How to Keep Non-Parent Friends Post-Parenthood

After you have kids, there seems to be a major shift in thinking in some people.  When all you can think about is the needs of a little human or litter of them, it is hard to remember what it was like before they were there.  I know this from personal experience.  I have tried to imagine what our life would be like with no munchkins constantly demanding things and taking up our time, but I honestly can't.  But just because I can't imagine life without kids, doesn't mean that I can't be friends with people who don't have any children of their own.  I find the proposition of ONLY being friends with other parents to be a bit BORING.  I mean, seriously, who wants to talk about potty training and breast-feeding all day long. I jest of course, but there is some truth in that parents always have the conversational crutch of talking about their kids and/or kid related things.  I don't know about you, but I have a whole list of other things I'm interested in than my kids.  So here is my list of 5 ways to keep your non-parent friends after getting puked on and diaper duty become regular things in your life.

1. Don't have sucky friends.
This sounds like a no-brainer, but it really isn't.  The worst part, sometimes you don't know that your friends kinda suck until after you have kids.  Example: We are really great friends with a couple from our non-kid days, and they aren't planning to ever have kids.  We knew this before Annika was born, but we had no idea why.  The reason: She's AFRAID of children.  Seriously!  She came over to visit us when we were visiting Evansville and Annika was about 8 months old.  Annika pulled up on the chair she was sitting in, and the woman actually cowered in the opposite direction.  There is a picture, but I will save her the internet embarrassment.  Being afraid of my children SUCKS.  Don't suck.  I promise my kids are not scary minions...most of the time, and I really want to still be your friend, but asking me to ONLY hang out without my kids is going to seriously limit the amount of time we can be together.  I LOVE this lady and her husband.  I still count them as some of our closest friends, but in this aspect, she sucks.  Sorry if you read this C, but I HATE that you are afraid of my kids.

2. Contact...it works both ways
This sounds simple, but it can be difficult to keep up with your friends' lives and in contact with them when you are busy chasing around kiddos.  Make an effort to keep your common courtesy when it comes to your friends especially.  Return their calls/emails/texts/tweets/facebook posts.  Comment on their lives too.  Your life and pictures on FB didn't all of the sudden become more important because you have kids.  Just do it.  One small note to friends without kids, parents will probably be a little slower with the contact.  Be understanding and a little more patient with us.  We still love you, we just have tiny humans sucking all the life energy out of us.


3. Have something to talk about other than your kids
Have you ever known someone that bought a boat?  They are soo proud of their purchase.  They want to show you pictures of it.  They offer to take you to see it and out on it whenever you want.  They are over the top enthusiastic about all things boating and can't talk about anything else all day every day.  You humor them for a while, but at some point you want to smack them across the face and say, "get over it already."  New parents can be the same way about their kids.  Your offspring might be the most interesting things in the world to you, but everyone else can only take so much of the blah blah blah kids kids kids.  Have something else to talk about to your friends. Whether that's politics, the news, the latest book you read, or any other acceptable conversation topic in the world other than kids or kid things.

on a very much related note:

4. Stay interested in your friends' lives.
Your children are not the center of everyone's universe.  Ask your friends what is going on in their lives, and be genuinely interested.  Be an active listener and don't forget to look at them.  The parent conversation where your eyes wander away to look for the kids is NOT appropriate with your friends who don't have children.  Make a point to be interested and look the part too.

5. Make time for them
Last but not least, make sure you make special time for your friends without your kids around.  This does the double duty of making your friends feel special and getting you some much needed rejuvenating time away from your kids.  Everyone will feel better, and you might not even be distracted while you converse.  You might even be able to enjoy a meal without having to cut up someone else's meal into tiny bites.  You might not get interrupted a million times and have to ask your friend, "What was I talking about?"  You might even meet them at a place that requires ID to enter!  GASP!

There they are, my 5 easy steps to keeping your childless friends after becoming a parent.
How do you keep your childless friends?  Have you ever had a friend who was actually scared of kids?    

Here we are at our friends' wedding that specifically requested NO KIDS attend.  

We got a babysitter and had a GREAT time!  Our friends who didn't respect the request may have actually gotten a scowl from the bride...the aforementioned C.  

6 Random Facts about Me & Andy

Oh Mama Kat, I have some really random facts for you about us. 

1. Andy and I met when I trained him to be a server at ChiChi's.  I was instantly attracted to him, and may have helped him cheat on his server exam a little bit (though he'll deny it).  I really love to tell people that I trained him though.  

2. Our song is Duncan Sheik's "Home."  Not many people know it, but it is totally worth a Google. Our amazing friend and ex-roommate Heath sang and played it on the guitar at our wedding.  It was so very special. 

3. We are very often the same weight, despite being 4+ inches different in height.  

4. Andy's birthday is the day before mine, so we're the same age for one day a year.  Every other day I'm 364 days older than he is.  At least he'll never forget my birthday.

5. When we found out we were having another girl, we had a really hard time agreeing on a name mostly because every time I suggested one, he would proceed to say it in the voice of a strip-club announcer.  It was extremely frustrating and funny at the same time. 

6. We don't get into watching many shows together, but we LOVE: the Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Gallactica, Weeds, and Parenthood.  A little eclectic, but that's us. 

Great Expectations @ Gfunkified

I didn’t plan on getting married.  My parents are on their 3^rd and 4^th marriage respectively, and seeing that many failed marriages made me pretty much reject the entire institution for a very long time.  Then I met Andy.  He came from a wonderful family where his parents married right out of high school and still actually loved each other.  He was handsome and a dynamite kisser, so what could I do but say yes when he asked me to marry him a mere seven months after we started dating.  It felt right.  I felt like I was home when I was with him...

Read the rest over at my friend Greta's blog: Gfunkified where I have a guest post today.  Looking forward to seeing you over there.  

Monkey Butt Cancer

Some kids have teddy bears, others have blankets, our Mayzie has a monkey.

*

*Photo Credit: Mike Terry

Stinky Monkey (as he is called around our house) arrived when Mayzie was a baby.  My mother bought it to sit in her jungle themed nursery and it had a sache inside to somewhat disguise the dirty diaper smell.  One night Andy put the monkey in the crib with Mayzie.  We left in in there for a few nights.  She snuggled with it and it was adorable.  Then, when we went to switch it out for another cuddle buddy, she would have none of it.  Did you know that smell is the sense most strongly associated with memory?  It's true.  She smelled that darn sache in there and was hooked.  With Annika we had diligently never let her get too attached to one single stuffed animal, with Mayzie there was no changing it up after the initial impression.  She was hooked.  

Stinky monkey goes everywhere.  We've convinced her not to bring him in public anymore after too many trips around stores searching for that darned monkey that she dropped in a random aisle, but he dutifully waits in the car for her snuggles when we get back.  Stinky monkey came to Germany with us, and that is where he contracted monkey butt cancer.  

It happened when Andy and the girls first arrived in Berlin.  We were staying at a temporary apartment and the girls were having a grand time exploring it after we lugged all our suitcases up to the 4th floor walk-up.  Andy and the girls had arrived just that morning and we were all already exhausted.  Mayzie went in the bathroom. I have no idea what she was doing in there, as we were certainly not watching her, but all of a sudden we heard it---the sound of the monkey plunking in the toilet.  EWWWW.  Ew Ewwwwww.  It had to be washed immediately; let's just say that the toilet wasn't the cleanest in the universe.  Stinky monkey went in the washer.  It came out clean, but we had no way to dry it other than to let it hang for probably 24-48 hours. 

Andy had a brilliant idea.  He stuck a hairdryer up the monkey's butt to get it dry faster, knowing full well that Mayzie would throw down if she had to try to sleep without the stinky monkey.  It worked.  The monkey was dry in no time.  But then, I held the monkey to check for dryness and noticed something.  There seemed to be a large mass in the butt of stinky monkey that had not been there previously.  The mass was the size of a softball, and it took us a while to figure out that the plastic beads in the butt of the monkey had congealed into a sort of monkey butt cancerous mass that could not be broken apart by hands.  

Doctor Andy to the rescue.  Being the superb surgeon that he is, Andy solved the problem by taking a hammer to stinky monkey's butt.  Mayzie watched in horror as her favorite cuddle buddy was mutilated by her father.  There was crying (Mayzie).  There was laughing (Annika & Me). There was frustration (Andy).  But by God, he got the mass to go away, mostly.  

We consider the monkey butt cancer to be in full remission now.  Despite a golf ball sized tumor that refused to be broken up, stinky monkey has shown no signs of cancer in more than a year now.  We're pretty sure the remnants are benign.  

Stinky monkey recently got another bath.  He was seriously stinky and you almost couldn't tell that he is actually two different colors.  He came out of the washer clean and wet, and Andy faced the same conundrum as in Berlin.  How do you dry a monkey that MUST be dried as quickly as possible.  I arrived home to the sound of something plunking in the dryer.  I asked Andy what it was.  

He replied, "Stinky monkey."  

"NOOOOOOO!  You'll give it cancer again!!!" I exclaimed. 

"Don't worry, I put it on the delicate cycle." He explained.  

Skeptically, I replied, "We'll see won't we." 

It turns out, monkey butt cancer only comes from hairdryers.  Thank goodness, because our hammer somehow got lost in the move and we haven't replaced it yet.  

Bacon

Thanks Mama Kat for another great set of options to choose from for the weekly roundup for the Writer's Workshop.  This week, I chose the prompt: a post inspired by Bacon.

This is not the popular opinion, but I'm just putting it out there that I do not like bacon.

Every Sunday I get to sleep in thanks to my amazing husband.  Every Sunday, he cooks an entire pound of bacon.  He lights a candle in the kitchen and keeps the fan running on the stove, and even sometimes opens the back door, but it is no use.  I still awaken to the smell of bacon in our bedroom upstairs with the door closed.

Perhaps it is my vegetarian nose.  Perhaps it is the fact that I never really liked bacon even when I did eat meat.  I don't even like Fake-on that much, though I will eat it when presented.  (That's fake-bacon for all you non-vegetarian friends.  Andy says it tastes like cardboard, but I've never eaten any cardboard so I wouldn't know.)

The worst part: Bacon is Andy's favorite food.  He could eat it all day every day.  I can't even kiss him when he has bacon breath.  Sometimes I swear that he eats so much bacon that his pores start to emit the smell and I can't even stand to be near him.  But I want to be near him.  He's really darn handsome and a great cuddler at that.  What is a vegetarian girl to do?

Our girls also love bacon, though Andy once got angry at me for giving them his leftover bacon from his Sunday cooking extravaganza.  He doesn't like to share.  I'm not sure it isn't a conspiracy to try to make our girls love him more than me, but so far it isn't working.

So here's to all you bacon lovers.  I love one of your kind, but your favorite food makes me want to yack.

Happy Anniversary to Us!

9 years have passed.  9 years and I'm still so in love with him. 

 We still slow dance, just mostly in the kitchen now. 

 We were so young and excited and clueless.  

Here are 9 things we've learned in these last 9 brilliant years together. 

1.  Things don't always go as planned, and that can be a good thing.  (Example: surprise pregnancy)

2. Being supportive through graduate school is not easy, and chasing dreams takes serious patience with each other.  

3. Keep talking.  Never stop talking.  We can't read each others minds yet, and staying on the same page is essential. 

4.  When it comes to the kids, we have to be on the same team. 

5. DATE NIGHT ROCKS!! 

6. Keep it spicy...you know what I mean. 

7. Finding other couple friends that we both like is HARD.  We're so thankful for the ones we have! 

8. We'd rather spend our money traveling than buying nice things, and we spend most of our traveling going to visit family.  We would have never predicted this 9 years ago. 

9. We really do love each other more deeply and passionately than we did 9 years ago.  Our love grows every day, which is still rather unbelievable.  

Fill in the Blank

That horse got covered in _________ today.

I said this phrase to Andy with regard to a stuffed horse at our house.
What do you think he thought I said?
What did I actually say?
Go.