Sundays, Sundays - By Cara Potapshyn Meyers

Mothers think about their children (no matter how old) day & night. Mothers love their children in a way they'll never understand. Mothers will be there for their children when no one else will. Mothers would take a bullet, jump in front of a train or ask God to take them instead of their child. If you have children you love as much as I love mine, post this as your status.

I hate Sundays. I actually loathe Sundays. I even begin to hate Sunday on Saturday. Why would anyone hate a nice, lazy, weekend day?? Because my husband has designated Saturdays as his day to spend with my son and therefore I get to spend all day on Sunday with my son. 

Now, on the surface, that appears fair and equitable. But in reality, it is far from it. My husband doesn’t sleep at home on Friday nights. He comes by to pick up my son around 8:30 - 9:00 am and brings him home roughly 12 hours later. On the contrary, my husband leaves for the gym at 7 am on Sundays when my son just awakens, and lately has gotten home close to or after 11 pm. And many times, my son waits until my husband comes home to tell him something exciting or ask him a question. Unless it is an emergency, my husband has made it clear that he is unavailable to speak or text with during the day. And the few times I have tried, I have gotten a response hours later.

The quip above had been floating around Facebook on Sunday. Although I was having one of the worst days with my son, I still felt, deep down inside that this still applied. But my comment underneath was, “VERY debatable.” I was having a really rough day with my son. And with no help and also 2 dogs to care for, it made for an even more challenging day.

The day started with a urine soaked bamboo bath mat and equally soaked bathroom floor. Need I say more? My son was distracted by something and wasn’t watching where he was “aiming.” My husband had left already and I was left to roll up and dispose of the mat and scrub down the entire bathroom floor. All at 7 am, sans even coffee. I can assure you that my husband has never had to begin “his” day with my son this way. And there have been other days when I have woken up to changing my son’s urine soaked bedding and have had to strip his bed at 7 am and do loads of laundry and re-make his bed. My therapists all claim that this is all a result of the psychological dynamics going on within our household. Yet I am always the one left to do the “dirty work,” as most mothers are.

The day only became worse. My son had a bad cold, so I felt that he needed a day of relaxation. This “relaxation” day tumbled into a day of tantrums and meltdowns...both his and mine. He “lost” a Pokemon/Bakugan/Yu Gi Oh card. There were cards strewn all over his bed, his desk and the floor. I tried to remain calm and got some gallon size Baggies and black markers. We identified each bag for each appropriate set of cards and sorted the cards into their respective bags. This alone took almost an hour and a half. And did we find my son’s “lost” card? Of course we did! In his pants pocket as I was sorting laundry to do!

Then there were meltdowns. My son waits until he is starving before he tells me he is hungry and “can’t wait” for me to make his meal (a carry over from when he was a baby. There were never any whimpers of uncomfortableness when he needed a bottle. He needed it yesterday and warmed yesterday! And his ear-piercing screams let you know it!). Then he didn’t like what the meal looked like, thus tasted like. So there were more meltdowns (mine) and tantrums (his). I ended up telling him that if he could find food to eat in the house (I had to go food shopping badly), he could eat. If he didn’t want the meal I made him and he couldn’t find anything to eat, he’d have to go hungry. A bunch of hunger-induced nasty insults were hurled my way (I say “hunger-induced” because my son has never spoken to me that way before. And after this past Sunday, I can promise you, he never will again.)

The dogs were taking their daily naps and he pounced on them. They, in turn, snarled at him (I would too if someone woke me up from a sound sleep!). His feelings got hurt terribly, so he spent a good half hour crying on the living room couch.

And the day gradually ended with a comment from my son that, at this point, not only made me laugh at the absurdity of it, but also gave me time for myself! My son said, “Mommy, I think you need to go to bed earlier because you’ve been cranky lately.” So I gladly responded, “Well, then I better get ready to go to bed around 10 o’clock so that I get a really good night of sleep and not wake up cranky!” To my surprise, my son didn’t balk when I said that I couldn’t hold his hand as he fell asleep. I meditated myself to sleep in my own bed. And ultimately, really did get a good night of sleep! And I made sure that I was bright and chipper in the morning so that my son would think that my going to bed early...his idea...was working!

It is a good thing that we have plans for the next four Sundays so that we can at least get out of the house! But at least you now have a glimpse of how horrible Sundays can be for me and why I hate them so much.

How much longer until my son graduates from high school??

Naps Make A Comeback by Maureen VanWalleghan

My daughter H. is in kindergarten. A half-day program at a Waldorf-inspired charter school. We picked it because she is on the young side for a kindergartener. After three years in a great preschool it seemed the best option.

At her wonderful preschool, H. went everyday and got a nap everyday. The preschool was such that she had breakfast, lunch and a snack there also. Needless to say her school was doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to managing my daughter. Now with a half day kindergarten I am back in charge.

Last semester, my very social daughter wanted to go to kindercare, which covered the time from noon to 3:00pm when the whole school got out. I had planned for two days because of my teaching schedule and H. asked for one more. There was a rest time at kindercare, but no real nap.

Little did I realize that without a daily nap our daughter was becoming very unpleasant. We have a happy kid. It felt like she was born happy. She is a teaser—a jokester, she likes to say. She is also very animated and quite flexible. As kindergarten progressed she became more moody and weepy in the evenings; also in the mornings as well. Basically, everything became a crisis. My husband and I kept wondering if she was trying on behaviors that she saw other kids doing at school. It was really difficult to know what to think. After working all day we found ourselves frustrated with all the acting out. Frankly, nothing was helping. I was trying to get her into bed by 7pm, but even that was having little impact on all the tears.

When my husband went hunting for a week at the beginning of December, my mom came to stay with us and help out in the evenings since I had evening teaching commitments. My mom is old school. All kids get naps; so H. got a nap every day. At the end of my mom’s visit I felt like a got my happy girl back. That’s when I realized that H. was tired. Really tired. No crying, no tantrums, no rudeness, just a happy girl again.

I decided to commit to a nap everyday during the Winter Break, but it was difficult as my husband was off and I was off and we didn’t have a routine to follow. Since I have some control over my teaching schedule I decided to set things up for this semester so that I could be home everyday at noon to fix lunch and do the nap tuck in. Funny to think that’s how my mom did it. I guess she knows a thing or two.

We just finished our second week with nap time firmly set into our day. The change has been noticeable. Evenings are a pleasure again. In the mornings H. jumps out of bed like she used to, plays and gets ready for her day. Her teacher at school has noticed a change as well. What a difference a nap makes. I feel very lucky I could adjust my schedule to meet that need. Now if I could get a nap in for myself everyday...would I be nicer too?