Advanced Mommy Skills 202...

Sit down and close your eyes. This next part is going to take a bit of imagination. (In other words, the picture didn't turn out well, so I couldn't post it.) Imagine you are at a hockey game with your family...three of you are very happy...the youngest member (aged 3 1/2) is not. Imagine the noise...the chanting...the mayhem everywhere you look. Now imagine you are 3 1/2 years old. You are very, very tired. Your pleas to go home five minutes into the first period are to no avail. Now imagine crawling onto your Mommy's lap and cuddling up in the midst of all that chaos and falling asleep because you are so very, very tired. Now imagine free t-shirts being tossed from the rafters above. All around your Mom the t-shirts are sailing past into the hands of the crowd. People are pushing and grabbing for the t-shirts. And calmly your mother reaches out and plucks a t-shirt from the sky, without ever disturbing your slumber. 

Of course the story above is true. It's too goofy not to be. In the midst of Sunday's hockey game, Ryan decided he was tuckered out and crashed on my lap. I actually did get a picture, however there is more bosom showing than I feel comfortable posting. But it did get me thinking about advanced Mommy Skills. That is, the amount of things you can now simultaneously accomplish that defy the laws of physics and gravity. Grabbing a t-shirt with a sleeping child was one of my more skillful accomplishments. But my real refinement of these skills came when Ryan was a newborn. My personal favorite was walking up the stairs while nursing Ryan to answer the call from a then 2 1/2 year Caitlin - "MOOOOOOMMMMMMY....I have messy poop. I need HELLLLP..." As I continued to nurse Ryan and assist Caitlin with her hygenie needs, all I could think was "is this really happening? am I really the same person that used to "do" lunch and get manicures?" The event was so horrifying and funny at the same time that I immediately called a working Mom friend of mine. She (fortunately? unfortunately?) was not at her desk, so I left her a lengthy message explaining "why leaving small children with a nanny and going to the office is a brilliant idea." She was so amused by my voicemail that she saved it for weeks and played it any time she was having a bad case of Mommy guilt. So today, cheers to advanced Mommy skills. Cheers to helping with spelling words and building Lego dragons at the same time. Cheers to simultaneously making tomorrow's lunchs, moving a load of laundry into the dryer, and still knowing when your children are up to something bad!