A few days ago I packed up the family and we headed to our local grocery store to load up on all the essentials of life. Bread, milk, Rocky Road… You get the idea.  But along with the delicious, life giving, ADULT brain food (i.e.,. Rocky Road) I also needed to stock up on some baby food.  Mom’s of the world, you know what its like.  Every grocery trip you find yourself staring at the wall of different brands and flavors of baby food as if it’s the wall of shame.  Cringing at the thought of feeding your child this packaged, strained, but easy goodness.  Criticizing yourself for not being a better mommy by making all the baby food that you swore you were going to make before your children were actually born.  Trying to remember what you imagined it would be like blending and mixing all your children’s favorite flavors together meanwhile saving TONS of money.  Oh what a Super Mom you were going to be.  Then you find that, while making the baby food isn’t that hard in theory, finding the time to do it is IMPOSSIBLE!  

Oh sure, its possible if you live in a larger size home where your child’s napping space is located a mile away from the kitchen where they can’t hear the knives cutting, blender blending, and water boiling oh so loudly.  But um, I don’t.  And yes I swear my child can hear the water boiling.  Oh, and lets not forget the screaming baby, whos head is about to pop off,  is done with their nap while your still trying to fill all those little ice cube trays with squished pears before they turn all sorts of unsavory colors.  (Hmmm, maybe Little Johnny will eat the brown fruit?)  So finding the time to make this Super Mom baby food is almost as impossible as going to the bathroom with the door shut.  At this point Super Mom is facing a tough choice and she has to settle for the wonder that is pre-made baby food.  This is why all the Super Moms eventually find themselves in front of this wall of baby food trying to figure out what our  little tots will like best.  We don’t want to waste money buying and opening a jar on a picky baby who takes one bite and acts like you put acid on their tongues, but you’re trying so hard to not have your kid live on only peaches.  And this is when Super Mom caves.  We give up trying to rationalize out our guilty feelings by telling ourselves that you’re not going to buy the jar of sweet potatoes since you can make that one easily at home.  So our children get 9 servings of pre-made baby food and 1 serving of true Super Mom love.  

If your child is anything like mine this will be the time when she decides she doesn’t like sweet potatoes anymore.  Ho Hum!  I’ll hand in my title of Super Mom now. 

Anyhoo, I think I got off track somewhere.  Sorry, it’s from the mind numbing prospect of another baby food run.  What I’m really hot under the collar about, and where I really meant to go with this post, is that twice this week I opened a container of food and it just didn’t seem “right”.  I have no desire to find out why a container of mixed fruit baby food starts getting chunky after only a little time past its expiration date.  ( Really, truly, I don’t want to know the answer to that question since I’m still trying to get over the shame of giving up on being Super Mom. So if you know the answer keep it to yourself please. ) But there it was, suspicious looking enough to make me look at the date.   I JUST bought it not two days before and it was two WEEKS past its expiration date!  Um, hello local grocery store!!!  I can understand missing the occasional item but one would think that baby food aisle would be the first place you would start!!!!  Or did I miss something in the “Things That Are Important In Life” manual? 

 This isn’t the first time this has happened too.  Of course I was furious.  I took the stuff back and gave the manager a rather nice ass chewing.  I’m still a good Super Mom like that.  But what really got me seeing red was another incident that happened in the store right after that.  I went over to the baby food aisle to grab replacements for the expired nastiness and found that there was still tons of the same expired baby food on the shelves.  I took one off the shelf and took it to the employee that stands around by the check out lines and acts like he helps people get into their lines faster (they always act as if they have a little more authority than the stockers so I thought it was a good bone headed idea at the time….) and told him that there was a ton of expired baby food on the shelves.  He told me he would have someone take care of it right a way acting like he seemed really concerned.  Fine.  But when I told him my story about how this wasn’t the first time this has happened, and it seems to be a trend in this store, he tells me that as a consumer we should always check to make sure our food isn’t expired before we buy it.  He does have a point, but the way he said it was like he was telling me it was MY JOB.  NOT HIS!    I’ve got enough on my plate trying to be Super Mom and now I have to play stocker at my local grocery store!  WTF people!  I had to bail out of the store quickly at that point before I found the manager again, and using my mommy ESP, made her eyes burn as I railed at her for the further aggravation this over blown stock boy gave me.  1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10  breath….  If anyone works at a grocery store and is reading this right now please go check your baby food aisle!  The Super Mom’s of the world need your help!

I’ll end my story with this.  After giving up and buying pre-made baby food, and teaching my daughter that great food always comes with a side of preservatives, I now get to check all the dates on all the items I toss in my shopping cart each week.  As if I didn’t have enough to do.  I guess I at least get to adopt back the title of Super Mom again, but I’d rather just be mom.

Tonight my group of tennis ladies had an end of season/early Christmas white elephant party since one of our out of town teammates is in town for a couple days.  It’s always so nice to get together with all the ladies.  The wine and margaritas were flowing freely and so was the chatter. When you took a look around the room you saw multiple conversations going on about who knows how many subjects.  But the amazing thing was there wasn’t one person left in the corner by themselves.  Everyone had someone to talk to and everyone has the same room full of friends so no one was lost in the conversation.  I had to bring my daughter tonight because dear hubby was playing in our club tennis tournament.  She spent the evening being passed around from one lady to another and was just the cutest social butterfly ever.  There isn’t a mama out there that is more proud than I am tonight.

As I made my way around the room chatting about everything under the sun I started talking to one of the ladies about having kids.  She’s about my age, married and is starting to consider going down the preggo route.  While I talked to her I saw a lot of my former self in her eyes.  Her doubts and fears were my own not too long ago.  Until I met my dear hubby I had pretty well decided that kids might not be in the cards for me.  I was one of these women who was completely intimidated by these little creatures.  I know, I know, all the women out there that were born to be moms and already had it programed in their DNA to be nurturers are all wondering how in the hell I could be afraid of such a cute little baby.  It’s easy.  They bite, they puke, they poop and pee and do any number of other disgusting things a person in their right mind wouldn’t purposely want to be involved with.  EWEWWWW!!  They cry.  REALLY LOUD!  They don’t let you  have personal conversations if they are in the room. They make your body look like you swallowed a watermelon while your pregnant and then like a deflated, flappy, good year blimp after they arrive.  Forget long showers, forget makeup, and simply forget remembering to brush your teeth everyday.  Sleep doesn’t exist.  Your deodorant will be your best friend but forget the perfume.  All it does is make your baby sneeze and get snotty and it doesn’t cover up the smell of baby puke anyways.  Forget clothes without stains and eating a meal without it getting cold.  I could keep going but since this is a mommy blog and since most of my readers are moms I don’t have to. You know where I’m at right now.  I know all these things aren’t that bad but knowing that all these things come in one very small, very breakable package is SCARY!

These were all the things I had heard about before I ever decided to have a child and my thoughts were NO THANKS!   I’d rather eat toe jam.  Then I met my husband.  The man of my dreams.  He’s so adorable it’s hard not to think of what he looked like when he was baby.  And then I started noticing how great he was with all his nieces.  They LOVE  their uncle.  He makes them laugh and always has something cool for the to play with outside.  You know, because he still a big kid in many ways.  The idea of a little ankle biter started growing on me.  He made it seem like all the icky things I’ve already mentioned might not be so bad.  But first we had to get past the thing that scared me most.  The idea that my child wouldn’t like me.  I have always been the type of person who would make what I thought was a funny face at a child in a checkout line they would start screaming.  I intimidated kids as much as they intimidated me.  What would I do if my own child decided I was scary?  Again, might seem ridicules to all the experienced, always meant to be a mom, moms but to me it was an honest fear.  But my hubby prevailed and convinced me that it wouldn’t be that bad.  That our own child would love me no matter what and all the other funky stuff I could deal with too.  He’s a very convincing man.  It’s probably a good thing he’s made a career out of tennis instead of being a con artist.

Long story short, we got pregnant.  Had our beautiful little girl.   And do you know what?  She’s not afraid of me!!  And I’m not afraid of her!!  She’s the light of my life and I can’t understand why it took me so long to do this.  I do believe children have a sixth sense about people.  Somewhere during my pregnancy the kids in the checkout lines started not being afraid of me and some even started to smile back.  I think they sensed that I was a mommy (to be) and knew I was now part of that secret society.  It was kinda weird to all of a sudden not be that intimidated person any more.  Now I live in a sea of baby puke, pee, and poop and I wouldn’t trade one minute of it.  Not for all the diamonds in the world or all the ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s.

So to my friend who I was talking to tonight.  Go for it, if your ready to face the challenge. Don’t expect yourself to ever be completely “ready”  because until the screaming beast actually arrives you won’t know the feelings I’m talking about.  That’s comes on his/her birthday.  But what ever you decide to do I support you and you can practice with my little sweet ankle biter any time you want.

Smiles