You know it’s been awhile since you’ve been out on a date with your husband when you find yourself going to the Mall ON your date so that you can find clothes to wear TO your date. Tonight Zeb and I were going to meet friends for dinner downtown. After my trip to the Strawberry Festival, my pants were no longer suitable for anything other than cutting grass or perhaps a trip to the Flora-Bama.

At the moment I have LITERALLY one pair of pants that fit. (Thanks to what as known as the “in-between-stage” of post-partum weight loss.) I know as women we say all the time, “I don’t have anything to wear,” but seriously people, I had one pair of pants that were totally trashed and my husband wanted me to go out to dinner.

I dug out an old pair of jeans, rubbed some Vaseline on my butt and thighs and pulled them on. (I might be exaggerated a tiny bit. TINY.) I buttoned them, but (lol) breathing was no longer an option. My husband walked through the bathroom as I was sucking it in and zipping them up and said, “Babe, you look cute.” I rolled my eyes. “What?” He asked. “I cannot sit down in these pants…” After explaining and showing my husband that I only had one pair of pants to my name, he called our friends and told them we would be a few minutes late (Sorry Petersons!)

The Best Husband in the EN-TIRE World took Momma to the store to get some new clothes. I won’t say the name of the store but I will say it’s the first time I’ve bought clothes in over a year that didn’t have buggies (carts, to you Northerners!)

I stood in the dressing room in nothing but my SPANX and nursing bra, and waited for Zeb to purchase my date night ensemble. As I waited, I was hopeful that this night would end better than the last date when I paid a babysitter to watch my kids while I contracted food poisoning. Ah, happy endings…new clothes and no vomiting OR diarrhea.

At the girls’ preschool the children study one letter of the alphabet a week. Every year for the letter ‘P’ the school has a Pajama Day. Aubrey remembered it from last year. When it rolled around this year, the girls were SO excited to wear their pjs to school.

Aubrey, the priss-pot that she is, insisted on wearing a nightgown even though it was only 20 degrees outside. (That is ARCTIC for Charleston!) Emma wanted to wear her very favorite, fleece footy pajamas that are covered with monkeys. I was afraid she would get too hot while playing in her classroom and want to take them off, so we put ANOTHER pair of pjs underneath the fleece ones.

Because Emma’s pajamas had feet in them, she couldn’t wear her shoes. Being the wildly innovative mother that I am, I grabbed a pair of Aubrey’s shoes and put them on Emma’s feet. ON TOP of the footy pajamas, ON TOP of the regular pajamas. (I packed her shoes in her bag so if she wanted to strip during the day she would have shoes that fit.) I was brilliant, I had thought of everything.

We grabbed our jackets and hats, bundled up and headed to school. I dropped Aubrey off in her classroom and all her sweet little, pajama-clad friends were there to greet her. Emma and I made our way down to the 2 year old class and I froze in my tracks. Every single child in that classroom was wearing clothes. You’ve GOT to be kidding me.

“I thought today was Pajama Day,” I said to her teacher.

“Yeah, the 2 year-olds don’t usually participate.”

Well that was obvious NOW. Aubrey had participated last year in the 3s, so I just assumed we were ALL going to be wearing our pajamas. FABULOUS. I did have a back up plan, and offered to let Emma change into the extra clothes we keep in her backpack for potty accidents. She flatly refused.

“I want to wear my pajamas.”

That baby marched into her classroom with two pairs of pajamas, her sister’s shoes and her head held high!

Leave your entries in the comments section or if you are having difficulty registering, email them to zebandrobin@hotmail.com.

The Baby Bjorn can be a lifesaver, it allows a mother to “hold” her baby hands free. It’s great for a variety of purposes, cooking dinner, trips to park when you have other children to wrangle, or any occasion that you have to tote a little one around but also need full range of motion with your hands.

That said, it is NOT figure friendly. The bottom strap wraps around right at the top of your postpartum bulge. (FINE, MY post-partum bulge.) The “baby bump” isn’t nearly as cute when you are no longer pregnant, and as much as I need to have my hands free, I cannot bring myself to strap on the Baby Bjorn. My self confidence takes a dive every time I even think about it.

In a flash of brilliance, I have decided that Baby Bjorn needs to team up with SPANX and make a girdle/baby carrier combo. (My apologies to anyone who thinks that SPANX is anything BUT a girdle.If you are not familiar, SPANX are “body shapers” that start at your knees and end at your bra strap.) They are also made to allow you to use the restroom without having to take them off. Trust me on this. If I could buy something that not only sucked, slimmed and smoothed, but allowed me to hold my kid hands free, WHILE I was peeing, you could NAME your price. Seriously.

I would HOWEVER like to ask the people at SPANX to attach the REAL version to the Baby Bjorn and not the cheap ripoffs they sell at Target that have SPANX stamped all over them. Before I had kids, I bought the REAL SPANX, the expensive ones you can only buy in department stores. After two kids and realizing the expenses of a family, I jumped at the chance to save a buck and buy them at Target.

I wore my newer, cheaper and somewhat larger SPANX for the first time to a friend’s lingerie shower. I ran for a potty break right before she started opening presents, I didn’t want to miss a thing. I unzipped my jeans, and sat down to use the restroom and suddenly felt a warm flood all over my backside and thighs. APPARENTLY, the Target SPANX were such a deal because they were NOT conveniently equipped to let you use the bathroom without removing them. Would it REALLY have hurt them to put a disclaimer on the box?

So, here is my proposal Baby Bjorn and SPANX….you can thank me after you’ve made millions of dollars off of MY new and innovative idea.

Technology is A-MA-ZING! I have a video baby monitor in my house. I don’t even have to get out of my bed to see if my baby is awake or asleep, with the press of one button I can look directly at her sweet little face. There is no creaking door or bumping into her bed in the dark to wake her up. It is FABULOUS!

Several weeks ago I put Sadie(3 mos) in the bed, wide awake (just like the books say) to go to sleep. I went to my bedroom, crawled into the bed with my book and turned the baby monitor on. My baby was GONE. My heart started racing, I broke out in a cold sweat and bile started to rise in the back of my throat…HOW could this be happening? I JUST walked out of her room….then I realized that not only was my baby gone, but her bed looked different and her bedding was gone. What the?

I ran into Sadie’s room to find her exactly where I had left her. Ahhhh, OK, so that was somebody else’s bed I was looking at…WAIT, if I can see into someone else’s house that means…they can see into mine. Oh crap. (Apparently one of my neighbors has the same baby monitor on the same channel and I was picking up their camera instead of my own!)

My mind raced back through the evening histronics of getting my 2 year old and my 4 year old into the bed. All the shouting, the screamed threats: “You’d better get in here RIGHT NOW and brush your teeth OR ELSE!” “If you touch her one more time I am going to spank you, do you hear me? Do you understand?” (Yes, we spank. I trust Dr Dobson, not Dr Phil. If you want to judge me I’ll be glad to take the day off and let YOU show me how it’s REALLY done!) “Quit acting like a snake and PUT YOUR PAJAMAS ON, NOW!”

Oh, no! No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Someone had heard all of this. SOMEONE in MY neighborhood had heard this. I froze as I realized that Zeb was outside in the garage as I got out of the shower that night, Sadie was crying and I walked into her room STRAIGHT out of the shower to pick her up. OH, crap.

My mind was racing and I was in a panic. I could just see Miss Perfect Mommy (you know her, she would never DREAM of spanking her kids, never has to tell them more than once to do anything, her kids pick up their toys without being told, eat all their vegetables and never have a cross word to say to their siblings…) watching her baby monitor in horror as I traipse around my house naked, swinging a wooden spoon at anything under 3 feet tall.

She’s already called DHR, I just know it. Where are they, I wonder? About to break down my door? Sitting in that unmarked car across the street waiting for my slightest misstep? I don’t know where Miss Perfect’s house is, so…Thank God, I sigh with relief, they don’t know where I am. LESSON LEARNED!

From that point on, anytime I pick my baby up out of the crib, the camera goes OFF! Yesterday I heard someone talking on the baby monitor. “Mm-hmm,” I thought to myself, “let’s just see how perfect you are…” I started to openly spy on this poor unsuspecting woman. She was changing her baby’s diaper and cooing to her, “Poooooor baby, hasn’t had a poopie diaper ALLLL day! Have you? HAVE YOU? NOOO, no you haven’t! ” “Honey, ” she says to her husband, “can you hand me a diaper and some wipes?”

I grinned with satisfaction as I turned the monitor off. Only a first time mom would actually waste a wipe on a wet diaper, which means she has NO idea the havoc that will be unleashed on her once that kid can walk and talk.

Perfect? Hmph! We’ll see who’s perfect! I give her 6 months before she’s knocking on my door asking for a wooden spoon and instructions on how to use it.

If sleep deprivation is a form of torture, the CIA needs to unleash my kids on all Al Qaeda suspects in captivity. They are pros. I’m pretty sure that they have a team meeting every morning while I’m sleeping for the 30 minutes they allot for me.

In my head it goes something like this:
Aubrey (4): I know we ran out of Cheerios yesterday so I’ll scream and cry for the first 2 hours for Cheerios. Emma, you just eat whatever she gives you. Sadie, cry until she feeds you.
Emma (2): I wore my favorite dress yesterday and got ketchup ALL over it, since Mom hasn’t done laundry in a week, I’ll refuse to wear anything but that.
Aubrey: Good thinking. Sadie (3 mos), you wait til we are ready to walk out the door to poop. You know how she loves having to come back inside once we’re almost all in the car.

They cover every aspect of the day, taking turns being the “good” one so that I don’t get suspicious. But I’m on to them…I just can’t find any evidence of premeditation.

During nap time today, I went back and forth from my bed to Emma’s getting the big girls settled in. After numerous threats, I finally got everyone including Sadie asleep. YES! I went to climb into my bed with Aubrey and realized she was smack dab in the center of MY “nest’o’pillows” asleep, the nerve. But whatever, I grabbed a couple of extra pillows and got in the bed on the other side…and woke her up.

“I’ll just close my eyes and she’ll go back to sleep,” I thought to myself. WRONG! She was AWAKE, and whining for juice. I dragged my butt out of the nice warm bed, got her juice and told her that nap time was NOT over and to go back to sleep. But it was pointless, I should have realized it then and there. She had taken a power nap…the bane of every mother’s existence.

For some unknown reason, maybe denial, I continued to lay in the bed and try to sleep. About every four minutes, just as my thoughts were getting cloudy and I was beginning to drift off, Aubrey would touch me. Just enough to wake me up. Torture. I rolled away from her and closed my eyes for the hundredth time, I was lying on a Polly Pocket but it was a small price to pay if I could just sleep for 30 minutes….OK, the Polly Pocket was REALLY hurting. (Torture, I’m telling you, they think of EVERYTHING.)

I rolled back towards Aubrey, but kept my eyes slammed shut. I didn’t want to give her any indication that I was awake…I could hear her moving around and knew she’d pounce at the slightest sign of weakness. All of a sudden I felt her lunge towards me and my nostrils were COVERED by her mouth as she took a DEEEEEP breath and blew her orange juice breath into my nostrils! I sat up, choking from the sudden and unexpected influx of air into my lungs.

WHAT was that? Did they talk about it at this morning’s meeting? Who was the mastermind of this new technique? As I got out of bed, defeated, I had another mental picture of their team meeting. Heads together with three tiny hands in a circle…”Ready….BREAK!” I could just see Emma and Sadie saluting their commander as they commenced to driving me right over the edge.