30 before 30

Here are my 30 before 30 goals, in no particular order...

1. Run six 5k's (30k's... get it?), at least one with E.
2. Plant a garden.
3. Learn to sew.
4. Volunteer.
5. Ride a horse.
6. Have family or friends over once a month.
7. Commit 1 act of guerilla goodness per month.
8. Reconnect with old friends and family (Facebook doesn't count!).
9. Introduce myself to all of my new neighbors.
10. Make a 1 year album for E.
11. Buy a hammock. Try to relax in it.
12. Host a holiday celebration.
13. Dream up an original family tradition- the weirder, the better!
14. Learn how to use Photoshop.
15. Stop screening my phonecalls. What if it's Justin Bieber?
16. Try 10 new recipes (bonus points for using ingredients that scare me).
17. Write a children's book for E.
18. Make exercise a regular part of my life again.
19. Write inspiration letters (more on this later!)
20. Go on a family vacation.
21. Leave E with family overnight (dreading this- I might leave it until the last possible second before my birthday!)
22. Explore 10 new local "family attractions".
23. Decorate the new house (sorry, but if I don't put this on here, it won't get done!).
24. Make more mama & baby friends.
25. Have one new experience each week.
26. Get organized!
27. More DIY
28. Start or join a new group
29. Eat less processed food.
30. Get outside and play (aim for at least 30 minutes with E per day)

Copycat!

"Teacher, she COPIED me!" If I had a dollar for every time some little darling came up to me and said that in the trademark high-octave kid whine, I would be a very rich lady. Most young children do not like to be copied- period- but as they get older, their feelings about being copied evolve to depend on the copiers. If they think the copier is cool, they will welcome and even aggressively court his copying efforts. Just think about how many social media outlets depend on people wanting to copy and be copied- Facebook, thousands of blogs and (my personal favorite) Pinterest. Anyway, thinking about how the world has embraced copying made me feel better about becoming a copycat myself. My very eloquent and witty friend Kristy over at 35tomatoes (not about tomatoes, FYI)  made a list of 34 fun and interesting things she plans to do before turning 35. I plan on copying her by making a list of 30 things to do before I turn 30 in April. By the way, Kristy approved this in typical teacher style by saying, "Let's call it sharing." :)

Like most of my decisions since September, this was motivated by my little E-man. As a new mom, I find it extremely difficult to remember that E and I are actually two distinct people. I rarely do anything for myself outside of the occasional trip to the gym (which I have rationalized as being acceptable because it offers E a chance to socialize with his little gym girlfriend, Naomi). However, lately I've been thinking that I might need to become a richer person to be a better mom.

Anyone who knows me and my WalMart-shopping, clearance rack-cruising ways must think I've finally gone off the deep end. No worries- I'm not saying being richer in the monetary sense would make me a better mom (although I'm sure E would love it if I invested more money in toys for him to smash). What I mean is that I am starting to think I need to invest more time and effort in myself to meet my full mom potential. I want to be a mom who inspires my son to think deeply about how he wants to experience the world. I want to guide him as he grows so he can develop the confidence and skills to make those experiences happen. And more than anything, I want to guide him to this rich, full life by example, not words.

Who wouldn't want to inspire this little man?

Now, how exactly am I going to inspire someone to live life fully by spending my days cleaning, Googling potential childhood maladies and micromanaging naptimes? I'm not. I need to get up off my mama hiney (yes, we use the word hiney around here now) and do something. Lots of somethings, actually. When I read Kristy's blog, her list of fun, life-enriching activities seemed like the perfect format to push me toward the fuller life I know I want. I LOVE lists- they help me clear my head, organize my thoughts and (most importantly) make me commit to any items I add to them. Perfect! 30 fun, enriching things before 30, here I come! Follow along and if you see things that you would like to do, let me know and we'll enjoy them together!

Thanks for the inspiration, Kristy. Being a copycat is fun :).

The mama I never thought I'd be- A reflection on crappy doctors and self-doubt

Growing up, I always knew I wanted to be a mom. I went through a phase where I was obsessed with babies, tried to wrangle my friends into starting a real life version of The Babysitters' Club, and shamelessly asked to play with/ hold/ temporarily steal any baby in sight so I could hone my mommy skills. Then I got a little older and my inquisitiveness and confidence in asking for what I wanted started to be replaced by insecurity and an overwhelming need to just fly under the radar. I developed a weird phobia of holding babies lest they cry in my arms and (gasp!) draw attention to me. I didn't want people staring at me and saying, "Gee, what did you do to that baby?" or thinking that the baby didn't like me.

Like all weird phobias, this one evolved as I got older. Not only did I avoid holding babies, I avoided admitting that I wanted to have babies of my own. I guess deep down I was always afraid that I wouldn't be able to a) have a baby and b) be good at raising it. Being a bit of a checklist-obsessed person, I didn't want to publicly put something that huge, that amazing and (most importantly) that uncontrollable on my lifetime checklist just in case I wasn't able to promptly check it off.

Slowly I began to think more and more about becoming a mom. Meeting and marrying an amazing person definitely helped in this department. Even though I still didn't totally believe in myself, I believed in him and I knew he would fill in any of the parenting blanks I might leave. Plus, he's super cool, super cute and also very laid back, so why wouldn't I want to create a little creature that was half him :) ?

Decision made, we added "Build a family" to our private checklist. Since all my life I've had teachers, parents and random old people in the grocery store tell me how easy it would be to get pregnant if I let my guard down for one second, I really didn't think it would be that hard. So we waited.... and waited... and waited. And my self-doubt grew and grew and grew. I'm a definite "signs" person, so I took all this failure as a sign that maybe I wouldn't really be good enough to be a mama. Maybe the universe was saving my poor little future baby from me messing him/ her/ it up. I wanted to pat myself on the back for not publicly admitting we wanted to have a baby because if we couldn't then I could pretend that I hadn't wanted a baby in the first place. The fact that no one knew we were failing was supposed to make it easier... right?

Well, wrong. It didn't make it any easier because I still knew what I wanted. As much as I tried to deny it and pretend like maybe my little zygote would be better off without me, I still wanted it. Really badly. So, I went to the doctor and tried to get some guidance on what to do. His only answer (and one that he repeated many, many times) was that I should go on medication. Let us just note that I don't even take Tylenol if I can avoid it because I consider it cheating. When I said I wanted to try other things first he said, "Well, I guess you don't really want to get pregnant then." Um, excuse me?!? Not cool, doctor man, not cool. Don't mess with a pre-mama and her pre-babies.

This stupid remark did two things. 1) It made me want to punch the good doctor in the nose. 2) It made me realize that I wasn't afraid to admit that yes, I did want to be a mom, thank you very much and  NOTHING was going to stop me. So there. After this I "went public" with our desire to start a family. And guess what? Apparently my eggs were listening to that doctor and, being stubborn and determined like their mama, they decided they would show him. Mr. E was made about a week later.

If you look closely, I think you can see the "stubborn" section of his brain lighting up.

One of the coolest parts about becoming a mama is how it has brought back some of the pieces of my child-self that I have missed. When it comes to my baby, I'm not afraid of making waves or getting noticed. I don't want to fly under the radar. And to be a good mama I've realized that I have to be honest with myself, figure out what I really want and then go for it. I'm allowed to put things on my checklist, cross them off or even just leave them on there for awhile without accomplishing them (pure insanity, list lovers, I know). And that doesn't make me a failure- it makes me a more open, honest, realistic person. It makes me a better mom, and that, my friends, is the number one thing on my checklist right now. I don't know if being a good mom is something you can ever really "check off", but I am certainly enjoying working on it.

~ love my boys ~

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 :).