Hi! I'm Shawna and I am a stay-at-home mom of three young girls. This is my life and my truth and all of the lessons I learn along the way. I hope you’ll sit back and savor the chaos with me!
Staying Close
When I found out I was having another baby, my thoughts immediately turned to my first daughter: Would I be able to give her all of the love I had before? Would we still be as close as we were? Would she still feel like she was the center of my world? Would she be OK?
Well, here I am 10 months later, with a six-week-old and an I-can’t-believe-she-just-turned-two-year-old, and so far the answers to my questions are usually, no, no […]
Calling your husband Daddy
Sometimes, once we finally get our daughter down for bed, my husband and I will pour a few glasses of wine, curl up on the couch together and…look at the photos we each took of our baby that day.
It’s shocking how much parenthood changes the dynamics of your relationship. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it’s not exactly an aphrodisiac, either.
Seeing my hubby as a daddy has definitely added to my vision of him, and I already had a […]
Letting boys be kids
I know I’m a little late to join the pig-pile of vitriol over this whole kid with pink fingernails thing, but I’m slogging in anyway. It’s an interesting topic, and one that struck a nerve with me (and 60 million other people). If you’re sick of it already, feel free to ignore me.
As the mother of two young girls (OK, one of them is only a 34-week fetus but I have already been mothering aka worrying about her for what […]
The unlikely archivist
No less than four dozen times a day, my daughter will do something amazing. Maybe she’ll make up a little song about her baby sister in mommy’s belly, or line up all of her stuffed animals and read them a story, or, like she did the other day, wake up from her nap, still half-asleep and say “Big, big nose. Big beard. No, little beard. So fun, so cute. Daddy!”
I will think to myself, “Man, I’ve got to write that […]
Open season
Fast forward six months, and the sight of another toddler’s nose running can send you into near-hysterics. Whereas really, that kid’s probably just teething, and it’s the clean-faced angel kissing your child on the mouth who really has CRV, his mama just doesn’t know it yet. The strategically placed bleach buckets for toys and the hand sanitizer bottles just seem to mock us now, don’t they?
How important is self-soothing?
Before I became a mom, I had never heard of self-soothing, much less worried about it. If you told me that I would spend hours and hours discussing it with other parents, I would have been about as credulous as if you’d told me I would someday be able to spot different baby brands on sight or that I would really, truly love making baby food.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about self-soothing over the past 19 months. I’m […]
Cute, cute, cute!
Quinn has entered the cuteness stage far earlier than I expected. No, not the stage of being cute herself. That’s one she’s always been in and will never, ever leave (note to self: Re-read that sentence when Quinn’s in eighth grade, then cue the chianti).
No, my toddler is in the stage where she remarks upon the cuteness of other things and people. Like her pigtails, my earrings and her friends (especially a certain little boy at preschool, who is actually […]
Baby longings
It happened today. I was at the zoo and I saw a woman cradling a tiny baby and I stopped and stared hard. “I want one,” said a plaintive (and possibly crazy) voice from deep within me.
Well, that is a damn good thing, lady, ’cause you’re getting one in four months! I am quite relieved that my desire for a baby managed to kick in before my baby got here. I got pregnant again when Quinn was just 13 months […]
Newborns: the magic, the misery
Now that Quinn is well into toddlerhood, and the burgeoning bump of my second baby sometimes edges into my field of vision, I have both the emotional distance and the sense of urgency needed to look back critically on the newborn period. My memories are often sepia-toned, infused with the magic that tiny little being brought into our lives.
But the picture isn’t always pretty. I didn’t realize it at the time (or at least I didn’t acknowledge it to anyone, […]
Ace of one…
My whole life, I’ve felt like I was obtaining random skills and taking up random hobbies for just my own pleasure. I am one of these ever-curious people who likes to try new things, learn new languages, make new circles of friends. I like the liberal arts approach to life, reading Gray’s Anatomy one week, a graphic novel the next, and splicing my Paul Krugman/ Malcolm Gladwell with Jane Austin fan fic.
I always thought that my lifestyle put me at […]