]]>My voice is raw from corralling the kids and my neck and shoulders are killing me from my nose dive into the steering wheel, so I emailed him instead of calling. The best part? It doubles nicely as a post:
]]>I’m so sorry I didn’t get to call you - it was one long march of homework, dinner, baths, hurry up, get dressed to go to school for star gazing night for which Dylan gets a homework pass, get there and it’s too foggy to see anything, so hang around and talk with the teachers and principal while trying to get the kids off the monkey bars in the dark, come home, fold laundry while the kids sing karaoke, then they all have trouble taking turns and finally Daphne loses it because Logan tries to get close to the mike and when she complains his head’s in the way he says, “You don’t have to be able to see - you can’t read” and she flees to her room sobbing, then Gil comes to get Logan because he has to get up at five for hockey practice at six at the Logitech rink in SJ before school, I cannot believe THAT is happening, and then there are all sorts of tears saying goodnight to Daddy, and I can’t get Daphne to go to her bed or mine, Logan is finally out the door with his shorts on his head but not until he’s absolutely sure I’ve noticed, while Dylan is sneaking onto the computer and immediately apologizing when I see him, and I finally get everyone calm, convince Dylan that he is not the worst kid in the world and that it’s not true that I don’t want to be around him, what is he, nuts? and that I really do love him but his behavior makes me nutty, finally everyone is happy and then Dylan marches into my room and announces he’s sleeping there, so Daphne flees to her room again, I tell her, no, go back, it’s your turn tonight, Dylan get in your bed, and Daphne is inconsolable because she “can’t even sleep in her own bed” because I won’t let her, and waaaaaahhh!
And… I’m spent.
Hey, this is a post. I’m going to read in bed. I love you.
With stars like Jessica Alba and Heidi Klum sashaying down the red carpet mere weeks after giving birth, Maggie Mason from Mighty Girl wonders if there are unrealistic expectations about losing pregnancy weight. So, is it the baby… or is it the fries? What do you think? How long did it take for you to lose the baby weight? When should this become a priority? Join in the Momversation by commenting below or in our related forums:
Panelists: Daphne Brogdon of Cool Mom, Heather Armstrong of dooce, Maggie Mason of Mighty Girl, and Rebecca Woolf of Girl’s Gone Child. ]]>After dinner but before dessert, I offered to go pick up one of the kids from a birthday party so that everyone could be part of the smash and smush angel cake surprise. What’s that? Well. My mother, the woman who never kept sweets in the house and fed us Familia Swiss Muesli until we were old enough to buy our own damn cereal, planned to have the kids slather an angel food cake with freshly whipped cream, bust up a pile of candy canes with a hammer, and sprinkle the debris all over the cake. What kid in his right mind wouldn’t want to be handed a hammer, candy, and whipped cream and told to get busy?
So I borrowed my ex’s Expedition (just to drive it again—it used to be mine), drove to the friend’s house, got out and stepped in a puddle, couldn’t remember the address, drove back home, picked up the school directory, drove back up the street to the party, got out of the car, stepped in the same puddle, and collected my child.
As I grabbed the “oh shit” handle and hoisting myself up into the SUV, my wet clog went flying off the running board and I fell forward at Mach 3 and, luckily, broke the fall with my neck. On the steering wheel.
“Mom, are you okay?”
“Mmmmfhhm.”
“Where are you? Where did you go?”
“I’m down here, babe, I slipped. Let’s go back to Grandma’s.”
So I was just sitting here watching Armageddon on TV, rubbing my neck to get the muscles to relax a bit, when I felt a DENT in my SKULL.
I’m changing my stage name to Klutzina McSlipsky.
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]]>Forbes Magazine recently named the top ten influential celebrity babies. So, Daphne Brogdon of Cool Mom asks the panelists, why the obsession with celebrity kids? Why do you think people are curious about celebrities’ children? Are you interested? Should the personal lives of celebrities be fair game for gossip? Join the conversation by leaving a comment below or participating in our related forums:
Panelists: Alice Bradley of Finslippy, Asha Dornfest of Parent Hacks, Daphne Brogdon of Cool Mom, and Heather Armstrong of dooce.SingStar Legends brings you a compilation of chart-topping hits backed by actual music videos from some of the biggest bands and artists in history including Marvin Gaye, Patsy Cline, Jackson 5 and The Police. Featuring a legendary track list, SingStar Legends includes 30 chart-topping singles such as ‘What’s Goin On?’, ‘Crazy’, ‘Roxanne’ and many more. Players can choose to steal the spotlight with a solo performance in single-player mode or share the stage with multiplayer options including cooperative Duet Mode, one-on-one Battle Mode and the team-based Pass-the-Mic. For more information on SingStar Legends visit playstation.com.
They’re all gone! Thanks for such speedy responses!
GM Covered With Giant Tarp Until It Has Money To Work On Cars Again
DETROIT—The General Motors Corporation announced Monday that it has covered its main production plant with a 500,000-square-foot blue tarp until it can get some revenue together to work on its cars again. “The rear-axle assembly line is all out of whack, and the carburetor department needs a complete rebuild,” CEO G. Richard Wagoner, Jr. said while wiping his hands with an oily rag. “It’s going to be at least a $50 billion job. Goddamn piece of shit American car industry.” According to Wagoner, the automotive giant spent its last $18 on cinder blocks to help secure the tarp.
Related stories:
The holidays are here! Asha Dornfest of Parent Hacks asks how other moms deal with the stress and fatigue of holiday travel with kids. What are you doing for Thanksgiving this year? What are your tips for how to make the holiday season less stressful?
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Panelists: Asha Dornfest of Parent Hacks, Maggie Mason of Mighty Girl, Mindy Roberts of The Mommy Blog, Rebecca Woolf of Girl’s Gone Child. | ≠ |  |
]]>Rule 1. Life is not fair; get used to it.
Rule 2. The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3. You will NOT make $ 40 000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping:—they called it opportunity.
Rule 6. If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.
Rule 7. Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes, and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So, before you save the rainforest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10. Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
Nothing in life is free.
Decide what you want in life, and then start the hard work of making it happen.
What’s the best way to discuss the current economy with kids? Today on Momversation, Nataly Kogan of Work It, Mom! wants to know if you’ve talked to your children about money and the economic crisis. How do explain family “budget cuts” to your little ones? What are your tips for other families? Join the conversation by leaving a comment below or participating in our related forums:
And speaking of the forums, we’re excited to announce some cool new features that will help you stay connected to your favorite Momversation topics including recent activity, recent episodes, and recent forum posts. Check out this forum thread for more information.Panelists: Asha Dornfest of Parent Hacks, Heather Armstrong of dooce, Mindy Roberts of The Mommy Blog, Nataly Kogan of Work It, Mom!
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I’ve always wanted to say that to my ex. Biiiig birthday yesterday. In keeping with our current insolvency, we decided to have homemade gifts and to bake a cake. Easy AND prudent, no?
So then I went to a craft store to get fondant, a fondant roller, alphabet cutouts, and child cutouts. Once all that was done I picked up the kids, took them shopping for the ingredients, and started to mix the sugar and eggs when I realized we had forgotten a dealbreaker ingredient. Back in the car, back to the store, back home for three minutes and… phone call from child still at Dad’s (home sick, fell asleep, didn’t come to the store with us). “I want to heeellllllp! Come get me!” Back in the car, back to Dad’s (two blocks from the store), everyone ran in to get something or other and then spent fifteen minutes saying goodbye to Dad when we’d see him at dinner in two hours WITHOUT A CAKE if we didn’t get going. Back home, freakage ensued because we’d already cracked the eggs, then everyone wanted to stir and sift and measure and oh, man, didja see how that flour just flies everywhere?
After we finally got the cake in the oven, I opened up the fondant and proceeded to break my wrists rolling it out. Yes, I know it needs to be at a certain temperature, thank you. And I also confirmed later that there is a point beyond which it just rolls over and over the pin and will not come unstuck. The kids were highly amused.
“This is great, Mom. It’s very funny.”
“Whoa! Look at that! The blue rolled out okay but MAN that green is giving you a hard time! This is great—the green won’t even—hey! It’s breaking apart. This is awesome. Hey, where’s your after-comment?”
“You mean my comeback? I need its help smashing this stuff so it will roll properly.” See? That would be an after-comment.
They couldn’t believe I wasn’t laughing along with them, since it was apparently the funniest thing they’d ever seen: me stopping myself before swearing, then giving in, but using made-up words.
“FA-mangia!”
“Score! We made her say famangia!”
“Schaumburg!”
“Double score!”
I presented them with a palette of red, blue, yellow, and green for the letters, plus pink, light brown, dark brown and black to make themselves. Hilarity ensued.
One child was in charge of “Happy 50th,” the next in charge of “Birthday,” and the third in charge of “Daddy,” plus the exclamation point. You would not believe the discussion that went into the exclamation point.
We placed all the letters on wax paper, me reminding them every three seconds that the placement didn’t have to be perfect - we were going to be putting them on the cake later. This did not stop them from handling every piece many times over and leaving oils and generally making it extremely hard to work with. Did you know that if you handle fondant too much it won’t stuck together? It’s true. So when you roll tiny eyeballs and try to place them on a face, they just roll back off and hide under the shirt and get stuck in the icing. That was especially fun, and not all of them have the same color eyes. And then I dropped Logan’s face upside down into the frosting. We riffed off the whole, “Oooh noooo! Mr. Bill!” thing the entire time. I love that he does commercials now so they can do it with me. You know, because I used to watch him on Saturday Night Live twenty-five years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
In the end, the cake was wonderful, and once placed on a fired-clay cake pedestal one of them made at school, it was a work of loving art. It blew Daddy away.
Oh, and Phil took us all out for sushi. Now that’s love.
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Join the conversation by leaving a comment below or participating in our related forums:
What are you people telling your kids about the financial crisis? Any of it sticking? I was having the hardest time explaining why the simple solutions my kid was coming up with—while insightful—wouldn’t do jack.
“But why can’t we just fix it? Why can’t you just go out and get a job?” Wait—that was last month’s question. And the previous month’s.
“But why can’t we just fix it? Why can’t the government just make more money if everyone needs it?”
“Well, sweetie, if you flood the market—with money, or gas, or marbles—suddenly the value of that item goes down. Then you’ve created an inflation problem. Usually we see inflation in the form of gas prices, which were artificially jacked up, but it can also happen with a sudden and significant influx of cash.” I actually said “influx of cash” without laughing my head off.
“But why can’t they just fix it?”
“Because it’s the economy, not a wand. If it were that easy, people way smarter than us would have already solved it and we wouldn’t even be talking about the price of marbles.” Ever.
“But I don’t get why they can’t help.”
“You mean like they helped the failing banks? Like that? Well, sweetheart, people way greedier than us put one over on the rest of the world. And the government is helping. A LOT. But that doesn’t just come out of thin air, it comes out of our taxes.”
“WHAT?”
“What did you think we paid taxes for? It costs money to run a government and to serve five hundred dollar bottles of wine at a dinner party for world leaders meeting to discuss the crisis. Taxes and the redistribution of them are helping us get by right now. Without taxes, there’s no unemployment benefits and no free school lunch program.
“Let me put it this way: let’s say you had five apples, and the lunch lady wasn’t there to set everything up. You could probably sell those apples for twenty bucks apiece because everyone would want one.” And they’d pay it too, with all the pocket money or gold bars kids in this neighborhood seem to have access to. Better yet, do you take American Express? “But if you had a thousand apples, you might get twenty apiece for the first couple sales, but then people would notice that big stack of apples behind you and wait until the price came down. And you’d lower it in a hurry to sell all those apples before they went bad. In fact, at some point you’ll be thinking about paying kids to take them away because you don’t want a great, stinking, rotting pile of apples left over. That’s because people would buy what they need and then walk away. Once they don’t need your apples, you’ll be dropping that price like a To-Do List just to make a few more sales.”
At this point, his eyes were kind of drifting over my shoulder to the opposite wall where he could see the reflection of Flapjack in a framed print behind us. So I continued, “And that’s when my leg fell off and I had to staple it back on.”
“What?”
“Hellooo. You just stopped listening. I was talking about supply and demand and apples.”
“Oh. Why would I sell apples?”
]]>Oh, and Dad? You can just pretend you watched it, okay? And all my brothers? EARMUFFS!
How do you mentally, emotionally, and physically regain your sex life after giving birth? Rebecca Woolf of Girl’s Gone Child asks the ladies of Momversation.com how their sexuality was affected after they had a baby, and what it took - or takes - to get back to their sex lives. What was your experience after giving birth? What adjustments or changes did you make to your sex life after having kids? Tell us in the comments or on Momversation, and visit our related forums for more advice:
Panelists: Heather Armstrong - Dooce, Mindy Roberts - The Mommy Blog, Nataly Kogan - Work It, Mom!, Rebecca Woolf - Girl’s Gone Child.
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