What have you accomplished today?

There is a reason mothers never get anything done - to accomplish anything in a single day (and by accomplish I mean focus entirely on a single task so that it is actually completed ) is a total waste of time. It is simply inefficient. For example, the gains from emptying the dishwasher are limited - you get all your dishes returned to their particular cupboard or drawer just in time to remove them for use during the next meal. But the losses stemming from emptying the dishwasher are seemingly endless. While you are putting plates and cups away, your kids are dumping cereal out on the floor, tying dental floss to matchbox cars and the banister and their baby sister, flushing things unknown down the toilet, changing their clothes over and over and over…

You would think that after eight years of parenting I would know this, and consequently know better than to ever try to get anything done (while my children are awake), and for the most part I do remember this and manage to never ever even attempt to accomplish anything beyond feeding, clothing and occasionally bathing my children. But every now and again I get cocky and ambitious and try to get something else besides child rearing (really child maintenance) done. And every time, without fail, the costs of the accomplishment far outnumber the gains…

On Wednesday, I made my toddler noodles (whole wheat wheels) tossed with olive oil and covered in freshly grated pecorino cheese. I then set to work loading and unloading the washer and dryer and the sorting a basket of my husbands dress socks. In celebration of my utter wholesomeness, I decided to take a little break. I sat back and treated myself to a little cultural enlightenment (the new US Weekly had arrived in the mail slot fifteen minutes prior) until I was rudely interrupted by a request for cheese - "Mo ‘nother kind of cheese" to be specific. My daughter, clearly indulging her white trash tastebuds (from her father not me) decided that $12.00 a pound pecorino just wasn’t cutting it - she couldn’t eat her wheels without a healthy sprinkling of Kraft’s Original Parmesan Style Cheese Topping. Not wanting to be interrupted again before I got to the bottom of this whole Madonna-A-Rod situation, I wisely left her with the entire can of cheese product.

And dammit not ten minutes later I was interrupted again and this time it wasn’t a polite request for a condiment, it was a full-on toddler wail. "MOMMEE my another finger stuck!". Sure enough my daughter had somehow lodged her tiny little finger into the middle hole of the cheese shaker top. I did not panic. I simply unscrewed the bottom half of the can of cheese product and set about pulling the finger back through the hole. Only that finger wasn’t going anywhere. In fact it was rapidly swelling to double, no triple its normal size. I tried lathering her hand with soap and tugging. Nothing, only screams. Next I tried olive oil. With the lid still firmly in place, I decided to make a few phone calls. I called a friend who is a pediatrician for her advice. She suggested soap and grease (so much for med school) and then upon confirming that the color of the finger had changed from sweet baby pink to a sickening reddish purple, she told me to gather up my toddler, lid and all and take her down to the ER for professional assistance.

Anyone who has taken a child to the ER knows that it is not something you do lightly, as one friend says, going to the ER with your kid is worse than going to the DMV (or if you live in Cleveland Heights even worse than signing up for anything at the rec center when the mean lady is working). But my friend, the magical pediatrician, did something so incredibly thoughtful that I will never be able to repay her - she called ahead and warned her colleagues that an incompetent mother was en route with a toddler who could not be extricated from the lid of a Kraft Parmesan Style Cheese Topping Container. When we got to the ER, there was a crowd of six or seven medical professionals gathered around to greet us. I’m pretty convinced they were there to see what exactly what kind of mother would feed her kid imitation cheese, unsupervised. What they didn’t know is that it was the same kind of mother who would bring her toddler to the ER barefoot and covered in magic marker on the left side of her body (she’s right handed I guess).

Forty five minutes, four doctors and three nurses later, my daughter’s finger was freed. I won’t tell you exactly how they did it but it did involve a lot of trial and error and some serious MacGyver style problem solving.

So what did I get accomplished? Well I gained, one moldy load of laundry (I didn’t return to transfer the load from washer to dryer for a couple of days), one wrinkled heap of towels, approximately seven pairs of black socks which haven’t quite made it to my husband’s sock drawer, and the invaluable knowledge that Madonna most certainly is leaving Guy Ritchie for a Yankee’s third baseman. And my losses? Well, the lid to my parmesan cheese bottle and the yet to be determined but definitely more than three hundred dollars Emergency Room bill are really only the beginning.

Was it getting something done really worth it? Hardly. Then again, I might be able to recoup some of my losses by filing a complaint against Kraft and their dangerous cheese shakers. But that would require some time to sit down and really focus on getting it done…

F*&!@ its the Fourth!

Ok so it’s been over six weeks since I’ve had any time or any thing to blog (you decide which is more likely). And here we are more than four weeks into the summer with the Fourth of July just around the corner. Which means only one thing - summer is half over. Which in itself means several (all equally depressing things): 1. I have just over six weeks to complete my summer to-do list 2. In less than two months I’ll have to start imposing bath time, and bed time, and no t.v. time and all the things that make the rest of the time I want to be a really bitchy hard-ass mom seem so much less impressive and therefore less effective 3. I have even less time until I have to figure out exactly when things like Little Gym and Kindermusik, and Fall soccer, and oh yeah, school start again 4. And most important, I have only half as much time as I did before to make this the MOST FABULOUS SUMMER EVER! This might sound crazy (if you’re a man, or if you are not in charge of raising children, or if you have no standards pertaining to childhood and nostalgia) but it’s not. I can say with authority that most women in my position would agree that the Fourth of July means much more than fireworks; it means time lost, and missed opportunities, and panic attacks, and the incredible, overwhelming pressure of being the best possible parent (make that mother) you can be by giving your children the one thing every child treasures - SUMMER! Now I know that sounds pretty intense and maybe even a little implausible, but just think for a minute, what are the best memories of your childhood? Take the top ten and for the most part they fall into one of two categories - they are either Christmas memories or Summer memories. And its a lot harder to make good memories when you don’t have a fat man with a shitload of presents to make the magic for you. So I’m not making this up, the pressure to give your children a fantastic summer is undeniable and when you hit the end of June, no matter how well things are going, you can’t help taking a look at what you’ve done with your kids and only seeing what you haven’t done.

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.

On Manicures

My daughter is seven. She has inherited a lot of things from me (blue, eyes, blonde hair, freckles) but she is, more than anything else, her father’s girl and she’s got all the quirks to prove it, including a mean nail biting habit. During a recent manicure session (for her siblings), we had the following discussion:

Daughter: Mommy why do ladies have those long lady nails?
Son: To scratch good with.
Me: Maybe. (and then to son) Please give me your hand.
Daughter: Sometimes girls in my class have nails like that.
Me: That’s inappropriate. (and then to son) Give me your hand - Now! (and to toddler) Give Mommy the nail clippers.
Daughter: When I see nails like that, I sometimes really want to eat them.

Hmm - how bad would it be if I gave son’s hand to daughter and let her chew on it?

Chores

Ok, I just stumbled on this charming little article by Ann Matturro Gault - "Chores and Fun in the Same Breath? You Bet! Here 9 ideas for getting kids to beat you at the cleaning game." While the nine tips below are probably quite helpful (in someone else's house), I've added my own commentary (in bold), if only to round things out a bit. Just to give credit where credit is due, click here for the original article.

1. Hide treats, stickers, or pennies in, on, or under knickknacks, then ask your child to dust. She gets to enjoy the rewards only when everything is dusted. Kudos to Gault for recognizing that these are tough financial times, no longer can we afford the luxuries of the bi-monthly visit from our "ladies" ("my lady" means only two things in middle class housewife speak -cleaning lady or therapist; if one goes to see "her lady," that's her therapist, if "her lady" makes house calls, she's got someone cleaning her bathroom). Now the only money we've got for cleaning services comes from the penny jar and we've got our kids on the job. That's cute and clever except for one thing, if you are going to put in the time to hide the pennies, wouldn't it be smarter just to do the dusting yourself?

2. Post individual lists of chores kids can do (one for each child in your family). Whenever your child accomplishes a task, have her mark it with a sticker. Whoever has the most stickers at the end of the week gets the Helper of the Week award. Is that like a Pulitzer?

3. Play "Go Fish" with a basket of clean socks. Divide the socks among the players, leaving a pile to draw from. Each player, in turn, holds up a sock and asks another player if he has the mate. If not, the asking player must take a sock from the top of the draw pile. When finished, the player with the most pairs wins. This is hilarious. Let's talk about logistics - do you match holes? stains? Can you make a book of socks? Do you get extra for collecting all the socks that came in the original jumbo pack? Who deals (cause if I'm gonna take the time to deal - I'm gonna go ahead and sort those socks myself)? And then there is the other thing, my kids don't like playing Go Fish - if you can come up with sock sorting Uno we might be game.

4. Turn any socks that stay single into child-friendly dust mitts. Insert child's hand into clean but dampened sock and use it to remove dust from houseplants and furniture. I don't get it, if I use all the unpaired socks as dust mits, what the hell are my kids gonna put on their feet in the morning? Plus, you're supposed to dust plants?

5. Have a scavenger hunt. Make a list of everyday items (newspapers, magazine, shoes, etc.). Set a timer for 5 minutes, then have kids collect stray items throughout the house. The winner is the child who picks up the most (and returns them to their rightful spots). Newspapers? Magazines? Shoes? Please! How about: socks and sippy cups, half eaten Go -Gurt tubes, sticks and rocks (yes inside), unused but dried up wipes, melted chapstick, mommy's jewelry, marker tops, legos, broken crayons, snow pants, a jar of dead potato bugs, oh and random pairs of underwear (boys or girls) behind the bathroom sink, or underneath the family room couch?

6. After dinner, do a "10-Minute Tidy." Set a timer and have family members scatter through the house putting away the day's clutter. Let me run through what would happen during the "10-Minute Tidy" at our house: Seven year old, picks up six pencils and then walks past four-year old brother and says - "Bunneri! Electrify!!" to which four year old is forced to respond "Pikachu! - Quick Attack," imaginary Pokemon battle ensues, which means that pencils are dropped, marbles are thrown, pillows are mysteriously, "necessarily" transported from family room to living room. Meanwhile, toddler discovers pile of dirt from freshly swept kitchen floor, plops down next to it and starts snacking on cheerios, soggy pretzels, and month old skittles, dirt pile is summarily decimated, broom is dropped and mommy goes to get a beer. And where's daddy? Upstairs in the master bath, doing requisite post-dinner, 10-Minute intestinal Tidy."

7. Appoint someone to be Inspector D. Clutter. Armed with a laundry basket and plastic police badge from the dress-up box, this person roams the house and puts stray belongings into clutter "jail" (the basket). To set an item free, its owner (Mom and Dad included!) must do a chore. Costumes, jail, handcuffs -this sounds borderline racy to me.

8. Turn a bucket into a personalized cleaning caddy. Use permanent marker to write your child's name on it and have him decorate its with other drawings. Store supplies such as sponge, dust rag and roll of paper towels, etc. Then use supplies such as sponge, dust rag, and roll of paper towels to clean up everything that kid drew on with permanent marker.

9. Show them the money? Some experts believe allowance should be reserved for teenagers. School-aged children will easily get behind the idea that chores are something you do as a member of the family — not for money." They'll be excited just to show off their skill at completing a task. " I'm not so sure about that. I mean when my kids get their weekly allowances, they look pretty excited about getting paid for their skills at completing a task. They take their money and carry it around, they count it and caress, and treat it like, well like money. What my kids "get behind" is that chores are a means to an end, and that end is whole bunch of money. So what if they're planning on using that money to build a super-powerful car that can fly and become invisible and shoot out a trailer of the back end and lasers out of the sides? As long as their rooms are clean, I'm not going to comment.