We're waiting...

I think I told you that we bought an HDTV on Sunday night. Since nobody had the TV we wanted in stock (because we, like everybody else in the New York/New England geographical area, decided to buy a new HDTV the weekend before the Giants play the Pats in the SuperBowl... duh), we ordered it online from Sears to pick it up at the store. The order confirmation gave yesterday as the estimated arrival date, but no TV yet. I called customer service tonight and was told that I have to call the pick up store directly to find out when they expect to have it ready for us.

I hope it gets here before the cable guys do (between 3 and 5pm on Saturday).

My Brain Hurts

Since we visited my parents over the holidays, John has been bugging me to get an HDTV.

My parents' TV was so old (twenty years old, I think) that the bottom six inches of the picture just disappeared. Dad kept putting off buying a new TV (had to be HD, of course) because he wanted to wait until they sold the house and he could get a bigass one for their new living room. As we all know, the real estate market tanked, so nobody's coming through to look at their house (if you're looking to relocate to Bucks County, PA, email me. my parents have a beautiful home for sale). My brother Ronnie finally shamed my dad into buying a new TV, along with upgrading to HD Cable. After a couple of hours of watching sports in HD, John was convinced.

So back to John and his latest quest. In order to keep him from walking into a random electronics superstore and throwing money down on some TV that we know nothing about, I must do research.

So I've been spending lots of time on cnet and reading Home Theater magazine in a futile effort to absorb everything I need to know about HDTV. In a nutshell: it's going to come down to whose remote and user controls are prettiest.

And then I've been doing all of this comparing between Charter Cable's and at&t Dish's offerings. Because we can't have a high-def TV without high-def cable, obviously. Ugh. I can't even stand to read this post anymore.

Lemon out...

There Goes the Neighborhood

I read some rather shocking and disturbing news on page two in the local paper last week. One of my neighbors was arrested for and pled guilty to possession of child pornography. He was caught when he tried to buy a videotape online that was actually a sting operation. Trial is set for March, but until then he's free on bond. He was arrested in 2006, so why are we just learning this now? What if, God forbid, one of our kids was molested by this guy?

Now, here's something I don't understand. One of the conditions of his bond is that he can't work with or be around children under 18 years of age. So how is he still living at home? I don't know this for certain, but another neighbor told me that the wife is standing by him and strongly suspects that he's still living in the house. The couple has three children under four years old.

And here's something else I don't understand. If buying child porn is what he got busted for, and for what proof exists, what else has this guy done that the authorities can't prove? Disgusting. I hate to wish harm against people, but if he's done worse than view child pornography, he deserves to be put in jail for a nice, long while. I feel bad for the kids.

No More Martyr Mama

I never understood why stay-at-home moms hired babysitters. To me, it seemed like they were cheating: if you're not working outside the home, why on earth do you need to hire someone to watch your kids?

Of course, at the time, it all made perfect sense to me. I had only one child, and he took a two-hour nap each day. I had a nice, long stretch of time every afternoon to spend however I wished. I could watch Dr. Phil, surf the internet, or - gasp! - do housework. Oh sure, I was drained by the end of the day, but I never felt like I couldn't catch a break until he went to bed.

And then my world changed. We had a second child, our first's naps became more sporadic (and rarely did they coincide with the baby's naptimes). I finally got fed up with wondering whether the oldest would nap and forced him to drop them altogether. That long break I used to have was gone - and was replaced by nighttime feedings, prying a toddler off a crawling baby, and believing that watching only one child was my break.

One year later, I have now come to decide that those moms are geniuses, and I have been a naive, stupid martyr. Tomorrow I am going to make my first phone call to an outside babysitter.

Now please don't think I'm going to start going out to lunch and getting manicures every week (I'm Catholic, I could never hire a babysitter to watch the kids while I do that - the guilt!). I just want someone to come for two or three hours every other week so I can leave the house by myself and come back feeling refreshed and ready to be with my kids again.

Crush With Eyeliner

If you've read any of my posts, you've probably gathered that I am (a) married, (b) a mother of two small boys, and (c) straight. All three are true. That said, I have a secret girly crush. No, not that kind of girly crush (you know, the kind your husband only wishes you had). The kind of girly crush where you think this woman is just so freaking smart and funny and successful and cool and you not only wish you were smart and funny and successful and therefore cool like her, but you want to be BFF friends with her and hang out and go to lunch and then go shopping with her. I have one of those big, fat girly crushes on Tina Fey. It would be so cool to be friends with her; our kids would have playdates and we'd sit around watching them play, shooting the breeze about parenting, marriage, and most importantly, snark on the world.

Maybe it's because I discovered that she's from Upper Darby, or that her birthday is the same day as my friend Stacy's, or we both graduated from high school and college the same year, or maybe it's because in my fantasy life I am that smart, funny, and successful. After all, I do have shoulder length brown hair, wear similarly-shaped tortoise shell glasses, but I'm about three inches taller. But that's neither here nor there... I like to think of Tina as my alter ego, the "me" I would be if I had gotten my head together a little sooner in life and was confident enough not only to know what I wanted, but to actually go out there and get it at any cost.

Shake the Disease

I hate when I get like this. I've been perseverating, no obsessing, about having a daughter. I just can't stop thinking about it, but not in a good way. It's gnawing away at me.

At the grocery store today I chatted up a woman who's due with her second child in two weeks. She has a boy who's a little over two and is expecting a girl. I'm happy for her, but that secret, little dark part of me was angry, wanted to know why I haven't felt that joy of awaiting my daughter. Fortunately I got over that pretty quickly. Then when I was checking out, I talked to a woman in the next lane who has two boys who looked about 4 and 5, and a baby girl who was maybe five months old. When I asked her what she did to get her girl after two boys, she gave me this serious look and said, "You want to know what I did?" and told me that she had in vitro with sex selection. I thanked her for sharing that with me. I really admire her courage to tell me that because people can get so judgemental and, frankly, angry when someone expresses the desire to balance their family.

So today I've been obsessing about IVF and PGD. How would I get hubby to agree to it? (we discussed #3 last night while we were out to dinner; he expressed his desire for pink but steadfastly refused my suggestion that we get his sperm spun to tip the scales to the pink side. his comment: "you get what you get" ...easily spoken by the man with two sons. I highly doubt he'd be feeling so cavalier if we had two daughters) How would I explain this to people? Would I explain it to people? How would I feel knowing I tinkered with the Almighty's domain to get a daughter? What if something was wrong with her? Certainly I would feel that I brought it on myself and was simply being punished for trying to play God.

So what do I do? Any low-tech method to sway for a girl seems to work just as well as simply doing nothing at all. Part of me wants to let go and trust God since He has a plan for our family, but part of me is terrified of being overrun by a houseful of boys with no daughter to grow close to, like I am with my mother. Part of me wants to try every low-tech method just so I could say, "Well, I did everything nonintrusive I could to have a daughter" should I have another boy.

I also worry that all this worrying about a daughter means that I'm definitely having all boys.

I need to get myself back into therapy before I get pregnant again. I can't keep having this obsessive thoughts. I need to be present and enjoy my boys since they're only little once.

In more serious news, I got an email from the husband of a friend today. She's pretty sick but he had little details to share except she's out of commission indefinitely. I don't like the feel of it, but I do hope she's okay and is back to her old self soon. I really like her a lot; she's a great person and I always enjoy her company.

My Big, Fat Girly Secret

Now that I've been posting here for a while, I feel like we're friends. I feel safe sharing some rather intimate and somewhat embarrassing thoughts and feelings with you. And this, in my opinion, is my big one.

I want a daughter. I really, really want a daughter.

Please don't misunderstand what I'm trying to say. I absolutely love and adore my two sons and would not change them for anything in the world, nor do I wish that either of them were girls instead. I do not feel anything but pure love for them and amazing gratitude that I have been chosen to be their mother.

Still, if hubby and I chose not to have any more children, I would feel that I was missing out on the experience of raising a girl. We do want more children, but that makes me worry because there is always a chance that I will have a third boy. I worry that, in that case, I will suffer from PPD that is more severe than what I've experienced with the first two boys, if only because hubby probably won't want to go for number four, and then my aching desire for a daughter will be unfulfilled. I don't know how to handle that.

If money were no option, I would pursue adoption for a baby girl in a heartbeat, or consider MicroSort to have a 91% chance of conceiving a girl. Or would I?

Whenever I start to think about either of these options for any length of time, I start to question myself, my faith, my ethics. If I adopt or have hub's sperm spun, am I playing God? If I adopt, is it less noble to specify that we only want to adopt a girl and not welcome a child of either gender with open arms? Since I had little trouble getting pregnant twice, am I tempting fate by spinning hub's sperm to tip the scales in XX's favor?

As much as I want to give it up to God and trust Him (because I really do believe that we get the children we get for a reason), the thought of actually letting go makes me panicky. It doesn't help that I still feel a pang when I run into women whose firstborns are boys who I haven't seen since they were pregnant pushing little pink bundles in their strollers. I try to push those nasty feelings away, and I am happy for women who "get" the gender they want, but there's still that voice inside me screaming WHY NOT ME?

I know this is petty and childish and a bit premature, especially since (a) I'm not pregnant with our third, and (b) we haven't discussed adopting or any other options, but I need to get this out there and off my chest.

I really want a daughter. I think the boys would love to have a baby sister. I love my mother dearly, and I want that same-sex relationship with my own daughter. I feel that I have a lot to offer a daughter, advice on peer pressure, mean girls, boys, and figuring out who you are and what and who are important to you. And I want to experience raising both boys and girls. I want to experience first-hand the differences between the sexes in addition to the differences within each child.

Thanks for the free therapy. Until later...