When Worlds Collide

Day three of Spawn being grounded from the Wii.

I got home late from work yesterday, and was in the middle of microwaving a nutritious family dinner when the following exchange took place:

The Boy: "Mommy, I'm bored. What can I do?"

Manager Mom: "Go and play with your sister."

TB: "But she has girl toys."

MM: "I don't care. If you don't play nicely together, you won't be allowed to play the Wii for ONE WHOLE MORE WEEK."

And, scene. Off goes The Boy as instructed.

After Spawn went to bed I was straightening up the playroom , because the cleaning lady was coming the next day, and, you know, I don't want her to think that we're SLOBS or anything.

When I got to the dollhouse, I saw the curiously heartwarming aftermath of their joint playtime:




The only scene that I found to be slightly alarming:


Did I mention that The Boy is terrified of dogs? Perhaps it's time for some therapy.

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I Swear To God, I Am Not Making This Up.

Step aside, Kum & Go. There's a NEW sheriff in town.

Sent in by alert fellow blogger reneedesigns at ButWhyMommy.

Nothing below the fold today, bloggy friends.

DIDN'T I TELL YOU NOT TO CLICK??? HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO REPEAT MYSELF?

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Wii Are In Peril

This past weekend, our house was finally invaded by the cultural force that is hell-bent on destroying America's families. It's the modern day Pearl Harbor-in-a-box known as the Nintendo Wii.

I blame it on Costco. I was rounding the candy aisle, checkout lanes in sight, thinking that I might be able to leave the store for less than $200 when I spotted a stack of Wiis - and they were going fast.

I had a massive panic attack at the idea that I had to buy it RIGHT THEN AND THERE, or I would never see it for sale again. Anywhere. Ever. And especially not at such a good price. (Never mind that I had no idea how what the regular price is - I have been duly brainwashed that if it's at Costco it must be a bargain.) I told myself that I would be helping the economy, and that MD could get me a Wii Fit for my birthday so I could try yoga without having to go somewhere and be around people that are wearing coordinated outfits and chanting and having tantric group sex or whatever goes on in those classes.

So I shoved aside a slow-moving twelve-year-old and snatched up one of the last boxes. Twenty minutes later, having blown the equivalent of two car payments, it was wedged in my trunk next to a box of tampons large enough to last me from now until menopause.

When we were setting it up, I had visions of the four of us gatherered around the TV, laughing as we engaged in wholesome family violence, beating the digital crap out of each other's Mii avatars. In reality, it turned them into cage-fighting maniacs. Now, one kid "accidentally" backhands the other with a controller, the other retaliates, and a full-on deathmatch ensues, ending only when one of them winds up on the floor in a quivering pile of blood, snot, and tears.

Last night, when I told The Boy he had to stop playing to take a bath, he spontaneously combusted into forty-eight inches of white hot fury and threw down some vintage Bobby Knight verbal stylings. It went on for over forty-five minutes and ending with him shouting the pre-school equivalent of the c-bomb: "I HATE YOU, MOMMY!"

So he's been grounded from the Wii for a week. And once again, the Irony Gods have vanquished me, transforming the Wii from something that made me Mother of The Year into an instrument of Satan which has made The Boy hate me on a daily basis.

You will pay, evil Costco executives, for turning him against me. I am going unleash pint-sized hell on your collective asses. The Boy is suffering from Wii withdrawal and he is HIGHLY PISSED OFF. Consider yourselves warned.

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To My No Longer A First Grader

You've probably noticed that the stuff I write usually tends to include some cursing, a fair amount of sarcasm, and often the ejection of bodily fluids. (Be forewarned - this post does not, and furthermore, it's laden with sentimental cliches. If you're looking for the usual, read this one instead). Because of all of the travel and work craziness I've had lately, my posts have definitely veered more toward the “manager” and less towards the “mom.”

When I got home late AGAIN the other night, The Boy shouted, “Thank you for stopping by, Mommy!” And it made me realize that when I go through these periods where the work goes out of whack and starts taking over my life, I feel like I have to create some emotional distance in my head, if I am going to survive all of the missed dinners and bedtime cell phone tuck-ins.

But that all evaporated when I dropped The Girl off at school the other day, her second-to-last day as a first grader.

We drove up to the building and I got out of the car to help her collect her things and so I could kiss her goodbye. I settled her backpack on her shoulders. It was heavy with keychains and notebooks and pencil cases and yarn for the friendship bracelets she likes to make, and the weight of it made her clothes go all cockeyed, pushing her pink cotton shorts low on one hip.

She received her kiss and skittered off on her flamingo legs. Before she went inside, she turned to wave at me, and in that moment I looked at her face and saw the baby that she once was and the woman that she will become, and it sort of took my breath away.

After that she turned and skipped into school without any inkling of how completely she had just laid waste to my emotions. And I thought to myself, I wouldn't trade a hundred rides on the corporate jet for this moment, standing here in the sunshine, next to the minivan. Watching my oldest child, who I will always hold as a little girl in my heart, off to start a day fraught with excitement and hope and happiness.

If that weren’t enough, this came home in her backpack. Her teachers had saved it from her FIRST day of school:


And it made me cry, for the first time in as long as I can remember.

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Phoning in a Twofer - A Meme with a Twist, Plus Giveaways!

A few weeks ago, I was "tagged" for the first time ever to do a "meme" (or whatever the kids are calling it nowadays) by the lovely and talented Mimi On The Breach.

When I first started blogging I didn't think I would do memes. But now I realize how hard it is to consistently come up with good quality shit to write about, especially since my life is not that interesting. Some of us can spit out daily posts that are dense, metaphor-packed, and cause the reader to weep helplessly by prompting the startling realization of a deep life truism. I, on the other hand, write about things like my kids' farts and my miniscule boobies.

Add the fact that work is really kicking my ass this week and the meme idea (with slight modifications for laziness) is looking pretty appealing. And for good measure, I'm going to throw in the other thing I thought I'd never do, which is to give away TWO (2) unfabulous prizes - revealed at the end of the post.

But enough pre-mumble. Let's get this party started. (And I'll keep the contest open until Saturday Morning.)

Rule #1. I tag ALL OF YOU. Don't feel like you have to link back to me, though.
Rule #2. Either read my six random things, or ignore them.
Rule #3. Leave a comment with one random thing of your own. Or not.
Rule #4. One prize will be given to a randomly drawn commenter.
Rule #5. The other prize will be awarded to my favorite comment, based on completely arbitrary and unfair reasons of my own choosing.

Without further ado, Manager Mom's Six Random Things:


1. I am afraid of earrings. I have vivid hallucinations about them getting caught on something and causing my earlobes to rip open and spew gore everywhere.



2. As a teenager I was once involved in a series of events that culminated in me throwing up in the back seat of a cop car. The fallout was more unpleasant (and more expensive) than you can imagine.



3. If you are trying to remain a MILF, but are on a budget, bangs are cheaper than Botox.



4. Having met him in real life, I find it entirely plausible that Always Home & Uncool and I are twins that were seperated at birth.



5. I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller. I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her. I wish I had a rabbit in a hat with a bat and a '64 Impala.

6. I almost didn't add the "Mom" to the "Manager". Back when Manager Dad and I were dating, I never realized that I wanted to have kids. But then came the day that we first met MD's newborn nephew. I saw the look on his face when they handed that baby to him and knew at that moment that a) he was the man that I wanted to marry and b) that he would make the best father in the WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD. (Happy Belated Father's Day, MD).

So there you have my six random things. And the unfabulous prizes?

Yep, that's right! Two lucky winners will get their choice of a Kum & Go wearable, which gives me the PERFECT excuse to order the green shirt for myself.

Updated on June 30th: The random winner is Ann at Velvet Lava and the Mom's Choice award went Stamford Talk. Because she was my first non-relative reader, and she begged a lot in the comment section.

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It's Good To Be Queen

Manager Mom is back in the house!

My 2008 "It's Business Time" West Coast Road Trip is over, ending on a climactic half-day strategic partnership event at the mad glamorous Denver Airport Marriott Doubletree.

I was gone a LONG time. I missed five mornings and was supposed to miss six bedtimes. But thanks to an unexpected travel karma niblet, I got home four hours early - just in time to catch The Boy in the middle of his bath and get myself a wet naked hug.

"Manager Mom," you are probably not thinking to yourself, "How could your coach class travel plans POSSIBLY have gotten you home EARY?"

American Airlines gets zero credit for my triumphant return. What happened was that meeting had a lot of high-falutin biggywigs there, and one of them canceled their travel plans at the last-minute, which meant an open seat on the corporate jet.

So being the selfless team player that I am, I stepped up and volunteered to be The One. And while I could pretend that I felt bad for the coworkers that didn't get on the plane, what I really want to say is, OH HELLS YEAH, bitches, THAT is how Manager Mom likes to ROLL!

I have unilaterally decided that I am NEVER AGAIN going to be subject to the cramped seating, anger-filled atmosphere, and virulent flatulence that are the hallmarks of today's air travel. From here on out, I'm all about sinking into the sweet leather seats of the Gulfstream G-Whatevermodel, Cristal in my pimp cup, posse at the ready.

There's just one TEENSY problem. I am WAY too low-level be able to ride the jet on demand. My lack of status was made abundantly clear when I tried to eat a Caesar salad that I found in the galley, only to have another passenger yank it from my hands so that she could give it to someone who was actually important.

I hope I'll never have to travel again, because coach travel will be pretty hard to take after this.

P.S. can somebody PLEASE teach me how to use photoshop?

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Whine And Sympathy

Day 4 of the 5-day bidness trip.

To date, I've been enduring repeated assaults by conference speakers who think that mumbling every single line on an 8-point type, chart-laden presentation is the path to corporate enlightment. I've been burning through Bullshit Bingo sheets at the rate of roughly 18 per session.

And I somehow managed to lose my bra - in my own hotel room. It was in the drawer when I went to bed but gone when I got up, apparently stolen by the same Underwear Gnome that lives behind our washing machine and eats The Boy's favorite cartoon-character underpants.

From a practical standpoint, the loss of the bra doesn't REALLY matter since it has been scientifically proven that I have the tiniest breasts in the world (and verified by the internet community - my #1 Google Search referral is from people entering "small breast mother"). However, I have to present to a large group of people tomorrow; from a confidence-building point of view, I'd prefer to holster the poached eggs instead of going commando.

But what really hurt was my last phone call home, when I found out that The Boy and I were no longer on speaking terms. He is angry with me for going away. And MD told me that The Girl has been taking my picture to bed with her because she can't remember exactly what I look like in person.

To make myself feel better, I went for a run, and spaced out listening to a playlist of self-pitying mopey emo songs. I came back to consciousness and realized that I had run six miles. All in one direction - east of frigging nowhere. Since it was getting dark, I had to run the six miles back and was feeling progressively crappier with every stride.

So when I finally made it back to the hotel, I vomited spectacularly all over the shiny marble floor. Right in front of a group of fellow conference attendees that were gathered for a cocktail reception. Those delicious fish tacos I'd had for dinner last night? Not nearly as charming during the encore presentation. And although the chunk-blowing was probably from overexertion, my hypochondria tells me otherwise. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to die from tomato-induced salmonella before I get the chance to atone to MD and Spawn for my absence.

I hope that doesn't happen. I'd like to leave Spawn with some heartwarming moments of actual togetherness, rather the fading impression of my voice on the other end of a cell phone. Although MD should make out pretty well, thanks to a hefty payout from my life insurance. I'm sure he'll find himself a new gold-digging slut on Match.com in no time.

Spawn WILL like me again someday. Won't they?

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Carnal Thoughts

It's business time!



I'm in the Admiral's Club Lounge at JFK, about to embark on the Manager Mom 2008 West Coast Business Tour. THREE cities. FOUR airlines. Infinite airplane misery. (Hi there, Herbietown! I'm feeling your pain, my brother.)

As I left my house at 4:30 A.M, (yes, I said A.M., because that's what I had to do to get the cheapest airfare, and I hope those sadists in our Travel & Expense Department get a horribly disfiguring skin rash) I saw that our local Greek Orthodox church was setting up their summer carnival.

Naturally, this makes me think of having illicit sex with random strangers.

Er, from a THEORETICAL, not a PRACTICAL, point of view, said the happily-married-for-nine-years mother of two who will spend the next several days attending an "innovation conference."

Why is this the case? Because in my late college years, when my friends and I got tired of getting groped and thrown up on by drunken frat guys (which more or less resembles my experience at a typical kid birthday party nowadays), we started having movie nights.

We'd gather in someone's apartment with a few cases of Schaefer Light, a fine brew whose 24-pack at $1.99 pack price point made their marketing tagline ("When You're Planning On Having More Than One, Make It A Schaefer") more of a personal challenge. Then we'd pop This Is Spinal Tap into the Betamax and spend the rest of the evening eating Tastykake Cupcakes and reciting lines of dialogue along with the TV.

But one day, my best friend happened to bring over a movie called Two Moon Junction. It stars Sherilynn Fenn as a proper Southern debutante who gets swept away by her passion for a brooding, mysterious carnival worker. This was definitely a Hollywood fantasy world because this guy looked nothing like the greasy toothless track-marked workers that staff, I don't know, EVERY SINGLE CARNIVAL I've ever experienced in my lifetime.

But with the Schaefer flowing, and all of us between boyfriends, this movie quickly moved into heavy rotation. Eventually, the novelty wore off and we realized that Richard Tyson is actually pretty gross, a fact later confirmed by his performance as Cullen Crisp in Kindergarten Cop.

And so in the spirit of love, and with visions of carnys dancing in my head, I'll leave you with another heartwarming piece of family exploitation - one in which my daughter, after having her Electra complex go from zero to 60 in under ten seconds while watching the movie Enchanted, created a little book in which she writes about the mating habits of adult humans.

Again, purely from a theoretical point of view. Certainly not by observing the mating rituals of her parents.

I posted it over here,and I hope y'all enjoy it as much as her art teacher did.

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And the "Company With The Smuttiest Sounding Name" award goes to...

I was in a meeting today where a guy from our sales group was presenting recommendations on how to improve our business performance within the convenience store channel, and when we got to a page with this company's logo on it, I completely lost it and started sniggering like a nine-year-old boy who gets his first glimpse of a real girl's boobies.

So I had to check out the website to make sure that this was a real company, not some subversive sales-team inside joke. And it totally is! The phallic gas nozzle and the kid with the shit-eating grin on his face just makes it even more entertaining. I mean, really. Is this a gas station website or a cautionary tale to frighten teenage girls into taking a vow of chastity?

They're located mostly in states ending in -kota or -braska, but that's no excuse. They have porn in those states too, don't they? Unless someone over there is working on a name change, I see limited growth potential in this company's future...

P.S.Don't click to read more. There's nothing there. I'm just too much of a moron to figure out how to get the code out of my post html.


DIDN'T I TELL YOU NOT TO CLICK??? HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO REPEAT MYSELF?

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Little Shop Of Horrors

A few days ago, I took The Spawn to their six-month dental checkups.

Normally I’m very good with managing appointments, which by “managing,” I mean “scheduling them for a time when I can’t go.” (Just kidding, Manager Dad! That "work conflict" that prevented me from going to their annual physicals was totally coincidental!)

But I thought I could handle this one because the kids generally don't mind going to the dentist. There's no pain involved (yet) and she gives them free stuff like licensed-character toothbrushes and cheap plastic trinkets. For added insurance, I planned to keep their moods (and blood sugar) highly elevated by deploying chocolate Munchkins at the slightest sign of distress. (Despite the fact that rewarding kids with junk food is probably not the best strategy in front of their DENTIST.)

So I wasn't anticipating any major problems. Unfortunately, I failed to account for the fact that The Boy has turned into kind of a wuss.

It started with a few weeks ago with baths. If you happen to be in our neighborhood on bath nights, the sounds coming from our house might give you the impression that they're filming the latest installment of Friday the 13th in our bathtub. Then we had the strep tests; when the nurse unwrapped the throat swab he started howling so loudly you would have thought she'd produced a straight razor and a bottle of bourbon and told him to lay down for a frontier-style tonsil extraction.

The dental visit was going OK until we got to the flouride treatment, which is just a quick coating of leave-on gel. NOTHING like the flouride treatments I remember, which consisted of five minutes of sucking on a gigantic, foul-smelling tray of gunk, choking back vomit while staring at an egg timer to see how much longer the ordeal was going to last.

But for whatever reason, the sight of that flouride-laden Buzz Lightyear toothbrush (the EXACT SAME ONE that had so delighted him just ten minutes ago) sent him into full-on, Code Red, fight-or-flight mode. He clamped his jaw shut and threw out all of his best Randy Couture kung-fu moves. The only time he would open his mouth was to shout things like "OH HELL NO YOU BITCHES AIN'T PUTTING THAT SHIT ON MY TEETH!" (Except he didn't use the word "ain't," because he's pretty good at grammar.)

Twenty minutes of threats, bribery, attempts at reason, and groveling didn't work. So we had to resort to force. Which meant that it took me and TWO dental hygienists to hold him down while the dentist pried his mouth open.

We finished the appointment with both The Boy and myself reduced to tear-stained, sniveling, snotty messes, while The Girl cheerily picked out her plastic chokables from the prize chest.

And I'm thinking to myself, - Crikey. If he carries on this much for teeth brushing and throat swabbing, what would happen if he ever had to get a blood test?

I need to get The Boy to toughen up when it comes to doctor visits. Any ideas?

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