Everything I know, I Learned From My Mother and Mother In Law

I have to start asking you all to vote again -- I know that I am a slacker who is on vacation and haven't been posting regularly, but I keep slipping on the Top Mommy Blog website.  I have already told you all how obsessed I am with this rather pointless rating website, so please just take your mouse and click on that brown button to your right that says "Vote for Me on Top Mommy Blogs" so I'll shut up about it.

Today I am biding time.  I have written a fairly long post, but I am waiting on permission to post it since it isn't my story to tell, really.  The person that it involves has not gotten back to me to let me know that it is okay to tell it, so I am waiting.  You all know how I hate to step on any one's toes.  (There is a great need for a sarcasm font.  I think a lot of what I say is often misinterpreted.)  So the question is, what do I talk about in the meantime?  In that post (that I do not have permission to talk about yet) I said that "it is hard to make an entire post out of "my mother-in-law gave my kids ice cream at 11:30" or "Jackson peed on my mother's leather couch" but I think that is what I am about to do....

Since we have been here in Alabama, my kids have caused much less destruction than they do at my house.  They still drop their clothes wherever they want when I say "Bath time!" and they are not good about picking up after themselves.  But I think that, like me, they are a little fearful of my mother, and respect her stuff much more than mine and even their own at our house.  As you may have deduced from the above paragraph, Jackson peed on my mother's leather couch.  It wasn't malicious.  My mother did not realize that he wears underwear most of the time, and therefore (wrongly) assumed that it would be okay to let him take a nap on her couch.  He peed on it.  She was (understandably) aggravated, but I Googled and found out "how to remove urine from a leather couch" and found a solution that worked on eHow.  It amazes me how straightened up my mom's house is and I have discovered the reason -- she does not have a bounty of toys and crap that would rival a Toys R' Us.  I am now more determined than ever to par down my kid's possessions.  I think I will go to The Container Store and get them each ONE plastic bin in their favorite colors and tell them that they can only keep what they can fit into it.  Everything else is GOING AWAY.

My mother and my mother-in-law are both wonderful women, but you could not get 2 more different grandparents if you tried.  My mom has rules (shoes go on the hearth, used washcloths are to be rung out and hung on the side of the tub and not wadded up soaking wet on the floor, etc.) and my mother-in-law has the philosophy that as a grandmother she is to do whatever my crazy kids want her to do.  Once, when I was pregnant with Bella, I came home from the store to find her sitting in the under-the-bed storage box I had bought.  I asked her what she was doing and she giggled and said "William told me to get in the box, so I got in the box!"  Like it was the most natural thing in the world to take orders from an 18 month old.  When we stay at her house, my kids rarely go to sleep before 1 in the morning.  Part of the reason is that we will eat lunch around 3:30, dinner around 8:00, and have ice cream at 11:30.  Then we all sleep until 10:00 and have breakfast around 10:30 or 11:00.  She is accommodating and bends over backwards to make my kids happy and give me as much "me" time as possible while I am here. 

I go back and forth between their houses to try to give them equal time but also because their differences are so extreme.  I eventually tire of the rules at my mom's house and the chaos at my mother-in-law's house, so I bounce back and forth like a virtual ping-pong ball.  It is a little stressful for me since I happen to be a perfect blend of the 2 of them.  Because I am awesome. (BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!)