Hi! I'm Kristyn. Yeah, I'm in mothering...

When I was in graduate school, simultaneously blundering my way through my first year of teaching (in a high-needs, inner city school in the Bronx, no less), my colleagues and fellow students were sitting around trying to pin down why exactly it was so hard, so all-consuming to be a teacher. Why couldn't we just put in our time, leave at 3:30 and never look back?

"It's because it's not like any other profession," my friend said. "Other people say, 'I'm in banking.' But what teacher do you know who says, 'I'm in teaching'?  No one. It's too big for that. It's like being a mom. No one says, 'I do mothering,' or, 'Yeah, I'm in mothering.' We say, 'I'm a mom. I'm a teacher,' because being a mom or a teacher is so much bigger than just doing a job."

When I became a mom to an amazing little boy this September (of course my mama job started in September, just like my teacher job would have!), I honestly was kind of lost for awhile. Being a mom was more than I thought it would be in every way possible. I was more tired, more emotional, more thankful, more confused (did I really volunteer to get 1 hour of sleep and be a slave to a 6lb creature?!?) and more completely in love than I could have ever imagined. The job of being a mama consumed me completely, much in the way that becoming a teacher had in the beginning. Like being a teacher, being a mom is too important to just be a job that you do- it's something you become.

As I tried to get a handle on everything, I realized I was looking to my teacher self for help. I found the only way I could keep some semblance of sanity while E was crying whenever my super jiggling/rocking/bouncing slowed slightly was to think of he and I as teachers and learners. Even though I often wanted to cry and sometimes started counting the hours until "dada" came home a whopping 5 minutes after he left, it made me feel better to think that not a day went by that E didn't teach me something and vice versa. I was teaching him how to do things like sleep without bonking himself in the face and he was teaching me how to ask for help (a big one for me!) and do everything one-handed.  Slowly, sometimes painfully, we were becoming better people because we were both constantly teaching and learning.

I am a little bit of a worrier (okay, a lot a bit), and having the responsibility of ultimately producing an adult who was intelligent, caring and not a serial killer was kind of too much for me ("All serial killers have moms," I soberly informed my friend as I peered skeptically at 2-week-old E sleeping in his stroller). Thinking of E and I as teachers and learners gave me a game plan for how to approach this task. I started to look for developmental milestones and think up baby lesson plans to support his learning. I bought books, spent hours on the internet and, most importantly, tried to pull as much info out of my mom friends as possible. As I infused my teacher-self into my mama-self, I started finding more fun and intellectual stimulation in my mama duties (A diaper change? What an exceptional opportunity for midline-crossing activities!).

Everyone has their own approach to "mamaing". I am the best mama I can be when I approach it like a teacher. I decided to start this blog because I wanted to give and draw support from all sorts of other mamas. I want to teach what I've learned and learn what others can teach me. I hope we can all help each other be better teachers, learners and mamas.

So, here we go - teach, learn and mama on :).