Enrolling your little one in fun classes is always a tricky path to get started on. I don’t know about you but I figured my baby was ready for a class around 8 months. I was so excited! I searched and searched and finally determined the perfect class – some music class relatively convenient to my house. I quickly enrolled the two of us in a session for every Saturday from late summer until Thanksgiving.

What great bonding, I thought! How fun to see what she’ll be like in music class and meet other babies! I really couldn’t wait.

But then we started going. And I realized that it’s a hassle to get to a class every single Saturday for so many weeks in a row, especially as a full-time working parent. I’ve got a lot of things to squeeze into one small weekend and eating up half the morning going to and from a class wasn’t always stress free. Then there was the reality of the fact that sometimes my baby just wasn’t in the mood for class or that half the class would be sick as hell, coughing and sneezing all over her, or just the difficulty in timing it with naps and getting her packed up and out the door to get anywhere on time. Before I get into how birthday parties and weekend visitors and other things eat into your ability to have a perfect attendance after you paid a bunch of money for this class.

Again, this common theme of nothing is at it seems.

But even after that experience, I still struggle with classes. Which classes should I enroll her in, how many is too many, which ones will she find fun before I cough up the cash?

And then the peer pressure. Suddenly on the playground you realize everyone else has had their kid in ballet and swimming for months. Should you have enrolled darling daughter in ballet? What if she is missing out on a great talent because I was too lazy and cheap to enroll her? Why is everyone else doing it and what does it say about me?

In those exposed moments, I have to dig deep within myself to find my perspective. I am a believer in there is a point to everything and less is more.

Sure, I struggled with whether or not to enroll my daughter in both swimming and ballet as the winter sessions were starting a few months ago. Until I focused on having to get her out of a wet swimming suit, dried off, dressed again and then get that head of hair dried before taking her outside, so as to prevent a cold, and then I realized I wasn’t charging down that path. What a freaking pain. Bath time is hard enough – I’d have to be a freaking masochist to want to face that battle twice a day.

And as for ballet, the sky high price of that class just seemed so outrageous to me for a two-year old who barely follows instruction on a good day, I just couldn’t justify it. Maybe when she’s four, but not now.

But that still doesn’t mean I didn’t struggle with it when hearing what others were doing.

Why do we fall victim to this? It’s just hard not to get caught up in it, I think. But I just have to stand firm. I keep reminding myself to view the world from the eyes of a two-year old. Those eyes are really different than mine and they get tired a lot faster. Down time and quiet time to balance out the chaos of school during the week – is more important to her than being carted off to yet another class, I decided.

But I think it’s a bigger picture issue. I worried that if I fell into the habit of over-booking and over-scheduling her at the age of two, what in the world is her life going to be like by the time she’s 12? This is where the whole “there’s a point to everything” reasoning enters my brain.

So in those moments of panic on the playground when I’m the only mom not taking my kid to some class, less is more, is what I tell myself. I truly believe less is more.

Those of you who know me well, know that I get to the gym very early in the mornings. So this morning, as I was pulling out of my driveway at o-dark-thirty, and wondering how in the hell it could be quite so cold, I noticed the moon. I hope some of you also saw the moon either last night or this morning. It was one of the most beautiful full moons I’ve ever seen. So big and bright and just glistening there – it immediately lifted my spirits. If only I didn’t have to keep my eyes on the road, I wouldn’t have been able to stop looking at the moon.

My great mood lasted only until I got to the gym and started watching the news. First, the local news was depressing enough and then the anchors busted out with how today is branded the most depressing day of the year. I’m sure there’s some bullshit reasons why that’s the case, something about it being three weeks into a cold month and no holidays to lift our spirits, everyone’s fat from over-eating, everyone’s given up their New Year’s Resolutions by now (ah ha! yet another reason to not make any – then you have nothing to feel bad about today) and the credit card bills from the holidays should be arriving this week (I’m definitely going to be feeling bad when that one drops through the mail slot. Any chance I can hide it from my husband??)

So, I was starting to come off the high from the bright glistening full moon, and then a segment came on about caffeine and pregnancy and miscarriages. Unfortunately, we all know someone who has experienced the pain of a miscarriage. I feel like I always hear the comment that it’s only the people who get pregnant the first time they try, that we all hear about – but who is actually talking about the frequency of miscarriage?

The thing is, in my circle of friends, though I hear this same comment, I feel like everyone is pretty open about miscarriages, the emotions that come with it, and her experience with it. I hope this is the case for everyone, not just KT’s BFFs, because it’s something that is so common and beyond our control.

That being said, everyone is always struggling with balancing what they can and cannot do when pregnant and handling caffeine is always one of them. So Kaiser just came out with this study of 1,000 women in San Francisco and the miscarriage rate among this group during the first three months of pregnancy.

Here is the finding: http://madelynfernstrom.ivillage.com/health/2008/01/caffeine_and_miscarriages.html?par=today,wb

“Those women with the highest caffeine intake (more than 200mg per day, daily) had double the number of miscarriages as those women who did not consume caffeine at all. 25 women out of 100 miscarried in the high caffeine group, compared with 12 in the 0mg caffeine ingestion group.”

So, if you haven’t heard this news by now, you might be wondering what 200mg amounts to? Sadly, not much coffee, read on: 

 “What does 200mg of caffeine look like? it’s two small cups of coffee, four cups of tea, or five cans of soda. ”

I must admit, I didn’t realize that two cups of small coffee is equivalent to five cans of soda. That’s actually really nasty. I mean – who in the world drinks 5 cans of soda in one day? But me, I definitely enjoy more than two cups of “small” coffee in the morning.

What I also heard on the news but isn’t explained in the above link is this: Caffeine constricts the blood flow to the placenta – thus making it not a good thing to digest for pregnant women.

In the interest of full disclosure, personally, when I was pregnant with my darling daughter, I basically cut out all caffeine the day we first started trying to get pregnant and I stayed completely caffeine free until I was through my first trimester. I’ll never forget the day that I was reunited with some caffeinated tea on that 13th week of pregnancy, it felt so good. We were long lost buddies, me and caffeine. From that point on, I probably had a cup of caffeine a day or every other day, for the remainder of my pregnancy.

Imagine my surprise when no one warned me that discipline with caffeine would persist for as long as I was breastfeeding. Talk about a buzz kill.

And speaking of buzz kills, by the time I was done working out, I was totally over the joy of the moon. From now on, maybe I’ll stick with watching E! instead of any news.

So to end this entry on this most depressing day of the year, I offer you this link, a predictor of your child’s height at the age of 18 brought to you by our friends at BabyCenter.com. I question its accuracy because it’s predicting my daughter will be 5ft. 11 inches by the time she’s 18….and that seems kind of extreme:

http://parentcenter.babycenter.com/child-height-predictor?pe=eiU70g&scid=mbtw_post26m:20080114:0:0:0