It's Never Over

So it's Friday night, and I wanted to write a blog because I have been writing freelance stuff all week.  I started this afternoon.  I stared at the flashing cursor thingy (which was totally mocking me, by the way), and I thought "What is wrong with you?  You have written over 14,500 words this week on traumatic brain injury, premise liability, boating safety, and other legal issues.  That was new.  This is YOU.  THIS is your thing!  Write!" 

And still I had nothing.

Sure, I started a few things.  I would write a few words, or a couple of sentences -- I even managed a whole paragraph once -- but I always "backspaced" them away because, well, they sucked.  I was really getting discouraged.  I thought I had lost my blogging mojo. 

I went back and looked at some of my most popular posts and I realized that it wasn't me.  It was my kids.  They were growing up and they weren't doing the same stupid stuff that they used to do.  They weren't shredding the mattress cover or cutting each other's hair or coloring the walls.  My kids are acting more normal and depriving me of great blog material.  No wonder I had nothing. 

Then, as if on cue, the 9 year old proved me wrong.

She was having a friend to spend the night.  We were going to order pizza and watch movies by the fire.  I sent her 2 brothers over to my mom's to hang out until bedtime so they could have girl time (her little sister stayed).  I gave them a snack and I started to watch "Revenge" from last Sunday on the DVR, telling them that we'd order pizza in a half an hour or so.  They went upstairs and I heard giggling and laughing and all was well.

Or so I thought.

Skipping the commercials, it took me 40 minutes to finish my show.  I started upstairs to ask what kind of pizza they wanted, and was met on the stairs by my 9 year old. 

"Mom, I have to tell you something."
"What?"
"We were pranking [her big brother] and....and...."(dissolves into tears).
"And what?"
"And I told her not to but she did it anyway."  (More tears)
"Okay.  Hold on.  Take a breath.  Start over."

This is the tale I was told:  My daughter and her friend wanted to "prank" her brother while he was gone.  It started fairly benign with molding clay on his light switch.  Then they decided to spray perfume all over his room.  Again, although incredibly smelly, also fairly benign and easily fixed.  If they had stopped here, we would have had a little scolding, and gone on with our evening of pizza and painted nails and Disney movies. 

But they didn't stop there.

They took his hair gel and squirted under his comforter and all over his sheets.  Sheets I had just washed.  Now it was getting annoying.  I was going to have to rewash his sheets and his comforter and I was going to have to figure out how to make his room smell like a boy again.

Then she told me that her friend had the idea to paint on his wall with glitter nail polish.  (I don't know why, we were not to the whys at this point, we were stuck on the "what-else-did-you-do").  So the friend got the glitter nail polish, even though my daughter told her not to do it.  She didn't come get me.  She took it into her brother's room and painted on the wall.  She still didn't come get me.  She didn't want to get her friend in trouble. 

So instead, she decided to try to fix it.

(SPOILER ALERT: She made it worse.)

My daughter is very artistic.  She received lots of art supplies for Christmas.  So she went into her room and got her acrylic paints and took them to her brother's room to try to paint over what her friend had done with the nail polish.  Now, to her credit, she expertly mixed about 6 different colors and matched her brother's wall color almost perfectly.  Not that it mattered, since her brother's room is painted with a satin finish, and she was using acrylics.  What did matter, was that in the process of all of this mixing, she got paint all over the carpet. 

THIS is when she decided it was time for her tearful confession. 

I turned to the little girl (whom I happen to like very much) and asked her if this was true and she said yes.

I made my daughter show me the damage.  I got some cleaning supplies and did what I could and I called her mom, my friend.  I relayed what had happened and we both agreed that they should come and get their daughter.  I told her (and her daughter) that I really liked her and was glad that she and my daughter were friends, but they had made a mistake tonight.  I also told her that I really hoped that she could come back another time, but that tonight they had abused the privilege of having a sleepover. 

Now don't get me wrong, I applaud my daughter for coming to me, even though it was a little late.  I let her know through the long discussions that we had tonight that I was proud of the fact that she told me but that I wish she had come to me sooner.  I let her know that there would be consequences beyond the end of the sleepover, and I talked to her about how I understood not wanting to get her friend in trouble. 

I explained that in the grand scheme of life, this was a very small thing; but that I wanted her to remember 3 very important lessons from it that would serve her well throughout life as the bigger things came up:  1) I want her to remember that she made a mistake.  She knew it was a mistake, but instead of confessing, she tired to cover it up and in the end it was a much bigger mess than she or I could handle.  I told her that if she remembered that, she could save herself a lot of trouble in the future.  2) I wanted her to remember that sometimes telling on a friend will keep them out of trouble.  If she had come to me and said "My friend wants to paint the wall with nail polish even though I told her it was a bad idea."  I could have kept all of this from happening and no one would have gotten in trouble.  3)  I told her that I loved her no matter what she did.  I told her that I would get angry at her and at what she does sometimes, but I would always love her no matter what.  We talked a long time.  She was very upset because she knew that she was wrong and because the evening had not turned out like she had planned at all.   She apologized to me, and in the morning she will apologize to her big brother.

I was going to wrap this up with a clever remark, but I am being verbally assaulted on my Facebook page right now and I cannot focus on being witty or clever.  The bottom line is, I realized that my kids still have loads of potential for future blog posts.  They may not be about how they are domestic terrorists who destroy the furniture or how they lock me out of the house so that they can have a butter and cheese picnic, but this is a parenting humor blog (for the most part) and I am a parent forever.  I will always find the humor in what they do and there will always be lessons learned. 

As for the verbal assault on my page, well, that is just more blog fodder for another day.

I'm Ready To Be Discovered

I have an email address specifically for my blog.  I get all kinds of weird junk emails from businesses who either hone in on "Counting" or "Caballeros" or who think that because I am a mommy blogger I must promote all natural fibers, organic, homemade foods, or homeschooling.  I have, in the past week received emails from people asking me to promote their homeschooling curriculums, their tools to teach toddlers how to blow their noses, their books about parenting, their blogs about organic eating for kids, and their music.  But my favorite emails are the ones who feel the need to voice their displeasure about me.  I typically get one about every 6 weeks or so and they make me laugh.  I get more than that if I post something religious or political, or if I talk about how I let my kids run wild, or how I fought with another teacher or parent.  I usually just laugh and hit delete.  I have been known to publicly ridicule those who feel that they are somehow entitled to judge me by calling them out here on the blog, and I even went so far as to publish one person's email in it's entirety WITH her email address because she had shown herself to be an ignorant, hateful person and I had not had the energy to address her with the proper level of snark by myself and had therefore recruited you guys to help.  But this week, I got the following email from a television producer and my mind began to race with the impending fame and fortune that was sure to follow:

Hello,
My name is Brian and I work at Anderson, a new daytime talk show hosted by Anderson Cooper.
I was interested in speaking with you about an idea I had for a story. Please give me a call when you get a chance at 212 XXX XXXX or contact me by email at brian.grobman@andersoncooper..com
It would also be helpful if you let me know a number I could reach you at as well. I look forward to speaking with you as soon as possible in the near future.
Best,
Brian
Brian Grobman
Anderson
1271 Avenue of the Americas // 16th FloorNew York, NY 10020O: 212.275.8939F:

My moment had arrived!  I was about to be discovered!  When this email was sent, I had just written the post If I Were Queen and I just KNEW that Anderson Cooper wanted me to fly to New York to be a commentator on his show about politics.  Or maybe he was doing a show about how difficult it was to break into the publishing business and was going to fly me to New York to meet with publishers and do a series of stories on what it takes for an unknown author to get published!  Or maybe he wanted me to become a REGULAR COMMENTATOR on his show and he was going to fly me to New York regularly!!  (Notice how in all of these fantasies I get flown to New York....)  I quickly typed my response, while trying to sound as non-chalant as possible:

Hey Brian,

Sorry that it took so long for me to get back to you, but the whole mom to 4 kids thing keeps me a little tied up, and your email originally went to my Junk Mail folder that I only check a few times a month. I must admit that you have piqued my interest -- what could you possibly want to talk to me about? Please call me at your convenience and satisfy my curiosity (817) XXX-XXXX.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Ginger Caballero
Author of Counting Caballeros

Then I waited.  The next morning I got this email back from him:

Ginger,

No worries.

Right now we are working on a story about a mom who cannot leave the house unless she looks perfect! Hair, makeup, the whole nine yards!

If you think you know someone like this we would love to talk to them!

Please let me know!

Best,
Brian

 Wait.....What?  This man obviously has NOT read my blog.  And more disturbing, he does not want to help me launch my writing career.  I was envisioning getting a job writing for a TV show, or a magazine, or being a regular commentator and getting a book deal and what does he want?  He wants to know if I know any June Cleaver types that he could talk to.  Sigh.  So this is how I responded:



Oh wow, um, I don't know anyone like that personally, but I regularly make fun of them on my blog. I am the antithesis of that mom. My uniform consists of t-shirts and yoga pants and I usually only wear make-up to church. Seriously, there is a post-it note on my front door that says “Do you have on a BRA? Are you wearing SHOES? Have you even seen a BRUSH today?”

I don't mean to be presumptuous, (actually, I do mean to be presumptuous -- what do I have to lose?) but why don't you guys do a show about all of the mom-bloggers out there and their opinions on things like education, politics, taxes, religion, etc? You could do a whole week of shows based upon what normal, everyday moms think. There is a plethora of mom-bloggers out there and we are all full of opinions. You could check out the site "Top Mommy Blogs" if you need help finding blogs to pull from. There are special needs moms who blog about the horrors that they face dealing with the system, there are moms who blog about the joys and heartaches of adoption, there are moms who blog about trying to homeschool, trying to feed their kids only whole foods, trying to cope with food allergies and developmental disorders, and then there are moms like me who blog about anything and everything and are just trying to make it through the next day. There are even some great dad bloggers. As a daytime talk show, I imagine that the majority of your audience is stay at home parents, and I imagine that as much as they enjoy hearing from various experts, they'd love the chance to hear from some of those that they could relate to. You could even make it a weekly segment -- once a week feature a different blogger with a different opinion on a different subject as a wrap up or a springboard for your topic that day. Truth is, we have a lot of great ideas about a lot of different things, but we have kids. This means that we cannot we cannot find time to write an entire book, or court the publishing world to publish a book we've written, and any book we'd write would be all over the place because that is how our lives are. In the past 2 weeks, I have personally blogged about what I'd do if I were president, how shocked I was to discover my 7-year old singing the Katy Perry song "Last Friday Night", what I think about the Michigan anti-bullying law, and what I think about the Penn State scandal. We blog mostly about what is on our minds on the day we sit down with more than 10 minutes at the keyboard, but we have amazing insight and (usually) pretty good ideas.

Should you decide to pursue something along those lines, (or if I can ever help you with another topic) feel free to give me a call. I have an entire list of fellow mommy-bloggers that I will be happy to pass along.


Sincerely,
Ginger Caballero
Author of Counting Caballeros

Seriously, moms who spend all of their time on hair and make-up aren't interesting!  REAL MOMS are interesting!  So far today, I have thrown away 7 partially eaten Pop Tarts and yelled at my 3 year old for washing the small pumpkin he got from school in the toilet. (Luckily, I had actually cleaned the toilet this morning.)  And we are smart and we have ideas and we deserve to be heard by someone who may actually listen more than our kids.

So far, he has not called.  I am picturing him pitching this idea to Anderson Cooper himself and that Anderson is threatened by me.  That's gotta be it.