Oh, How Times Have Changed...

I was recently chatting with my mom about keeping my son safe from all the crazies out there wanting to do him harm, and what I was planning on doing about it.

Not that he goes anywhere or does anything without me at this point, he's not quite three, for goodness sake, and I'm not completely crazy. But I do let him play unteathered at the playground, and just keep an eye on him while I either chat with my mommy friends, or find a bench and stay out of the sun.

But when my mom was a kid, she and her sisters would leave the house after breakfast, then go off and find whatever to do till they got hungry. If they were hungry for lunch, they'd come home and eat lunch, otherwise they'd come home at dinnertime and nobody sent out the national guard for them, it was just what people did.

Even when I was a kid, I can remember going from my house to the houses across the street, then behind those houses, through the woods, across this stream, up the hill to the park and we'd play there till around dinnertime, or we'd go over to the rocks by my friend Bethany's* house, or we'd go over to my friend Lisa's house, several streets away, just whoever's house we felt like playing at that day.

Even when I was getting to be a teenager, after my younger sister had been with a couple of friends and had been flashed by some guy that the cops eventually caught. My mom still let me go by myself after dark up the street to my friend Misty's house to spend the night. Those were the days when it seemed like every time you passed one particular street lamp it went out and freaked you out so much that you ran the rest of the way to your destination. When in reality it was either coincidence or a different one each time and you didn't notice because it added to the drama of the story. I can still remember my mom saying how she was glad it was my younger sister who had seen the flasher guy, because she remember lots of details about the car he was driving, what he looked like, the coat he was wearing, etc. She thought if it had been me and my friends we'd not have gotten such good intel since we'd just have been looking at his penis. Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mom! We were 12, not sex fiends.

But we walked all over that neighborhood as well, to the different playgrounds they had, the convenience store, the elementary school my sister went to, my friends' houses. And we never called home to let Mom know we'd gotten there either. It was just assumed that we did, and that we'd be home later.

There was even a guy who was a former cop who said he ran a youth group for teenagers who was taking them to the local amusement park and would I like to go and take a friend. My mom let me go with them without doing any sort of check into whether he was even who he said he was. A bus full of kids showed up, my friend Denise and I got on the bus and off we went.

Today Big M and I have double and triple checked the daycare that we will be trusting to look after Little M, and have not even let anyone but family or other Mommies that we know personally watch him for any length of time. He's barely been out of sight of one of us his entire life so far, and when the time comes for him to be able to do some unsupervised play in the backyard, I expect to have the gate locked at that time. Right now we have a 5-foot-tall privacy fence back there. So someone would have to work hard to get in or to even see in and know what's going on back there.

But if Mattie will be playing at other kids houses, I play to know the parents personally, and I plan to know if there is alcohol in the home, and whether it is locked up, same with firearms. And if there are firearms, I will suggest that the playdate take place in our home.

It's just not the same world that my mom and her sisters pranced around the front yard in their "Liger's Club" dance. And my baby is too precious to risk. I know it won't make me very popular with him, this overprotective mama-bear stance I've chosen, but I'd rather him be angry at me, than me be explaining to the police that "he does this all the time and nothing's ever happened before..."

*All names have been changed to protect the young and possibly stupid.

Starting with the Background stuff

So here I find myself, up late-ish on a Sunday night, having to run for the baby monitor that I left on the charger in the kitchen - BRB!



OK, no noise is good news, the little guy is still snoozing away the night. I should mention that my son, we'll call him Little M, is 6 months old, and is just a great little guy. I knew I'd love my baby no matter what, but this child is just amazingly good! For example, I put out some toys on the high chair tray for him to play with while I mixed up the cereal for his dinner, and he didn't touch them, he spent the whole time watching me make the cereal. And feeding him has been a dream! Most times he just opens the little mouth for the next bite, and doesn't get his hand in the way at all.



So right now this is my life, being a mom, and running the house. I ran the house before I was a mom, I was just working a full time job at the time. Now I'm home, and the hubby, Big M, is out slaving away for a paycheck.



I always knew I wanted to be a mom, I just didn't know I'd want to be a stay-at-home mom so much. Sometimes I miss the rush of being under a deadline, or the challenge of figuring out the logic for some java code, but I look at that little smile, and those little toes, and I'm totally in love with my son!



It took a LONG time to get to this point. I met Big M almost 10 years ago, and we got engaged 4 years after that. We went off the birth control and after 4 years of no pregnancy we got serious about trying. We ended up using Shady Grove Fertility's IUI process to finally get a BFP (Big Fat Positive on a pregnancy test for those of you unfamiliar with the fertility world lingo).

It was a rough pregnancy. I was overweight to start off the pregnancy, so I ended up having to deal with Gestational Diabetes and Pregnancy Induced Hypertension. My OB planned to induce me at 38 weeks, but when I came for my appointment at 37 weeks she sent me right to the hospital and said we'd get things started right away.

It did NOT go at all smoothly, but that's a story for another time. We ended up having a 5# 15 oz. baby boy who was 18 inches long.

For anyone confused about the title, I just wanted to have it reflect who I was, the geekgirl who got good grades, studied when she had to, and generally was a homebody. I've always been great at making friends, but not so great at keeping in touch with them. I blame that on the Navy. My dad joined with I was 3, so I kept having to make new friends wherever we went. And you never really had to keep in touch with people because you'd see them again when you moved to where they got stationed, or they moved to where you were.

Back to the geek thing. I love doing logic puzzles, reading books (always have) and I'm just SO not into the latest hairstyle, or clothes or makeup. I use the fact that I'm a new mom as an excuse to hardly EVER wear makeup. Little M doesn't care, as long as the boobies have milk, he's happy.

Anyway, I have a lot more to say about a lot of things I've just glossed over here, but that's what I started the blog for, people! I'm hopeing I can strike a chord with anyone else who might have similar thoughts, or feelings, or a situation. Because in my attempt to grow up, I've learned a few things, and have come up with a few pearls of wisdom that might, at the very least, make someone smile.