A couple of months ago I did a post about how excited I was to have one of my stories selected to be included in an anthology called “Martinis & Motherhood: Tales of Wonder, Woe & WTF?!”
Today I’m even MORE excited because at long last, the wait is over, and the book is available at Amazon.com.
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I had the weirdest dream:
I’m sharing a couch in a hotel bar with “I Just Want to Pee Alone” NYT Bestselling Author, Jen Mann. Our conversation meanders from our mutual admiration for Hugh Howey to me giving her shit about the fact that her rental car has manual roll-down windows. We then somehow make the connection that I was in the PTA with a book blogger that she follows. The next thing I know, Kim Bongiorno (Let Me Start By Saying) is next to me dressed up as Urkel performing a “Dancing With the Stars” worthy number with Frugie from Frugalista Blog.
Almost two weeks ago I challenged myself to do something that I never do: Go shopping.
I detailed the ‘whys’ in a previous, “Dusting Off My Parachute” post the night before my adventure. The boiled down version is that I hate shopping. I find it completely overwhelming both in terms of the sheer number of choices available and also because I am incredibly thrifty (okay, cheap).
I’ve been reading a lot recently about the comeback of the 70s summer: Unscheduled summer breaks forcing kids to use their creativity to fill their “I’m bored!” hours instead of having their parents fill their hours for them with $200/week camps.
Our unscheduled summer will be officially be held the week of August 17th, which is the only week this summer that I do not have filled with some sort of travel or insanely expensive camp for my kids.
Today at noon, I will face my greatest fear head on.
I’ll be doing something that I’ve been putting off for a long time and as the day has grown near I have even hesitated putting together this post because I think my brain is still in denial that it’s happening.
What could this dreaded event be?
Am I presenting to a group of a thousand people? No, that would be fine.
Am I flying cross-country solo with two kids? No, that’s a piece of cake.
Am I taking some kind of dangerous, death defying adventure? Kind of….
I’m going shopping.
It’s Book Fair time again!
Even kids who haven’t willingly opened a book the entire school year completely lose their minds over Book Fair.
And who wouldn’t when the decorating committee transforms their simple library into some magical land, like a medieval castle or an undersea experience, complete with a bubble machine at the entrance.
Even if you’ve missed the Book Fair reminder notes in your kid’s folder or all the giant red banners around campus, it’s hard to miss the kids wandering around after school dressed as human billboards ringing bells and spreading the news about the Book Fair.
There’s never a particularly good time to experience your first earthquake. I can, however, tell you one of the worst times: November 1983, a week after being traumatized for life by watching the ABC Made for TV Movie, “The Day After” (insert mental image of a mushroom cloud and decimated city here.)
For an 11-year-old kid who spent each waking moment after watching that movie convinced that the sound of every airplane would be shortly followed by a nuclear detonation, an earthquake could only mean one thing: the end of the world.
And for about 30 seconds that November morning, it was.
(Inspired by The Sometimes Mom by One Mother to Another )
Sometimes I send the kids off to school with a kiss, smile and a wave.
Sometimes my “Hurry! We’re late!” warnings are so loud they startle the kids at the bus stop outside.
Sometimes I pack my kids lunches worthy of being Instagrammed.
Sometimes I completely forget to feed my kids lunch at all.
As a mother, there are plenty of thing to keep you up at night worrying: Are the kids getting good grades? Do they ever get bullied? Do I push them too much? (Or not push them enough and they’ll end up living in my house forever?)
But the thing that worries me most is knowing that even if you do everything right and have a really good kid, there will come a day when they surprise you by making a stupid decision that you never saw coming.
At least that’s what I did to my mom.
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As the mothers of newborns we do some pretty strange things to keep our babies healthy & comfortable:
Would you use your teeth to trim your baby’s fingernails? Anything for my baby!
Would you squirt your breast milk into your baby’s eye at the first sign of conjunctivitis? You’d be crazy not to!
Would you suck snot out of your baby’s nose with a plastic hose? Of cour…..Wait a minute…..you want me to do what?
My name is Susanne, and I sucked my baby’s snot…..and you should too!
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