I Just Want to Pee Alone

by Some Kick Ass Mom Bloggers

  "I'm sorry to tell you this, but my son went to the restroom in there and it won't flush. There is no plunger in this entire house."

  "Well, no one lives here."

  "But, couldn't they have at least kept a plunger behind??"

  The nice little real estate lady nose scrunched up.

  We didn't want that house, anyway.

  (No judging. The cleaning lady walked up as we walked out, thank the good Lord.)

  We perfected the art of peeing when there was no restroom around during those six months of house hunting. With two boys, a water bottle has come in handy - a lot. They seem to always have to really bad at the really wrong times, like when we are in the car waiting for some house hunting-related something or other and no public restroom is nearby and just letting it all go in the trees is not really an option. (Just don't tell little boys jokes when they're right in the middle of using that water bottle. They tend to lose focus on their aim, if you know what I mean.)

  At one point while walking up to house number 4,216 on our journey, we noticed there were a couple of bricks that were cracked in the sidewalk. Throughout our house hunting, we noticed other things, too, like closets so small that a box of matches wouldn't even fit inside them, barking dogs that had ruined the carpets, rooms painted colors we didn't even know existed. My husband, as was his custom, said he didn't like that house. It wasn't "the one for us."

  "Will there ever be one for us??" I questioned as I began to wail and gnash my teeth.

  At that moment, I contemplated several alternatives to enduring this moving process (that was more complicated than I had ever imagined), such as moving to Calcutta to try my hand at selling woven rugs, becoming a stage sweeper for a traveling Cirque du Soleil show, volunteering as an elephant-poo-picker-upper for a circus or operating a Ferris wheel as a carnie. Any of those would have been more desirable than not agreeing on houses, engaging in bidding wars on properties and . . .

  "What are those?" I asked my boys as I stared at red shards ofrock they had bunched up in their hands as we drove away from that house.

  "Rocks."

  "Those don't look like normal rocks. Where did you get them?"

  "From that house."

  It clicked.

  "Those are the broken bricks from that house's sidewalk! You took the bricks from their sidewalk! You can't to do that, guys!"

  My husband made a quick U-turn. We had to try to put the brick puzzles pieces back together before the homeowners returned. We didn't want that house! What could we possibly say to them as we pieced together their front sidewalk? We hate your house but not your sidewalk? We loved your broken sidewalk so much that we tried to take it with us?

  The homeowner' SUV whipped into their driveway and opened the garage door as we approached the house.

  Goshdarnit.

  "Okay, let's wait in the car for a second. As soon as they vanish inside, run and put those bricks back together! Go as fast as you can and then run back to the car so we can speed away! On your mark, get set...GO!"

  I knew that if we were discovered, I sure didn't want it to be me putting a brick jigsaw puzzle together under the homeowner's glare. I don't even like puzzles!

  Off my eight-year-old flew with shards of brick in his hands with my four-year-old close behind with his own collection. Pieces fell as they made their way to the little area they had just looted moments before. Their little hands were moving so fast that you would have thought a bomb was going to explode if they didn't put it back together in under five seconds. (Actually, there was going to be one! THE MOM BOMB, youknowwhati'msayin?! Okay, that was terrible.)They collected rogue pieces, put them in their proper place, stood up and ran back to the car like they were mini James Bonds.

  SCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH!!!!

  If the homeowners saw us, we would have never known. We turned the corner on two left tires, never looked back and then we high fived.

  See, the thing is, the whole moving process was NUTS, but I do feel like it brought our family closer together, which is something I wasn't expecting. We may have endured looking at some crazy houses with some crazy yards, a whole other chapter by itself, but we made it through finally!

  Now, I just have to unpack these one million boxes. Want to come over?

  * * *

  Kelley Nettles is a Texas girl and the creator of Kelley's Break Room, a humor blog meant for everyone: mothers, fathers, single women, single men, teenagers, the elderly with good eyesight and highly developed toddlers. She is a Bravo-sponsored blogger and a writer for NickMom. She has contributed to Nickelodeon's Parents Connect and Scary Mommy. In 1999, she married her college flame and has two sons born that were born in 2004 and 2008 that wrestle, roar, and jump from objects every single chance they get. You can find her avoiding laundry and trying to make people laugh on Facebook and Twitter. A lot.

  Pregnancy Secrets From the Inner Sanctum

  By Tara

  You Know it Happens at Your House Too

  So, you're pregnant. From the moment you pee on that stick for the first time, you immediately form these pictures in your mind of how perfect this pregnancy and motherhood are going to be. You are going to rock this pregnancy and do everything exactly the way they say to in the books from the get go. You are going to eat right and exercise, you will be strong and refuse the epidural during labor, and once your little bundle of joy arrives, life will be picture perfect. Rainbows and puppies, fluffy clouds and sunshiny days, unicorns and clean sheets. I'm just gonna tell you right now, forget about it. It's bullshit. All of it.

  Once you get over the intimate relationship you had with your toilet for the first three months of your pregnancy, you realize you are hungry. I am not talking just any kind of hungry here. I'm talking about a hunger in which you would eat the ass end of a horse if that is what was on the table. You have a baby in there constantly demanding some womb service and there is no way in hell you can fight the power when you see that cake sitting there begging for you to eat it. Baby wants it, baby gets it. You stuff yourself with the cake and the cheese, and before you know it, you have no regard for what they tell you to avoid in the books and all you want is a nap.

  Workout? BAH! This kid is sucking the life out of you and it isn't even on the outside yet.

  Sleep and eat, eat and sleep. That kind of schedule makes it difficult to accomplish anything else.

  The moment you have been waiting for finally arrives; labor begins and you tell your husband that you think you had better make your way to the hospital. If you are lucky, he will recognize that you aren't just yanking his chain and that this is some serious business. If you are lucky, your husband won't ask you to hold on for an hour while he goes to bale hay. That baby is knocking on your pelvic floor and you are beyond ready to notarize that eviction notice. Pack up your placenta baby, time to move on out.

  A few hours of light contractions, a few pushes, and boom. Baby. Isn't that what labor consists of? Oh, you hear horror stories from your friends about hours upon hours of excruciating, make you want to remove your husband's scrotum with your bare hands kind of pain. Not you. Hell no. You are strong like bull. There will be no reason for someone to stick an oversized needle in your back. You are going to rock the hell out of this labor, drug free and glowing. But hey, just so you know, there will be no ticker tape parade in your honor or a big cardboard check for a million dollars in recognition of your bravery if you do refuse the drugs. Just a little friendly reminder to keep your options open, courtesy of yours truly.

  Your doctor comes in with a smile. He gives you a good vaginal probing, tells you that you are progressing slower than he would like for you to be, and decides to start you on some Pitocin, AKA "the Devil's elixir," in order to "get things moving." Two hours later you are begging for mercy and yelling at anyone and everyone to GIVE ME THE FUCKING DRUGS! Never fear, no one will think any less of you for this. In all reality, the nurses will be giving you virtual high fives and slaps on your ass, especially when it com
es time to push that watermelon sized head out of a hole half its size.

  Please trust me when I tell you that when it comes time to deliver that little bundle of joy and your feet are up in those stirrups, you will have absolutely no dignity left. Short of the janitorial staff (who will be in there afterwards), everyone in that hospital will have seen your nether regions and chances are, you won't even care. You now have drugs and are riding the wave to happy town. This pushing bit will be a like taking a good poop and in just a matter of minutes you will be holding your little bambino in your arms. Nothing can go wrong. You are on a Caribbean cruise and are coming into port.

  Your doc comes in one more time to see if your door is propped all the way open and while he is elbow deep in your vagina he says to you "this is a bigger baby than I expected". Now would be a good time to start warming up your vocal cords as you will start singing praises to your anesthesiologist. You will be singing and entire opera when you see your lovely doc turn his back to you and whip out a pair of forceps. When you see those torture devices coming toward you, you will start scrambling for words as you inquire as to where exactly where he plans on sticking those big ass salad spoons because you sure as hell don't think that your vagina will be a good fit for tools of that size and shape.

  As you try to figure out what exactly is happening down there, you realize that not only do you have a bigger than expected baby trying to escape from your uterus via a very narrow birth canal, but your doc has now shoved large metal spoons upstream and he is now wielding scissors. Wait. Scissors??? What. In. The. Hell? It is at this exact moment that you realize that your vagina is under a full blown assault from two different people at the same time and there is not a damn thing you can do about it but string together all the curse words you have in your arsenal and let them fly; Holyshitdamnitalltohellwhatinthefuckdoyouthinkyouaredoingdownthereyousonofabitch! You are pushing, he is pulling. He's telling you to push harder and you are screaming obscenities while fighting every internal urge to kick him square in the head. Finally, you have a baby. Oh sweet Jesus, the emotions, and the crotch pain, are just more than you can bear.

  You cannot wait to get out of that room and take your sweet angel home. You need to get home and get back to your perfect plan. You bent a little with the epidural, but there is no way you can let that happen again. This is going to be just like you see in the magazines and books. Your hair will be perfectly coiffed, your clothes will be clean, and your baby will never cry. What the members of the mommy inner sanctum never told you was that not every baby takes to breastfeeding right away. Not every baby sleeps in four hour shifts every night. Not every vagina bounces right back after the trauma yours has been through.

  Before you know it, you haven't showered in days, unless you consider squirting your hoo-ha with an iodine solution a shower. You find yourself delicately walking around your house topless, not for your loving husband's visual enjoyment, but in order to help your nippies heal. Your clothes are covered in poo and spit-up, but since your little love bug often bears a striking resemblance to Regan from The Exorcist you decide to test your best yoga pants for absorbency instead of creating more laundry. You quickly figure out that breast milk and baby vomit not only works wonders on your hair, but makes for a fabulous perfume.

  When you start to feel like you have failed, like you have completely messed up as a parent, take a long look at that little human that you made. YOU made a person. While the road to get there may have been rough, and at times even unbearable, YOU made a PERSON. While your road may not have been (or will be) this brutal you never know when there will be a bump in the road. Fortunately for us mothers, we are blessed with the ability to forget the painful trauma suffered by our crotch or abdomen (whichever the case may be) and instead turn it into a ridiculously funny story. In the end, it doesn't matter if you caved in and got that epidural. It doesn't matter if you find yourself sitting in the rocking chair for eight hours in a shirt so full of holes that you don't even have to lift it up in order to feed your munchkin. No one is going to send you an award for getting up every morning and fixing your hair and putting on your makeup.

  Motherhood is never what we expect it to be, but if you make the most out of it and just roll with the punches, the rewards are better than anything you will ever see in a magazine.

  * * *

  Tara is the mom of 5 young kids, wife to one busy farmer, and the mastermind behind You Know it Happens at Your House Too. If she ever had free time she would plan a trip to LA to have a quiet dinner and share a bottle of wine with Johnny Depp while discussing average Joe, real life stuff. Until then you can find her on the farm in Kansas wiping noses, vacuuming up Legos, fighting over homework, and French-braiding hair. Doing it all with a smile, a sarcastic comment, the occasional eye-roll, and always with a glass of wine.

  Embarrassment, Thy Name is Motherhood

  by Amy

  Funny is Family

  Motherhood is full of indignities. From the moment I stuck a stick in my urine stream, my life has been one embarrassment after another. After that faint line confirmed my suspicions that I was, in fact, pregnant, I got on the horn to make my first OB appointment. For six weeks later. Six weeks?! It might as well have been six years. There is no way I could wait that long for my "official diagnosis." Well, I did wait that long, puking my way through that month and a half.

  Since my husband was working on his PhD at the same campus as my OB's office, he planned on meeting me at the appointment. This was a teaching facility, and with my permission, a medical student was there, observing and assisting. That was fine, as long as I didn't know the student (I didn't), and the exam began. My husband was late, and he walked in, coffee in hand, to be greeted by two men standing between my legs, eye level with the good stuff. After an awkward chuckle and introductions, it was time for my first ultrasound. An ultrasound at eight weeks isn't the kind you see in the movies with the gel on the belly. This is a vaginal ultrasound, with a very phallic shaped wand. When my OB busted that thing out, and rolled a condom on it, I lost it. WTF was wrong with all of my friends with kids who never told me about this hilarity? I couldn't wait to tell everyone I knew about my dildo ultrasound. The men in the room didn't think it was as funny as I did, least of all my husband. From his perspective, I guess I can understand that. We heard our baby's heartbeat, and saw what looked like a jumble of Play-Doh growing inside me, and the situation became less funny and more emotional.

  That experience made it very clear that pregnancy wasn't all sitting in a rocking chair gazing out the window, or letting people make comments like, "You're glowing!" and "Look at you! All belly!" I was a mess. I puked for months, I peed my pants more than once, and on the day of my baby shower, I peed my pants while puking. By the time my due date was approaching, I was breathing so heavy I sounded like an asthmatic bulldog, and I was ready to get that baby out.

  Labor made that first OB appointment look like an intimate gathering. Multiple medical professionals and several family members crowded around my splayed body, and a video camera was ready to record the entire event for anyone who wasn't on hand to watch the live version. As if anyone would ever settle in with a bowl of popcorn to watch me crap a kid out of my cooter. I didn't even care about the crowd. I didn't really have a "birth plan," but I wouldn't have expected to want anyone but my husband and my mom in the room. My dad stuck around, mostly because I made him, and we needed a cameraman. I showed a dash of modesty by insisting he keep the camera away from the business end, and as you can imagine, he wholeheartedly agreed. My brother and his wife waited in the hallway, but not because they were asked to wait outside. They had politely declined my invitation to front row seats to the big show.

  After that, my body was still not my own. When my sweet boy was eleven days old, at a lovely Mother's Day brunch hosted by my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, I showed all of the women in my husband's family how one nipple was WAY bigger than the other. "You guys wanna see something crazy?" Seve
ral weeks later, we left the boy for the day to attend our favorite annual beer festival. Mixing beer with my already blurred privacy boundaries resulted in my insisting that everyone give my boobs a finger poke to see how hard they were before I pumped. I loved my short-lived, rock hard stripper boobs and I was sure all of myfriends would too. (My husband would like you to know that while most of our friends did touch my boobs, it was not as slutty as it sounds, and we aren't "those kind of people.")

  I've always had boundary issues. I am an oversharer, much to the dismay of my more private friends and family members, but having a baby took it to a whole new level. As it turns out, this is a good thing.

  Kids, by nature, have no boundaries. They don't understand social protocol, so they air dirty laundry with abandon. I now have two children, and they can both speak. That means they can embarrass me. At age two my daughter liked telling people, "Mommy has dog hair on her bagina," and at three she could be heard yelling from the yard, "Mom! Are you still on the potty? Come out here and play with me!" She shares other secrets, too. Recently at our rec center pool she noticed my padded top, and broadcasted loudly, "Oh! Your swimsuit comes with its own boobs!" As you can imagine, she's pretty much solidified my title of Neighborhood Hot Mom.

  My five year old boy is only moderately less embarrassing, mostly because he's older - and a boy. The girl talks from morning to night (and in her sleep) and notices things her brother doesn't. He had his time, though. As a baby, he would swiftly pull the blanket I was using to cover his head and my breast, pop off the boob, and look around to see how many people got an eyeful. He would then look me square in the face, and settle back in for the rest of his meal. This year he told Santa that he helped Mommy and Daddy by "picking up lots and lots of beer bottles" at one of my husband's work parties. They both enjoy a running commentary of the size, smell, and duration of my public bathroom bowel movements; and more than once we've emerged from a stall to a group of women suffering from shoulder-shaking laughter.