Fair and Square

There’s nothing that feels more like summer than going to the fair.  I enjoy that little slice of Americana every year.  Looking at the 4H animals, people watching, eating the most delicious $4 corndog, the rodeo, you name it.  I love everything about it.  Ok, that’s not true, I’m a little chicken about the carnival rides.  This hasn’t been an issue for a long time though.  Sometime in high school it was acceptable to not go on rides and just go out looking for boys.  After that, the rodeo, beer garden and dancing under the grandstands was the agenda for the evening.  Then, when my son was little, we’d hit the petting zoo and watch him ride the kitty rides that are small and not very scary.  Something happened last winter between ages four and five.  My son became Captain Danger.  He wanted to go on the Zipper this year!  It’s like a quick paternity test, because he definitely didn’t get this trait from me. 

Paternity Test

There was a crying seven year old getting off the zipper and a high school girl that was throwing up upon exiting the very same ride.  But I found it strange that the only thing deterring my kindergartener from going on the Zipper was a nice, chain-smoking  man with a neck tattoo that worked the ride.  He informed my son he was too short to ride this year.  Thank God!  As he and his dad were about to board the Screaming Swing of Doom, my son says to me, “Mom, it’s ok to be a little scared.  Someone has to stay with that baby.”  I instinctively snapped back, “I’m not scared.”  I am completely scared of carnival rides.  They are only set up for 5 days then they move on to the next town.  On a long enough timeline mechanical failures happen to everything mechanical. 

Silas and Me

I realize that I resemble Debbie Downer on this, but when we got home from the fair, I saw this video on the local news! A girl at the Gallatin County Fair actually flew off the Power Tramp because a bungee cord broke.  My parents took me to the fair and carnival when I was little.  Then, they let me go with my friends when I was older.  Those are some great memories of my childhood and I want my kids to have awesome memories and traditions.  But, after your fears are confirmed about carnival rides with an example at the actual carnival you attend, do you still let your kids go on carnival rides?     

Wedding Season and Apologies to the Butterflies

It seems that since I’ve been in my 30’s, I go to more baby showers than weddings.  Such is life.  But I  love wedding season.  Summer nights, dressing up, people of the hour pledging love to one another, drinks and dancing with good friends.  What’s not to love?  Tomorrow is my and my husband’s tenth wedding anniversary which was making me nostalgic for some funny wedding traditions.  Now, let’s keep in mind that each bride wants her day to be the pinnacle of perfection, every little detail planned, backups to the backup.  Well, sometimes things go terribly wrong, just ask the butterflies.

My best friend and I traveled to a small town in Montana to attend the wedding of her college roommate.  At the conclusion of the ceremony, the ushers handed everyone a little box which read, “Please release a butterfly in honor of the happy couple,” in lieu of rice or bird seed or other strange things that are chucked at freshly married people.  The butterfly release seemed like a nice idea…initially.  All of the wedding guests were lining the church stairs, butterfly boxes at the ready when the bride and groom exited the church.  The guests opened up the boxes.  But the butterflies did not fly free and line the sky in an awesome fertility celebration as we expected.  It was their first day with wings.  You see the butterflies are put into the boxes as very hungry caterpillars.  When I opened my box, I noticed my butterfly stretch his wings slowly but he was just standing on his lifeless cocoon (which was also in the box).  So I flicked him off of his perch and into the bride’s hair.  Not exactly what I meant to do, but since he actually flew a little, other guests did the same.  Most of the butterflies flew clumsily down to the bottom of the church stairs with their brand new wings where  there was a group of toddlers happy to be out of church.  The gang of little two and three year olds saw the butterflies float to the ground and began stomping them.  Oopsi-daisies.  By the time the moms intervened the butterfly carnage was undeniable and my friend and I had a bad case of the giggles.  Luckily the symbolism was not ominous.  The happy couple we were there to honor is still married 15 years later and they have two children.  So was the butterfly massacre a sign of good luck and fertility or should it be skipped?  Have you been part of any awesome wedding traditions?

This is from swallowtailfarms.com. They sell these butterflies. Please notice the bride’s face!

Oh, “Camping”

Camping has taken on several meanings throughout my life.  When I was little, my family loved going camping.  Me, not so much.  We would go out to the wilderness, sleep in a tent, look a the stars, roast marshmallows, the whole nine yards.  I remember asking my mom late one night around the camp fire, “Why are we staring at this fire?  We have a perfectly good house with a TV.”

Then, in college (and after college), camping was a little different because it was a great excuse to go to the woods with friends and drink as much as you could prior to passing out in the back of your vehicle. I could get behind this concept of camping.  I remember telling my mom where my friends and I were going prior to one camping trip while I was home from college for the summer.  She remembered back to how much I did not love camping when I was little and asked, “Do we have to keep calling it ‘camping?'” and made bunny-ear, air quotes with her fingers.  “Or can we just start calling it ‘drinking?'”  I explained we were sleeping in tents (some of us) and sitting aimlessly around a fire. So it was still “camping.”

Now that I’m a mom, I can’t go “camping” (stressing the air quotes that acknowledge binge drinking) because I’m in charge of two kids and a dog.  So I’m again asking, “Why are we feigning homelessness for recreation?”  Is it the lack of sleep you get in a tent?  Is it the air mattress that starts out so comfy at 11:00 PM and then sneakily releases all of its air until you wake up at 4:00 AM with one shoulder and one hip in such excruciating pain that you swear you’ll never do this again?  Is it that all my clothes and my hair smell like smoke?  Is it the art of recreating your kitchen in the great outdoors and inevitably forgetting a spatula?

Silas and Grampa fishing

Yeah, it’s probably all of those things.  Please tell me what you love (or don’t love) about camping.  Have a great weekend!  If you need the BurgettReeveses we’ll be “camping!”  Wait…camping.

The Skylander Consumerism Gateway

My first blog entry focused on the Mom Jeans part of this blog title.  Today, we’d better focus on the Ninjaneer portion.  A “Ninjaneer” is part ninja, part engineer and all bad ass trained in the art of stealth.  There are more Ninjaneer definitions in the Urban Dictionary, if you’d like to take this reading a bit further or are considering a career in ninjaneering.  As it turns out, I am only a ninjaneer in training because lately I have been out ninjaneered by a surreptitious little group that goes by the name “Activision.”

Ninja Stealth Elf on the Magic Portal taunting me…

My son has been talking about a video game he plays at the neighbors’ house called Skylanders (made by the Activision ninjaneers) for a couple of weeks now.  He is enamored with this game and has been asking if he can get it too.  Last week, our whole family was in Target.  It happened to be my birthday, Silas noticed that the game was on sale and I was feeling generous.  It was a perfect storm of consumerism.  We bought the starter pack for our Wii that comes with the game, a magic portal and three Skylanders. You place a little Skylander action figure on the portal (as demonstrated by Ninja Stealth Elf Skylander above) and that is your avatar for the game.  Well, I like to consider myself a savvy consumer,* but this level of trickery, I did not see coming.  The three Skylanders that come with the starter pack are not nearly enough to complete all the levels of the game.  Luckily, the good people at Target will sell you a variety of other Skylanders at nine to fifteen dollars a pop.  Now, my sweet, five year old son has gone from not wanting to go to the store to always wanting to go to Target to buy, you guessed it, Skylanders.

I have to hand it to Activision, you got me.  Now, since I’m a parent, I need to find a way to channel this Skylanders Conundrum into something beneficial or at least some sort of tooth brushing and/or chore bribery scheme that will make me feel better about buying a Skylander museum and letting my son play video games.

Have you fallen for a never ending consumer scheme?  Please tell me I’m not alone!

*Just because I like to consider myself a savvy consumer, does not mean I am a savvy consumer.

Hello, Mom Jeans!

This is the first post of my blog.  I’m wondering, are there any other moms out there that used to make fun of mom jeans, but now understand? 

 I have a confession.  Prior to having kids, I had been known, in certain circles, to make fun of “mom jeans.”  For those of you unfamiliar with the term, please reference this SNL Mom Jeans Clip.  The digital short also highlights “Mom Hair” which will undoubtedly be discussed in a future post.  My poking fun at “mom jeans,” like most insensitive bashing, was born of ignorance as I was not yet a mom.  Since the second trimester of my first pregnancy to the present, nearly 6 years and two kids later, I am acutely aware of the need for some additional material on my low-rider jeans.  Never before this time have I wanted to wad up my additional self, located around my middle, and tuck it into my pants.  But post c-section, my muffin top took on it’s own zip code.  I am now 37 years old, 4 months out from my second baby and my weight has been redistributed in places I hadn’t imagined, including, but not limited to the area that gets zipped securely into my mom jeans.  I thank the makers of those jeans everyday for shirking societal pressures and still making pants with a seven inch zipper.

I had no feeling for this kind of humility prior to becoming a mom.  But I guess the old adage is true, “You’ll never know a mom until you zip up the 7-inch zipper of her mom jeans.”  Well, that might be a new adage.  Please let me know if you have similar issues being a parent and trying maintain your old, cool self.