Update on my guardian angels

Posted: February 7, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: breast cancer | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Remember these three lovely ladies? If not, read this. I wrote about my guardian angels and their unfortunate accident in which they flew off the shelf and crashed onto the floor.

They’ve been repaired and restored to their shelf in the kitchen, where they can watch over my family and me. I think they’re recovered from their trauma, but are likely wary of another episode and probably watch over me with a worried eye, thinking, “There she goes, crashing around the kitchen again like a crazy person. It’s only a matter of time before she bustles over here to grab a cookbook off our shelf, and down we go, smashed into bits on the hard porcelain tile.”

Or something along those lines. I have no idea what Willow Tree angels’ conversations actually sound like, but that’s how I imagine this one. 

All three angels went to Ed’s magical workshop for repairs. They may want to ask about a frequent customer card, as they’ve been there before, and will probably end up there again. His rates are very reasonable, he does outstanding work, and he always manages to work in the casualties resulting from my carelessness.

This angel sustained the most extensive yet least noticeable damage. She pretty much snapped in half, suffering internal injuries but held it together cosmetically. You can see that she now has a long scar all the way across her middle, which is prescient as that’s what I too will have after reconstruction, since they’re gonna cut me hip-to-hip to harvest the skin & flesh to rebuild me up top. Ick. I wish I could manage as serene an expression as this Angel of the Heart in the face of my trauma, injuries, and recovery.

The Angel of Hope needed limb restoration, but thankfully she managed to escape the accident with her right arm intact, since it holds her lantern that she uses to watch over her careless charges. A single amputee is bad enough; a double would have been really tragic. She also lost part of her ponytail, but as we all know, hair loss is temporary, and hers did magically grow back at the workshop, and her scars are barely noticeable.

Sustaining the most overall damage was the Guardian Angel and her young companion. The decapitation was especially devastating, and sadly his head was never found. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Harry the eating machine found it and devoured it before he realized it wasn’t actually food. She also lost her head, but I found it and it, along with her hand, were restored to their previous state.

Thanks to everyone who wrote, called, or emailed with concern and support about these lovely ladies. Let’s hope they stay in one piece for a while.

Shameless plug

Posted: February 6, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Is it a shameless plug if it doesn’t benefit me personally? Is it even a plug? Or shameless? These are the questions that fill up my brain and try and distract me from the task at hand, which is to get out the vote.

Meet Alexis. Or at least meet three-quarters of her face. Yes, her eyes really are that blue. No, she doesn’t wear colored contacts. She’s 16 and entered in a contest to win scholarship money for college. She wants to go to TCU and the tuition is quite dear, as our British friends would say.

She’s funny and loyal and responsible. She coaches little kids’ swim team and basketball teams. She babysits and never loses her patience. She genuinely likes little kids. She thinks it would be cool to counsel people in drug or alcohol rehab (hmmmm, she may be seeing me in her future!).

She loves animals. A lot. She got a bunny named Henry for Christmas. Adopted him from the SPCA (yes! They do have bunnies there), because while she wanted a bunny, she also wanted to be responsible and do the right thing and make a difference, and all that. She assumes full responsibility for him: feeds him, cuddles him, cleans up his messes, and spends her babysitting money on timothy hay and chew toys.

So do me a favor and vote for her. She’s funny, responsible, caring, forward-thinking, and kind. How many teenagers do you know who fit that description? Hopefully lots. Being the silly girl that I am, I believe that good things happen to deserving people. Don’t you?

Vote for Alexis!

A month of soup

Posted: February 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: food | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

With it being so bitter cold in my neck of the woods, I want soup. And a can of Campbells just won’t do. I was raised on homemade soup, and when the weather turns or a nasty cold invades my system or a surgery is imminent, homemade soup is what I crave. I toyed with the idea of making a different soup every day for a month, but that may be the cold weather talking (seriously, 27 degrees in Houston?? Egads). Then I realized that I don’t even have a month between now and my reconstruction, and once I have the surgery, it’ll be quite a while before I’m able to cook again.

When I am able to cook again, I’ll be making soup. The weather will have warmed up by then; in fact, we may even be trending toward summer. But I’ll still want homemade soup. It must be genetic. My mom made soup. Well, actually she made everything, but soup for sure. She had many specialities, but her broccoli soup was my favorite. I’m not a big fan of broccoli (I eat it because it’s good for me and packed with important things like cartenoids, vitamin C, calcium, beta-carotene, lutein, and phytochemicals); but I love my mom’s broccoli soup. She knew the recipe by heart, but I have to look it up. Luckily for me, the cookbook falls open to the broccoli soup page every time. 

When I was a kid, my mom helped run a cooking school with a friend of hers, Mary Gubser. Mary is a bread and soup guru. She wrote a few cookbooks and taught cooking classes out of her home for suburban women who wanted to learn how to put a yummy and nutritious meal on the table.

I remember one time I was probably younger than Macy, and I was sick on a cooking school day. My mom bundled me up with a bag full of activities (no PSPs or iTouches back then) and took me with her. I settled on Miss Mary’s couch and listened to the women chattering as they went through the lesson: herbed vegetable soup and meunster cheese bread. My mom brought me a piece of baguette, warm from the oven, with real butter, and it remains to this day one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.

Maybe that’s why I love food so much: because memories of meals are so interwoven with memories of my mom. Food is such a powerful force, and it does way more than provide fuel for our bodies and sustain us through the day.

Soup has always been comfort food for me. You can have your mashed potatoes & gravy, your mac & cheese, your pot roast. I’ll take soup. But it’s gotta be homemade.

I got the love of soup from my mom, and Payton & Macy got it from me. In fact, Macy takes a thermos of homemade chicken noodle soup in her lunch every day. She’s vegetarian, but some things, like my chicken noodle soup and PF Chang’s honey-seared chicken, don’t count as meat in her mind.

Every week, I make a big pot of chicken noodle soup. For me, there is security in routine. Making soup for my kids every week is a ritual, and when chopping onions, celery, and carrots, I fall into an easy rhythm. Sauteeing the veggies in glistening green olive oil and with a few garlic cloves fills the kitchen with a smell of innate goodness that fills me up. Anyone can open a can of Campbells, but making what I consider real soup is a different thing entirely. It’s a labor of love, which I hope fuels and sustains my kids and weaves a delicate yet tangible ribbon of connection between them and me.

Goethe’s got it goin’ on

Posted: February 4, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: literature | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”— Goethe

I’ve always liked this philosophy, and what better day than a snow day to heed his words?

Well, let’s see: it’s a snow day without snow (gotta love Houston), so the kids are home but not playing outside. No snowmen or women, no snowball fights, no sledding or tubing or ancillary snow-related activities. No giant snowbank on which Harry could leave his yellow mark, and certainly no homemade snow ice cream.

Instead, it’s 10:30 a.m. and the kids are immersed in video games and iTouch pursuits. When they become bored from those, they will likely move on to Nickelodeon.  The washing machine is humming, the dishwasher is doing its thing, there’s a long list of things to do, and none of them coincide with Goethe’s missive.

Ok, wait, I will turn on my iTunes while I type this, so I am hearing “a little song” (some Jack Johnson to drown out the hum & clank of the labor-saving devices). I will attempt to speak a few reasonable words, but suspect the result will more likely be a rambling blabbityblah instead.

With the humming & clanking sufficiently quieted, I got to thinking about Goethe and who he was and what kind of a person he must have been to utter the above suggestion, which is so simple yet deep. He’s basically giving me a recipe to daily happiness. I like that. I need that. I’m digging Goethe.

If I stretch back into the deep recesses of my grey matter, I recall that he was a German writer in the 1800s from a good family. After some trouble in school, he was home-schooled, and his mama encouraged his love of the written word, just like my mama did. He’s described as a polymath, a word that’s always intrigued me. Of course the Greeks defined it best and used it to describe someone as “having learned much. ” While Goethe is perhaps best known for his written word (he was called the supreme genius of modern German literature, after all), he also was into nature, politics, and painting. A real Renaissance Man.

Goethe’s insights on plants & animals paved the way for naturalists like Charles Darwin, and I like to think that Goethe opened the door to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Our modern-day jokes about the shallow end of the gene pool wouldn’t be nearly as funny–or true–without either of these guys. Don’t know why, but I find that interesting.

Politically, he was conservative and thought the revolutionaries in France were wasting their time because people couldn’t possibly govern themselves. He was a fan of small principalities ruled by benevolent despots. Which is all fine & good as long as the principalities want to be ruled and the despots are indeed benevolent. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

Seems Goethe anticipated being remembered for as a painter, but he gained his fame as a writer. He did study colors extensively, and considered his Theory of Colors to be his most important work. He believed that colors developed from “the dynamic interplay of darkness and light.” I’d venture to suggest that this concept does not apply strictly to art. If I were a better student with more patience and time, I’d love to investigate this concept and expand on it. But alas, the laundry calls and the dog-hair tumbleweeds grow. Goethe probably didn’t do his own laundry, and I bet he wasn’t troubled by the accumulation of dog hair on a tile floor. He was busy pioneering the idea of physiological effects of color, which is intriguing because he lived in a rather black & white world. Imagine how he’d react to our technicolor lifestyle.

Since he was famous for his writing, I thought I’d break out my copy of his most well-known poem, Faust, (anything to avoid tacking the to-do list) but then I remembered that it’s really, really long. I remember it being billed in one of college courses as relevant and timely for our modern world, but I don’t have that kind of time to sit and read it.

A little Carl Sandburg, perhaps. His stuff is easy to bite off into manageable chunks. Fog is my favorite. I’m not a cat person (d0n’t flame me, cat lovers, I don’t not like them I’m just more canine-inclined). I do like the image that Sandburg paints of “little cat feet.” If you don’t know this poem or are a little rusty on its simplicity, allow me:

“The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.”

Simple, beautiful and I can read it in about 10 seconds. Yet the imagery will resonate with me long after. I think Goethe would approve.


Fun with t-shirts

Posted: February 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: breast cancer | Tags: , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

I’ve been wearing this shirt to the gym (thanks, Jodie!) and always get comments on it. Positive comments that is. At first I was self-conscious about wearing it, then I said to hell with that, I’ve been through a lot so I’m going to wear it proudly. Kinda the flat-chested girl’s version of  “If ya got it, flaunt it.” I’ve no longer got “it” or “them,” as the case may be, but I can certainly flaunt my survivor self.

It’s a good thing the shirt explains everything, though, because when I first started back at the gym after a long absence (thank you, mycobacterium, you SOB), one of the other regulars there asked our trainer what was wrong with me, because something looked different but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

Hmmmm, I wonder what it could be? Maybe the total absence of breasts? Maybe the evidence of rib cage poking through where normally there would be a little padding? Or my inability to extend my right arm fully (I miss you, lymph nodes)?

Well, thanks to the shirt, no one needs to wonder. It’s cleared up and we can move on…to the next shirt.

I can’t wait to wear this one (thanks, Kayte!), right after I get reconstructed. 

Wonder if they’ll let me wear this in the hospital, instead of a scratchy gown.

He’s done it again

Posted: February 2, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: pets | Tags: , , , , | 5 Comments

Good Lord in Heaven, I think my dog Harry can read.

I think he read my post about his thieving ways (see “Thank goodness for tile” under recent posts; the link isn’t working so you’re gonna have to find it yourself). While I was busy carrying in my loot from Costco, he snatched a pound of sliced Swiss cheese and horked it down.

Damn that dog to hell.

It’s too cold to keep him outside, and I am a bit of a sucker for his big brown eyes imploring me through the window to let his sorry butt inside. But it’s that sorry butt I’m worried about after a pound of cheese passes through it.

If he makes another mess in the house, I’m shipping him off to the glue factory.

Now that I have a surgery date…

Posted: February 2, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: breast cancer, drugs, infection | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Now that I have a surgery date, if you feel compelled to join the Greek chorus that’s asking if I really want to have the surgery, don’t.

Just don’t.  

I don’t want to hear it.

I don’t need to hear it. 

Isn’t the fact that I have a surgery date evidence enough of my decision to go forward?

If I didn’t want to have the surgery, would I really have a date? Would I be putting myself through the mental anguish that accompanies such a decision and the days that stretch on between said date and today?

Sometimes I hate people. 

Mainly those who say stupid things, but Sarah Palin & “President” Mubarak are on my list too. If you like either of these idiots, you may want to unsubscribe from this blog, because I will most likely rip on them and their idiot-ness a lot, esp when I’m in a foul mood like I am now. And if ripping on dumbasses makes me feel better, then Katy bar the door because I’m gonna do it. 

So there.

And don’t tell me that people mean well, and sometimes they just don’t know what to say. They can suck it. If it’s that hard to come up with something not stupid to say, then perhaps they should zip it.

But back to the surgery. Reconstruction is a big step. It’s a scary step. It’s a horrifying assault on my already-beleaguered body. If things were different, I wouldn’t be in a hurry to do it. By “things” and “different” I mean the path of destruction left by the blasted mycobacterium.

I hate that myco almost as much as I hate Sarah Palin. Sheesh, just typing her name makes me mad.

Ok, reigning it in.

That darn mycobacterium wrecked things up good. If it was just a question of having a flat chest, I’d be in no hurry for reconstruction. I kinda like my flat chest. It’s simple. It’s low-maintenance. I never have to wonder if people are paying attention to what I’m saying, because they’re certainly not distracted by cleavage (there is none). But thanks to the infection and subsequent tissue excision (gross, I know), it’s a mess that’s gotta be fixed.

And thanks to the infection, I can’t just pop in the implants and go along my merry way. I remember being asked as a kid if I had to do everything the hard way (I was a little stubborn back then). The answer is yes. Yes, I do.

I do not like surgery. Or hospitals. Or hospital gowns. Or hospital linens (scratchy, so scratchy). Or hospital food. Or the hospital smell. Or needles. Or being an invalid. Or depending on other people. Or waiting on other people to show up and do what they need to do so I can get outta there.

I do like the drugs, though.

But not enough to rush into a big, long, complicated surgery. So while I don’t actually want to have this surgery, I need to, to clean up the leftover infection mess. It’s going to be hard, and the recovery will be long. I won’t see a tennis court for several months. I will once again be at the mercy of other people’s kindness. But I need to do it, so I will. And I will leave you with another mantra from my childhood: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. Thank you, Thumper. Preach it, little rabbit. 

And if you can’t follow Thumper’s advice, and still feel compelled to tell me how dangerous this surgery is, or how complicated, or ask me to think about how it might affect my kids, or any other stupid thing that flies out of people’s mouths, then consider this: 

Official diagnosis

Posted: February 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: breast cancer | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

While looking through my paperwork from Dr Spiegel and mapping out the next month of pre-op stuff I have to do, I found something that made me laugh out loud.

I hope you find it funny, too.

If you don’t, there’s something really wrong with you.

This is the orders for the EKG and labwork I have to get done before my reconstruction. 

The handwriting is kinda hard to read, and the picture is pretty fuzzy, but if you look closely you’ll see that for Diagnosis, it says “absence of breasts.”

Other than laughing hysterically, I don’t know how to respond to that.

Thank goodness for tile

Posted: January 31, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: breast cancer, pets | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

I guess Harry was worried about me today. While I was at the medical center (all day!) taking care of some pre-op business, he had a BIG accident that wasn’t quite solidified.

Suffice to say, I came home to an atrocious smell and found a gigantic pile of mess in the dining room.

Thank goodness the entire downstairs is tile. Otherwise, I’d be ripping up carpet and throwing it on the front lawn instead of typing this right now.

Gross.

After a long day at the hospital, this wasn’t what I would have liked to find.

Poor Harry. He’s always had a nervous stomach. His tummy gurgles a lot, and he’s had some issues with his backside off and on. Some sort of doggie IBS, I guess. He’s high-strung and can be quite grouchy, and the retired neighbors who walk up and down the sidewalk in front of our house multiple times a day really set him off.  Maybe he needs more time lounging on the couch. That’s relaxing.

He’s a nervous traveler, too.

He’s famous for stealing food when no one is home. He has a big appetite. 

I found this when I came home one day a couple of weeks ago. Harry had gone into the pantry in my absence to look for a snack. He lucked out, and found about 2 dozen rice krispie treats within reach. Score!

He picked the wrappers clean. There wasn’t a speck of krispie to be found in all that mess.

He was full, but ashamed. He wouldn’t even look at me.

He knew he’d been bad, but he just couldn’t help it.

His sweet tooth is a powerful force.

Curiously, he never gets sick after his thieving.

He’s eaten an entire loaf of whole grain seedy bread from Whole Foods more than once. I’ll never forget the infamous Christmas cookie incident, in which he unwrapped and consumed 2 platters of homemade cookies that were intended to be gifts.

When we adopted him from the SPCA four years ago, we had no idea that he’s psycho. They don’t seem to advertise that at the SPCA. But he is psycho.

He loves the water.  The day we brought him home from the SPCA he jumped right into the kiddie pool.

He was so happy when we built him a real pool, and he swims a lot.

He swims alone, with the kids, and with his friends.

No matter the weather, he will swim. If there’s a leaf in the pool, he won’t rest until he fishes it out. Same goes for bugs.

He and Snoopy spend a lot of time in the pool together. Good times.

Harry has a major oral fixation. He has to have something in his mouth all the time. Preferably a tennis ball. We have about 100 tennis balls in the house and in the yard on any given day. That boy is crazy for tennis balls. If we throw two balls in the pool at the same time, he’ll put them both in his mouth. At once.

I told you he was psycho.

He loved this jolly ball so much we ended up having to hide it from him. It was hard plastic, and just big enough that if he held it in the right spot, he couldn’t see where he was going with it in his mouth. He crashed into a lot of walls, and people, before we hid the jolly ball.

He loves to carry his collar in his mouth, and shake it like a small animal destined to die a slow death at his hands. He usually ends up whacking himself with the metal ID tags, but he’s gonna kill that collar.

Sometimes he can’t find his collar or a tennis ball, so he’ll grab whatever is handy.

The bath mat will do. And if he can’t find something to put in his mouth when we get home, he will go crazy looking for something, anything. Scraps of paper, dirty socks, kitchen towels. Nothing is off  limits for Harry.

He’s also really lucky that Macy loves him so much. She picked him out, and he is definitely her dog. He sleeps in her room, and no one commands his attention like her. Well, except for maybe a tennis ball.

He loves her a lot in return.

Here she is showing him a cascarone (Mexican confetti egg).

She organizes a birthday party for him every year, and sometimes there’s entertainment, like the cascarones. He wasn’t too interested in the confetti inside, but he did eat the eggshell.

His nickname is Mr. Chin, because he will rest his chin on anything. The windowsill is a favorite spot for Mr. Chin. 

Sometimes he looks like he’s going to dislocate his neck, with some of the positions he settles in, but he always manages to go to sleep, even if his head is twisted.

He’s crazy, but we love him. Even when he leaves a huge pile of nastiness on the floor.

Mommy calling cards

Posted: January 29, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: breast cancer, kids | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

I’ll admit it right here, live on the web, in front of however many people are reading my blog today: I’m not 100%  into the whole suburban mommy thing. Thankfully, my kids are old enough now to (A) be in school all day Monday through Friday, (B) no longer need constant supervision, and (C) no longer follow me into the bathroom. Don’t get me wrong, I love and adore my kids, and I think parenthood is a noble and under-appreciated profession, but child-rearing isn’t my whole life, and I like to have some time away from my kids every day.

My favorite thing in the world is to be home alone. I know, I really should set my sights higher.

I crave peace & quiet. I get overstimulated like a small child when there’s too much noise, too many voices, or too many electronic devices running at the same time. I have been known to go to my room for a self-imposed time-out during times of chaos. Which is pretty much every day at my house. I’d like to blame it on the stress in my life from the whole cancer thing, but the truth is, I’d be that way if the words “malignant tumor” weren’t part of my life.

Like many suburbs of big cities, ours is a bubble. Everyone around here is affluent, successful, talented, well-educated and better-than-average looking with kids who are nothing if not gifted and talented. A gas-guzzling SUV is de riguer. A minivan works, too, but sedans, not so much. Nobody cleans their own house (except for me, because I’ve never been comfortable having “the maid” in my house when she and I both know perfectly well that there’s no reason I can’t mop my own floor), and everyone is overscheduled and overworked with overprocessed hair (myself included; I seriously have no idea what my real haircolor is but I know that it gets darker all the time).

Since I’ve never seen an episode of Desperate Housewives, I can’t say that my little bubble is similar to or different from from Wysteria Lane, but some of the stuff I see around here makes me think, you couldn’t write a more outlandish script if you tried.

Like the mother of the first-grader who’s in the principal’s office multiple times a week (the kid, not the mother) for bad behavior who asked the teacher to please call her (the mother) next time the kid was about to be sent to the principal, so she (the mother) could come pick the kid up from school. Apparently the mother “feels bad” for her child because his life is so rough, and it’s not his fault he has such bad behavior, he just doesn’t like to go to bed at night so he stays up until he passes out in front of the TV at 1 a.m. Every night.

True story.

Or the principal who nixed plans to have a fundraiser to benefit the family of a child with cancer–a child who had been attending that school until too sick to come anymore–because it might hurt the feelings of kids who don’t have cancer.

Another true story.

Now, don’t assume that all this goes on at my kids’ schools, because I know people in other neighborhoods whose kids attend other schools. And I wouldn’t rat out my own kids’ schools (unless it was a really, really good story). Suffice to say that these are examples meant to convey a sense of an overall picture.

I did camp out — literally, as in spend the night in the parking lot — to ensure that my kids got a spot in preschool, but not because it was the preschool to attend, but because it was the only one with an opening, and I really, really wanted to hand my toddler off to someone qualified for a few hours a week. And yes, I did willingly buy a plane ticket and fly in from North Carolina to camp out at that very preschool (and waited in the cold rain) before we moved back, to make sure Macy had a spot at the same preschool Payton had attended before we moved away.

But I was never really one of those mothers. I looked like the other suburban mommies, I did indeed quit my job and surrender my paycheck to raise my kids, I do drive a gas-guzzling SUV, and I pay a ridiculous amount of money for organic milk to avoid those pesky hormones & antibiotics that my generation consumed.

My kids just aren’t my whole world. They are a big part of it, and if there was a pie chart depicting the parts of my life, the part labeled “kids” would be the biggest. By far. But there would also be a part of the pie for tennis, book club, cooking club, and friends; in other words, I have other interests outside of my progeny.

So imagine how hard I laughed when one of the pop-up ads on my web browser was hawking “Mommy calling cards.”

Have you seen these?

If you have a set, you  might want to stop reading now, because I’m fixin’ to rip on them pretty hard.

It’s not bad enough that this poor woman, and apparently lots of other women, identifies herself as Lillian’s mom and Matthew’s wife, but the card itself screams MOMMOMMOMMOMMOMMOMMOM all down the side. That MOMMOMMOMMOM screaming is the reason I need to hand my kids over to someone else and take time-outs, and now the mommy calling card is not only endorsing but promoting it?

How about this one? Really cute design, I will admit; I really like the smiling fish and the cool blue color, but my first thought was, since when did we get to the point of having to hand someone a card and beg them to be our friend?

Am I making too much of this? Because it seems pretty ridiculous to me.

A quick Internet search turns up all kinds of options for mommy calling cards. Tons of cute designs and fun colors. And I am a sucker for good stationery. I adore heavy cardstock, genuinely appreciate embossed invitations, and have no problem spending good money on paper goods.

But these seem crazy to me.  Really crazy. 

This one not only identifies the breeder as Elizabeth & Gabriella’s mom but also has a convenient place to mark the dance card, as it were, and force the recipient to commit to a playdate right here! right now!

You can even have photo cards, to be sure the person you hand it to knows exactly what your kid looks like. Or in case you’re worried that your Olivia or Mackenna will be confused with the other one in her playgroup.

While I do admit that Lindsey Walters is a cute little girl who likely comes from a very nice family, I can’t for the life of me imagine myself seriously handing someone a card hawking my kid.

If Payton were to make make it to the Major League and had a baseball card, I would for sure hand those out to any and all interested parties, but that’s a long time in the future and a big uncertainty. Which is another thing that disqualifies me for Suburban Mommy of the Year; my pesky realistic impression of my kids’ abilities. Some of the baseball parents we’ve met at the fields seem a lot more confident than me that their kid will be the one that hits the big time. Even though the odds are a little sobering: as in about 1 in 200 players. So 0.45 percent of all boys playing high school ball. Not very many. Payton’s Little League has something like 800 kids total, from t-ball to majors. So 4 boys in the entire FCLL, but half the parents up there think there kid is the best thing since Ted Williams. Payton genuinely believes he’ll make it, despite the odds (and more importantly, despite his tendency to depend on his innate ability rather than work hard at honing his craft). And I encourage him wholeheartedly to go for it, pursue that dream and aim high. There’s nothing that would please me more than if it happened for him. But I also tell him to study hard and have a back-up plan, just in case it doesn’t work out.

Because some kind of cosmic force is indeed in effect right now, shortly after the Mommy calling card pop-up ad appeared, I came across a website that offers snarky versions, for the not-so-perfect moms. 

Like me.

Ok, I admit, this one is a little harsh, even for me.

Hush now, I know some of y’all think I’m the queen of harsh, that I invented snarkiness and that I live to mouth off.

That’s not entirely true.

This one is a little kinder. A little gentler. Yet gets the idea across.

I admit, I like the bumper stickers that say “My kid could beat up your honor roll student” or however they word it. I wouldn’t put one on my own vehicle, but I snicker every time I see one. Bad mommy.

Here’s the modern suburban mom’s version of Sophie’s Choice, conveniently laid out on a snarky card. Hee hee.

And I make no promises about little risk of mycobacterium.

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