Am I Really Feeding My Child Marshmallows for Breakfast?

Marshmallows are the most imaginative type of food. This is just my opinion, but stick with me and I’ll show you where I am going with this.

Every parent should feel their child is the funniest/smartest/cutest/will surely cure cancer, or at least people’s muffin-top situation. If you don’t feel this way, I worry about you.

The other day, I had that moment with my daughter.

Last year, when my daughter was in Kindergarten, each student had to keep an art/drawing journal. They created self-portraits, pictures of the various seasons, and glued photos into the book. It was pretty awesome to see the growth in her drawing abilities from the beginning of the year to the end.

One drawing caught my eye.

“What is this?” I asked my little person.

“That’s you having me in the hospital.” She replied.

“Oh.”

Below is the drawing.

I’d like to draw your attention to some outstanding details:

1) Apparently my daughter felt she was a breech baby. She wasn’t, but notice the feet shooting out first.

2) Did I sneeze and birth her? She is airborne.

3) We couldn’t be happier. Every birth is a magical and happy moment, but we are both so relaxed. Maybe I’m on Quaaludes.

4) Clearly my daughter finds me to be a snappy dresser. Notice my Jacklyn Smith pant-suit in the delivery room.

5) My daughter was born in Texas, but does she feel she was born in a border town? Notice the stark surroundings. Also, no one seems to be helping us out at El Medico.

6) At least she got my stringy, birthing hair right. I could have used a brush that day.

Even though this drawing made me giggle a bit, it warmed my heart to the core. As parents, it’s a surreal experience to see your child’s interpretation of various events.

Many times, we adults might find a restaurant so-so, but your child thinks it’s the best because they put multicolored sprinkles on the ice cream. Or as we bustled to and from stores, never fully taking in our surroundings, our children are eyeballing the colony of rolly-pollys in-between the pavement cracks and giving them names and duties.

Kids have the amazing, un-censored gift of imagination. I hope mine never loses her sense of wonder, or I may be forced to have her watch “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” on repeat while feeding her marshmallows (ah, it’s a marshmallow full-circle).

I am going to frame this rendering.

I’ll wedge it between her ballet recital photo and the blank space that will one day hold her Oscar, Nobel Peace Prize, and Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes.

Am I Really Running Out of Q-Tips De-Clogging My Ears From all the Political Debates?

Put a fork in me – I am done people! It’s not that I don’t care about the future of this great nation. I do care. It’s not that I haven’t watched all the debates. I have viewed each one. But enough already. How many times can a person listen to the same answers over and over again? It’s time to get this show on the road and vote already so I won’t have any more interruptions to my Modern Family episodes.

This is not about which side of the fence you are on, not at all. Both parties make valid points, and they both talk a little baloney too.

The call for a “cease-debate” is more about this: You know when you argue with your kids to put away their toys and they say, “I did.” And then you say, “No you didn’t, they are still all over the floor.” And then they say, “Well I put those toys away.” And then you say, “I asked you to put all the toys away.” And then they say, “You never said put all they toys away. You said put your toys away. And I did put my toys away.” At this point you start to raise your voice and express you don’t care for the attitude. This is usually overlapped by some sarcastic eye rolling and an observation about the other’s diminished skill set. There is a lot of denying and usually a “fact checker” (a.k.a. dad, grandma, or stool pigeon sibling) is called upon to corroborate the story.

Yeah, so that is basically how the debates have been going. Lucky for us, the last one was Monday.

There is one person who cannot get enough of it all. My dad. He toggles between, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News like a sports junkie trying to watch all playoff games at the same time. If DIRECTV created a political version of the NFL Sunday Ticket, my dad would buy it. Especially if Bill O’Reilly refereed. I’ve never seen anything like it. What does he think he is going to miss? A fifth body language professional from Topeka, Kansas who specializes in eye twitches and head nods?

While I know he is not alone in his 2012 election obsession, that’s enough debate re-hashing for me. I actually miss the news discussing whether or not the current administration is doing a crap job with oil and gas prices. I want the good ole’ days of ridiculous situations, such as when the Secret Service agents were caught with Colombian hookers. I’d even take the “breaking story” about how people were stealing life-size David Hasselhoff posters from Cumberland Farms.

So if you are with me, take a deep breath, get your rear out there and vote early. Then sit back with a cold one and watch the political tide roll in.

Or click over to TNT because seriously, even watching re-runs of The Mentalist is better than listening to a moderator say, “You’ll have your turn for rebuttal” …again.

Am I Really Comparing Our Language Skills to a Strip Mall?

OMG! Girrrrrrrl, I’m just LMAO at the way her boobage is showing. Somebody give her a one-way ticket to knockerville.

This is how my mom talks.

Just kidding.

But seriously, this is how many Americans speak (and by many Americans, I mean me). Are we really this lazy of a people that we have to make up words that are clearly not in the dictionary? Or create abbreviations because actually saying the words might take up to much oxygen?

Driving around town the other day, I noticed a plethora of strip malls. Now these shopping centers are pretty nice, utilizing the adobe roof tops and faux stucco walls saying, “Hey, we’re not really in the Mexican desert, but let’s just pretend while you drink your pumpkin spice latte while on Twitter.” These convenient store locations are a quick in and out for what we need in life. It doesn’t take a lot of work to find, and or, purchase milk.

It makes one wonder, is our language reflected by our surroundings?

Remember the days when people referred to one another as “my lady” and “my lord?” Remember using thy, and thine, and ‘tis? When describing the sniffles, it was a , “blackness in the recess of my lovers darkest cavity.” Remember? No, of course not. No one reading this was alive then. But that is how folks talked in those days, all the while wearing eighty-five petticoats and corsets, and looking through drapes made of heavy brocade.

The vernacular of Elizabethan times, of the turn of the century, of really, any other time before the 1960s, was laced with, well, lace. They utilized flowering language to describe a sunset, a birth, or how the soup was cold at dinner. There were so many hidden doors in the old homes, just like there were so many hidden meanings in one’s speech. A person had to sit, digest the nuances, and then figure out if they were just insulted or complemented. It’s kind of like living in the south (just kidding).

Today we speak like strip mall edifices. We are chock full of speedy, greasy speech, losing something important with its rapidity. As a society (and by society, I mean I totally do this. All.The.Time.) we are plagued with misspellings, abbreviations, and run on sentences – all of our own doing.

I am the first to say, I blow chunks when it comes to proper grammar. To be honest, I enjoy sloppy word usage. Which makes sense because my clothes are wrinkled right now as I write this.

To drive home my point of the language = décor, let us open our eyes full of contacts and hearing clogged with ear-buds, and take a looksy around:

Abbreviations = Fast Food Joint – I know, I know, the majority of our abbreviations are utilized in texting, however, they too are used in speech. Look at the OMGs (Oh my God), Cra-Cra (crazy), and HAM (Hot A$$ Mess) to name a few. We are telling each other that we don’t have the time to say all the words out loud (no time to cook), instead we are just going to say a few letters while cruising past you in the hallway (the drive thru). Most likely this will confuse one person while they try to decipher what was said (mystery meat?), and leave another a bit unsettled (indigestion).

Creating Words That Do Not Actually Exist = Tanning Salon & Cosmetic Surgery Clinic – I do this all the time. It’s kind of funny if you really think about it. Take the word irregardless, I’m pretty sure people started pushing super hard in every day speech to get it into the dictionary (for reals, check it out). Saying words that are not actually words is like covering pale skin; we all know you are pasty white under there, nonetheless, we will enjoy your orange glow. Or like new boobs – not real, but fun for somebody.

Misspellings = Half-Lit Neon Gas Sign – There are probably twenty-eight misspelled words in this article. Yet I am still writing, and thankfully, you kind people are still reading. You know when you pull into a SHELL station and only a few letters are lit up, creating a HELL gas station. That’s a misspelled word – we all know what you mean, and we are still going to fill ‘er up, but do you really want to pull into that station again?

Speaking Quickly With Massive Hand Gestures = 7-11 Convenience Store – We have got to get it all in, and fast! I too enjoy driving home my point with some type of Richard Simmons hand calisthenics. Think of rapid speech as a massive Big Gulp soda; you suck it down so fast you forget to breathe, realizing too late that you are wired, have a brain freeze, and have to pee. Too much talking can leave both parties a bit light-headed.

A study was conducted about the way we speak, text, and disregard the rules of writing. It was found (and I am paraphrasing here) that the written word will become extinct in one hundred years (or less). So what is the answer? Start speaking to your children in Shakespearean dialect? Maybe. Write, “I will not use abbreviations,” five hundred times on the blackboard? Doubtful.

Here’s something simple I like to do: read a book. Then keep that book made of paper and put it on the shelf to keep. Books use complete sentences and words, no half-words. It is something fun and relaxing and you might learn something new.

Then, when you are finished with your book, FB your BFF that you LOL’d at the hootchie protagonist named Prudence (gag – she was so not prudent!).