Taking A Hit For the Home Team

It hurts to get up.

It hurts to sit.

It hurts to lie down.

And don't get me starting on walking.

Late Blooming Mom is recovering from hernia surgery, and planning to make the kids feel guilty about it some day.

It's their fault, it really is, no kidding.

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Vegas With The Kids: Highlights and Lowlights (Part Two)

All thoughts of Vegas being a family-friendly destination pretty much vanished at 6:25 a.m. on Easter Sunday, when the pounding on the door and the shouts of "Metro Police!" awakened us. Burly officers then hustled into the room, turning on all the lights. To be fair, once they spotted the sleeping kids on the pull-out couch in the suite, they switched the lights off and conducted their search by flashlight. But it was a post-dawn full room search, bathroom and balcony included. I sat up in bed while my husband, who'd let the cops in, dealt with them, and managed to blurt out, "What's going on?"

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Vegas, Babies, Vegas? (Part One)

We took a long weekend over spring break -- the Passover/Easter weekend -- and went to Vegas, Baby, Vegas ... with two four-year-olds.

No, it's not exactly the first thing you think of when you think of family-friendly vacation destinations. In my parents' day, it was known jokingly as Lost Wages, but gambling is just item on its present-day menu of vices in which to indulge. Families trudging from one hotel to another on the sidewalks of the famous strip must run the gamut of street hawkers pushing "escort services" -- "Girls, Girls, Girls In Twenty Minutes," read their t-shirts -- handing out cards with phone numbers, past the blinking signage advertising all-you-can-eat buffets, and through the throngs of tourists clutching chilled alcoholic fruity drinks in brightly-colored, far-too-large novelty cups. And that's just what families experience outside. When they walk through a Vegas strip hotel to get to or from a parked car, a restaurant, or the monorail, they experience half a lifetime of second-hand smoke inhalation.

But despite all the negatives, Vegas beckoned anyhow, because two seventy-something-year-olds -- grandparents to Thing 1 and Thing 2 -- make thrice-yearly visits to it, all the way from New York City. Apparently, sometime after Americans turn sixty-five, the slot machine switch turns on in their brains, and Vegas becomes as powerful a draw for AARP members as the early-bird dinner special at the local diner.

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Becoming Your Mother

I now see it's inevitable.

At some point into motherhood, at some moments, every woman becomes her mother.

It happened to me this morning when I had to lay down the law to my four-year-old daughter. We had driven to ballet school and were getting changed for Sunday morning ballet class in the changing room there -- a weekly class she elected to attend, mind you, I don't force her and it wasn't my idea -- when she put on her ballet shoes and then firmly declared of one of them, "This one bothers me."

Off it came. Much readjusting of the shoe was attempted, to no avail. It's not that it's too small; it wasn't pinching at the toes. My daughter just didn't like the way it felt around the ball of her foot today. I offered trying it on the other foot. We did. No dice. I suggested taking her socks off. That was met with refusal. I offered to buy her a new pair at the store at some later time, when it would be open (it wasn't this morning and besides, even if it had been, class was starting). All I got was wailing.

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They Are Enough: Looking Back From Twinfertility To Infertility

Now that I'm four years-plus into motherhood, and five past the infertility that bogged me from my late thirties to age 40, I sometimes forget what that desperation to have a kid was like. I think this near-amnesia is the mind's way of protecting the heart, and helping it move on.

Now my problems are of an utterly different sort, and most of the time, I am oblivious to the fact that they are problems I'm lucky to have. These days, the problems are garden-variety kidstuff. I've got a son who can't wind down at night, and keeps wandering out of the bedroom, or tossing and turning in bed if I deign to stay in the room with him; he doesn't get enough sleep, often wakes up cranky, yet can't seem to give up his nap at school, the one thing that might make him tired enough to nod off at a reasonable bedtime. I've got a daughter who must, simply must, have things her way, on her schedule, of her choosing. And I'm nearly unable to buy a pair of pants that fit, even though I weigh about 112 pounds naked, and the problem ain't fat: it's the re-arranging of my belly's shape from a twin pregnancy that no amount of exercise or anything short of surgery will make go away. (Suffice it to say those low-rise pants will never be for me. When someone as thin as I am still gets a muffin top protruding over a pair of pants, those pants are JUST WRONG!).

Five years ago, I was suffering through multiple miscarriages.

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