The Bad Moms Club

Road Tripping With Tiaras

Barbies, princesses, and the colour pink: these are all topics that I have wrung my hands over again and again until they were raw and needed to be encased in totally unironic evening gloves. But I chilled my concerns about all things pink and princess-y when I realized how much these things inspired my daughter's imagination and independent play. I'm easygoing like that.

This means, of course, that I've also chilled out about Disney. Which is convenient, because Disney World is pretty awesome.

Bad Moms Love Lost, But Totally Don't Know What The Hell Is Going On, OMG

I've been sick. Like, Island-infection-dip-me-in-the-Temple-hot-tub sick. So sick that I've barely been able to raise my head to slurp my Benylin DM, but not so sick that I couldn't watch Lost. And I'll say this: Lost makes a little more sense when you're hopped up on meds. Not enough to be comprehensible, but still. Every little bit helps.

Anyway. Seeing as we watch Lost every week, and further seeing as we are always totally confused by it, we though that we might bring our confusion here, to chat about, just as we might do if we had actual real relationships with you people and, you know, hung out. So, like, not a recap - if I could follow things closely enough to produce a recap, I wouldn't be this confused - I think - but more of a discursive WTF, a sharing of the things that are confounding us, an airing of our grievances concerning too much Kate/not enough Sawyer/will Jack stop grimacing already, etc.

(Spoilers ahoy, if you haven't watched the first two weeks' episodes)

Baby Einstein, Baby Shmeinstein: Crazy Roller Baby Videos Are Good For My Kid, And For Me.

The girl is home sick today. And when I say 'sick,' I mean, 'possibly contagious and so unable to mingle with her peers but well enough to run around the house and wreak havoc upon everything including my work day.' Which is to say, not sick enough to sit still long enough for me to get any work done, or keep up with my Tweeting.

She will, however, sit still for this video. Which has been running on a loop on my iPhone the entire time that I've been writing this post:

Hyper Parents And Helicopter Parents And Curler Parents, Oh My

I think that the most interesting thing about the trailer for the upcoming CBC documentary on hyper parenting (watch it after the jump) was the news that in some places 'helicopter' parents are referred to as 'curler' parents (as in curling, the winter sport; as in, presumably, 'sweeping away all obstacles so that one's giant puck-like children can skid freely across the ice toward a spray-painted bulls-eye future') and that those places are not Canada.

The mom giving her one year old a four thousand dollar birthday party? Eh, not so interesting. We know that there are such parents out there, somewhere. We don't know any personally, though. Isn't hyper-parenting, like, so Aughties?

Bad Moms Like Morphine

One half of our team is in hospital this morning with some kind of mysterious something something requiring tests and, also, morphine. Which really, really sucks, and the other half of the team is really, really worried, but also appreciative of the fact that, hey, morphine. And bed rest. And little cups of jello...

So the Bad Moms Club has to shutter up for the rest of the day while some of us pace and bite our fingernails and others get high on a morphine drip. I'll let you figure out who has it tougher.

If You Liked It Then You Shoulda Put A Sling On It

My first baby hated slings. HATED them. Slings, Baby Bjorns, carriers: if it strapped her against me, she didn't want to have anything to do with it. My second baby? LOVED the sling. My back still hurts from all the sling-loving.

It probably would have hurt more if I'd been doing this sort of thing:

Festivus: Something For The Rest Of Us (Or, Oh Crap, Is It That Time Of Year Again?)

Confession: I'm incredibly disorganized at the holidays, specifically the ones that hit in December. At this point my Christmas and Festivus cards aren't sent (or even purchased), gifts -- even for those who live far away and require one month mailing windows -- haven't been selected, oh hell, I don't even know who I'm buying for this year. CRAP, I suck at this stuff.

Hats off to those who do it all: cards, cookies, home-made gifts that don't suck, personalized wrapping paper, organizing and costuming the local neighbourhood production of Handel's Messiah right down to wrangling the donkey. I don't hate you, I just don't understand you but still, to you I give a hearty round of applause from my couch.

Baby-Planners Are The New Purple-Polka-Dotted Silver Mesh

According to the Huffington Post, baby planners - a prenatal version of the sort of manic organizational consultant that is hired to plan weddings - are the latest thing for mothers-to-be. After all, why prepare for baby on your own when you can delegate?

Here's why:

This Just In: Overparenting Is The New Bad

The good news: the world seems to be to be finally waking up to the fact that overparenting - the hovering, fussing, toddler SAT-tutoring, oh-god-will-giving-my-kid-formula-bork-his-Harvard-chances mode of hyperparenting that, seriously, just sounds exhausting - is maybe, you know, not so good if we want to raise relaxed and happy children. The bad news? There's a class for that!