Angry Birds and Pigs Have Taken Over My House—Margaret Hart

My son's interest in collecting began with Thomas the Tank Engine, when he was about two years old.  He wanted every engine.  We'd build tracks all around the house and run the engines until the batteries died.  We started with the wooden trains, but once he discovered the motorized ones, they took over my house.

We moved onto Hot Wheels cars somewhere around age three or four. Every trip to the grocery store we had to buy one or two, or sometimes three.  I could justify the expense because they were only a few dollars apiece.  But then one day I looked around and they had taken over my house. We had to purchase storage cases to get them off the floor, and storage shelves to get the storage cases off the floor. And of course we had to buy the racing mats on which to race the cars. 

From race cars, my son made a quantum leap to Monster Trucks. At age five, he knew the names of every truck and its driver. He wanted to go to Las Vegas for the World Finals.  And it wasn't enough to have the trucks, we had to have the world finals and freestyle competition videos. And the books. I was happy about the books because that meant reading even if I had to read them. We started with small trucks and moved onto big ones. This called for really big storage bins. And the trucks took over my house. 

About the same time, my son started showing a strong interest in Sponge Bob Square Pants. I wasn't keen on the idea. I wasn't sure about the language. So we started small. We bought some discounted videos and a few books. But his interest took off. I started to notice the square guy everywhere. Next came t-shirts and PJs, and at Thanksgiving, while visiting relatives, we noticed the cousins had a super-sized Sponge Bob pillow on their beds. Santa brought one to our house that Christmas, along with a plug-in video game. SpongeBob started to take over my house. 

When he was five turning six, he started to get interested in Mario and Luigi.  It was inevitable. Most of his friends had the Wii gaming system and my son was introduced to Super Mario Brothers at play dates. After a lot of "please, mommy," and "please, daddy," we decided to buy him the Wii system for a preschool graduation gift.  I am certain I never got a gift from my parents when I graduated from preschool, but we needed a reason, and the timing was right.  

Now Super Mario was taking over my house. Along with Wii sports and other games.  I had to buy a small basket to store  the games. Turns out buying the Wii was one of the best decisions we ever made. While intuitively he could master almost every game with little or no assistance, it was the motivation of wanting to learn the games that encouraged my son to stretch his reading skills to learn the challenging vocabulary on the screen. My husband and I are convinced that the games he played have helped propel his reading skills. As long as his reading continues to excel, I will gladly allow the Wii games to take over my house!

This month, as my son marked his seventh birthday, the talk has been all about Angry Birds. If you haven't at least heard of the game, then you've been living under a rock! It was released in 2009 and has since reportedly been downloaded over 42 million times. Make that 42 million and 1 when I got my new iPhone this past September. My son became a groupie. He plays the game on my phone while we wait for the bus to come in the mornings. And he plays every chance he gets. 

So for his birthday on December 2nd, he wanted an Angry Birds-themed cake. So my mom and I created Angry Birds cupcakes to bring to class, and my husband and I splurged and had a cake designer create an Angry Birds cake based on a drawing my son made, for his big party with all his friends. The cupcakes came out great and all the kids loved them. The birthday cake was a huge hit and the kids were amazed. The parents, too. I just thought I'd share.

Now the Angry Birds, and the pigs are taking over my house! He has at least six birds by last count, and an equal number of pigs, plus the gigantic "mighty eagle"—birthday gifts from friends and family. They are on his bed most of the time, and sometimes I have to dig underneath them to find a boy! His plush toys and stuffed animals are definitely taking over, but as long as he can still fit under the covers, I guess I'm okay with it.

Designer Cake

Angry Bird Cupcakes

Mommy Rants - By Cara Potapshyn Meyers

Every Mom needs to rant and vent from time to time. Now that it is the unofficial middle of summer, with our “balmy” 100+ degree weather, it is the perfect time to get some “pet peeves” off my chest! And since the air quality alert is so high, it is recommended that everyone stay indoors. The time is ripe for my annual “Mommy Rants” blog! So, since it is so dang hot, I think I will first start with the “balmy” weather rant...

“Balmy Weather”

For close to the past two weeks, the temperatures here in NYC and surrounding suburbs has been either close to, at, or over 100 degrees. So hot, that watering my grass and potted plants for two hours in the early morning and two hours in the early evening still has left them shriveled! So hot that they are keeping the kids at my son’s day camp indoors half the day to watch movies. The early and late parts of the day, they are spending extra time in the pool. They did go to a Water Theme Park one of the days. I can’t help but think though; Why am I spending hundreds of dollars for my child to go to a pool that I could take him to and watch DVDs, which he could do at home? My rational is that he is with his friends all day, plus I get some peace and quiet. That, alone, seems like a pretty decent reason to me. I can also get so much more done when my son is out of the house. Okay, so now that this rant is somewhat rationalized, let’s move on to my favorite rant...

Day Camp

It is only halfway through camp and so far my son and the camp has “misplaced” (ie. lost) several items. The first of the “misplaced” items is two...not one, but two lunch totes!! One has my son’s name embroidered across the front in bright red!! How in the world do you loose two lunch totes in less than two weeks!? Knowing my son, the answer is entirely apparent. But don’t the counselors keep a small eye on some of this stuff?? My son also lost one shoe (yes, only one), a ratty towel (I hadn’t even noticed...the counselor brought it to my attention. At least they keep an eye on ratty towels), and a sport water bottle. Now here’s the best one: The camp also lost my son’s Epi Pen!! A medically indicated device that the ADULTS are supposed to be in charge of!! This completely boggles my mind! Since we are at our insurance limit for Epi Pens until the end of August, it would cost $150 to replace it! The camp told us they would replace it if they couldn’t locate the original. But this is absurd! Also highly negligent! And what have we accumulated in return? About 15 camp shirts! Enough so that I can throw out the small ones at the end of the season and still have more than a week’s worth for next year. If we send my son next year. I’m losing faith in a camp that loses a life-saving medical device! Oy! On to my next peeve...

RSVPing to Birthday Parties

My son’s birthday party is this coming Saturday. I sent out invitations about a month ago. As of the RSVP date, I received exactly 5 responses out of 21 invites sent. I am highly understanding of families that were away for one or two weeks and missed the RSVP date. I understand that this heat is getting to us all and we are all a little lightheaded. But I now have to track down, make calls, leave messages, and find phone numbers of the families whom have yet to RSVP! All this while finishing the final touches for my son’s party!! I even put both our phone number as well as my e-mail address on the invites, to make it even easier to RSVP!! I think I rant about this every year, and every year I think it gets worse. Along with not receiving even a handmade thank you card for a gift you went out of your way to get a party child. As Ms. Manners would say, “Tsk, tsk...”

Last, but not at all least...

Laundry, Laundry and Yet...More Laundry

I know I moaned about this several blogs ago. It seems that no matter how many bathing suits, SPF shirts, ratty towels, shorts, camp shirts and socks I stock up on, I still find that I need to do laundry every other day, for one reason or another. This time, the culprits are my son’s karate outfits. My son has karate after camp three days a week (nice, tired kid!). He only has two karate outfits because he only was able to take two classes a week when school was in session. Now he takes three. I asked to purchase a third outfit, but the karate school is out of my son’s size and is waiting until mid-August to place a large order for the Fall classes. My son is drenched when he finishes his karate classes. These clothes cry out to be laundered! So, after my son’s Tuesday and Wednesday classes, I do a load of laundry to make sure that he has a clean outfit for his Friday class. It is a good thing that they have a home delivery service called Soap.com. In this weather, I hardly feel like shopping for and shlepping home hoards of laundry supplies! I make a purchase online, get free shipping if I meet a quota, and in less than 2 days, I have laundry supplies on my front porch! Now how cool is that?! (Shout out to Soap.com!!)

Well, that is all the ranting I can stand to give at the moment, although I’m sure there is more!

Please feel free to leave a comment and let us know what your favorite Mommy Rant is! I’d love to read them all! Let’s compare rants!

Side Note: Today marks the official, second anniversary of my blogging for MotherhoodLater.com! I hope you have enjoyed my blogs just as much as I enjoy writing them! For those of you who are curious about what I wrote for my very first blog, I am adding a link directly to it. I must admit, it was probably one of the most creative blogs I’ve written to date!

Enjoy!

Week 16...Beauty and Brains - by Liimu

This week, I have a couple different topics forefront in my mind: Beauty and Brains. The first, beauty, is an interesting switch from last week’s discussion of pregnancy weight gain. Although I can’t deny that my weight gain is on the high end of the spectrum, I also can’t deny that this pregnancy is the first time I actually feel like I know what people are talking about when they talk about the pregnancy “glow.”

On Sunday, my sister in law was in town and she wanted to take photos of my children – she’s a photographer in NYC. She got me in a couple shots, make up free and all, and she just kept remarking on how beautiful I looked. I had to admit when I saw the pictures, they weren’t half bad. And often when I accidentally catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror as I pass by or as I’m washing my hands in the bathroom, I have to do a double take, because I really like what I see. Pregnancy agrees with me this time around. So, that’s an interesting shift in my perception – that regardless of the number on the scale, I can still look and feel beautiful during pregnancy and hopefully this is something I will carry on into my life well beyond my delivery date.

The second thing I have to talk about is Pregnancy Brain. I have had a lot of experience with the way in which pregnancy causes me to be completely scatter-brained. I can remember putting milk cartons into the kitchen cabinets instead of the refrigerator, and …. well, I’m sure there are other examples but I can’t think of them because I have Pregnancy Brain! Maybe it’s because I have three other children, maybe it’s because I’m working 70 hours a week, maybe it’s just because I’m getting old and there’s a little senility mixed in there with the rest of what’s going on, but this Pregnancy Brain is out of control. As an example, let’s talk about my 4-year old daughter’s birthday party. Granted, there are EIGHT birthdays in September in my family. No, I’m not exaggerating, there are eight: my sister, my two brothers-in-law, my sister-in-law, my two nephews and my two daughters. So, there are a lot of moving parts in September, but I’ve never really had a hard time managing it all before. Well, for my four-year old’s birthday, I decided to do a Little Gym party, which generally is pretty straightforward. You call them up, you make the reservation, they take the deposit, you send them the addresses, they mail the invitations, done.

Well, first of all, somehow they didn’t take the deposit, so I almost lost the reservation. Then, because most of the children I wanted to invite on my daughter’s behalf were in her class at day care, I decided I would take care of the invitations myself. So, I had a little help from my sitter – we put the invitations together, and then after forgetting day after day after day, I finally remembered to put the invitations into their little lockers at school. Then, I realized at 3 am one morning, that I had forgotten to include RSVP information on the invitations. So, I then very cleverly (I thought) made up notes with just the RSVP information. Of course, I didn’t have a guest list so I had to try to conjure up the names from memory. Then, I get a call from the Little Gym reminding me about my party, including the date and the TIME, which turned out to be an HOUR AND A HALF later than what I had included on the invitation. So, I created another “Oops” flier for all the locker (feeling not nearly as clever as I had before), and now could not even slightly pretend that I could remember who had been invited, and who had received the first Oops message. The best I could do was field the e-mails and phone calls that came in, including those from the Little Gym asking if I had my final guest count yet. It has been a mess. Fortunately, Sunday will come and the party will have gone off, one way or another. And people are very tolerant of the way in which the brain functions, or perhaps malfunctions, during pregnancy, due to all the extra attention it’s giving to the little project going on down below.

So, that’s what I have going on this week: Beauty and Brains. Maybe next week will be Brawn, if I can ever get my larger-but-cuter butt back to the gym. You’ll have to stay tuned to find out!