Not too surprisingly, potatoes won out as your most favorite veggie. This is not hard to understand since there are so many delicious ways to eat them. Next up were asparagus and broccoli in a tie for second. Not a big broccoli fan, but give me some grilled asparagus brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt, and I’m a happy person. Eggplant and carrots were tied for third. Which was a bit shocking, as I had no idea people loved eggplant so much.

Now, you know I just have to ask about fruit.

The real Ben Browder won out handily over David Blaine, and thus shall ascend to the vaunted CDF Hall of Fame.  Maybe I should start handing out cigars to the winners?

So I’ve got a brand new set of papas for you today.

The first is an actor who was apparently on The O.C. and was in Easy A (fantastic movie!) and Twilight  (crappy movie!)but isn’t someone with a huge amount of name recognition.

The second is also an actor with quite a bit of name recognition, although has faded out of the spotlight since his uber famous sitcom stopped airing.  But there’s always reruns!

VERSUS

If someone could answer that question for me, I’d be grateful to know when the light will be showing at the end of this long and torturous tunnel.

You see, my beautiful, outgoing, mile-a-minute 2 1/2 year old still does not sleep through the night.

Well, Glinda, that’s fairly normal for her age, you say.  It’s a myth that all toddlers sleep through the night.

You would be right.

However, do most toddlers stay up for HOURS?  When I say hours, I mean that last night she was up from 3am to 4:30am and the night before she was up from 12:30am to 3:30am.  This goes on for usually three to four days a week.

She used to spend most of this time screeching, but she’s gotten a little bit better.  We used to think that it was teething pain, but that is no longer the case as she now has all the teeth she is going to have for a while.  We will give her some water, maybe change her diaper, and we certainly don’t sit there and entertain her. However, she has a horrific time going back to sleep, even though she initially falls asleep fairly quickly.

We co-sleep with her, but have also tried leaving her alone, which hasn’t worked very successfully.  And truly, we just can’t take it anymore.  It is impossible for me to predict if she will nap or what time she should go to bed from day to day, which drives this routine-loving mom crazy.

We tried speaking to our pediatrician about the issue, but he blew us off and said it was probably just teething.

My tired husband (who has to get up at 5am for work) and I, who usually have to take shifts during her awake periods, are at the end of our rope.  We talk daily about leaving the kids with some water and crackers and checking ourselves into a hotel.  Uh, jokingly, of course.  As if! As if I would think of doing that.  For more than five minutes.

I never knew how wonderful a sleeper my son was until my daughter came along.  He was sleeping all night from 9 months on, and can still sleep through almost anything.

Any advice?  Because I will admit that I am far from a perfect parent.

My son is going on a trip to Sacramento this weekend with his grandpa, and we told him he needed to get a haircut this week.

“I can’t get a haircut!  I want a mohawk!”

Uhhhhh, whaaaat?

As a child of the 80′s, I have absolutely nothing against a mohawk.  I actually don’t have a problem with my 9 year old sporting a Mohawk if that is what he really wants to do, which it apparently is.

But.

I’m wondering where the hell this came from.  We currently don’t know anyone with a mohawk, and I’m trying to figure out where he saw a person with a mohawk that he now wants to emulate.

I tried to discuss with him that despite the fact that it seems to be a rather carefree, rebel hairstyle, it requires quite a bit of work to keep it looking decent, including rather frequent haircuts.  I also told him that he would probably have to start using a lot of hair gel.

The mohawk is currently on hold, pending my son’s decision on how exactly how much he hates hair gel and haircuts.  Which up to this point has been quite a bit.

Self-expression is a bitch.

If you’ve had a hectic week or so, just looking at these will lower your blood pressure.

 via

Ben Browder needs to win just one more CDF to place himself in the Hall of Fame.  Will it happen?  Or will our next challenger boot him out of nirvana at the last second?

You tell me.

Our next competitor is best known for his stunts, although he claims to be a magician.

Also, I thought you could use a six-pack for the weekend.

VERSUS

As a mother of two who had a HORRIBLE time producing breastmilk despite trying like the dickens, I’m not pleased that there is a group asking all hospitals to forgo giving new mothers free samples of formula.

If I hadn’t had those sample bottles, both of my children would have gone very hungry in those first few weeks.  My son didn’t want to latch on at all (despite the help of a lactation consultant) and my daughter might have been a good latcher, but I’ll never know because I had a hell of a recovery from my C-section.  She did fine in the hospital, but once I got home, I could barely move, much less get in any type of optimal breastfeeding position.

After three months of trying to get my son to breastfeed and pumping, my milk supply, which was never great to begin with, dried up completely.  We now know that it was most likely due to undiagnosed hypothyroidism, but who woulda thunk?  Instead I felt like a huge failure.

For my daughter, I bought into the whole guilty breastfeeding is best thing, and I chose to pump for a full nine months, which was probably a big mistake.  Waking up every three hours at night when all you want is to grab as much sleep as possible probably turned me into a horrible mother.   And even though I was on medication to alleviate the hypothyroid symptoms, I was never what you would call a champion at producing milk.   In fact, the last few months saw me supplementing with both previously frozen milk and formula, despite spending a lot of time being hooked up to the pump.

I think that if you can breastfeed, you are entitled to embrace it as fully as you like.  Go ahead, pop the girls out in public when needed!  I support your right to breastfeed! But I also think that there are circumstances where breastfeeding exclusively is just too much for some women (read: many working moms) and the judgey-McJudgersons should shut it.

We always do a family egg hunt every Easter, and sometimes we go to hunts sponsored by local parks.  This year was one of those years, we were meeting a friend of mine who has a daughter almost the same age as the Munchkinette.

So of course there is a taped off area full of eggs, and for our age group (1-3 years) a bunch of kids who really didn’t know exactly what was going on.  I know mine certainly didn’t.

But the parents sure did.

The parents kept pushing the tape boundaries, inching ever closer to the eggs.  One lady in front of us had extended the tape a good three feet into the “egg area” so that the city workers were forced to move some of the eggs which were now very much in arm’s reach.

That should have given me my first clue as to how this was going to go down.

For our age group, we were instructed to not help our children, and only let them pick up what they themselves could put in their basket.

They might as well have been whispering in a hurricane for all the good that announcement did.

When the air horn went off, I of course allowed my daughter to bend over and pick up an egg, only to have a helicopter parent of another child swoop it into her arms, along with the dozen other eggs she already had.

I loudly exclaimed that only the kids were allowed to pick up eggs, and was treated as if I did not exist.

This woman was definitely not the only person with this mindset, as I saw kids who could barely walk with baskets filled to the brim with eggs.

Mine got four.

WTF, people?

No wonder cities have been cancelling egg hunts.

This stuff is FREE.  There were some kids who got no eggs at all.  Your precious spawn truly does not care about the contents of the stupid eggs, which tend to be things more commonly found at the 99 Cent Store.  Would it kill people to actually follow the rules and have a little humanity?

An early life lesson for my daughter is that the answer is yes, it apparently would.