Don't Make Me Turn This Car Around!

I did it!!

I ran my first 5K!

I finished with a time of 38:47 and sixth overall in my division...the 50-59 females!

Ugh! I still can't believe that I am 50 years old.

Not really sure how I got here or how I survived passed my early 20's.

I was so stupid, headstrong, and willful. I knew everything and you couldn't tell me a thing.

In short, I  was pretty much a jerk.

Then I stopped drinking became well, a sober, stupid, headstrong, willful, know-it-all!

It's taken many years of trials and tribulations and failures to get to where I am today.

I am smarter but still headstrong although much less stubborn and I know that I don't know much but I can learn anything as long as I am willing to admit what I don't know.

Most importantly, I am a mom.

I am a mom of twin four-year-old boys who are learning to be independent, but can be headstrong, defiant and willful.

Just like...well, me.

Yup!

In fact, the twins turned four today.

The boys' T-Rex birthday cake

Where did four years go?

I find myself asking that question each year as time flies by in what appears to be a blur.

Another mom reminded me of a great expression yesterday, "The days are long but the years are short."

How true it is.

Yesterday wasn't just long, it was hellaciously long.

The kids were whiny and cranky all day. I'm reasonably sure it was the stupid time change from daylight savings.

David was the worst. We endured a 20 minute fit over my putting his sippy cup in the diaper bag,  something I've been doing for four years (I use it for sippy cups and food now). Evidently, he wanted to carry it. So I took it out of said bag and put it on the counter so that he could carry it and the tantrum got worse because he wanted to take it out of the bag, something he's never done.

It was hell.

No amount of distraction tactics would work to calm him or divert his attention to something else. He was just determined to scream.

I managed to get him in the car but then actually had to turn around and go back to the house and sit in the driveway with the threat of shutting off the car and going inside to get him to stop.

I was fully prepared to do this but I didn't really want to.

They are learning that mommy doesn't make empty threats. But that doesn't stop them from pushing the limits!

I follow through. It's tough and really, really difficult at times, but I feel it's important for teaching them where the boundaries are, how to follow instructions and to play by the rules!

It doesn't mean that they are not headstrong or defiant at times, yesterday being one of them, but they are learning when to push and when not to.

Sometimes my refusals are based on my fears not their abilities. It's tough to remember that when I'm frustrated.

The boys making silly faces

I'm hoping that their headstrong, defiant behaviors will make them successful and unwilling to quit when life gets rough.

They try so hard to be independent but still need me to zip their jackets, tie their shoes and wipe their butts.

Independence will come but it will take time.

They are only four and I am not in a rush for them to grow up.

Although having them wipe their own butts would be nice.

I love being a mom. The boys complete me in ways I never knew I was deficient. I had to become a mom to truly understand my shortcomings and know love.

Don't Make Me Turn This Car Around!

I did it!!

I ran my first 5K!

I finished with a time of 38:47 and sixth overall in my division...the 50-59 females!

Ugh! I still can't believe that I am 50 years old.

Not really sure how I got here or how I survived passed my early 20's.

I was so stupid, headstrong, and willful. I knew everything and you couldn't tell me a thing.

In short, I  was pretty much a jerk.

Then I stopped drinking became well, a sober, stupid, headstrong, willful, know-it-all!

It's taken many years of trials and tribulations and failures to get to where I am today.

I am smarter but still headstrong although much less stubborn and I know that I don't know much but I can learn anything as long as I am willing to admit what I don't know.

Most importantly, I am a mom.

I am a mom of twin four-year-old boys who are learning to be independent, but can be headstrong, defiant and willful.

Just like...well, me.

Yup!

In fact, the twins turned four today.

The boys' T-Rex birthday cake

Where did four years go?

I find myself asking that question each year as time flies by in what appears to be a blur.

Another mom reminded me of a great expression yesterday, "The days are long but the years are short."

How true it is.

Yesterday wasn't just long, it was hellaciously long.

The kids were whiny and cranky all day. I'm reasonably sure it was the stupid time change from daylight savings.

David was the worst. We endured a 20 minute fit over my putting his sippy cup in the diaper bag,  something I've been doing for four years (I use it for sippy cups and food now). Evidently, he wanted to carry it. So I took it out of said bag and put it on the counter so that he could carry it and the tantrum got worse because he wanted to take it out of the bag, something he's never done.

It was hell.

No amount of distraction tactics would work to calm him or divert his attention to something else. He was just determined to scream.

I managed to get him in the car but then actually had to turn around and go back to the house and sit in the driveway with the threat of shutting off the car and going inside to get him to stop.

I was fully prepared to do this but I didn't really want to.

They are learning that mommy doesn't make empty threats. But that doesn't stop them from pushing the limits!

I follow through. It's tough and really, really difficult at times, but I feel it's important for teaching them where the boundaries are, how to follow instructions and to play by the rules!

It doesn't mean that they are not headstrong or defiant at times, yesterday being one of them, but they are learning when to push and when not to.

Sometimes my refusals are based on my fears not their abilities. It's tough to remember that when I'm frustrated.

The boys making silly faces

I'm hoping that their headstrong, defiant behaviors will make them successful and unwilling to quit when life gets rough.

They try so hard to be independent but still need me to zip their jackets, tie their shoes and wipe their butts.

Independence will come but it will take time.

They are only four and I am not in a rush for them to grow up.

Although having them wipe their own butts would be nice.

I love being a mom. The boys complete me in ways I never knew I was deficient. I had to become a mom to truly understand my shortcomings and know love.

Not Just A Mom

When I was younger the only thing I could ever picture myself being was a mom.

Friends and family members would ask what I wanted to be when I grew up and I'm sure I gave the usual responses for girls like a nurse, a teacher, and at one point I even thought I wanted to be a physical therapist. Honestly though, the only thing I ever really saw myself "being" was a mom.

I had almost given up on this dream. In fact, for many years that's all it felt like: a dream. My marriage dissolved and I really thought that it just wasn't going to happen...ever. 

Then along came this wonderful, patient, sweet, loving guy who was not the least bit concerned that I had been married before - more than once - and, although I saw myself as such, did not see me as damaged goods. 

Before I knew it my resolve to "never get married again" had melted away and I found myself professing my love and devotion to him until death do we part surrounded by our families on a blustery January morning in 2010.

One friend still calls me a liar to this day, because I got married again.

It's ok...He's worth the teasing.

Since we knew that we both wanted to be parents, we began trying right away.

The odds were against us.

Forty might be the new thirty but my eggs had no idea about the rule change. Women are not supposed to be having babies in their forties.

Nearly a year of disappointment went by before we decided that it was time to look into medical intervention.

This is where it gets really interesting...

We opted to do IVF.  IVF stands for In Vitro Fertilization which is a process where an egg is fertilized outside the body. The clinic we went to had a "Shared Risk" program that gives you your money back if you don't have a baby after six tries. What an incredible opportunity!

There was a catch.

We had to use donor eggs to qualify for the program because I am old...reproductively speaking of course.

Cool!!!

Most women would be a little bummed about this but let me tell you that I was not in the least upset about stopping my genetic line.

At the time, I had just buried my father, the latest in a long line of male cancer victims in my family,  (someone with my genetic history would have been excluded from the donor program had I been younger) and if we used my eggs there was a five percent chance of success with an 80%+ chance of birth defect!

Bring on the donor eggs baby!

We signed up, signed our lives away financially and got busy reading bios of egg donors.

Not only did we get to see baby pictures of the donors but we even got to see teenager and adult pics as well. The donors fill out medical history forms and write an essay about why they are making the donation. It was a very cool experience...the first time.

I'll cut to the chase here. The twins were the result of our fourth round of IVF.

IVF is not just swirling the eggs and sperm around in a test tube it is a huge science that involves timing, injections, restrictions on what I could and couldn't eat and even whether or not I could wear deodorant the day of the transfer!

Cycles one and three resulted in nothing. Try number two started out as a pregnancy and ended in a miscarriage.

A devastating experience I would not even wish on my greatest enemy.

I'd waited my entire life to be a mom and there I was six weeks into my first pregnancy and it was over. To make it even worse I bled so badly that I required surgery and nearly needed a transfusion.

People don't talk about miscarriage.

To this day I will always wonder who that baby would have become. Despite the love for my two beautiful boys, I will always mourn the loss. It was devastating in ways that I could never describe. If you've been through it you know how horrifying it is. If not, you'll never fully comprehend the immeasurable sadness that accompanies the loss.

It literally took weeks for me to bounce back emotionally.

Once I was ready we began to look at bios again and prep for round number three. Despite all the stars aligning and everything being perfect, it didn't work.

To make matters worse, it seemed that everywhere I went there was an entire army of pregnant women. One of my friends, who hadn't wanted children, called to say that she was pregnant.

Well...now...how unfair could life possibly get!

Don't get me wrong here, I was and am insanely happy for her, but I was jealous as hell!

Heading into round four everything went wrong! There was one donor but three recipients for the eggs. One of the recipients didn't like the birth control pills that she was supposed to be taking so she didn't take them and postponed all of us for a month.

I swear to you that if that woman had been standing in front of me at the time, I would have punched her in the head. I was livid!

Then the donor got pregnant! Seriously?! WTF!! Could things get any worse?

Back to the bio database we go. Lo and behold there was a donor that already had two recipients signed up. We were the third and all systems were go. Things moved so fast from that point on that it is nearly a blur - or it could be that the children have destroyed that much of my memory - I can't be sure. Before I knew it we had eggs being fertilized and a transfer date was set.

I distinctly remember the doctor saying to me, "Since you've had such a difficult time, I think we should transfer two embryos and see if one sticks." Ha! We agreed, signed the necessary paperwork and I assumed the position on the table.

They tell you not to do home pregnancy tests but I don't know anyone that can resist that temptation...I still have all of mine. Needless to say, that when I went in for the blood pregnancy test I was not surprised that it came back positive but I was surprised at the number.

Whether you pee on a stick or you have a pregnancy test by blood draw the hormone that they look for is HCG (Human Chorionic Gandotropin - which is made up of cells that form the placenta). The HCG hormone is measured in milli-international units per milliliter or mlU/ml. In a blood test anything above 25mlU/ml is considered positive for pregnancy.

My nurse called me the afternoon of my blood test to say that it was positive and that my number was over 3000!!!! My response was, "Oh my God, they both took!"

Three days later I went back for my second and this time my number was over 10K. My nurse giggled as she suggested that maybe one of them split and I was carrying twins. Yeah, um...not funny!

Everything was confirmed with an ultrasound and we could see two little heartbeats at 14 days after conception.

Because of the previous miscarriage, we were cautiously optimistic and told no one what we were doing! Should this pregnancy fail too, I didn't want to have to tell everyone like I did the other time. The thought alone was painful.

Six weeks in I started to bleed.

The trip to the local emergency room is 8 minutes but it felt like an eternity!

I told the intake counselor what was going on, they triaged me immediately and put me in an exam room. The doctor came in so quickly I wasn't even finished changing into my gown!

After I was examined he declared that all was fine but was sending me down to ultrasound just to double check. The ultrasound showed no abnormalities and we were sent home.

I remember thinking that I wanted my mom. She had no idea that we had even begun another round of IVF. I wasn't about to call her from the ER and tell her but I knew that the conversation was going to happen very soon.

Six and a half weeks later I started bleeding again.

This time they didn't even triage me. They just brought me right to an exam room and the doctor was waiting for me. After a full exam and ultrasound I was once again declared fine and sent home to rest.

The good news was that that was the end of the ER visits.

The IVF process doesn't end with the transfer of the embyo(s). I endured shots of Progesterone for three months and shots of Estrogen for two. Prior to the transfer there were other shots. The easy ones were the belly shots which use insulin needles, are very, very tiny and barely pinch. The others hurt like hell. The progesterone comes suspended in an oil. The progesterone gets absorbed right away but it takes longer for the oil to get absorbed in the skin. In the meantime, I had oil lumps on my butt. Every night before the shot, I would have to find a location without a lump that my hubby could stick the needle.

Pretty much nothing made this any easier or less painful. It is what it is and if IVF was the only option for having a child then this was what I had to endure. Besides it will be a great guilt trip when the kids are older.

In all, pregnancy sucked.

The only thing good about pregnancy was the end result: our boys.

Would I do it again? Hell yes!

We have just celebrated the boys' first birthday. The house was packed with friends and family and the cake smash was epic. I look back the pictures from this past year and can't believe that these two beautiful baby boys are mine.

I have dreamt my entire life what it would like to be a mommy. My dream has come true. I've been a mommy for a year now and reality doesn't disappoint.

Yes it's tough sometimes, especially the teething. I mean seriously, teething has been a nightmare but I'm sure it's no picnic for the boys either.

That they are not my DNA doesn't matter. I carried them. I felt them wiggle in my belly. They are mine. I am not just a mom, I am their mommy.

Did you really just say that?!

Ok, so, let me ask the other moms out there... Does your mother give you idiotic advice or ask you ridiculous questions?

After walking through the Farmers' Market, on our way to lunch, I realized that I had forgotten to pack the boys' Cheerios. Cheerios have become a staple in our house. Sam's club sells two large boxes for $5.28. We are completely stocked up! Anyway...I paused and said that I didn't have the container of Cheerios for the boys but I would ask for oyster crackers or saltines to hold them over until we got back to the house. Her reply was, "You'll have to break them up!" REALLY?!?! I hadn't thought of that. I was just going to let nine-month-old boys stuff as many crackers into their mouths as possible and see what happened. Maybe I'd finally get to use my Red Cross training!

I questioned her need to constantly state the obvious or give me advice that implies that I am a complete and utter moron. She said that all mother's do that. Um...No. Sorry mom, but you are the only mom I have ever heard say things like this.

She has never outgrown the need to make sure I am safe and now her over-protective nature is over-flowing onto my kids. I appreciate the concern but seriously, take a breath and think before engaging mouth.

And everyone wonders where I get it!

In the middle of the summer when the heat was nearing 100 degrees after telling her that I let the car run to cool it off before putting the kids in it, I was lectured about not leaving the kids in the car alone...You mean like you used to? The trailer-hitch incident is legendary in our family!

Mom and I talk every day. This affords her ample opportunities to ask me ridiculous crap. Driving down the road on the way to the store in the middle of the day on the phone with mom, "Are the kids with you?" she asks. "No," I replied. "They were sleeping so I left them at home. Of course they're with me! Where do you think they would be?!"

She is one of the smartest women I know. She is an award winning writer, was an editor, has a vocabulary that puts Webster to shame and all with only a high school degree and a few college credits. Yet, she sometimes lacks ALL common sense. Years ago while waiting for my sister to come through the customs' doors after an international flight, my mom tapped me on the leg and said, "Here, take this and shoot them when they come thru the doors." As people began to dive to the floor I ripped the camera from her hand held it above my head and shouted, "Camera! It's just a camera people!" Thank God this was before the Patriot Act!

While in a parking lot waiting for the torrential downpour to end so she could run into the store, she told me she had to have her windshield wipers on fast forward - As opposed to reverse?

Today, after a really wonderful barbecue at her house she was trying to get me to take the leftover apple pie home. I told her that both hubby and I were trying to lose weight. She said that I looked fine and didn't need to lose any weight. I replied that my clothes were still too tight. She said that was because my clothes were too small. Um...yeah...that would be the weight loss part.

There seems to be something about being a mother that makes her brain take a vacation and I seem to be headed in the same direction.

Some people call it Mommy Brain. I've heard it referred to as Mom-nesia. Either way it can be defined as the sensation of losing the ability to think rationally combined with memory loss.

For example, I've been a sailor my whole life. Thanks to my dad, I know all the parts of a sailboat intimately. I started sailing lessons when I was about eight years old and for as long as I can remember, spent every summer racing with dad. Some boats were small; some were large but those summers are the bulk of the best memories of my life.

Recently I offered to make a birthday cake for my friend's son who will be turning 4. He wants a Jake and the Neverland Pirates cake. I did a little research and found a picture of the pirate ship and thought it would be really cool to make it out of cake. I pulled up the picture to show it to my hubby and explained that I thought the toughest part would be the...the...the point. My hubby, a die-hard sailor,  looked at me totally aghast and said, "Do you mean the bow?" Yeah! That's it, the bow!!! Oh! My! GAWD!!! My father must be spinning in his grave! Never once before in my life have I referred to the bow of a boat as the "pointy end."

Until now.

It's official I have mom-nesia. I forget what I am saying in the middle of sentences. It takes me at least three tries to do just about anything and I am already calling the kids by the wrong names!

I am doomed!

I pick on my mom but the truth is that when the chips are down or if I need some advice she is the first person I call. I call her for Hollywood trivia. She knows actors and actresses like the back of her hand and could even tell me the name of the woman who played Hot Lips Houlihan in the movie M*A*S*H*.

I once called her from my office, first thing in the morning, to ask her what ennui meant. Not only did she know the word but she gave us the definition and used it in a sentence! This was impressive not just because she knew the word but because I couldn't even pronounce it and had to spell it for her. More importantly she had been sound asleep until my call had woken her up at 8:30 in the morning! Mom doesn't get up before the crack of 10!

She is a unbelievable writer. I dabble, she is a pro! I'm completely serious. If I were to compare the two of us I would be so intimidated that I would never publish a word. She has a blog too but doesn't write enough to satisfy any of us! Feel free to visit her site and let her know she needs to write more: Widowhood For Dummies

She is a Wonder Woman. She possesses and amazing knowledge of the English language, can plan an event, run any social function imaginable and is an authority on just about everything. She knows more about obscure medical stuff than most of the medical community and watches surgical shows for entertainment.

She knows the melody and lyrics to every children's nursery rhyme ever written and makes a point of singing the most annoying ear worms to the kids in my presence because she knows they drive me crazy! Skinamarinky dinky dink anyone?

Just don't ask her anything that involves geography. Her lack of knowledge is painful. She once asked me where Indianapolis was.

She possesses an air of authority that commands respect. Unless of course you are her daughter and are constantly bombarded with ridiculous advice like, "Don't leave the babies in the car" on a 100 degree day. I'm not saying I'm perfect, I'm just not that stupid.

If she were an American Indian her name would be, "She Who Must Not Be Denied." If she tells you to do something you'd better move! Doesn't matter if you are her child or not.

An order is an order.

You don't ever want to piss her off or threaten her children or grandchildren. She is the ultimate momma bear and when backed into a corner can come out so ferociously that you will be both begging for your life and apologizing in alternating breaths.

She has just about the worst diet of anyone that I know. She can live on leftover birthday cake for a week interspersed with Lean Cuisine frozen dinners and Pot Stickers with room temperature Sprite Zero to wash it all down.

And salad gives her heartburn.

She is the person we all go to when we need help and it doesn't matter what the problem is. A friend went to her because they were going to be cutting off her husband's government benefits. Mom took on the cause like it was hers and didn't give up until she got a Senator on the phone and got him to commit to helping her friends - which he did. 

I remember being so mad at her when I was a teenager and wondered if I would ever be able to be friends with her. I may tease her but we are more than friends now, we are buddies. My day is not complete unless we talk...at least once. 

Usually at dinnertime...the woman has a knack for calling whenever we are eating!