Equilibrium

On having four kids...

Again and again I find that having four kids puts me in this weird middle ground.

When I got pregnant with #4, eyebrows flew up and the comments really began in the general public. So I went online and sought to create a community with other moms of many, including several with families significantly larger than mine, and suddenly I felt like my clan was practically miniature. At least I felt very normal, since there were also plenty of other moms in the group with four kids.

But then when I go into a big group of moms, I'm reminded again how relatively rare it is to have more than two, at most three kids, nowadays. People either think I'm amazing or insane. And I know it probably sounds as though I'm blowing smoke up their collective rears when I insist that having four kids isn't necessarily twice as hard as having two (I would have felt the same way when I was adjusting to two kids, so I get it). You grow into your family size...most of the time, it isn't dumped on you all at once. And when it is, you do what anybody does when faced with something challenging: you muddle through, do your best and learn in the process. I did that when going from 1-2 kids, 2-3, and again from 3-4...though going from 3-4 was, for me, the easiest transition.

To be very honest, I wasn't thrilled with the title that was ultimately chosen for my book (the Table for Eight part), because I don't like the idea of defining what makes a large family with a number, even though I know that number wasn't meant to be exclusive!). Even when I had three kids, plenty of people referred to us as a "big" family, and I found that I was suddenly dealing with a lot of logistical issues I hadn't faced with just two. And I learned so much just by interviewing moms with six or eight or ten kids that I think any-sized family could get something of value from the book, whether it's tips on dealing with sibling rivalry or home organization. So if you drop me a line and put "book giveaway" in the subject I'll enter you into a giveaway for a copy of the book when it comes out...no matter how many kids you have. Or even if you just have goldfish. Because having six goldfish when most people have one or two...well, that's hard, and I want to help.

Big families and financial planning...

are kids as expensive as they're made out to be? Should people make sure they've got all their financial ducks in a row before having kids...especially before having lots of kids? The Art of Making Money argues:

In my opinion, financial issues in raising your children have the potential to transcend your abilities to be a good parent. You could have the best mom/dad instincts in the world, but without *sufficient* financial planning, you might have a hard time acting on those instincts.

This brings up another interesting question - so, people who are in a self-inflicted financial mess make bad parents?...No, people in a financial mess don’t necessarily make bad parents - it’s just that their financial situation may, at times, force them to make decisions which are not in the best interest of their children.

The blogger then asks: "What’s your take on this issue? if you were deep in debt (or some such financial difficulty), at what point would you decide against (or in favor of) having children? how strongly would your financial situation influence the number of kids you have?"

Go ahead...head over to the post, chime in on the discussion if you like (you'll see my thoughts in the comment box), and then come back and let us know what you think!

Five Things I learned at BlogHer...

First, I have to apologize. I didn't go to the BlogHer conference last year (and very nearly didn't go this year), and I remember thinking that the blogging world was totally boring for at least two weeks before and a week after BlogHer. Everybody was talking about how great the conference was and high-fiving the people they met and I felt left out and, well, bored by it all. So I'm going to try hard not to do that here, but there are a few things I learned that I must share (and really, they don't have anything to do with BlogHer anyhow...)

1) I apparently STILL look a lot like Miranda from Sex and the City. I have been told that before, but I got it no fewer than half a dozen times over the weekend. A few years ago I was getting stopped on the street regularly while people gaped at me and said..."Miranda?" but my hair is different and the show's been over for a while so I thought maybe it would stop. It hasn't.

2) I also, apparently, look nothing like my picture. This is one reason I changed the picture on this blog--it was almost four years old, after all, and I know faces change; but I also wear glasses pretty regularly, my hair is different, and I heard a few times that the old pic looks nothing like me.

3) You can leave a nursing toddler overnight and your breasts won't explode. I'm sure this is affected by how often he's nursing and how much he's getting, but in my case, I made it almost 24 hours in relative comfort and we both lived to tell about it. I've nursed two other children to toddlercy, but one was never away from me overnight until he was nearly weaned (because I was afraid of the exploding boob thing) and one weaned easily when I was pregnant so it was just never an issue. I don't anticipate pulling lots of all-nighters, but it's nice to know I can should I want to.

4) Even after a few glasses of wine and a late bedtime, NOTHING compares to the uninterrupted, mouth-hanging-open, flat-on-your-back sleep you get in a quiet hotel room with no children to wake you during the night. It has been a long, long, LONG time since I've gotten that kind of sleep, and I miss it.

5) If shoes don't feel that comfy when you slip them on, they really aren't going to get better after you stand around in them all day and well into the evening and it's especially not going to get better when you hit the city streets looking for a restaurant. Yeah, I should have figured THAT one out a long time ago. Next time, my feet will do the remembering for me.

The Mom Clock

(republished from my regular weekly column at Lansing NOISE and Upstate LINK)

Not long after Owen was born, I attended a great yoga class; probably the best one I'd ever been to. And I needed it. After nine months of pregnancy, childbirth, and the hunched-over tensed-up first months of holding a baby, I was kinked up in all the places I wanted to be relaxed and loose, and saggy in all the places I wanted to be firm and tight. The class fit the ticket perfectly: it was challenging. It was strengthening. It was balancing.

It was more than two hours long.

The session itself was so engaging that I didn't even realize we'd gone past an hour, an hour and fifteen minutes, an hour and twenty minutes. But sometime around the hour-and- -half mark I got an inexplicable, panicky feeling. My mom clock was going off.

I waited it out as long as I could, but the nervous feeling got so strong that even yoga couldn't overcome it. Unable to stay in corpse pose visualizing radiant light for a second longer, I hopped up and slipped out the door.

I'm sure the moms reading this know what I'm talking about. The mom clock is that that inner timer that goes off when you've been away from your family for longer than whatever your comfort level allows. And then there's real time; the kind that's logical, made up of pre-set increments and makes sense. Unfortunately, the two aren't always synchronized.

Of course, I had a great excuse: a needy, possibly (but not probably) hungry newborn and a hormone-packed bloodstream. But the mom clock doesn't go away when kids leave babyhood, it just changes. Sure, I no longer panic that my child will starve if I'm away from the house for a few hours, but my clock's skewed in other ways now. I start to feel a vague sense of guilt as any outing - even if it's something sensible, like grocery shopping or mailing packages - stretches on too long.

I know it's completely illogical: my husband is a grown man, capable of keeping his kids fed, safe and happy for hours - even days! - at a time. (Clean? Well, that's another story.) My being gone for a few hours, or even a few days, isn't going to cause anyone irreparable harm.

Moreover, I know it's undeserved. I spend most of my waking hours thinking about or doing things for my family. That's how it is for most moms I know. If there was ever a group of people who deserved some guilt-free, anxiety-free, schedule-free time off, it's us. So why can't we seem to just seize it?

Interestingly, my husband has no such skewed sense of time. Maybe it's biology: since moms are physically attached to babies before they're born - and for a while afterward, if they're nursing - it just takes longer to get used to any length of separation. Or maybe that same sense of duty and responsibility that turns our brains into a virtual organizer of dentist appointments, discipline strategies and dozens of other details is what keeps us from being able to relax and enjoy even the best-deserved break.

Maybe we moms are TOO good at what we do: we're so accustomed to keeping everything running along smoothly, making sure everybody's happy, fed and well-rested, and basically taking care of everything, that we fear total system breakdown if we leave the house for a few hours.

If that's really the reason, the only solution would be to stop being so darn indispensable. Maybe if we moms stopped keeping up with the laundry or didn't bother to feed the kids, the dads would take over and then they'd be the ones sweating through the end of an over-long business meeting.

Maybe. But I tend to think it's not so much what we do that makes us so irreplaceable, but who we are. At least, that's what I'm going to tell myself next time my mom-alarm starts ringing wildly.

I might try to ignore that mom clock once in a while - and I think we all have to sometimes to keep our sanity - but when it comes right down to it, I'm glad it's there, anchoring me to the various small people I love.

Ringing in a new decade...

...at Blogher! I turn 30 today, which is exciting in many ways. I spent my 20s growing, birthing, nursing, and raising four children while trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted out of life. Obviously, I'm still raising those four children (and nursing one!) and I haven't exactly planned out the rest of my life to the nth degree, but I am struck by how much more grounded and confident I have become over the past ten years. If life got that much better between 20 and 30, I can only imagine how great 30-40 will be.

So it seems apropos to be kicking off my 30s by venturing down to Chicago's Navy Pier for the annual BlogHer conference. Well, technically I kicked it off last night with a dinner for the Chicago Moms Bloggers/Silicon Valley Moms Bloggers at the very swanky downtown restaurant, Viand, generously hosted by Yahoo!, which by the way, is my e-mail provider of choice and has been for the past decade, and I'm not just saying that because they also sponsored several free registrations to the conference, one of which I was fortunate enough to win.

I've been blogging since 2000, but I've never been great about keeping up with the larger blogging community or the technology involved in keeping a blog up-to-date, interactive, and interesting. So I'm hoping to get a lot out of the conference (and am already!) from a business and technology perspective, but also to get better in touch with my fellow bloggers.

I pitched an article to BabyTalk magazine in late 2003 about "mommy blogging". At the time I'd been blogging for two years and really thought that blogging was in its heyday--that it was peaking in popularity. I think I was a year or two too early! Earlyish in 2004, I finally got a call from an editor at the magazine, telling me she was interested in my writing a feature on the topic. It was one of my first assignments for a national magazine, and I was beyond excited. I promptly wrote the article, filed it, and went through a round of edits. And then...it sat for two years, finally getting published in the spring of 2006!

Such is not unusual in the magazine world, I've come to learn, and I was dead wrong about blogging. In the years after I wrote the article, blogging seemed to explode--everybody I knew, it seemed, was either blogging, reading blogs or complaining about them. And yet, when the article came out I got a ton of e-mails from moms thanking me for "turning them on" to blogging! So that just goes to show you that not only did blogging NOT peak in 2003, but it's still growing and growing. I've met so many interesting people over the years initially through their blogs, and look forward to meeting more this weekend and in posts, comments and conferences to come.   

I have to cut this short because I'm in the middle of a media training panel--which, I joked to my writing list, must be how you learn how not to have an accident on the couch if you manage to get on Oprah--and the person sitting next to me is saying something interesting. Looking forward to my 30s...and the rest of this weekend.   

Got a big family? Tell us about it!

I'm happy to announce that the website for my upcoming book, Table for Eight: Raising a large family in a small-family world, is up and running . Check it out, and if you've got lots of kids, send an e-mail about your family: share your favorite piece of advice on anything from discipline to saving money on groceries, tell us about a typical day at your house, dish about the upsides and downsides of raising a bigger-than-average family, give us your best comebacks to criticism about your family's size, or even share a picture. I'll be sharing profiles, tips, and pics of other big families on the site, and you'll be entered in product giveaways!

And, of course, if you have, or are thinking of having--or are just curious about!--a big family, you'll want to pre-order the book. It's available October 2, and will cover everything from schlepping lots of kids around to family planning to sibling rivalry and much, much more.

Does birth order matter?

Over at largerfamilies.com, we're talking about whether or not birth order affects personality. What do you think?

Here's a link to my latest column, which also talks about birth order in light of a new study indicating that kids raised as the eldest in the family turn out smarter...

It's possible that my oldest son is smartest on paper, but that doesn't mean my younger kids aren't plenty smart enough. It would be interesting if there was a way to quantify things like artistic aptitude, confidence, friendliness, communications skills and compassion in numbers. Maybe it would turn out that second-born children are more likely to be musically inclined, as my son Isaac is; or that third-born kids get points in being personable and earnest, like my William, or fourth-born kids are courageous and physically accomplished, like my daredevil Owen.

Those things are probably impossible to apply a number to, so from a scientific standpoint, they can't be measured. But they matter in my family, because they make each one of my kids who he is ... regardless of his IQ level. And frankly, that's all that matters to this mom.

Read the whole column here.