June 14, 2008 | Job? Huh?

I want you to know that I feel extremely lame posting these as the follow-up to having spent an evening with Ludacris, but I can’t be rubbing elbows (or grabbing asses) with celebrities ALL the time. I tire easily, y’all. I’m a delicate flower, you know.

Nevertheless, a few links for you if you just cannot get enough of me (I know, I know):

WIN: I’m hosting a really neat Father’s Day contest at Want Not that you may want to check out if you or Dad are sports fans.

READ: Who doesn’t love dairy? Communists (and vegans) (sorry, vegans!), that’s who. I’m going to be writing a series for the Dairy Management folks this summer, and the first installment is up for your reading pleasure.

LISTEN: This one is for fellow bloggers and/or marketers, but I was interviewed last week by Maria Reitan, the brains behind a show called Purse Strings, about marketing to bloggers. The podcast is now available here if you want to have a listen.

This weekend I’m off to battle the dining room walls again. Pray for me.

June 13, 2008 | Friends, Haven't been hit by lightning yet!

I have a great many awesome friends. Some of them take me out of my comfort zone, periodically, which is to say that they make me leave the house and pretend to be an adult. I hear that this is good for me.

So when my buddy Melissa sent me an email that said, “Hey, I often have to go to these media dinner things to check out restaurants, and I get to bring a guest, so do you think you’d like to come with me sometime?” I immediately replied that YES, that sounds like FREE FOOD GREAT FUN and she should count me in.

Silly me. A couple of weeks later she mailed to invite me to a dinner at Straits Restaurant. “You have to come,” she wrote, “because I really like the idea of two suburban moms eating dinner with Ludacris.” (more…)

June 12, 2008 | Offspring: ecstasy and agony, Ottomatic For the People

It’s funny, because when I wrote about our dinner out and subsequent dessert demolition in the last post, several of you commented that you wish you could’ve seen it. And then I realized that I really wished I had given better description to what the kids did; I titled it “dueling spoons” but that was really a misnomer, because in fact, I have rarely seen the kind of cooperation they showed when it came to scarfing down that dessert.

It was rather like watching Jack Sprat and his wife share a plate, actually. There was no squabbling. There was no “SHE GOT MORE!” or “HE’S EATING MINE!” or anything like that. Monkey—my chocolate monster—ate most of the cake. Chickadee—for whom the perfect world would be coated in vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce—ate most of the rest. It was perfect harmony. (more…)

June 11, 2008 | Offspring: ecstasy and agony

So, the night before the kids left this last time, we decided to make it a really special evening for them before they went. We took them to a strip club and got them all liquored up and gave them each a cigar and a fistful of dollar bills.

Oh, wait. Wrong night. That was something else. My bad!

Okay, so, we basically said to them “Whatever you want to do tonight, let’s do that. You two get to pick!” That is—as any parent knows—a recipe for total disaster under the best of circumstances, anyway. But we are very slow learners ’round here.

If you don’t understand why our offer to them was a problem, you clearly either A) don’t have kids or B) have just one kid. You cannot possibly ask TWO children to AGREE on a special activity. It’s sort of like asking the surface of the sun to be just a little icy, please, just this once. (more…)

June 10, 2008 | Health is overrated, It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

So yesterday Otto and I went out to run some errands and go to our first appointment with the specialist Monkey will be seeing, because for the first appointment just the parents get to go. We spent a lot of time sitting in the waiting room, and then a lot of time telling the nice doctor our entire medical history (well, mine and Monkey’s, anyway), until somewhere around the “Has your cousin’s step-sister’s uncle’s father ever had bursitis?” question I became sorely tempted to tell him that I had JUST REMEMBERED that actually, Monkey is adopted and we have no medical history on him whatsoever!

I didn’t do that, by the way. Even though I REALLY REALLY wanted to. I’m such a rule follower.

Anyway, while we were out and about, it was approximately 100 degrees and Otto offered to buy me an ice cream. Because he’s swell that way. (more…)

June 9, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Ottomatic For the People

We tried to pack as much family time into the first half of Saturday as we could, before the kids left (again). We got up early and hit the farmer’s market, we came back home and had pancakes (and bacon! for when you love someone enough to feed them PIG FAT!), and then after we’d finished tidying up and making sure the kids were packed, we were sort of just hanging around.

The way our house is set up, the dining room is between the kitchen and the staircase/family room. That is to say, we walk through it about a billion times a day. At some point on Saturday, I grabbed a corner of the wallpaper in there and gave it a tug. You know, just to see how hard it would be to pull it off. It peeled back pretty easily, so I called to Otto, “Hey, I just figured out what we can do while the kids are gone! We can finally redo the walls in here!”

Otto came into the dining room to discuss this plan with me, and then things get a little fuzzy in my memory, but the next thing I knew, Otto and I were ripping paper off the wall while Monkey stomped it all down in a trash bag. (more…)

June 8, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

Tomorrow I shall tell you all about what I’m doing today (because it will be funnier after I’ve pulled a muscle or twelve, and BELIEVE YOU ME, that’s coming), but in the meantime I thought you might enjoy knowing what’s brought people ’round here lately. I often forget to check my stats and then when I do, I am invariably delighted to discover all of the reasons stranger stumble upon my little corner of the web.

(And by “delighted” I of course mean “alternately amused and horrified.”)

Shall we take a look? Let’s! (more…)

June 6, 2008 | Haven't been hit by lightning yet!

The children are leaving (again) tomorrow, so today I am all aflurry with laundry and packing and snuggling and cooking (motto: When in doubt, BAKE!). I figure that blogging can wait a day, and even if it can’t, tough.

However, as I was making a fresh pitcher of iced tea, this morning, I couldn’t resist a bit of delight, thinking about telling all of you mintphobics that I just brewed my own concoction of mint tea, with MINT! MIIIIIIINT! from my herb garden. It smells divine.

And I always brew my tea without any sweetener, because I’m a complete sugar fiend and am therefore not allowed to have sugar in my beverages. (This is me, cultivating a taste for the unsweetened, grudgingly.) But, you know, I’m going to be having some guests in the next few days, so I had a brilliant thought. (more…)

June 5, 2008 | Offspring: ecstasy and agony

This has not been my favorite week ever.

There’s lots of reasons, of course (many of them already blogged), but the main reason is that this week is sandwiched between a one-week trip and a two-week trip away, for the kids, and I really want us to make the most of our (scant) time together.

Do you know what my daughter wants? She really wants to be angry. She wants to make her DISPLEASURE WITH THE WORLD known, because she is 10 and she’s stuck in a sucky situation and SEETHING OPENLY seems like the logical course of action when you are 10 and stuck in a sucky situation.

I really can’t fault her for that, though I do (of course) wish she were happier. And less argumentative. And less prone to glaring at me as if I were her own personal Satan come to make her life especially difficult. (more…)

June 4, 2008 | Haven't been hit by lightning yet!, Health is overrated

I’m not the sort of person to blog about what goes on in therapy, usually. I mean, why would I tell you about that when there are so many more interesting things to talk about, like mammograms and surly children and such? The point is that I generally consider that to be a situation above reproach and somewhat sacred/private.

[Well, usually. There was that one marriage counselor my ex and I saw who sat in an oversize rocking chair, sipping I'm not sure what (tea? bourbon?) from a mason jar and telling us---in the midst of what anyone could see was a badly broken marriage---that if we just went out on a date together everything would be fine. Clearly her advice was spot on, because we lived happily ever after. Um, well, I did, six years later, anyway....]

And then, of course, we have the case of the sweet young thing in the teaching program whom I’ve now see twice. Last time, I told you that I wanted to make her a sandwich and tell her to do her homework. This time, it was much worse. (more…)