Not Winning

Parenting. 

I'm guilty of it.

In this effort to have it all together and balanced and be amazing, you are all together and balanced and amazing, and then the amazingness starts to crumble.

Your almost-eight-month-old STILL isn't sleeping consistently through the night, but technically she is sleeping through the night for ten hours straight, but it doesn't make 4:30am any more charming or reasonable.

And then your sunny 22 month old becomes a hot mess in what you hope is just some late separation anxiety and not something more.

Not something that has to do with the fact that his little sister is now crawling and is all up in his BALLS and RINGS and toddler business.

You go on vacation for five days, and now he treats morning like Chinese water torture.

He climbs your legs like trees.

He screams from the moment he wakes up to your hoping only five minutes after you drop him off at school.

And you yearn for those days that he ran into the classroom and started playing and you couldn't even get him to say goodbye to you.

You announce transitions to try to make things easier.

You say goodbye to everything as it fleets through the toddler life.  Bye ball!  Bye tree!  Bye balloon!  Bye milk!

You are that parent who takes walks outside at restaurants because to sit?  Still?  For 20 minutes?  Unfathomable.

And that sweet sweet baby who really isn't grumpy anymore, but damn Mom needs some sleep.  You try the dream feed.  The not-quite awake diaper change.  You make the temperature hotter, you make the temperature colder.

She won't eat fruit.  She prefers salmon and quinoa.  Only pureed.  If you try to introduce anything other than a puree she gags and you get to practice your hemlich again.

You dream of date nights, but with family no where near by, the thought of a $300 night out is not do-able.

You want to punch anyone that has family nearby.

You think it is LUDICROUS that a two income family has to pay what they have to pay to live in a crappy school district.  You KNOW it is CRAZY that your daycare bills are more than your mortgage.

Yet you want to have another.  But without the infertility treatments.

And you are SO MAD that you are even having these thoughts because when infertility gets mixed up in hard parenting times you just feel like a gigantic schmoeburger.

This to shall pass.

But parenting?  It's not all sunshine, balloon, puppy kissedness.  Sometimes we need to admit that too to each other.  Or at least to your 40 Facebook friends that indulge your blog posts.

And sometimes, you just eat Goldfish for dinner.