My kids are not in my office, staring at me while I type. I know that it’s Take Your Children to Work Day, but as the offspring of a work-at-home blogger-writer-author-spokesperson, my kids see me work all too often, whether it’s Mom answering an e-mail from an editor while we’re in the cereal aisle at the supermarket, or all of us being followed to the school bus stop by The Today Show.(more…)
You no longer know the TV schedule from 2-6 a.m. by heart.
Your doctor gives you the “green light” for sex, but you ask for a flashing yellow.
Your toddler is using your postpartum donut as a hat – and you don’t care.
Baby lotion commercials just aren’t the tearjerkers they were a few weeks ago.
You’ve stopped calling the baby’s bouts of colic, “The Devil’s Visiting Hours.”
Your sitz bath is under your husband’s car, full of motor oil.
You can see your ankles again, and boy do they need a good shave.
You’re wearing shoes. And pants – with pockets!
The baby finally smiles – and you smile back.
It’s midnight and you’re spamming baby pictures across the Internet – again.
Coming in May! Preorder now at Amazon:
Jen Singer’s “Stop Second-Guessing Yourself books have a thank-goodness-I’m-not-the-only-one tone while also offering practical advice for whatever parenting challenges may arise.” — Baby Center
“Jen has bestowed us with the rare parenting guides that actually give parents the shot of confidence we need to survive another day. ” — Cool Mom Picks
Andrea Summerville of B'Cara Salon trying to make me look like my eyelashes are naturally long for Park Place Magazine.
“What other rooms would you like to shoot in?” the magazine photographer asked me this morning, sweeping her hand toward my family room.
“Uh, well, this is the room I cleaned,” I said, thinking about the little papers from my shredder strewn pretty much all over my office floor and the dining room filled with remnants of The Great Closet Clean-out of 2010.
When she finished taking my photo on the couch, I let her photograph my kids and me in the living room. I didn’t have to move the tape dispensers, which was nice, and nobody reading the magazine article about me and “Mom 2.0″ will see the Pee Wee Herman doll sitting on the coffee table. Not this time, anyhow. (more…)
I see you at the school bus stop, and, frankly, you look frazzled. Like you’ve got too many things on your mind, too many things to do, too much on your plate before the kids are home for the holiday break. Too many places to be at once, too many recitals, too many parties and too many get-togethers.
Too much shopping to finish. Too much decorating to do. Too much to juggle this holiday season.
And I know you don’t want to complain. You don’t want to seem like a scrooge. So you smile and tell me you’re “ready” for the holidays, when really, you’ve got a load of wet snowpants making a racket in the dryer, and you can’t find the vanilla for the cookies you’d planned to make tonight. You know, after you finish hunting down photos and cotton balls (a.k.a “snow”) for the “surprise” holiday craft the kids are making for you at school.
You thought you’d surprise them back by decorating the pine tree out front, only to discover that the 1,000 lights you ran out to buy during the kids’ basketball practice pretty much covers 1/8 of the stinkin’ tree. So you stand outside in the freezing rain, staring at the neighbor’s elaborate selection of decorations, and wonder why you’d even bothered at all.
You try to remind yourself that the kids won’t be kids that much longer. You remember that they’ll leave you soon enough, and then you’ll have to share the holidays with their in-laws. And you’ll miss them. You truly will. And you’ll miss what the holidays were like when they lived at home. But your previously wet hat is frozen solid now, and you have to go pick the kids up at basketball.
Yet, as you’re leaving your driveway, you see something that lifts your spirit…
And for a moment, you realize how pretty this time of year can be, and now grateful you are to have family and friends to celebrate the holidays with again this year. As you pull out the camera you keep in your purse, just in case, and snap this photo, you think about what a pretty holiday card it would be.
Then you remember that you forgot to order holiday cards and you’re out of stamps anyhow. Plus, you’re late for basketball pick-up, and you’ve got no time to stop for vanilla. And then I see you at the school bus stop, and you smile and wish me a happy holiday. I smile back and wish you a happy new year, before we both head to our houses to get scratch something off our to-do lists.
I’ve got a crazy busy day ahead after a crazy busy weekend, so I thought I’d put up this popular trailer for my book, “You’re a Good Mom (and Your Kids Aren’t So Bad Either.)” It’s available now, along with my “Stop Second-Guessing Yourself “books on parenting toddlers and preschoolers. (The baby one comes out in May.) My mother would tell you they make nice holiday gifts. Then she’d give you directions to wherever you’re headed, provide the weather forecast and tell you she likes your hair. She’s that way.
I remember feeling something crawling across my bed in the middle of the night. Something small. Something furry. I jumped out of my bed and flipped on the lights to find Salt on my blanket. Pepper, I soon found out, was in the closet with the kids. I didn’t bother to wake up my parents. (more…)
I’m convinced that my mother has a secret compartment in the back of her closet that opens to a room filled with filing cabinets. There, men in visors type feverishly on old fashioned typewriters until my mother appears at the back of her closet to make a request for, say, a brochure from her 2006 trip to Canada or the Playbill from Bye Bye Birdie — the original 1960 production as well as the latest Broadway revival. (more…)
While America is busy running around today, buying turkeys and flying to relatives’ homes, I thought I’d make today’s blog brief. I wasn’t sure what to say until I was stuck in traffic behind this ambulance today:
I can hope only that they're better at saving lives than they are at spell checking.
Essentially, it says, “EMS at it is best.” which makes no sense. Now, before you go calling me a grammar snob over my it’s vs. its, please remember that words and spelling do matter. They really do, as shown in these, some of the world’s most expensive typos. After all, forget a space between two small words and suddenly “the pen is mightier than the sword” has an entirely different meaning — one that many men probably believe, but has never been substantiated. Just ask Lorena Bobbitt.
My kids are not in my office, staring at me while I type. I know that it’s Take Your Children to Work Day, but as the offspring of a work-at-home blogger-writer-author-spokesperson, my kids see me work all too often, whether it’s Mom answering an e-mail from an editor while we’re in the cereal aisle at the supermarket, or all of us being followed to the school bus stop by The Today Show. (more…)
I remember feeling something crawling across my bed in the middle of the night. Something small. Something furry. I jumped out of my bed and flipped on the lights to find Salt on my blanket. Pepper, I soon found out, was in the closet with the kids. I didn’t bother to wake up my parents. 
