From Working Mom to WORKING Mom!

So, I am minding my own business trying to be the best mom I can be to my boys. The other night, after they went to bed I began downloading pictures from my camera onto the computer. As the pictures are downloading I see that there are some wayward, random pictures taken and figure Noah must have found the camera and decided to try his hand at yet another artful collage of pictures. I see pictures of the ceiling fan, Blue's Clues on TV, the window, the coffee table, and then OMG!!....NO IT IS NOT!!!  I anxiously wait for all the pictures load but DREAD what I am about to see.

As I look though the photos it appears that my sweet little five year-old son as done some exploratory investigation of his own body. Yep, right there in plain sight and I am staring at my son's private parts on my computer!!! Not one photo but more like five or six....from different angles. I felt as though I had been hit by a Mack truck. That is the LAST thing I expected to see when viewing his latest photography collage. Now what?!

He is FIVE years-old, I am not ready for this!! Now I know this is just innocent curiosity and it is very age appropriate for this age. But my first instinct was to SCREAM at the top of my lungs for him to get out of bed and explain this to me! I also would like to reach into the computer and pull out any and all photos. If these pictures got into the wrong hands, it could be really bad. I waited for my husband to come downstairs and I tried to tell myself to calm down, this is not as bad as it looks. After a few minutes I returned to my senses and realized that it is normal for a kid to be curious.....MY kid just happened to document his curiosity with a camera!!!

Did I mention the kid is five years-old and WE ARE NOT READY FOR THIS?! Really I know it isn't that big of a deal but IT IS!!! This just snuck up on us. Here I am minding my own business, being a mom and then BAM!! It snuck up on me like a lion pouncing on a poor unsuspecting mouse! It was not on my radar for being a possibility in the near future. I guess I just chose not to think about it and thought it wouldn't happen.....EVER.

Once my husband saw it, we sat dumbfounded in front of the computer...feeling numb....likely thinking, what do we do now??

So now what.....sleep....that is what I need, I just need to sleep on it. I will be more rational in the morning. And I was.  Instead of yelling and screaming at him for being naturally curious about is body, I would talk to him, calmly.  The next day, after finding many things I HAD to do like, washing clothes, cleaning the kitchen, washing the floor, with a tooth-brush...twice, I sat him down.  I told him that I was looking pictures on the camera and saw that he took some of his body parts. The poor kid looked terrified. I told him it was okay to be curious about his body and that if he has any questions he could always ask Mommy or Daddy. I also told him that his private parts are private and not meant for others to see including taking pictures of them. I told him that if he wanted to look, it needed to be done privately in his own room but to leave the camera out of it and to remember that he could come to me or Dad anytime he had questions. He said okay and I could see the worry melt away from his face.

So that is how I handled it. Hopefully it was okay. What would you do? Anything different?

So I decided to embark on our the next home improvement project. The playroom makeover gave me the urge to add more color to our house. My 2 year-old son's room has been severely neglected and has never been really decorated.  Before he was born, I just decided to re-use the set that I used for his older brother when he was a baby (minus the paint). So his room looked pretty bare bones especially since we took the crib down (he was caught almost climbing out of it when he was 16 months) and got rid of his changing table because he was always climbing on that too. We decided one broken collar-bone from falling off of it was enough, so we sold it.

Anyway, back to the project. Here is the before picture of what it looked like:

Domestication is just not my "thing." As I have said before I have fought it tooth and nail. Cooking was one of the tasks I found myself to be domestically challenged. When I was in college I did as little as possible to cook, cereal was my favorite meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If I could pour it out of a box to make it that was great. If I just had to open and eat, even better.  Preparing uncooked food was disgusting to me...especially meat. In short...I detested cooking, not to mention I was a disaster in the kitchen.  Have you ever ruined Kraft Macaroni and Cheese? I have.  After college, it didn't change much (or at all really). I got married and my new husband soon realized that if he didn't want to starve he would have to learn to cook!!  Being a career woman and then eventually becoming a Mom didn't help matters. I had no idea how people worked full-time AND provided home cooked meals while maintaining a household and keeping their children in one piece. So, my husband continued his role as "Head Cook" and this was more than fine by me. During this time, our oldest son would ask his Dad what was for dinner and would be surprised if I actually made dinner.  I know there were people that wondered how in the world I got by without cooking and pitied him for having to cook. We made it work and it worked for us - he is a phenomenal cook by the way. 

As we entered 2011, like so many households with kids, we had new toys to contend with. Before Christmas, Noah (my 5 year-old) and I went through all our toys and decided which ones we could donate.  I thought I was getting the toy room ready for new toys.  I knew the toy room (which is really a storage room turned into a toy room) was in desperate need of a makeover.

But I wasn't prepared for the insane overflow of toys that ensued after Christmas. We didn't go overboard with gifts for the kids and neither did other family but just the addition of a few toys for both kids made our entire toy room and family room explode with toys. With the exception of having the "baby toys" separate from the toy room, there was NO organization to them at all. The kids didn't even really play with anything because they could hardly walk much less play!!

When I get an idea in my head I just go for it. My nature is to just jump in feet first without much thought or planning. And that is exactly what I did with the toy room, on super bowl Sunday no less (my husband thought I had gone nuts, but he is used to my spontaneous, spur of the moment projects by now).... I decided to paint the toy room. It was nap time and I had finally hit my breaking point with the toys. I began to gut the toy room by putting all the toys in huge storage bins. Then the room was empty. Now what?!  I had no plan, no shelves, bins or anything to organize the toys any differently. But I was going to paint. After the toy room was gutted I went to our paint supplies and found about a quarter of a gallon of two colors that I thought would work together (blue and green). And I painted....and Noah came in while I was painting and said, "wow Mom what else can you do?!"  Not sure if I should find this laughable or insulting, my kid obviously think I could do much of anything :)

The next day....I walked down to the toy room and thought oh no, what did I get myself into?! I have nothing to put the toys in to make it any better than before!  It is not as if the paint was going to organize the toys.  So it was off to Ikea I went, in my small Toyota Corolla, by myself (While the kids were at a friends house and my hubby was at work). I came home with my car stuffed to the gills with two Trofast Shelves and an Expedit shelf. Then onto Menards I had no carpet in the toy room (we had used the foam letters for flooring) and wanted a cheap way of putting in carpet. I had heard of carpet tiles and found them at Menards. They were VERY easy to lay down.

After the carpet was laid and the shelves were put together we sorted the toys into three piles:

1. Give Away
2. Throw Away (criteria being if it is broken or missing pieces it is to be thrown away).
3. Keep

This process was not as painstaking as I expected. It was very invigorating. I felt like all the "junk" toys were gone. I can't stand clutter and I love DECLUTTERING.  I then sorted all the toys that we were keeping into the bins (I did this myself so I had them exactly how I wanted them organized).  Now instead of having the "baby toys" and the bigger kid toys separate they are all in one room. If there are toys that are not appropriate for the younger one, they put up higher, out of his reach. So far this has worked. And the end result......I think turned out great.

I took these pictures before I finished labeling and I plan to put some cute things on the walls to make it even more "kid-ish" Other than that, here are the before and after pictures:
                                                                                

I am reading a book called Calm My Anxious Heart: A Woman's Guide to True Contentment by Linda Dillow. I was able to download it for FREE on my Amazon Kindle 3 the other day and am SO glad I did!! This book seriously had me captivated within the first two sentences. I thought I would share with you a few excerpts that caught my eye.

• Never allow yourself to complain about anything - not even the weather.
• Never picture yourself in any other circumstances or someplace else.
• Never compare your lot with another's.
• Never allow yourself to wish this or that had been otherwise.
• Never dwell on tomorrow - remember that [tomorrow] is God's, not ours.

So, I am finally coming to terms and accepting this whole stay-at-home Mom gig and then God throws another curve ball. Really? He sure likes to keep me on my toes!  I received a phone call from a legal staffing firm that I signed up with right before I was booted from my last job.

Wait....let me back up. I know I said I have a degree in Early Childhood Education, and I do! But I never actually formally worked in the field. Two weeks before graduation (while student teaching) it hit me like a Mach truck. What was I doing? I never wanted to be a teacher, I couldn't see myself doing this for the rest of my life!....I know, you are thinking well that would have been helpful to figure out WAY before graduation! Believe me, I know. Plus, I tend to look to the future not the present. I envisioned myself correcting papers and cutting out the next days project for the preschoolers at 50 years-old when I was only 24 years-old. Nothing like not living in the present.

So, I received my diploma, got a random job working for a health insurance company. Then a few years later I decided I needed a career direction and went back to school to be a paralegal. So, that is what I did for five years before I ended up where I am now.

Back to the curve ball.  This staffing firm called me today to tell me about a fantastic temporary (3 month contract) position doing pretty much the exact same thing I did at my previous job (which I loved).  My thought is, maybe this opportunity would give me a boost to experience the career world again just long enough for me to appreciate what I have at home...to help me to realize what I have is GOOD! God sure does work in mysterious ways!! I am just rolling with it. I will keep you posted as to what I decide....