The one day I leave my hemp and flax dress home...I swear

I had today off from work. Chuck was on interviews (after a year of being laid off, employment is on the horizon) so Junior and I were left to frolic in the wonderland that is southeastern Connecticut.

Gah.

I decided to buy Junior some new books. I was all set to go to Barnes and Noble when I thought, why not support an independent bookseller instead? So I set my sights on the Niantic Book Barn.

Holy books. The place is set up like a compound, and there are used books everywhere. Not only do they sell books, there’s a kids’ playground…

…which was so infested with mold and mildew I skeeved at Junior touching anything. Seriously, have you ever been to someone’s house and enjoyed the ambiance of his/her laid back décor but upon closer inspection realized you mistook carefree for neglected? That’s how the Book Barn felt. I wanted to embrace the outdoor armchair nestled by a stack of books, but the more I looked at it, the more it looked like a chair I’d seen by the side of the road on dump day.

I don’t want to leave an establishment with Cladosporium clinging to my ass.

So Junior and I ventured inside and climbed the steep wooden stairs to the children’s section. A flattened Clifford the Red Dog lay on the floor, along with an assortment of…oh, hell, why pussy foot around? The toys looked like they had mange. As I raced through the books, I kept whispering to Junior, “Don’t play with that!”

Have you ever done the whisper-shout? It hurts your teeth.

Finally, I’d had enough. I grabbed some books and paid for them. The cashier ringing me out looked like a chubby Lily Munster. She didn’t smile. No one did. It was like everyone had just survived a plane crash and was suffering from PTSD.

Maybe I didn’t fit in. Maybe I should have worn a beret with crusty apple stuck to it and been perusing Yeats instead of wiping my child down with Purell? Maybe I should have braided organic alfalfa sprouts into my pubic hair to symbolize the suffering of genetically modified food?

Whatever.

I don’t need every retail experience to feel like Mickey Mouse’s smile is crammed up my butt, but as I drove away, I seriously wondered if I’d accidentally wandered into a Niantic commune full of childless artists and hippies and if they were pissed off about it.

Oh, but right, the books. The friggen books.

The best part? As we walked to the car, Junior squatted, turned to the woman walking past and grunted, “I’m poopin.”

Book Barn, if you'd give me all your Bukowski and Curious George books, I'd spend the day sweeping and polishing. You just need a little shine to your grime. I also have some gently used children's toys I'd be happy to donate. And maybe, just for a day, your moose statue could squirt vodka instead of water. Maybe then someone would smile.

Random Tuesday thoughts: Everyone's naked

It's time for RTT, brought to you by the fabulous Un Mom.



Why do some people walk like they’ve just climbed off a horse? It makes me silly.

What should I do about my life? I got a job offer in my field that would allow me three days in the office and two days at home. I’m thrilled but honestly, can I really get any work done with a toddler in the house? Sometimes it’s hard to find time to pee, never mind design a catalog.

I wish I didn’t like muffins so much.

I’m trying to be positive about winter coming, but now that the leaves have fallen off the trees, Connecticut is starting to get that dead look. How can one possibly be cheery when the natural world is screaming, “I’m a scraggly, naked mess!”? Or am I just projecting onto the trees?

(I’m not naked right now, promise. But if I were, would that change how you felt about this post?)

We’re getting five new windows put in downstairs. They are big ass windows, and the man’s here right now putting them in. When Chuck answered the door in his bathrobe, Chuck accidentally flashed him.

Ok, that’s not true but Chuck’s reading this over my shoulder and I wanted to give him a rise.

I’m not going to miss the plastic we used to put over those old windows. The draft was so bad the curtains would sway. It still wasn’t as bad as that apartment Chuck and I rented in Portland, Maine. My dad helped us put Styrofoam over some of the windows and then plastic.

Course, I think he saw Rico the landlord and wanted to shield us from the view. Didn’t work.

I am now convinced that ad agencies are feeding their creative teams LSD. How else to explain a juice commercial that involves school children, a comatose rabbit and balloons?



I'm scared.

But I'm not naked.

Promise.

News flash: Thomas the Train does not have a bar car

I don’t mean to be overly dramatic but holy shit, we made it. We spent our day with Thomas the Train in Essex, Connecticut. Walking into that Lala Land of Sodor music and screaming kids was downright trippy. I’ve never seen so many Sodorites. Every kid was sporting Thomas gear. And meltdowns? Scary. Ear piercing. Frequent. On more than one occasion I held Junior to me and whispered, “Thank God you’re mine.”

Junior was pretty juiced to ride Thomas. The bouncy train seats were nice. As was the open window. The sunshine. Mellow Junior.

But.

I know, I know, there’s always a but.

The ticket-taker talked the whole ride. On a microphone that was wired into enormous speakers—speakers that were everywhere. If your toddler wanted to ask you a million times “Is Thomas puffin?” you had to keep shouting yes. YES, YES, Thomas is puffin!

And instead of “Day with Thomas,” it should have been “Five minutes with Thomas.” Unless you walked to the front of the train after your ride (and by “walk” I mean let the crowd carry you), you didn’t see him. Junior kept asking us where Thomas was hiding.

For $90 ($18 per ticket x 3 tickets + $17.50 service fee + $15 shipping fee), my kid should not be struggling to locate the whereabouts of a bright blue locomotive with a face! It’s almost funny.

Almost.

Know what else is almost funny? Overhearing other parents’ conversations as we ate our $3.50 mac and cheese (to be fair, hotdogs were $1.50). My favorites:

“I need a cigarette and a nap.”

“Godammit, Spencer! [belch] Now I have to get you another [belch] straw!”

I don’t know what was scarier: The fact that someone thought picnic tables next to Porta-potties was a good idea or the loose interpretation of the term parenting I observed.

I don’t mean to put a negative spin on the experience (I mean, when Junior reflects on his life this will probably be up there with getting laid), but I feel jipped. The ad said storytelling. In reality, a video of Thomas played on a pull-down screen. The ad promised “Build with LEGO bricks.” There were LEGOs in the shape of Thomas, but he was already assembled, and kids were playing King of the Mountain on him (I’m not kidding, Junior took a heel to the cheek trying to just stand near him). Sure, you could meet Sir Topham Hat—for another $20.

Twenty bucks! To meet a scary-looking plump white guy who’s always giving orders.

And what the frick? The allure of Thomas the Train isn’t just Thomas, it’s all of his friends. It's the "You're cross" and the "No, now he's cross" and the "Check the signals!" and the "Ok, even though we're fickle little engines let's be friends again" comradery that makes it special.

For some kids, naming Thomas’ friends is as much a rite of passage as knowing their ABCs. Yet the only sign of Gordon, Emily, Percy, James, Sir Handel, Henry, Stanley—crap, I know too much about this topic—was one incredibly lame waist-high poster with a few of the trains on it.

Oh, and in the gift shop. The gift shop’s cup runneth over.

Well, next Saturday my cup will runneth over. My aunt, cousin and mother want to experience Thomas with Junior. He’s a lucky little boy in that he gets to go twice. I'm lucky in that now I know exactly what to bring with me:

1) earplugs

2) a peanut butter and jelly sandwich

3) a flask

I don't just blog about fleas and rotten meat. Hello. Take II

My friend called me yesterday. She’s the one who gave me the cookbook, so I thought she was calling about my meat explosion.

I was right.

After the mockery she said, “I like your blog, but you don’t really talk about being a mom that much.” I must have sounded hurt because she immediately backpedaled. “What I mean is, I wouldn’t really call it a mom blog. You write about work a lot. And Chuck. And Mulletville. And fleas. And other stuff, too.”

The conversation ended there because Junior wanted to get out of the tub and I didn’t want to wrestle a slippery toddler with a phone crooked in my neck, but I’ve been thinking a lot about what she said.

Avoiding the obvious—which is that the life of a mom need not be relegated to parenting issues alone—part of me wondered if I’d have more to say about being a mother if I didn’t work full-time. That made me a little sad. I’m home by 4:30, so I have a nice chunk of time with Junior at night, but my posts aren’t full of anecdotes about my kid because, well, I’m not with my kid all the time.

But even if I were, Junior isn’t entertaining 24-7. Sure, he held up plastic hangers to his ears last night and shouted, “I’m a moose!” but you’re not Junior’s grandmother; you probably don’t want to hear about every cute thing he does.

Another part of me tried to remember if my intention from the get-go was to be a mom blogger. I think it was. I think when I first started this blog I fancied myself a valuable resource for fellow moms. Clearly, I was drunk when I envisioned that.

The more I thought about the whole “You’re not really a mom blogger” comment, the more I realized I’ve kind of been avoiding the mom issue, and that my meatloaf is a fitting picture for why. It illustrates what my brain sees lately in the blogosphere: momsplosion.

Lately, there are so many women blogging about what it means to be a mom that my brain cells can’t synthesize it all. There are blogs of helicopter moms, supermoms, entrepreneurial moms, kayaking moms, product-reviewer moms, WOHMs, SAHMs, WOOHs, juggling moms, green moms, hybrid moms, stepmoms, same-sex moms and moms with two vaginas.

Then there are moms blogging about the helicopter moms, supermoms, entrepreneurial moms, kayaking moms, product-reviewer moms, WOHMs, SAHMs, WAHMs, juggling moms, green moms, hybrid moms, stepmoms, same-sex moms and moms with two vaginas.

And we haven’t even gotten to the dad blogs! (Had I known Chuck was so en vogue as a stay-at-home dad, I would have gotten his Viking-Ghostbusting-Stay-at-Home-Dad in the Buff calendar ready a whole year earlier.)

My point is that there are parents everywhere, and they are blogging about everything. A few years ago, blog tracker Technorati estimated there were about 8,500 blogs where parents were writing about their kids. That’s before the mom/dadsplosion. Right now, there are probably 657,836,098,747,647 blogs where parents are writing about their kids.

I've connected with some of them—like .0092%—and I love it. I really do. But some days, the sheer volume of words makes me feel like reaching for the Massengill. Do we honestly have that much to say about parenting? Do you ever feel that we’re saturating the blogosphere with our parental introspection? Do you think by now we might have covered everything?

I do. Some days I envision the parental blogosphere as the Great Oz. And I picture a mom—or dad—hitting “publish” on her—or his—blog post and the Great Oz receiving this notification:



Yah, the Great Oz uses a Mac. Of course he does.

The good news is that Quentin Tarantino is working it into his next script

Almost one year ago, I posted this. Oh, fine, lazy asses, I'll give you the Cliff Notes. I wrote "...I want to be culinarily fertile. I want to leaven a lasagna, birth a moist banana nut bread, souse a Succotash."

I still feel that way, even though the memories of this and this still haunt me. So last night, I put on my big girl pants and ventured into the Land of Meatloaf.



But instead of Julia Childing a meatloaf, I ended up with something that resembled...oh, shoot, are you trying to eat breakfast? I should probably be offering you a puke pan instead of descriptive analogies.

What happened? Was the meatloaf scared of the edge? Why did it recoil so?

Seriously, if that damn chunky blob of wretch is not the most compelling argument for becoming a vegetarian, I don't know what is. You fellas at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association better watch out. I'm single-handedly (and, albeit, unintentionally) bringing you bad boys down.

I'm hoping the Apron Goddess can whip me up a flowery one of these. I'd like mine in extra small: all this nauseating food means Mama Mullet's shrinkin as fast as her meatpile.

The silver lining to this debacle is that Chuck has agreed to take a cooking class with me! Isn't that sweet? Now I just need to find one through the Mulletville Continuing Education Department. Shudder. One whose menu doesn't include possum dumplings or fried muskrat. Mmmyah, maybe now you'll take this post a little more seriously.

Some nights it's better not to talk

Mrs. Mullet, after a rough day at work: "I need a hug."

Chuck: "Hold on."

Mrs. Mullet: "Now."

Chuck: "I'm coming."

Mrs. Mullet: "What's taking so long? Don't you want to be there for me in my fragile emotional state?"

Chuck: "I always want to be there for you in your fragile emotional states."

Mrs. Mullet: "States? Who said anything about multiple states? I didn't say state, plural. I said state. As in one."

Chuck: "One what?"

I'd consider dating the Easter Bunny

Seven parents. A one-year-old princess. A four-year-old Spider-Man. A five-year-old rock star. A five-year-old Super Mario brother. A four-year-old Butterfly Princess. A two-year-old dinosaur. And Junior, the two-year-old pirate who looked more like a well-dressed hobo.

I now know exactly what it feels like to herd sheep: crazed, maniacal, cackling sheep on a sugar high. The most frightening sheep ever! Sheep who decide to roll around on people's lawns. Who disappear into shrubs and wander off with other trick-or-treaters. Who yell into the night sky like barbarians.

Who wake up at 6:15 a.m. thanks to Daylight Savings Time.

Halloween, now that we've officially met, toddler-style, I think it's time we start to see other people.

I need your help! SOS! WOK! PAN!

Did you know that I am single-handedly keeping Morningstar Farms in business? Me and the company are such good pals I'm a Facebook fan. I'm a member of their prestigious Insider's Club. Junior's on their Chik Patties like a...oh crap, it's early, insert witty simile. Or is it metaphor? Did I mention it's early?

I'm begging you, if you know of any good toddler cookbooks, tell me what they are. Junior wants to dress up as a Morningstar Farms Veggie Riblet for Halloween and cute as he'd be, it'd be so nice if we could wean him off the pre-made stuff and onto something Mama Mullet made.

P.S. Please, please, puhleeeze don't suggest Jessica Seinfeld's kiddie cookbook. I think the family has enough money and the cover design is so hokey!

P.P.S. I was not paid to write this post. Not even in black bean burgers.