It’s the end of the school year, and on Monday E had a pajama and movie party to celebrate. We signed up to bring in a movie, but it had to be rated G.

Earlier this spring we learned that some parents freak out over PG ratings. E had begged me for weeks to bring in her Happy Feet DVD, and I had finally relented. One of the teachers Mrs. L was excited, too, because she had never seen it and all the kids were talking about it.

While watching it during the evening pick up time, a parent came in, saw the movie and said, “That’s PG!” and huffed and puffed her way with her child out of the school and complained to the director.

What’s wrong with PG I thought? They are kid’s movies for crying out loud! Then I happened to watch This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a documentary on the film rating system and the MPAA. A great film! Go watch it!

So anyway, I was curious when I came home and looked at all my children’s movies. All of the Disney animated and CGI animated films were rated G. And all the Dreamworks, Fox, WB films? Rated PG for Parental Guidance suggested.

Example, Ice Age: rated PG “For Mild Peril.” None of that in Monsters, Inc, though. Flushed Away is PG “For Crude Humor and Some Language.” Other PG rated movies describe rude humor, crude humor and suggestive humor. So all the good stuff for us adults, that kids don’t get anyway, and the movie is rated PG.

What about Toy Story and the Little Bo Peep and Mrs. Potato Head lines? Oh no, apparently not suggestive at all.

And isn’t there “mild peril” in Finding Nemo, Aladdin and Little Mermaid among others? I know E freaks out at the shark scenes in both Nemo and Mermaid.

It just goes to show you that one person’s humor and peril can be rated inappropriate without parental guidance. Maybe E will become a juvenile delinquent someday since I allow her to watch PG-rated movies. Oh well, I’ll take my chances.

We brought in Curious George and Cinderella to appease the masses. I think being forced to clean, scrub the floor, make breakfast, laundry and general chore work is the scariest thing of all, but hey it’s Disney.

................................................................................................................................................................................................
comment | digg this | reddit | facebook | del.icio.us | stumble | permalink

When you get a phone call from your child’s school, your first thought is, is she OK? I had a message on my answering machine on Friday afternoon which arrived while I was in a meeting. The news: E was complaining of a tummy ache, was crying and inconsolable and would not take her daily nap. This is way outside of her normal behavior. Sometimes she will not nap, but at least she will be quiet and rest.

I called back right after I hung up from voice mail to speak to Mrs. P. E didn’t have a fever, but was not her normal happy self and all she wanted was Mommy. They wanted to make me aware, and asked if perhaps I could pick her up early. I said I’d call the doctor’s office to see if they would see her, or if they thought I should bring her in. The doctor’s office said 5pm, or wait and see. Since it was a Friday, I choose the wait and see plan.

I called back to her school and said I’d be there shortly. I go to pick her up and arrive as all the children are waking up from their naps. E is no longer crying, but she looks very sad. She says to me, “I need to go to the hospital.” I refrain from laughing and tell her I talked to the doctor and he said she needs to go home and get some rest.

Her best friend K stood right beside her with tears in her eyes, ready to cry. It was very tragic. A few other children gathered around her too, showing their concern. I told her to give her friends a hug goodbye and we left.

On the way out she repeated that we need to go to the hospital. “No,” I tell her, “We do not want to go to the hospital. It’s only for sick people.” I say we can go to the grocery store to get some ginger ale and crackers. We get there and she says, “Hold me!” She is way too heavy for holding, but since she is sick, I picked her up and carried her into the store.

She picked out her crackers and I got a liter of ginger ale. We proceeded to the checkout line where she spotted the candy. “I want some candy,” she said.

“You’re too sick for candy,” I replied.

“I feel better now,” she answered.

Of course! Candy always can make you feel better. I picked up a box of Nerds and told her she could have some later after she got all better.

We went home and had a snack of crackers and ginger ale, and then laid down for a nap. I don’t usually nap with her, but she was supposedly sick, so I gave in. She proceeded to hug me and cuddle, but no nap! She was too energized after the snack. It’s amazing what miracles ginger ale can perform.

And the hospital part? Well apparently another boy, A, told her since she was sick, she would have to go to the hospital. No wonder K was so upset when I arrived to pick up E. That about broke my heart more than my own daughter. If you could only have seen her poor face worried about her best friend!

................................................................................................................................................................................................
comments (2) | digg this | reddit | facebook | del.icio.us | stumble | permalink

I suffer from mini-van and SUV envy due to E’s school. Whenever I pull into the parking lot I’m among the minority with my little four door compact. I want a larger car. We are running out of space in my tiny car.

We are also running out of space in our town home, but that’s another issue. We are saving all of E’s baby stuff in case of another kid, and our small storage closet is packed and we’ve been putting bags and containers of clothes and toys up in the attic.

But back to the car issue. I know we will get a bigger car when we have another child. What I’m waiting for is the hybrid minivan. Toyota is supposedly coming out with one in 2008. I don’t know why they haven’t created one before now. Moms are some of the heaviest drivers, carting kids around here and there.

One of my mom friends had a Prius and one car seat fit in it ok. Then she had another baby within 20 months, and 2 car seats were a little too tight. She is also shorter than me, so could have the drivers seat pushed up further than I can with my long legs.

Too bad they don’t make station wagons like they used too. Big boats with large backseats and buckets in the back. I never thought I’d be a mini van mom, but they are practical and spacious. I borrowed my sister’s when I watched her 3 kids, and it held 2 car seats, plus a booster seat. That was 4 children total and 2 adults, but we could have squeezed another in. Some mini vans even seat 8.

Back in the day, my parents had one of those huge Dodge Ram vans with three seats in the back. Each one of my sisters and me got our very own seat. My older sister sat in the long seat in the back, I got the middle seat, and my younger sister got the front one. It kept us from arguing. Oh, the good ole days.

................................................................................................................................................................................................
comments (3) | digg this | reddit | facebook | del.icio.us | stumble | permalink

This week I’m getting ready to celebrate my birthday and it’s a big one. The old three zero, 30! I think the majority of readers here are under 30, so you know what I mean. Remember when 30 seemed so old? The number sounds old, but I don’t really feel that old. I sometimes still feel like a college student; well actually I am.

Anyway, last year was a pretty lousy birthday overall as I turned 29 (which actually marks the end of my 29th year and beginning of my 30th). What’s memorable about last year is that after working all day and putting E to bed, I went out by myself and ventured to Best Buy to buy myself a b-day present.

I browsed the music CDs and purchased a Hoobastank album (so I could feel young, hip and with it musically) and then a Pearl Jam best of set to relive memories of my youth (high school and college years).

See, I don’t even own an iPod yet. Another sign of aging and having kids is that your purchasing habits drop sharply for yourself, especially in the musical area.

I’ve probably bought less than a dozen CDs in the past 3 years. As far as “hip” music goes, may 3-4 CDs. Those would be Pink, Hoobastank and Blue October. Would you count Madonna in there?

So I only have a few new CDs for myself, but E has a monopoly on our radios these days anyway. It started when she was over a year old. We had bought her a Wiggles CD for car rides to school. One CD turned into 4 Wiggles CDs and now we’ve expanded our collection of children’s music because frankly we were sick of the Wiggles!

Now E’s become fixated on the Disney’s Best of 1&2 CD’s which we’ve been listening to for several months (ever since I had the bright idea to buy them after our ice skating show trip). E liked the show, but I only have a few of the movies she has never seen, and since Disney has that stupid vault deal, she may not get to see them until her teenage years. But at least we can have the music!

This b-day should be much better than last year. We are taking a little trip to Williamsburg for a week and then my mom is taking E for the weekend.

My husband, A, may even buy me an iPod for my birthday. What should I load it up with first, Pink or Pearl Jam?

................................................................................................................................................................................................
comments (5) | digg this | reddit | facebook | del.icio.us | stumble | permalink

My life is very boring. Busy, but boring. If I were to have my own reality show, no one would watch. But I do have an active imagination.

After being married for seven years and only one man for over eight, you have to have some sort of escape. My fantasy world, which I only allow myself to escape to one every blue moon, fills in the gaps of my boring existence.

“Sex in the city for moms,” doesn’t sound very sexy, eh? I feel very unsexy as a mom, yet I still feel young and sometimes have a surge of creative hormones. I know it works differently for us women compared to men, and since I don’t watch porn, my readings of Anita Blake vampire novels come the closest to getting me in the mood.

My own most detailed fantasy happened with a previous co-worker. Read more…

................................................................................................................................................................................................
comments (5) | digg this | reddit | facebook | del.icio.us | stumble | permalink

I’ve created a monster. Actually, so have my friends and family.

My daughter E is beautiful and everyone tells her so. Now, I’m not just saying that as her mother, but she is really one of the, if not the most beautiful child I have ever seen. When she was first born she wasn’t much to look at, but she grew into her beauty about a month later.

Her father and I are decent looking, but she is all together gorgeous. Something in our DNA combined to create her, but its funny how genetics work. Several friends have already said she could be a model, and I even had a friend ask me to make her a baby just like E! Sometimes you see the most attractive couple, and they have the ugliest baby you have ever seen.

E can’t be blamed that she’s a monster, because we were the ones that called her “pretty” all those times. We also call her smart, but at age 3, pretty is what she prefers to hear.

The other morning I’m getting ready for work, putting on my makeup (which only consists of a few things, foundation, powder and eye shadow) in the bathroom and looking in the mirror when E comes in and says “You’re not pretty.”

You can imagine my shock. I proceed to tell her “You don’t ever say ‘you’re not pretty’ to anyone!” I then go on to explain that both mama and E are pretty, because she looks just like me! (Only more lovely; a great combination of DNA from her father and me.) So, if I wasn’t pretty, then she wouldn’t be either!

I don’t want her growing up to be a mean girl. Even at her preschool, her class treats her like a movie star. One day when dropping her off later than normal, we both walk into the classroom and the kids all exclaim “E is here!” and begin to gather around her. The teacher then had to say, “Give E some room, let her in the door!”

If saying that I wasn’t pretty wasn’t enough, she also wants her fingernails painted. And where did she learn about nail polish? From school. Her best friend had her nails painted.
Her father strongly objects. I just think she’s too young, but I like girly things like hair and makeup! I was going to compromise with my husband and only paint her toes, but E insisted on having her nails done like her best friend K. This is the same girl (K) who got a whole set of makeup for her 3rd birthday.

So hot pink for her toes and pale pink for her fingers. Mind you, I myself only paint my toes during the spring and summer and I hardly have time to keep up maintenance with them! E had her toes done two weeks before I managed to give myself a pedicure.

Dad flipped out, because of course E goes around showing them off. Now I will sometimes put some pink eye shadow on E if she sees me putting on makeup, but my color of pink hardly shows up on her, and I wouldn’t give a 3 year old her own set of makeup! Yet, I do remember being fascinated with makeup at a young age but that was like at age 5 or 6.

Now she wants to wear my bracelets, necklaces and earrings (of which I hardly ever wear). But, she doesn’t have her ears pierced, and I’m going to make her wait till she is 13 like my mother did!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but everyone beholds E to be beautiful. We are going to try to stop telling her so often that she is pretty, but sometimes I find it hard not to just sit and stare at her myself.

................................................................................................................................................................................................
comments (2) | digg this | reddit | facebook | del.icio.us | stumble | permalink

E just turned 3, but I still haven’t finished putting all of her baby pictures in her baby album. I’m great at taking the photos, getting them developed and putting them away in the big photo albums, but not so good about writing captions and cutting out photos for her book. We have a gap in her first year, I have newborn photos, 3 month, 6 month and 1 year photos, but am pretty much missing her 9 month old photos. I know I took some photos then, but I have to take time and find them on my computer, and get prints made.

I’m sure you’ve heard of scrapbooking too, but I’ve not gotten into the whole phenomenon. It’s enough that I get my pictures put into albums. My mother had a few albums of us girls up until we were about 6 or 7, but the ones of us older and as teens are still in boxes somewhere. I guess with three girls her life just became too busy to keep up with the albums.

There are these super crafty moms (which I long to be) who will create scrapbooks of all their precious memories. There is your traditional scrapbooking where you get an album, but some fund papers, stickers, etc and glue your collage together, but I know that is definitely not for me.

Then last year I discovered digital scrapbooking and this fabulous site Scrap Girls. Some of the scrapbooking sites have free clips available for download, but the Scrap Girls site goes all out with a daily newsletter that gives you two freebies a day! They include background papers, cute frames, holiday ornaments and so forth. So I’ve been acquiring and downloading these images religiously for several months. It’s become an obsession of mine, but I’ve yet to “scrapbook” or design anything as of yet. I just don’t have the time.

I started out just getting the freebies, but later on began reading the newsletters, and they actually do have decent content. They have instructions on how to scrapbook digital and feature their designers and so forth, but frankly the women who do this seem to live in a whole different world than I do.

Most are stay at home moms, that work part time or not at all, and some are addicted to scrapbooking about their kids so much, that they feel they don’t spend enough time actually with them.

I showed one of my normal photo albums to a friend’s grandmother and she told me, “You’ll treasure those when you get older.” I guess the nice thing about photo albums versus scrapbooks is that you get to remember your photos the way they are, and your memories of the event. With scrapbooking, the design can be distracting and the memories may only dictate one of the things that occurred.

E always loves when I sit down with her and show her the albums and tell her stories of what happened in each pic. Don’t get me wrong, scrapbooks are lovely, but they just may not be for me.

Of course if I get Alzheimer’s in my old age, then I may regret not writing anything down. One of these days, I need to sit down with my computer and albums and start writing down those dates! Thank goodness for digital cameras and date stamps.

................................................................................................................................................................................................
comments (9) | digg this | reddit | facebook | del.icio.us | stumble | permalink

Metro Mama has had a busy day, so my apologies for being late! Tomorrow is E’s birthday party, so I’ve been busy running errands. After dropping E off for pre-school, I headed to the gym for a quick 30 minute workout. I then stopped at Home Depot to purchase a few bags of mulch and potting soil. We’ve had a flat of snap dragons that E picked out a week or two ago, but have delayed planting due to the frigid temperatures. Today was a perfect day to plant them since it rained last night, and I have the day off.

Next stop was Party City to purchase some balloons for the party. I picked a few out and will have them ready on Saturday. I also have the exciting task of trying to find Madagascar themed party wares. E went with her dad last week to pick out a cake at Safeway. While flipping through the book she wanted every cake she saw, but when she landed on the Madagascar cake, that was it, that was the one she wanted!

Of course Madagascar is several years old now, so as you know with the tides of children’s marketing, new movies have been released so all the old movie merchandise has been eliminated! Luckily for me, I remembered after having looked at Party City a few weeks ago for goodie bag items, that in the clearance bins (my favorite place) were a few Madagascar items. I managed to find a few napkins, a Happy B-Day banner, some paper cups, and some plastic cups that I will give away with the goodie bags. All for under $10! We are just missing plates, but any old color will do.

Then I came home, and have been busy planting flowers and mulching, fun fun. I figure I might as well do it before all the guests come over on Saturday. I got down and dirty and saw a few of our earthworm friends. I only completed the front yard…the back yard will have to wait another day. I do have a few empty pots left, so after I pick E up from school, we will head to our high schools flower fundraiser stand. Then we have to go to the mall to pick up her professional portraits.

I’m already feeling exhausted and I know with all my yard work and workout this morning, I’m going to be hurting tomorrow. I think we’ll eat out for dinner tonight. Looking forward to Saturday when we’ll have about eight 2-4 year old girls over for the actual event. I know I’ll be even more exhausted on Sunday.

................................................................................................................................................................................................
comments (8) | digg this | reddit | facebook | del.icio.us | stumble | permalink

E’s birthday is coming up, so that means time for party planning! On her 1st Birthday we had a huge bash with family and friends, and last year her B-Day was around Easter, so we just combined them together. She ended up having three parties last year. One at her preschool with cupcakes for her classmates, one with our immediate family with an ice cream cake from DQ, and one with the extended family on Easter, with cupcakes and other sweets.

This year is her 3rd, so we are thinking of doing a smaller party for just a few of her friends at our home. She’s already said she only wants girls at the party. We also plan to take cupcakes to her school again, but of course these days all the goodies brought to the school have to be store bought. I remember the good old days when my mom could make home made cupcakes to bring, but these days with allergies and other fears, homemade items are off limits. How times have changed!

We also have to plan for the “goodie bags” to give to all her friends. Last year since it was near Easter, I did a bunny themed bag with mini stuffed animal bunnies, pastel colored candy corn and egg shaped bubble gum. This year I’m not sure what them to do, but I also want to be somewhat environmentally friendly. Most of the junk we get in goodie bags we just end up tossing. It also can get to be expensive as all those little items add up. I think I spent about $60 last year on supplies, and that was through the Oriental Trading Company.

I overheard another mom who did a Dora themed Fiesta party say she spent around $100 just for the paper goods and goodie bag treats at Party City. That was not including the food she had purchased at Baja Fresh. Her 4 year old had outgrown the home parties, but she wasn’t ready to move to the big time, Chuck E. Cheese just quite yet. She said that she would probably have to for the next party.

Another mom in E’s preschool had a party at the local recreation center. For $85 she got a rental for 30 minutes of a room with table and chairs, and 30 minutes of the soft play room! So I’m not sure what I’ll do, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out without breaking the bank. Or I won’t.

I remember I had one party at a Showbiz Pizza Place when I was about 6 or 7, and another party I had at home with fond memories of my cakes that had a doll in the middle of it, and the cake and icing was made into her hoop skirt dress. I also remember that my mom baked cupcakes for school almost every year until I got too old. My younger sister with a birthday in July never had that particular gift. What are your favorite birthday party memories?

................................................................................................................................................................................................
comments (87) | digg this | reddit | facebook | del.icio.us | stumble | permalink

Every Thursday Metro Mama writes about issues facing parents in our crazy slice of heaven.

Spring is my favorite time of year. When the weather starts to turn warm, you know its time to bring out the cooler clothes. In the case of my daughter, its time to buy new clothes as last year’s no longer fit. One of the great kept secrets of children’s clothing is consignment sales.

I wish someone had told me about these before I bought E all those brand new expensive clothes that infants outgrow within a matter of weeks. 0-3 months basically lasted about 2 weeks for my girl.

I probably would have been a snob about them before, “Nothing but new clothes for MY daughter.” But then you realize how quickly they outgrow them, and how dirty clothes can get during a few hours in pre-school, and the snobbery goes out the door.

Why pay more than $8 for something you know will only look nice the 1st time they wear it for about 5 minutes? Also the area I live in has some really fancy schmancy people who dress their kids really nice in brand name and hip clothes! Sometimes on the infant racks you can find brand new items or clothes only worn once. Most clothes, shirts, shorts, pants and shoes are under $4. They also have accessories like bouncers, swings and play pens that are used by in great condition.

This weekend will be busy for me as I have two large sales to hit up at two local churches. The best thing is the half price sales! After a few hours, or the next day if it’s a two day sale, the items go for half price. That $3 shirt is now only $1.50! Most parents are just eager to get rid of all the little clothes their kids won’t be able to wear anymore.

I’ll come home with a bag or two filled with great clothes for under $30. Now where else can you get an entire season of clothing for that price? At a regular store you’d pay that much for two outfits, maybe.

Take my advice, shop consignment sales for your little ones, or future infant. You’ll save so much money and get some really good buys.

My favorite buy from the fall sale…Baby Phat jeans in E’s size for under $4! Can’t beat that.

................................................................................................................................................................................................
comment | digg this | reddit | facebook | del.icio.us | stumble | permalink