Some quotes from one of my favorite moms, Erma Bombeck…

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is.

There’s something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she’s only measured water in it.

When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he’s doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911.

Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.

Do you know what you call those who use towels and never wash them, eat meals and never do the dishes, sit in rooms they never clean, and are entertained till they drop? If you have just answered, “A house guest,” you’re wrong because I have just described my kids.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

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.

And here are some photos from the ever popular Sh*t My Kids Ruined to prove it…

Seriously, I can NEVER get enough of these…

I’ve gone and done it.

For the first time in at least ten years, I didn’t send out Christmas cards.

You see, I waited much too long to take a picture of the kids. I kept telling myself that we could wait one more week. What was one more week? But then things kept happening, and finally the weekend that was to be my final deadline came and went with all of us being sick and barely able to function, much less posing and smiling for a picture.

I can’t think of a worse recipe for a photo than two sick kids, one of them a toddler who has hit the terrible twos with a vengeance.

So I didn’t upload the picture, the card never got printed, I never had to go pick them up, and I didn’t have to spend a bunch of time addressing them.

I feel sort of bad about it, because I know many people look forward to having a picture of the kids.

But then again, I sort of don’t.

Maybe I could send out New Year’s cards?

53% of you have the baking gene, while 21% of you do not.  The other 25% give it their best shot.  I would say that I am a fairly good baker, but that I don’t seem to find the time to be able to do it as often as I would like.  Which with my toddler is like, never.  I have sworn, though, that I will bake some cookies for my son this year for the holidays.

Today I’m all about the holidays. Again.

So we have a family that we are good friends with, who happens to have a son the same age as ours.  They are good friends, too.

The boy is an only child, and actually has four sets of grandparents, so he is definitely not lacking in the Christmas gift department.  And truly, like my son, he pretty much has everything he needs.  His parents have more than once told me they are of the mind that he has more stuff than he could ever possibly use. And if he did want something, it would probably be too expensive for me to buy it for him on my own.

I called his mom last week, and told her I had an idea.  I wanted to run it by her, and to make sure that she wasn’t thinking I was trying to wriggle out of gift-giving.

Instead of buying him yet more things he didn’t really need, I told his mom that I was thinking of taking the two of them out on a special outing, such as to an amusement park or a really fun place they don’t normally get to go.  He wouldn’t be getting a gift, per se, but getting what I would like to refer to as a “treat.”

His parents both enthusiastically agreed, and although it was of course my idea, I felt bad for a nanosecond that I wouldn’t be giving him an actual gift on Christmas.

What say you?

Good idea, or does it just look like I’m trying to get out of getting him a present?

Because truly, I’m not.

Hello my dears, apologies for my absence last week.  Things got a little confusing for a bit, and then sickness hit both myself and my husband at the same time.

The overwhelming consensus was that the leopard-print polyester shirt intended for teens was a big bunch of fugly, with 53% disapproving.  Another 26% felt that it was criminal to charge that much for something that looks like a bargain-bin find at the Salvation Army.  Only a small 9% total felt it was fine, or could possibly look cute on someone less than 14 years old.

As the big holidays creep ever nearer, I want to know what you do in the kitchen.