Party Planner

2 daughters, born ten days (six years) apart. Birthdays are looming. Luckily I'm on top of things. When I shop for supplies for the eight-year-old's birthday party, I pick up stuff for the two-year-old's celebration. For example while picking up your standard number eight rainbow candle, I found (and purchased)the most perfect pink and purple number one for the little one. Just right for a little girly-girl who loves things like pink and purple...

Except that she's turning two. DAMMIT!

Mother's Day is CANCELLED!

I think daddyfesto should buy mommyfesto a scanner. Then you could see the following note in the actual handwriting, which can only make it more poignant, more hilarious, and yes, even more depressing than it is in the transcripted version below.

Today I found a note on the floor outside my seven year old's bedroom door. Unfortunately I found the note only after I had discussed with her and "resolved" the various transgressions that had led to her banishment to her room (for those who want to know, her crimes included general bitchiness and lying about feeding her lizard).

Here's what the note said:

MOM I am mab AND you know iT. i Am SO MAD VERY MAD MAD MAD. I AM MAD!!! you ARE A MEANY AND MEAN. DONT COME UP to ME DONT. GO AWAY AND i WANT YOU TO KNOW NOT HAPPY MOTHERS DAY TO YOU GO AWAY.

EMMA

I'm A Better Mom Than...

I can read. Really. I even have a highly-developed vocabulary and keen literary analysis skills. I used to toss around words and phrases like "irony" and "acute awareness" and "syntax" and, well you get the picture. If you checked my nightstand, or our bathroom, or the kitchen counter, or the passenger’s seat of my car - any of the places a girl-on-the-go keeps her reading material - you would never believe that I can read. You would think that the closest my mind can get to a literary experience is by interpreting the pictures of over-exercised, under-dressed, over-medicated, under-qualified Hollywood celebrities and "newsmakers." And I couldn’t fault you for coming to that conclusion, because the only printed material - outside of pink-eye-in-the-classroom notices, math worksheets, and the occasional Crossword puzzle (I can do up to Thursday, thank you!) is a copy of the latest installment of my Us Weekly subscription. And I couldn’t fault you for assuming that I only "read" Us Weekly, because I am a materialistic celebrity-obsessed former intellectual who thrives on gossip about people she has never nor will ever meet.

But that would be incorrect. I don’t read Us Weekly because I love Hollywood and fashion and reality TV and Britney Spears, I read Us Weekly because it helps my self-esteem. No, really it does. Now I’m not delusional enough to think that looking at pictures of the beautiful people will help me like my body, or my hair, or even my wardrobe more. I am woman in my thirties who has given her body and her hair and her wardrobe over to motherhood and the three children that came with it. I read Us Weekly, because in every issue, without fail, there is at least one item that can obliterate my deepest fear - the sometimes overwhelming conviction that I am the worst mother in the world.

No matter what goes on in my own home, I can open Us Weekly and within moments find absolute proof that there are in fact women in this world that are way worse at parenting than I am. (And the best part is, they all live in LA or New York, so not only are there individual mothers who suck at mothering in ways I can’t even touch, there are entire communities of women who are fucking up there kids!)

So there is always Britney to boost anyone’s confidence in their mothering skills. Her parenting is legendarily bad: a Seven-Eleven style diet, driving with babies on her lap or with the car seat improperly installed, dropping babies or letting them fall out of highchairs. I only let my kids eat crappy food when I am way too busy to give them something healthy or on special occasions like days when we are driving past MacDonalds and I have enough cash in my wallet to buy my way out of cooking dinner. I always make my kids sit in the appropriate booster or car seat - except when I have to squeeze one extra kid in for a carpool or some other emergency - and even then its not like I’m speeding down the road because the paparazzi is chasing me. And I would never drive with a baby in my lap (except for the one time I was at school in the pick-up line breastfeeding and I had to pull forward because they can be really mean about it if you hold up the line and I pulled over as soon as I could.) And I have never, ever dropped a baby! And even if I did, I would catch the baby myself, I wouldn’t need a bodyguard to catch him for me.

But Britney isn’t the only Hollywood mom worth watching. There’s J.Lo and her buddy, Leah Remini, who in last week’s Us Weekly freely admits that she has serious parenting problems - "Leah’s Toddler Trouble." Apparently things are so out of control between Leah and her three-year old Sofia that Leah had to turn to Rachael Ray to sort things out (I guess the Super Nanny was not available). It seems Leah’s parenting transgressions include still giving her daughter a bottle all the time, co-sleeping, and allowing her to eat popsicles for breakfast! Hmm? All those things are clearly way worse than anything I would ever do. Obviously my kids don’t eat popsicles for breakfast, they wait until after they eat their nutrient packed eggo frozen waffles to ask for sweets. As for co-sleeping, I am very strict about that - I always put my kids to bed in their own beds. I can’t help it if that’s not where they end up in the morning.

I often like to check in on Suri Cruise. She’s only a few weeks older than my youngest, so Katie Holmes is a good comparison mom for me. So far I can’t figure out exactly how Katie is fucking Suri up, but I’m not worried about that. I know I am a way better mom than her. After all, I didn’t choose to have a couch-jumping, medicine-rejecting, five foot two, freak father my kids.

And Angelina. So what if she’s beautiful and love kids so much she buys a new one every year? I know I’m a better mother than her, it’s all in the pictures. Every picture of one of the Pitt-Jolie children involves a bag of cheetos, or krispy kremes or KFC. And maybe what you feed your kids doesn’t necessarily make you a bad mom, but when you know for a fact that there is a band of camera’s documenting every morsel those kids ingest, it makes you a pretty dumb one.