NaBloPoMo

That has to be the worst acronym in, like, forever.

It sounds as if it has something to do with a National Organization of Teletubby Sodomizers.

But, it's not.

No, it's the acronym for National Blog Post Month.

For the entire month of November, bloggers who join the movement (or perhaps it's a cult, mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha) take a blood oath to sit in front of their screen- be it large and flat or tiny and expensive - and once a day, to crack their knuckles thricely, stick the tip of their tongue out of the corner of their mouth, squint their eyes and knit their eyebrows, and then tap, tap, tap away at the keys until they finally click on PUBLISH POST (or SEND, or whatever) and, in effect, post something to their blog EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH OR ELSE!

Don't ask me "or else what?"

You can't HANDLE the "or else what?"

Just think thumb screws and water boards, that's or else what.

Okay, not really.

Just think a big "KICK ME! I DROPPED OUT OF NABLOPOMO!" written on a giant yellow Post-It and stuck to the back of your blog for the entire month of December. It's true. These organizers aren't messing around.

And what if you DO post every day for an entire month?

Well, my friend, you have the satisfaction of a job well done.

And maybe there will be another widget to add to your sidebar. Something like "I NaBloPoMo'ed and all I got was this grayscale widget. And a rash on my Tinky Winkie."

Anyway, I signed up. And I'm forcing my sister to sign up, too. I'm the older sister, and you may think that by the ages of 40-something and 30-something, big sisters would no long wield any bully power over their younger sisters, but you would be so, so very wrong. In fact, watch how easily I can blackmail my younger sister into posting to her blog every day for a month.


"Hey. Hey, Seestor. Hey, c'mere I want to tell you something...

Perrier Water.

That's right...Perrier Water.

Yeah, that's got your attention.

I knew it would.

So. Now. Hows about you buddy-up with me and write something every day on your blog for a month, and that story will go no further. No farther, either."

Of course, the downside to bullying my sister is that my sister not only has an equally and infuriatingly obnoxious story she can tell about me, but she's also much stronger than I am and can hold me down and do that thing where you grab the other person's hand and say, "Why are you punching yourself? Huh? Why are you punching yourself?"

Also, she's a natural blonde. Which is neither here nor there, but bears mentioning as a super power.

SO.

Here's the plan.

NaBloPoMo suggests that to make this endeavor a bit easier so as to not "run out of gas" around day 14, bloggers should blog on a theme. My Summer Vacation or Thirty Ways To Cook Toast or What I Found In My Driveway This Morning.

I, however, had the wildly brilliant idea of co-blogging with my Seestor. And because I'm hyper-organized and a pain in the ass, I came up with a easy-to-follow template for each day of the week with revolving topics and writing prompts. Boy. Am I fun or what.

Anyway, it's going to go like this:

MONDAY: Random Noodlings. A little of this. A little of that. Stray thoughts and scrambled eggs.

TUESDAY: Get to Know The Ugly Sisters! Where we get all autobiographical, tell some Remember When type stories, and reveal which one of us has a peg leg. Just kidding. It's only a peg toe.

(Yes, back in the day when we ran with a group of rock-n-roll hippie yonkos, my sister and I were lovingly dubbed The Ugly Sisters. Our friends told us that they were being ironic. However, there does exist a photo of me and my sister with underwear on our heads and frizzy perms. So, it has crossed my mind that our friends were being ironic when they told us they were being ironic. Anyway, we embraced the name as a good moniker for a rock band at the very least, and yes, The Ugly Sisters is trademarked. Not by us, mind you, but that's not stopping me from using it here.)

WEDNESDAY: Best of Awards. Because everyone likes to give an award.

THURSDAY: Question From My Sister. Where we ask each other questions and answer them. Duh.

FRIDAY: Geek Of The Week. Don't be an idiot, and we'll all get along just fine. Get up in our grills, and, boy oh boy...oh boy...why I just outta...don't get me started. Who will the Geek of the Week be this Friday? Stay tuned!

SATURDAY: Ugly Sister Smackdown. Started here. Ended here. To be continued.

SUNDAY: Sisterly Advice - Our weekly advice column. This is the part where we take questions from the audience and offer you the wisdom of our combined years. Ask us anything! We'll give you a thorough and well thought-out answer. Or not. Maybe we'll just make stuff up after giggling over your dilemma. That said, we have a whopping 27 years of parenting experience between us and can adequately cover (i.e. tap-dance our way through) most topics from diapering babies to homework blues to answering "Band-Aid or stitches?" to teenage drivers, as well as philosophizing over more general questions such as "When should I be supportive, when should I discourage, and when do I pretend she's someone else's kid" and "Glitter! What the hell?!" We've both had encounters with possibly rabid animals, and my sister raises goats and wild horses, so right there, a wealth of information. If you need recommendations for beverage pairings to your favorite entree, or music to whittle by, we can help. Problems with noisy neighbors? Wondering whether to dump that dude? Got bunions? We're your gals. Drop us a line at
TheUglySister@yahoo.com or post your question in the comments section at any time and we'll do our darndest to point you in the right direction. (Your mileage may vary.)

So there! Doesn't this sound promising?

Here's to NaBloPoMo!

It's a dessert topping! It's a floor wax! It's a Peruvian poet!

It's whatever you want it to be!

Now, get thee to the buggery bloggery!

I will never drink alcohol again.

I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.

(Watch this space for exciting NaBloPoMo events.)

I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.

(Kenny? Kim? Did you figure out how to upload photos yet?)

I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.

Don't Cry For Me, Schuylkill County!

Yes, it's that time of year again.

Time for the Dead Celebrity Party, to be held at an undisclosed location high in the Pennsylvania Appalachian Mountains.

I didn't go last year.

I forget why.


Oh yeah.


This.




How could I forget the person stapled to my leg. (At the time, to my boobs.)


In holding true to a theme, I once again am dressing as a dead Latino. Or Latina.

There was Che, immortalized here, and on several billion liberal arts student T-shirts.

Then a few years ago there was Frida.




I am once again trying to come up with some celebrity I half-way resemble, but according to this



I don't look like anyone who is yet deceased. Thank goodness.

However, I now understand why chicks and drag queens dig me so much.

Anyway, as far as the dead celebrity I finally decided on, I'll leave you here with a teaser:


Look at the title of this post. Sssssshhhhhhhhh!


In other news relevant to food and all things...uhm...food, here's an entertaining post or two to read while I put on my make-up.

Eggplant, Oh Eggplant

Leeks: Who Knew?

The Veggies Are Here! The Veggies Are Here!

WARNING: The last post contains photos of adults dressed as produce, and an evil smiling tomato, all of which may be disturbing to minors. And pets.

Enjoy!

I'll be back soon with photos of my drunken debauchery.

I mean, my costume.

I want a $250 gift card for use at Williams Sonoma

Well, they did say to give the post a unique title.

Okay, let's start again. The folks over at The Parent Bloggers Network are throwing down the gauntlet and asking for blogger tales of mealtime woe and more woe. Woe, woe, woe...just like the Bee Gees.

This week’s Blog Blast is all about commiseration: Are your kids picky eaters? Were YOU a picky eater? What have you tried to get them to eat, and what have they done to avoid eating what you’ve served?

All this renewed and never-ending talk of picky eaters is being spurred-on once again, this time by Jerry Seinfeld's wife, Jessica, and her new book Deceptively Delicious. (Although, personally, I'm partial to the also-ran Sneaky Chef by Missy Chase Lapine. The recipe for meatloaf in that book is without a doubt the best meatloaf I've ever eaten. Even Seconda chowed down and asked for second and third helpings which, if you read on, will help you to understand why I've sent Missy's name to The Vatican in request to put her on the fast track for canonization.)

Everyone, but everyone is talking about picky eaters these days, Yours Truly included.

Well, to be honest, I wasn't talking about picky eaters at all; but, wave a $250 Williams Sonoma gift card in front of my nose, and I'll sing like a canary. Picky eaters? The details of my morning ablutions? Ten digit code for the back door to the missile silos? Just tell me what you want to know.

So anyway, here's to The Parent Bloggers Network and Jerry Seinfeld's Wife and Missy Chase Lapine, just for good measure. ("Good measure"...get it? It's a cooking pun.) Hopefully, I'll be the random choose-ee and mama will get some new Le Creuset. Or any Le Creuset. It's not like I have old Le Creuset in my cupboards.

Bon Appetit!

Check out the other posts for today's Blog Blast! Good stuff! Good eatin'!

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My kids are picky eaters.

I don’t much like to refer them as “picky eaters”. It’s such an ugly, unsavory term. It makes me think of fourth grade and Raymond Wallace sitting in the back of class scratching at the scabs on his knees and popping the scratched-off pickin’s into his mouth.

“Picky eater”…yuck.

I much rather think of my kids as evolutionarily challenged.

It has a lyrical and at the same time objectively scientific ring to it, yes? Evolutionarily challenged. Makes it sound as if my kids' food issues are beyond my powers of nurture to influence one way or another, and - most importantly - it doesn’t make me out to be a bad mommy.

It’s Darwin’s fault that my kids hate kale, after all, not mine.

See, back in the day - waaaaaaay back in the day like when humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth together (eh-hem) - a kid who toddled around and ate anything bitter tasting was, most likely, a kid who did not live to see her second birthday. Even today, bitter tasting plants generally get the Mr. Yuck sticker. Bitter is poisonous. Bitter is vomiting and respiratory distress and violent convulsive seizures and a quick - or sometimes painfully prolonged - death. Bitter is hemlock and nightshade and giant, killer rhubarb leaves.

And guess what else tastes bitter?

That’s right.

Kale and collards and spinach and Brussels sprouts. All those “good for you” foods.

Now, if we’re talking 200,000 years ago, my kids are definitely the survivors who take the long road around both the pokeweed patch and the spinach field, while all those other kids who gladly ask for second servings of Brussels sprouts (although back then they were called Paleolithic Sprouts) are on the road to being pterodactyl food.

If we’re talking 200,000 years ago, my kids rule.

However, we’re talking 2007, and my kids’ DNA has evidently missed the memo which gave the all-clear for eating your leafy greens again.

Many a supper have I witnessed a mere eighth-cup helping of escarole (delicately seasoned with extra-virgin olive oil, organic lemon, kosher salt and freshly ground pepper) cause a 40-pound child to writhe and retch and spin on her head to such a shocking extent that we had to lash her to the four poster bed and douse her with improvised Holy Water to stop the continued summoning of what could only have been demons. (By the way, you can readily concoct your own Holy Water by making the sign of the cross over almost any liquid - I once baptized an infant using a glass of V8. Although, I do not recommend Holy V8 for expelling beta carotene demons. Best use some plain seltzer.)

And I want to make one thing clear right here: up until the time they reached 18 months old, any and each of my children would eat anything. Really. Anything. Terzo is 14 months old and right now he’ll eat tofu mashed with wheat germ and almond butter; avocado and banana with smooshed sunflower seeds; cabbage and beef and onions and green peppers. He’ll even eat crayons and graphite and boogers. As of right now, he’s very much not a picky eater.

Meanwhile, Seconda, my six-year-old, watches her brother with disgust.

“Ewwwwwww. He’s eating green and brown chunky stuff. That looks like vomit.”

“Darling, you ate this same exact thing when you were his age and you loved it.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

“No, I didn’t love it.”

“Well, you ate it.”

Seconda considers this historical factoid about herself, decides that it doesn’t jibe with her current identity as someone who will not allow green food to pass her lips, and eyes me with a mixture of indignant disbelief and white hot anger for all the psychological wrong I have caused her via past helpings of green and brown chunk food.

And if you ask me when their aversion to certain foods began, or why it happened at all, all I can answer is that I truly don’t know. One day, my kids were eating sardines and spicy mung beans and the next day the only thing that they’d allow to pass their lips was unsalted mashed potatoes.

Seconda whole-heartedly began her the picky-eater "stage" (I'm thinking positively, here) at around 2 years old and continues to be excruciatingly choosy. However, I honestly think she’s a Super Taster (someone for whom a lima bean tastes of 1,000 lima beans) and maybe, just maybe, a little more evolutionarily challenged than my other kids. I mean that in the best way possible. I love her dearly and she’s a charm of a kid, but let’s face it - she wasn’t going to make it through the Potato Famine of 1740 if she was going to insist on being picky about eating stray dog and peat. Either the stray dog-eating gene is recessive in our family, or Seconda takes more strongly after her Lithuanian ancestors who were all about potatoes and butter and hold the leafy greens, I don't care how many Prussians are coming through the door.

Prima, my eldest, went through a developmentally normal stage of “I no likey” and then came out of it at around age five without much - or any - brow-beating or bullying or gnashing of teeth on my part.

And yeah, I know that calling mealtime encouragement “bullying” comes across as a bit dramatic, but let me clue you in on where I’m coming from:

If you’ve ever been a five-year-old on a Kindergarten after-school playdate and have been invited to stay for dinner, and during dinner your best friend’s dad has stood over you gruffly not allowing you to leave the table and resume playing Colorforms until you’ve eaten what looks to be about three pounds of droopy, hemorrhaging, boiled red beets, you’d get a bit dramatic, too.

I shall never, ever forgive Wendy O’Boyne’s dad for trying to make me choke down even one red beet. To this day whenever I see a red beet, I fight back my gagging, and I say a small prayer in the hope that somewhere, at some dinner table, some child is finding the nerve to rise up and fight back his own fetid root vegetable oppressor by determinedly flinging the awful plate of pulsing purple blood tubers against the wall (or at least feeding them to the cat) and yelling, “Give me potatoes, or give me death! I shall not feast upon your bitter fruits of misopedia, nor give-in to this beta vulgaris that you call 'respect for authority'. As God is my witness, I will never eat red beets again!”

Seriously, what I put into my mouth is a very personal matter.

Just ask my…confessor.

You give me a rule like, “You must try three bites of every food on the table” and I’m going to do my best to prove to you that I’m not going to must try anything, sister, so put that wacky-weed in your bong and smoke it.

You tell me that I won’t get dessert unless I eat what’s on my plate, and I’ll sit with my arms crossed and lips zipped and say prayers to St. Sarturninus and the Irish Hunger Martyrs for a speedy delivery to the great beyond (Paris) where Gaston Lenotre will serve me plates of pain au chocolat while I sit upon a silvery tuffet.

You show me pictures of children starving in Kolkata and tell me that I am spoiled and over-indulged and I should be humbly thankful for the bounty that is The United States of America, and I’m going to tell you that, if you want the truth, a plate of uneaten green beans is the least of your worries when it comes to over-indulging the whims of this Western child; when it comes to me, you have bigger character challenges to deal with than can be wished away with the false security and self-congratulations gained by getting me to eat my legumes. (And anyway, my friend from India tells me that plenty of kids there are picky eaters and that her cousins’ mommy-talk is just as likely to be centered around “how to get kids to eat their curry” as not. Starving kids, yes, will eat anything, even their own hair or soiled bed sheets. But I’d rather not use starvation motivation as the basis of my parenting, nor associate pangs of hunger with my intended gift of enlightenment and deep joy that can only be gained through a profound and loving relationship with radicchio. Sure, most kids won‘t starve themselves - as is the oft-heard wisdom - but Seconda, who is already a wee slip of a girl, will easily drop five pounds when faced with a week’s worth of “just try it“ food. This is a fact. It's been attempted.)

Basically, I was an incorrigible child. But my steadfast stubbornness which was borne and came to full fruition at the dinner table has nevertheless served me well during, say, withstanding teen-on-teen peer pressure to forge notes from my parents to the tattoo parlor, and even thirty-five years later into the present day, e.g. when I need to doggedly negotiate with a surly customer service representative over returning a pair of shoes without a receipt. So there is a positive there.

.....

When I was a kid, I didn’t like the taste of pizza.

Can you believe that?

What kid doesn’t like pizza?

I hated all red sauce. I didn’t like macaroni and cheese. I only ate vanilla ice cream. I survived, instead, on a limited diet of gravy bread and cube steak. Vegetables were mostly gray and came from a can and that's the way I liked it. I was not adventurous when it came to passing food across my palate.

These days, however, I am both gourmande and garbage can. I will eat anything and everything. I will try it. I will enjoy it. I’m an easy date when it comes to choosing a restaurant. The only thing I kinda sorta still despise is olives, and I sincerely feel bad about this. But greens and tripe, blood sausage and monkey eyes, I’ll taste them all. My favorite flavor ice cream is “yes please, I’ll have some more” and right now I am eating a plate heaped with roasted sweet-hot cubanelle peppers and throwing my head back and laughing in ecstasy (except only after chewing thoroughly and swallowing). I can devour a head of raw kale in one sitting and am firmly convinced that I’ve more than made up for all that lutein I missed out on as a child. Really. My eyesight is so good that I can see through walls, closed doors, and often right through the back of my head. Just ask my kids.

And best of all, trying any new food for the first time was all my idea.

The moment I started trying new foods was exactly that moment when other people stopped suggesting to me I should try them.

It was a control issue, pure and simple. It still is. I’m that kind of girl. Love me or leave me.

(Although, when I was five, tomato sauce did honestly taste like armpit to me.)

On the other hand, I hear I was ridiculously easy to potty train; I evidently went elsewhere to work through my control issues, i.e. the dinner table. So, carefully choose your parenting battleground and hill to die on, is my advice. Frankly, I much prefer being a conscientious objector parent at the dinner table, saving the bloodshed for the really important issues (like “no repelling from the second story roof”), but that’s me.

But what of my own kids? What of my super taster and my stubborn “you can’t control what goes into me or when I later expel it” child? What happens when Terzo just says no to roasted tofu and wheat germ casserole? Am I to play the short order cook to my equally and endearingly incorrigible children? And other than not having the time to cook eleventy-two different meals a night, is there something inherently wrong or morally damning to my children should cooking multiple meals be my choice? After all, my mom catered to my odd gustatory whims and - as the other oft-quoted wisdom goes - in spite of the anecdotal “data” and dire warnings which speak of airs of entitlement and all-around bad manners, I turned out okay.

Except for that belligerent arguing about shoe receipts thing.

And I know at least one person who ate all their vegetables every night as a child and who is now is prison. True story. So, so much for the virtue of clearing your plate and its magical property of instilling discipline and good-etiquette. According to my data sample of one, any success in getting a child to eat carrots under duress or threat of no brownies will be short-lived and only later lead to that child's driving without a license, armed robbery, and unfortunate choice of hairstyle. I'm not even smiling here.

Well, maybe a little.

Okay, I'm smiling a lot.

I know plenty of perfectly lovely people who were once childhood members of the Clean Plate and "Try A Bite" Clubs.

The short of it is that I cook food - when I rarely cook food - that everyone in the family likes. A little bit of everything that everyone enjoys out of respect for their oh-so-very-human idiosyncrasies, big people and small people alike. Something for my choosy husband, something for my picky kids, and I’ll just have a bowl of cereal, please. And if that’s not pleasing to your palate, then help yourself to a yogurt or grab an apple or learn how to make toast and open a jar of peanut butter. Choice is a luxury my family enjoys, not unlike the luxuries of indoor plumbing, relatively inexpensive gasoline, and the availability of twenty different brands of toothpaste, for starters. For better and worse, there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle either which way. We most of us have got it good here and telling a kid that they have no choice when right in the next room is a television with 3,490 children's entertainment channels is a bit…contradictory, yes? You recognize the forces against us.

Anyway…

Occasionally, for a vitamin boost, I puree organic green and orange foods along with a dash of wheat germ, and hide the veggie moosh in meatloaf or pancakes. Some would call that lying to my kids and being a bad mom. Well, I hearby promise to come clean about the sneaky yams around the same time I tell my kids the truth about Santa Claus, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and Chappaquiddick.

Really, my kids have it very good. And they are very good kids, and not just "good for kids who don't eat salt cod". And if the worse that happens to them is they someday find out that I was lying to them about the tuna casserole ingredients, then basically their careers as misunderstood and tormented poets and artists will be over before they began.

They so want to be misunderstood poets and artists. And finding some depth of material borne of emotional and physical hardship can be rather tough in the cushy suburbs. No one writes long mournful songs about the time they got stuck in traffic and almost missed soccer practice. No, you need a good long famine or dinosaur attack to spark that kind of creativity.

So maybe - just maybe - in spite of all I've just said, this evening I’ll whip-up a pot of gelatinous red beets and kale, and force my kids to eat a plateful. In fact, I think I hear Andy Warhol insisting on it.

Tomorrow is born the artist.

Tonight, my children dream of pterodactyls...and bitter greens.

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John Lee Super Taster, by They Might Be Giants - creators of the best kids' music on the planet




Check out the other posts for today's Blog Blast! Good stuff! Good eatin'!

Parent Hack

One of my favorite parent hacks! I just can't keep this to myself anymore. Hack away and thank me later.

Toddler Lost and Found

If you're like me, you spend a good 55 minutes each morning running around the house with increasing vexation, volume, and rapid arm movements in a frenzied search for your house and/or car keys. Your keys should be on the peg over the desk. But of course, they aren't.

You are sure that you put the keys on the peg last night. You distinctly remember coming home from the supermarket with keys in hand and hurriedly tripping over the front door threshold, executing an energetic half-spin in a fruitless attempt to land on your keister instead of your pate, and thusly propelling four bags of groceries across the kitchen floor (because two trips back and forth to the car is completely ludicrous in your time-crunched world) upon which the family dog made good use of himself by devouring a package of chicken tenders, box and all. And then there was your lunge toward the dog despite immediate concerns over whether your elbow was just bruised and not shattered like so many jars of pureed organic peas, and the yelp, and the grabbing of the dog's tail, and the sliding nails across the vinyl tiles, and who knew such a small dog could drag an adult woman across the floor and headfirst into the dishwasher? And then the phone rang and you were hoping it was 911 just checking-in like they always do this time of day, but instead it was your mom who was checking-in just to let you know that she found an 8x10 framed photo of you from 7th grade and do you want her to mail it to you or just wait to bring it the next time she comes to visit, and before you can even answer (and that answer would be "burn it") the dog rounds the hallway corner with a box of tampons in its mouth and you have no choice but to whip the telephone handset at the dog's head for its own good because last time the dog ate a tampon the result was a very sick dog and several thousand dollars worth of surgery.

And that's why I'll never own a dog.

The end.


Wait.

That's not what I started talking about.


Oh! Parent Hacks!

(However, I do know someone whose dog ate what later proved to be the most expensive tampon in the whole world)

So you're busy. Or you're out-of-control chaotic, but you call the chaos "busy" because it looks better on your resume. Or you're just a nutty absent-minded-professor type who can't keep track of where her own socks are even when they are snugly on her own feet.

Or, like me, your house is infested with evil space pixies who steal your keys and tuck them away between folds of an invisible time-space curtain. And the evil space pixies only bring forth the keys after they know that you're late for the dermatologist appointment you've waited seven months for, and they see that you're driven to kneeling in the middle of your living room begging Saint Anthony to come around, there's something lost and can't be found. It is at this moment that the evil space pixies tantalizingly jingle your lost keys from somewhere in the next room, but then quickly toss the keys back through the time-space curtain and onto Umbriel, the darkest moon of Uranus.

That's usually where my keys are.

Anyway, there is a parent hack here, I swear.

So anyway, while the dog is ripping through your personal girl stuff with great gusto and the ice cream is melting into a mint-chocolate-chip puddle while you sit on the kitchen floor with a bag of frozen corn on your bruised-probably-broken elbow, the only way that your domestic tableau could truly be complete would be if the baby toddled into the room brandishing a Phillip's head screwdriver.

And he does.

Where the baby found a Phillips head screwdriver, you'll never know. You just spent three hours yesterday looking for a Phillips head screwdriver so you could install the batteries in the back of a cuddly, red, Strangle-Me Elmo doll so that the baby could have another age-appropriate and eyeball-friendly toy to play with. Perhaps this would be the toy that would rapt baby for a solid fifteen-minutes with its high-pitched singing so that you could finally make that phone call to the roofers or install a taller (and maybe barbed-wire) baby-gate at the top of the stairs. You'll never know. You couldn't find the Phillips head.

But baby could.

You try to lure the baby and the eyeball-poking instrument toward you and redirect by pointing at the melting ice-cream, saying, "Here baby! Look at the yummy, sticky, bright-green mess to play in! Give Mommy the pointy ouchie yuck-yuck stabber and go make messy in the pretty, mooshy ice cream, that's much more fun!" - upon which the baby giggles maniacally and then executes a perfect javelin throw, whizzing the Phillip's head past your earlobe where it lodges Thunk! in the door of the lazy susan cupboard behind you. And as the baby toddles back into the living room, you briefly wonder with some trepidation (and a little pride) at his advanced overhand-throwing skills - and surely that’s a 24-month-old developmental milestone - when suddenly the baby returns with a corkscrew in one hand and a sharpened chopstick in the other and you wonder WHERE THE HELL is he GETTING these things?!

I mean, I know for a fact that not only is every room in the house mostly baby-proofed (and sometimes within an inch of its foam-cornered life), but the house is also currently strewn from stem-to-stern with brightly-colored, round-edged, soft and jingling, lead-free, unswallowable, happy-fun-fun, baby-lookee-here! paraphernalia. And yet I've watched this kid bee-line through the beeping, blaring, fluorescent, glowing, rolling, bouncing, shining, whirring, spinning, safe-safer-and-safest baby toys, on a mission to dive headfirst under the sofa and retrieve a tiny razor-sharp shard of broken pottery (from a vase that broke two years ago even though I KNOW I’ve cleaned under the sofa since then), and then howl bloody murder when I try to pry the slivered crockery from his chubby fingers.

Which, in a roundabout way, all leads me to my parent hack.

And here it is:

For parents of toddlers, an easy way to keep track of your car keys is to fashion a keychain from a pair of carbide-tipped, diamond-cut, serrated, meat shears.

(Or you can use a television remote. Kids seem to love those things, too.)


Now when you can’t find your keys, you can be sure that Junior will.


(For dog owners, you can substitute a tampon as a key chain.)


Voila!

Your keys will never go missing again.


Wasn’t that worth waiting for?

Letting My Freak Flag Fly

Let's face it: I haven't been posting a whole lot lately.

Every once in a while I write one of these "Here's why I'm not posting so much lately but if you just hang on for a while I promise to start posting more" in an attempt to salvage the last of my audience, and as soon as I write that post, my husband immediately emails me and tells me that, basically, I am lame.

No one wants to hear why I'm not posting more. They just want me to post.

Except that after a while, I think, people just give up waiting for me to post more, and with good reason.

Boo-hoo me.

Oh sure, I get a lot of clicks on my blog...except lately, most people out there from The Internets are looking for this picture of David Suzuki naked with a fig leaf. I swear, I get at least twenty hits a day with searches for that photo, and most of them are from the Czech Republic and Dubai. Kinky things going down in Dubai. The Czech Republic, I don't even want to know.

And so my once semi-faithful readership has moved on to more prolific pastures. Well... Slouching Mom still loves me with the eternal flame of Heathcliff for Cathy, and Jane for Mr. Rochester, and for that I am grateful. And Julie Pippert I pay $35.79 a month to read my blog and comment whenever she can. And then there is that gorgeous woman from i, obsess with the sexy hair and the sultry words and the ear she once sent me in blue velvet box (which is why she wears her hair long).

But other than that, some days it's my lonely violin against the hum of one cricket.

That cricket would be my sister.

Anyway, after having a third baby and almost immediately losing my readership due to said baby's favorite pastime of running with scissors and tossing himself down flights of stairs and my necessarily needing to be on call at all times to pry scissors from his tiny Cheeto-encrusted hands, I find that I now have a newfound freedom to be just really wacky-assed on my blog. I had sort of slipped into the Mommy Blog thang - and that's a whole fun genre to be sure, and the material is endless! (Until my oldest daughter gets her own computer and begins trolling my blog with anonymous comments dissing my poor sentence structure and telling eye-rolling tales about how I try to sing like Amy Winehouse in the shower.)

But I suppose I do begin censoring myself a bit. Why? I'm not sure. I mean, I read the other Mommy Blogs and, seriously, some of all y'all are twisted tighter than velcro pantyhose in a dryer. I mean that in the best way possible. Yous guys are nuts in your own endearing ways andI worship at your thrones built of pixels, Play-doh and martini glasses.

And I guess that even though I know that we were all once Not Moms and have our own stories of table dancing at lesbian rugby parties and shooting out ex-boyfriend's truck windows with a b.b. gun and dressing like jesters at Grateful Dead shows...

Oh what? It's not like I ever stole a horse like someone I could mention who happens to share my gene pool.

I don't know...I meet "real life" moms and they all seem so n.o.r.m.a.l and proficient at this Mom thing what with their hair-dos that are something more than a ponytail or a baseball cap, and their blouses that don't have odd light-brown stains on them just around the belly button like all mine do, and their secret knowledge of "how to get the floor mopped more than once a month" and, well, I'm not going out of my way to use my blog as a convincing argument that I should win Mother of the Year, but yeah, sure...I want to come across as...well...

Sane.

At least.

I mean, it doesn't take too many clicks to figure out who I am and where I live, and for gol's sake, I'm a Girl Scout Leader! A pillar of the community! I have to be careful, right? Okay, Halushki isn't threatening to steal Dooce's readership - epsecially not now - nor am I a household name in my neighborhood as "That Woman With The Blog Oh My Gol You've Got To Read Her".

But still.

I was holding my freak back a bit.

(I have to interrupt here to report that my husband just handed me a glass of teaberry wine and it's very sweet and minty and I'm not such a wine snob that I'll lie and say I'm not enjoying it because, well, I am. It's disgusting and I'll probably drink the entire bottle because it's so good.)


Anyway, look-it here....

I posted below about poop. Okay. No biggie. A little juvenile sure. My husband told me to grow up. But I'm rubber and he's glue and what he says bounces of me and sticks to him.

Then I found this other potty video that I thought was absolutely side-splittingly genius comedy and I wanted to share it with...well, with whoever...because it's genius that must be shared even if it is oh-so-very-wrong.

But then I began to question whether someone I know might Google me and find this post and then I wouldn't pass future background checks and I'd get kicked out of Girl Scouts for posting a video that shows an animated tiger-boy penis and then my children and I would be shunned at the playground should the neighborhood moms find out that I laughed at the little kid singing filthy rap lyrics while sitting on a potty.

Although, you know what?

No one is going to Google me and find this post.

And really, not too, too many other people are looking right now, anyway.

And what the hell, if getting kicked out of Girl Scouts is the worst thing that happens to me, I'm doing all right.

I can't stand all the permission slips and paperwork anyway.

So here it is...Nazi bathroom humor and animated tiger-boy penises. I think this video is funy as hell. If it clears the room, I'll just dance on the table naked.



And here's another.



Why am I watching Japanimation toilet training videos?

Who can say?

Is Mercury out of retrograde yet?

More importantly, where's that bottle of teaberry wine?

Poop For Peace

First of all, don't even ask.

I'm not telling you what I was Googling that lead me to this video.

Second of all, I strongly recommend that you show this video to any child between the ages of 5 and 10 - the years I like to refer to as the Poop-is-Hilarious Golden Years - to achieve instant godlike status in your home as being the funniest person alive on the face of the earth. Yeah, I get that parents aren't supposed to be friends with their kids, or be cool, nor should they be the source of introduction to even more doody jokes. But since the last words my 8 year old spoke to me today before getting on the bus were something like, "You are unfair and mean and I'm pretty sure that you grind children's bones to bake your bread and you love everyone else more than me even the lady who bags the groceries and broke our eggs..." - I don't remember the exact phrasing, but the bone imagery was especially effective when paired the teeth gnashing and tearing of her pigtails -

(And this all because I insisted that I would not sign her homework agenda book when she had not, in fact, finished her homework. Logical consequences are not pretty.)

Well, anyway, I need one of those cuddly, happy, connected moments with my kids that only a poop song can effectuate.

Afterwards, I'll immediately sit down and write "I am the grown-up" five-thousand times and then mail the lines off to Drs. Laura and Brazelton. I promise.

As soon as I'm done watching the Poop for Peace video again.

And then emailing it to my sister.

Because we are five.


(For anyone who is concerned that my children are being overly exposed to coarse humor, please do not fret. I'm teaching them French, as well.)




From The Poop Report

(ACHTUNG! The entire Poop Report site is not kid friendly. Tread carefully.)

"Today, humanity stands on the brink. Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel, Darfur... across the world, violence and anger overwhelm any progress towards peace and liberty. We are a divided species, basing our hatreds on even the most arbitrary classifications, unable to move past our quarrels to embrace common humanity. Since difference is all we can see, suffering is all we can expect.

That's why you should go poop right now.

Because today, April 13, is Poop For Peace Day.

Poop For Peace Day is not about protest or partisanship or politics. Poop For Peace Day is about acknowledging the fundamental basis of shared humanity: black or white, liberal or conservative, Christian or Muslim or Jew, we are all united in struggle against the tyranny of the bowel.

So print out your Poop for Peace guide sheet, drink some coffee to get things moving, and head off to the bathroom. As you grunt out your morning constitutional, think of the billions of people all across the world who are undergoing the exact same struggle. Think of the children of Iraq and the children of America. Think of Bush and Blair and Hussein and bin Laden, and think about the fact the twelve hours following Taco Bell are going to unfold for each of them in the exact same way. Think about how our differences are irrelevant -- we're all human beings. Our poop proves it.

Today, April 13, 2007, war is over -- if you grunt it."