Hi, I'm Jackson's Mom! I have a name of my own. Despite what Jackson thinks, I haven't always been Mama/Momma/Mommy. Before his creation, most people knew me as Jessica or Jess or Jack. I also lurk the interwebs as Trillicat. My wonderful husband Andrew helped make Jackson on March 25, 2007. (Men have a much easier time birthing babies than women do, and it seems to feel a lot better for them....) We were graced with an enormous newborn on December 31, 2007--just in time for a tax deduction. Weighing in at 9lbs, 15oz. (an ounce shy of 10bs.), Jackson was no petite flower of a child--and never has been since.
My little athlete is a meaty 38lbs. now at 26 months of age. We have good times together when I'm not in physical therapy. (This is not a joke. I have a serious back injury from a car accident in December of 2006. Having a child in the 100th percentile doesn't help.) Some of these good times you may read about here in the Cheerios Garden, but the teacher in me seems more inclined to share useful information rather than strictly storytelling.
Some background about me: I'm a Floridian, born and raised, as is Andrew and, so far, as is Jackson. We currently reside in Gainesville, FL, which boasts the University of Florida, home of the Gators, as its pride and joy. Personally, I've never really thought that blue and orange match, but after a year or so of living here I can tune some of it out. The median age here is 28 years, so this summer I will officially be older than half the population in town. Eep!
Jackson was an unplanned pregnancy (well, we had kinda talked about making babies, but not until after we'd done things like get married and such first, so it would have been at least another year) that fortunately has worked out to be a wonderful if exhausting addition to our lives. Before his foray into the wild world, I was a Jack of All Trades. I worked in babysitting, fast food, and customer service for a major department store while in college, then bookkeeping for construction companies, freelance contracted bookkeeping, office management, assistant to a journeyman carpenter, substitute teacher, and long-term math sub teaching an entire course of math to high school drop-out prevention students (i.e. those are are often termed "juvenile delinquents"). I've also been certified as a personal fitness instructor and have a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics. Some day I hope to be certain as to what it is I want to be when I grow up, but right now I'm a SAHM who has a lot of doctor visits, so I'm saved for now from having to sort all that out.
I also really enjoy writing, which is how the blog came into being. I'm a big proponent of information sharing and telling the truth. Too many parents are seemingly ignorant of the realities of childrearing until they are in the thick of it. This is a mistake. People in Western cultures are deprived of the knowledge which might help them make better decisions as to when or whether to become parents. There are not many jobs which expose you to another person's snot, vomit, urine, and feces, among other joyful excretions, on a daily basis, multiple times a day. It's a challenging, exhausting, wonderful experience but not something that should be entered into lightly in today's world.
Moreover, some of us never really got to experience first-hand what a good example of teamwork parenting looks like. We grew up in an age with an extremely high divorce rate and with a great number of single parents. Many of us lacked an admirable model for one or both parents or for how parents should interact with one another. And of course, as we cannot remember our own infancy, and most parents spawn their children during a fairly short window of time, we have little or no frame of reference as to what the process of childrearing is like in the early years. I think that's unfair. People withhold information on the reality of a situation and (worse) try to pretend like everything is all sunshine and roses, that they can handle everything despite lacking any sort of handbook for how to be a parent. Those of us who become parents with these supermoms and superdads surrounding us are overwhelmed and feel a need to compete--or risk looking like bad parents. That's just WRONG.
So, as a big part of my push against the lack-of-information campaign, I wrote the Parenting Philosophy Toolbox for this blog. I also shared a fair bit of my experience with labor and delivery and some of the time leading up to it, though admittedly even I tamed things back a bit, knowing that I had been pretty bitter about pregnancy for a full year afterward. ("Why would anyone want to do that more than once?!?" "Oh, wow, my kid turned human again at 12 months. He's kinda fun now and not nearly such a PITA. I guess that's why....") My writing can be a bit graphic at times, but I try to keep most things aimed at a PG-13 level or younger. After all, I never know when my own progeny will be reading my work someday.
I've got lots of ideas, lots of directions I want to take with this blog. Forrest Gump might compare the writing here to a box of chocolates. I only hope the posts taste as sweet.
