Happy Mother's Day to All!

Recently, there has been more and more discussion about what makes someone a good mother. Some circles say that you can only be a good parent if you feed your child an all organic vegetarian diet, never let them see a minute of television and make them read 100 pages of the Bible before bed. Others insist that you must carry your child on your hip 18 hours a day and allow them to breastfeed until they are ready to be finished, which is apparently high school by all accounts. A totally different camp believes that children are smart and can find their own way in life and we are just there to guide them.

Why are we all competing for the Mother-of-the-Year trophy? And who is voting on this? I'm pretty sure that my daughter is the only one who can say for sure how I'm doing as a parent and it will be quite a while before we know how she turns out.

Motherhood is like the clique in school where you always felt like you were on the outside looking in. You want to be one of those "perfect" moms but just won't ever have the right stroller or playgroup or feeding plan. What is funny is that even the moms that you are looking at and trying to emulate are a total mess. They have all the right answers on the outside but on the inside their life is a mess. They are suffering from a secret depression or their kids are flunking out of school or they are secretly eating Twinkies in the middle of the night after eating uber-healthy all day long. No one can maintain perfect. It is too exhausting.

Just wondering if you are good mother, makes you a good mother. That level of concern makes you aware of ways you can make your family better. All we can hope for is to make the best out of what we know because the "experts" will tell us once it is too late how wrong we were.

Why can't mothers just support each other and in some cases agree to disagree? We are all doing the best we can to raise our families. We work outside the home, we stay at home, we don't spank, we spank, we ban TV, we welcome it, the list goes on and on. Women are smart. We have helped to continue on the human species for millennium and since we are all here to debate this, we must have done a decent job.

 Give each other a break and Happy Mother's Day!

 P.S. The media could stand to give us a break for the week and stop contributing to the competitive nature of it all. We have enough to worry about without hearing about the Mommy Wars. I don't know that we would be "warring" if we weren't being told that we were.

Meet Robby

Our homes are full of machines, robots, who do things for us.  Through a little bit of programming, they can detect if our clothes aren't quite clean enough or if the dishes need another rinse.  Something as simple as a thermostat can respond to certain parameters and switch from heat to cool and back again.  All just a set of guides.  Now, meet Robby the Roomba.

He vacuums.  As the hubby says, "this is how robots will take over the world, we will just have to stand around and watch them as they work".  Yep.  And then the other robots will sneak around while we are distracted and before we know it, we have been defeated.  No battle, just a little bit of distraction.  I admit, it is frightening to think about.  This little "creature" finds all my hidden little dirty secrets and sucks them up into his belly and then plays a "Ta-Da" when he is done.  Amazing.  My floors have never been cleaner and I spend half the time he is vacuuming watching him zig-zag across the house in a seemingly random pattern.  I guess the take over has begun all ready.

In all honesty, I don't think my floors have ever been this clean due to extreme laziness on our part.  Now I'm not so scared to think about what Baby Girl might be picking up and eating off the floor.

Tunes

Why is it that the most annoying children's songs in the world are the ones that your kid loves the most?  It can't just be "Camptown Races", it has to be "Camptown Races" sung out of key by a group of children.

I had a headache and I'm not sure if it would have been better to continue to listen to off key children or if the screaming kid in the backseat would have been a less brain stabbing option.

First of all, a special thanks to my husband for letting me totally steal the name of this blog.  Not that he had a choice.  I believe the rules of marital property say:  what's his is mine.  So by that rule, I also get anything that he has that I deem cool. 

The cast of characters.  I'll start with our little family first.

Me: 30 something with too many jobs and a dirty house.
Husband: Age Redacted  Also with too many jobs and a naggy wife.
Baby Girl: 1 years old.  On the verge of walking, talking and taking over the world.  Seriously.  I'm waiting for the day she busts out with a full sentence of, "Momma?  I need some milk, fishies, oh and would you mind getting me some yellow cake Uranium?  I've got an idea."


The rest of the cast will probably pop up as we go along.