Well, we survived Thanksgiving. Barely. Between going to two houses, making two different kinds of stuffing, (”We have to have Stove Top!” “I don’t care what kind you bring, just not Stove Top.” )and comparing pies, I’m surprised we didn’t all just float away on a sea of tryptophan and whipped cream.

And now, let the frenzy begin! DH scored major points with the girls by putting up Christmas lights on Saturday. They’ve wanted lights every year, and every year he complains that they’re just too hard to put up [DH: They ARE hard!]. Well, apparently, this year it got easier [DH: Nope!], because it took him relatively little time [DH: 3 hours in the FREEZING cold], and he was filled with all sorts of unrighteous pride [DH: ok, I’ll admit to this] because……Behold! We were the first on our street to get lights up! Seriously. This was a big issue for him. Why he had to be first, I do not understand, but hey, if it gets the lights up, I will not complain. [DH: It seems like every year we are playing catch-up to get all of our Christmas stuff done. I was just happy to be a little ahead of the game for once!]

And so begins the season of re-putting up decorations on the tree daily that little destructo-man pulls off. (Fortunately they are all plastic towards the bottom of the tree). So begins the season of “Don’t go in there! No reason, really, just don’t!” So begins the season of looking forward to getting the mail, because instead of solely bills and junk mail, there are Christmas cards from friends and family. So begins the season of “Where’s the tape? Have you seen the scissors? Again, no reason really. Just wondering for the sake of organizing the house.” And so begins the season of dusting off the dial to the car radio (instead of listening to children’s music CD’s) because they start to play Christmas carols, and that is something my kids and I both enjoy. Or they are forced to enjoy, anyway, because that IS the music that gets played in the car.

So begins the season when network television becomes watchable, with Rudolph and Charlie Brown making their annual pilgrimage into my living room. Break out the hot chocolate and the popcorn, because “The Year Without a Santa Clause” is on! How I love the annual war between Heat-Meiser and Cold-Meiser.

So begins the season of really focusing, even more than usual, on Christ, His birth, and His life.

Bring it on.

So I was chatting with a woman I know who is almost 90 years old. She was complaining that her hair needed to get done. I asked her if she went to the beauty parlor that was located in her retirement community. She said no, she goes to a woman she has been going to for oh, 15 years or so. Her son takes her out to her gal.

“My son is so sweet. He lifts me up out of my wheelchair and sets me down into the shampoo chair. Then, when the ladies are done with me in the shampoo chair, he lifts me back up and out, and sets me back down in my wheelchair, and my little girl does my hair then, sets it in curlers, you know.”

I’ve met her son. He eats breakfast with her every morning. I had an image of him gently picking up his bird-like mother and settling her in her shampoo chair, then gently lifting her back to her wheelchair. This son is taking time out of his no-doubt busy schedule to get his mother to the beauty shop, just so she can keep going to the same little girl who knows how to get her curls sitting just right.

I scolded this woman for telling me something that touched me so much. After all, the residents aren’t supposed to see the rehab staff cry! She chuckled a little nervously, and said, “Are you saying that you envy me?”

I told her, in no uncertain terms, that she was, indeed, a woman to be envied. Then I went to the bathroom and made sure there were no mascara marks all over my face.

Jacob had his swim lesson today, and generally did very well, if I do say so myself. The class comprises of about 6 kids, and the teacher does what he can to give them all individual attention. Most days, the 6 kids line up along the wall of the pool, and the teacher takes them out, one by one, doing whatever it is he’s trying to show them.

Today he was teaching them the rather complicated concept of side breathing while trying to do the free-style stroke. Never mind that my 3 year old hasn’t a clue what “alternate” or “left hand” or probably even “breathing” means, he hung in there like a champ. A clueless champ, but a champ, nevertheless. Still, the complicated explanation paired with too long just hanging out on the wall in a not-so warm pool got the kids wiggling, talking, dunking, laughing, anything but really listening to the teacher. The teacher did what all teachers do: gave a little “Hey, I’m talkin’ heeyah!” and told the kids to shhh. One kid refused to shh, and kept trying to engage Jacob in more general silliness. The teacher gave him a stern look and said, “Zip it”, and then mimed zipping his mouth.

That kid then got back into the teacher’s face (the teacher is A LOT bigger than this kid, mind you) and said, “No, YOU zip it!” Yes folks, this is a kid who is probably not yet 6 years old, sassing a man who literally holds that kid’s life in his hands. Not the smartest little booger, I would say.

To the teacher’s immense credit, he kept his cool, and simply told this brat that he could continue to swim and listen quietly, or he could sit on the edge of the pool for the rest of the lesson. He had to repeat the threat twice, but the kid eventually calmed down, and I didn’t hear any other major snottiness.

After the lesson was over, the teacher and I were chatting, and he said, “I’ve been doing this stuff for 30 years, and kids used to call me “sir”. The attitude from kids this days…”, and he just shook his head. “There are a few exceptions, of course, but on the whole, kids are just don’t respect anybody anymore.”

Is that true, do you think? Are kids just brattier than they were 30 years ago? If so, what caused the shift? Are we, the parents of the future generation, raising a bunch of snot nosed, selfish little pricks who think it’s ok to tell a man 12 times their age to “zip it!”? How do we stop this wave of total brat-o-rama?

As for me, as Jacob and I were walking out, I marched him up to the teacher and demanded that he tell the teacher “Thank you”. The teacher smiled and waved us on, clearly aware of the point I was trying to make.

The OTHER kids may be jerks, but MY son, of course, has perfect manners.

There’s a toss up for the title of this little blurb soo…

Conscientiousness vs. Convenience or How I Sold my Soul for Cargo Space and some Huggies.
OR (I just love OR’s)
Oil Vei, My Handbasket is a Honda!

This fall marked some major milestones in my life. Among other things, we moved into our first house and bought a car. Earlier this year I had my first child and my husband finished a big part of his schooling. We, at age 30, are “growing up”.
Part of being a grown-up, to me anyway, is being responsible. Making wise choices, being a good citizen. I’ve always kind of fancied myself as a bit of a socially and environmentally conscious person. I’ve spent my adult life letting my dollar do the talking when it comes to business and trade practices and so forth, choosing (when and where possible) to shop at stores and buy brands that I believe to be more corporately responsible than their counterparts, often spending a bit more to feel better about my consumption. Call me a bleeding heart if you must. In addittion to my retail practices, I’ve always driven a Honda Civic and made the choice to do so with fuel economy and emissions standards in mind.

Well folks, in the span of but a few weeks I’ve blown that all to hell.

The new house we bought is not anywhere near the “big-box” store that I prefer to patronize. While admittedly still a “big-box” store, it has a bit better reputation as a corporation and as a community member than its evil step sister Wal-Mart. You guessed it. Turns out the new house is VERY close to the local Waldemort. Tantalizingly close. And I need diapers. That scoundrel smiley face taunts me as I write this. It is altogether likely that in the madness that is “falling prices”, my favorite nappy is at an incredibly low price right across the bridge from my house.
Which brings me to my second consumer transgression. In order to pack the Huggies home and still have room for the rest of the groceries and the stroller and the library books and the diaper bag and not have parcels piled up around my son in his car seat I needed more room.
[Head hung in shame]
I bought an SUV.
[\Head hung in shame]
I know I know! Aghh! In all fairness, it isn’t a Suburban or anything. It has a small car chassis! It gets 25 mpg! It’s still a Honda! Aw crap, it’s still an SUV. It’s still a glutten with gas compared to the alternative. It’s still a bit of a road hog. But oh baby, I drank the kool-aid. I can SEE out of it (as a short person this is marvelous) and I can put so much STUFF in it. I’m gonna feel like an actual authentic mom navigating around the parking lot at…

Wal-Mart.

And then I’m going straight to hell.

Hey, we made it into the Salt Lake Tribune! Ok, granted, the article was all about Bannergate over at T&S , but still, Mormon Mommy Wars is mentioned . They like us, they really like us! Woo-hoo!

Don’t get me started on the topic of the article, though. The whole Banner of Heaven thing just blows my mind, and I still can’t figure it all out. Initially I thought that either the people who did it are just astonishingly egotistical or just a bunch of jerks. My husband, who knows several of the perpertrators personally, insists that they are neither, so I’m not sure where that leaves us. Oh well.

But hey, negative coverage of the Bloggernacle notwithstanding, MMW is an acknowledged part of it all. Hooray!

The other night my oldest daughter came downstairs holding her big kitty. It is stuffed, of course. I would never have a real cat in my house, because a) they are evil, and 2) my dog would kill it. My dog is a very sweet little thing that’s friendly to everybody - but a cat shows up, and she’s psycho dog from hell. But I really don’t like cats, which seems to be the general feeling among posters on this blog.

But my daughters LOVE kitties. “They are soooooo sweeet!” “We can put Maggie outside!” “Come on, Mommy, can’t we bring this kitty home?” “Why can’t we have a cat?” “Amy has a cat.” And my personal favorite: “When I grow up and get my own house, I’m going to have a cat.”

And that is fine with me. When you grow up, do whatever you want in the cat department. Go ahead and discover the evils of all things feline. I’m pretty sure that now my oldest is compiling a list of things she’s going to have when she grows up that her mean mother vetoes.

Which reminds me - I wonder how I’m doing on the list of things I would always do/have when I grew up? You know, that magical time when nobody could tell me what to do anymore.

My Non-Comprehensive List of: When I Grow Up, I Will:

1. Eat sugar cereal every day. Preferably Crunch Berries. (I actually do usually have Crunch Berries in the house now. I just really like them, though it’s by no means my daily breakfast).

2. Not make my children take lessons of any sort. No dance lessons, no piano lessons, nothing that seriously cuts into their play time. (I have, of course, changed my mind on this one).

3. Make my children lunches every day, and those lunches will include all things COOL, including chips AND drinks. I will NOT tell my kids just to get water from the fountain, while all their friends pull out their groovy Capri Suns. (The irony in this one is that I actually began to do this - with water bottles to drink, because it turns out that Capri Sun=not so good for you - and then my daughter requested hot lunch, because NOBODY brings cold lunch to school. Sigh….)

4. Never be late. Ever. And I will NEVER pick up my children 20 minutes after everyone else has gone home. (I’m doing pretty well on this one. I am occasionally late, but it is by no means a chronic thing, and I do always pick my kids up on time).

5. Keep my house clean and organized. (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA)

I have a friend who buys tons of fruit roll-ups because her parents would never buy them for her. I have another friend who spends too much money on cars because she was embarrassed at the clunker her parents always drove around. Not a financially wise decision, but a very emotional one. And one gal I know won’t iron anything, ever, because her chore was to iron all the linens in the house, and she had to do it every week, and now the mere thought of ironing makes her ill.

So I wonder if my daughters will turn into crazy cat ladies, with 30 cats around, just because they could never have one growing up. I wonder what they will hate and resent about how I raised them, and in what form it will manifest itself - i.e. massive amounts of fruit roll-ups in the food storage.

Heaven help me. And heaven help all parents who mess up their kids without knowing it. So I guess that means - God bless us, every one.

Carrie made this comment on a previous post:

“I feel far more comfortable when I am working in my field than when I am being a mom. I think I feel l am better at being a designer than I am at being a mom (at least for now), so I feel more confident in that arena. The funny thing is when people ask what I do, I automatically say I am a SAHM even though I work about 20 hours a week. I wonder why that is?”

I think Carrie’s feelings of being more competent in a professional arena than in her own home are not uncommon. When I went briefly went back to work full time after Jacob was born, I was overwhelmed with the feeling of confidence I had dealing with the problems at work compared to the guesswork of dealing with with a alien newborn at home. Interesting that we can feel so comfortable solving professional problems, but feel overwhelmed and helpless when it comes to calming a crying baby. Or soothing a grumpy toddler. Or cleaning up an entire box of Cheerios that has been dumped out on the carpet as a snack for the dog. (FYI-A dog can eat half a box of cereal in about 3 and half seconds. Who knew.)

And I think this brings up another interesting question–can we still say we are SAHMs even if we work a little bit outside the home? I’m working now, but I still consider myself a SAHM, just because I’m working so little. And yet, technically, I guess I’m a working mom. I had a friend who worked way more than part time, and yet she would talk about being home with her kids. It used to bug the heck out of me, because I would scream at her in my head, “Stay-at-home moms don’t get paychecks!” (Of course, now she has a nanny, so now I scream “Stay at home moms don’t have nannies!)

Are there gradations of being a SAHM, if you will, or do you automatically lose your status if you actually get a paycheck somewhere along the line? And if your paycheck is a pretty sad little sum, does it even count? Maybe we should have a pay scale category type thing: $100/month, well, that’s so pathetic you’re still considered a SAHM. $500/week–whoa, you’ve hit the bigtime baby–off to the working woman category for you!

This week marks my first official week back into the work force. It’s not a spectacular entry–I’m only working about 10 hours a week, give or take, but it’s definitely added something extra to my schedule, to be sure. The transition was a little bumpy, and we had some unexpected child-care issues, but all in all, everything went pretty well.

My first day, I felt like a spy in disguise.

People kept asking me questions about patients, looking to me to give answers, asking for my signature on mounds of paperwork.

I even got to wear a nametag.

All of these things made me giggle a little bit on the inside, because the whole time I was thinking, “Ha! These people don’t realize that they’re not talking to a speech pathologist, they’re really talking to a MOM!”

The whole day felt like that until the other speech pathologist said, “So, where else do you work?”

BUSTED! I paused for a second, contemplating some pithy and enigmatic reply, but nothing came. I finally just said, “This is it. I have a son at home, and the rest of the time I’m a mom.” I felt she had exposed my secret, and I wondered what she would think.

To my surprise, her face lit up and she said, “Oh, that’s what I want to do when I have kids! I’m getting married this year, and when we have kids, I don’t want to work either! Has it worked out for you?”

I smiled back at her and said, “Yeah, it’s worked out great.” And it has.

Of course, when I went back to my regular life, I expected a huge welcome, hail the conquering hero, all of that. After all, Jacob’s mother had been gone for hours! How had he survived?

When I walked in, Jacob just looked up from snuggling with his Daddy while watching a movie and said, “Oh, hey Mom.”

So much for the hero’s welcome. At least he didn’t say, “Hey, I’m hungry. Go make dinner.” Well, not immediately, anyway.

Truer words were never spoken. The little nose, the tiny whiskers, the little, beady red eyes that bulged when Bobo the python squeezed it to death. The mouse we fed to our snake tonight was indeed, so soft and cute. Jacob pronounced it so as he fled from the room in tears.

Yes, we fed our snake tonight, for the first time since we acquired the reptile, oh, about a month ago. Ball pythons don’t eat very often, are opportunistic feeders in the wild, and tend to get obese in captivity (only in America are our pet snakes too fat, too!), so I wasn’t sure exactly how to proceed. The people who had the snake before us said he ate about once every two months, but sometimes more if he seemed to be on the prowl. Well, he seemed prowly, so we gave him a mouse. He disposed of it with suprising and sickening speed. I was actually quite impressed.

Jacob was not.

I prepped him pretty well when we bought the mouse, telling him that it wasn’t going to be our pet, that it was really Bobo’s food. He’s told everybody and anybody who will listen that our snake “eats live mice”.Still, he insisted on checking out the rodent in the carrying cardboard box, which was labeled “Handle me with Love”. He also was really eager to watch Bobo eat the mouse, so I didn’t let him play with it, or touch it, or even name it, because I knew he would freak out if Bobo ate “Puffy”, or something like that.

He freaked out anyway. That mouse was, after all, so soft and cute.

So now we have a dilemma. Do we keep the snake? Do I use this opportunity to teach my child about nature, the great circle of life, and try to break his obvious bias for furry animals? Or do we just get rid of the creature and feel relieved while wallowing in our own irresponsibility as a pet owner? I feel strongly about taking responsibility for the animals one chooses to bring into one’s home. I mean, it’s like kids, right–don’t have ‘em if you’re not going to raise them! Still, I guess my child’s mental stability does come first. It won’t do to be a good pet owner if my own child has nightmares about getting eaten by a python, now, would it?

As squeamish as I am about the whole thing, it was pretty cool to watch the snake hunt. It was like the Discovery Channel, right there in the comfort of our own home.

Ok - so, is the controversy over? Can we go back to being Mommies now? Oh, wait, that’s one job you can never quit. Sorry (shakes head), I forgot that for a second.

Anyhooo, this is a post to ask all you mommies out there one simple question: What’s for dinner?

That’s right. I want your dinners, because it’s very clear to me that I lack life skills, and dinner seems to be one of them, and so I want to steal yours. So please post up one (or two? Dare to dream!) of your favorite dinners.

Here are the rules:

1-It must be a main dish. (We can do side dishes/salads/desserts later if y’all want to, but for now, let’s keep it simple)
2-It must be fairly easy to make. (Again, with my lack of life skills….)
3-It must be something your kids will actually eat. I don’t want recipes for fancy meals that are totally yummo, but require me to make a box of mac and cheese for the kids. (Again, we can do that later if requested.)

OK, I’ll start us out. We call this one: Not Just the Same Old Chicken

Chicken (breasts or thighs will do)
One bottle of Russian dressing
One package of onion soup mix
Jar of Apricot/Pineapple Jam (I like to use about 1/2 the jar, but if you like really sweet, go ahead and use the whole jar)

Dump all of it into the crock pot, cook on low for 3-4 hours, or until chicken is falling apart. (If you use the crock pot, you don’t even have to thaw the chicken first - bonus!) Or, if you prefer, mix all ingredients together, place in a 9×13 pan, bake in a 350 degree oven for 1 - 1 1/2 hours. (depending on your oven).

That’s it! It goes really well with pasta, (the extra sauce is great on noodles) or
it’s also really great on baked potatoes. If you’re going low-carb, well, then, I don’t know what to tell you. Serve it with steak.

So, there you have it. Me blatantly turning this blog into a recipe site, just for now. I just am really tired of recycling the old meals over and over, and I am coming from a house where my husband makes most of the meals! But when it’s my turn, well, let’s just say my repertoire is very limited, and I could really use some help. So….HELP. Plus, I can’t really be the only one out there who needs help with dinner, now, can I?

Oh, one more semi-rule. Should you choose to post a link to a website with recipes, please point to one (or two) recipes that you make on a regular basis and really like. Not just, “Hey, I googled recipes, and this one looks good.” I want real meals that real moms actually make. Thank you.

Ok, Adrianne has taken a lot of heat around here. A lot. Thanks for sticking around, Adrianne. A lesser woman would have fled. You’ve got some heuvos, girl.

I was checking out the discourse between Tracy M and Adrianne over at Dandelion Mama (seriously you guys, check it out. I’m too lazy to post a link, just click on the sidebar, and dig through the August archives. It’s Tracy’s very first post.) There has been a lot of talk about how young Adrianne is, and she said something on Tracy’s blog about how her opinion shouldn’t be less respected just because she is 22.

Hmm. She might be right about that. But then again, she might not.

My older sisters read this blog occasionally, and the oldest one, a fantastic pillar of the faith who has definitely been through some serious motherhood battles, says that she just has to laugh at all of us young moms, twiddling about this and that. “Just live a little bit longer, and you’ll get it!” she says.

My visiting teacher said the same thing. I ranted and raved about some catastrophic mess that befell my house because Jacob is 3, and she said, “I’ve got a mop and some cleaning supplies. Those problems, I can fix. Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.” And her accounts of trying to curtail her teenager’s underage drinking and drug use shut me up real fast. I’ll take fingerpainting with poop any day over substance abuse, thank you very much.

So should we dismiss our problems because we are young? Does being young really mean that we don’t know anything? We are all dumb and naive at some point in our lives (some longer than others, to be sure), but that’s something that usually, we can’t really help. It’s not Adrianne’s fault she’s 22.

Now, of course, if young people have stupid ideas, just because they’re young, does that mean we should talk them out of them, or should we just wait until they’re old? Should we try to educate each other, or just let each other learn as we go, and hope nobody has to go the hospital because of anything too stupid along the way?
And don’t hesitate to comment because you’re young. Or old. Or crazy. We take everything except spam. Just don’t call anybody a JackAss.

With that, dear friends, I’m going to bed. Finally. In my sweats. Which are still dirty.

I have tried to change this about myself - I have tried to ignore it, I have tried to dance around it. The only thing I haven’t tried is embracing it - so that’s what I’m trying to do. Here’s the thing - I have no life skills.

I cannot do even the smallest amount of plumbing. At all. Currently, my toilet moans at me horribly whenever I flush it, and so I ignore it and go to the other bathrooms in the house so that my house doesn’t explode. DH assures me it’s not going to explode, but, you know, better safe than sorry.

I cannot garden. Occasionally I can tell a weed from a plant, but not always. I’m not even sure it’s most of the time. After all, some weeds are pretty, too. And i can’t trim my little tree/bush things evenly, no matter how hard I try, because they always look even at first, and then I take a step back, and everything’s skewampus. It’s kind of a metaphor for life.

I can barely cook. I can cook enough to not starve. But not enough so that my family actually enjoys what we’re eating. As we say after a meal like that “well, it filled the void, anyway.” Maybe I should move to England? I hear everyone is a bad cook there? Yes?

I cannot do home repairs of any kind. I try, occasionally, and then I find I can’t replace the ‘drill bits’ (if that is, indeed, their real name) in the drill, even after reading the directions a hundred times. I tried to replace the hardware on my bathroom cabinets as a surprise for DH. Instead I ended up calling him in tears because the $%$%!!!$% drill thing would not work. And the measurements were off.

I cannot decorate. At all. I have no sense of what home decor would look good where, I just know that when I do it, it’s not a pretty picture. I have to recruit my sister who lives in a different state to come and hang my pictures for me. Truly. I have done this. And she came. And made my house pretty. I cannot go shopping without her, or know where to put a new rug, or if a picture is hung too high on the wall. It’s sad, but true. I now have a decorator friend who helps me out. Which is good, because my sister is not coming in time to help me figure out which of my Christmas decorations are nice, which ones are crap, and where they should go to maximize the holiday spirit.

And lastly, and most pathetically of all, I cannot dress myself. I can’t. I don’t know if things fit, or if they’re too short, too tight, too loose, or if that’s simply not the way that particualr shirt is worn. I am stuck in the era of jeans and T-shirts, but I can’t even do those right, because apparently my jeans are too big in the waist and too short at the bottom. And even T-shirts turned on me and became difficlut to figure out. Too long! Too short! Don’t tuck it in. Yes, tuck that one in, obviously. I don’t know if jewelry is trendy and cool, or lame and trying too hard. And which shoes are appropriate with what? AAAAIEEEEE!

So, I am embracing this about myself. I’ve spent too long battling it. I’ve spent too much time staring at the wall trying to figure out what picture to hang there, and too much money trying to buy the right bedding that will finally make my bedroom cute. I’m just going to focus on playing with my kids, playing with my friends, playing with my husband, and traveling around to see random plays.

I’m going to try to have my kids have memories of Mom laughing and singing, (although they often tell me to stop singing, it’s kind of annoying) and not stressing over her messy house that she can’t manage to keep clean. (That’s another skill I totally missed out on when they were passing them out. Keeping a house clean is fundamentally impossible to do. In my world, anyway.) I have to embrace that we all have different talents, and mine somehow don’t seem to be of much use in this world. Maybe the next one. There’s always hope.

And yet, somehow, I want my children to have life skills. I want them to be able to function where I somehow cannot. Hopefully that’ll work out somehow. Maybe with enough faith.

Adrienne has noticed something about the SAHM she encounters during the day. She thinks we look like crap.

She wonders: what it is about SAHMs that make us think we can let ourselves go? The ponytails and sweats, no make-up. Apparantly, there was something about this on Oprah, where lots of SAHMs said that they had let themselves go, and it has made them depressed and sad. Do we all have to shuffle around, looking so frumpy? Can’t we make it a priority to make ourselves look nice? If we have time to blog, we have time to fix ourselves up a little bit. We would all feel better if we looked better. (Adrienne, I think this is the crux of the issue–looking better so we all feel better. Am I headed in the right direction here?)

Ok. Let’s talk about that.

First, let’s start with some basic issues that a non-mom doesn’t get:

1) Sleep deprivation. It’s constant. You can’t possibly understand how tired one human being could possibly get and still be required to function unless you are a mother, or one of those soldiers in Vietnam tortured and brainwashed with no sleep. Getting up 45 minutes earlier to look good for people you don’t care about (because the people you do care about, your children, could care less what you look like, and you’ve got at least 8 hours before your husband gets home!) is really not that appealing. Ever.

2) The messiness factor. My loving sister gave me a beautiful leather jacket for Christmas when I was pregnant, and it sat for 2 years in my closet before I wore it. Why? Because I didn’t want to get baby body juice all over it. We wear sweats because kids are messy, and thus moms are always messy. We don’t want to ruin nice clothes, so sweats it is for those oh so fancy trips to Target.

3) Ever tried putting on make-up with a little kid around? Jacob ruined 3 lipsticks, a blush, and an expensive eyeliner before I finally figured out I couldn’t put make-up on anywhere except for in the car while I was driving when he was safely strapped in, far, far away from those magical and permanent staining items. Luckily, the day he ruined my lipstick, I was wearing sweats.

4) Showering with a small child around is not as easy as you might think. And leaving any child unattended for 45 minutes while you do anything with your hair is a recipe for disaster. You may ask, why not shower while your child naps and make yourself look all lovely when he’s asleep? Well, that’s a good point, unless you want to sleep when your child sleeps (see #1 above), or unless your child naps in the afternoon (which accounts for like, 99% of all toddlers), which leaves you the morning to go to Target stinky and ponytailed, providing more fuel for non-mothers to say, “Wow, she’s really let herself go.”

I don’t think that motherhood automatically gives us license to eat bon-bons, get fat and groty and never take care of ourselves. But I think it’s hard to realize when you are not a mom how little time we have to do just that–take care of ourselves. So the next time you see a tired, bedraggled woman pushing a cart through the grocery store in a ponytail and sweats, please don’t wonder why she doesn’t have any make-up on. Just be proud that she’s trying to actually buy real food and not ordering pizza all the time to feed her kids. And remember that the grocery store is not the Ritz Carlton. There are no dresscodes there, after all. At least not the last time I checked.

This is, of course, just one woman’s opinion. Adrienne feels strongly that this is an important issue, so please, ladies, I want everybody’s 2 cents. You could even toss in a dime if you’re feeling particularly perky.

And FYI, I wrote this entire post while wearing sweats. Dirty ones.