Hey mamas. This is where it all started for me. Twelve years ago I managed to talk my editor into letting me write my own newspaper column. I was only 23 years old. Boy, what was he thinking? But I sure am glad he gave me the chance because the column has become a big part of my life. It has given me the opportunity to connect with readers in my own community and beyond, thanks to the magic of e-mail. The column runs in a few newspapers in Arkansas and Missouri and a few of the pieces have appeared in the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series.

I’ve compiled a few of my favorite columns on this page. Some are recent and some are oldies but goodies. If you’re in the mood for a love story, check out the Valentine’s column. If you’re a dog lover, click on “Good Dogs.� If you’re having one of “those days,� you’ll want to read “Isolation Booth.� If you’re potty-training a kid, then you can commiserate with me by reading “Naked Nuggets.� And if you’re feeling embarrassed about something stupid you did recently, then you must read “Laid an Egg� because you will feel infinitely better about yourself after you read it. I promise that whatever you might have done is not even a half as humiliating as what I did. Guaranteed.

If you like what you see, drop me a note. It’s always a pleasure to hear from fellow mamas.

A few Rockwood Files

My funny valentine

Second time around

When good dogs get old

The sound of silence

Today I laid an egg

By Gwen Rockwood, newspaper columnist and mama of 3

When you’re a mother of three with a little experience under your belt, you should really know better. But last night I made a classic rookie mistake. I didn’t get around to shopping for the kids’ school supplies until the night before said supplies were due at school orientation. Dumb. Very dumb.

There I was in an aisle swamped with desperate shoppers, just like me scrambling for a few packs of No. 2 pencils and Elmer’s glue. The scene looked much like a crowded toy store on Christmas Eve, minus the “peace on Earth and goodwill to men�.

When you wait until the night before to shop for school supplies, you not only have to wade through throngs of people, you also have to deal with shortages. Last night I needed a certain type of red folder specified by the kids’ school. It was supposed to have pockets and metal prongs to hold the paper inside. But all the smart parents who’d planned ahead had already bought all the red folders with metal prongs, leaving me with boxes and boxes of no-prong folders to sift through in shame. I and my fellow procrastinators searched through the leftovers hoping perhaps one or two pronged folders would magically surface.

All around me there were irritable fathers on cell phones talking to mothers who were dictating the school supply list. “No, they don’t have any red folders with prongs left,� I heard one say.  “I’ll just get the kind without prongs. What? Why can’t I get the kind without prongs? It’s still a folder! Well, they don’t have any. What? Red pens? No, they’re all out of red pens. I’ll just get red crayons. Well, why not? They’re still red!�

By the time I left the store, the school supply aisle was a shambles. A bin of folders without prongs spilled out on the floor and hurried shoppers dodged the mess as they continued their futile quest. I left the store two supplies short of a completed list which meant I had to make a last-ditch attempt to find them at another store first thing this morning. I berated myself all the way home and swore I’d never wait until the night before ever, ever again.

There’s a saying that goes “When you know better, you do better.� And experienced parents learn, often the hard way, that there are a few mistakes you just don’t want to make more than once. Along with shopping for school supplies the day before school, here are a few other rookie mistakes that make my list:

• Leaving the house with a baby and no backup baby outfit: When you make this mistake, cruel fate will step in and give your baby a terrible poopy diaper “blow-outâ€� which will inevitably travel all the way up the baby’s back and between his small shoulder blades, soaking through his clothes and onto yours.

• Forgetting to buy batteries on Christmas morning: There’s nothing quite like kids thrilled by new presents which they have no chance of trying out until the stores open the next day. Fun times.

• Thinking you can potty train your kid when you are ready: There’s absolutely no such thing as parents who potty train kids. The truth is that the kid is going to do it when the kid is darn good and ready, and the parent will simply provide the potty, the Scooby Doo underwear and heaps of praise whenever that time comes. You know that old phrase about how you can “lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drinkâ€�? Same applies to toddlers and their bowels. Parents are just along for the ride, bumps and all.

The good news is that I did find those blasted red folders with the all-important prongs. I spotted one this morning in a pack of 10 other folders (which I absolutely did not need), so I snatched them up before another desperate parent could get them first. Sure, I had to pay for the unnecessary nine extra folders, but I finished the list and learned my lesson – even parents who should know better still have a few things left to learn.

Got any more “rookie mistakes” to add to my list? Click the word “comment” below and post your additions.

Gwen Rockwood is a mom to three great kids, wife to one cool guy, a newspaper columnist and co-owner of nwaMotherlode.com. To read previously published installments of The Rockwood Files, click here.  

By Gwen Rockwood, newspaper columnist and mama of 3

When it comes to road trips, there are two types of travelers. The first is a laid-back wanderer who’s more than happy to make multiple stops along the way for bathroom breaks, snacks or a spontaneous visit to the world’s largest Spam museum where one can see “16,500 square feet of Spam artifacts, history and fun�.

The other kind of traveler sees the driving portion of the vacation as a necessary evil to be dealt with as quickly as possible. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid. Better to just get it over with. More than anything, these travelers want to “make good time.� Tom and I are in that second group.

The only thing better than completing a safe road trip where you’ve “made good time� is the opportunity to brag about it, so here goes: We just drove to Minneapolis and back with three little kids in a minivan. And not only are we still sane, we only stopped ONCE going up there and ONCE coming back. (Here’s where you insert your gasp of disbelief.)

Keep in mind that this trip is 631 miles and should take about 9 hours and 40 minutes if you never stop. But when you’re in a minivan with three little kids, the adjusted drive time for this trip is about two weeks of interstate purgatory, give or take a few days.

But not for us! We made it in 10 hours and 12 minutes, a fact we proudly announced to friends and family once we made it to our destination. Of course, everybody wanted to know how we’d done it. Had we forced the poor children to pee in Mason jars along the way? Had we installed catheters before the trip? Did we purposefully dehydrate them to prevent pit stops at rest areas?

Nope. None of that was necessary because our kids are blessed with iron bladders, just like their mother. Of course, bladder control isn’t the only pre-requisite for making good time on a road trip. With kids in the car, you’ve got to have entertainment and motivation. So we loaded up on cheap movies for the kids to watch along with a few video games, puzzle books and plenty of snacks. And I splurged on a new DVD of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast for 3-year-old Kate, which turned out to be a brilliant idea because she requested back-to-back encore viewings for about 98 percent of our time on the road.

To motivate good behavior during the road trip, I resorted to plain old bribery – a method which may be scoffed at by parenting experts but is actually pretty effective when more than 600 miles are stretching out in front of you. I borrowed the idea from a fellow mom. Here’s how it works: You give each kid a roll of quarters at the beginning of the trip. The “Car Coins� are theirs to keep as long as they have good behavior in the car. If they whine, argue, fight, or otherwise mess up along the way, they must give you one or two quarters for each infraction, (depending on just how much it ticked you off). At the end of the trip, they keep the remaining quarters.

Was it worth it to us to pay the kids a collective $30 to have peace on this road trip? Oh, yes it was. And you can bet your Spam artifacts we’d do it again.

Some would argue that vacations should be as much about appreciating the journey as the destination. But most road trips today are an endless stretch of interstate that looks much the same. The only real landmarks between here and Minneapolis are a huge neon sign shaped like a cowboy that points down to a place called “Terrible’s Casino�. And then there are the towering windmills looming over fields in Iowa, and the aforementioned Spam museum in Austin, Minnesota. Other than that, there’s not a whole lot to see.

So we kept busy with movies, snacks and a lot of trivia questions which Adam read to us from the Family Feud app on the iPad. And, believe it or not, ripping off those 10 hours and 12 minutes didn’t hurt a bit.

We arrived home late last night and fell into our own beds. But as soon as the sun came up, so did the kids and they began devising ways to spend their hard-earned Car Coins. We just returned from a trip to Wal-Mart where two of the kids used their Car Coins to buy mechanical hamster toys called “Zhu Zhu Pets�, which are currently scurrying all over my kitchen floor and driving our new cat Percy crazier than a crate of catnip.

Oh, it’s good to be home.

Gwen Rockwood is a mom to three great kids, wife to one cool guy, a newspaper columnist and co-owner of nwaMotherlode.com. To read previously published installments of The Rockwood Files, click here.  

By Gwen Rockwood, newspaper columnist and mama of 3

Most men don’t fully understand this, but sometimes a woman walks into a room in her house and knows, with certainty, that something has GOT to change. It happened to me recently when I walked into the guest room and realized I was sick of the varying degrees of beige in that room. It felt dull, lifeless. It bothered me every time I walked by it.

So I chose a color, and Tom painted the room a cool, airy blue that I love. But repainting triggered a chain of redecorating events. The old bedspread didn’t go with the new blue, so I switched it out with one that does. Then the peeling finish on the nightstands screamed for attention.

I started repainting the nightstands after Tom left for a five-day, out-of-town trip. My parents had come for a visit that weekend, and I recruited my dad for a little father-daughter painting project. We spread out a paint tarp in the garage and began the long sanding process. Once the hard part was done, we used spray paint to speed up the job.

Nearly drunk on paint fumes, I suggested we move the nightstands onto the driveway to do the second coat of paint in the open air. It wasn’t until I started spraying the nightstand’s legs that I realized we hadn’t moved the tarp.

“Uh oh,� I said. “I just painted the driveway.�

“Oh well,� Dad said. “It’ll wear off.�

I agreed and went right on spraying until the nightstands were a beautiful glossy white. I couldn’t wait to show the paintjob to Tom when he came home.

About 10 seconds after Tom got home and hugged me and all the kids, he asked, “Why are there white spots on the driveway?�

“I repainted the nightstands in the guest room. Want to see them?� I said.

“And you painted on the driveway without the tarp?� he asked, completely ignoring the bigger fact that I’d painted two nightstands.

“Well, yeah, but it’s just the driveway, so it’ll wear off in time. What’s the big deal?� I said.

“You’ve gotta get those spots off. It’s going to drive me crazy,� he said.

I agreed to the spot removal just to appease him and then promptly filed it away at the very bottom of my “to do� list, knowing the likelihood of me getting around to doing it was somewhere between “remote chance� and “never gonna happen.�

Fast forward one week, and the subject of spots suddenly resurfaced again last night:

“You know, I asked you a week ago to clean those paint spots off the driveway, and you still haven’t done it,� he said, a bit perturbed.

“Tom, it’s the DRIVEWAY. Why does this bother you so much?� I asked, wondering if the spots had, indeed, driven him crazy.

“They just do! And don’t act like you don’t have weird things that drive you crazy because you do,� he fired back.

I scanned my list of personal quirks, trying to think of something as seemingly trivial as the spots-on-the-driveway issue. Couldn’t come up with a single one.

“Okay, so what do I get all worked up about that seems ridiculous to you?� I asked, certain he wouldn’t be able to think of anything.

“One word,� he said. “Countertops.�

Silence.

He had me there, and I knew it. I’ve got a thing about clearing the kitchen countertop, and I come a little unhinged when he leaves things out on the counter and then walks out of the room without putting them away. For me, clean counter space equals a clean mind. Counter clutter makes me edgy. But I felt certain I could defend my position, so I foolishly pressed forward.

“But you have an English muffin every morning and then leave the kitchen even though your butter knife, jelly jar and crumbs are still RIGHT THERE on the counter!� I said.

“Did it ever occur to you that I might want ANOTHER English muffin so I’m leaving that stuff out on purpose?� he said. “I can’t even set a drink down on the counter without you whisking it into the refrigerator when I turn my back.�

“Well, that’s just crazy,� I said, a little flustered and painfully aware that he’d proven his point.

The discussion ended soon after because neither of us could deny our own “sore spots�, irksome things that exist in any marriage. And, ironically enough, his sore spot is an actual spot – on the driveway.

So today, because I took a vow 11 years ago to love and cherish his sanity, I will attempt to remove white paint spots from the driveway. (E-mail me if you have any tips on how to do this.) But, if I come inside after restoring the purity of his precious pavement and find a jelly-smeared butter knife on my kitchen counter, I may just have to use it on him.

Gwen Rockwood is a mom to three great kids, wife to one cool guy, a newspaper columnist and co-owner of nwaMotherlode.com. To read previously published installments of The Rockwood Files, click here.