Anne TootillTo Be or Not To Be a Mother - Part Three
February 28th 2007 16:06
I spent the morning walking up and down the aisles in the health food store with Josh and Alex complaining in the cart. I picked up a bag of yam chips. They looked exactly like potato chips except they were orange. In another aisle I discovered the alternative grains. Heavy, tasteless white bread alternatives such as Spelt (this has something to do with wheat but supposedly is better tolerated by people with wheat allergies) Amaranth, Groats, etc. Then it was on to the milk alternatives. This included the, not yet popular and doubt it will ever become so, rice milk (passed it by) and rice (Dream) ice cream (high on fat content it burned my throat as it went down, but if like me, you crave sweet, this definitely fits that bill) soy milk (forget the plain and go for the vanilla lowfat…yummy and adds a lot of flavor to a bowl of cold cereal) and soy ice cream (smooth and creamy it came in low fat and tasted nice and sweet without the burn) and goat milk (gagged at the thought of drinking it) and goat cheese (actually kind of good). It was an education and a fortune (one bag of groceries = one month’s rent…O.K. I’m exaggerating…slightly) to say the least.
It was not easy trying to read all those labels in the health food store with two whining and complaining kids in tow but since I had no one else to watch them until my husband came home, which would be after the health food store closed, it was go now or wait until the weekend and then I wouldn’t have had the time to see how I tolerated the new foods by Monday, which was when I was scheduled to check back in with the nutritionist. By the time I came home with the food and the kids I felt like the energizer bunny after the battery ran out. But I still had to feed them and diaper them.
Did I mention that Josh was refusing to toilet train? And he was three years old. And the extra large Huggies barely closed on him. And yes I’d read all the books, bought the little potty, tried positive reinforcement both verbal praise (such as “yippee, Josh made a jumbo poop in the potty, what a good boy my little Joshie is”), bribes (Thomas the Tank Engine matchbox trains were his thing) a larger bribe, uh I mean goal to aspire to (he wanted this flashlight fire engine, which we prominently displayed in the hopes of motivating him), etc., etc., etc. And when all that failed I cried and screamed every time I had to clean a disgusting load of poop out of his teeny tiny Mickey Mouse briefs. I let that crap roll out of the underwear and into the toilet. Then I flushed it. Then I scrubbed and I scrubbed and I scrubbed the underwear by hand until the stain was barely noticeable. And then I tossed it into the laundry and cleaned it with bleach. And after all that work the $1.00 pair of briefs looked brand new again. So I’d put them back on Josh and we’d go through the same thing all over again.
Much later a friend asked why I didn’t just throw them out instead of torturing myself. How I wish I could have thought of that back then. Wow, how much easier (on me) that would have been. But tossing a new pair of underwear for no other reason than it was easier for ME seemed selfish. And since despite witnessing my potty training meltdowns, my husband never told me it was O.K. to throw them away I did what I thought I was supposed to do. And I hated it.
Anyway, back to my new foods. So I feed and diapered the kids and then I set them up with toys and sat in the dining room chair watching them play. And then I tore into a bag of yam chips. Not bad. They were sweet and salty. Of course the calorie count was the same as potato chips. I figured at the rate I was shoveling them into my mouth I’d probably be a big as a house and then have to add obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes to my long list of health problems. Oh well, lately I’d been thinking that it wasn’t like I had much to live for anyway.
It was not easy trying to read all those labels in the health food store with two whining and complaining kids in tow but since I had no one else to watch them until my husband came home, which would be after the health food store closed, it was go now or wait until the weekend and then I wouldn’t have had the time to see how I tolerated the new foods by Monday, which was when I was scheduled to check back in with the nutritionist. By the time I came home with the food and the kids I felt like the energizer bunny after the battery ran out. But I still had to feed them and diaper them.
Did I mention that Josh was refusing to toilet train? And he was three years old. And the extra large Huggies barely closed on him. And yes I’d read all the books, bought the little potty, tried positive reinforcement both verbal praise (such as “yippee, Josh made a jumbo poop in the potty, what a good boy my little Joshie is”), bribes (Thomas the Tank Engine matchbox trains were his thing) a larger bribe, uh I mean goal to aspire to (he wanted this flashlight fire engine, which we prominently displayed in the hopes of motivating him), etc., etc., etc. And when all that failed I cried and screamed every time I had to clean a disgusting load of poop out of his teeny tiny Mickey Mouse briefs. I let that crap roll out of the underwear and into the toilet. Then I flushed it. Then I scrubbed and I scrubbed and I scrubbed the underwear by hand until the stain was barely noticeable. And then I tossed it into the laundry and cleaned it with bleach. And after all that work the $1.00 pair of briefs looked brand new again. So I’d put them back on Josh and we’d go through the same thing all over again.
Much later a friend asked why I didn’t just throw them out instead of torturing myself. How I wish I could have thought of that back then. Wow, how much easier (on me) that would have been. But tossing a new pair of underwear for no other reason than it was easier for ME seemed selfish. And since despite witnessing my potty training meltdowns, my husband never told me it was O.K. to throw them away I did what I thought I was supposed to do. And I hated it.
Anyway, back to my new foods. So I feed and diapered the kids and then I set them up with toys and sat in the dining room chair watching them play. And then I tore into a bag of yam chips. Not bad. They were sweet and salty. Of course the calorie count was the same as potato chips. I figured at the rate I was shoveling them into my mouth I’d probably be a big as a house and then have to add obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes to my long list of health problems. Oh well, lately I’d been thinking that it wasn’t like I had much to live for anyway.
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