For the third time in as many years (I think), NBC has pre­miered a new drama series, let it run a few weeks, and then taken it off the air.  First, it was Wind­fall.  That wasn’t a great show, but I was sort of look­ing for a weekly soap opera drama, and it fit the bill.  Then, it was Kid­napped.  I really thought that was going to be good.  Unfor­tu­nately, it dis­ap­peared one day, and I found out thanks to my Tivo that it had been moved to Sat­ur­day night.  We all know that the move to Sat­ur­day is never a good sign.  Now, it seems as though The Lis­tener is gone.  These days, we don’t watch much tv, but on the days that I do want to sit down and watch a drama, I want to know that it will be around for more than 2  months.  If I am going to learn the char­ac­ters’ names and fig­ure out how they are con­nected, I want my effort to be rewarded.  I think soon I am going to have to stop watch­ing NBC shows, because I am not sure that my impa­tient tv watch­ing self can take much more of this.

Tonight was not fun.  I have a 2 and a 3 year old.  If you know me in per­son, you have prob­a­bly heard far too many K and A sto­ries for your lik­ing.  I love them SO much that some­times I feel like I can­not stop talk­ing about them.  Tonight, how­ever, I felt inadequate.

I could give all the back­ground (me being in Chicago for the week­end, stay­ing up too late a few nights recently, mov­ing 3 weeks ago, etc) or I could explain that they both woke up between 5 and 5:30 this morn­ing, but in the end it didn’t mat­ter why.  Tonight, they were so tired, and they sim­ply melted down.  Both of them.  For an hour and fif­teen min­utes.  When Jason was gone.

Hav­ing been a spe­cial edu­ca­tion teacher in my past life, I often give off the appear­ance of remain­ing calm and know­ing just what to do in a tough sit­u­a­tion.  Tonight, I felt like I had no idea what to do.  I knew they were both tired.  I knew tonight would be an early bed­time.  When Jason left, I knew I just had to get them ready for bed and lay­ing down.  Exhaus­tion would take over from there.

Unfor­tu­nately, we hit a snag in the road right around clean up time.  They had invented a new game.  I’m not sure of the details, but as it appeared to me, the goal was to pile as many toys from the play room as they could onto our liv­ing room chair.  When it was time to clean up, they were ready and will­ing.  I sug­gested we each put away 3 toys.  Know­ing how tired they were, I planned to do the rest later on my own just to get them in bed.  Well, it turned out that I unknow­ingly took the toy that K had his heart set on putting away back into the play room.   I told him I was sorry I hadn’t known he wanted that one.  K began to cry.  He explained to me over and over that he had wanted to put both big trucks back into the room.  I offered him a cou­ple solu­tions.  He could go get the truck and put it in him­self or he could pick up x, y, or z toy.  Those didn’t work for him.  From there, every­thing was wrong.  He didn’t like his pajamas(which he chose), his tooth­brush, his tooth paste (which he chose), or his diaper(which he chose).  He also didn’t want to help fill up his water cup, nor did he want me to fill it.  He did want water though.

Dur­ing this time, A was also upset.  He is pretty sen­si­tive, and I think that between being tired and K feel­ing upset, it was just too much for him, and he shared in the sad­ness.  Poor kids.  I tried to take turns nurs­ing them.  I offered them cud­dles and hugs.  I empathized with them.  “It sounds like you are feel­ing sad.”  “You really wanted to take that truck into the play room.”

At some point, I started to feel over­whelmed, really over­whelmed.  My instincts were to say some­thing like this, “Enough.  No more cry­ing.  You are tired.  Lay down.  I am not fight­ing over this any­more.”  I really wanted to do those things.  I didn’t actu­ally think they would help or calm the boys down.  I didn’t think that they would make K or A see the light and think “yep, she’s right.  That is enough cry­ing.  Guess I’m okay now.”  I felt like I didn’t want to deal with it any­more.  That was about 25 or 30 min­utes in.

I didn’t say those things though.  I also didn’t say any­thing like, “You can go to your room, and when you are done yelling, you can come back out here.”  I also didn’t spank (and never have) either one.  These are com­mon sug­ges­tions that I get when some­one over­hears me talk­ing about a melt­down at our house or if some­one hap­pens to be over when it happens.

I didn’t say or do those things, because that is not the way we have cho­sen to par­ent.  In my moments of clar­ity dur­ing a melt­down, I often think about how I would feel if Jason and I were hav­ing a fight that included me being upset and in tears.  If he left me alone until I could talk about things rea­son­ably, I don’t think that would help me feel loved or com­forted.  If he said, “I’m going to go watch tv until you are ready to talk” I would be m.a.d. If he tried to help me feel bet­ter and com­forted me for a few min­utes but left when it wasn’t work­ing, I think I would feel even worse.

I know that kids and adults are not in the same roles in fam­i­lies, but I do think that there is value in allow­ing a child to express emo­tions and val­i­dat­ing them.  I also think there is value in being with a child dur­ing a tough emo­tional time.  Because of these beliefs and many oth­ers, we choose to par­ent in the way I described in this post.

I haven’t writ­ten a lot about our spe­cific par­ent­ing beliefs on this blog.  I have alluded to them, and we try to prac­tice what we believe when we inter­act with our kids although some­times I fall far short of my goal.  One of the rea­sons I chose to write this post and pub­lish it was a con­ver­sa­tion I had with a friend over din­ner a cou­ple months ago.  Our friends are mar­ried with no chil­dren.  They had sup­per at our house one night.  Dur­ing the course of the evening, I said, “we don’t spank” and “we don’t use time outs.”  The wife of the cou­ple said to me, “What do you do?”  So, I thought I would give an exam­ple of what we do because both spank­ing and time­outs are so com­mon that some­times peo­ple don’t real­ize that there are other options.  I know, I didn’t.

To give a lit­tle res­o­lu­tion to the sit­u­a­tion, I’ll let you know what hap­pened to finally resolve the melt­down.  After we went into the bed­room to get ready for bed, K threw his cup into the hall­way.  (We keep a gate in the door­way so they don’t wake up and wan­der around our apart­ment at night.)  K felt pretty sad that his cup was in the hall­way.  I told him (prob­a­bly around 50 times) “I can go get your cup if you sit or lay by your pil­low.”  I felt like I needed him to be in a place where he would be safe and at least a bit calm before I could leave him and A in the room to get his cup.  Finally, he said, “Can I have mama milk?”  I nursed them each one at a time.  They laid down, and they were asleep within 15 min­utes.  Poor kiddos.

But I couldn’t find the right pic­ture.  Darn.

Although I am still recov­er­ing from the travel, lack of sleep, and chaos of the week­end, I have to admit I am already try­ing to fig­ure out if I can go again next year in New York.

I left my apart­ment of only 2 weeks last Thurs­day.  I drove to Min­neapo­lis (about 5 hours away) where I would be fly­ing out to Chicago.  Thurs­day night, I had sup­per with a friend of mine from ele­men­tary and high school who had lived two houses down from me for about 14 years and the neigh­bor who had lived in between us.  It was a lit­tle reunion for us.  Sur­pris­ingly lit­tle of our con­ver­sa­tion cen­tered on our expe­ri­ences grow­ing up, but it was fun to recon­nect with them after not see­ing them for sev­eral years.  After sup­per, of course, I made the respon­si­ble choice and went to bed early in prepa­ra­tion for my 6 am flight, I stayed up talk­ing with my brother and sister-in-law far too late.  I got about 3 hours of sleep before it was time to get up.  For­tu­nately, my travel was pretty seam­less.  I had no issues with secu­rity.  My flight was on time.  We arrived in Chicago a lit­tle before sched­uled, and I was able to maneu­ver the blue line and find­ing a cab all by myself!  I waited to reg­is­ter, and I began meet­ing other blog­gers right away.  Molly was stand­ing behind me in line, and we vis­ited while we waited to get our badges and bags.  After the first ses­sion and speed dat­ing, I vis­ited with Andi and Kim.

I went to a great ses­sion about find­ing your mommy blog­ging tribe.  In each ses­sion, I felt like I picked up one or two key points.  If I had let myself over think it or get over­whelmed, I could prob­a­bly ended up throw­ing my hands up and say­ing that I wasn’t going to do any­thing new because there were too many things to do or as Megan said sev­eral blog­gers do each year, throw­ing in the towel and shut­ting down my blog.  Instead, I decided to focus on these things:  First, be who I am.  Write for myself and own my blog posts and my life and my thoughts.  Sec­ond, com­ment on oth­ers blogs.  I am not an amaz­ingly great writer, but I think I have some pretty inter­est­ing things to say once in a while.  I think it is okay for me to put those on my blog and share them with oth­ers when I read their blogs.

As part of my BlogHer expe­ri­ence, I was cho­sen as a vol­un­teer to be a micro­phone wran­gler.  That meant that I was assigned to four ses­sions (out of the six avail­able) to hold the micro­phone and get it to the per­son mak­ing a com­ment or ask­ing a ques­tion.  Because of this, I ended up attend­ing a cou­ple ses­sions I wouldn’t have cho­sen otherwise.

The first ses­sion I “worked” (although I can hardly call it work­ing), was a ses­sion for blog­gers who didn’t fit into the typ­i­cal blog cat­e­gories (i.e. mom blog, polit­i­cal blog, review blog).  After that, I wran­gled the micro­phone at the ses­sion dis­cussing what it meant to be pro-woman in a post-Palin world.  This ses­sion had an amaz­ing panel.  There was a very lively dis­cus­sion, and by the end, the miro­phone was placed in the stand and peo­ple were so anx­ious to talk that they were lin­ing up at the stand for their turn.  Lucky for me.  I was able to sit back and lis­ten.  Both of these ses­sions were SO good.  They had amaz­ingly diverse and thought­ful women on their pan­els.  Although,  I have to admit that I hadn’t read any of the blogs of the women on the pan­els I attended, I can safely say that I will be adding most if not all of them to my Google reader.

Fri­day night wrapped up with the com­mu­nity keynote.  This is the ses­sion where blog­gers sub­mit their best posts of the year and sev­eral are cho­sen to be read to those who attend the con­fer­ence.  Karen W was one of the blog­gers cho­sen to read her post.  She also has a sum­mary post that lists all the blog­gers and their cho­sen posts (about halfway down).

Fri­day night, we social­ized.  There was a cock­tail party com­plete with Wii bowl­ing and karaoke in one of the ball­rooms.  At that party, I showed up look­ing very cute in a new dress, but I knew NO ONE!  That is absolutely not my idea of a com­fort­able sit­u­a­tion.  So, I walked around the edge of the room until I spot­ted some­one else who was alone.  Emma was stand­ing around watch­ing peo­ple.  I took a chance and intro­duced myself.  She and I vis­ited a while.  Then, her friends Annie and Allie arrived.  Even­tu­ally, I also met Jen­nifer and Amy, too!  Hav­ing met so many new peo­ple, I was very excited to meet Amy whose blog I have been read­ing for quite a while now.  Hav­ing quite a bit in com­mon with these ladies, I was very glad to be able to hang out with and fol­low them around for the evening!

At some point, I also met Tara who I had been fol­low­ing on Twit­ter for a few weeks.  It was fun to put faces and names together.  It was also a lit­tle funny, because I didn’t rec­og­nize either Tara or Amy until some­one explained who they were to me.  After 22 hours, I col­lapsed into bed.  I will admit, I skipped the keynote and the sec­ond ses­sion on Saturday.

My first ses­sion was titled “Women of Color and Mar­ket­ing.”  Again, I fig­ured that this was a ses­sion that was prob­a­bly not all that use­ful for me.  First, I am not a woman of color, and sec­ondly and more impor­tantly, I have noth­ing to do with mar­ket­ing.  I am not mar­ket­ing any­thing, and I am not mar­keted to.  I fig­ured it was just one of those things.  Attend the ses­sion because I was a vol­un­teer and it was my job.  Well, um, I was obvi­ously wrong again.  This was prob­a­bly my favorite ses­sion of the con­fer­ence.  I know, I know.  The panel was AMAZING.  The room was packed, and every time some­one made a com­ment, I found myself being more and more impressed with the intel­li­gent, well spo­ken, crit­i­cal think­ing, smart, beau­ti­ful, and funny women at the con­fer­ence.  Seri­ously amazing.

Thurs­day after­noon, I vol­un­teered at the Green and Eco Blog­ging ses­sion.  Although, I was bummed that I didn’t win the Miche­lin tires that were given away at the begin­ning of that ses­sion, it cer­tainly didn’t hurt when I found out that I won a Mac­Book from the Safe­ty­Tat give­away.  Then, I won all the give­aways I will win for a decade because I fol­lowed up the Mac­Book win by win­ning a Flip Ultra from Mom­flu­ence at the clos­ing keynote session!

Now, as part of being a mom blog­ger, I will abruptly end this post to go get my chil­dren who are awake from their after­noon naps!