when your house looks like this... 

the only thing left to do is have a silly string fight!

confesssions of a not-so-playfulmama

after a brief lecture about truancy (in the big boy school) i let josiah stay home from school again yesterday. i know it's wrong but i had no energy to make myself go to school, thank god this is the pre-school trial run i keep telling myself. what am i going to do when i actually have to do this EVERY day, like 5 days in a row. somedays we are just having too much fun for school but i must admit this was not one of those days.

so this morning after a huge drama from jack over cutting his nursing session off sooner than he would have liked, i managed to get everyone ready, fed and out the door by 9:30am. i'd only be 15 minutes late, for me this is probably a record or something. i fill josiah's snack bag and throw it in his bag when i discover school papers sent home from god knows when.

it's a field trip...a baking adventure at nora's house. her family (all together) built a wood stove out the clay that was harvested from the land surrounding her house. this is also the same family that invited the parents to a letter writing party for amnesty international just a few weeks ago. oh my god. i can't stand nora's family today. how can they be so perfect?

nora's mother probably sends nora to school EVERY day and doesn't completely forget when it's her turn to help in the class.

all i can think is that my kids are on day two of tv marathons and how josiah cried his heart out when jorge left for work this morning. is that normal? i ease my mind by telling myself that jack's been sick, maybe excessive tv watching is somehow okay and that it's a good thing that josiah is so attached to jorge.

truth be told jorge is really the more playful parent. he can play for what seems like hours of dinosaur computer games, legos and he is an expert wrestler. who can compete with that?

lately, i've been just been ignoring my kids so i can curl up in my bed and read my new anne lamott book.

and then i pull myself out of my bad mother funk and decide to do a load of laundry. i find sour laundry from like 2 days ago, i swear to myself i'll follow through today. i wish i had a pint of ice cream to drown my awful motherness in, but i don't, so a left over half eaten frosty will have to do. and then i start to think about nora's family, a messy house and truancy. i start thinking about why we as mothers play the comparison game, why we measure and judge ourselves. how did we get to the place of uber/everything-mom being the goal?

in my heart, i really have no desire to be that perfect, everything mother but i do want to be more than i am. i have always wanted to be more than i am...

so i start to feel bad about nora's mom. i sometimes openly loathe her, but the truth is, i secretly love her. i love that she is doing so much to change our world and involving her kids in her passion and quests. i am proud that josiah goes to a school where these values are just like breathing. just part of everyday life, and i pray that fresh air goes deep into his lungs and fills his heart so he can expel the goodness back out on to the world.

i want be surrounded by people like nora's mother, because as much as they might annoy me, they make me want to be a better person. not to compete, but because they plant ideas in my mind, they draw the goodness out of me- the mom that can barely get her kids teeth brushed every day.

3 loads of laundry are done and maybe i'll get another chapter read- and maybe i'll even write a letter tonight and hand it to nora's mother when i drop josiah off at school 30 minutes late...