Oh the humanity!

I'd like to start out this post by saying that I love my mother.

But . . .

when she showed up with a bag full clothes for the kids that she'd gotten while garage saleing and within its contents was a size 2T shell suit, I started to question her sanity.

You remember shell suits don't you? The fugly fashion of the late 80's and early 90's? If not, then let me refresh your memory. That's not even the worst part. Before I had a chance to burn it, Gwen had grabbed it and was pushing it in my face, desperate to put it on! What was she so attracted to? The hideous color combination? The odd placement of the printed panel? The sweat inducing properties of the synthetic non-breathable fabric?


I don't know, but she loved it. I'm only going to indulge her this one time though. I cannot let her wear it again, and definitely not in public. I'd better get it burned before she finds it again and requests a coordinating fanny pack to go with it.

Confession - the Kit Kat incident

Forgive me Super WalMart, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.

I knew it was wrong, I don't know what came over me but when I saw her there with her face covered in chocolate, I just lost it. I mean she'd been trying my patience ever since we entered the automatic doors. The greeters recoiled in fear when they saw she was untethered. Fellow shoppers did their best to avoid her in the hopes that she wouldn't target their shopping cart, commandeer it and push it directly into the 6 foot display of pantiliners on aisle 6.

She was a force to be reckoned with. She scoffed at the confines of the cart. She spat out the pacifier with her shrieks of anguish. She mopped the floors with a face full of tantrum tears. Other mothers embraced their children lovingly and vowed to be forever grateful that they had such an easy child.

Finally I reached the end of my epic journey - the checkout. I was almost free and clear and while placing the contents of my overflowing cart onto the conveyor belt I glanced down to see her with the Kit Kat - half eaten. I knew what I should have done. I should have laughed in one of my patented "oh how entertaining these little angels can be" laughs, handed the candy to the cashier and asked that they ring it up since my sweetpea had already ingested the majority of the shiny wrapper. But I didn't. I glanced around to make sure no one had seen it and then threw the open candy back on the shelf behind a box of king sized peanut M&M's.

Was it embarrasment, frustration? I don't know. I stand before you in shame and with sincere regret. I'll throw an extra 58 cents at you the next time I'm there. Oh and you might want to rethink that endcap full of light bulbs over in the hardware aisle. Thankfully she was distracted by the air freshener display in automotive.

He draws the line at indecent exposure

Over the years Matt has grown accustomed to my sense of humor and no longer argues with me when I ask him to make a stupid pose with an inanimate object. See the example above. All I had to do was ask him if he loved me and when he replied in the affirmative I told him that I needed him to pretend that inflated T-Rex was about to eat him. I even once convinced him to fondle the breast of a female statue at a mini golf course (I seem to have lost that picture, perhaps he found it and destroyed it).

There are times though where he still refuses me. For example - as he stood in front of this replica moon in the Kansas cosmosphere he repeatedly declined to grace me with the image of 2 moons. I mean come on - it would have been hilarious and the surveilance camera wasn't even pointed anywhere near it.

Just call me the Lunch Lady

We’re currently hosting our 2 nieces and our nephew at our house and while it’s been fun so far, and Aaron is in absolute heaven with his live-in playmates, there have been challenges as well.

One of the biggest challenges for me is meal preparation. Cooking is not one of my favorite tasks (which is somewhat odd since eating is) and I often struggle to cook something for myself and my own 2 kids and now I’ve got 3 more to worry about. Last night I opted for chicken nuggets, mac and cheese and peas – a healthy meal balanced with items from each of the three processed food groups (processed powdered cheese, processed chicken parts formed into nugget shapes and heavily salted canned vegetables).

While the preparation was no different than usual, the quantity was and I spent what seemed like 15 minutes just trying to calculate how many nuggets to bake and whether or not I should do one box of Mac and Cheese or two. Once preparation was complete – putting it all on plates was an elaborate assembly line production which conjured up images of school days in the cafeteria. At one point I wondered if I should be wearing a hair net.

Tomorrow I think I’ll serve up some mashed potatoes with an ice cream scoop.

The fruits of my very minimal labor

I planted a cherry tomato and a grape tomato plant in a huge pot on my patio this year. It was my way of connecting to mother earth, and enjoying tiny tomatoes on my salad without having to pay $2.99 every 2 weeks.

They're so delicious and were so easy to grow that I've started wondering why I don't garden on a much larger scale, and then I remember that I'm still officially on strike. My parents promised me 10cents for every quart of strawberries I broke my back to pick from our huge family garden back in 1988 and I've yet to see a penny of that money.

Unfortunately I was only 12 so according to my lawyer, the contract was not legally binding since I was a minor. However, I'm still pushing for a settlement. If you factor in lost wages and pain and suffering, I think we're talking close to $2,000.

Creative Writing 101 - Character Development

I attended a creative writing class once that suggested taking a situation or scene that you witness (a couple sitting at a café, a group of people having an animated conversation on the street etc.) and using that scene as a starting point for character building. Who are the characters? How did they get into that situation? What is prompting them to act they way they are?

I’ve attempted it a couple times but never really found an adequately inspirational situation to evolve into a proper set of characters. That is, until Sunday night.

Matt and I had taken the kids for a ride in the evening, pretty much to get them settled and to be honest – to avoid our normal lengthy nighttime ritual just for a change of pace. On our way home, around 9:30 or so, the kids were snoozing softly in the back and we were just getting ready to pull onto our quiet street when we noticed a car stopped at the intersection.

A woman, probably early to mid 20’s, was leaning her entire torso out of the window and yelling at someone either on the street or in the cheap motel on the corner. The driver of the car was a man, about the same age, slouched in the driver’s seat, looking fairly embarrassed and dialing someone on his cell phone. Here’s the kicker. The woman was completely naked from the waist up. Yep, fun and fancy free my friends.

Now after the initial shock and excitement wore off; I mean stuff like this is a fairly rare thing to witness by two socially dead middle aged parents in the heart of the Midwest, I began to create my own detailed storyline to fit the scene.

The woman’s name is Tamara, and she insists on being called Tamara, not Tammy. She practices the almost extinct art of macramé and also crochets things like pop can belts and purses and sells them on ebay to supplement her income from her cashier job at the local health food store. She’s just gone through a very messy break up with her boyfriend Dan, whom she caught sleeping with her best friend Samantha in a cheap motel.

She was feeling a little sorry for herself tonight and had a few too many bottles of Boone’s strawberry wine while watching Footloose. The fight scene at the bar got her all teary. She remembered the time Dan had punched some guy who had playfully smacked her on the behind at the local bar. She’ll never forget that romantic day they spent together after she bailed him out of jail for assault. Anyway, she’d ran out of liquor and didn’t want to drive to get more so she called up Terrence, her co-worker, whom she knew had a secret crush on her and would jump at the chance to do something for her. Sure he was a complete geek and she suspected that he was stealing herbs from the “male enhancement”display at the store, but he seemed harmless enough and could take her for more liquor.

Terrence was delighted when he got the call and was so excited that he even logged off Socom (his username is TerrITup29) before finishing the battle. He was sure that his online teammates would understand. He wondered if he should he take some of those herbal supplements before he went? He picked her up in his Mom’s Camry and she was so drunk that he thought he had about an 85% chance of getting a little first base action.

He made a critical error though when he chose the route that took them by that motel with the ancient outdoor swimming pool that they had filled in with dirt and allowed every manner of weed to invade.

She just lost it when she saw it, and before Terrence knew it she’d ripped off her shirt, threw it in the backseat, leaned out the window and started shouting obscenities at the numbered doors of the Motel. She was reliving that terrible night when she discovered Dan and Samantha in room 3B and fueled by the power of cheap liquor, she was somehow reliving it barechested.

Terrence was in a complete panic. This scenario had never come up in that online tutorial; “What to do on a date with a hot chic”. Desperately he dialed his best friend Kyle – he was the guru. He’d made it all the way to the finish line with Sarah Grettelman on prom night. Sure, she’d been drunk, and possibly slightly unconscious, but it still counted as a score. Kyle would know what to do – especially with a drunk chic. He just needed to lay low until he got a hold of Kyle. That couple that just passed him in the mini van looked like they recognized his Mom’s Camry. Maybe they knew her from the neighborhood association?!

Now isn’t that fun? Talk about inspiration! Come up with your own characters or at least a believable scenario if you’ve got nothing better to do.

My friend Shawna came up with the following: the driver is her boyfriend and they were having an argument. He suggested that she needed a boob job, and was in the midst of calling one of his buddies to confirm his beliefs and she was so irate that she whipped off her shirt and was soliciting opinions from passersby.

What do you think?

Losing a finger or two could be considered as a character building experience.

I recently upgraded the status of my “body fat terror alert” from yellow to red. It’s been determined that my ass is a weapon of mass destruction and I’ve enlisted the help of Weight Watchers to help me fight the good fight.

Losing weight is always a struggle, but I like the “Points” system and so far things are going well. The key is to have a lot of weight loss weapons in your arsenal – and I’m not talking about workout equipment or little scales to measure out all your portions – I’m talking about 2 cupboards worth of Fudge Grasshopper and Fudge Stripe 100 calorie packs.

Because without these things I could seriously be caught licking the Oreo cookie crumbs off the faces of my children, or worse: “Here sweetie, eat this Little Debbie Fudge Round and don’t worry if you get all messy, Momma will clean you up . . Oops, we’re out of wet wipes, let me just nibble that chunk of cookie off your sleeve there . . .”

I take these treats seriously here people. First of all they’re pricey and second of all they’re the only things that can keep me on track on certain days and I’ll be damned if I’m going to give even one of these little cookies up. But I have 2 children and as anyone with children knows – what’s yours is theirs. Far too many times I've had little fingers reaching into those sparsely populated bags. Too often have they reached for their own entire pack! I cannot allow this to go on. So far I’ve found the following strategies to be beneficial:

Distraction: Throw in a Dora or Diego DVD and as their little eyes alight upon the glory of Nick Jr. entertainment and their little bodies (and probably minds) cease to function, I sneak into the kitchen to enjoy my 100 calorie pack in peace.

Bargaining: “No honey, you can’t have any of Momma’s cookies . . . Oh don’t cry! You know how you’re always wanting to play driver in the van? Well here are the keys – go on out and play in the van for a while. Just remember to leave it in Park because neither one of you can reach the pedals.

Other times I try lying but Aaron is getting too old for that to work. For some reason he doesn’t believe that those cookies taste like broccoli, and he’s smart enough to recognize the boxes in the cupboard when I try to tell him that we’re all out.

Now maybe some of you are thinking that I should be sharing these low calorie, low fat snacks with my children in order to teach them how to be healthier and I’d have to say that I agree with that in theory. However, they really have fairly little nutritional value and most of the time my kids are content with some fruit. Thankfully they haven't yet learned to equate happiness with sugar and chocolate. Not to mention the fact that things are going to get really, really messy if I come home to find that I’m completely out of those 100 calorie miraculous elf created treasures. So even though I love my kids so much that I'd throw myself in front of a bus for them, they'd better leave my cookies alone if the want to go through life with all 10 digits intact.