreeze

November 30, 2012November 30, 2012Leave a comment

Jon went hunting last night with the hopes of bringing some deer meat home to his family (I’m just hoping for some of Vicki’s meatballs!).

It was just the kids and I and I had to help out a local non-profit with decorating for a gala tonight. So the kids got to head downtown with me and “work” their little butts off. They had a blast doing it. The gala is at the Vault, which I believe is an old bank converted to an event hall. It has a vault in the back of the hall that provided a secret hideaway for M&M. They loved running around the place and hiding from me. But they also provided assistance putting favors in bags and decorating table trees with red ornaments. They thought placing the plastic red cardinals on the tree was the bomb!

They were polite yet animated and the volunteer crew loved them. I love that I can share with them my passion to help others and they enjoy doing the work with me. I hope I am instilling in their little bodies a life-long desire and passion to care for others. With each project, I imagine their souls expanding to make room for all the compassion, empathy and purpose pouring from their little bodies into the work.

But, alas, they are kids and must mix a bit of childish fun along with virtues of compassion and giving. Mario found Febreeze in the ladies bathroom and thoroughly enjoyed spraying its remnants among the four walls of the tiny room. I thought a cheap perfume grenade had exploded when I stepped in to retrieve Mario but his face said it all – no grenade, only Mario orneriness.

Drawing woes

November 13, 2012November 14, 2012Leave a comment

Ri and Mario and I sat at the kitchen table a couple of nights ago and drew. We play a game where someone names an animal or thing and everyone draws it. My drawings are always the worst, and the kids find much humor in them.

However, on this particular night, we decided to use Maria’s animal sketch book from the library to help us out. It showed the steps you had to take to get the animal you wanted like starting with an oval and ending with a cute pig. I like the book because it allows me a step-by-step process to get a finished result.

We started with a deer. Mario and I were working away. I had gotten close to completion with a deer that actually resembled a deer for once and showed my drawing off. Maria was amazed. “How’d you draw that so well, mom?” I looked at her drawing and couldn’t tell what she had made. This is unusual for Ri. She typically draws animals that you recognize immediately. She looked over at Mario’s drawing and saw that he was on his way to making a pretty good deer, too. She lost it.

“I hate drawing! Hate it! I am no good at it and I never will be!” She threw her marker in the bin and charged upstairs. Mario shrugged his shoulders and carried on as if a fly had just whizzed by but was now far away. He began to draw a rhino after his deer. Pretty amazing how well he drew when he had detailed steps.

And then it struck me. Mario and I are total left brainers. We think linearly and need set instructions in order to best draw an object. Maria is a right brainer. She sees an object with her own mind and draws it how she sees it. Requiring her to follow steps hinders her process rather than boosting it.

I walked upstairs to comfort her, andI got attacked.

“I can’t draw! I am dumb! D-O-M, dumb!”

I wanted to laugh at the irony of her calling herself dumb and how she spelled it (I knew she was stressed because she knows how to spell “dumb”) but figured she’d go into major distress so I just sat still. Maria went on about how her cousin Alana draws so well.

“Maria, she draws for hours in the day. She doesn’t do as many things outdoors as we do so she draws a lot instead.”

Maria looked up at me with a glare. “We’ll then it’s your fault for making me go outside so much!”

Oh, we have a lot to teach that girl when it comes to accountability.

I hugged her again and brought her downstairs to work on drawing anything she wanted. I explained to her about being right-brained and she seemed to understand that concept (because she is right-brained!). I told her how lucky she was that she could draw an animal without having to follow detailed steps. I reminded her ridiculous my animals looked when I didn’t have detailed instructions. She laughed at the thought of them.

She began drawing a girl in a gown and then a boy with a bow tie. She wrote “mom and dad” next to the drawing. It was us on our wedding day. Meanwhile, Mario kept cranking on that rhino.

Love no matter what

November 5, 2012Leave a comment

My sis recommended a heart-warming blog titled “Star in Her Eye” narrated by a mother, Heather Kirnlanier whose baby girl has a genetic disorder, Wolf-Hirschhorn Syndrome. It is serendipitous timing as I just began the book “Expecting Adam” by Martha Beck about a mother raising a baby boy with Down Syndrome. Both writings challenge the cultural view towards special needs children and reinforce a mother’s love for her child no matter what the ailments.

One of Kirnlanier’s blog entries describes a time prior to conceiving her child when a friend of hers told her that an acquaintance had given birth to a baby with Down Syndrome. She expressed her condolences to the friend and they both gossiped about how hard it would be to have such a child. She cringes at the thought of talking and feeling that way now that she has her own special needs child. She acknowledges that surely there are medical difficulties with a special needs child – quite profound ones possibly – but she challenges our thinking that such difficulties should inhibit us from moving forward with rearing such a child.

How many of us have said “My babies are growing up too fast?” Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a child that develops just a little more slowly so that you have more time to “smell the roses, to see in all its minutiae the subtle learnings of a little girl?” How many of us spend an inordinate amount of time raising children only to feel an immense pain when they leave the nest? A special needs child likely requires care throughout her life; how wonderful to have a lifetime with your little babe. Change your thinking and change your world.

I remember watching a mom and her son with Down Syndrome walk into Maria’s kindergarten class a few years ago. My immediate thought was “what a woman she is; that has got to be hard.” After getting to know the mom and hearing Maria talk about class-time with her son, I began to get a small glimpse into this “hard” life I imagined for mom and son. Sure, the mom had her days when she was ready to wring her son’s neck because he would not eat his breakfast before school or he refused to take off his coat when they got into the classroom. How many days was I ready to scream at the top of my lungs because Maria took forever to get dressed? How many mornings did I walk away irritated with her because of her snippy attitude? But this mom also had precious moments with her son – riding their tandem bikes around town; picnics at the park; long, thoughtful discussions about why flowers bloomed in the Spring; and hard laughter when the mom sang her son a certain song. He brought her more joy than she could have ever imagined before he entered her life and that is all that mattered.

We have a cultural bias towards everything perfect – “perfect” being size 2 bodies, no grey hair, wrinkle-free…and able-bodied. “Ableists” as Kirnlanier points out by way of Wikipedia, believe that a disability or imperfection is a mistake or failing rather than a simple stamp of human diversity. It takes people like Kirnlanier and Beck to reverse this type of thinking. Hearing their stories drives open your mind and strips away any inherent cultural bias in you. How could it not? These kids are just like mine and my friends – they enjoy watching bubbles float in the air, smelling flowers, laughing at their silly parents, listening to music, and feeling immense love from their mamas.

Mario blooms

October 24, 2012October 24, 20123 Comments

A car drove past Mario and me while we biked to school this morning. I thought the guy driving was a colleague so when we biked past him, I waved. As I waved, I noticed that the guy was not my colleague and no one I knew. I said “that’s embarrassing, Mario. I just waved at that stranger.”

Mario’s reply: “No it’s not, mom. You probably made his day. He may have been sad and now he’s not.”

These are the moments where I realize that my kids have listened and seen me, and they have instilled some of my values in their lives. Mario has seen me say “hi” to people passing by, be pleasant to workers bagging our groceries, strike up a conversation with a gentleman waiting for a bus while we waited on our bike for the traffic light to change. He has witnessed the smiles on these people’s faces after someone smiles at them, says hello to them, engages with them. And he has heard me talk about the importance of being nice to others and how you can never know when someone just needs a smile to feel better.

And so he reminded me that I shouldn’t be embarrassed about waving to that stranger but rather feel happy that I may have made someone’s day and allowed them to see the randomness that is this life – be it a stranger waving at you or a bright red Autumn leaf falling on your shoulder or a child blooming right before your eyes.

"MOM!"

Adventures in the Life of a Working Mama

Tag: Parenting