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03 Feb

the_mommy_effect
 

The Mommy Effect is real.  My husband, for a long time – until we had a second child – denied its existence.  He has since come around.  He now can see what all mothers have always seen.  The aura that mothers emit, throwing their offspring into a tizzy with their mere presence — The Mommy Effect.

 

The Mommy Effect is best explained by example.

 

Case 1: Dinner Time
Mommy isn’t home from work yet.  Daddy is in the kitchen whipping up dinner.  The kids are playing quietly nearby.  The older one is building a ramp for his cars and the younger one is calmly threading some beads onto a string.  Everyone is happy.
Enter mommy — home from work.  Instantaneously – shrieks and tears erupt.  Both children must hug mommy simultaneously.  Both children must be touching mommy at all moments for the next 20 minutes.  Children are crying in her face, grabbing at her shirt, screaming vital information like “Daddy gave us chocolate”.

 

The Reversal:
 
Daddy is not home from work yet.  Mommy is whipping up dinner with a toddler in one arm and the older child standing on a chair in the kitchen “helping”.  Both children simultaneously need her attention at every moment, “Mommy.  Mommy.  Mommy.  Mommy.  I need to eat some sugar from the bowl.”  The older child suddenly needs to give mommy 24 kisses and needs to have a piggy back to do so.  Putting the youngest down results in an immediate cling-to-the-leg with accompanying whine.
Daddy gets home and wonders why there is so much chaos.

 

Case 2:  I Need Milk

 

Mommy is wiping down the coffee table and scheduling an appointment on the phone while carrying a toddler.  Daddy is in the kitchen, at the fridge pondering snack possibilities.  Preschooler runs from his spot beside Daddy all the way to Mommy and says “Mommmmmmmmy, I need milk”.  Clearly Daddy doesn’t have the superpowers needed to procure milk.
 

The Reversal:
Daddy is working on the computer.  Preschooler is thirsty.  He pushes chair to cupboard and then to the fridge to get the milk and pours himself a glass.

 

Case 3: Sickness

 

Sick toddler spends week at home and not in preschool.  During Daddy’s shift, Daddy and Toddler sit side-by-side and watch Aladdin.  Father-son bonding.
 

The Reversal:
During Mommy’s watch, Toddler must be laying on Mommy, or nursing, or trying to nurse while craning neck to watch TV.  Or removing mommy’s glasses.  In a test sequence, during the 5 minutes that Daddy wore said glasses, no attempts at removal were made.

 

The Mommy Effect.  It’s real.  Ask your mother.  Or wife.

 

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Read some of our other posts:



31 Jan

Nine Parenting Shortcuts Worth Considering

1/ Forget the pajamas – let them sleep in their t-shirts.
2/ Don’t sort the laundry by colour.  The shirts are already grungy anyway.
3/ Let them watch TV.
4/ Make them eat whole apples.
5/ Let them wear non-matching socks.
6/ Don’t fold the laundry — just pick it out of the dryer daily. (a lot of these are about laundry — it’s all starting to make sense now ..)
7/ In the mornings, rather than getting up and taking them downstairs at an ungodly hour, encourage them to run laps of the second floor giving high fives to your sleeping self as they run by.
8/ Play hide and seek and always hide in the bed under the covers where you can take a nap.
9/ Only wash hair once a week.  People only have so much tolerance for shrieking.
10/ When they refuse to put on their coats — rather than fight them on it, let them go coat-less until they’re cold enough to ask for them.

30 Jan

Old Life, New Life.

Datenight_ads_dogs


29 Jan

What have you done for Motherhood Lately: Gisele Bundchen

Celebrity Mother-Advocates

Women in the spotlight do a lot to promote women’s issues, particularly pushing the line between career and motherhood.  There is no doubt that society in general, and attitudes towards motherhood specifically, are highly influenced by the actions and opinions of women that we see in the press.  If you’re choosing to put yourself out there and go on record about child-rearing, motherhood, career and family … you’re opening yourself up to both praise and criticism.  And I would hope that famous mothers would go on record in a one-of-the-sisterhood manner.  Conceding that motherhood can be tough.  And that the balancing act is tricky.  Even more so if you cannot afford the paid help that many in the press can.

The first in a series of posts about famous women and what they say about motherhood.

— Gisele Bundchen —

I have a love/hate relationship with what Gisele has to say about motherhood.

She’s notoriously pro breast-feeding:

“Some people here think they don’t have to breastfeed, and I think, ‘Are you going to give chemical food to your child, when they are so little?’ There should be a worldwide law, in my opinion, that mothers should breastfeed their babies for six months.”

Which is great and appreciated by many … except that nursing doesn’t always work out the way that mothers anticipate it will.  An interesting BBC article points out that throughout history, there have always been children who weren’t nursed, due to maternal death, the need to work or the physical inability to do so.  And that the non-boob options today are far superior to the wine and honey, soups and eggs, milk soaked bread or donkey milk that infants used to be fed (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25629934).

Taking such a harsh stance when you haven’t seen the other side of the coin isn’t particularly supportive of the sisterhood.

“I think a lot of people get pregnant and decide they can turn into garbage disposals. I was mindful about what I ate, and I gained only 30 pounds.”

A little harsh, Gisele.

‘It didn’t hurt in the slightest.”  –Gisele has said about childbirth

Well, I wouldn’t put it exactly that way.  While I’m sure that the experience is easier for some than for others, saying that it didn’t hurt in the slightest, may be a biiiiit of a misrepresentation.  Plus, it sets up other women for failure and disappointment and gives false expectations of what the experience is.

“When Benjamin eats broccoli, he thinks it’s dessert!”

That is great that your kids love broccoli.  We’re all striving for that.  But I’m not sure that I can convince my kids that broccoli is dessert and keep it that way.  Unless we move to a cave and start up our own cult-like community.

gisele_nursing

Gisele Nursing in a make-up chair

You gotta give her some credit for nursing in public.  It’s something that should be socially accepted and she’s certainly helping to push the boundaries of acceptance by doing so.  Buuut ….this is probably mis-representative of 99.999% of the population’s motherhood experience.  It’s definitely the for-instagram/facebook/twitter version of the breastfeeding experience.  Although I do multi-task while nursing … I’m generally much less glamorous while doing so.  But I guess she’s a supermodel and I’m in tech … so that’s her equivalent of my trying to find a bug in my code with one hand on the keyboard while nursing.  So point taken, I guess.<

Overall:

I do think that Gisele is trying to promote positive things for motherhood.  But I think that she injects too much showmanship and overdoes the perfection lens while doing so.  To be truthful about motherhood — you have to admit some self-doubt or some weakness to be truly believable.  Unless she is a superhero.  Which she might be.  But not a warm-and-fuzzy one.


28 Jan

Secret Stashes that form once you have kids

  • Chocolate
  • Screwdrivers (world’s favourite toy, apparently)
  • Flashlight (which my husband hides in the car with the screwdrivers to ensure its safety)
  • Wrapping Paper (prevents the “unwrapping” of the entire roll in the kitchen)
  • A “Good” Shirt (the one that isn’t stained, stretched or fingerprinted)
  • Birthday Party Clothes (the only way to ensure that the kids have something decent to wear to a party)
  • Soothers (self-explanatory life-saving stash)
  • Car Crackers
  • Purse Hotwheels
  • Squeeze Packs (you know, that tube of babyfood that you initially swore that you would never give your kids?)

26 Jan

Ways that current “parenting wisdom” screws new parents ..

(Disclaimer — I made this all up.  It’s not advice — it’s  joke.)

1/ Nothing besides the baby in the crib.  Because everyone naturally likes to sleep in the middle of an empty field.  When baby flails their arms out — they love to have them hit empty space.  Makes them feel safe and secure.

2/ Don’t let them fall asleep at the boob.  As if this is even possible.

3/ Don’t use a soother.  Babies love to suck.  No soothers means mucho crying.  Better to listen to a lot of crying.

4/ Nothing near their face when they are sleeping.  Babies love things touching their faces.  Like boobs.  It’s comforting.

5/ Start in the bassinette – then move to the crib.  Babies love changes to their environment in their first weeks in a new world.

6/ Let them get used to loud noise.   This one is ridiculous.  The “wisdom” is — if you keep the house relatively noisy — they’ll be used to ambient noise and be better sleepers.  As a mature and former-professional sleeper — you know what loud noise does to my sleeping self? — it wakes me the heck up.

Thanks world of parenting “wisdom” for making up these dumb rules to sabotage our first steps into parenthood.

(Disclaimer – these are jokes)


26 Jan

Lightbot – 3+

Lightbot is amazing.

Android: Free version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lightbot.lightbotlite

Paid version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lightbot.lightbot

iOS: Free version: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/light-bot-lite/id659285751?mt=8

Paid Version:https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/light-bot/id657638474?mt=8
Cost: Free to $2.99
Ages: 3+

light_bot_2

I know that I’ve been going on about it.  It’s a good game.  Write the code (pick the commands) to take the cute little robot to the blue square — and light it up.  In this case — he needs to go forward 2 times, and then turn on the light — just like the instructions say.

It gets more complex as you go.  My 3 year old can only do the first 3-4 screens.  But then you can work together with them to figure out the problems.  Great for introducing the basics of coding for kids.  Great for spatial visualization too — they have to make the robot turn … which arrow shows the way that you want him to turn?  And great for teaching that trial and error is a perfectly reasonable strategy for learning.  Try to write to instructions for the robot.  Are they wrong?  What else does he need to do?  Take one more step?  Ok — add it.  Try again.

As I alluded to earlier — it’s a hit with parents, too.  It kept my husband up late quite a lot for about a week in November.


24 Jan

Old Life, New Life.

Datenight_mummum_917


22 Jan

Monkey Preschool Lunchbox — Ages 2+

A great App for basic counting, colours and following directions.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thup.lunchbox&hl=en
iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/monkey-preschool-lunchbox/id328205875?mt=8

Cost: $1.88-1.99

Ages: 2+

monkey_preschool

Although the music can drive you crazy after a little while, this app is a great one for learning about a wide variety of things.  Besides matching and counting … it introduces early letters and a memory game as well as some puzzles.  It’s also good for enforcing one-to-one counting — pointing to an object and saying “one”, then “two”, because as the child touches the objects — the app counts.  The App also moves along between levels easily — so that your child can play it for 5-10 mins without running to you for help.  Kids get “stickers” to put on their board when they complete levels.  Thumbs up from me.


21 Jan

Toys — Price vs Longevity

price_vs_longevity_toys_2

Conclusions — Add a little danger — and you’ve got a great toy.


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