The best laid plans....

of mice and men go oft awry.

The longer that I'm a mother (8 years now), the more I realize how little is really in my control. When I was pregnant with my first child, I had a birth plan. That got thrown out the window almost immediately. I thought I would train him to sleep on a schedule. Hah! I thought I would make his baby food -- he had no interest in baby food. Who knew?

I chilled more with my second. And even more with my third. I ended up nursing all over the place because I didn't want to hide or have to leave wherever I was. I nursed my third for more than two years, surprising even my more "granola" friends. It was easier... honestly... but it wasn't what I planned.

Other moms had told me that even though you think the work will get easier when they're in school, it doesn't. I never really understood that. But now I have all three in school (Hallelujah!) and I feel run off my feet. They get home, there's homework, extra reading, patrolling computer time, taking them to friends' houses, fixing dinner, wrangling them into some state of semi-cleanliness and then bed. Gah... it's exhausting. And I get off work by 2 pm everyday. How do people who work a 9 to 5 (or 6?) schedule do this?

It's satisfying and fun to watch them grow. I love them. And they're growing into little people who have more and more of their own personalities every day. But not necessarily what I planned. Of course, you can't plan what someone will be like.... but you get what I mean.

My oldest is maybe the most like me in personality. I feel like I really understand him. He does naughty stuff and I see where he's coming from.

My girls remind me a lot of my mother -- both the things I loved about her and the things that drove me crazy -- and sometimes those things were the same.

You have dreams for your children before you are born. But you can't really plan anything. You have ideas about being a parent -- but again, you can't really know what you'll be like until you're doing it. As a child, I never thought that I'd go crazy about a kid's messy room, but there I am. And now I look back on the way my parents raised me... and I think that they must have been amazingly patient and probably pretty tired.