i officiated a wedding  in atlanta this weekend, and in order to save all members of our immediate family from the bird’s car trip conniptions, the monkey and i took off on our first ever adventure as a traveling duo.

the six hour drive, two sleeps in the hotel, and back-to-back wedding festivities were a far cry from the monkey’s usual routine. in order to preserve our collective sanity, i made up a few new traveling rules on the fly.

1. the driver can change out the movies in the car dvd player, but the passenger is in charge of pushing buttons to begin the featured presentation.

2. lollipops, bags of cookies, mentos, baked lays, and other wedding goody bag items are all approved components of the travel meal plan. also, it’s a good thing ketchup counts as a vegetable. thanks, ronald reagan. and p.s. who cares if the three-year-old in question consumes a green ring pop on the way to the rehearsal dinner and arrives with swamp monster teeth?

3. though the $16 ticket price at the center for puppetry arts seems a bit steep, it’s really quite a small price to pay for an hour-long puppet show, a make-your-own-puppet workshop, a gander at some of jim henson’s origional puppets, and free mango iceys on the back lawn.

4. if your handmade stellaluna puppet loses a limb during vigorous museum or restaurant play, you can just tape it back on using excess adhesive found elsewhere on said puppet.

5. wedding venues in parks such as this one come complete with neighboring playgrounds.

it is perfectly acceptable for a wine-toting, cocktail-dress-wearing mom to spend equal amounts of time inside the reception and outside sitting on a decorative boulder next to the orange “curly slide.”

6. bedtimes are later than usual. bathtime is optional. if parent and child fall asleep together on a pull out couch during story time, so be it. if a three-year-old wants to wear his house shoes for an entire day, fine.

7. the rules of the road are certainly not fit for everyday guidance. in fact, over time, they would most certainly lead to rotton teeth and malnutrition. however, in the face of unprecidented one-on-one time with my baby-turned-“big boy,” they afforded us a little glimpse into the kind of fun our future will hold. this is why the next rule is this:

8. we must do things like this again and again!

[while megan is my latest “mother of invention,” i am the subject of her weekly blogger interview. we’re a mutual adoration society. check us out!] 

first name: Megan

age: 32 (ugg…)

current city: Montclair, VA

living situation: I’m married with two young children. My daughter Sage, is almost four. My son Phoenix, is 14 months.

occupation: Stay-At-Home Mom (SAHM) and Managing Director of Modern Bird Studios (http://www.modernbirdstudios.com).

how do you structure your time and space? Wow. I was hoping you could help me structure my time and space. I barely structure it all! I dabble in some mommy-ing, and then I dabble in the Modern Bird stuff, and I switch back and forth throughout the day. I work from home along with my husband, so my office consists of a couch and a laptop. There are toys strewn about, an overly emotional three-year-old at one ear, and a teething14-month-old tugging on my leg. Peace comes at nap time and bedtime, which is when I get most of my marketing duties done. 

We have a pretty set schedule with the kids. I get ‘em up at 8:00 a.m., feed them breakfast, play, put the baby down for a morning nap, hang with Sage, get the baby up, feed the kids lunch, play, put everyone down for the afternoon nap/quiet time, and do dinner, bath, and finally bed (for the kids) by 7:30 p.m. 

I don’t have much personal time now. The hub would prefer me to take more time for me, but I simply don’t. I probably should. I get up at 5:30 a.m. (did I mention that I abhor waking up early?) three times a week for my workouts so that I can still fit into my clothes while I neglect every other need that I have. That, and I shower everyday. And do my hair and makeup. I can’t stomach not being put together. I just don’t do much else.  If I’m feeling overwhelmed with the Modern Bird stuff, I step away and get outside. Home making?  I used to be so much more on top of it, but the house is still in good order. I clean it once a week, and I force my children to clean up their toys everyday so they don’t choke the rest of the house. Anyway, to answer your question, I’m basically a disaster.

using the metaphor of seasons to describe the phases of women’s lives, 

-what are the particular challenges and highlights of your current season? This season brings with it financial challenges and the task of balancing the business with the kiddos. Modern Bird Studios was launched almost four months ago after my husband and I got tired of his sending resumes to every stinking company out there. He was laid off from his job in September of 2009, and I have been a SAHM since June of 2006, when our daughter was born. We’ve been scraping by on his freelance gigs. The guy has mad skills! Have you seen a Modern Bird Studios piece?  We decided to take control in our fate instead of waiting on the job market to improve — something that we couldn’t do anything about.  Luckily, I had a career in business development for seven years before baby number one came along, so I have experience in doing things similar to what I do now. 

The highlights of our current situation are many. We get to work together, and we work well together. Our kids get to see my husband throughout the day when I let him out of his studio to take breaks from creating the pieces to have a few sips of water here and there. Neither one of us has to commute in that crap DC metro traffic. We love what we are doing. It is crazysauce fun! We’ve met so many amazing and generous people, and we have had some great success in both exposure and sales in such a short amount of time. We’ve built lasting relationships, and we’ve even had the opportunity to pay it forward. We feel so blessed about our little company, and we can’t wait to see where it takes us. Plus, our kids are with us as we build it; they will be the heirs of the Modern Bird fortune.  

-What season(s) preceded this one? I would characterize the previous season as one where I played the traditional role of SAHM to two kids and ran around to play dates here and there. I still do that, but I organize a whole lot less of them nowadays. I did have some of those moments where I wondered if I wasted all that time in college since I wasn’t using my education/career experience in my real day-to-day life. This has been one of those internal struggles I’ve been trying to wrap my head around. I am not tempted to re-enter the work force and stop being a SAHM though because for me, being a SAHM is something I highly value. Still, I find myself trying to justify the point of my higher education and former career experience and how these things relate to my current situation.  

-What season(s) might your future hold? My guess is that my future will be highly successful and full of fun, laughter, and joy. I have about five friends who are pregnant right now, and every time I think about it, my womb aches a little, so I’m quite certain we will be adding on one or two more to the Modern Bird under-aged work force. Other than that, I try not to speculate too much. My life has been full of curve balls, so I don’t put too many concrete expectations out there because so much of my life is beyond my control.

Favorite family activity/activities: I think anything that includes sugar is up there on my list of favorite things to do with the family, specifically going for ice cream! I also love the seasonal things we do—pumpkin patch in the fall, hot cocoa in the winter, looking at flowers and playing outside in the spring, and going to the beach in the summer. Oh, and the big family wrestling and tickle fights bring out the big, belly giggles, which I adore.

favorite solo activities: Is this a trick question? I have so little time to myself! I do love to scrapbook. I was so anti-scrapbooking, and then I had kids, and all of sudden, I wanted to do scrapbooking! It’s my own fault for having such cute kids that I love taking pictures of.

sources of inspiration: the beautiful things around me, including my husband and my kids; the beautiful creations of this world; my faith.

best MakeShift moment: Day to-day life with young children is full of makeshift moments, or what I like to refer to as hardcore boardroom negotiations. My MakeShift moments include giving my 14-month-old a toy to get the TV remote from him, and letting my three-year-old rearrange her stuffed animal “friends” for the millionth time if it means she will settle down and take her nap.

find megan on the web:

• modern bird studios: http://www.modernbirdstudios.com/
• blog: http://www.modernbirdstudios.com/blog
• twitter: modern_bird

over the last six months, my strangest mommy fear has increased with every casual stroll through the dining room.

each glance at the “sorting table,” with all of its bizarre collections and carefully-placed containers, sends me into a dim vision of the  future, wherein i accidentally tune in to one of those hoarding television shows only to behold my poor adult son, meandering through a narrow path in his  junk-filled house.

easter basket appropriated for sock storage

i recently confessed to my college roommate that i am raising a future hoarder, and thankfully, she sent me this illuminating article  that states that sorting is a normal sign of cognitive advancement in toddlers. upon further investigation, i stumbled upon this article  that actually instructs parents of preschoolers to encourage sorting behavior in their children. apparently, the key is that the monkey sorts with great joy and gusto, not out of a misplaced sense of obligation.

this is all excellent news! but now what am i to do when i want to have company over for dinner?

i think it is very telling that the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM), the giant tome published by the american psychiatric association to aid mental health professionals in diagnoses and treatments, is revised regularly, in part, to reflect changes in our culture.

in other words, there is an evolving cultural consciousness that helps determine what sorts of behaviors are disordered and what sorts are not. and perhaps, more importantly, sometimes societal norms change to CREATE new disorders.

without further explanation, here is my letter to the american psychiatric association, suggesting that they consider adding a new disorder to the upcoming DSM-V:

dear american psychiatric association,

my name is mary allison, and in many ways, my life is a reflection of today’s motherhood and vocational trends for young(ish) women. i have a hard-earned master’s degree and two long-awaited small children, a part-time job in the world, and a full time job in the home. these conditions have led me to the following pattern of disordered behaviors, called  maternal part-time hybrid disorder (M-phD) from here on out. please consider adding M-phD to the DSM-V.

overcommitment: as one who suffers from M-phd, i commit myself to too many work-related projects in order to compensate for my fear that my four-year masters degree and growing passion about my work will forever lie dormant.

vanderbilt divinity school graduation with my friend maria

self-applied pressure: because my full-time work in the home means that my presence in the working world is abbreviated, i feel that my vocational output must be of exaggerated quality to make up for its lack of quantity.

failure to live in the moment: i have come to measure the worth of my days by the amount of work i have accomplished, which is silly when my days are full of soft, curly, wiggly embraces.

the above behaviours produce an array of symptoms ranging from feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and the permanent “storage” of junk under the couch.

i would greatly appreciate any strides your esteemed association could take in the diagnosis and treatment of M-PhD.

sincerely,

mary allison

welcome new fantasy-to-do-list-makers! you never know what will come of our little game.

perhaps secret agent mom will publish a book. maybe stacy and her husband will open that restaurant. lane just might play bass in a band! megan could be on her way to fluency in american sign language. hiking and camping in yosemite could be in katherine’s near future. kathi could begin to incorporate daily meditation into her life. jessa might soon be found “riding allovercreation” on her new bike with kid attachments. we might see lindsey’s name on a campaign sign in the next few years. reverendmother could perfect her signature dish when she’s not traveling far and wide. i’m hoping that melissa will open that candy store on south main. jaime and i can go there to celebrate when she gets her first hole-in-one! then, to burn off those extra candy calories, i can go with emmy to her first spin class.

it’s not too late to make your own list! see this post for details.

first name: Madison

age: 32

current city: Nashville

living situation: I live in a 1960s one-story ranch house in the Nashville suburbs with my husband, Charles, and our two-year-old son, Charlie. We also have two enormous German shepherds who take up lots of bed space.

occupation: Mama, household manager, chef, maid, laundress, dog walker, secretary, chauffeur, wife – and that’s just on weekends and before 9:00 a.m. and after 5:00 p.m. on weekdays! The rest of the time I’m a marketing communications manager for a global risk consulting company. I recently went back to work full-time after working a flex/part-time schedule for about 18 months.

how do you structure your time and space? Going back to work full-time was a hard decision to make but I had to choose between increasing my hourly commitment or leaving altogether, and I have neither the patience nor the creativity to be a stay-at-home mom (my hat’s off to all of them out there!). So life right now is a little crazy. I used to run errands during the week so we could have family time on the weekends, but now we spend at least part of our Saturdays and Sundays going to the grocery store, the cleaners, Target, et cetera.

Another casualty of working full-time is that our home life isn’t quite what I want it to be. I wish our house were tidier. I wish I made the beds every morning. I wish laundry were done (meaning cleaned, folded and put away) in fewer than three days. I wish we all sat down to a home-cooked meal every night at 6:30. So I’ve learned to lower my standards a little bit, while maintaining focus on the things that are most important to us: eating healthily, exercising, having some downtime, reading books, playing, and getting enough sleep. I figure that if the biggest victim of our lifestyle is that my house is a little messier than I like, I can live with that. Hopefully Charlie will remember that we read to him every day, not that a laundry basket routinely sits in the den for days on end. We do have a housekeeper who comes once a week and does the heavy cleaning. And she irons. That’s been a huge lifesaver for our whole family.

In terms of time structure, flexibility is crucial for us. With a young child, creating a morning schedule and evening routine is essential – but so is the ability to break that routine when there’s a tantrum, or someone gets sick, or one of the pups decides to escape. Another critical element is teamwork. My husband (who’s incredibly supportive and helpful) and I tag-team to get everything done. That way, if there’s a wrench thrown into a morning routine that would prevent me from making an early meeting, Charles can take Charlie to school.

Childcare has been an ongoing struggle for us. We had a nanny after Charlie was born, which was wonderful. But it’s an expensive undertaking, especially for one child. She did help keep our house clean, and do the baby laundry, and meet work/repair people in the middle of the day. We definitely took all of that for granted. After a bad experience with her replacement, we put Charlie in a full-time daycare/preschool near my office. It’s had its ups and downs, but overall, it’s been a great experience for him. Plus, it’s about one-third the cost of a nanny. The only downside for me personally is that it’s a 40-minute commute from our home, and that much time in the car with a cranky, hungry toddler can be challenging. That and my car looks like a Goldfish explosion happened.

I’m incredibly jealous of our peers who live near their relatives and thus have access to free, on-demand babysitting. Charles and I would really like to have more date nights, so we’re working on creating a stable list of good sitters. 

using the metaphor of seasons to describe the phases of women’s lives, 

-what are the particular challenges and highlights of your current season? We’re in spring right now. It’s a period of growth, of transformation, of blossoming. We’re watching our toddler turn into a little boy right before our eyes. It’s amazing and humbling. He learns so many new things every day, and we love being there for those discoveries. Spring is also a period of change, and our lifestyle has changed dramatically with my working full-time again. We’re also hoping to have another baby soon – another transformation for our family! Challenges abound for us right now (the terrible twos are in full force in our house), but we try to keep some perspective and remember that this is just a stage that too shall pass.

-What season(s) preceded this one? Fall, which is both a time of new beginnings (school season, football) and endings (leaves turning, warm weather ending). We lost two people very close to us: Charles’s aunt and my great-uncle, who was my quasi-grandfather. It was incredibly sad. But it was also a joyful time of spending time with an unimaginably awesome little boy and a fantastic husband.

-What season(s) might your future hold? Hopefully summer – both literally and figuratively. Pool and popsicles and beach trips – so much fun for all of us! Maybe enjoying our last few months as a 3-person family (summer always comes to an end, right?). 

Favorite family activity/activities: We’re really lucky in that Nashville is a great place for families. We love going to the zoo and riding on the carousel, attending story time at the library, playing at the playground, having picnics at the park, swimming at our awesome Y in the summer, and hiking at Radnor Lake  or Percy Warner Park. Once a week, Charlie and I also do a toddler music program called “the music playhouse,” and a gymnastics class.

favorite solo activities: Reading is my lifeblood; I’d be lost without it. I also love crossword puzzles, cooking, writing, swimming, hiking, and movies. I’ll also cop to really loving TV. Writing all this makes me wish I had more time for myself!  

some of you might have felt a little sorry for me when you read “host a make-your-own-pizza night” on my fantasy to do list. “poor mary allison,” you must have thought. “while everybody else is fantasizing about world travel, lottery money, and fame, this poor, unimaginative girl is dreaming of pizza!”

well, last night, andy and i hosted a make-your-own-pizza night, and i am here to tell you that it was indeed worthy of fantasy, thanks to the recipe for home-made crust, perfected and given to me by my friend, mary.

mary’s recipe was simple and incredibly delicious, and the good news is that she’s given me permission to share it!

thanks to mary for putting in the hard work of perfecting the process so that morons like me can have first-time success. i’m off to eat the leftovers for lunch. yum!

happy memorial day weekend, folks!

for the memphians, if you’re not too busy at the shell, zoo, or sunset symphony festivities, you should know that there are probably some strawberries still ripe for the picking at the agricenter.

i took the boys last weekend, and we had a blast!

the monkey pretendedhe was at an easter egg hunt. the bird pretended he was at a cafeteria. (thankfully, there are no pesticides on these berries, just a little fertilizer, which our little guy needs.) i pretended to be the paparazzi.

this week, thanks to the boys’ picking prowess, we’ve enjoyed strawberry short cake, and this delicious berry syrup, good over ice-cream, pancakes, or in a sparkling adult beverage.

the p.r. firm that handles the “aha moment” campaign for omaha mutual found me on the web and contacted me a few days ago with the request that i tell the story of my blog’s inception and impact on my life. i think it’s safe to say that the internet is a crazy animal.

so today, i trecked on over to the parking lot of the rock and soul museum, boarded the 35-foot custom mobile studio, and talked on camera about my “aha moment,” which is defined on the campaign’s homepage as “a moment of clarity; a defining moment when you gain real wisdom — wisdom you can use to change your life.”

i’ll link to the monologue in a month or so when it goes up on the aha website but for now, i’ll leave you with a picture and a bit of wistful reverie. first the picture…

and now the wistful reverie:

oh to be young and hip and employed by an internet marketing firm to travel the country and talk to people about inspiration and wisdom! the folks i met from skedaddle media  made me want to amend my fantasy to do list to include something like “get paid to spend five months sampling the sights, sounds, cuisine, and culture in select american cities.”

for now, i guess i’ll have to settle for reading their blog.

wednesday was the monkey’s last day of his first school year. let’s recap some of his newly acquired knowledge, shall we? he has learned…

1. that god “just keeps on making him special.” nice process theology, son.
2. that when school’s out, it’s summer, and when it’s summer, you’d better find some shade.
3. that “addie and brice are dating. this means that addie is brice’s special friend, and brice is addie’s special friend.” [names changed to protect the socially advanced.]
4. to count for hours, cut out shapes, and observe the weather.
5. to mark certain occasions by bursting into song. for example, if someone reappears after being absent, it is customary to sing, ” we’re really glad you’re back… we’re really glad you’re back.”
6. how to draw self portraits:

now for the things that i have learned from the monkey’s first school year. i now know that…

1. good teachers make all the difference in the world. i would send the monkey to the planet neptune for school if i heard that ms. aimee and ms. ann would be there.
2. sharing the dropping-off and fetching responsibilities with my husband is a wonderful convenience.
3. it is okay that i am different from the other moms.
4. the first year of school is just as much about honing the immune systems of children and their entire families (including grandparents) as it is about honing kids’ cognitive skills.
5. the monkey can behave like a monster at home and a boy scout at school.
6. i am really not that different from the other moms.

in case you are worried that my poor child cannot see through all of the curly hair covering his face, we have remedied that problem with a handsome little haircut. now, since it’s summer, i’m going to find some shade.