THAT Mom...

I've SO become THAT mom. The mom who does those things that she said she would never do. I want to share a few. So here are some things I said I would never do, but have come to understand better since becoming a mom:

• I was NEVER going to let my kids run around with snot running down their faces... Now I realize how traumatic it is for these little people to have their noses wiped - and that their noses run for myriad of reasons and often - and so sometimes it's just not worth the battle. I'm still slightly fanatical about it in public, but at home I'll wipe it once it looks like it's going into the mouth.
• I was NOT going to have the nasty car with crumbs all over the car seat, the floor, the ceiling. You know, the kind of car where you'd be totally embarrassed to have to move the car seat in front of anyone. I thought that was disgusting. Now I realize that there are a bazillion things I want/need to do with my time. If I cleaned out the car every time it got crumby then I would spend half of my life with the vacuum in the garage. And I've dealt with taking the car seat out and sweeping the crumbs on the floor in front of people. Was I embarrassed? Heck no! Okay, maybe slightly, but mostly I just felt proud of my lived-in car and the fact that I am not as obsessive as I thought I would be. I do clean my car - every three months or so. :)
  
• "Take your kid out if they're howling in sacrament meeting" is what I used to think. I am really quite conscientious about this still, two kids later. I don't want to disrupt the meeting. However, now I know about trying to teach your child that they don't get to go out in the hall every time they wail. I also know that a loud scream can be fleeting and I would rather get it under control than get up and run out of the chapel every time.
• I didn't think that I could ever keep walking through a store with my kid crying in the cart. I used to look at that and think, "Why don't they stop and comfort their child?" Now I realize that they 1.) Hear crying often and it just doesn't phase them much 2.) HAVE to get errands run, crying child or not, and so they are just hurrying through the store. Stopping to soothe, in many cases, will only prolong the drama/trauma. So just get 'er done!
  

There are still some things that I won't do. I'll never be the mom who hysterically screams at her children in the grocery store and calls them names. Not my style; still makes me cringe. So I guess there is a kind of mom I can say that I will never be, but there are so many little things that just don't matter as much as you think that they will before you actually have kids.

Okay, so spill. What are some things you've learned/taken back now that you're a mom? Or if you aren't yet a momma, write some things you've thought along these lines so that the rest of us can get a chuckle and say, "Oh, you just wait..." :) And, by the way, a lot of this didn't happen until the second child. You can manage to not become THAT mom with one sometimes (I kept a relatively clean car with Max), but wait until you have more!