Photo by Richard Whittaker via Austin Chronicle

You know what I never expected when I learned I was to become a mom?

The Mess.

Oh sure, I knew that babies need to be bathed and have their diapers changed, and that when they are learning to eat, baby food can be splattered on walls four feet away if the wind conditions are right. And of course, they could not pick up after themselves. No surprises there.

But then silly, naive me thought that with increasing age, there would be a decrease in the amount of The Mess.

Wrong.

Maybe it is just my son, but he cannot seem to go anywhere without The Mess following him. Because even though there is no longer baby food splattered on the floor beneath his chair, make no mistake that there are significant amounts of whatever he just ate within a two foot radius or so.

The older he gets, the more intricate and smaller are the pieces of toys that he plays with. Think, if you can, of a regular Lego container that holds probably four thousand Lego parts. That’s how small some of them are. Resulting in perhaps not a bigger Mess size-wise, but one containing more parts per million than when he was younger.

I’ll be honest, The Mess is starting to taunt me. It keeps telling me that it loves it at my house, and it doesn’t ever want to go away.

And really, now that I have named it, The Mess will really start to get comfortable and begin leaving dirty socks around and demanding that I get it an apple juice. In a cup. With ice.

Great.

From marriedtothesea.com

It’s not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last, that I steal a headline from Michael K at DListed. How could I not, with that line?

Taiwan is home to an unusual maternity hospital; one entirely decked out in Hello Kitty accoutrements (can you ever have enough?). Is this, as ITN suggests in the following video, just “a sneaky way of making the father suffer through pain and nausea during childbirth,” or is it as the marketers would have us believe, a way of relaxing mothers and ensuring that they and their baby feel safe and loved during the birthing experience?

Tsai said, “I wish everyone who comes here – mothers suffer while giving birth, and children suffer with their sickness – to receive medical care while seeing this Kitty, it brings a smile to their faces, helps them forget about discomfort and recover faster.”

Or is it just an appallingly tacky money grab?

What say you? If you’d decided to give birth in a hospital, would you pick Hello Kitty Hospital or Barbie Dream Ob/Gyn Clinic over Yourville General?

Alas, that holiday giving has become cynical and competitive, unlike the more generous days of old, where, say, one giver would present his beautifully wrapped, carefully chosen frankincense, safe in the knowledge that Mister Giving Bars of Gold For God’s Sake Over There wasn’t going to snark about it later at the club. Because that so didn’t happen, you know it.

Still, it’s not that way any more and if you doubt it, just see how far an 8-track tape of Kenny Loggins gets you with your loved ones this season. It’s all about The Cabbage Patch Doll, The Tickle Me Elmo, The Wii, The Next Big Thing…and now, we present, The! Next! Big! Thing!

The CheetoPet!

Come on! You think Britney’s having a comeback by coincidence? It’s the Year of the Cheeto!

I’m not sure, but I think this was taken at Sarah Palin’s office:

Oh. Joy.

Now every four-year-old girl’s dream can come true: she and her poor, brow-beaten Mommy can dress just like that icon of chic and sophistication, that lady of a certain age, Barbara Millicent Roberts.

Yes, it’s Barbie’s 50th birthday and to celebrate, like many another rich woman at midlife, she’s decided to turn designer, although with what the harsher among us might judge to be perhaps less success than, say, Carolina Herrera.

From the Guardian (and one can hardly wait to hear what their resident fashion harpy thinks of the collection):

The 50th birthday of Barbie, the iconic fashion doll, is to be celebrated next year with the launch of a designer clothing brand for humans, complete with a cosmetics range and a catwalk show at New York fashion week…

Wang is creating a wedding gown for the special birthday collection – one version for real women and a mini-version for Barbie – while Scott has designed a high-end capsule wardrobe.

I don’t know about you, but if I woke up and found I had a wardrobe comparable to Barbie’s, I’d need a few capsules of something, for sure.

As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about in our lives, here come the Moms packing heat, and proud of it!

Another mother — eight months pregnant and with a young child — declared that “our gun is the only way I could defend myself and my children should someone intend to do us harm.”
And there was this disclosure from a police officer mom: “I keep a loaded 9mm in my Coach diaper bag.”

A gun in your diaper bag? Are you nuts?

I mean, do you know how hard it is to find anything in those diaper bags?

I had a difficult enough time finding my son’s favorite teething toy, much less being able to find a gun. And digging through the gaping maw that is the Coach diaper bag in time to point it at the bad guy before he gets away?

Fuhgeddaboudit.

You’d have better luck chucking a bottle at his head.