Stay at Home Mom

Exclusive engagements of MOTHERHOOD begin on Friday, October 23

Yes, they are three consecutive letters in the alphabet but they are also very important letters for all of us Stay at Home Moms. MNO means “MOMS NIGHT OUT!”.

It is our night. Dad can stay with the kids – heck he can even get them dinner and put them to bed. Every now and then it is Mom’s turn to get together with the girlfriends and wear something nice without worrying “will that permanently stain if someone urps on my shoulder?” You can even wear dangley earrings without worrying about a little hand reaching up and grabbing them right out of your earlobe.

Tonight is your night to relax and have a few laughs. My kids are a little bit older now and so Moms nights out come a little more frequently but I still remember when an evening out was almost better than a nice long hot uninterrupted bath ( although those were always welcome too ).

It is nice to remember you can say things one time to friends and they get it – you don’t have to say everything three times before it sinks in “shut the door shut the door SHUT the door”.

October 23 is Stay at home moms official MNO – MOMS NIGHT OUT!
Get together with a girlfriend or two or three and go see “Motherhood” starring Uma Thurman. Usually, on MNO we encourage moms to talk about books or philosophy or lipstick or anything – anything at all other than the kids. But on October 23 we make an exception. It is all about the kids and the glories of being a Mom. It’s time to celebrate all of our wonderful imperfections, dreams and aspirations and have a laugh ( and maybe even a few tears ) with our friends around us.

We will be tweeting all day @sahm411 about the movie and getting info from all of those of you who are lucky enough to be in one of the major cities where this movie is premiering.

Send us your pictures of your night out and we’ll post them here.

Have fun! It’s your night.

Today we had the chance to sit in on an interview with Anthony Edwards seen in this picture in a scene from the upcoming movie Motherhood.

Lots to report on about this interview but first off just wanted to post one of the most brilliant comments Anthony made about being a parent. One blogger asked him what kind of parent he thought he was – he replied that he tries to be a calm parent. He said he reminds himself that

“My frustration has nothing to do with what this child is going through”

So, stay calm moms and make plans to check out this new, wonderful film about a day in the life a mom and a family.

There is one reason that families have more than one child and that is we forget. Some people call it post-partum amnesia. The thing is it can go on for years. We forget. It is one of the wonderful things about being a mom.

Before we become mothers we look at other people and their screaming children and we think, “I would never let my child scream like that” or “I’m not ever going to let a child of mine have a runny nose like that” or “No synthetic fabric will ever touch my childs skin”. We have this idea of what it will be like when we have kids. Before we have kids we live in ignorant bliss thinking that somehow we can have kids and they will fit into our lifestyle.

Then, we get pregnant. I have actually talked to some women who love being pregnant – and thats great. But for alot of moms it is a means to an end. Then we find ourselves in a delivery room with a paper thin kind of robe on our bodies that really does nothing to protect our modesty in a room full of people who hopefully we have met prior to this moment but probably haven’t. Besides that if we saw them in the hallway 10 minutes after the blessed event we probably wouldn’t even recognize them anyway. It is a blur.

Before the birth of my first son my mom sat me down and suggested that we should probably talk about what to expect. She told me “It hurts and then its over”. OK. I thought to myself at the time that those comments were really no help to me at all but in fact they were true. The next day we welcomed our darling baby boy into the world. And as I remember it now he was a perfect child. So perfect in fact that we thought we should do that again.

During the birth of our second son I was in a hospital where a woman down the hall had arrived too late for an epidural and I could hear her screaming in a very clear and distinctive yet primal voice “This Hurts”. Not very calming for the rest of us moms to be on that floor but what were we going to do – we were committed to this thing at that point.

So, we go on and we somehow blissfully forget. How can any of that matter when you look into your babies eyes for the first time.

My baby is now 11 and starting middle school and I had almost forgotten most of it. Not the good stuff. I remembered all that – birthday parties and first sightings of butterflies and moments of delight. As I look into the eyes of these wonderful growing up people I clearly remember jumping on beds and laughing at the goofiest things. But there were many memories I had managed to forget for the most part.

That is until today.

I watched the trailer for the new movie coming out in October “MotherHood” ( CLICK HERE to watch the trailer ). A wave of memories came flooding back. That’s right….I remembered. I wear sweatpants and a t-shirt to bed because one time I did drive the kids to school in my jammies and was totally busted. I had almost entirely forgotten about that. Now, if I roll out of bed and we’re running late and someone sees me in sweat pants they might even think I was getting in a work out before getting the kids up and ready for school… ( of course before having kids I would never have thought of wearing sweatpants to bed and even worse I would never have left my house in jammies but things change ). And we forget.

It is hard to make a movie about the mommy experience because it is so universal and so unique all at the same time. This movie seems to have found that chord that rings true and connects with the universal mom without making her too cliche.

Check out the trailer and let us know what you think.

Tweet your reviews ( in 140 characters or less ) to
Twitter.com/sahm411

Forgetting some of these things is not necessarily a bad thing and either is remembering. The one cliche I heard over and over again when my boys were very little was “Enjoy every second of it because they are grown in a blink of an eye”. “All right Old Lady” I would think to myself, “That’s all fine and good but I was up all night last night checking to make sure their diapers were dry and they were breathing and this is going to go on for years – how can you expect me to believe that this will seem like a blink of an eye”. And then, in a blink of any eye, it is 11 years later and they don’t need to be tucked in to bed any more or read a bed time story.

We had a strength in us that got us through some of the craziest times and then we sort of forgot about all that.

But sometimes it is good to remember.