Mamakaze! Attacking Life at Full Throttle

Wherein bleary baby-blues are banished (despite toddler’s best effort)
Sunday, July 09, 2006

There may be some mamas out there who jump out of bed before baby, well-rested and looking fabulous, but we haven’t met them. The mamas we know are like us — bleary-eyed and barely-there, awakened at odd hours of the morning by teething, pacifier loss, and other infant emergencies. Even wearing our full-coverage foundation, most of us look less than bright-eyed as we face our day.

Mamakaze wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without aforementioned foundation, but even more important is what’s underneath. A good eye cream can mean the difference between run-down raccoon eyes and perky peepers. We already knew StriVectin made a wonderful stretch mark lotion — but there’s even more to love.

StriVectin SD Eye Cream takes advantage of the same active formula as the original, but without the aromatic oils. Reducing fine lines, wrinkles, and even those puffy dark circles we moms know so well, StriVectin eye cream is a perfect solution on mornings when we’ve had five hours of broken sleep and finally woken up for good to our toddler’s finest impromptu fingerpainting. A little StriVectin and a little concealer, and we could be mistaken for one of those elusive Supermoms who wake up feeling relaxed and refreshed.

A little espresso, and with any luck, we may at some point in the morning feel relaxed and refreshed, too!

When you’re a busy mama like Mamakaze, it’s hard to find time to take a real break. Once the wee ones are in their beds, there are still toilets to be scrubbed and dishes to be washed.

We bought ourself some aromatherapy bath and shower goodies, but we can’t remember our last bath and our cherished steaming-hot showers now last, on average, a good five minutes. If only Mamakaze got to soak our body for as long as we soak our hands in scummy, lemon-scented dishwater! (Sigh!)

While we can’t change the fact that dishes pile up in our house faster than we can wash them, we can change what we wash them with. Mamakaze prefers to wash dishes with something that smells delicious and relaxing, rather than like something we’d clean the bathroom with. (After all, that’s next on our list!)

Whether it’s the grocery-store brand’s new apple scent or a luxurious aromatherapy detergent such as The Good Home Co.®’s lavender dish soap, we find dishwashing just a little less odious when we use something with a fresh, pleasant aroma. It’s not quite the relaxing bubble bath we’d rather be taking, but it certainly smells wonderful, and it does involve soaking in steaming-hot water.

Now, if only they made aromatherapy toilet-bowl cleaner, Mamakaze would be a blissful mama indeed!

Wherein fire should scare kids just a little more than the boogeyman
Saturday, July 01, 2006

In addition to the ubiquitous nightlight and battalion of stuffed animals at the ready, Kidakaze likes to sleep with her door just a crack open. We would find this far more amusing than we do, had we not recently boned up on our fire safety. Sleeping with a door open may give our little princess a sense of security, but if Mamakaze Central ever caught fire, it could cost our little one her life.

Fire experts will tell you that a closed door can keep the flames back for 20 minutes (more than enough time for the fire department to reach the house) and prevents most smoke from entering the room. As you may have guessed, an open-just-a-crack door not only lets in copious amounts of smoke, but keeps a fire at bay for zero minutes.

While kids raised with an open-door policy are reluctant to brave the boogeyman, they may be more eager to help with other important fire-prevention tasks: Checking smoke alarms regularly and drafting a fire-escape plan for your home. If your house is multistory like Mamakaze’s, it’s even more important to have some sort of exit plan for emergencies. An emergency escape ladder, like this one from RoomForKids Kid’s Furniture, can be tucked in closets or under beds on the second and third floors. It’s made of flame-resistant, antislip material and holds up to 1000 pounds.

We can’t guarantee Kidakaze won’t open her door a crack after we close it, but we can rest easy knowing that in case of fire, she has access to easy and quick means of egress.

Mamakaze remembers the exact day we had our last spa pedicure. It was approximately 15 hours and 21 minutes before little Totakaze entered the world. To be honest, we thought about skipping the pedicure, but we looked at our rough heels and our unpainted toenails and realized that very soon they would be showcased in stirrups for all to see, and so we timed the contractions while our nails were painted a lovely shade of salmon. After we’d enjoyed our morning of paraffin pampering, we drove home and told Papakaze it was time to head to the hospital.

Since then, we’ve had enough trouble finding time to get our hair done, let alone our poor, world-weary feet. But we are not defeated so easily by a 21-pound toddler. While the wee one is napping, little does she know that we’re sneaking in some quality pampering time!

The HoMedics PedicurePro Foot Spa, HL-200 has massaging inserts on the bottom to soothe our tired tootsies, and its pull-out pedicure tool has five spinning attachments to conquer the calluses and give us the nicest nails this side of the spa.

While Totakaze is sweetly slumbering down the hallway, we’re exfoliating our heels and buffing our nails. If she takes a particularly long nap — or if we wait until she’s in bed, we can even squeeze in a soul-soothing paraffin dip, courtesy of HoMedics Paraspa Deluxe Paraffin Bath.

Call us sentimental, but we bought several bottles of the same OPI lacquer
we wore the day before our little one was born. We may not go to the spa anymore, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a good pedicure. And we think of Totakaze every time we stick our feet in the warm, churning bubbles!

Like most mamas, Mamakaze doesn’t get much of a break when the kids are around. Which essentially means we don’t get a break, ever. When we were a young, carefree career girl, we might have wound down after a hard day with a few girlfriends, a chick flick and a pitcher of pina coladas. But that, dear readers, require that one has a few hours of spare time, friends without kids, and most importantly, no fetus sharing one’s bloodstream.

We found it difficult at first to take what we considered a break, but after awhile we discovered that those 10 minutes during which our preschooler is not asking us to pretend we’re the mama tiger and she’s the baby tiger are a break. The five minutes in which our newborn is dozing in a bouncy seat absolutely qualify as a break. The 30 seconds in which our toddler is coloring on paper and not on hardwood? Even that, my friends, is a break.

And what better way to celebrate our two-minute break than with a warm, aromatic mug of tea? At first, we felt embarrassed that we were taking tea breaks, because this is something our mother would do. Then we realized that we were probably the very reason Grammakaze began drinking tea in the first place.

Since our tiny breaks are incredibly precious and far between, we have culled the inferior teas from our cabinets and now insist upon only smooth, high-quality hot beverages. We steep our tea in our favorite pretty teacup, pausing to deeply inhale the fragrance. In short, we enjoy our cup wayyy too much.

Our tea of choice right now is Stash Red & White Tea. It’s full of antioxidants and we love its fine, sweet flavor. We also adore their various green teas, which are smoother than your run-of-the-mill green, and Stash’s wide variety of quality herbal teas.

Once we’ve had our little rendezvous with the teacup and some quality flavor, no matter what Totakaze has done to the hardwood in the meantime, we are calm, cool and ready to face the world again.

Did you know that having a baby can be hazardous to your dental health? Apparently, there’s an old wives’ saying that goes, “For every child, a tooth.”

Mamakaze finds the prospect of losing our teeth none too appealing, which is why we are careful to take our calcium each and every day during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and to brush our teeth fastidiously morning and night. While pregnancy itself doesn’t harm the teeth, we’re told that the hormones in our body make us more susceptible to gingivitis — which, if untreated, can ultimately be bad news for our beloved set of choppers!

Our dentist told us that in order to prevent gingivitis (whether we’re pregnant or not), we should brush and floss daily. He recommended that Mamakaze use a Sonicare toothbrush, whose microvibrations shake plaque loose and strengthen up our gums. It’s far less bulky than Papakaze’s battery-operated spinning brush, which barely fits in our mouth, and the two-minute timer beeps every 30 seconds to let us know it’s time to move to a different quadrant.

Our teeth feel squeaky clean after brushing with our Sonicare Essence, and at our last dental appointment, no matter how sadistically the hygienist prodded our once-tender gums, there was not a drop of blood to be found.

Our mother’s belly is a roadmap of stretch marks — Grammakaze was unfortunate enough to earn her stripes with all four kids. So when we got pregnant with Totakaze, we took a long look in the mirror and said goodbye to our smooth tummy. However, we weren’t quite so resigned to our fate that we failed to take preventive action.

Officially, the jury’s still out on lotions that claim to prevent stretch marks, but Mamakaze slathered on our potions faithfully each morning as soon as we toweled off, and each night before hitting the sheets. And we are proud to report that the only scars we sustained were to “the twins,” whom we foolishly neglected in our lotion-and-potion campaign.

Now that we are pregnant again, we’re leaving nothing to chance. For Mamakaze, nothing but Mustela’s double-action stretch mark cream will do. This time, though, we’re going above and beyond the belly, so that we may fearlessly flaunt our new-and-improved girls in a low-cut swimsuit this summer. After all, while we love Grammakaze, we don’t want to look like her in a bikini just yet.

Mamakaze finds our Mustela stretch mark cream at PoshTots.com.