babybloomr

Midweek is about the time I usually do a quick mental inventory and figure out what I didn’t get finished from last weekend, and start making plans for what I won’t get finished want to tackle next weekend. It’s also the day I usually give myself a stern talking-to about my tendency to procrastinate, although I rarely listen to me. *fingers in ears LA LA LA LA*

Sometimes I just get stuck, you know? Like, for no discernible reason I can’t seem to bring myself to mop the kitchen floor. For five days. And I have dogs in there, remember, including a fluffy, sheddy one that produces these black and white furry dust bunnies the size of tumbleweeds that accumulate in the corners. I did sweep the other day, so it’s not all nasty in there, but every time I think I’ll go get the mop and that squirty hardwood floor cleaner stuff, I pause a minute, look at all the furniture I have to move around and the dogs/kids I’d have to kick out of the area and just think, “Aw, screw it, it’s not that bad…” However I’m pleased to report that this morning right after taking the girls to school I threw myself into it, and my floor is now all shiny, sparkly, 50’s housewife clean. I got so into it that I carried my dripping mop into about three other rooms and gave them the once-over, too, so now I feel better about myself, though a wee bit concerned that I have now spent two paragraphs talking about mopping. Heigh ho, the glamorous life.

 

In other news, Pip the world’s smallest passive-aggressive dog, is still periodically walking into the laundry room, sticking his tiny wizened head out of the doggy door, looking around at the scenery, lifting his tiny stick leg and peeing where he stands. He has the good sense to at least look reeeeally sorry when I yell at him, and yet he still does it, doesn’t he?  Dumb-ass Yorkie. Good thing he’s old, it’s the only card he has left to play– but hey, my dad is 92 years old and he’s never done that even once.

Scene of the crime- already cleaned up of course, because ewww.

 

Right after I yelled at him. Don’t fall for it.

 

 

The thing about growing up as the youngest kid in a big family is that you always have a tendency to see yourself as the youngest in every situation– maybe not consciously, but it’s in there. Whatever group of people I find myself in, I automatically assume I am among the more youthful demographic in the room. I’m not delusional, it’s not like I’m unaware of my age, it’s just kind of a mindset. Maybe it’s that birth order thing, maybe it marks and defines me more than I ever thought. My parents are now 92 and though I am obviously a grown-ass woman, I’m still referred to as the baby of the family. I’m strangely ok with that.

I married at 20, and when we moved to Nashville and started our lives here we were surrounded by people older than that, so I felt like ‘the new bride’ longer than I had any right to. When Russ and I entered the music business, he was hired as the youngest singer in a group of older guys, and then after a few years he went solo, so career-wise we were the new kids on the block for quite a while. Also, we waited 15 years before we had kids, so I went through that new mom phase later than most. What I’m saying here is that I have a skewed sense of how old I really am– and since I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, sometimes it really surprises me to realize that these days I’m quite often the OLDEST one in any given situation.

Especially in the world of moms. Since I turned 50– or as we like to call it around here just because it freaks my kids out, “The Half-Century Mark”– I have finally started to notice that the mothers at my girls’ schools are almost universally younger than I am. Sometimes by a little, sometimes, like, I could have breastfed them. What’s weird is that it doesn’t seem to bother me. Should it? Should I be kind of embarrassed or apologetic that I’m this old? I see them as my peer group, we’re all just moms raising kids the same age, trying to figure it all out and not screw it up too much. My mother had me when she was 40, just like I had Charlotte when I was 40. I don’t remember noticing a big difference between her and my friend’s moms. She certainly didn’t try to dress or look younger than her age, she just always blended in with everybody else. What did I know, I was a kid and all mom and dads looked alike– old!

There isn’t really a big point to this, or profound conclusion I’m trying to draw here. You’d think that since I’m this long in the tooth, pithy bits of wisdom would just be flying out of me, right? Apparently you’d be wrong! I guess my point is simply that the older I’m getting, the more I’m realizing that age is relative. The numbers are what they are, but there are some choices in how you view them. You can be an old young person, or a young older person, it’s kind of up to you. I do know that I never want to be one of those desperately-clinging-to-my-faded youth kind of moms, with a too-taut face and an over-exercised body crammed into too-youthful clothes. Ok, actually I kind of would, but I don’t think I could successfully pull it off, and if I tried to, Madi would laugh her head off and possibly kill me in my sleep. So I guess I’ll just keep doing what I’ve always done– try to look ‘good for my age’, continue to hang out with friends both older than I am and younger than I am, and remember not to introduce myself as the baby of my family. That kind of creeps people out when you’re at The Half-Century Mark.

Here we are as 36 (me) and 39 (Russ) year-old new parents with Madi Rose, and yes, we are cute as bunnies.