Watch Out, I'm in a Mood

For the love of all that is holy, you Moms out there, please do not read Cookie magazine. I got a few issues free with something or other, and paging through it makes me want to hurl brocade velvet Boppy pillows at the editors with a shearling catapult until organic mashed edamame squirts out of their noses. Perhaps Stella McCartney wants to read about Stella McCartney teaming up with LeSac to create $375 vinyl diaper bags or $500 quilted plastic carryons, but I see no relevance in it to anything that remotely resembles actual motherhood. Besides this specific rag, has anyone noticed that all women's magazines nowadays seem to be nothing more than shopping guides? Not that I haven't had manicky experiences of my own, buying $300 scarves, $500 suede handbags, or $250 backgammon boards, but I wasn't well at the time. Magazines nowadays would have us all believe that this stuff is normal, ho-hum, nothing but the Joneses. It's like some kind of moronic, government-funded stimulus package. I'm so sick of dewy photo spreads of $175 anemone eye cream and $35 sapphire nail polish, of renewable bamboo bath towels and $800 mustard patent-leather biker-chick platform sandals. I swear I am going to move to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Great. Now a certain love of my life is mad at me for blogging instead of working. The two kids who can talk are yelling at each other. The dog, I think, is eating a little paper picture of Belle that is supposed to be stuck into the Happy Meal Princess bracelet that's on the floor. The cat is hiding from the yelling kids and the baby is trying to stuff an entire burp cloth into her mouth and wondering why I don't just walk across the room and turn on her damn bubbling bouncy seat so that when she kicks the dangling seahorse the frickin' thing bubbles like it's supposed to.

Why working, you may ask (if you are still with me)? Working, as in writing that memoir, sanitizing bottles or mopping up hairball puke? Or working, as in sifting through boring spreadsheets to figure out if my law firm can ally itself with this particular partner who specializes in hedge-fund bankruptcies? The latter, unfortunately, because apparently the whole place was barely hanging on during my (year long) absence and they cannot possibly wait one more benighted moment for my star-spangled input. So for the last two weeks, including during our much-needed Las Vegas trip -- during which, incidentally, I lost a not-insignificant amount of money -- I have been doing just that. Working. Working is so boring and tedious. Why can't we just live and let live? Calvinists. Bastards.

Now my older kids are play-wrestling with their Daddy, laughing their heads off, and the baby is fascinated with the weave of the couch upholstery, scratching and mouthing at it while she laughs at me and happily poops in my lap. That is, she is in my lap, diapered and dressed and pooping; she is not pooping directly in my lap. The dog is snoozing sweetly on her tummy, occasionally lifting only her ears when she hears a worrying wrestle-noise, and the cat even came out and rubbed my leg hello. The Penguins are playing a fierce one against the Islanders and I'm perfectly content to ignore the terry-cloth-lamb lovey strung up in the kitchen like a traitor outside the city wall. My cup is runneth-ing over, even if it's a much sweeter drink than I ever expected.

What the --?

The kids were watching an educational DVD we bought them about the deep sea. Ryan usually watches TV transfixed; you'd think the box had sucked his brains out, except that you can see the wheels turning behind his eyes. Shannon, on the other hand, often keeps up a running commentary, especially when no one is listening. This time, though, she too was quiet. Until the part where the narrator explained that the commercial fishing industry was killing off the sharks and that, in turn, was killing off the coral reefs. Shannon suddenly blurted out, "They're killing all the sharks?? Don't they know what they're doing!?!?"

I think that kids have a natural understanding of environmentalism. Just like their innate sense of what God is. It's we grownups who screw it up.