Does Jon Hamm like animal crackers?

Last year I was again sucked into the lure of Williams Sonoma, and once there wanted to buy everything in the store. I did buy some animal cracker cookie cutters. Oh, I thought, this will be awesome, I can just make my own animal crackers and Ellie will love them and oh my god I am going to soon dethrone Martha Stewart because I am such a domesticated genius. Where shall I start in the poking of holes in that whole deluded thought? Let me start with calling out whoever that mean person is who printed the recipe. Don't you know that some of us mothers didn't have our children in high school? Meaning we are OLD. Well, specifically meaning, I cannot read a recipe on the box of animal cracker cookie cutters in 8 point type without some sort of reading glasses which my toddler has absconded with. So thank you for making me feel old, something I really didn't think a cookie cutter could do.

Perhaps if I'd had my glasses at the store I would have realized that the recipe had too many ingredients AND required refrigeration of the dough. Like I have that kind of time. But I was determined to crank out these tasty treats for my child. As I was rolling out the dough I had visions of my animal crackers being featured on the Today Show. Matt Lauer would interview me. Jon Hamm would be a guest that day and taste one of the animal crackers and fall in love with me. Except refrigeration of that damn dough made it really hard to roll out, then it got warm and stuck to the cookie cutters, then I tried to transfer them to the cookie sheet and they fell apart. Then I baked a few and they burned. Then I threw the rest of the dough away, put those cookie cutters on the top shelf of the pantry and set my mind on other ways to attract the attention of Jon Hamm.

Today I thought of those cookie cutters while I was eating some animal crackers. You know, the ones that come in a GIANT tub for $10 at costco. Who in their right mind makes animal crackers? The homemade marshmallows I am totally down with but animal crackers, that's sheer lunacy.

Don't get too full of yourself mommy

The other day, a particularly trying day since my daughter decided not to nap, I was hooking her into her car seat and she put her arms around my neck and said "I love you so much." And oh yeah, I saw the cute side of 2. Last night after she was in bed I heard her reading and talking and then looked to see her pick up her stuffed monkey and said "I love you George." Ok, she did say she loved me so much and she just simply loved George so I'm still better than the toy but it did kind of knock me down a peg.

Did anyone see this headline on Yahoo today?

Can robots be programmed to make ethical decisions?

Did I miss that big announcement how robots have been programmed to clean your house and fold your laundry and pick up the dog poop in the back yard? Because that's what we need the robots to do, isn't it? I don't wish there were more hours in the day so I could tackle all those weighty ethical decisions I just can't get to. Well here's a doozy, I know, "Roomba, vacuum yourself over here and figure out if we should put grandma in a nursing home," thank god we had that robot here to solve that!

Yeah yeah I know i watch too much television

But this web ad pops up on Yahoo and I immediately notice - that's Alan from Sesame Street. I don't think I'm seeing things here, that IS Alan right? It really freaks me out to see children's television stars out of their natural habitat, like when you were a kid and saw your teacher in the grocery store and it made no sense because obviously she lives at school and why would she go to the grocery store when she has access to those cafeteria sloppy joes 24/7?

Nightmares and cats

It rained torrentially here on Friday and Saturday and quite frankly we are so spoiled by our year round good weather (even the hot stuff) that most every day revolves around some sort of outside activity. So when nerves were wearing thin on Saturday afternoon, Ellie put on her raincoat and grabbed her monkey umbrella and we headed to an indoor playscape/coffee shop. Now I had already anticipated that it would be kind of crazy but I've been there on a weekend before so I thought I knew the scope of insanity we'd be dealing with. Do you hear that noise? Yes that's probably every last one of you chuckling because clearly I am so very stupid. It was like if you took every child who has ever been on Super Nanny and their dumb parents and sent them to this place. I expect that children will attempt to walk up the slides, that's what kids do. But I also sort of expect that parents will be kind of supervising their kids and notice that when their kid is climbing up a slide and a child is sliding full bore into them, maybe you should tell your kid to get off the slide. I do not expect the dads of these children to be walking up the slides. Seriously, what kind of grown up are you?

After literally 10 minutes of being seriously concerned about my child's safety, I left. Oh, I have a great idea, let's go to the paint your own pottery place I thought. That would have been a great idea if I'd been driving the deLorean from Back to the Future because apparently the paint your own pottery place closed down. From the looks of the abandoned storefront, several months ago. Because she was being a total good sport about the whole ordeal I really figured I owed Ellie some outing. At this point all I could think of was PetSmart.

Well we hit paydirt at PetSmart. Now we've been there before but every time Ellie is amazed at what she finds "LOOK mama, I found a TURTLE!" Imagine that, right there in the tank with that turtle sign on the front. But the best part was the cat adoption area. It appears that it is someone's job to come up with sales pitches for the cats. I had to photograph them because I'm afraid no one would believe that there's a "gossiping" cat available for the asking right up there at PetSmart.

Calling all weirdos

I was going to post on the nightmare that was my Saturday and maybe even touch on the epic toddler meltdown at art class this morning that left said toddler and mother covered in tempera paint. And then I came across this piece of awesome journalism:

The 10 Weird Ways to have a Baby.

I don't know, perhaps I'm a tad sensitive but I think to call surrogacy or embryo adoption or a gay couple adopting a child from a homeless woman "weird" is well, crappy. Families are made lots of different ways and the desire to have a family however you can make it happen is far from weird. I'd even venture as far as to say that it's "normal."

Perspective

After I watched Mad Men again last night - Ellie was having some issues getting to sleep on Sunday night during the show so I missed some of it - I was trying to find something else to watch. I stumbled upon a documentary called Beyond Belief. And, well, oh my god.

It's about two amazing women who lost their husbands on 9/11, Susan and Patti. They are amazing in so many ways. Because they were able to not just keep life moving forward in a positive way for themselves and their children but also for women and children half a world away. They decided to help widows in Afghanistan. They partnered with CARE and raised money to help these women become self-sufficent and support their children. They decided that they really needed to travel to Afghanistan and meet these women. I was thinking "no way would I do that, too dangerous." They acknowledged the danger and their trepidation but after watching their experience there I get it.

Women and particularly widows in Afghanistan live in such poverty and in the most primitive conditions. Many can barely feed their children much less send them to school. Susan and Patti give them the tools to change that. There were a couple of moments that really struck me. First, Patti and Susan were meeting with a group of the women that they are helping and asked if any would ever remarry. They all emphatically said no. Then they explained, in Afghanistan if you remarry you must leave your children behind with your husband's family. At another point they were talking about their children and the Afghani women asked Patti and Susan to send pictures of their children and their houses. Susan started to cry and said thinking about that made her embarrassed, because she has so much and these women have so little and how it's not fair. As she said that I was having the very same thoughts.

I do have so much. I will never have to worry about feeding or educating my child. I will never have to contemplate leaving my child behind. Yes these are lean times for our family and our country. But honestly, I don't think we know what lean times really are. I am lucky, I already won the lottery, I was born in the United States. I'm not a cocky American, I don't think I'm better than anyone else because I live here. But I'm pretty damn thankful that I do live here.

Um, what?

On any given day I think I have early onset alzheimer's, hearing loss, vision loss, and or some other kind of dementia. In reality I think it's just that I am distracted by stupid things like reality tv and serious things like nobody having jobs and trying to figure out health insurance. But oh my, in the last few days I feel like I'm completely nutters. To wit:

• The tv was on and I was half listening to a commercial and getting a load of laundry out the dryer. The commercial said "do you hate cat owners?" and I'm thinking hmmm, some of them ARE kind of weird but some of my friends have cats and they're pretty normal and not hoarders or anything.....hey, what kind of commercial is this? The kind of commercial that's for cat litter and asks if you hate cat "odors." Oh, ok then.
• I'm running this morning and I see a guy running towards me and wonder why he's running with that goat on a leash. Probably because it's not a goat, it's a dog you dumbass.
• Am getting freakily bothered by grammar errors by people on twitter. Like it matters.

Maybe it's the whole "mommy brain" thing. I try to keep lots of brain space free for the "don't forget the kid in the car" reminders. Speaking of the kid. We went to hobby lobby yesterday to get supplies for her halloween costume which I'm amazed they had given that nearly a third of the store is full of christmas decorations. In one of the aisles, Ellie spotted her latest fixation, scissors. She is always wanting to use scissors so I located a pair of kids' scissors and got them. Had I known the power of scissors I would have employed them as a potty training treat. This morning right after she woke up she asked "where are my purple scissors?" We did have to institute a new house rule. Scissors are for paper, not for cutting mommy's flip flops. I don't even want to mention hair because when we tell her not to do something it's like a dare.

And now she's dead

Well if dishwashers are considered female, like ships and such, then she's dead. My mother's dishwasher that is. How prescient my post on that dishwasher turned out to be. My mother called the repairman because the dishwasher was no longer draining. She said he spent the entire time he was there shaking his head and asking questions like "do you actually USE this?" He asked her if it got the dishes clean. "Well, no, actually. We pretty much wash them and then put them in the dishwasher and they get dirty and then I hand wash them after I unload them" she replied. The lock is broken ($200), the pump is broken, you know the thing that spins and sprays the water? Yeah, that's broken. When he got to about $600 in potential repairs, he stopped and said "once the repairs get more expensive than the appliance, I stop." He said he'd never actually seen a dishwasher in that condition that someone was trying to use.

It's interesting because my mother's frugality extends really only to appliances and honestly, she has amazing luck with them. She only replaced her washer and dryer a few years ago. The washer and dryer she got when she was first married. In 1967. And it kind of killed her a little bit to buy a new dishwasher because "I figure I'm only going to be in this house another 10 years or so."

Here's something that doesn't suck today. California grilled pizza. It's a Barefoot Contessa recipe inspired by Alice Waters. I've made it many times and it's always good. We're having it tonight, we usually do just pesto and veggies and cheese. In a nod to Alice Waters, we're having a local artisan goat cheese on ours.