Teeny Manolo

Last week, 43% of you said it was inappropriate to ask if Sarah Palin being the mother of a special needs infant was relevant to her ability to be a Vice Presidential candidate.

Fair enough.

The next highest vote total was 18% not being sure that she could juggle the needs of her family and the country and do them both well.

That leads me to this week’s poll. What I want to know is how you feel about stay-at-home moms versus working moms. “Versus” not being used as a combative term, I assure you.

Now that Ms. Spears is back, slimmed, extended, tanned, rested and ready, the tabloids are begging to know her diet secrets (what, “chainsmoking, three hours of daily rehearsals, and not eating” doesn’t work for them?). We here at TeenyManolo have sussed out the situation, made contact with not a few shady characters (are there any else in her life?) and discovered the secret.

Here, at last, via Meg Tucker, is the long-rumoured recipe for Britney Spears’s Cheeto Chicken Casserole!

Britney’s Cheetos Chicken Casserole

Ingredients:

4 to 6 chicken breasts cooked and cut into bite-sized pieces
1 can of cream of chicken soup
4 hard oiled eggs
1 onion diced
1/4 c. mayonnaise
1/4 to 1/2 c. chopped celery
1 bag of Crushed Cheetos for topping

Directions:

1) Mix above ingredients together and put into casserole dish
2) Crush enough Cheetos to cover top
3) Bake in 350 degree oven for 30 minutes.

Or just adapt a page from the great Samuel Johnson, who explained that “A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”

Family.com, a Disney site, is sponsoring a contest in which you can actually win a prize for being badly dressed!  Well, when you were a kid, anyway.  Or maybe you can cash in on badly dressing your own child.

I’m thinking back to my own childhood, and for a while, my mother was dressing my sister and me like twins. Uh, except we were almost six years apart. I remember one year we were particularly resplendent in matching red Christmas outfits of scratchy polyester with peter pan collars and white rickrack trim. Good times, good times…

Photos Courtesy of Family.com

This ad is so very wrong, but I can’t help but love it anyway. Weren’t things just so very simple back in 1941? Just smack a kid around and give them a laxative!

And I have to admit, I am digging those spectator pumps. I have a thing for spectator pumps because even when they are standing next to a screaming child, they still look good.

via Boing Boing

Actually, I have no way of knowing how old this fellow is. He’s just some anonymous complainer on a complaint board set up so as to allow ranters to rant in peace. But something tells me that, when he’s not hitting nails on heads w/r/t raising children, he’s holding the Venetian blinds apart with two meaty fingers and yelling “GET OFFA MY LAWN!” I love him anyway; we shall grow old together, in matching lawn chairs and Bermuda shorts, crankily waving our canes at any child who unplugs from the electric teat long enough to step foot on OUR LAWN!

From the Seattle Times:

Rant “To the couple pushing a toddler in a stroller around Green Lake on Aug. 13. Your little boy was watching a DVD on his lap, complete with headphones for easy listening. Are you kidding me? Your child does not need an activity to keep him occupied while on a walk; the walk is the activity! If your child can’t go for 60 minutes without watching TV, you have a big problem. Whatever happened to watching the scenery and talking about what you see? Please, at least give him a book to look at instead.”

Well, my life may not be normal, but it sure is glamorous: today when I was supposed to be posting I was instead locked in an art gallery which contained no list of staff phone numbers (I snooped everywhere, I tell you) but many, many paintings on the themes of powerlessness, distress and alienation. We bonded, those paintings and I, while I waited for someone, anyone with keys to come and release me from my empty, gilded cage.

Fortunately, raincoaster here is a resourceful woman possessed of a large handbag, and thus is never without a paperback and at least one back issue of Vanity Fair. So it was that I became re-acquainted with an old friend of mine, the book Elegance, by Genevieve Dariaux; through the intermediary of the book Elegance by Kathleen Tessaro.

Some background: Dariaux’s book is really the definitive literary examination of the concept and practice of elegance (What Would Jackie Do notwithstanding, and I’m sorry but Breakfast at Tiffany’s was about a call girl and Capote really wanted Marilyn Monroe in the role, so there). Tessaro’s book is a well-done chick lit look at what happens to a particular woman when she tries to live by the rules set out in the original. Dariaux also wrote Entertaining With Elegance, which I’ve had for perhaps twenty years and believe me, between that and Miss Manners you’ve got the distressing concept of social interaction just stone-cold covered.

In any case, Tessaro’s book quoted a part of Dariaux’s book relevant to the TeenyManolosphere and I thought I would reproduce it here. It fits very well with the Frugal Indulgent’s Manifesto which I quoted earlier:

Little daughters are understandably the pride and joy of their mothers, but they are very often also, alas, the reflection of their mother’s inelegance. When you see a poor child all ringletted, beribboned, and loaded down with a handbag, an umbrella, and earrings, or wearing crepe-soled shoes with a velvet dress, you can be certain that her mother hasn’t the slightest bit of taste.

It is a serious handicap to be brought up this way, because a child must be endowed with a very strong personality of her own in order to rid herself of the bad habits that have been inculcated during her early years. The more simply a little girl is dressed - sweater and skirts in the winter, Empire-style cotton dresses in the summer - the more chic she is. It is never too early to learn that discretion and simplicity are the foundations of elegance.

Of course, to translate this to our modern world requires some rearrangement; for instance, anyone who’s seen Joe Simpson and his offspring knows that the above does not apply exclusively to mothers, if it ever did.

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.