At Least I Know What She Wanted To Buy At Target

Found this one when I was straightening her room. It may or may not be related to yesterday's list:

Is she trying to re-enact a scene from the movie "Fargo"? Slay some vampires? Cross-stitch me a "Bless This Mess" needlepoint to hang on the kitchen wall?

I better not piss her off, just in case she actually manages to get her hands on any of this stuff.

Another shawty post... no need to click.

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The Girl Is Starting To Worry Me With Her Lists

I found this when I was cleaning up the random papers on the coffee table early this morning:

I can't even begin to figure this list out. I mean, she's SEVEN YEARS OLD. Midgets and prison? Is this a list of things she wants to do over the holiday weekend?

Nothing below the fold, no need for clickage.

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Further Proof That The Girl is My Biological Daughter

I twittered (tweeted? twattered? twut?) yesterday about how when I got home last night, The Girl came running up to me, all kinds of proud because her front tooth was loose.

"How'd THAT happen?" I asked her.

"My friend Katie kicked me in the face today!" she said happily.

Katie must have some sort of karate belt, because she did a solid job on on that sucker. Not even 24 hours later, the tooth fell out. I don't know if it's residual paranoia from being kicked in the head, or if the kids at camp are questioning the existence of the Tooth Fairy, but The Girl clearly senses that something's not right with our story. After she fell alseep I found this note under her pillow, in a Ziploc bag along with her tooth:

Yep, she takes right after her suspicious, cynical, type A old momma.

P.S. We gave her three bucks. What's the going rate for teeth nowadays?

P.P.S. Our answers are under the "click here to read more."

P.P.S.S. Haven't slept more than 4 hours straight for the past week. May pass out any minute. Please inject caffeine or stronger substance directly into my veins.



We answered "it's a secret", "sky blue, like yours," and "golden."

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Triage

Things are going to be crazy these next ten days.

A very insightful woman that I once knew (who nonetheless had the unfortunate habit of speaking almost exclusively in the language of "cliche") once told me, "When you are juggling a lot of different balls in the air, you need to figure out which ones are glass and which ones are rubber."

Since I have already eliminated sleeping, my only rubber balls seem to be in either the "shaving my legs" and "blogging and the internets" areas.

So I am going to dust off a few vintage postings until I get back on track. I won't be able to read too many blogs either. But not because I don't love you...I'd give each and every one of you a big sloppy kiss if I could. With tongue, even. And I'll be back.

This post originally appeared here, and was created using child labor.



I'm sure THIS little project raised a few teacher eyebrows in The Girl's art class...

(More of The Girl's art below the fold...)

Someday, she'll realize that you don't ALWAYS need two people, thanks to the magic of electronic aids.

I'm not sure exactly what these love box items are, but I'm afraid to ask, because if she's been going through my drawers again I might have to answer some, er, 'probing questions'.

It helps to have a little something something to loosen things up and put you in the mood. Or to get you tipsy enough so that you can just lie back and think of the mother country.

When I was in high school, boys used "Drakkar Noir" cologne to serve this function.

Note to self: explain to The Girl (and especially someday, The Boy) that Love Pills are not a recommended method, unless you are looking to wind up in jail.

And that, my friends, is how the magic happens in the Manager Household.

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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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Playdate, Or FBI Child Pornography Sting In The Making?

The Girl is getting ready to go to one of her friend's houses for a playdate. To make sure that she maximizes their time together, she wrote up and presented me with an agenda of planned activities:
As a anal-rententive person who's been known to throw down a few lists of her own, it brought a little tear of motherly pride to my eye to see that The Girl is following her old mom down the Type A path, even at this tender age.

So I began gathering up and packing all of the required props for her to-do list. I was cross-checking the bag full of stuff against the list, when I saw this item, which I hadn't really noticed the first time:

Er... This family, as far as I can recall, only has two school-age kids. I thought I checked them out pretty thoroughly, and I'm pretty confident that they don't have any extra babies stuffed in a closet somewhere.

I hope that she didn't discover any funky pictures on their computer the last time they went on Polly Pocket.com...

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This Post Was Manufactured Using Child Labor

After dinner tonight, we were doing our usual routine: MD checking his fantasy sports standings, kids watching an age-inappropriate television show starring a semi-disgraced budding multimillionaire of middling talent, and me banging away on the laptop, ignoring my family.

But tonight, thanks to the fact that they repeat that stupid show about three thousand times per episode, even 50 inches of high-definitional splendor couldn't keep The Girl amused. So she came over and climbed into my lap, causing me to accidentally hit the delete key and lose about half of a post I was working on.

"Are you working on your blog again?" she asked. "And what is a blog anyway?"

I tried to explain to her that a blog was kind of like a diary: a place where you can write all of the private things you think in your head, but don't have the courage to tell other people unless either a) you're drunk and they're your bartender, or b) you post it in the most public arena possible, where it has the potential to shame your family and friends and maybe even get you fired.

She didn't quite grasp the nuances of my explanation, so she said, "That sounds neat. Can I have a blog too?"

Now, for a first grader, the kid's a pretty good writer, and she can be relentless when she gets interested in a project. I'm not a jealous person, especially of my own daughter, but with my luck if I let her have her own blog she'd be averaging a couple thousand hits a day AND have a book deal within the span of about two weeks.

So rather than compete, I decided the best thing for me to do would be to exploit her for my own selfish gain. I told her she could have a guest post on my blog. Besides, its about time the little freeloader started pulling her weight around here.

She brings her "sloppy copies" (what she calls her rough drafts) of her writing portfolio home on Fridays, so we had quite a bit of material to select from. She decided to share some of her thoughts on the what life is like in her first grade class. And so, without further ado, may I present The Girl's first guest post (with just a tiny bit of editorializing from her mother):

Heh heh...she wrote "Uranus". Now here's the weird thing. She SPELLS it correctly, but when she SAYS it, instead of "Your Anus" she pronounces it "urine-us." It reminds me of the whole Anita Hill debacle where all of the newscasters must have thought they sounded crass by saying "huh-RASS-ment" and fancied it up by saying "HARassment" instead. I never taught her to pronouce it that way, so I'm thinking it came from her teacher, who must have gotten fed up after twenty years of rude seven-year-old boys cracking up every time she gets to that part of the solar system.Mommy knows some compound words too, and accidentally taught them to your brother just the other day! The Boy's teachers were NOT pleased when he shared that particular vocabulary lesson with his little friends. Judging from a few of the emails I got that evening, neither were their parents.

All right, honey, I love you dearly, but... you left the owl alone, and touched a frigging giant hissing cockroach instead? I knew I shouldn't have had that glass of wine in my third trimester...

That's right, girlfriend. You rock those fact families. Learning IS fun, and even math is fun, no matter WHAT attempted brainwashing those antifeminist reactionaries over at Mattel will try with their vapidly programmed Teen Talk Barbies.

So that's it. I hope you enjoyed a look into Toquam School's Classroom #40. One of the best schools in this miserable district, and oh yeah, the one that the incompetent buttwipes in our Board of Ed are still trying to close.

We'll see if I invite her back for future guest appearances.

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