Teeny Manolo

This is what it’s like to work for a celebrity. In limos, you are the one stuck on the jump seat while the boss gets the whole back to himself. In restaurants, you get the table by the bathroom door while the owners ply the celeb with Champagne and truffles. And when it comes to reader-submitted vintage YouTubes of Texans endangering their chillens for the sake of a tawdry few moments of fame, you get sloppy seconds.

So go over to The Manolo’s place for the very best in Baby Hater news. I’m going to drown my sorrows in Ovaltine…

That’s “Tim Burton,” not “Tuberculosis,” although you couldn’t tell to look at him, eh? Captions in the comments. No tears, no regrets, no standing downwind of these two on a warm day.

Cute, well-dressed kid though.

For some strange reason, this week just sort of sped by, and here it is Friday already!  I hope your week went as quickly as mine did.  And if it didn’t, I just so happen to have some serious man candy for you today.

To be honest, I was quite surprised that Jason Bateman beat out Benjamin Bratt in last week’s Faceoff.  I was sure many of you ladies were going to go for the tall, dark, and handsome BB, but Mr. Bateman (who will always occupy a soft spot in my heart for being Michael Bluth) won the contest quite handily.

So, I am going to start throwing some heavy hitters at y’all and see what happens. I also wanted to let you know what hard, backbreaking work it is looking at pictures of handsome man after handsome man, trying to determine which one is worthy of this contest. I do it all for you, my friends. All for you.

Ready?

 vs.

more at twiigs.com…

Because this is what the universe really needed. Oh, yes it did.

To fill up the precious, precious time left over from taking care of your house (if any) your family (if any) your job (if any) and your social life (if any) the little elves of Silicon Valley have now produced a social networking site specifically for the progesterone crowd. Because it’s a well-known scientific fact that the state of pregnancy is so mind-altering that one loses all ability to or interest in conversing with the non-pregnant, suffering a sort of temporary hormone poisoning of the brain in preparation for the nonintellectual tasks of diaper changing and breastfeeding. I refer you to the Law of Parent/Child IQ Equivalence, which states that when a baby is born the IQ of its parents drops to that of the child, since any normally intellectual person would go raving mad if s/he had to converse about the texture of poop and the semiotics of Playmobil toys 24/7. So naturally someone thought there was money to be made there, and built a walled compound to contain those conversations and keep them out of the mainstream.

Yes, it’s Facebook for preggos, and it’s called Babble Playground.

Babble. Ah, the power of metaphor.

You would not believe the furor this picture has caused on the internets.  I won’t bother linking to any of them, if you’re curious you can simply Google something with Angelina and Cheetos.

The gist of quite a few snarky posts were that ohmigod, Angelina Jolie feeds her kids junk food! Bad mother alert! Bad mother alert!

You know what I say? 

Fabulous!

As long as junk food is eaten in moderation, I don’t see anything wrong with it. And I highly doubt that these kids have Pop Tarts for breakfast, Cheetos for lunch and hot dogs for dinner every day.

Kids like junk food.  Should they be fed junk food at every meal? No.  Should they get junk food every time they want it? No.

But.

If a mom can’t relax and let her kids have some now and then, then it becomes the forbidden food that they want to have all the time.  It’s basic psychology that to deny access to something makes it all the more attractive.  And trust me, they will find a way to get it without you knowing, all the while pretending to crave your special brown rice and broccoli recipe.   I know this from experience.

So the self-proclaimed food police can have their macrobiotic diets and whatnot while the rest of us have a little snack.

Ice cream, anyone?

Voice of GenX (sorry, Douglas Coupland) McSweeney’s genius and 826Valencia founder Dave Eggers talks (for nearly half an hour) about engaging with the public school system. Lengthy, but worthwhile.

Somehow, it just seemed topical. For some reason.

I dare say that we have all been there.

You’re sitting in the movie theater, after having shelled out your hard earned dough on some overpriced tickets and a bucket-sized Coke.   The commercials pre-show is running, and you are trying to figure out which movie Adam Sandler starred in that mentioned the devil, or some such frippery.   You anxiously await the start of your PG-13 or R-rated movie, which may or may not include nudity, blood, cursing, convoluted plotlines, sex or any combination thereof in copious quantities. 

Then, to the horror of the entire movie theater, they come in.  The people with the little kid.

Now, I’m going to exclude infants from this category, which is probably a controversial move.  I am of the belief that the decibel level in most theaters is a bit too loud for such tender ears, but I have seen babies who have slept and/or nursed throughout the entire movie.  I’m feeling charitable today, so I’m going to give them a pass.

No, this is the toddler or the preschooler who will definitely NOT be napping or nursing their way happily through the movie.

This is the toddler or preschooler who has no business whatsoever seeing scary, sexy, bloody, curse-y, complicated-y types of movies.  The one who will bounce around in their seat, as bored toddlers are wont to do.  The one who will babble some type of information about Barney as you are trying to grasp who exactly the ambassador to Russia is, and why he is tied up in a hotel room.  Or the one who, and this is a true story, will scream as loud as hell when Nicole Kidman has that really freaky scene in the film when she is dead but thinks she is alive, but then finds out she is the one who is dead.  You know the one.  I think that child is scarred for life, and only after she had been gauranteed nightmares for the next six months, minimum, did her parents remove her from the theater.  Which was like, an hour and ten minutes too late.

So, come on up to the front of the theater, you Lazy Parenting Award Winners,^TM because we all feel the overwhelming need to pelt you with our popcorn as we shout, “Get a babysitter already, will you?”

Ah, teachers. Who’d be one? Like nursing, it’s a career path of critical importance to society, yet vastly undervalued both in public prestige and in the critical area of renumeration. That’s how you spell it, right? “Renumeration.”

What can I say? I was homeschooled as a toddler. Then public schools. Then hippie boarding school where they told my mother “Raincoaster doesn’t come to class. She sits in the hall and reads books. But they are very good books, so we’re giving her an A.” So there’s lots of blame to go around.

In any case, I’d like to share with you the case of United States District Judge Samuel B. Kent, a man who obviously paid attention in school. It should warm the very cockles of any underappreciated teacher’s neglected heart to know that out there, somewhere, perhaps in the back of class, perhaps hidden behind that big Samoan kid in the third row, there may be a Samuel B. Kent of her own, a student who not only listened in class, but who learned, and that profoundly.

Watch the master at work (via Metroblog):

Both attorneys have obviously entered into a secret pact — complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words — to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the Court would be so charmed by their child-like efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed. Whatever actually occurred, the Court is now faced with the daunting task of deciphering their submissions.

With Big Chief tablet readied, thick black pencil in hand, and a devil-may-care laugh in the face of death, life on the razor’s edge sense of exhilaration, the Court begins…

And concludes:

At this juncture, Plaintiff retains, albeit seemingly to his befuddlement and/or consternation, a maritime law cause of action versus his alleged Jones Act employer, Defendant Unity Marine Corporation, Inc. However, it is well known around these parts that Unity Marine’s lawyer is equally likable and has been writing crisply in ink since the second grade. Some old-timers even spin yarns of an ability to type. The Court cannot speak to the veracity of such loose talk, but out of caution, the Court suggests that Plaintiff’s lovable counsel had best upgrade to a nice shiny No. 2 pencil or at least sharpen what’s left of the stubs of his crayons for what remains of this heart-stopping, spine-tingling action.

In either case, the Court cautions Plaintiff’s counsel not to run with a sharpened writing utensil in hand — he could put his eye out.

IT IS SO ORDERED.

Selah.

As I have mentioned before, the Munchkin is playing T-ball this year.  Nothing excites him more than being able to put on his uniform, which is a blue jersey with his name on the back and his sparkling white pants.

Wait, did I just say sparkling white pants?

Listen, obviously the T-ball league is run by a bunch of men, because no woman in their right mind would ever sentence another woman to the laundry hell that is a five year old in white pants.  Who plays on grass.  Which is sometimes muddy.  Which results in pants that wind up being not so sparkling white at the end of a game.

A fellow mom was sitting next to me as we watched practice last week, and she asked me what I used to get the Munchkin’s pants clean.  She told me that she didn’t want to use bleach, but had heard that Oxi-Clean worked well.

I had to fess up that I do use a bit of bleach, else the pants would already be gray-green from the knee down.

She told me that nothing she had used got the pants clean, so she just went ahead and bought a few other pairs.

It was at that point that I wanted to leap off my folding chair and cry, “We must stop the insanity! Who gives a crap if our sons’ pants are not pure white?  Does it make us bad mothers if they are not?”

The answer is, of course not.

But if only we lived in a world where dirty pants were worn with pride.  They would be the mark of a dedicated player and a mother who is too proud to get rid of her child’s badge of honor for sacrificing their body for that ground ball.

Maybe someday.

But until then, I’m sticking with the bleach.

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