Mother's Day Gift Ideas for Every Type of Mom - Guest Post

Celebrate those women who gave us life, raised us and helped us become the people we are today. There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to moms, however, so here’s a handy list of Mother's Day gift ideas based on your particular maternal situation.

Spa Package

Single moms rarely get a second to themselves, let alone an entire hour or two for pampering and relaxation. Help them find the time they need with a spa package for a local day spa. Spaweek.com provides resources whether you’re looking to spend big on a trip for mom, or small on a massage or other service nearby. If traveling with her sounds like your cup of tea, you can even book a trip for two.

Photo of a day spa by ppacificvancouver via Flickr

Flowers

Since the dawn of time, flowers have spelled out affection, romance and love. Married moms often succumb to the demands of work, children and the household, with little time left over to — well, stop and smell the roses. If you are a child or husband of a busy family mother, flowers are the best way to let her know she is remembered and that all the magic hasn’t fled her life. Consider Mother's Day flowers at FTD.com, a responsive site with a wide variety of arrangement choices, then shop by color, price or flower to find the perfect match for your mom.

Photo of tulips by photosteve101 via Flickr

Guidebook

There’s no gift more powerful than a willingness to carry your baby if you cannot do so yourself. Surrogate moms provide a service that cannot be paid back, but at least you can do something wonderful for them on Mother’s Day. Since your surrogate has made your dreams come true, consider helping her with hers. The Lonely Planet has wonderful guide books to almost every country on Earth, complete with a range of places to stay, eat and tour based on the price of the traveler. If your surrogate mom needs a new experience after giving the baby back, this could be just the ticket — no pun intended.

Photo of a Lonely Planet Guidebook by Jaymis via Flickr

Gift Certificate to ModCloth

New moms have entered a whole new world, rife with sleeplessness, anxiety and changes in their relationship with their baby, partner and the people around them. More than anything, though, they are dealing with changes in their bodies. Give a new mom some pleasure with a gift card from a fun site like ModCloth.com, where she can choose something that fits her new size and makes her feel pretty.
If you’re feeling generous, accompany it with a gift certificate to a nice restaurant where she can sport her new dress.

Photo of a gift card stand by 401(K)2013 via Flickr

Netflix Subscription

Empty-nesters were once people too! Even though a mother’s life is largely devoted to her children while they are at-home, when the kids leave, she’ll finally have time to do a few things for herself. That could include taking up a hobby, attending a class at the university or catching up on a show she really loves. If the empty-nest mommy in your life is really into a new program or has a soft spot for one of the old classics (think “Bewitched” or “Gilligan’s Island”), get her a Netflix subscription so she can indulge her passion. If she has time between all the great new programming in her life, she’ll thank you for it.

Photo of a Netflix envelope by Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar via Flickr

The Mom Pledge - Guest Blog

Becoming Supermommy alerted me a while back to the Mom Pledge, an idea I really like and needed to know more about. She graciously agreed to write a post for me explaining the pledge and what it means to all of us.

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I’m not the creator of the Mom Pledge.  I’m just a mom, and a champion for it.  You see, there are bullies all over the place, we just don’t usually call them that.

I remember being a kid.  I was weird.  I was awkward.  I had huge hair, gigantic glasses, and a crooked smile.  I was a teacher’s pet, a know-it-all.  I never got in trouble, I always had my hand in the air.  My family were vegetarians, so I always had strange or exotic foods (by lunchroom standards) in my lunch sack, “Vruit” juice boxes and Baybel minis replaced Capri Suns and lunchables.  I was one of a half dozen Jewish kids in my whole school, and another two were my sisters.  In short, I was bullied mercilessly.

My parents would repeat, over and over, the same explanations for why I would come home from school heartbroken and miserable.  “Kids are mean,” they’d say.  “But one day they’ll grow up and stop being so mean.”  The implication was that bullying is a childhood phenomena, and that once you outgrow your childhood, you outgrow bullying.

Nowadays, I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I’m a grown-up.  I must be, after all I’m approaching 30 at a steady pace, I have children, I do a fairly good job behaving as a responsible member of society.  I don’t always feel like an adult, but for the sake of argument I’ll agree that I am.  And I’m still being bullied.

Not by other kids, but by other moms.

At first, this seemed absolutely absurd.  Adults?  Bullying each other?  Surely not!  But they do.

Each mother is fairly certain that what they’re doing for their child(ren) is the right thing to do.  Unfortunately, many mothers don’t leave it at that.  For many mothers, the choice by another mom to parent differently is an indictment.  And in their defensive angst, they attack.

Moms gang up and bully other moms for not homeschooling.

For vaccinating or not vaccinating.

For circumcising.

For choosing to hide the gender of their children.

For raising their children in a specific faith.

For NOT raising their children in a specific faith.

For what the feed or don’t feed their kids.

For how they dress their kids.

For what they name their kids.

For the way they gave birth.

For nursing too long or not nursing at all.

For watching some or no television.

For having a family structure they don’t agree with.

Every detail of parenting is personal, and therefore every parent takes the conversation about parenting personally.  And when you get personal, things can get ugly.

It’s said that you should never talk about religion or politics in polite company.  I would add parenting to that list.  It’s a hot button topic.

But the fact of the matter is that we DO talk about parenting.  The mommy blogosphere is HUGE- there are MILLIONS of moms across the world blogging about being a mom.  Blogging about their parenting choices.

And because the internet is perfect for connecting moms to other like minded moms, it’s easy to form a mob.  Easy to organize a few moms into a horde of enraged bullies who attack another mother until she shuts down her blog, changes her aliases, or abandons the blogosphere altogether.

And that is a terrible thing.

We don’t all have to agree.  I don’t know a single mom who hasn’t made a choice for their kids that I disagree with.  Not in the real world, and not online.  And that’s because we all have to make the choices that work best for OUR lives, for OUR families.  And the fact that we make particular choices does not give us the right to attack anyone else for disagreeing with us.

That’s why I took The Mom Pledge.  And that’s why I urge you to do the same.  Pledge not to allow your online space to be somewhere that people are attacked or attack others.  Pledge to facilitate conversations, not mobs.  Pledge to treat other moms, no matter what their parenting choices, with respect.

Because we’re all moms.  We all know how hard it is.  How much work children are.  How gratifying every milestone can be, how each step they take towards maturity makes you beam with pride and still breaks your heart.  How everything you do, you do to make sure that they have a good life.  A life at least as good as your own, but hopefully better.

That’s all any of us want for our kids.  Whether we vaccinate or not, circumcise or not, home school or not, no matter what we teach them about God or Science or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. 

Our kids grow up, they go into the world and have to make friends with other people.  And they pick up lessons we don’t even know we’re giving them.  If we, as moms, attack each other, our kids will learn to attack each other.  And so on.  But if we treat each other, always, with respect and consideration, our kids will not grow into bullies.  They’ll see that grown-ups do not engage in that awful behavior, and as they have since their earliest months, they will want to make us proud by being LIKE us.

So let’s be the best examples we can be.  Let’s stand together, despite all our disagreements, for an world that is an improvement over the world in which we grew up.  Let’s take The Mom Pledge together, support each other in the exhausting and difficult endeavor of raising children, and let’s put a stop to mommy bullying.

For more information, visit The Mom Pledge.

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Lea, aka Becoming SuperMommy, is a writer, painter, chef and costumer, dabbling in the all consuming chaos that is motherhood.  She and her husband try to maintain their happiness and harmony through an unceasing sense of the absurd.  The twin toddlers seem to help with that.  In a family where both parents are cancer survivors, both returning to school in the down economy, and both practicing different religions, they manage to keep things interesting enough that Lea never ceases to have something to share with her readers.  While still becoming, well, SuperMommy.

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International Women's Day

It is the 100th anniversary of the first International Women's Day, today, and I am left without words.  So many women have shaped me and influenced my life, and I am grateful for every one of them.  Here is a tribute to the closest of the bunch.

My mother. She is a Vice President at a local hospital, mother of three.  She has taught me how to succeed through hard work and perseverance. She is an amazing woman with a big heart and a tenacity unmatched by any other I've ever met.



My sister. She is completing her Ph.D in Biomedical Engineering. She has taught me how to laugh at myself and how to keep sight of the truly important things in my life when other details seem to take priority.  (That's my brother next to her.)

My kids, Dulce and Natalina.  They are teaching me the meaning of my life, piece by piece, day by day.  They are making me a better person.

Dora.  Oh, wait, no.  Just kidding.

Happy International Women's Day. We all have a little piece to give to the world.

In cooperation with One Wee Voice.

 

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Love Hormones

The rise and fall of hormones in women who have just given birth as they continue to interact with their infant as it grows has been well documented.  But what about those same hormones in dads?

A new study, just released, shows that fathers also experience a rise in the love hormone as they interact with their child.  It also shows a correlation between the mother's hormone level and the father's.  If a woman is experiencing PPD, the father's hormone level tends to stay low as well, which may explain some of the depression dads can feel after their partner gives birth to a baby.

This study was done only on what Americans would call "the traditional family," and as I continue to talk about the results, you'll see that there is no way to broaden these findings to include all families.  I can only hope there are several other studies in the offing right now that study the hormone levels of adoptive families, gay couples, and others who would not fit into this very slim mold.

Researchers say that the hormone, oxytocin, rises in dads when they are teaching babies - pulling them up to sit, showing them how to see the world around them, playing with them.  Mothers experience a hormone boost when they gently handle babies - comfort them and caress them.  All of which, they say, may explain why children tend to look for dad when they want a happy playmate, and to seek out mom when they're feeling bad and need reassurance.

In my opinion, this is a very preliminary study, full of holes and vagueness, but one important thing its publication can perhaps do is encourage fathers to be a part of their children's lives as they grow.  Clearly there is room in a child's heart for every adult looking to give him love, and no adult should feel tied to any "traditional" duty or feeling. 

As we continue to progress as a society, men as a group are slowly coming off of that 'manly' image they have felt, throughout history, the need to portray.

The point of this entry is - man, woman, mother, father - the words don't mean anything.  You can be yourself.  You intuitively know how to love your child, and you'll know if something isn't quite right.  You'll know if your feelings of sadness are too much.  Don't second guess.  Within the ever-complicated politics of family life there is room for everyone and for every feeling.

Your baby will love you from day one.  And we don't need a study for that.  Your baby will love you whether or not you fit into the slim mold of test subjects for this particular study.  Your baby will love you whether you are a mother or a father.  Your baby will love you whether you play with him or cuddle him.  Your baby will love you.

A Race to the Bottom

There is yet another chain message going around the facebook ranks, and this one involves moms.

 "All the unselfish moms out there who traded eyeliner for dark circles,salon haircuts for ponytails ,long showers for quick showers, latenights for early mornings, designer bags for diaper bags, and WOULD NOTchange a thing. Lets see how many moms repost this. Moms who don't care about whatever they gave up, instead...LOVE what they getin return.Repost this if you're a mom and LOVE your KIDS."  (sic)

While I understand, and even support, what I feel the author's intended message is, I don't think that paragraph even closely resembles the thought process behind it, and I'm forced to ask myself - yet again - why facebook is so stupid.

Spelling, grammar and incorrect use of capital letters aside, this message indicates an odd trend in motherhood.  A sort of mommy martyrdom competition.  A race to the bottom.  It implies, accidentally, I assume, that those mothers who have sacrificed every shred of their pre-child personality love their children more than those who haven't.  It sets up a system where mothers can assess their "competition" using false and shallow indicators as measurements of love.

Instead of including all mothers in a supportive group hug as we struggle against losing ourselves, as we struggle to provide and love our children in our own ways, we waste time excluding mothers who do not fit our mold, who don't stand up to our own falsely set standards of what love means.  In my opinion, love and sacrifice are not the same thing.  One mother may have to sacrifice everything for the child she loves; another may sacrifice just a few things for the child she also loves.  Sacrifices vary by time and personality; love is a constant.

By using the things we have given up to show the world how much we love our children, we are feeding into the exact ego that messages like the one above are declaiming.  In one fell swoop that message says to me: 'mothers do not care about their egos, and since I care less about mine than you care about yours, I am a better mother than you.'  And in believing that we are better than other mothers who do things differently, we are feeding the very same ego we just looked down upon.

I believe the intent behind the message is to shore up mothers who may be feeling down, but it fails by excluding most of its core audience.  What about the moms who can still manage to put eyeliner on?  What about the moms who have supportive spouses or family and can take a long shower or two?  What about the moms who do go out on a Friday night once in a while, hiring a babysitter when the kids are asleep?  Do they love their kids any less than the others?  I doubt it.

The last line of the message sums up my view of it nicely.  "Repost this if you are a mom, and you love your kids."

Simply put, it's redundant.  If you are a mom, it's implied that you love your kids.  I don't have to repost a badly written facebook chain letter to prove that, and I can still get my hair cut, to boot.

Drink's on Me

After nine months of pregnancy - of nausea, of swollen feet, of fatigue, of aches and pains - mothers have certainly earned a drink or two.  But often breastfeeding mothers forego that small pleasure out of fear of passing the alcohol on to their baby.  They feel that if they do imbibe, hours of the dreaded "pump and dump" await them.  I know when I was breastfeeding, milk was too precious to dump down the drain.  Pass me the water, please.

People with infants are already giving up so much.  Should they also give up adult pleasures if they happen to come upon a rare night out?

Passing alcohol to your baby through your breastmilk is a valid concern, but a breastfeeding mother shouldn't feel like she can't ever have a drink.  And each mother should have the right to choose for herself what her limit should be while feeding her child.

There's a new product out there for the nervous among us that can test your breastmilk.  MilkScreen are disposable test strips that indicate the volume of alcohol concentrated in your breastmilk at any given time.  Since alcohol concentration is dependent on the mother's weight, her food consumption at the time of drinking, and the amount of alcohol in her drink, it might ease the minds of many mothers to know for sure how much alcohol they may be passing on to their children.  Mothers can test the milk by saturating a test strip for two minutes. The strip will change colors if more than .02 percent alcohol is found in the milk.

When I was breastfeeding, I hadn't heard of this product, but that didn't stop me from having a glass of wine with dinner every once in a while.  Time is on your side when it comes to alcohol dissipation within your system, and so, instead of pumping and dumping, I would simply wait until the babies were in bed for their first long snooze of the night.  By the time they woke up, any alcohol traces left in my system would be minimal.

Of course, there is a huge difference between one or two drinks and drinking enough to be impaired.  Still, I say, if a mother wants to enjoy an adult evening once in a while, she deserves it.  There's no need to turn to formula, either.  Many women express extra breastmilk to have on hand in case of an emergency.  This is easy to do if you have a pump, but women can hand express, too, if they've got the patience.  If a mother doesn't have the test strips and she's unsure her alcohol level is safe, she can easily dip into her stash to ensure her baby gets the nutrition it deserves, without compromising the party or night out she most definitely deserves.

I'm no expert, but I would advise doing this instead of feeding directly from the breast after drinking.  After all, alcohol can impact an infant's sleeping and eating habits. And consistent doses of alcohol can alter a baby's weight and gross motor development, so always be wary of how your actions can affect your child.

If you choose to use these strips - which I wish I'd known about when I was breastfeeding - know that milk with a .03 alcohol concentration level should be dumped.  MilkScreen isn't cheap.  It costs almost $15 for 12 strips.  But for the cautious mothers among us, it may just be worth it.

Whether you choose to have that drink or not, remember, infancy is not forever.  Even if you breastfeed your babies well into their toddler years, eventually they won't need you continually on tap.  As they transition to whole milk and solids after their first year, and they perhaps only want to nurse in the morning and at night, take comfort in the fact that someday, your fridge, too, could look like this:

Oh, the joys of toddlerhood.



For more information: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/09/13/2218756/milkscreen-allows-new-moms-to.html

Beating Depression

Postpartum depression - a serious condition that is finally getting the attention it deserves from both doctors and sufferers.  Because of newfound understanding in the medical field, countless mothers have been safeguarded - have been saved - from harming themselves or their children.  Because of newfound understanding in the public eye, mothers need not be afraid of the stigmatism that formerly went along with such a diagnosis, if such a diagnosis was even given.  While this understanding does not lessen the pain or still the symptoms, mothers no longer need feel so alone - bearing their cross, wondering what is wrong with them, feeling like failures.

But what about fathers?

A new study published Monday says in the first year of a baby's life, as many as one-fifth of fathers can suffer from depression.  I think these results could go a long way in helping both mothers and fathers understand the feelings rushing in on them as they struggle to stay afloat during the first few months of their child's existence.

As adults, particularly as parents, we all seem to go just a little hard on ourselves.  Responsibilities continually rush in, finances rise and drop, relationships between spouses, coworkers, and immediate family are close then strained then close again.  Because all of these things are happening to us, we assume they're happening because of us.  We sometimes think we can change all of those variables using only our strong characters and stronger wills.  When we can't, well, we've added more to our pile of stressors.  Now add a baby.

Financially, a baby is, at best, a burden.  Everybody knows that.  During these past few years, however, job stability has spiraled downward, leaving many parents unsure if they'll be employed tomorrow - forcing many more out of the job market entirely.

A baby requires a lot of attention.  Many parents think they're ready for this kind of mind-numbing call-and-response, but even the most well-read, prepared adult can be thrown for a loop if their child has colic or is high-needs.  Even easy babies like mine take all that I have each day - and have been doing so for two years now.  Parents are setting themselves up for failure if they try to live up to the standards they set for themselves before the baby was born.  It's impossible.

The attention that a baby needs not only saps energy from every adult within cry-hearing distance, it also changes the dynamic between partners and between older children.  While this sometimes leads to jealousy or hurt feelings in those to which a new parent is closest, more often it results in just one more thing for that new parent to feel bad about.  They sometimes feel that they're letting the new baby down, letting their other kids down, and letting their spouse down all in one fell swoop.

Change is always hard.  It's harder when you don't take each facet of that change into consideration.  Depression isn't just hormones, it isn't just genetics.  Depression can hit anyone, and many times the triggers occur outside the body.

What I'm trying to say is it's okay to have a bad day.  It's not your fault.  And if you have several bad days, bad weeks, bad months, go to your doctor.  There may be help out there for you.  No one will look down on you, and you might end up feeling a lot better.  New parents, you have a lot on your shoulders - it's okay to get off your back.



**CNN article linked above: http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/06/dads-get-baby-blues-too/

** For more information: 
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/postpartum-depression/DS00546
http://www.postpartummen.com/

Childish

My house, one Thursday night, after putting the babies to sleep.  I'm sharing a bottle of wine with my husband when an internet article by a woman who does not know me assaults my way of life. 

Polly Vernon begins her article for Marie Claire by essentially complaining that she has more work to do because a fellow coworker is out on maternity leave.  I understand where she is coming from when she says she bristled and acted in defense when some man who doesn't really know her says, "That's okay. Women hold the fort for each other because you'll be hoping someone will do it for you."

Vernon says it's not okay because she's not going to have children, but she's wrong.  It's still okay.  She may someday need to go on disability.  She may someday have to quit with little or no notice.  She may experience a death in the family, or some emergency she must tend to, forcing her to leave the office for a bit, forcing another person to pick up her slack - male or female.  When someone is out, everybody left should work a bit harder to make up for them.

Still, in many ways, Vernon's article is right.  She should not have be on the defensive over her lifestyle choices.  Too often groups within a society belittle, mock, and make light of those who choose a different route.  But Vernon's bitterness does not give her a carte blanche to attack her fellow women, most of whom are not her enemy.

The brush she's using to paint every mother is an ominous shade.  Women who have children, she says, have "a sense of entitlement that can lead to some profoundly uncivilized behavior — as anyone who has ever been thrown off the pavement by a stampede of unapologetic Bugaboo-pushing mothers would agree."

That's an awfully small segment of society, I would say.  Having children doesn't automatically place me in a Bugaboo herd, just as not having children doesn't automatically make her unsatisfied with her life.

And to say that she accepts that most women don't feel the way she does is an ineffectual disclaimer when juxtaposed against the name calling in her next sentence.  "Still, I think as cultural movements go, this one has veered wildly out of control, consuming huge chunks of airtime, to the detriment of other concerns. Also — shhh — it's kind of boring."

Parenthood, like any lifestyle, has a following of readers and television watchers.  If you are bored by certain topics, it is well within your means to avoid them.  There are any multitude of channels you could surf, and millions of blogs and magazines that cater to world issues.

Also, parenthood is not a cultural movement.  Just because Vernon feels ostracized for her choice does not make parenting a "fad."  She cites celebrity births, lists a few movies in which bearing children is the plotline, and mistakenly involves women who are having trouble conceiving, in her quest to prove this is a "trend."

"Meanwhile," she says, "those trying, and failing, to have babies launch themselves into expensive rounds of fertility treatments, railing against being denied what they consider their absolute right, the one thing that the movies and TV shows and pop songs and celebrities are telling them is their defining opportunity for happiness."

Apparently, in Vernon's view, women who are trying to conceive are doing so because pop songs and celebrities are telling them to do so.  I, who never longed for children, find this one of the most tasteless and insulting paragraphs I have ever read on the internet.  Women who want children perhaps want children for reasons of their own, reasons which I will not attempt to prescribe for them, reasons that, I'm guessing, have nothing to do with pop culture.

Women have been having children since the dawn of human existence.  Looking back through history, one will find times where women, as a group, had upwards of 12 children, and times where women had none.  If she had looked just 50 years back, she would have seen the baby boom.  Simply put: having children is nothing new.

I have, of course, saved what was most personally insulting for last.  How can I not take offense when Vernon says "regular women have taken up the trend. Ubiquitous mommy blogs host heated debates on the relative merits of organic baby food, four-figure strollers, and the latest inventions of "momtrepreneurs.""

A parenting blog makes no claim on anyone's time.  A debate on organic food is heated because there are people out there who care about that sort of thing.  If Vernon is not one of them, might she just leave those women who are alone?  Must she poke at them and make them feel lesser as human beings because what they happen to find important, she finds laughable?  Isn't that exactly what she is fighting against in her own life?  And, who knows, perhaps one day an invention by one of these "momtrepreneurs" will save her life.  Why is a mother's invention any less valid because she is a mother?

Vernon had an opportunity here to meaningfully stand up for her way of life, to shut the doubting mouths of those who would brush her decision aside.  She chose, instead, to instigate a bitter attack against a group of people just trying to get by with one less food stain on their carpet.

Vernon may be childfree.  She may be childless.  She is certainly childish.

Marie Claire article linked at the top: http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/relationship-issues/articles/childless-by-choice?click=main_sr

Your Mama

I don't like when people who don't know me call me "mom."  This happens at the grocery store, at the post office, at the park, and even at restaurants.

Most recently, a waitress, who I assume was trying to be empathetic, continuously called me mom throughout our entire meal.

"Here, mom, here are some more napkins." Or "Did you get a chance to eat yet, mom?"

I smiled politely, but there is nothing more annoying to me than someone completely overlooking my identity due to the fact that I birthed a few children.  As if women don't give up enough of themselves everyday to their children alone, we also have to accept that society no longer sees us for the people we are, but for the role we play.

I know this is not solely a mother irritation.  Many people are defined by the task they perform.  However, it's difficult to peg an executive on the street.  If you see someone wearing a nice suit, you don't automatically address that person as Vice President of Such and Such Hospital because you really don't know why they are wearing that suit, and, furthermore, you usually don't care.  A suit, or a hat, or a Subway uniform hardly even register in the public's eye.  Why should motherhood?  Some people take their smart phones with them on their lunch break to cater to the needs of others - nothing is said.  They are regarded as a person eating lunch, not as an employee making calls.  I take my babies with me on my lunch break, and I am regarded as the mother, and sometimes - more often than not - forgotten as the person.

Now, I don't expect my motherhood to be ignored, especially as I drag two toddlers across town - it is what I am, and I am proud to wear my badge - but there is no need to put me on an entirely different level than your other patrons.  There is no need to coddle me, give me a wink and a nod, or relate to me solely in terms of my job.  I don't refer to you as waitress, after all.

So, to the waitress who so well-meaningly tried to converse with me the other week:  First of all, I'm not your mom. And secondly, you're lucky I was up to my elbows in a milky mess trying to shove a jelly sandwich into my babies' mouths while simultaneously picking up all the crayons they were dropping on the floor and collecting all the napkins they were shredding to pieces, or I would have shown you just how flawless I usually am when I go out to dinner.