Investing $12.95 In Your Future

I used to worry about what would happen to me when I got older.

I feared final days of eating generic cat food out of rusted tins and fighting off rabid raccoons that had crawled in through a hole in the roof of my dilapidated uncared for home.

I say 'used to,' because now, I have the training tool my three children need in learning how to properly care for the aged and infirm.

For the cost of only $12.95, I have ensured that my children will have had plenty o' practice in becoming familiar with the old, geriatric me that looms sooner and sooner on the horizon.

Click over to Aiming Low, for my post there today, and find out how you and $12.95 can teach your children well. 

Requesting A Do Over Of These Specific Times

I have one of the nicest jobs in my small town. I work catering, making some fantastic food in amounts large enough to ensure that I get a taste of the chorizo stuffed dates and skewered shrimp in mango chutney we prepare for some very appreciative clients.

I like the food sampling part of the job a lot. I also like the way I can stand behind my green cutting board with the perfect evening summer sun coming in through the picture window in front, the sound of my freshly sharpened knife chopping and dicing, while my mind wanders.

Most of my thoughts are sweet reminiscings of the day spent with my three children, but on occasion there has been the unpredictable mental wince that pops up out of nowhere, making me squint my eyes in emotional pain as my data banks cycle through like a roulette wheel and the memory dice land on a time where I wish I could have a Do Over.

Painful, humiliating, cheek burning recollections that come up and slap you in the face like some angry cuttlefish. I have had memories that come barreling in destroying the peace of an afternoon as an image of me is conjured up -- of times like when I was in the 8th grade and thought prepubescent me could somehow look good in a red tube top.

Want to know what a red tube top on a 5 foot 5 inch 94 pound thirteen year old girl looks like? It looks like this:

Subtract the men fighting for my hand and you've got a spittin' image of me at 13

I'd like a Do Over.

Of that end of school year day, when I walked into JCPenney's on Appleton Avenue and stopped at a display table in the Junior Department full of itty bitty 5 inch wide tightly cinched tube tops and said That's the look for me! I can ignore the 34B breasted mannequin filling in the prototype so nicely. This sausage encasing like fabric will look just as AWESOME on 28AA me. [a cup size that truly does exist. No matter what Victoria's Secret tells you]

And that's how it goes, one minute I'm at work, smiling as I slice ruby red Roma tomatoes and Vidalia onions into thin ringlets for tomato pie with a three cheese blend topping, and the next I'm almost slicing my finger off from the needle across a record scratch of a less than stellar moment in my life memory in my head.

I'd like a Do Over, a Do Over of so many moments when things seemed like a good idea at the time. 

Like when I thought I really had what it takes to haul an 18-month-old baby along with a three-week-old newborn with me for my annual tooth cleaning. Really?

Like that July afternoon when I attempted the community pool with a six-month-old baby and two-year-old toddler with the only words in the toddler's vocabulary being "let go a hand, mama ... let go a hand!..."

A Do Over, please, of the time I thought matte red lipstick, black mascara'd eyebrows, gold hoop earrings, and a spiral perm would NEVER make me look too ethnic. Nooo .... anyone can get shouts of "Hey! Maria! Is that you?" as they walk down a street.

Could I please also have that day back when I mailed a six-page-long hand written in my salty fat tears letter to my *one and only boy I will EVER love* telling him I understood what happened between him and Margaret after the party at Ronny's house on Saturday and I was all grown up and ready to forgive. Call me. Since this is 1982 and there is no voice mail, I'll be here all weekend. Waiting.

Can we turn back time to the hair appointment in 1983 where I said yes and let that two days out of Aveda beauty school hair "designer" talk me into hacking off five inches of lush locks for the Rosanne Rosannadanna? [especially this day, could we have back? This one still makes me feel like I can't breathe. I looked like an arrow]

And why? WHY can there not be for the love of all things holy a Do Over of the hour I wasted in my graduate school advisor's office while he MADE me listen to him practice his Shakespeare-In-The-Park for his community theater rehearsal that night? Like I didn't have other things to do? Do. Over.

And, finally, a Do Over, for the time I sat my college freshmen butt down at my can-you-believe-it-I'm-dating-a-grad-student!'s grandmother's house, while she served up a platter of I swear it's cauliflower! my favorite! that I excitedly heaped onto a pile in the center of my red apple rimmed china dinner plate, announcing, "These? I LOVE these!" with the dumbest smile possible as I shoveled gobfuls of cauliflower-looking rosettes of what was hand-whipped BUTTER into my pathetic mouth. [I still see your horrified face, Gramma Lucy, at your grandson's Latino girlfriend's mad passion for the oleo, which is why I'd like a Do Over. To explain.]

A Do Over, a start over, a repeat.

Just another chance to do it oh so differently. You know, like that first weekend in the summer of my thirteenth year, a Do Over, to whisper into my 8th grade ear as I picked up and tugged at the elastic puckering of the red tube top; a Do Over, to say, Get the ruffles. It's the sleeveless flowered chiffon number with the layers of ruffles hanging on the rack to the left that you want.


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**I'm over at CoffeeLovinMom's site today, shouting to the world about the one thing I just can't seem to do without: coffee. I hope you click over and meet Amy, I met her at Bloggy Boot Camp last year, and we were instantly comfortable with each other. Must be that Midwest thing.

Having Fun Getting Dusty

One of the very first two followers on this blog was the flame-haired beauty Shari, of Earth Mother Just Means I'm Dusty. Dusty and I have become comfortable enough at each other's blogs that they feel like our own. I don't remember how we met in the blogosphere, but we have never wandered far from each other.

We've been roommates at BlogHer and have spent time together at humor writers' conferences.

After knowing each other for over two years, we have become a permanent online and offline presence in each other's lives.

It's a thrill to be guesting for Dusty today while she is away in Florida teaching acting to people ages six to eighteen, because she is genuinely talented in that department: quick as a whip and never missing a chance at a good come back.

I'm sharing a story at Earth Mother Just Means I'm Dusty, about what happens when you agree to anything just to get your child *coughBabyE* to finish a task already.

Walk a mile in my shoes, you may have a better understanding of  how I got to be the way I am.

*Thank you.

Bite Me on FnS

It's Bite Me Theme Time at FunnynotSlutty: the internet's premiere website for bringing some of the funniest women on the internet all together in one place.

This month, FunnynotSlutty is celebrating "Bite Me: Funny Food and Cooking Stories."

I've got a good one over there. On what happens when you're raised by a fancy lady who really finds time behind the stove less than thrilling.

Don't worry, nothing a few grown-up hours of eating Twinkies and Arby's and Rocky Rococo's didn't cure.

Hope to see you here.

The List

My 10-year-old son, Baby E, is home for the summer and back to posting on Mondays [if he hears the calling]. Last week, he talked about having your kids start their Stream of Consciousness List of Things They Want To Do For The Summer. *The rules are that the kids can write down whatever they want to, and the parents can't tell them any idea is dumb or undoable.

Today, we have a snippet of what Baby E's 101 Things To Do For The Summer List looks like.

Feel free to print and use as your own mental springboard to get your kids started. HAVE FUN!

101 Things To Do For The Summer by Baby E

1.   Invite a friend over

2.   Go outside

3.   Ride to the library and get new books

4.   Go to the pool

 

5.   Go to the park

6.   Make a diorama out of a shoe box and model magic

7.   Draw with crayons and black marker outlines like in TinTin

8.   Bike ride with some friends

9.   Pack a picnic to a new park

10. Go to the bookstore and everyone gets one new book

11. Go on a field trip to a pizza factory

12. Play a board game

13. Borrow or swap a board game with another family and learn a new game

14. Go online and learn new origami to do all together and have an origami store

15. Go online and learn new card tricks for kids and do a magic show for your family at night

16. Go to a baseball game in the afternoon

17. Play hide and seek at night with flashlights. Don't say you found them just sneak up on them

18. Make a fort in the backyard with blankets and the clothesline. Have your mom bring lunch in it

19. Have a sleep over in a tent in the backyard and have your mom bring pancakes to wake you up

20. See a movie in the afternoon even if you saw it already

21. Have a squirt gun fight with little old fashioned squirt guns not big power blasters

22. Have a water balloon fight with over a hundred balloons. Get the camouflage kind.

23. Play school and you are the teacher

24. Do sudoku

25. Make up your own crossword puzzles

26. Do a newspaper and be a reporter

27. Tell scary stories at night with the lights off downstairs and the storyteller gets a flashlight to shine on people

28. Play any sport that you make up

29. Play with your brothers and sisters

30. Have a summer party and everyone brings a bottle of soda and mentos to do outside

31. Have a lego contest with your friends. Call them to come over and make different kinds of things.

32. Have your mom send you on a scavenger hunt with your friends or brothers. (sometimes people are nice, sometimes they aren't.)

33. Make a store and sell your stuff. Buy ice cream with your money.

34.  Play library/coffee shop/bookstore and have books to take out and sell pretend soda coffee

35. Play chess/checkers/ and tag

36. Have a karate chop competition

37. Have your mom fill up the backyard with all the sprinklers you have

38. Sell lemonade

39. Write mystery letters and put them in your friend's mailboxes

40. Go to a nature center that has a pond and look at bullfrogs and walk and chase butterflies but take bug spray

41. Go outside and take a huge blanket and lay down and try to make up cloud shapes from the sky

42. Have your friends come over to play with the Slip-n-die (what my mom calls it)

43. Walk downtown and meet your friends there and get an ice cream cone and then walk outside to eat it

44. Do a night time walk with flashlights and catch fireflies to keep in your room overnight

45. Make T shirts with T shirt crayons that say things you want them to say to wear for the summer

46. Play catch

47. Do a tournament that has all your friends in it and do every sport

48. Go to Netflix and watch old shows that are really old that you liked when you were little

49. Have whatever you want for lunch and make it with your mom

50. Go to an aquarium or a zoo or a museum. If it's really rainy out go to Dave & Buster's

51. Make your own comic books. Your mom can do some funny stuff if you let her

52. Make your own stickers out of white sticky labels cut in circles

53. Go buy a pet fish at a fish store. Just stay there for awhile and look at other fish too.

54. Have your mom make cupcakes and then you decorate them. Do the same with cookies.

55. Make a treasure map of the backyard and really hide something where the X is

56. Write a story and read it to your family and make pretend tickets for the show

57. Give lessons to your family in something that you know like dominos. Give domino lessons.

58. Visit a gem shop and ask if they'll let you go to the basement where they keep the really good stuff 




**Note from Baby E: these are half of my ideas. I want to see the stuff you guys do, too. Bye! 
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Digging my parenting style? Catch more of my tricks of the parenting trade at my weekly column found on milwaukeemoms.com