All right, I swear I wrote a post for today, but the server ate it! Seriously!

If you can remember far back enough, your last choices were Jamie Oliver and Chris Noth. Well, the chef won over Mr. Big by a fairly slim seven percent margin.

However.

When this blog first began way back in 2007 (has it really been that long?) Celebrity Dad Faceoff was one of the first features I began, and I’ll be honest with you, I’m wondering if it’s time to hang it up. I’m guessing that if it’s beginning to wear on me, then what must it be doing to you, dear reader? Oh sure, it’s been a nightmare digging through pictures of handsome, often shirtless, men. But I’ve bravely carried on for your sake.

It’s a new year, though, and the time is ripe for change, if necessary. So, I’d like to see what you think…

And no, Hugh Jackman doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, but I don’t really need much of an excuse to put up his purty face, do I?

A couple weeks before winter break, the Munchkin came home upset because he had gotten into trouble at school.

When pressed for details, he lied about the incident, claiming it was because he had called another child’s drawing “stupid.”

While not a fantastic thing to do, I wondered why he was so emotional about it, when the truth finally came out. Well, it came out after being badgered about it for the remainder of the day by moi, as my Spidey-senses told me all was not as it seemed.

Turns out, a fellow classmate had accused him of saying the word hell in a non-opposite-of-heaven way.

He swore up and down that he didn’t say it at all, and claimed to not even know what it meant.

I’m on the fence as to whether he did say it or not, but I’m pretty sure he knows what it means.

Did the Munchkin get punished?

Well he did, but not for the cussing part.  He got punished for not being upfront about what had happened.

Because yelling at him for cussing? Pot, meet kettle.

You see, my father, who was a very fix-it type of guy, would curse up a storm every time he worked on a project.  So if he had to fix a leaky sink, my young self would stand in the kitchen, see a waist and a pair of legs sticking out from the cabinet doors, and hear a stream of curses that would make any sailor blush. 

Did I cuss in elementary school? You betcha.  And I was a very straight-laced honor student at a Catholic school.

I was just smart enough not to cuss around anybody that would tell on me.

I truly try not to curse in front of my children, and I would say I am 99.8% successful.  But one of his best buddies is an 11 year old from a home that has a lot of salty language being thrown about, not to mention my in-laws not watching their language around him, or even my own dad on occasion.  Oh, and my own husband isn’t all that great at keeping his language perfectly clean either.

Yes, I know all about the people who say that cussing means you are ignorant and haven’t the language skills to truly express your outrage, so cursing is just a way of flaunting your lack of vocabulary.

Actually, I think the people who go around saying made-up expressions are worse.  You can go around all day and spout nonsensical expressions, but when you stub your toe against the bedpost, “fiddlesticks” just will not do.

According to the Daily Beast, anyway…

At the top were names such as Louis Bardo, Marcello Daniel, and Cosima.  All right, I’m down with those.  But Billie Beatrice? Amadeus Benedict Edley Luis? Nelly May Lois?  I’m sorry, but I am so not feeling them.  For some reason, I don’t like when girls are named boy names. I know, I’m an old fogey and anti-feminist, but I just think that when I see a name on a piece of paper, I should know if it is a boy or girl.  Feel free to flog me publicly.  Don’t get me started on the Amadeus one, which the site praises for it’s mix of “style, ethnicities, and eras.” Do they not know people are going to follow him around on the playground singing the refrain to a rather bad but unforgettable 80′s pop song? And Nelly May Lois sounds like someone who spends most of her time being mean to people at a bingo parlor.

At the bottom were gems like  Buddy Bear Maurice, Sundance Thomas, and Draco.  Jamie Oliver (who is currently winning his CDF round) is perpetrator of the Ursa major, and Draco comes courtesy of one former Ms. Winnie Cooper.  I’m not totally up in arms about Draco, though.  At least it’s a literary name, not one that’s made up.  They also slammed Vera Farmiga about her choice of name, which was an ethnic Lithuanian one.  I’m not cool with making fun of names from other cultures, so I take issue with that one.

It’s a hectic week my friends, so posting this week? Totally on the light and fluffy side… Hope you don’t mind.

I’m only telling you this because we are such good friends.   And also because if you think Child Services should be called, you don’t know where I live.

I was on the phone with my mother when I noticed the Munchkinette sidling up to the front of the Christmas tree.  Now this puts her between the tree and the middle front window, so between being on the phone and a dicey sightline, I don’t see what happens next.  Until, of course, it’s too late.

And what happens next is that I see her proudly holding a glass Christmas ornament in her little hand.

I give out yell because I’m thinking she’s going to drop it. I begin running toward her.  Er, well, probably lurching is a better term for it.

She does me one better.

In one of those slo-mo effects in the movies, I watch as she crushes the ornament in her hand.

At this point, I let out a full blown scream because I’m envisioning myself in the ER with her thrashing around as they stitch up the million cuts in her hand.  Also, I’m a little pissed because it’s one of the intricate ones handed down to me from the 1950′s and I’m wondering why she couldn’t have chosen a regular old ball.

So I’m continuing the lurch and watching what seems like hundreds of little glass pieces scatter around her, which I finally crunch through and grab her.

I frantically seize her tiny hand, fully expecting shards to be stuck in it and blood dripping down her arm.

Nothing.  Not a scratch.

No aftermath of any kind except for me losing a very cool ornament and having to thoroughly vacuum. 

We’re thinking of having her pick out our lottery numbers.

I had candy on the brain last week, and so asked for your favorite. It was not too surprising that two chocolate choices tied for first, one being chocolate-only, the other being something chocolate, with nuts, and chewy. That last bunch is hard to please. I know this because I belong to it. Black licorice made a surprisingly strong showing with six percent of the vote, and chocolate and nuts garnered eighteen percent. Sorry, I’m having a hard time focusing with all this talk of chocolate.

Today I want to ask about something that’s been on my mind lately, and that is school bullying. It can be any kind, as I feel verbal abuse is just as bad as physical abuse. My son has been a victim of bullying twice, once in pre-K and once in first grade. The pre-K bullying was from his classmates, and the first grade bully experience was from a third grader. Each time, the supposed “playground monitors” didn’t do jack to help him. Nor did his pre-K teacher, who chalked it up to boys being boys. Uh huh.

I’m going to direct your attention over there. 

You know, a diatribe against this woman is just too easy, isn’t it?  I mean, there is nothing about what she is doing to her daughter that is healthy or redeeming in any way.

Mothers are guilty of passing on body issues even without really realizing what they are doing. 

This woman has just thrown all pretense out the door and said, screw it, I’m fat and I don’t want my kid to be fat.

But as Jezebel points out, doesn’t that speak just as much to society’s treatment of fat people that she would go to such extreme measures?

Discuss.

Although, Mother of the Year? Yeah, so not her.

My next birthday will see me turning forty.  And I will have a one year old and an eight year old.  If you had told me this fact three years ago, I would have laughed and encouraged to you keep on enjoying whatever you were smoking.

I kid, I kid.  But, there are definitely some good things about being an older mom:

- Perspective.  I haz it.

- I’ve already done all the “crazy” stuff I wanted to do in my twenties.  As my friend, who had her son at 38, said, “Sometimes twice.”

- A fairly well established network of friends and family totake advantage of ask for help.

- A bit more patience, although I’m guessing that might be a purely personal thing.

- A good sense of myself, one that I can honestly say I didn’t have until I hit about thirty, and it’s only gotten better since then.

- Lots of years of pop culture behind me, the better to quote to my son, who has no idea what I’m talking about. But I do, so it’s still fun.

- More financial stability and just a better general knowledge of money and how it works, or in some cases, doesn’t.

- I have the self-confidence to not care what the younger moms think of my gray hair.

- The boobs were already headed in a southerly direction, so not much trauma there.

And, there are some drawbacks as well…

Not to brag or anything, but my kid, he was one of the first in line when they were handing out the brains.

Wait, that is bragging, isn’t it?

Well, tough.  I call it like it is.

He has sailed through math this year, except for one chapter.

The chapter where he had to look at a clock face and figure out what time it was.

We had visited this concept last year, and I thought he had retained it. But, there was some frustration along with wrong answers at homework time. You see, my home has absolutely zero old-timey clock faces. And yes, I am going to label them old-timey. I don’t care if that makes you feel old.  If it does make you feel old, you probably are.  Again, telling it like it is.  Ahem, back to the story…

 If we had inherited a certain grandfather clock, then we would have one, but we didn’t and so each and every clock in the house is digital. The one on the microwave, the one on the stove, the DVR, all the bedroom clocks. And yes, I do have some watches, but wouldn’t you know, all of them needed new batteries and were thus useless in demonstrating how the big hand follows the little hand around in a circle. I found myself biting back a flippant, “You know, the hands go in a clockwise direction!”  Which of course, he really had no frame of reference for and would not have found the least bit enlightening.

Even though telling time on a clock face is second nature to me, my son has grown up with a distinct lack of them. There might be a few scattered here and there in his life, such as at the library, but not enough to make any impact upon him. He doesn’t even have one in his classroom.

So try explaining to someone totally unfamiliar with the concept of an old-timey (yes, yes, it makes me feel old, too) clock and how it works, and you are met with a blank stare. And possibly a question as to why anyone would use such a complicated time-telling device when you could just look at the numbers on a digital clock. 

We struggled a bit.

Eventually, of course, he got it, but I began wondering if telling time this way was already pretty much obsolete. And if, in this age of computers and cell phones, if reading a clock face is a skill that needs an entire math chapter devoted to it.

What do you think?