How To Know You're a Mom: Part 3

• You realize you took all of the simple things in life for granted until you had kids...like being able to safely and quickly cross a parking lot, open a door for yourself without juggling a carseat carrier, a pack of diapers, & the biggest, puffiest blanket your daughter could possibly choose to take with her to daycare, and use public restrooms without having to give constant reminders not to touch anything.
• That line from A Christmas Story, "My mother had not had a hot meal for herself in fifteen years", rings a little too true.
• You've "pretended" to have to use the restroom just so you could have 30 seconds peace.  That fails, though, as two year olds follow the scent of their mother like a bloodhound follows a rabbit, and ten seconds after you're in your 'sanctuary' you see tiny fingers reaching under the crack of the bathroom door.
• The longest book you've read in recent history was written by Dr. Seuss.
• Before you had kids, you were appalled when you heard parents threatening their unruly kids with the whole that-man-is-going-to-take-you-if-you-don't-sit-down ploy.  Now, it's one of your best tricks.
• You've learned that some things just aren't worth arguing about.  Sure, kid.  You can wear your Spongebob life jacket to Sunday School.
• You've discovered that you can throw all of your commercial thermometers in the trash because nothing detects a fever better than a kiss on the forehead.
• You find yourself doing constant headcounts.  For a fleeting moment, you consider instituting the Sound of Music whistle method...that seemed to work pretty well.  You reconsider because you know you'd end up spending more time looking for lost whistles than using them to keep track of your kids.
• Speaking of which, your most frequent pasttime is searching for lost cups at dinnertime and lost piggies and blankeys at bedtime.  Note:  frequent, NOT favorite.
• You never really knew what it meant to multi-task before.  Now you can nurse a baby, cook dinner, find missing cups, repair cardboard boxes, and talk on the phone all at the same time.  [This makes me think of that quote, "“If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?”]
• You graduated at the top of your class in high school.  You won awards in college for your senior engineering design project.  And yet, you've never been more proud of an academic achievement than the first time your child sang the alphabet without skipping any letters.
• You know that it doesn't matter what time you walk out the door with the kids, you could still be what will feel like hours from actually leaving after strapping everyone in, retrieving forgotten items from inside, refilling cups, and whatever other apparent life-or-death situations arise.
• You start to understand God's sense of humor.  You prayed for patience.  He gave you kids.