My Daughter the Democrat

Oh how could I.

How could I even forget to mention the most awesomely awesome thing that just happened?

Right. I'm so sleep deprived now that Thalia is back to sleeping in my bed only when I am in it with her and am willing fall asleep with her (after an hour or two) while holding her hand and reading her eighteen stories and convincing her that the dark is not scary and clocks are friendly.

Ahem.

When I first was pregnant with my little non-sleeping angel, someone turned me onto Brain, Child magazine. I flipped through the pages thinking yes! Yes! YES! Oh YES to something smart and wonderful and well-written for parents out there that has nothing to do with top ten lists or exercise tips or recipes that include the term Jell-o Brand Gelatin or Crock Pot, sometimes together. This is before I discovered blogs, of course.

Mostly your blog. Yes, you. Yours rocks. Have I told you that lately? I know I haven't commented. It's not personal; I'm really really tired. Did I mention Thalia's not sleeping?

Ahem.

One day, I thought, one day if maybe I work really hard on it and stop overthinking every freaking word and forget for a moment that I'd been turned down twice by McSweeney's and don't chicken out at the last minute, maybe I could pitch the editors something they might deem worthy.

This month, I have my first piece in Brain, Child - it's one side in a debate as to whether you should raise your child with your own political values.

Can you guess which side I took? I mean, I do contribute to MOMocrats.

Click over to read or better yet, get yerself a whole subscription, woman! It's totally worth it. (Coincidentally, the first piece in the issue is an editorial about J&J Camp Babygate which mentions Mother Goosemouse, Her Bad Mother, Citymama, and Susan Getgood among other fine blogging mamas.)

The other POV in the debate, from a writer named Lora Shinn, is wonderfully thoughtful. I'd love to know what you all think after reading both sides...

[illustration via brain, child]

Etiquette, Bitch.

As I become increasingly fed up with the lack of decency and and the proliferation of self-centeredness in the world, I have found myself becoming New York's own common courtesy enforcer.

Or as I like to think of it, The Etiquette Bitch.

I feel a little like the Bernie Goetz of thoughtfulness, although without the gun. And the whole [cuckoo! cuckoo!] thing.

It started innocently enough with my growing annoyance at litterers. Occasionally I'd approach the culprit and smile sweetly, "I think you dropped this," gesturing towards the candy wrapper on the subway track or ATM receipt on the sidewalk. Nate hated this, fearing I'd--or more likely he'd--get stabbed one day. He's probably right. It might not be worth it to die over litter.

Recently on the subway, a middle-aged gentleman hobbled on with crutches and no one stopped to offer him a seat. Standing myself, I leaned over the healthiest, youngest looking seat mates and asked if someone might offer him one. Three people looked the other way, but the teenage girl with the nose ring obliged me. The guy on crutches didn't so much as offer me a smile in return.

I started to wonder why I bothered, or whether I did the right thing. I figure well, a guy on crutches deserves to sit down. Even if he is a jerk on crutches.

But this past Monday, I was walking with Thalia to the playground when a couple in a brand new SUV pulled over and parked. Right in the middle of two choice parking spots Move up!" I called to him. He ignored me.

"Move up!"

Nothing. I pushed Thalia's stroller right up to the driver-side door. He rolled the window down tentatively while his wife wondered what this crazy woman with the toddler could be asking for.

"I'm sure you didn't realize," I smiled, "but you're taking up two spaces. If you pull up, then someone else can park behind you. There's not a whole lot of parking in this neighborhood." He pulled up about two feet.

"All the way forward!" I gestured. Annoyed and I think a little befuddled, he inched forward a bit more then turned off the ignition still with a good five feet between his front bumper and the car in front of him. At that point I gave up. At least the neighborhood Mini Cooper would have a parking space.

"What happened mommy?" Thalia asked as we turned the corner headed towards the playground. "What did that man do?"

"Well sweetie, some people just aren't that good at sharing."

"So you are telling him to share?"

Suddenly I felt completely stupid. Who am I to tell him anything? It's not like he's going to walk away thinking hm, I think I WILL park more considerately next time! It's not like the litterers will think twice before tossing that used MetroCard on the sidewalk or the seat-hoggers will be any more considerate. Mostly, they'll just walk away muttering something nasty about me.

At minimum though, I was hoping Thalia learned a little something. Well, something more than the fact that her mom is a self-righteous Etiquette Bitch with a low threshold of tolerance for inconsiderate asses.

As we got close to the playground, a jogger stopped me.

"Hey, did you just actually tell that guy back there to move his car?"

"Um...yeah. Yeah I did. You saw that?"

"Well that is just awesome!" she laughed as she headed up the brownstone steps to her front door. "I can't wait to tell my husband. He's always doing stuff like that."

"Really? That's great!"

"Oh yeah." she said. "Aaaalways. He's going to be so glad he's not alone."

[Junk Food Mr. Rude tee via 80stees.com]

Walking the Walk. (Or Toddling the Toddle?)

Sometimes you are totally stressed beyond any stress you've ever felt every before. Things seem to be crashing down around you, tension abounds, and life just isn't cooperating in any sort of way. Curses are used. Tears are shed. Fists are shaken. Wine is consumed.

And then, just when you really need it, the universe gives you a gimme--just a teeny little cosmic chuck on the shoulder as if to say yo mama, chin up.

Sage started walking. It's a happy thing. A very happy thing.

It's getting harder to call her "the baby."

Lucky Charms: God's Cereal

When you get a pitch from Lucky Charms, you answer it. Because as long-time blog readers know, the Lucky Charms guy is God.

Basically they added a new marshmallow to their cereal and would I like a free sample to find out what it is? How could I resist! My mind reeled at all the outstanding marshmallow shape possibilities:

The number seven?

A gold dubloon?

A skull and crossbones?

A scale representation of the Great Barrier Reef?

A crop circle?

An afro pick?

The virgin mary?

A DNA double helix?

Carmen Miranda?

The Microsoft logo?

Van Gogh's ear?

(General Mills, if you ever want me in on your new product ideation sessions, I'm available.)

Nope, wrong on all counts. It was an hourglass.


Darn.

But a magic hourglass with the power to control time.

Evidently it also has the power to turn the entire box of cereal into crack, because it's the first thing my daughter woke up asking for every morning until it was gone.

By the way, you know you're getting old when you wish that the Lucky Charms cereal to marshmallow ratio was weighted a little more heavily towards the cereal.

---

Apologies to all the other PR pitches which did not make it onto my blog this week, including but not limited to a "me time" promotion at a coffee bar on the other side of the country, the chance to win a body and face treatment at the value of ___ (It literally said that. She forgot to fill in the blank), car wax to "keep the interior and exterior of your vehicle in tip top shape, but also work wonders to restore, protect and shine household surfaces", a coupon for diapers, a new towel, delicious meal and snack recipes, six books, five new websites or blogs, two upload your own video about blahblahblah for a chance to win blahblah contests, a new coffee beverage, some air fresheners, and gum.

I will put you back into the PR pitch fishbowl and draw a new lucky winner to post about at random next week. So keep those pitches coming! I can't get enough. Especially the ones that address me as "Dear Julie."

It does help if you have God affiliated with your company.

Let's Talk About Sex...and the City

I was prepared to hate the Sex and the City movie.

I already had the beginning of the ranting blog post composed in my head as I purchased my ticket. It had something to do with how I rolled my eyes along with Nate as he described the increase in cosmos he's been serving at work lately, and his stories of fifty-something New Jersey housewives giggling about "how Carrie" they were. Um, yeah, wearing a big flower brooch doesn't make you "Carrie."

I just knew I was going to write about how that movie just sucked the big one and how every critic was right and what a freaking waste of $12 and two hours of my life it was and...

and then, as the opening credits started to roll, I cried.

Don't tell Nate.

(Don't tell anyone I know. Because I think it's supposed to be cool to hate Sex and the City these days.)

Sure, I could talk about the forced plot twists, the dialogue which sounds mostly like it was written by gay men, the fact that no one sleeps in pearls. But then I'd have missed the point entirely.

What people like Nate misunderstand is that the series was not just some annoying show that made thousands of women think that they were ohmygod JUST LIKE Carrie/Miranda/Charlotte/Samantha. Well okay, it was that. But it was more. If you read between the Manolos, it wasn't about fashion or dating or love or even sex. What it was was a strikingly dimensional homage to the importance of adult female friendships.

And I watched it every single week, every episode, without fail. And I loved it.

It's hard to remember of course. The years since the series has been off the air, I slowly joined the cynics, forgetting my fondness for the show, the characters, the relationships, the writing before it crossed the line from clever to punny to yeouch. I've told myself that it was a moment captured, and that its time had passed, sort of like when you listen to your favorite song from high school for the first time in ages and for the first time, you realize how absolutely terrible it is.

But that's not what happened at all. Sitting in that theater, the subway rumbling beneath me and my arm elbow-deep in popcorn made me remember exactly what I loved about the show then. More than that, it reminded me what I liked about myself then.

When SATC originally aired, I was a perpetually single writer who wrote a lot about dating. And no, I wasn't ohmygod JUST LIKE Carrie, but I did have a lot of shoes and no mortgage payment, and I did have my share of one-night-stands with bold-faced names and I certainly could walk into Jeffrey and drop a week's paycheck on a cashmere tank top without having looked at the price tag first.

Sigh.

And no, I wasn't ohmygod JUST LIKE Miranda, but as the series was drawing to a close and Miranda the high-powered attorney, was moving to Brooklyn to raise a kid with Steve the bartender, I, the high-powered ad exec, was moving to Brooklyn to raise a kid with Nate the waiter.

Let's just say there were some similarities. (And they were pointed out to me more frequently than I would have liked.)

New York women loved that show, dammit. It was our show. It was our city. It was our lives, even if it wasn't really our lives. Even if we'd never ever actually stepped foot onto the cobblestones of the meatpacking district after a velvet-roped party at Spice Market, or even knew what that meant. That's why the show worked.

I think it's every city chick's prerogative to swoon over the Vivienne Westwood dress, identify the shooting locations (Hey! That's La Focaccia on Bleecker!), recognize the extras, envy SJP's ability to look awesome in lingerie at 40+, and reminisce about when Patricia Field's on 8th Street was your favorite shop in high school, where the drag queen sales clerks urged you to try on bondage skirts behind dressing room doors that were neither high enough nor low enough to really afford any privacy.

It's our prerogative to enjoy the happy ending.

It's our prerogative to forget what we know about film criticism or relative coolness and just enjoy the ride for a couple of hours.

And I think it's every out-of-towner's prerogative to order the fucking cosmopolitans if it makes her happy.

Failing Gloria Steinem Once Again?

Thalia has officially entered the "put clothes on my dolls" phase of toddlerhood.

It's awesome because it gives me something to do with all the clothes she and Sage have outgrown that I love and refuse to part with.

Seriously, the definition of insanity has to be when you start feeling bad for a onesie.

Thalia has this pair of dolls courtesy of one of Cool Mom Picks' favorite shops, The Silly Wagon - a boy and a girl. The artist, Galia Chai, named them Noa and Tom. Thalia calls them Dora and Diego.

It took me a while to figure out what she was talking about when she first demanded to go see Dora and Diego and then retreated to her room to play with dolls. Especially considering how pasty white these particular dolls are. They definitely do not have the world-weary look of children who have spent their youth traipsing unaccompanied across the Mexican countryside in the blazing sun.

Recently Thalia has decided Dora and Diego need to be dressed. And undressed. And dressed. And undressed. And dressed. And undressed. And once again, I found myself defaulting to stereotypical gender roles (Bad feminist! Bad! Bad!) when I opened Thalia's dresser and held out a football jersey for Diego and a frilly something or other for Dora.

Thalia, ever the free-thinker, politely declined.


Diego got the tank top. Dora got the flaming leg warmers.



Thalia got the Clinton Portis jersey.


And then she walked around the house in nothing but the jersey and a pair of plastic pink princess "heels" trimmed in marabou and probably dripping with unimaginable levels of lead paint. But Thalia likes them. So I like them. Enough.

She is going to defy all expectations, this girl of mine. I just know it. She's not a girlie girl. She's not a tomboy. She's just a cool little kid who wiggles when she gets excited and loves kicking a soccer ball and wants to try on my makeup and knows the Redskins fight song and thinks a princess is someone who dances in a special skirt and gets to save a prince.

All of this gender role stuff can be so impossible to get exactly right. It's hard for me to let her walk out of the house in a football jersey. It's hard to remember to buy her trucks along with the dolls. It's hard to when I try to describe what makes boys different than girls. It's hard to say "Sure, why not put Diego in a pink ribbed tank top . He looks fabulous, and hey, let's put on some early Madonna while we're at it and we can play West Village hairdresser. I'll bring the Prosecco."

I was raised to know better. So this really must be a bitch for other parents too.

I want so very much to allow Thalia to be who she is. Something tells me she won't have it any other way.

So There's That.

Thalia has discovered her vagina. As in, really discovered it.

There is no page in the baby book specifically to record this milestone. I checked.

Brooklyn Hipster Parents: Myth Dispelled

I know some of you think I'm some sort of wild hipster parent because I have a Brooklyn address but I assure you it's not true. Sure, Finslippy used to live here and she's cool. And Dooce held her book-signing party here and she's cool. And the Sleep is For the Weak book signing party is going to be at the Tea Lounge in Park Slope on September 12. (Shameless plug! Shameless plug!) But those are other parts of Brooklyn.

Brooklyn is a big place.

In my part of the borough, Brooklyn Heights, Nate is like the lone tattooed dad, and probably the only one that ever lived on Avenue C with four roommates and a couch that smelled like the homeless guy they swiped it out from under. This is not exactly where the struggling writers and bloggers and comedians and table-waiters come to spawn. It's more like where the Wall Street guys settle when they want a short commute and a few trees for the kids.

Which is why it still totally cracks me up that we live here.

If you want to know more about where I live, or the rest of NYC for that matter, Mommy Poppins, which is the most awesomely unpretentious blog about New York for families, just put together a really great New York City neighborhood guide written by all different bloggers.

Click over and you can read my essay on Brooklyn Heights, see a cute picture of Nate and Thalia, and learn about pathetic second-rate celebrity sightings here.

Here in hipster Brooklyn.

A Staying At Home Mom. Not a Stay-At-Home Mom.

I feel like there's a difference between stay-at-home moms and moms who are home with their children. Me being the latter.

Freelance has been slow with summer here (any leads anyone?) and I've found myself home with the girls more often. Which is wonderful. Awesome. Fanfreakingtastic. That's what we're supposed to say, right?

I pass these professional moms in my neighborhood who just seem to have their crap together and their routines down (and their hair perfect and their kids bathed) and while we give each other The Kindred Stroller-Pusher Smile, I don't feel like I'm one of them.

It has less to do with me not having a Wall Street husband and me not having a grasp on childcare basics.

I still fumble through my building's front entrance and smash the wheel into the doorframe when I try to navigate the double stroller through. I'm terrible at getting it up stairs - I'm always that mom who kind strangers approach asking, "You need some help with that ma'am?" I forget to strap the baby in in the first place.

I'm always tearing through my diaper bag searching for [diapers, wipes, goldfish, water, crayons, binkies] and they never seem to be there. Or the ones that are there are filthy. Or broken.

Yesterday I was so proud of myself for remembering to actually grab a diaper and toss it into the stroller just in case.

It was used. Don't ask me how that happened.

I often find myself relieved when one kid is off having a special day with a grandparent or home napping with Nate. Two are three times as exhausting. Or maybe that's just because I make it harder on myself because I can't get organized.

Last weekend I went to a Kung Fu Panda promotional event with both kids and (after getting in a huge fight with the Masshole who stole my parking space and coming this close to slashing his tires) was so frazzled when I arrived I didn't even remember to get the stroller out of the car. Isn't that like the first thing you get after the children? The stroller? So there I am carrying my 19-pound pre-walker all the way to the event, then juggling her for an entire two hours while trying to wrangle snacks for Thalia and shake hands with other parents. At least the ones who weren't scurrying away from the sweaty mom who was offering twenty dollars if someone would just get her a beer. (Stupid kid-friendly party.)

Even after nearly 3 years of parenting experience and two kids to show for it, I think when I'm out in public with my girls I come across more as the hapless but loving sitter than the experienced mom. Even my sitter thinks so.

Do they have new parent refresher classes? Like continuing ed for moms? A GED for the breeding set? Maybe something at the Learning Annex? Someone should get on that.

FSBO, 2br, hi ceilings, chefs kitchen, 1 ba + outhouse in LR

There was indeed some discussion when we first spotted the cardboard house. The discussion being that Nate, in typical fashion, wanted it for Thalia (along with everything else in the store) insisting that she would love it like nothing else. I resisted.

He won. And he was right.

It started with a lot of potential - a pristine white 3-dimensional canvas ready for water colors and imagination. But instead of turning it into a rainy day art project (because that would take planning) we decided to let Thalia go at it with any art supply, any time she likes. Basically the Running with Scissors approach to creativity. She had her way with stickers and shards of Crayolas retrieved from under the sofa. She painted. She let her sitter sketch suns and trees and stars. She wrote the letters in her name.

Even if it yielded a big multicolored mess it was her mess and she loved it. Her beloved mess in the middle of our living room.

Over time we saw the house evolve, as we had hoped. It was a castle, a kitchen filled with play food, a playroom, a dress up space. It was a place Thalia accepted junk mail through the little pass through slot or sat on a single pink toddler chair and ate an apple. She hung her art work on the walls. She invited her sister in for tea.


And then in the last week, it became something we hadn't expected - a bathroom. Thalia moved her potty in there for privacy. Once a day she announces her intentions, then races in shutting the little cardboard door behind her.

I always wanted a second bathroom in our apartment. I never expected it would be an outhouse.

The best part:
Reading material.

These are the Moments That One Day Your Kids Will Ask About.

Hey Bill Engvall, here's one for your Google Alerts

Ring, Ring.

"Hello?"

"Hey Liz, want to sit down over brunch with some other bloggers and two cool comedians to talk comedy and parenting and their new show on TBS?"

"Will there be cantaloupe? Because it's in season now and it is really delicious."

I wish there were more dirt to share about the celebs. Bill Engvall is a guy you could totally hang out with for three hours and trade stories about your kids. It's impressive that Mr. Blue Collar comedy could hold his own in a room of white collar NYC moms dangling Ora Kiely totes and teetering on Jimmy Choos. (The moms, not Bill Engvall.) But you've got to like a guy whose favorite Father's Day gift of all time was a '77 van his wife bought him when they probably could have afforded a Cayenne.

Tim Meadows is, well, he was the longest standing cast member of SNL after ten seasons, but is still known as That Black Guy on SNL so that alone qualifies him for some sort of honor. Plus he mentioned that had he not been doing comedy he'd be writing bad ad copy, he did improv and I did improv, he worked with Michael Richards and I worked with Michael Richards, and and he used to work with Adam Sandler who was my college boyfriend's best friend in high school in New Hampshire. So if you think about it, we're practically related.

I haven't watched my screener yet because I'm still two weeks behind on Lost. But it would seem The Bill Engvall Show is a solid, mainstream, family-friendly sitcom about parenting and families and the things they do. Kind of like The Family Guy.

So we talked about parenting and families and the things they do, about Facebook and teens, about which women are funny these days, and why people with blogs post mean personal attacks on celebrities.

(Answer: The same reason people with blogs post mean personal attacks on each other. I believe the proper term is asshattery.)

I think I am fast becoming the B-list momblogger PR whore, attending any press event that will send me home with a goody bag. I'm just like the celebs at those Hollywood baby graft gifting suites, grinning for the Nikons while waving their free $26.99 minkie blankets.

Holly Robinson-Peet, Jason Priestly, some soap opera star, Mr. Tori Spelling.

Me.

I did insist on getting a blurry photo before I left. You can't leave without getting a blurry photo, you know.


Was I grabbing Tim Meadows' ass? I will never tell.