Apparently I am that mom...

The other day in the car we were playing a game of silly names. We like to make up silly sounding nonsense words that sound a lot like the real name, but are totally ridiculous.

This incarnation was mostly centered around Star Wars Princesses & Queens.
Some offerings for Princess Amidala were...
Princess Wack-i-doodle
Princess I'm a doggie

Howls of laughter from the back seat.

Then I came up with "Princess Pizza Face" !?!! Where did that come from? It was greeted with laughter from the back, but some horror from the front. They just thought I was being funny, but in fact I was introducing them to those names... names which I hated as a kid.

So I was thinking back and wondering how that girl who joined the year book for the EXPRESS PURPOSE OF BEING IN THE BOOK (and has one lousy picture to show for all the work. Here it is. I see it hasn't improved with age. Still looking sullen, still peeling an orange, still below hot Kelly Fellers, sigh, oh, and Greg Frost is some hot shot at the Associated Press or something...) turns into that mom who is teaching her kids what Pizza Face means?

I love my kids and I think they have an even chance of not being permanently at the loser kids table, but mostly because being a geek is now cool. But I don't want them to be the ones armed with the mean words and the pithy taunts to other children who happen to have acne, braces, and glasses. (I can pretty much guarantee all of the above for J and P).

Recently Ryan and I have been wondering how Kindergarten is a microcosm of the future. There are already cool kids, fashion conscience kids, geeks who love Lego and Star Wars, and even a bit of a bully. They are tamer in all respects and there seems to be less exclusion at this point, but it's all there. We encourage J when he comes home and tells us he's now hanging out with someone new. But we also ask about what happened to the old friend we used to hear so much about?

So, I will watch what taunts I teach them. But it's too late for birthdays... be prepared to be told that you look like a monkey and you smell like one too. That was me. Sorry.

Internet Uphoria Lost! Bah!

I was mentally writing another post about how much I love the internet and how it makes seemingly simple things like getting a cake for your son's birthday so much easier until I was faced with the flip side... badly implemented great ideas.

So, let's say you are coming down from an all time terrible weekend where you
a) pulled your back throwing 40 lbs of kids into a ball pit, over and over
b) spent the rest of that day in bed
c) woke up on Mothers Day to a wonderful breakfast with your family, showered with love and presents only to crawl back in bed to recover
d) got up to make dinner for parents, only to have it be a crashing failure when your improvisation of the recipe you have and the recipe you remember and wish you had were different enough to cause a terrible meal to be delivered
e) oldest child starts vomiting
f) you start vomiting
g) youngest child starts vomiting
h) saint of a husband spends the night with kids, helping them
i) you spend the next day with kids at home, parents watching them (thank you sooooo much) and much of it in bed, or the bathroom
j) wake up the next morning still feeling terrible and have to cancel an interview that looks quite promising
k) go back to bed for hours
l) watch tv all day and still feel exhausted
m) go to bed only to NOT SLEEP for the majority of the night

Oh, I forgot the part where we figured it was the beautifully made and wonderfully tasting home made quiche that my husband served for Mother's Day breakfast was the suspected toxic food for much of this time. Happily, this has been rethought and it seems to be a store bought lasagna is more likely. Can I add that none of this was Ryan's fault?

So, here I sit, looking for something easy to make this upcoming birthday special with as little effort on my part as possible.
In comes Ben and Jerry's.
There is a scoop shop less than a mile from the house we are staying at the beach. I went to their web site and was pleased to find that they have lots of information about their shop and an INTERACTIVE CAKE CREATOR!!! All my Internet loving molecules went into overdrive.
Choose the size, the flavors of ice cream (P likes Vanilla with Heath Bar, I feel sure), the filling, the icing, the sprinkles, the writing on the top! So easy! Enter your name and address, email and phone and presto!

Waiting

Waiting

and then a weird blank popup with a helpful x to close it. That's it.

So, I'll call them later and see if they have 6 orders for a birthday cake for P or none at all.

Star Wars Birthday Success!

J turns 6 tomorrow (hard to believe) and we had his birthday party on Sunday. It was a weird Austin-in-winter day where it looked like rain but only sprinkled a few times, while being over 70 degrees so we had to have the AC on in the house...

We got a moonwalk with a slide in it as the main form of entertainment. Happily the house has a great side yard that accomodated the giant blow up structure nicely. Only one piece of drama: the installer came right as we were finishing cleaning up the yard and set it up. It had two blowers so we ran one extention cord into the living room (front of the house) and the second to the back porch. Ryan was out watching J and P jump before everyone arrived. We had agreed to have some "quiet time" before everyone got there, so they were coming in. Ryan comes into the house and I see the house deflating...

"Oh, you unplugged it until everyone gets here?"

"What do you mean?"

Yells from the back yard "Mom, Dad, Help!"

We had blown the circuit breaker with the kids in it!
They were rescued, we moved one extention cord and we were fine for the rest of the day.

One nice moment in the whole party prep process... J actually pitched in. He began the process with a very self-involved attitude about how he didn't have to help, but we had a chat about how it's a lot of work to get ready to have a great time, and then he was on board. He gathered all the laundry baskets and helped sweep the floors, all without a word of complaint (miracle!).

The other big hit was the cake. It was a bit of effort on my part, but it was all worth it when J walked around the whole party telling everyone what a wonderful job I had done and how he thought it was "the best cake Mom has ever made". It's nice to see him grow into more adult emotions.

As we like to say "May the Fork be with you... use the Fork!"

Birthday

From my old blog (chairmanofthedog)


Last week was my birthday. While not an especially meaningful number, it turned out to be a nice, slow roll into the next year.
The biggest "moment" of the celebration was my Day of Beauty.
I have a yearly ritual that I feel sure my mom knows to expect. Every year around my sister-in-law's birthday I ask what she is getting. My mom always has a great gift which has been wrapped, shipped and confirmed long before the actual day. As a sort of torture device/attention getting tactic I then ask my mom if she has my gift. Every year there is a silence on the other end of the phone. Oh, yeah, what will I get my daughter? Hm...
Having learned from one year where "you get what you ask for" and hadn't asked for anything, I told her I wanted a Day of Beauty.
A month later, with cash in hand (we live in different cities and my mom knows I am way too practical to be bothered by the fact that, in the end, I got an envelope of cash rather than a well thought out gift) I made my reservation for a "European Day Spa". I had convinced my friend to join me, having recently secured the promise of an offer for a job, reason enough we both agreed. We booked the "Day Together" package at the local "European Day Spa".
When I thought of a "European Day Spa" I hadn't thought it would be an "East European" experience.
While my manicure has lasted longer than ever, I had the distict impression that the older russian lady doing it hadn't had access to the disposible culture of America when she learned how to file and paint. She used the same 1x1in square of cotton for the entire manicure. She used toilet paper to separate my toes, which worked rather well, but she counted the squares before tearing it off.
The massage was fine, but the ambiance was lost when I was lead out the back of the building across the parking lot to the other building.
Lunch was served in a cute little room with ivy on the walls and a glass top table. It didn't occur to me until I was half way through my salad that this was the room I had walked through to get my massage until someone else was escorted through.
Finally, the facial was the only disappointing procedure. Perhaps the feeling of an asthma attack when they put that steam right into your face that ruins it for me.
In the end, as my friend said "we got what we paid for". We wanted a day of beauty, but since neither of us had the cash for the super-luxe salons, we indeed, got what we paid for.
5:23 PM