The only reason to have kids is to create clone humans to take your place when you kick off.

Any other reason to breed pales in comparison to nature’s need to reproduce your genes. Unconditional love, feelings of worthiness, premature ejaculation, and one-upping your sister all fall into a distant 2nd place for reasons to spawn.

Patrick and I are raising our girls for us to each have our own Mini Me, as you can see in this photo I took this past weekend at Star Tours.

We’re successfully raising goofball, Star Wars-loving, Disney World-going nerds who will do pretty much anything for a laugh to replace us when we die.

You’re welcome, universe.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anna, claire, Disney World, hollywood studios, instagram, star tours, star wars, walker

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In the weirdest, most Awesome twist of how the world’s energy works, while I was writing this post, I received an email about Susan Niebur, Why Mommy, of Toddler Planet, who has been suffering from metastatic breast cancers and is currently going through an extremely hard bout.She’s written about how she sees strength in LEGO mini-figures, and her friends around the interwebs are sending virtual mini-figs to help her with her fight.

…and leave you with the image of a very tiny and very strong lego girl inside me, fighting the cancer with her minature sword, side-by-side with the new medicines that at once starve the cancer cells of estrogen and deprive them of their ability to grow and divide.  She is fighting, and I will fight, and my little ones will not crumble, but cheer me on in this new trial. Susan Niebur, Us Lucky

My sister works for LEGOLAND, but seeing as I get anxiety attacks when I try to build anything from my imagination or from a manual, that has no bearing on this post. And really, the fact that she works at LEGOLAND has nothing to do with this either. It really just means that we get to go to LEGOLAND for free. Neener.

Over at Curvy Girl Guide, my super Awesome friend, Nanette, wrote about the new LEGOs for girls. LEGO Friends, as they’re known, has just been released to the masses after a 4-year study conducted by LEGO to try to market to the 50% of the kid population that happens to be female.

Having two girls of my own, I make every effort to guide them into choosing what they want to play with, not what is being marketed to them to want to play with.

Being the socially liberal girl that I am, I was at first miffed at LEGO for making a “girl” line of LEGOs. I read the blog posts and news articles and saw the protests and petitions to get LEGO to stop “marketing to girls.” At first, I was with the angry mom mob.

But when we went to the store and actually looked at them, my girls flipped over getting a set of “Friends” that was both pink and pretty but also challenging for them to build. They spent their Christmas gift cards on getting two sets that they’re dying to put together that they can play together with their already-built Buzz Lightyear ship.

With Anna, my eldest, she has always steered towards more “boy” toys like Toy Story and Star Wars, but Claire has always steered towards more “girl” toys like Barbie and princesses. They’re all of 18 months aparts, so I know there’s no gender bias in how we’re raising them, but they are who they are and they like what they like.

They both love All Things LEGOs, and while I’d love for them to want all of the LEGOs despite the theme of the box, as long as they’re using their brains to build figures, I don’t care what color the bricks are.

There’s nothing made for both girls and boys that is perfect and 100% without any bias.

And when is someone going to get all peeved off at boys not wanting to build a LEGO Pet Care Center or a Friends Salon?

While my girls are busy building houses and dog show sets, I’ll be keeping my distance from the anxiety-causing build-a-thon and thanking LEGO for making a mini-figure with chest hair.

For Susan.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2012. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: lego friends, lego mini figures, why mommy

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I started to write a lunchbox love note on this notepad for Anna, but she didn’t think it was a good idea.

Anna:  Second graders shouldn’t be reading about diarrhea, MAMA!

Me: Why not? It’s science.

Anna: Don’t you think that’s inappropriate?

Me: Quit using big words, kid.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: love note, lunchbox notes, when diarrhea strikes

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credit Chester Zoo

In the part of the contract babies sign when they take us on as parents, I’d like to add in the caveat that we, as their parents, may pick, poke, and squeeze anything we find on their bodies.

It’s nature.

I’ve done the Baby Lawyers a favor and outlined some rights as parents and/or guardians I’d like included in the contract.

••-••-••-••-••-••-••-••-••-••

I, your >insert parental role here<, have free reign over the maintenance of your body.

• I will remove eye boogers from your eye corners.
• I will stick my pinky finger in your ear to get out the ear wax.
• I will scratch your back, and as is my right, pop any zit I find.
• I will forever brush away the hair from your face.
• I will use my fingernail to pick the food from your teeth and conversely check your teeth for post-brushing completeness.
• I will hold up a tissue to your nose, hold closed one of your nostrils, and tell you to blow.
• I will search for nits in your hair when I get the school letter that lice was found in your classroom.
• I will use the sneak-attack to pick a booger from your nose.

Included, but not limited to, the above listed maintenances, if a foreign body or naturally made substance is attached to your body, it is my right as your >insert parental role here< to enjoy picking it off.

••-••-••-••-••-••-••-••-••-••

*Insert “mother who bore your giant baby body through my lady canal and am raising it to be a productive member of society” as my parental role.

What am I missing from this list? Before I send it off to the Baby Lawyers, I need to make sure everything is spelled out as succinctly as possible. What more needs to be added?

credit Spencer Wright

credit Annie Mole

credit Adam Jones

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2012. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: animal photos, baby lawyers, monkey grooming, monkey grooming bird, parental contract, pick kids nose, primate grooming, tamir

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Since I’m medically certified as crazy enough for prescription medication by my pill-pushing psychiatrist, I no longer understand the Instant Cry routine Claire has implemented. Her arsenal of tactics to get what she wants has evolved from throwing her wee body on the ground in protest to the Instant Cry where she’s perfected the art of popping out tears in less than 1/2 a second.

As a teen girl with teen girl problems, I recall using this effective method of attention-getting on my boyfriends. They’d tell me they couldn’t make it over to pick me up for school because of some bullshit reason like lack of gas money, and I’d do a 180 of emotion to full-on weeping. I can’t say it worked every time, but for my more sensitive high school boyfriends, my crying charm got me what I wanted.

I’d want to go to Taco Bell, he’d want to go to Hardee’s, I’d throw a tantrum, and we went to Taco Bell.

His mom wanted him home by 11, I wanted to stay at my friend’s house until 12, I huffed and puffed, and we stayed out until 12.

I don’t think this method of getting what I want would work today. Mainly because Patrick has been around too long to know the difference between a real cry and my fake stomping, but also because my highly-medicated brain is prevented from producing any emotion beyond extreme highs and lows. ZOLOFT FTW!

By now, I’m convinced that Claire is a 14-year-old trapped in a miniature 6-year-old’s body, complete with tear-popping meltdowns, a love of anything trendy, unexplained melodrama, and the necessity to be asleep for a minimum of 11 hours a day.

She’s gorgeous, so people tell me they assume she can get away with anything. But as her mother, I’m legally responsible for not letting that happen. Her big blue eyes have no heart-melting affect on me.

Aside from ignoring the whines, cries, and general disagreeableness, I have no idea how to parent my child. I thought her sister was going to be the difficult one to raise, but after she got over her selective mutism, acute anxiety, and speech delay, Anna is pretty close to being the Perfect 7-Year-Old Child. If she continues on the path she’s currently living, she’ll end up a well-educated successful woman.

Claire? Not-so-much.

I’m thinking of just teaching her how to use her emotional powers for evil against boys to get everything she ever wanted. If only my mother had taught me the ways of Candy Spelling, I, too, could be set for life as a wealthy Stage 5 hoarder. Instead, I lost my ways as an emotional manipulator and ended up a middle-class Stage 1 hoarder.

My daughter has the potential to BE something: A Stage 5 emotional manipulator with a Sugar Daddy.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: emotional, girl, raising a 6 year old girl, tantrum, teenager

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Claire turns 6 today. She’s pretty effing Awesome.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 6 years old, birthday, claire

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Though it’s not indicative of her size, when she was about 8 months old and crawling, we nicknamed our 2nd baby, Claire Kong.

It should be obvious why (see: destroying everything in her path, creator of messes, pre-hoarder, beating her chest in protest of things she does not agree), and she’s never outgrown her name.

Our living room isn’t huge, but it has a large, open space between the ottoman for the couch and the TV, which to little children means, “LOOK AT ALL THIS SPACE WE CAN COVER WITH ALL THE THINGS!” Our living room floor is clean for 1-2 weeks a year, and that’s when our girls visit their grandparents in the summer.

We marvel at the non-mess of our living room floor. We take pictures of the cleanliness and send it to the girls to prove it can be done. I post pictures on the interwebs to brag about our empty space.

Wide open, clean spaces in MessyHouse are few and far between.

This morning has been like most other Sunday mornings: Sunday Morning on the TV, girls dragging us out of bed to microwave their breakfasts, each of us doing our own things all together. Basically, lazy, and exactly the way I like it.

It was announced yesterday that today would be CLEAN ALL THE THINGS DAY after a lazy morning. I’ve started my laundry-slash-”work”-on-the-internet task, Anna has started her sneak-in-reading-during-cleaning-her-room task, Patrick started his clean-his-area task, and Claire continued being Claire. “Being Claire” means doing her avoiding-all-requested-tasks-while-making-bigger-messes task.

As I do several hundred thousand million times a day, I told the girls to clean the floor you see below, that JUST YESTERDAY was clear of ALL THE THINGS.

Claire’s response to me: “But Daddy made this mess.”

That “mess” labeled “Patrick’s ‘Mess’” is his mid-task-sorting of cleaning the table next to where he sits.

The rest is the result of what Claire Kong can do on one Sunday morning.

And in the middle is her feeble attempt at hiding her handiwork.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: She’s lucky she’s so cute.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: claire kong, messy house

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I’m nothing if not Awesome. I mean opinionated. And also Awesome.

Rarely is there anything that will make my facehole drop open in disbelief, but it happened several times this week. The first time was when I learned that Lowe’s pulled ads from the most vanilla “reality” show ever produced, All-American Muslim, and the second was reading the hateful, bigoted comments in support of Lowe’s. (PeeEss – Don’t click that link unless you want to be disappointed in humanity.)

So I spoke up for the other editors and writers for Curvy Girl Guide in The Daily Curve’s, “Our Statement: Lowe’s Pulls Ads For TLC’s All-American Muslim.”

I’m not often proud of something I’ve done, but this is one of those times that I am proud.

By the by, other times I’ve been proud include birthing babies, birthing pretty babies because I’m vain, scrubbing dog pee from carpets, weeks when I shower more than 4 times, making it a whole day without crying, and fixing a meal where no one complains.

Today, I’m proud of what I’ve written because I feel like a part of what I’ve done will make a difference for these jokers.

Let’s hope so.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: all american muslim, curvy girl guide, lowes

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I don’t often brag about living in Florida. Except I’m lying. Going to the beach in December is pretty effing Awesome.

Just be glad I didn’t take a picture of the margarita I drank while the sun set over the Gulf.

I’m slightly jealous of everyone else’s cooler weather. And I’m definitely jealous of everyone else’s summer weather. But days like today are when I feel it’s appropriate to flaunt my state.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anna, beach, claire, florida, gulf of mexico, nolan, paige, photos, sunset, tampa

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This holiday season, don’t forget your kid’s teachers. Not that I think you would. I’m just sayin.

Do you have any idea what your precious princess’s professor has to plan for a proper progressive period of primary (or secondary)?

A shit ton of planning.

I was a teacher in a past life. After going through the hell of undergraduate school and then submitting myself to the torture of graduate school, I taught for a whole 4 years in charter and public schools.

I stopped teaching for a reason: I was sorely underpaid for the amount of work required to make me a successful teacher. With all of my schooling and all of the support I received from my family, they paycheck I received did not equal the output required to make me a good teacher.

From excessive county requirements funneled down through my administration to provide in-detail reports not yet vetted by researchers to training standards far beyond what makes sense to the sensible mind, I couldn’t justify the time spent away from my family to get the job done.

There are people who can do it. There are teachers who are VERY good at what they do. Luckily, the teachers my girls have had so far are very good as far as I know. And really, isn’t 1/2 the job convincing the parents that their precious prince’s teacher is a qualified professional? 

Politics and my whining aside, don’t forget your kid’s teachers when you’re out buying every plastic, character-covered toy in Target. Show them some real love. They probably deserve it more than our bratty precious kids anyway.

One of the most important things I learned as a teacher for those few years is what to NOT give as gifts:

• Teachers DO NOT want a framed photo of our adorable child. If you give them a nice frame with a photo of your child, they will remove your photo and replace it with a photo of their own child or pet. If you give them a crappy fram of your child, they will throw the whole thing away.
• Teachers DO NOT want something your precious picked out from the Dollar Store. She’d rather have that dollar than the crap your kid settled on choosing.
• Teachers DO NOT want an apron appliquéd with “World’s Best Teacher.” If she is the kind of teacher who wears such an apron, she’ll have one already.
• Teachers DO NOT want a homemade coupon book of favors done by your kid. Save the construction paper and teach your kid to do nice things for his teacher all year long. His teacher doesn’t want to have to hand over a request for your prince to have “1 Whole Day Of Sitting In My Seat Without Being Asked!” He should be doing that already.
• Teachers DO NOT candles. No. More. Candles. NONE. Please. I speak for the 99% of teachers who don’t need more scented candles flaring up her allergies or stinking up her kitchen.

The #1 best gift to give your kids’ teachers? GIFT CARDS. You may think they’re impersonal, but no matter the amount of the gift card or to where it is spendable, the gift card is the perfect teacher gift. Couple the gift card with a handmade card by your kid, and she’ll love you forever.

They may even buy more books for their classroom for your kid to read so you don’t have to buy the damn book yourself as my kid’s teacher did this week. ::ahem::

Friends, you are welcome.

For more of my rantings on being a teacher and the US education system, my friend Joanne Bamberger, aka PunditMom, is sharing them on her new women’s collaborative political site, The Broad Side.

Teachers Have It Easy? Just Ask One.
This? Is Not OK: Teacher Pay Edition

What are you gifting your kids’ teachers? Do you have better ideas than mine? Probably.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: teacher gift ideas

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