Sometimes I feel like a "real" mom!

There are days when I definitely don't feel like a mom. How can I possibly be a mom? When did that happen? Where was I? It's just sometimes hard to wrap my mind around the fact that I'm married, have two boys, a job, a minivan, a house, and two dogs. I love it, but sometimes I just marvel at it all.

Then I wake up (at 1 a.m. mind you) because there is a 4-year-old tapping on my butt. Will this child ever sleep a full night in his own bed? And if he must come and sleep on our floor, will he ever stop feeling the desperate need to wake me up to share the fact that he has indeed left his bed? Then I remember...oh yes, I am in fact a mom who is in her 30's with gray hair and a grumpy attitude that late at night.

It's just that some days I feel more like a mom than other days. The days when I barely scrape by are the days I don't feel so mom-like. You know those days. Those are the ones where I am sniffing the uniform shirt that the kid wore the day before and analyzing whether the dirt spot is "too" dirty to send him off to school in. Those are the days when he's eating a granola bar in the car on the way to school...if he cooperates and eats anything at all.

Those are the days when the little one wakes me up at 4 a.m. screaming in his crib because he doesn't like the feel of poop running up his back. I can't say that I blame him, but does it have to be a 4 a.m. diaper change? Those are the days when the teeth don't get brushed, the hair looks like I super glued it straight up in the air, and the shoes don't quite make it on the feet.

And then there are days when I get a wild bug and decide to bake homemade muffins from scratch at 8 'o clock at night because apparently I don't have enough to do. Then I sort of feel like maybe I have this mom-thing down! Then I remember this is me we are talking about and I get a good chuckle out of myself. But in any case, I always feel more wifely and motherly when I cook or bake.

I did bake cream cheese blackberry muffins tonight. I got the recipe from a friend at this blog. Caroline makes the most amazing muffins and scones. I know this because I used to be her children's teacher and she made yummy treats for me from time to time. I have a sneaking suspicion that my muffins did not turn out quite like Caroline's. And I certainly did not package the muffins in a cute container with a cute label the way they were always delivered to me in my classroom. That's okay. I tried. I made a large mess in the process.


Here are the muffins before they head to the oven. I don't think they look very pretty. My counters didn't look very pretty either.


See?


As usual, I get smack into the middle of a baking project only to be perplexed. I had to call my mom to clarify what "creaming the butter and sugar" meant precisely. I think the problem is that I do not have a standing mixer. I had to use my little hand held mixer. The butter and sugar did not exactly seem to "cream" to me. I don't bake enough to understand these tricky terms! At least the batter smelled good.


Are they done? Well, I'm not really sure because I used the microwave timer to tell me when they were done. In the middle of baking, Hudson started screaming. I had to console him, hunt down his milk bottle (which mysteriously had levitated to the bathroom counter across the hall), refill his bottle, and shove it in the microwave for 30 seconds because neither of my children drink cold milk. Stupid habit I never should have started with those two. And as soon as I opened the microwave to put in said milk, I lost the "timer" element on my microwave. Ugh. So I guessed how much more time these babies needed to cook. I decided they did not look done, so they went back in for some more heat.


The finished product. I think they look fairly nice. And more importantly, they helped serve the purpose of making me feel more like a mom this Monday evening. I've been a mom for over 4 years now, but it never seems to get any easier. Maybe by year 5 I'll have it down pat! Yeah right.