First, there was the report of “the latest bank robber,” this one wearing a Darth Vader mask. In previous weeks, there have been reports of a bank robber who hides his face with a bouquet of flowers, and an elderly gentleman in a checkered jacket with liver spots on his hands, lugging an oxygen tank while holding up a bank in San Diego.

Then, in the very same newscast, a New York City official of some sort — I didn’t catch the details as I was trying to get the Star Wars “Evil Empire” theme song out of my head — implored people to “please take the money out of your mattresses and put them in a bank.”

Good Lord.

Bad economy.

What to tell the kids? Do we keep on prepping them for a future that’s like our past? Do we send them to college for liberal arts degrees so they can be “well rounded” individuals?

Or do we start teaching them Mandarin and send them for degrees in technology, because by the time they get out of school, the only jobs they’ll be able to get will be half-way around the world and involve bringing the next iPadish item to the growing middle class in Shanghai?

Or do we just get them Darth Vader masks?

Yet, I do believe that the bad economy is, in some ways, good for parenting — and for our kids. If you missed why, here it is, and today, it’s FREE!

Share, share: What do you think? Is the economy good or bad for parenting?

Sadly, however, she is not in charge of casting, so I gave up on the idea of bribing her with chocolates and housekeeping services for a year, and hunkered down to make a video to apply for the casting call, no doubt like, oh, a few bazillion other mom bloggers out there. 

Still, I think my video came out pretty good, and I would have shared it on MommaSaid even if that wasn’t part of the rules for the Project Mom Casting Submission. If you’d like to submit your own video or written blog for the New York City casting call at BlogHer, you have until midnight PST on Monday, July 26th to post it here.

Meanwhile, if you like my entry, and you’d like to see me on TV on a regular basis, please do what the kindergarteners do: Share, share that’s fair.

Thanks!

Jen

For Part 1, click here.

For Part 2, click here.

For Part 1, click here.

For Part 3, click here.

Really.

This week, I’m going to try with all of my power and might to stay the heck off the Internet. That means no blogging, no moderating comments, no tweeting, no Facebooking bon mots that I come up with in the shower.

Really.

But, as any blogger knows, you really can’t leave your web site just sitting there all alone and untouched for a week. That’s like leaving a hamster to fend for itself while you lie on the couch and watch every John Hughes movie every made 20 times in a row. It’s cruel, and it could mean the death of it.

So, before I signed off for the week, I looked back at my old videos, the ones I’m not legally allowed to say the name of anymore, and put together three fun new videos called “MommaSaid’s Hall of Shame.” They’ll make you feel better about what’s going on in your house, and they just might make your coffee come out of your nose. 

The first one goes up today and the other two will launch later this week. Of course, if you subscribe to my YouTube channel, you can watch them all now because dammit, I’m not touching my computer this week.

Really.

For Part 2, click here.

For Part 3, click here.

And don’t miss the wildly popular: “In a Mom Blogger’s Shoes.”

To make your virtual banana split so that Electrolux donates $1 to the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund, head over to Kelly Confidential.com.

Also, if you’d like to see my kids and the back of my head with Kelly Ripa on People.com, click here.

 *Note: Electrolux paid for the whole she-bang, including the limo from our house, with a detour to the Intrepid Air and Sea Museum on our way home. The video is all mine, though.

Fellow blogger Dana Loesch over at Mamalogues (hint), asked me nicely to stop using the title of my videos because she owned the registered trademark. There was only one problem: I said the word in every single one of the 178 videos, which chronicle my motherhood experience from when my kids were in preschool until I had cancer.

So my lawyer said I had a case because I could prove that I had actually used the trademarked word in commerce before she registered it. And for a while, I pursued it, even though I didn’t really want to. That’s her brand. I get it.

But I haven’t recorded any of these videos using the word in years, and I don’t want to fight anyhow. Besides, I figured out how to use my editing software.

So, in the spirit of “coopetition,” I hereby leave the word to Dana and use my own to present, what else? Momma Said…