Big Time

Internet, I have arrived. And by that I mean I shelled out for a real, live .com for the 'ol blog, so that now whomever is searching google for the following pressing reasons, as was apparently the case this past week:

• Mama Needs Coffee
• Medium length bobs with bangs
• Shoulder length bob 
• Mama sex free (um…)
• Deepest masculine desires (I really can't comment)
• Mama needs coffers (true) 
• Caffeine during pregnancy harmful (emphatically, no)
• Free range toddler (indeed)

will be directed swiftly here, to mamaneedscoffee.com. 

Watch out, world.

Blinded by the Life

I'm a little bit spoiled in that I have 4 younger sisters (and 2 little brothers, but I'll kindly leave them out of this) and while two of them are out of town working the family business of racking up dolla dolla bills at FUS (to be paid back over a lifetime of SAHM-ing), 2 live very conveniently close to me.

Okay, full disclosure: one just took up temporary residence in my basement with her brood of blonde offspring. The other is a blushing bride-to-be with a knack for taming nephews into gentlemen of sorts, or at least getting them to bed in a reasonably efficient fashion.

Bridal sister was kind enough to have mercy on a desperate, waddling woman and snuck me out of the house mid-morning today for a little third trimester pedicure action, which you long-term readers might recognize as a cry of desperation/induction method round these parts. Such is not yet the case as I am but a tender 35 weeks ripe (poor, poor choice of verbiage there) but the pampering was glorious, nonetheless. And I must say, I think I'm getting a thicker (perhaps it's all the water retention?) skin, because when my petite and beautiful pedicurist leaned back and eyed up mount midsection and proclaimed "you huge, you have big baby in there!" I merely batted my puffy eyes and smiled indulgently down at her whilst she scrubbed my calloused heels.

"Yes, I make large children. It's my specialty."

I folded my hands serenely over my massive girth and settled deeper into my massage chair, sighing in relaxation. I snuck a glance over at Hillary and saw that all was not well with her soul, however.

Mouth agog, the future Mrs. blinked at me in horror, a flush creeping over her face and neck on my behalf. I leaned over and patted her dear arm and assured her that this was not all that unusual and yes, strangers say this kind of shit to pregnant women all.the.time. Sometimes it's nice stuff, sometimes it's not so nice stuff, and sometimes it's just a straight up cultural collision of inappropriate-to-say-to-your-best-friend-let-alone-your-customer/a-complete-stranger.

We continued our sisterly date over lunch, reflecting on the utter weirdness of hearing people's internal monologues vomited on of the sidewalk in front of you, thanks to a simple biological process known as procreation. I reminded her that in a culture of death like the one we inhabit, new life is always a little bit shocking and a little bit in your face, so to speak.

I honestly think people can't help but blurt in front of pregnant women because, frankly, it isn't every day you see a human growing out of the front of somebody. Maybe in some areas of the world it is, but in medium-sized-metropolis USA, it sure ain't the norm.

On good days I think of these little encounters as opportunities for evangelization, or at least much-needed doses of humility. On bad days I stare morosely into the freezer at 11 pm and think about eating the rest of whatever ice cream flavor is currently growing a layer of ice crystals.

While I can't promise I won't pen weekly odes to gestational obesity from here on out, I can only assume that this is going to become a somewhat regular theme for me to touch on here as I increase and my sense of dignity decreases. Or something like that.

At any rate, my toes look amazing, and it turns out I chose a super appropriately named shade of pink:

Do You Speak Toddler?

So I have this three year old. Don't try to tell him he's three though, because he will assure you (As he assures me multiple times a day) that he is 'a really big man' and also, 'really, really handsome.' He might also tell you he is going to be a priest and a daddy, and that he might have babies some day, but not in his tummy because he is 'a real man.'

If real men spend 90% of their waking hours asking questions, telling on their younger brothers, and fashioning straight objects into weapons, then he is Mr. Marlboro himself. I'll let him do the rest of the talking just to prove it to you.

At bedtime, after somebody got to stay up late to watch the first half of the Notre Dame game:

Joey: (sobbing) John Paul is cryyyyyying.
JP: (indistinguishable moaning)
Joey: (in a piercing wail) He is really crying and I can't like that noise!

While driving home one evening:

Jenny: Buddy, do you want to stay up with Daddy and watch the football game for a little bit?
Joey: Well I'm really sleepy. Maybe just a little bit of football and a hot bath. Can I get a hot bath? And a drink?
Jenny: Would you like a cigar, too?
Joey: Just a hot bath, Mommy

Upon discovering the requisite Millenial tramp stamp mommy sports on her unfortunate lower back:

Joey: Why you got a flower on your booty, Mommy?
Jenny: I made a silly decision when I was younger and now I have to live with it.
Joey: Daddy doesn't have a flower on his back
Jenny: Nope, Daddy was not quite as silly as I was when he was a kid
Joey: Daddies don't have flowers, because they have penises
Jenny: ...

Wandering through the family room, unaware he is being observed:

Joey: All we have to do is get our SHINE ON!
Jenny: What?
Joey: A big giant guard
Jenny: Excuse me?
Joey: I got away on a telescope
Jenny: ... sips coffee

Looking very concerned upon waking:

Joey: Are my teeth grayish, Mommy?
Jenny: What?
Joey: Just a yittle bit gray, do you think? Maybe if I sleep with a toothbrush...

Busting into our room at o'dark thirty:

Joey: (flings open door, slamming it into the wall) Good morning! I'm ready for gluten free pancakes!
Dave: (blink, grumble, snort)
Joey: All you have to do is get your shine on. (Can you guess what his favorite song is?)
Jenny: Are you real?
Joey: I'm really hungry for gluten free pancakes

Dragging an empty Pellegrino box through the living room at 8 am:

Joey: We just need some more wine. To get on the airplane!
Jenny: ...
Joey: Everybody needs more wine!
Jenny: ...

While driving through far-eastern rural as all get out northern Colorado to visit friends:

Joey: What I'm seeing out there, Mommy?
Jenny: Llamas. Those are llamas, they have nice fur that makes sweaters
Joey: (silence)
Jenny: They're from Peru. Aren't they cool looking?
Joey: Do llamas do bad things to people, Mommy?
Jenny: ...

Boasting about his newfound ability to stand and deliver at the potty:

Joey: I pee like a man. I'm a real big man!
Jenny: Yep
Joey: Like Peyton Manning. He pees like a man. These are his undies.
Jenny: ...

He is a delightful, challenging, confounding, and hilarious little housemate. I just wish I could figure out the source of his rich interior monologue. Because I'll have one of whatever he's having.

Huge with Child

Here's my advice to all you gestating women of size out there in cyberspace: don't ever, ever agree to appear on camera in your third trimester of your third pregnancy in roughly three years.

Ouch.

I'm filming some Catholic content for a forthcoming project spearheaded by a major Christian media company, and while I'm flattered (and deeply, deeply confused) to have been tapped to speak on parenting, I'm now reeling from the approximately 6.5 minutes I just spent reviewing unedited footage of myself talking about discipline and sleep deprivation while looking absolutely huge. Huger than I imagined myself in my wildest nightmares and certainly much, much bigger than those floor to ceiling mirrors at the gym are willing to admit. Oh holy hell, only 7 weeks to go, how much bigger can I get?

At least I'm in the good 'ol USA where perhaps a handful of other women can relate to my significant swelling in stature. Roman mammas would have run screaming from me in the piazzas, I presume, stilettos clicking hastily away down cobblestoned alleys, errant cigarette butts tossed aside, still smoldering, while clutching their petite pregnant bellies in horror. Bellies which more closely resembled  a taut, youth league basketball stuffed under a thin veneer of cashmere.

I love these little people so much, but they have destroyed my body. Not just altered it, but absolutely destroyed it. I just have to believe that I am being remade, stretch mark by stretch mark and dimple by wrinkle, into someone more beautiful and more worthy of the immense dignity of this vocation. But no wonder, no wonder motherhood is so denigrated by our society: it's appalling. Not on everyone, certainly, and not at all times, but when it comes down to it, it's basically biological war being waged on a woman's physique. And what mothers - what I - choose to do in response reveals the deepest held beliefs about the worthiness and the nature of the call. Do I really, really believe there is some higher purpose to what I'm doing here, aside from propagating the gene pool and ticking the next box on my life-long to-do list?

After looking at myself looking like that, I sure as hell better believe it. Because otherwise why, why, oh why would anyone undergo this kind of searing, soul-scarring transformation, this death and dying to self and to the world and to one's image in the mirror...all for love of another? And then possibly another. And another. 

I hope this is not coming across as some bizarre mashup of piety and self-loathing. I'm honestly stunned by my own appearance, and stunned by my reaction to it all the more so. I might hate what I'm seeing, but I have the emotional and spiritual distance for the first time in all my life to realize that she isn't fully me, that I'm more than the sum of the camera angles or the reflections tipping my own image back to me. So is it horrifying? Decidedly so. But there's a degree of detachment that I haven't experienced before, and that's pretty surprising. In a good way.

So here I lounge, debating between a long, hot bath in the semi-clean tub only recently vacated by two pair of toddler buns clutching melting Klondike bars in their grubby fists versus a nice hour in bed with my current dystopian young adult fiction addiction of the moment (Allegiant, the final book in the Divergent trilogy, FYI), and while my larger-than-life image will be forever burned into my retinas, I don't think I'll lose sleep over it tonight. At least not as much sleep as will be claimed by sciatica and heartburn.

And so to all you other big, pregnant mamas out there: I salute you. It's not easy being stuffed full of life in a culture that gluts itself on slender death, and it's certainly not always easy to look yourself squarely (roundly?) in the swollen face and say, bring it on, I got this, I was made for this. But you're doing it. We're doing it. 

Motherhood: it's not for the faint of heart (or for the small of pants.)  

The Secular and Sacred

I didn't really know 'doing' Halloween versus opting out was such a hot button topic until this year. Growing up we wouldn't have dreamed of missing out on trick or treating, (hence my participation as one of the Spice Girls when I was in TENTH grade. Somebody should have punched me and my 4 co-conspirators off their front porch steps in retrospect.) but we weren't allowed to be anything 'creepy' or evil, which was loosely defined as being of the occult. So witches, vampires, and Satan himself were out, but pretty much anything else was in.

I guess I saw fit to continue allowing my children to participate in this vein, since we're both citizens of the kingdom of Heaven (hopefully) and also of the kingdom of man. I mean, we celebrate all the other secular holidays too, and Thanksgiving is pretty close to the tip top favorite of my list, so I don't see why we can't kick off the holiday season October 31st. Plus, I read this fabulous piece last week and was like, yeah, see, this ain't no stinking pagan ritual. So there, Hallmark channel.

All that being said, I hate horror anything. The last horror movie I saw on purpose was The Glass House, I think, and it was on a semi-blind date with a townie from Steubenville who ended up being slightly underaged, a fact that didn't reveal itself until the moment he ordered up a Mountain Dew to match my Yvengling at our fine dinner beforehand at Applebee's. The moral of the story: horror movies are awful. Also, I don't do well with blood or surprises. Ask me how parenting is going so far...

Without further ado, here is photographic evidence that my will to participate in seasonal festivities has not been totally thwarted by pregnancy hormones. Yet.

Exhibit A: Superman and the duck.

Exhibit B: St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and St. Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and martyr.

Please note the bloodied cannonball protruding from Loyola's knee, and the blood-thirsty lion clinging to Antioch's back. You know, he did pray to be ground in the teeth of the lions that his body may become the wheat for God. Or something pretty close to that.

We trick-or-treated on Thursday night (or rather, Dave and Joey hit the block while JP and I retired after visiting one solitary house, at which point I elected to wait in a bubble bath until Joey brought me his candy to "gluten screen." Poor kid, can't eat a single Twix, I simply had to help him out...)

On Friday morning we lined up all our saint dolls and icons on the kitchen table, lit a bunch of candles, and made pumpkin chocolate chip pancakes while rocking out to this tune over and over again before hitting up an ill-planned noon Mass.

Some of our saintly crew.

We hit up an even more awesome Feast that night with our friends the Servants of Christ Jesus, where many, many calories were consumed, bonfires were admired, and where Ignatius of Antioch took home the night's top prize for best costume because, come on, a bloody lion.

The next day we paid a quick visit to the Adoration chapel at a nearby parish to pray for our deceased friends and relatives and all the holy souls in Purgatory, and then Target. Because everyone knows that Target on a Saturday morning is a kind of preparation for Purgatory, especially when you bring along your husband and a pair of hangry toddlers.

So there you have it, my two cents into the Catholic blogosphere on the nature of Halloween, and why it's totally cool to nerd out and celebrate the trifecta of Hallow/Saints/Souls Days.