(Illustration / Stacy Lenz)
NickMom — What? You’ve all thought about it.
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Read the full list over at NickMom.
NickMom — Is this normal? Because basically the highlight of my birthday parties was Big Mac Container Stacking.
NickMom— You put a fish tank in your kid’s room because you think it’ll teach valuable lessons about nature and responsibility, and then the fish more or less try to kill themselves.
3. “I said, ‘Maybe we SHOULDN’T put the moray eel in the aquarium,’ but nooooooo no one EVER LISTENS TO ME.”
Pictured: What shopping with kids looks like. Sometimes they're even the tantrum-my ones.
GateHouse — I approach clothes shopping like most people approach their pet’s funerals.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I guess with pet funerals there will be at least some part of it you’ll enjoy — warm-hearted memories of being lovingly licked all over your previously germ-free face, or the way your little Scotch terrier used to whizz like a French fountain on the pants of everybody new who entered your house, or that time you drank a giant glass of milk and then your dog got out and you found yourself sprinting through your neighborhood at the age of 13 with a full quart of milk slorshing around in your stomach, and when you found the dog you were overcome with relief at both locating the dog and the knowledge that now, finally, you could walk home slowly to throw up. Naturally, all of the preceding stories are accurate.
Anyway, point is, there is some joy in the funeral of a pet. There is no joy in clothes shopping, which, by contrast, is a miserable few hours of staring into a gaping hellmouth filled with things I am now too fat for.
I hate shopping, mostly because I’m terrible at it. This past weekend — and I feel no small degree of pride in saying this — I went into a few stores and successfully obtained a series of t-shirts that were, in essence, perfect clones of t-shirts I already owned, with some minor and in some cases molecular-level variation on the order of “Well this gray shirt is slightly more gray than that gray shirt I already own, but I like that gray shirt very much so maybe a grayer version of the gray shirt, plus the original gray shirt, is in truth a wise financial and stylistic decision.” I am a real party to go shopping with. If it’s one of the three days per year in which I’m required to try something on, I whine like a three-year-old getting a haircut.
NickMom — Hey, you know what a magic kit helps you get done? NOTHING AT ALL.
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The full list over at NickMom.
NickMom — To be fair, if I just learned that I had feet, I’d probably stare at them for 45 minutes too.
GateHouse — Many years ago, I had a son.
Well, OK, I still have a son, but “I still have a son” is a crazy-boring lead, and “MANY YEARS AGO,” which I imagine to have been spoken aloud by a drunken Sean Connery, makes this column seem more akin to an epic clash of skygods and dragonlancers instead of what it is, which is a belated attempt to pin months of my son’s misbehavior on a 6-year-old named Brayden.
Many years ago I had a son in kindergarten, a son who was getting in trouble. A lot. Two or 3 times a week, for most of the winter. Our kindergarten reported behavior via a series of stoplight-coded cards — green (for Gallants), yellow (for Goofuses) and red (for the criminally insane) — and my son had been a Green for months, which I promise I’m not saying with that obnoxious dadblogger “MY PRECIOUS ANGEL CHILD SPENT THE ALLOWANCE HE EARNED PLANTING PEONIES FOR THE NURSING HOME ON EYEGLASSES FOR NAMIBIAN ORPHANS EN ROUTE TO HIS MOST RECENT SOCCER GAME WHICH I SHALL NOW TELL YOU ABOUT ALSO” thing — whatever, he was usually on green. Until one week, where a yellow snuck in. Then another, and then another, until there were yellows many times a week, and I began to dread asking about colors when I picked him up.
NickMom — This list is probably only relevant to Danica Patrick but hey you NEVER KNOW.
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7. The lactation consultant would also sell funnel cakes.
3. Birth would immediately followed by me thanking Jiffy Lube for all their support.
Read the full list at NickMom.
Darth Maul, whose character development begins and ends with his evil Southwestern facepaint
GateHouse — Went to see the new, 3Dmafied version of “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” this weekend, and I didn’t hate it. I should’ve hated it. I didn’t hate it. What the hell is going on right now.
Like most “Star Wars” nerds and nerdesses, I have a love/hate relationship with “The Phantom Menace,” and by “love/hate” I mean “Just the hate, with a side of grilled This Sucks and a mug of What Is This Horse Poop?” I saw “Menace” in 1999 with a cadre of fellow nerdlingers (and, inexplicably, our fiances) and we spent the next two weeks struggling to think of nice things to say about it, fighting to justify the emotional investment we’d made, an investment that had been returned to us in the form of jokes involving flatulent space horses and the nuanced drama of intergalactic trade route taxation disputes.
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