Please Forgive Me & Happy Mother's Day...I'm So Sorry - Part 1

Last year on Mother's Day I was 5 and a half months pregnant.  When I suggested to Chris that we celebrate my first Mother's Day he just smiled at me and informed me, "You don't know what Mother's Day is yet sweetie." and gave me a condescending squeeze of the knee.  I protested (mildly) and informed him how I'd given up drinking, reduced my caffeine consumption from a giant tub of coffee in the morning followed by a series of smaller cups of liquid energy through-out the day to one small coffee in the morning and one small tea in the afternoon and how my 5 foot 1 frame was going to be carrying two full term babies in a matter of months.  He wasn't buying it.  So I brought out theories on how pregnancy is like running the world's longest marathon.*  He reminded me that people don't celebrate their performance in a marathon until they finish.  Defeated.

Source: flickr.com Via: Loozrboy On: creativecommons.org

This year, I'm getting my Mother's Day, having been a mom for over 9 months now, I know that I've earned it.  It's been a wonderful, but challenging time since I've officially earned the rank of "Mom", so I'm going to start what I think may become an annual Mother's Day tradition, A year in Motherhood - things I now feel that I owe my mother an apology for:

Dear Mom,

I'm SO sorry for:

• Being a month overdue....I only had 38 weeks of pregnancy, I can't imagine what another 6 weeks would have felt like.
• Any back pain you have ever experienced, from pregnancy & beyond, apparently one of my pelvic bones is re-aligning much slower than the other, Thank You Molly!
• Morning Sickness, that lasts all day, for nearly 5 months.
• Heart burn and acid re-flux
• The hottest summer in the history during pregnancy!**
• Colic...after experiencing over 400 hours of constant screaming that you can not calm, cannot diagnose, cannot explain, but can set your watch to, I finally get it.  I feel lucky and loved to have survived it.
• Sleepless nights
•  Poo in the bath tub.  I don't want to know how many times I have had to fish out and flush, followed by intense scrubbing of the baby bath and my own tub.
• Terrible timing for disgusting things like blow out diapers and spit up everywhere mere moments before the sitter arrives and a formal event is waiting.
• Hair Pulling
• Eye Gauging 
• Finding disgusting things and putting them in my mouth.***
• Necklace & earring pulling
• Goober marks on shoulders
• Sneezing in your face
• Coughing in your face
• Tantrums or pouting of any kind, ever.****

And thank you for giving me a break whenever I need it and for never saying I told you so!

P.S. I'm still not sorry for wearing black lipstick as a teenager.

*This blog entry has a great comparison: http://www.runnerstrials.com/2011/07/11/pregnancy-vs-marathon-training/
**Thank you to my mom for clipping a newspaper article confirming how hot it was last summer, so I can prove to my children that I'm not full of it.
***Keep your minds out of the gutter people!
****I was unaware, until the birth of Molly, that pouting is a facial expression that is not learned and comes naturally to babies.