Being Kendra (4 page)

Now that Hank is eighteen months old and a very independent little boy, and I’ve got my act together when it comes to balancing work and being a mom, we are in better shape. One thing I try not to do is overbook myself. But I do realize I need to work. Just because I’m not a nine-to-five type of corporate employee doesn’t mean I can’t put in a solid forty-hour workweek. Sometimes I work at night; sometimes on the weekend. But I know I have to do it to provide for my family. Even if I’m tired, I do what I need to do (my team calls me the “trouper” because no matter what, I’ll work). I spend a lot of time with baby Hank. Sometimes it’s a full week, seven straight days, every minute of every hour. So I don’t feel bad if the next week I spend seventy-two hours away from him. I know we get a ton of time together and I’m lucky for that. But those seventy-two hours that I’m away I try to book as much stuff as possible. If I’m doing a book signing in Chicago, I’ll also make sure I do an Ab Cuts signing in a GNC store, or host a party at a club in town that night, all the while doing interviews and anything else to fill up my time and be efficient while I’m away. I read once that’s what Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie do: they try to stagger their workloads so one of them is always home with the kids. Now Hank and I don’t have as much power or money as Brangelina. If something big and important comes up, I’m going to do it, but we do try to make it so that when Hank is playing football, my schedule is light. This ends up meaning that I’m always on, either in full mommy-mode for seven straight days or I’m in full work mode for seventy-two straight hours. Life gets crazy, but since I do my best to separate the schedules, I feel like I have a little bit of control.

So even though by adding a baby my schedule is now ten million times more hectic than before, I feel better. I’m having more fun. I would have nervous breakdowns right after he was born; the slightest things would send me over the edge. I didn’t eat breakfast in the shower then because I didn’t even have time to shower! Now I don’t have nervous breakdowns (as much!) because I’ve learned how to smile and make fun of things. That’s who I was at the Playboy Mansion, the girl who made fun of everything and just laughed. I lost that when I first became a mommy but I’ve since learned to laugh again. When I first had the baby I would cry or I would throw a big fit over the smallest things.

Recently while I was on
Dancing
with
the
Stars
I got in a car accident, just a little fender bender. I was getting off the freeway coming home from a
DWTS
practice and I was bouncing around listening to hip-hop. There was a car in front of me at the stoplight, but there were no cars coming, so I was looking left, getting ready to turn right. I fully expected the car in front of me to go, and I thought they would have gone already and turned right. But he didn’t. And as I was pushing the gas pedal I realized that, but too late, and I slammed right into the back of him.

If it was my old self, right after I had the baby, I would have freaked out and cried behind the wheel, slamming my hands on the dashboard. But now if things like that happen and I know no one got hurt, I just say, “Let’s pull over and do our business and get on with it.” I keep telling myself that life’s too short to spend it freaking out over every little thing.

But this time I calmly called Hank, because I was right near the apartment, and told him to come. Then I took a breather, I looked through the glove compartment, and I realized I didn’t have any registration or insurance info with me because I wasn’t organized (shocker). But I felt like, “Why freak out?” It is what it is. I can’t change it; no matter what it’s going to be my fault. I could have easily screamed at the guy and said, “Why didn’t you go?!” But instead I just apologized and he said, “It’s okay, Kendra” (his wife was a big fan!). In the past I would have had no filter; I usually couldn’t hold anything back. Being a mom has made me relax; it’s calmed me down. I have a better sense of what’s important. And I’m finding an inner peace in being a mom and letting it go, because really, after taking care of a kid all day, I don’t have time to argue with everyone I come across.

T
hree sevens are supposed to be lucky. For me, three sevens are my reality. Lucky or unlucky, baby Hank is now up from seven
A.M.
to seven
P.M.
, seven days a week.

Like most babies, he starts stirring long before he actually wakes up. For baby Hank, that’s at about seven
A.M
. We don’t allow him to actually get out of that crib until eight
A.M.
, so Hank and I can get an extra hour of “beauty sleep,” but we hear him. We’ll usually just lie in bed and watch Hank Jr. on the monitor. He rolls around, claps, talks to himself, hums some tunes, but when he sits up and starts standing in the crib that’s when we know he’s awake and ready to come out.

Depending on who’s on morning duty, one of us will quietly sneak out of our bedroom, grab the baby, change the diaper, and then get him dressed and put shoes on him. We rarely let him walk around barefoot since he’s still falling a lot, so the shoes help him balance and walk without hurting himself. He has so much energy—he goes in and out of the doors and outside a hundred times a day—so instead of taking his shoes off and putting them back on all day, we just usually keep them on him.

Right now since Hank is in the off-season for football, he’s in his “on-season” with the baby. When Hank is playing football, I’m on. But we are very lucky; Hank’s a morning person and overall if he’s around he likes to do mornings. He offers to keep on that schedule so that when football season is back, he won’t have a tough time waking up. It’s for his own benefit, or at least I try to trick him into thinking so.

One of us will usually go downstairs with the baby (he walks downstairs by himself, and every step he makes he says, “Step”) and sometimes it can take a few minutes! Hank goes into the kitchen and blends him a smoothie right away, all-natural smoothies with banana, strawberries, and blueberries with a little bit of yogurt. While he drinks a smoothie, we make eggs and we put natural freshly sliced ham and turkey on the griddle. Hank Jr. drinks the smoothie throughout the morning and we make freshly squeezed juice for the rest of the day. Then we take him for a walk outside. We like to think of our mornings as a great way to start off the day, with fresh fruits and proteins followed by a walk. If everyone could start off his or her day like Hank Jr., what a healthy world this would be. It gets his brain working because we like to teach him stuff outside and words like “tree,” “sky,” “clouds,” and “houses.” I believe that’s as good as staying inside and reading a book. We do the reading thing throughout the day but real-life experiences are so important. I would rather him know “tree” and “sun” and “sky” and “clouds” by seeing them rather than just reading about them.

At ten
A.M.
he usually starts rubbing his eyes and will sometimes go down for a nap until twelve
P.M
. Now that he’s one and a half, Hank Jr. rarely takes his afternoon naps. I wish I was one of those parents who could get their kid to nap in a stroller or a car, but for some reason Hank Jr. really likes his crib. And we are very strict with his schedule and try not to stray from that. So he has to be in his crib.

If he’s napping from ten
A.M.
to twelve
P.M.,
I get to do my thing. The second that baby is out, we turn on the shower, get the coffee going, and start spending “adult time” doing errands and taking care of business. We know we’ve got a good two hours of (hopefully) silence and peace where we can do whatever we need to do. To a parent, two hours is like a day and a half. But throw in a shower, life obligations, or a workout, and next thing you know it’s over. So we try to do it all as fast as we can. It’s during this time that I’ll run out to the grocery store and stock up on groceries, or make sure the tank is full of gas, or that anything else we need for the house is taken care of.

As we approach twelve
P.M.
we start to get his lunch ready. One practice we try to live by is to prepare in advance for the rest of the day instead of being spontaneous. Hank and I have found that trying to plan out everything, from knowing the weather to what we are going to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner as soon as we wake up, helps us be prepared for the full day. We think about the day and our schedules ahead of time, so we don’t stress out if anything changes last minute. Preparing everything the second we wake up is the way to go. We have a set day by lunchtime. This also helps us avoid unhealthy decisions like just ordering pizza because we are too tired to make anything.

But as Hank Jr. gets older he naps less and has more energy, so we drink as much coffee from ten
A.M.
to twelve
P.M.
as we can, because we need all that energy to chase him around until he starts tiring out at seven
P.M
.

We’ll never let Hank Jr. stay up past eight
P.M.
; we are very strict. I see some of these Hollywood parents dragging their kids out to five-star restaurants at eleven
P.M.
on a random weekday or even babies up and about in the Walmart parking lot at that hour. I would never allow my kid to stay out late. I worry about those kids. They may
say
they want to come out, but really they just don’t know any better. Kids are on a biological clock and they need their sleep for brain development. Kids should be in bed and sleeping late at night, not at Nobu ordering sashimi and a cocktail! I feel like now that I’m a mom, I have every right to have an opinion about other Hollywood parents. You’ll never see baby Hank out that late. He’s home in his PJs cuddling up in bed. That’s just common sense. Hollywood parents have enough money to have a babysitter sit there and watch the monitor as they sleep.

Enjoying the day at a park near our old house in Pasadena.

My son is not a perfect angel. Sure he’s “perfect” to me, but he’s not a perfect angel. He has his tantrums just like any other kid. When he doesn’t nap (and every day he gets older, his naps become less and less of a guarantee) his tantrums start. And disciplining isn’t easy because he’s only just now learning the word “no.” It’s hard on little Hank, but we’re not afraid to use that word. He needs to know, and we as parents are the perfect people to explain it to him. The world is not going to cater to him, so he might as well get used to it now! But we like to keep a clear difference between getting in trouble and the word “no.” When he gets in trouble he’s going to cry because we take something away from him or have to give a loud shout at him. Drawing on the walls calls for a big fat “no!” He’s got to learn what he can and can’t do, and we are going through that stage right now.

We can always tell when those tantrums are about to come. They usually start bubbling up when he doesn’t take a nap, because he starts to get cranky. He doesn’t know what he wants, he runs in circles, and he cries and points at things he thinks he wants. So we’ll shove every piece of snack in his face, or water or juice, but he doesn’t want it. Then Hank and I usually start arguing! “Maybe he wants this, maybe he wants that! Well, if you had done this! Or if you hadn’t done that!” We just want to be able to help him and fix what’s wrong. Sometimes arguing is just a reflection of the fact that we want everything to be right.

The tantrums can go on for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. If he’s teething we’ll put medication on his gums, but ultimately he doesn’t know what he wants. We try to teach him to tell us what he wants by pointing, but sometimes he just points to the sky. I can’t give him the sky, as much as I’d like to, and it gets really sad and frustrating to watch a meltdown. The best I can do is try to comfort him and get him to settle down, hopefully with a nap.

Of course, we aren’t always in the comfort of our own home when a meltdown comes. Hank Jr. had a big meltdown on a flight from L.A. to Minnesota. Hank and I hadn’t seen each other in a couple of weeks while Hank Jr. and I were living in Pasadena and Hank was playing for the Minnesota Vikings. We had been Skyping each other a lot all week saying how excited we were to see each other. So my emotions were definitely running high. Hank Jr. and I got on the flight with my assistant, Eddie—I was in one seat with Hank Jr., Eddie was in the other—and a producer to film the whole experience of Hank picking us up at the airport and me running up to him to say how much I missed him. It was a late-afternoon flight and the second we took off Hank Jr. started to cry. From then on, he was uncontrollable. The entire flight he was screaming, crying, and kicking. This was an almost four-hour flight and by hour number two I had had it. There was nothing I could do. He would not sit still; I must have picked him up fifteen thousand times to put him in the chair and take him out of the chair and put him back in and take him back out. I tried to give him anything I could to distract him—toys, milk, juice, water—but nothing would work. It was the flight from hell. Luckily, most of the people in first class kept saying to me they were parents themselves and totally understood what I was going through. But I couldn’t help but think that a lot of them were assuming I was a bad mom or Hank Jr.’s a bad kid. I thought they must have been thinking to themselves: “Oh, of course he’s a bad kid. Look who his mom is.” I had to take the flight; I had no choice. We had (and wanted and needed) to go see Dad. But when you’ve tried everything to calm a kid down, there’s not much else you can do except pray he stops or falls asleep. I can’t hit him or say shut up. I was helpless and just had to take it.

When we finally landed in Minnesota, I took the baby and handed him straight to Hank and just said, “Here! Take him!”

As much as we try to keep the baby on a schedule, sometimes the cosmos doesn’t allow for it. Stroller walks replace sweaty workouts, showers get neglected, and errands go undone. Sometimes he doesn’t take those naps and our plans fade away. For Hank, working out is important for his career, but a lot of times those workouts are canceled because baby Hank won’t nap. And when the baby gets tired and cranky, we are all tired and cranky. We get so tired by four
P.M.
if the baby is off schedule, and we rarely get a moment to ourselves. We don’t have an office to go to, and if we’re not working in a studio or in football season, we’re working from home. And usually during the day I have interviews, photo shoots, appearances, and meetings for the show, and they often all get canceled because of the baby, because we are so tired, because we barely have energy to keep up and drive all the way to a meeting and talk about our lives, a.k.a. the show. Sometimes I’ll resort to doing meetings over the phone, but really being a mom is the nine-to-five job I have now. My show, my books, my appearances—those are my second job. Sort of like bartending at night to pay the bills.

The tantrums, the rush, the sprint—it gets to us at the end of the day. Hank and I are exhausted after a full day of work/home/life. I’ve always heard from other parents that being at work is a thousand times easier than being at home with the kids (though certainly less rewarding), but in my case I’m at work
and
at home with the kid. A double whammy.

Hank and I used to like to drink a glass of wine before bed to slow us down from the day. Now we don’t drink wine because we don’t need it and we end up crashing easily without it. We just need water to stay hydrated because we are so worn out!

Hank will try to sneak in a spa appointment for me (“Kendra, you have to relax, baby!”), but he knows those things just slow me down. My life and my job are so fast paced that if I stop and get a massage or do some sort of breathing thing it just slows me down. I have so many things to do, breathing gets in the way. But when shit really hits the fan, that’s when I know I need to stop.

I see stuff about those Real Housewives or celebrities in Hollywood always being pampered and doing stuff for themselves. Yoga seven days a week, Botox parties, Thai massages on the beach, seasonal trips to Cabo—but if I had the chance to spoil myself I wouldn’t want to be like that. When it comes to getting my nails done . . . Hank has to force me to get a manicure. If I have spare time on my hands, I don’t want to waste it getting a massage; I want to spoil my husband.