Accidental bedsharers

Most mornings I wake up with a pair of feet in my face. It's like I went to a raging party the night before and don't remember how I got to my bed or, better yet, why there are feet in my face.

I'm usually grumpy when I first wake up, so having a toe shoved into my sinus cavity makes mornings even less pleasurable. This, of course, is not how we planned to spend our first waking moments most days of the week when we welcomed our babies to the world.

In June 2010, Josie joined our little family and at that time, like so many other first-time parents, we tried to follow some of the rules — you know, things like rest when the baby rests and always put them to sleep on their backs.

That's laughable. Looking back on our first few weeks as parents, I didn't listen to a damn thing anyone told me. Oh, the baby is sleeping! Time to scrub the bathtub and do nine loads of laundry and run up and down the stairs. My brain did not shut off. By the time bedtime and those middle of the night feedings came at the end of the day, I could barely keep myself awake to get her to latch on properly. Instead of sitting in the rocking chair in her bedroom at 2 a.m., I tried propping myself up on pillows in bed and promptly fell asleep despite my husband's incessant pleas to keep me awake.

The cold from hell

This cold will go down in history as the most irritating thing to happen in my house. I swear it's a virus spawned from the devil himself.

Both girls have been a boogery, coughing, slimy mess for two weeks. The pediatrician said, "Lungs are clear. Looks like it's just a bad cold." That was 12 days ago.

That same day I realized they charged my insurance for two upper respiratory infections. It hit me that doctors, or the billing department, play the system as badly as some patients and it kills me. If my child has what you're going to tell my insurance company she's been diagnosed with, then I want an antibiotic for her. I'm not going to argue about what's ethical or not, but if a parent is going to see on the printout from the office staff that a diagnosis is an infection, then use the handy-dandy prescription pad you've been licensed to carry as it was meant to be used! Or, at the very least, use a different billing code.

Instead, we've gone through doses upon doses of pain reliever, cough medicine for my big girl, warm showers, gallons of water in the humidifier, sleepless nights and when all of that seemed to stop helping, I stopped caring if they drank my green tea and had popsicles for breakfast. At least they're getting fluids.

Breastfeeding's bittersweet end

I'm pretty sure my 14-month-old daughter is a 15-year-old boy in disguise. She is absolutely obsessed with my breasts.

Breasts. Boobies. Tatas. The girls. Second base.

We all call them a variety of names and they seem to help sell a lot of magazines and whatnot, but in reality they serve a single purpose — to feed our young — and the purpose of mine is quickly coming to an end for the second time. I know not every mother is able to successfully breastfeed, and some simply have no desire to nurse, but for us it's been the right choice.

When I was pregnant with our first baby, I had high hopes of being able to breastfeed and went so far as to order my $300 breast pump before talking to my endocrinologist about the thyroid medication I take and if I would be able to breastfeed while taking it. The long and short of that conversation was I could and I did.

Josephine was breastfed for the first six months of her life. I was proud as a first time mom to be able to nourish her for that long considering the numerous weight checks and the talks of formula and the eventual supplementing with formula that led to the end of our breastfeeding relationship. It was sad and heart wrenching, but the only thing that mattered in the end was she was eating and healthy. Despite my efforts, I simply didn't take good enough care of myself to be able to continue feeding her exclusively from me after that point. A word to moms out there who want to and are able to successfully nurse — make sure you eat and stay hydrated. Those are the two things I failed to do. I was ecstatic when the pregnancy weight melted off and my swelling (and boy did I swell) went away, but at what cost?

Here goes ... everything

It's 1 a.m. and after weeks, maybe even months, of considering this, I've made the decision to jump head first into an irrational sea teeming with thousands of others throwing caution to the wind and giving the virtual public a look into their deeper selves.

Like so many other writers out there looking for their own corner of the Internet, I'm a stay-at-home mom. It wasn't always this way. I had a career, and still do to a degree, in community journalism.

Tough choices needed to be made when our family grew and I opted to try my best to contribute to the bills by freelancing for my colleagues. Instead of spending bath time at board meetings and breakfast with my nose in my email, I opted for motherhood — the morning fight to get our 2-year-old to wear anything but her pajamas, a daily wrestling match with our 14-month-old that others call "diaper changes" and wondering why the house is a disaster at the end of the day despite my marathon cleaning efforts.