I’m Not a SAHM. I’m a RAM.

We made it through Week One, and we are ALL exhausted.

So, I’ve made it through the first week of being a SAHM.

AND… I’m ready to go back to work. Naah, just kidding. Sort of.

Here are my first impressions, based on one week at home with the kids:

 First of all, the term “Stay at Home Mother” is a misnomer, at least as far as I am concerned. I think I spent about twenty minutes at home during this whole first week. The rest of the time was spent schlepping my kids around the world, bringing them to 83 different museums, 47 libraries, and 76 playgrounds. I think “Roam Around Mom” is a much more appropriate term for what I’ve been doing.

I may have overdone it on my first attempt at keeping my kids entertained for seven days straight. But we DID enjoy ourselves, and we DIDN’T make a huge mess of our house (because we were never THERE), and we DIDN’T lose any limbs or end up in the emergency room (though there were definitely some very close calls) and for those reasons alone, I feel incredibly triumphant.

I also feel incredibly EXHAUSTED. Dude, this gig is TIRING. I love how in my delusional pre-RAM state of mind, I was trying to figure out where I would fit in time to EXERCISE. HAH! There is NO NEED to exercise when you spend ten hours a day chasing a near-three year old and a seven month old child. My body is SORE. Mama needs a MASSAGE. Maybe next week, I’ll teach Emmy how to walk on my back and knead my achy feet (and if she resists the idea, I will bribe her with Oreos).

I have realized that my children are MORE hysterical than I thought they were. When I say “hysterical,” I mean that they are immensely FUNNY. I ALSO mean they are prone to unpredictable bouts of hysteria, at the most inconvenient times. For instance, my dear son chose to have an overtired meltdown in WalMart on Monday, which caused a total stranger to come up to me and COMMAND me to make him stop crying. That was an AWESOME way to begin life as a Roam Around Mom, let me tell you.

I have realized that I will miss adult conversation, but conversation with Emmy is MUCH MORE entertaining than any conversation I ever had with my officemates. Today, in the car, we talked about how she does not like it when I get angry (apparently I am more strict than her teachers and her Baba, and she was offended when I gave her a "time out" for running through the museum parking lot like it was a grassy meadow). The conversation went a little something like this:

“I don’t like it when you get angry, Mama.”

“I don’t like it when I get angry either, Emmy. That is why I ask you to behave and cooperate. When you behave, I can be Happy Mama, and I would much rather be Happy Mama than Angry Mama. But when you don’t behave, sometimes I become Angry Mama.”

“I like Happy Mama.”

“Me too, Emmy. Most of the time, I am Happy Mama, but sometimes I am Angry Mama.”

“And sometimes you are a FROG!!”

“Um, yes, that’s true. Sometimes I act like a frog, too. Who do you like the best? Happy Mama, or Angry Mama, or Frog?”

“FROGGG! Ribbett! Ribbett!”

I NEVER had conversations like that with my co-workers.

I have realized that I have more resilience and more patience than I thought I did. Because this first week of “stay at home” life included my son having constant antibiotic induced diarrhea, and me having a sinus infection, and my husband working late pretty much every night, and Emmy nearly scraping off her entire nose on the pavement in front of our house. Despite all these lovely hurdles, I still made it through the week with a relatively clear head, and a relatively loving heart (and a LOT of gratitude for Desitin, and for MY antibiotic, and for the half-hour of conversation I have had with my husband this week, and for what is left of my daughter’s nose).

I have also realized that I will likely be blogging a lot LESS. Which is OKAY, because I would rather be the kind of mom who has TONS to write about but no time to write, than the kind of mom who has TONS of time to write but nothing to write about. I’ll try to keep writing regularly, but if I DON’T, it’s probably just cause I am busy having fun with the kiddos (or perhaps just trapped under a huge pile of their toys).

This coming week, we will be visiting with my parents and relatives in New Jersey, which means we won't be at our house at all, and we likely won't stick to much of a schedule. My only goal for this week is that the kids have a wonderful time with their family. I'll deal with my other goals when we get back.

Tipping the Teacher

I have a love/hate relationship with tipping. As someone who has worked as a waitress, a barrista, a babysitter and a camp counselor, I fully recognize that tipping is hugely important to those who work for (or around) minimum wage. I didn’t bust my butt at those jobs JUST BECAUSE I knew it would result in good tips, but counting up my bonus at the end of the day, or at the end of the summer, was definitely THE thrilling highlight of those careers.

But BECAUSE I have worked many jobs that were hugely impacted by tips, I am now a very generous, very guilt-ridden tipper. Every time we eat out, I leave the restaurant wondering if we were generous enough with our tip – after all, the poor waitress had to deal with our chaotic entourage, and our two kids always manage to leave a treasure trove of straw wrappers, spilled salt, and bread crusts under our table. In my mind, tipping our server is a way of making sure that if we are to return to the same restaurant, we won’t see our photo on a “MOST WANTED” sign posted on the establishment’s door.

So if I am THAT laden with guilt when it comes to tipping for food service, you can only imagine the anxiety I experience when my daughter’s school year comes to an end, and it is time to tip her teachers.

On the one hand, tipping teachers doesn’t quite make sense to me. I FULLY acknowledge that teachers are underpaid and overworked, and I think that totally SUCKS. I think teachers (especially early childhood teachers) should be paid like rock stars, because seriously, they ARE rock stars.

But just because the world is totally effed up, and teachers (especially early childhood teachers) are paid in peanut shells, should the parents feel the need to make up for it with our holiday and end-of-year tipping? We already pay OUT THE NOSE for daycare for our child. If we weren’t paying for daycare, we could afford to buy a new car EVERY TWO YEARS. So in a way, feeling obligated to ALSO tip the teachers is like pouring salt on a very open, very festering wound.

But on the other hand? My daughter’s teachers are demigods. Every day, when I drop Em off at school, I look around the room at all of the crazy, sniffly, cranky, rambunctious kids, and I just think “how in the WORLD do they DO it?” And I mean, I KNOW how hard it is to watch my daughter for nine hours a day. Her attention span is exactly three seconds long. She has the patience of a crack addict. Yet, somehow, her teachers have managed to wrangle her energy and keep her from killing herself for the past 365 days. For that, I feel like I owe them ALL of my money. ALL of it.

So of course we end up tipping the daycare teachers, twice a year. But again, the minute I hand them the envelope, I am wracked with guilt. Did we give them enough? Will they open the envelope and laugh at our “gift”? If I am walking down the street with my two kids, years from now, will they try to run me over with their car because I didn’t give them enough? What is ENOUGH, when it comes to tipping a teacher?

I am glad that yesterday was Em’s last day at daycare, and that we will be starting life as a stay-at-home family next week, for a multitude of reasons. One of those reasons? I won’t have to deal with “tip-the-teacher” guilt for at least a few more years.

How do you deal with tipping the teacher? I’d love to hear from you!