My life has many aspects, and I’ve always been sensitive to losing my identity through motherhood. Too many women I know go around known as “Mikey’s mom”, rather than as someone with their own interests. As a Sunday school teacher before I had kids, I realized I knew many folks through the church as “Mikey’s mom”, rather than “Sue” or “Elaine” or “that awesome mom with this talent in…”. So, I’ve always been interested in exploring many interests and highlighting things here from those interests: coding, clowning, business, motorcycles, etc. But now let me give you into my life as a mom.
Tomorrow is my son’s 10th birthday. He’s the youngest of my three. While we don’t have birthday parties with friends every year, we’ll do it for big birthdays. Ten counts as one of them, as does thirteen, which is what my middle daughter will turn in just two weeks. So tonight we have the sleepover for my son. He had 5 friends join him for a Harry Potter birthday party at our house. We did a Dementor pinata, a Quidditch match, a cake that would have made Hagrid proud, butterbeer, polyjuice potion, and lots of jellybeans and chocolate. (No chocolate frogs this time…) The house was decorated in Hufflepuff colors and we had a photo area for ‘Have you seen this wizard?’. All of this is homemade… Pool noodles became brooms and hula hoops became Quidditch rings. Paper bags and black clothing became a pinata. Ice cream and cream soda became butter beer. Much consultation with Pinterest over the past few weeks…
Tomorrow is also the fun fest at our church. My daughters were approached to do face painting, and to help them fend off feeling completely responsible, I became responsible for face painting. Tonight we three were practicing. On my hand, I have a two different flowers, a heart, and a shark. Each daughter has some set of images on their hands and face, all in the name of practice for tomorrow.
Next Saturday is the Homecoming dance, my eldest’s first. So, in addition to party execution and face painting, tonight was online Homecoming dress shopping. We debated dress length, dress fit, and backup plans in case the one ordered doesn’t hit the mark.
All this is the life of a happy mom on a Friday night. The earlier part of the day had satisfying interactions with Gitlab open-source code as part of work. But the afternoon and evening has happily been consumed with making memories with my kids. There are 4 boys around my kitchen table right now playing a drawing game and generally ramping down to go to bed for their sleepover. Some of them are unfortunately still eating the sugar we overstuffed them with earlier – slightly counterproductive on the whole sleeping thing of sleepover…. But much less energetic than the epic Nerf battles going on earlier.
The life of a mom… Ahhhhh…