What Successful Parenting Means to Me

Tuesday was a success. Wednesday was a failure. What made them different?

Tuesday I stayed home, watched too much tv, and had a glass of wine once all the kids were asleep.

Wednesday I stayed home, watched too much tv, and had a glass of wine once all the kids were asleep.

Tuesday I got up with my toddler instead of clinging to the idea of more sleep. I did some chores when the twins let me put them down. I asked my toddler to help me with those chores. We had fun together.

Wednesday I kept trying to sleep after my toddler woke up. She came into my room at about 9:30 with a poopy diaper. The first thing one does in the morning should not be to struggle with a toddler who doesn't want to have her poopy diaper changed.

Wednesday I did no chores. Well that's not strictly true. I did wipe off the table after my toddler spilled juice everywhere.

Wednesday I ignored my toddler, or at least tried to. She made it difficult.

Finally at 4pm, clearly fed up with being ignored all day, she hollered at me from the kitchen. When I turned and looked her way, she was dancing on the table. I laughed and then promptly went back to watching my show.

Then my poor, sweet toddler fell off the table. I think. I actually don't know what happened, because I was ignoring her. But I heard a thud, and then she came to me crying with a bloody lip.

Tuesday was a success, not because chores got done, but because of my perspective, because I remembered that my children are not a hindrance to my ends; they are ends in themselves.

Wednesday was a failure, not because my kid got hurt, but because my kid got ignored. She deserves better than that. I can do better than that.

We all feel like we're terrible at this parenting thing sometimes. We all are terrible at it sometimes. But we are also sometimes really on top of our game. We can't let the guilt from the failures overwhelm us. We have to just keep doing our best.

Today my goal is to take a walk with my toddler. When I go for walks with her, I am fully present with her. No checking my phone. No watching tv. Just being with my daughter. That's my goal.

It's not what we're doing that matters. It's the quality of the time we're spending together.

Also Big Guy just sneezed in my face. Happy Thursday everybody!

Conquering the Self-Hate that Comes with Pregnancy Weight Gain

Every pregnant woman worries about weight gain. When I look back at my diary from the first time I was pregnant, the very first entry is a pregnancy meal plan I made for myself to ensure that I was getting what my body needed without taking in excessive calories.

I also remember staring at my beautiful, folic-acid-filled lunch and thinking, I don't want to eat any of this. I want gummy worms.

Every pregnant woman worries about weight gain because every woman worries about weight gain. We've all stepped on a scale and cringed. We've all been told since birth that our appearances give us value.

I'm generalizing, of course. This is not every woman's struggle. Some women are not worried at all about becoming fat. Some women struggle to gain weight before and during pregnancy and to maintain a healthy weight while nursing. You may be tempted to say, I wish that was my problem! But please stop and recognize that being chronically underweight is just as difficult as being obese. The point is, we all struggle.

This post is about how I overcame my own personal weight struggle. This post is not about some magical diet I discovered or the best fat-burning exercises. This post is about conquering self-hate.

The only logical place to start is the beginning: I was in the third grade when I began to think of myself as a chubby kid. My mom and grandma were the ones who made it painfully obvious to me. They weren't trying to be cruel. My grandma doesn't think that calling someone fat is an insult. "It's just a fact," she says.

Chubby became part of my identity, part of how I viewed myself. I weighed 135 lbs all through high school. This is a perfectly healthy weight for my height, but no one had ever told me that healthy weight ranges vary from person to person. I thought a girl ought to weigh less than 125 lbs. A girl ought to be dainty. I wasn't particularly thin, so I continued to think of myself as chubby.

In my freshman year of college, I educated myself about these things. I learned to eat right, learned to love running and weight training. I spent one glorious summer wearing sundresses and weighing 128 lbs. My thighs never chafed!

Then classes got harder. Stress eating happened. I got up to 140 lbs. I felt bad about this, but not awful. I knew 140 was the top of my healthy weight range. I believed I could get back down once I wasn't so stressed.

But then I had a miscarriage. It was a very dark time. I gained 20 lbs in a matter of months.

So when I got pregnant with my daughter, I was in the 160s. I tracked my weight for a while, promising myself that I wouldn't let it get out of control. But my pregnant appetite was insatiable. I ate constantly. When the scale got above 200, I stopped looking.

After giving birth, I weighed 190 lbs. I'm nursing, I told myself, so the weight will just fall off. I had seen this happen for my sister-in-law who had given birth 6 months before I had. She was now thinner than she ever had been! Breastfeeding would make me thin, too!

But it didn't. When my daughter's first birthday arrived, I was still 190, and I was drowning in self-loathing.

It infected every area of my life, and it was particularly harmful to my marriage. I begged my husband to help me. I don't know what I expected him to do. Snap his fingers and make me thin? Become my personal trainer? His approach was to counteract my negativity with compliments. He told me I was beautiful every day, and every day I hurt him when I scoffed in response.

It's impossible to lose weight when you hate yourself. Every weight loss effort is really a punishment you're inflicting on yourself for not already being thin. I starved myself out of hate and then gorged myself out of pity. I couldn't approach weight loss as an attempt to be healthy, because I didn't feel I deserved good health. I sabotaged myself at every turn.

Finally I reached out to my mom. "I hate myself," I told her. "I'm sorry," she said, "that's my fault." She was right. All my life she had equated fat with ugly and used both words to describe herself. So when I looked in the mirror and saw the shape of my mother's body, all I could think was 'fat and ugly'.

I decided to pretend that I loved myself. Fake it 'till you make it, right? When I had negative thoughts, I counteracted them. I said to myself, I'm beautiful, and I love myself.

I had some success with this approach. I went to a birthday party for my friend and pretended to be my old, confident self. I talked to strangers and danced and had more fun than I had had in years.

I struggled on that way for a few months, pretending I loved myself. Practicing cognitive restructuring. Some days were good, and some days were difficult. Then one day I had an epiphany.

I was just driving to the beach, thinking about motherhood, and I realized that I never ever not once in my entire life looked at my mom and thought she was ugly. And no one ever looks at me and thinks it either.

When I got home, I told my mom what I had figured out. Tears formed in her eyes, and she said, "I've never thought my mom was ugly!"

My sweet dad is a children's minister at church. He's always asking what he can do to help young girls have good self-esteem. I'm sorry to say, I don't think there's much he can do. We learn our insecurities from our mothers.

It's not often that a problem is truly solved by an epiphany. Usually realizations require some sort of action afterward. But I have felt beautiful every single day since then. I felt beautiful all through my twin pregnancy wherein I gained thirty pounds. I feel beautiful after the c-section with all my loose skin.

I feel beautiful because I am beautiful. I've conquered my self-hate. I hope my story helps you conquer your self-hate, too.

Get Those Twins on the Same Schedule

With twins, the most often repeated advice is to get them on the same schedule. Yes, absolutely! Definitely do this! And once you have done it, come show me how you did it, you sage, you magician, you baby whisperer!

They say, "If one of them wakes up, wake the other one up also." Ah of course, it's the only way to keep them together. But here's the problem: One of them is always awake. And pooping, I might add.

I exaggerate. It's not as bad as all that. One glorious night they woke up together for all three of the night time feedings. And they fell back to sleep together within an hour after each feeding. Yes a most glorious night it was! And I woke up refreshed the next day with my six hours of broken sleep! And I took my daughter to the park!

Last night, however, was not a glorious night. It was the kind of night where you lay down only to get back up ten minutes later, where you and your spouse sigh at each other grumpily, where your toddler is awake for a solid hour just saying, "Lay down mommy" over and over again. I want to, Darling. I want to so bad.

The sunrise brought with it a raging headache that caffeine is powerless against. It is noon as I write this post. My boys have been asleep at the same time for exactly 13 minutes so far today.

Forget the Nursery, Make Your Bedroom Awesome!

For the first six months of my daughter’s life, I spent zero time in the nursery. My daughter slept in a cradle next to my bed. Most of her diaper changes were done in the portacrib in the living room. Until she started sleeping there, the nursery felt like a beautiful waste of space.

With the twins, I changed my approach to nesting. My husband and I still did a lot of work in the room that will become the nursery, (It had pink walls and a dirty old carpet, ew) but instead of filling it with empty cribs, we made it into a guest room for my mom - the magnificent saint who is staying with me until March! Then we focused our attention on our own bedroom, because that is where the twins actually live.

I’m going to try to make this into an exhaustive list of what I have found to be helpful to have in my little postpartum oasis. First things first, of course, the giant cradle. At this stage, the boys don’t wake each other up. Newborns can sleep through any amount of screaming in their ear, it seems. Hanging from the cradle is my diaper organizer. It holds diapers and wipes, of course, but also extra cradle sheets, burp clothes, and pajamas for the boys. There's room to spare, I might add.

Now I didn't waste any space on a changing table. I just change the boys on a towel on my bed. I also didn't bother to get one of those tiny diaper genies. They may reduce the smell in the room, but I need a much larger trash can for all the diapers we go through. We take the trash out every other day.

The next most important space is the nursing/pumping area. I don't nurse in the bed. Beds are too comfortable, and I'm terrified of falling asleep while nursing and subsequently dropping my poor babies on the floor. So I nurse in a chair (big enough to hold my nursing pillow) next to a table. The table is essential for the water that I guzzle while nursing. 

*Side note* Not many people discuss this, but nursing makes you so thirsty! It was torture not to know that with my daughter. I'd get all comfortable and start to nurse and suddenly be struck with thirst! And there was no relief for it until the nursing session was over, because I didn't want to disturb my sweet nursing baby while I walked to the kitchen.

The table is also essential for the pump and pumping bra. Now I didn't go spend twenty bucks on a fancy pumping bra. I just cut some holes in an old sports bra (free the nipples!). Why bother with a pumping bra at all? Because holding the stupid pumps to your boobs for ten minutes multiple times a day gets old real quick, and hurts your wrists to boot!

The table also holds my kindle and my bluetooth headphones. The kindle and the headphones are tools for helping me stay awake during those night time feedings. It's important that the headphones are bluetooth. Changing diapers with wires hanging down in the way is very annoying. 

The night time feedings are also helped by soft lighting. No one wants harsh overhead lighting when they have to get out of bed at 2 am. You want a pretty lamp you can turn on that is just bright enough to ensure that you got all the poop off those cute baby butts.

Fitting a mini fridge into my bedroom was one the best ideas I ever had. I pump and store so much breastmilk. I would hate to have to go downstairs to the kitchen as often as I open my mini fridge. Plus it holds snacks! Nothing like nursing twins to make a girl extra hungry!

Along with all the pumping and storing breastmilk comes lots of washing bottles. So I keep dish soap and dish towels in my bathroom.

Lastly I put up a mini white board on the wall to write down which kid ate from which boob at which feeding. Lots of girls use those cute bows that clip onto your bra to remind you which boob to offer your kid first, but twins. And I like to see the whole day written on the board. It's helpful to ensure that both my boys are eating 8 to 12 times in 24 hours.

Ok there you have it! The 15 things in my postpartum bedroom that make my life easier!