Teeny Manolo

Sigh.

I knew it was coming.  I mean, I have a son, so I knew that sooner or later a certain sort of humor would begin appealing to him.  One that leaves me shaking my head and praying that it will soon pass.

Although I know it won’t.

I’m talking about burping.  Yes, burping.  The Munchkin has reached the stage where burping is now considered the epitome of entertainment.  He gets a kick out of burping while he is in mid-sentence, and lately he will burp just for the sheer, uh, joy of it.

As any parent worth their salt knows, non-reaction is the key to stuff like this.  Keep the face completely devoid of emotion. Keep the voice on an even keel, and only remind him to excuse himself in a normal speaking voice.  That’s about all I can do.  I’m sure he and his friends do it constantly, and part of the fun is seeing if Mommy will have a cow.

I’ve promised myself I won’t give him the satisfaction of having a cow, even as inwardly I roll my eyes and wish for him to find the really bad jokes he would come up with on his own to be the preferred form of comedy again. Even as I find his amusement at the sounds emanating from his mouth completely amusing, I cannot in good conscience condone burping as a valid form of humor.

Times like this, I wish for a girl.  Then I would only have to deal with what she wants to wear to school and how I should do her hair.

Right?

Actually, if I’m wrong, I don’t want you to tell me.  Let me live in my fantasy world.  Please? 

…and crosses their fingers behind their backs in the hopes that their tumultuous relationship with their tween daughter will finally come to a peaceful end with hugs all around. All thanks to an extremely popular fifteen year old boy straight from the Disney corporate music machine.

You see, Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers (the 2000’s version of Menudo, NKTB, Hansen, etc…) has revealed the importance he places upon how a girl treats her family. “They have to be good to their moms.”

Maybe now your 12 year old will think twice about slamming that bedroom door and texting to their friend: MOS CID NO FOS IHTFP!!!!!

I’m quite sure my mother wished that Simon Le Bon had said something very similar, thus sparing her a good three years of arguing about when I had to come home from the movies. 

Dear Mom to Your Couldn’t Have Been Older Than 12 Year Old Son,

Come a little closer to me.   Yes, a little closer now…

Sorry, but I really needed to give you a good smack upside the head.

Because what are you thinking, allowing your young, impressionable son to wear this in public?

Oh, let me guess. You weren’t thinking at all, were you?

I was truly speechless to see a boy sporting such a shirt as this. I already question people who dine at Hooters with young kids, much less those giving a hearty two thumbs up to wearing a Hooters T-shirt. I thought about trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you fought him tooth and nail on this, and compromised with permission only if he read 30 books in a year, and then he could wear it once.

I’m guessing, however, that this wasn’t the case. And it wasn’t Dad’s shirt, because the shirt fit your son quite well.

And yes, I am going to judge you. Because we are lying to ourselves if we think we don’t judge people by what they wear. We may try not to, because we all know that it is what’s on the inside that counts. But when I am sharing a restaurant with you and am forced into staring at this lovely graphic during my meal, I’m just not inclined to look much deeper than the shirt.

So Mom, I’m going to look askance at you. With a son that young, you should be able to put your foot down and insist that he cannot wear it out.

Or how about this revolutionary idea, that this particular piece of clothing do a little disappearing act from the closet altogether? Or some “accidentally” spilled bleach? Or claiming it was the only item around while the cat was having kittens?

If you need more ideas, you know how to reach me.

Smooches,
Glinda

What time is it? Overshare time, my friends! It’s time the ol’ raincoaster dished the dirt on her beloved Mom; and why? you ask, or perhaps you don’t but just play along, willya?

Because of this bracelet from tefsjewels on Etsy, passed along by a sharp-eyed and practical reader:

It’s designed with a charm which you move every time you nurse, so that you always know when the next feeding is due, even if the baby has been squalling like a flock of seagulls for the past ten hours straight and you’re trying to get by on two and one-half minutes sleep, a situation not unknown in households which have recently welcomed the pitter-patter of little feet. Why two of those feet never belong to a butler is one of life’s little injustices, but that’s as may be.

Should you breastfeed you can, of course, switch it from wrist to wrist. It’s flexy like that.

But what does this have to do with raincoaster’s mom? I can hear you ask or maybe not, but humour me, okay? You’ve come this far.

My mother, you see, was as absent-minded as she was over-cautious, and so as a baby I enjoyed approximately as many feedings as the entire livestock of the local zoo. If my mother had been possessed of such a piece of personal bling, I might have started life with a keener understanding of portion sizes and an easier time of it, when I finally decided to heave myself into an upright position and attempt a waddle.

Which I am sure I did only because the kitchen wasn’t going to come when I called it.

You’ve all heard of Dara Torres. There is no way you could not have heard about her. You know, the 41 year old Olympic swimmer and mother of a two year old, who is shattering stereotypes and breaking records everywhere she goes.

Well, I’m tired of hearing about her inspirational story. You know, the one where she has worked hard, sacrificed much, and stared adversity in the face until it gave up and sulked in the corner where it belonged.

I want to like her, I really do. She’s intelligent and articulate. She seems like she would be a fun person to hang out with.

But she’s making slacker moms like me look bad.

My husband is suddenly wondering why he has to take out the trash, because obviously women have the strength for such tasks. He’s also questioning my dreams and ambitions, which are limited to folding all the laundry and becoming the kindergarten room mother. The laundry dream has yet to be achieved, and I’m still in training for the room mother position.

Yes, my strategy of keeping everyone’s expectations low has worked suprisingly well so far. That way when I actually do something, it looks like I have gone above and beyond the call of duty.

But noooooo.

Dara had to come into town. Bringing her cute smile and six-pack abs with her. Oh, and that annoying work ethic.

Yes, Dara, just please go ahead and win your medals. Prove to everyone that motherhood and aging are no match against a woman of perseverance and talent.

Then maybe my husband will forget about you, and I can go back to looking impressive when I weed the entire front yard.

In one week.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s August out there, and around the ol’ raincoaster homestead that means one thing and one thing only: making a laughingstock of yourself trying to play with the kids’s beach toys.

You name it: hula hoops. skipping ropes. beach balls. shovels and pails and pimped-out sandcastle engineering equipment. swimming pool badminton. trac ball. nerf football. water balloons. boogie boards. that stupid little rope on the ring with the dooie at the end of it that you stick on your ankle and dance around like Ed Grimley rolling on E.

They whup my sorry ass every damn time.

But among the glories of summer toys too tempting for even those of positively Malkovichian gravitas, one stands supreme, like the lone cherry on the very summit of the quadruple chocolate-mint meltie with extra crushed hazelnut praline that lives in my dreams, if not in my diet.

The SuperSoaker.

And, as with all the many immortal archetypes which chime agreeably in our collective unconscious like the orchestra of the divine Big Band which plays at the right hand of God (except when the bagpiper is there), the history of the SuperSoaker is nothing less than an epic of human achievement and a moral fable of the most exquisitely resonant irony.

And iSoaker has it; here’s a snippet:

The year of 1989 began the water weaponry revolution. The origin of the Super Soaker® actually dates back to 1982 when Dr. Lonnie Johnson, a nuclear engineer, first had the idea of making a high performance toy water gun. At the time, he was employed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California as a spacecraft systems engineer on the Galileo mission to Jupiter. As a part time inventor, it took eight (8) years before the gun was finally introduced to consumers…

The idea behind the Power Drencher was actually derived from some work Lonnie was doing on a heat pump that used water as opposed to freon. He hooked up the model of the pump to his bathroom sink at his home. “I turned around and I was shooting this thing across the bathroom into the tub and the stream of water was so powerful that the curtains were swirling in the breeze it sent out,” he said. “I thought, ‘This would make a great water gun.’” (Quote from a Weekend Edition interview between Lonnie Johnson and Liane. Click here for more information.)

Unlike its motorized predecessors, Johnson developed a gun that relied on air pressure and arm pumping for pressurizing the firing chamber. The end result was a water blaster capable of delivering more water farther and faster than any other water gun on the market. The brand name, Super Soaker®, was introduced nation-wide in 1991 through a series of TV-advertisements.

If we, the adults, cannot beat those darn kids at their own game, the least we can do is learn enough to bore them stupid on the subject, right?

Actually, a fellow I used to work for was walking with his six-year-old son (well, they WERE walking on the nude beach, but it’s contiguous with the not-nude beach and they’d just overrun their usual mileage) when they ran across the son’s teacher, lying nude on the aforesaid nude beach.

Awk-waaaaaard!

What do you say? “Nice seeing you?” Subsequent parent-teacher meetings are guaranteed to be livelier. “Haven’t seen much of you lately” would work for the occasion…

Last week’s poll about corporal punishment had forty percent of respondents considering a well-placed, well-timed smack on the butt to be fine. Almost a quarter disagreed, saying that any use of physical punishment was wrong, while almost another twenty percent said it depended on the nature of the offense. In the comments, this was clarified as a hit on the hand to prevent touching a hot stove type of thing being OK, but one for accidentally spilling the milk, not so much.

This week I am going to draw from something that happened to me recently. Glinda has to admit that she does cuss upon occasion, which she places the blame for squarely upon her father’s shoulders. But, never around the Munchkin. The other day, I dropped something that I was afraid was going to break, and the word “crap!” came out as it slipped out of my hand. My husband (the Scarecrow) chided me for saying a cuss word around our son. I confess to thinking that crap was not really a cuss word, although I could understand how some would think it was.

What about you?

Enter the Super Fantastic Stila Giveaway now!

When you first discover you are pregnant, one of the first things you do, after the initial panic, is think of names for your beautiful yet-to-be-born child. You lovingly ponder family names, names in your favorite works of literature, names that will truly distinguish your child from every other child on the playground. A name that will show the world exactly how special they are to you.

Babynamesworld.com has this to say about naming your child:

If the two of you have come up with a nice name, ponder the possible nicknames that could be derived from it. Is it a negative sounding nickname or a really obvious target for bullies?
Again, don’t put too much weight on a name’s potential for teasing. It’s almost always possible to come up with a nickname that could be used in a negative way. Try to avoid names,
however, that inspire nicknames that are almost asking for teasing.

So what goes through the minds of parents that name their child something like this?

Parents of said child above, I give you the Lazy Parenting Award^TM!

Not only were you too lazy to think about the trauma of her childhood with a name like that, how did you ever expect her to land a job? In fact, you made it easier for other kids to tease her with a name with such ridiculousness built right in, no need for her classmates to waste any precious brain cells thinking of names on their own.

And, you were selfish to boot, perhaps considering only your own amusement instead of what you intended to saddle her with for the rest of her life, although thank goodness she apparently inherited the common sense gene from further down the DNA line.

So relish your trophy my chosen recipients, as we all think of, ahem, creative names for you.