Pinterest..The Greatest Conspiracy Ever

I'm going to go ahead and admit it, but when this whole concept of Pinterest was introduced to me, I just didn't get it. What is so great about this  "online pinboard?" (Thanks to the captn obvious friend that used this description to fill me in on what Pinterest was.....really, I'm not illiterate, I gathered that much.) It seemed like a waste of time really. STOP!

Grab your jaw off the floor....why would I ever even think about bad- mouthing one of the greatest creations ever????  Well, think about it. Rationally, don't all of us moms really have enough to do already without having to organize some imaginary pin-up board too????  Well, touche, touche my dears, because Pinterest has turned out to be one the greatest conspiracies of all time.

Conspiracy you say, why is that?  Seems harmless. Magical little board where the 13 year-old girl in you can take the magazine clippings and arrange them into all sort of categories, its like an OCD person's kryptonite. Plus its free. No cost to sign up, create an account, or pin away your little heart. Harmless fun....WRONG!
Let's discuss some of the groups that have likely come together and made this their brain child.

1. Men-
Yes ladies, they may pretend to hate it. They may say they don't understand it either. They may stare at you blankly when you show them something on your humor board that makes YOU lose bladder control (seriously, you don't find that funny at all, are you alive?), but I think they could be behind it. Face the facts, men are the worst gift givers ever. Unless your husband has some weird girly gene in him, his shopping skills are probably much like my own husbands. Lets review his gift giving strategy.

•  I need to get Tiffany a gift
• Maybe she will tell me what she wants
• Maybe she will actually buy it for herself and wrap it
• Oh Sh$t...gift giving holiday is tomorrow and no gift has magically fell in my lap
•  I need to come up with an excuse to go to the store, since a reasonable husband would have had a gift days ago. 
• I'm in a store now and the gift has neglected to fall off the shelf and into my hands.
•  D@mn, time is running out because I told her I was driving to town to get gas (who does that, really?)
•  Maybe this sales guy will know
•  Okay, he's a bigger F*#tard than I am 
• .I am going to get something expensive, although I know she won't really like it, but at least I have blown $300 on a necklace she will never wear. All girls like jewelry right?
•  Good now that I bought this overpriced gift, I am going to look at duck calls
•  I like to hunt ducks

Why is this important? Just look at your Pinterest board ladies. In all likelihood, you have a board that says something like THINGS I WANT or perhaps WISH LIST. There is usually even a direct like to click on and buy the d@mn items on there. Talk about a terrible gift givers dream. Boys, if you are not utilizing your womans Pinterest wish board, you are dumb, YOU ARE SO DUMB, FOR REAL~!

In the event that you have Amazon Prime, you can probably even get the above mentioned gift in a cool 48 hours or less. Sometimes I am not even done ordering stuff off there are I swear they will bring it to the door to see if I like it. Its probably those weird drones they use. You know what that drone did right before it dropped a bomb full of whoop a$$ on the land o' sand and those hateful Taliban...thats right, it delivered my size L Merlins Magical Sleep Suite straight to my doorstep.   Oh, I digress.

Is Merlins sleep suit magical because it make the baby sleep or because it can make it from California to Western KY in 13.5 hours?

Crafty Supermoms-

Okay, you know these people. They make everything you do look like the Dollar Store version of their IKEA. How about a chalkboard paint table made of pallets that simultaneously teaches your preschooler to read????   These moms just need to take a prozac like the rest of us and chillax. I don't care how many projects you have been able to make out of empty toilet paper rolls, it doesn't make you a better mom.

•  While your busy cutting little tiny snowflakes out of the Charmin roll, I am taking my kid to Sams to learn a little life lesson about the self check out. (You want something done right, you do it yourself.)
• While you are crafting super organic homemade baby food for hours on end, I have already been to the store, bought the jars of organic baby food at Target, made it back home and have been having a 2 hours dance party with my kids. (Life lesson there- Time is the most valuable thing you will ever have,  and some sh$t is just not worth your time. Dancing to inappropriate songs in your kitchen...always worth your time.)
• And while you are busy creating awesome sensory projects for you toddler, I am teaching mine to cook and fold laundry.(Life lesson- Everybody does their share if they get to live in my house)

My first and only attempt at a Pinterest craft project. I really NAILED IT didn't I?

Skinny Heath Nuts-
How many recipes do you see on pinterest that are labeled something like this
PALEO CALORIELESS NO CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE BROWNIES

Newsflash....those suck. We don't do any half a$$ cooking in this house. If we are going to make some good stuff, the hell if I am going to use applesauce instead of sugar and bananas instead of butter. Don't tease yourself into thinking that just because something is listed as healthy on pinterest that it will be even 1/100th as satisfying as the real thing. Man up and make like Paula Dean....get the healthy desserts out of my face.

                Tripp told his preschool teacher recently that they only things
 his mommy knew how to bake were rum cake and bourbon balls. 

Lastly..
Time Mongers-
These are the little mythical creatures that come our during the hours that you are not at work or asleep that steal little bits of your time and make it seem that your actual free time disappears like a non-Paleo plate of cookies. Hell, I am be on facebook for awhile, then just hop right over to pinterest and make a night of it. Pretty soon, its 11:30PM and I'm going to be expected to be up in 5 hours to care for the various crib midgets, furballs, and man-children in my house. How is it that four hours at work can drag like molasses in winter, but 4 hours in a pinterest/social media frenzy can go in the blink of an eye? Conspiracy....One of these days I am going to find this stash of all my free time, and maybe stored with it are my youth and my flat stomach.

Its like magic....POOF...4 hours is gone!

You see girls, Pinterest is not for you. You just think it's for you. And that's how they want to keep it.
Well played, Well played you male, craft-tarded, healthy, time-stealing fools. One day I am going to come up with a way to get you back, until then I will be busy organizing my imaginary online pinboard for hours on end with a real sense that I have been productive. This mommy thing.....NAILED IT!

I Can't Believe You Send Your Kids to Daycare...You Must Be a Terrible Parent

So not really, but this is seriously the way I felt EVERY SINGLE DAY from the time my kids started daycare until just recently.

So you are telling me that you have spent the better part of 4 years feeling like a good for nothing sucktastic parent because you have elected to send your child to a.....oh no...don't say it... a DAYCARE????

Well..... pretty much. It was not all in my head either. There were people all around me making me feel bad about it. It was probably rooted in the fact that I was raised by a stay at home mom. No complaints.....I thought it was great. So great, in fact, that for some reason I pitied kids that had parents that worked and had to go to daycare or a babysitter. My mom got to be at all our programs, school parties, and was always there. In turn, I remember dreading ever having to be "babysitted" by anyone else. I think I spent the better part of the first 3 years attached to my mothers right hip. My mother still thinks if you are going to have kids you should stay at home and "raise them yourself."

Now enter guilt tripper number 2, my dad. To his credit, he spent the vast majority of my childhood working so that my mom could stay home with us. Sure he would realize the reality of having to earn a living after you have children. Well, I vividly remember at my babyshower when I was pregnant with my first, beloved Mike says to me, " So your not going back to work are you?" To which I replied, "Well, yes, I supposed I am after the baby is 6 or 8 weeks old, I am going to go back to work and the baby will probably go to daycare." I clearly remember his only response was "THAT'S AWFUL."   Really, are we kidding? The man that taught me how to roll my own cigarettes "because it is cheaper," and the finer point of the differences between Ten High and Kentucky Tavern is now giving me some parenting tips.... 

So then with all the bad juju surrounding it, we actually start daycare part-time. What made it worse was that my sweet little crib midget would literally scream all the way in to daycare, then actually have to surgically be removed from me by the teacher. All while he was screaming, MOMMY, MOMMY, DON'T LEAVE ME. Eventually I would have to literally turn my back from my screaming pleading child and walk away. Talk about feeling like crap. Well, that little show went on for TWO YEARS. Yep 365 days x 2. I would read these articles on the web that most kids would get adjusted after 2-3 weeks, at most, a month. Well, not my little Tripp. He could have made Hilter feel like a bad person at the AM drop off session every morning. It really made me question whether or not after I left,  they were engaging him in a waterboarding session or something.

So is this how you keep them contained all day????

Sometimes when I would pick him up, I would walk into the room and he would be very happy and playing, the minute he would see me, he would start crying. It was almost like he forgot and was like, "Oh, Sh#t, she's supposed to think that I hate it here, better go into instant psycho mode to cover up my seemingly normal behavior that she just witnessed. They would swear to me that he was fine during the day,but it was hard to imagine anything but his frantic little voice calling my name. He was the damn master of the guilt trip.

Several times, I thought about pulling him out of daycare. For one, there was the traumatic emmy-winning performances each morning that I had to endure. Second, there was the never-ending cycle of sickness from about the ages of 14 months to 24 months. Especially, after his first febrile seizure happened, then I walk around with a damn ear thermometer in my back pocket all the time just waiting for signs of illness to appear. Believe me, I didn't have to wait long either. That boy didn't go 2 weeks that whole year without some sort of new illness or fever to deal with. Around the age of 2, I honestly got to a point that I just didn't know if it was worth it to take him there. Deep down, I felt like the interaction with other children was a good thing. I knew that being exposed to germs was an inevitable part of life and if his immune system didn't get primed now, I would just be dealing with a sick kid the entire first year he went to Kindergarten. Plus, I still had to two above mentioned parental units that were negative Nancying my efforts to hold strong and push through.

So what changed my mind????

1. Well lets be honest, first off, I live with one of the cheapest individuals on the planet. We actually make about 8 times the income now that we did when we first got married, and he is just as tight as ever. There was no way he was going to let me quit work.

2. I spent 6 years of my life in college. I also spent almost a cool $100,000 getting my PA degree. Furthermore, PA was friggin hard. It was like drinking fire through a water hose. I really just wasn't ready to flush all that down the sh$tter to stay home and be supermom. I feel most like myself when I am at work, and I love what I do. Personally, I think that when I get home from work, I am a much better mom because I haven't gotten to see my kids all day. At the end of everyday I am genuinely excited to go pick them up. I have patience (most of the time) for things that I dont think that I would if I stayed home all day.

3. Tripp started coming home telling me things that I knew I didn't teach him. I'm not talking bad things, I'm talking songs, letters, numbers, Spanish for goodness sakes. Come to find out, they do about 1000x more with my kids than I would probably be able to do with them if I stayed home. Crafts-EVERYDAY! Songs, letters, colors, shapes, languages. They serve them healthy food ( Guarantee if I was home with them everyday we would be eating a smorgasbord of Hostess Cakes and peanut butter from the jar on the daily.)
They are way better to my kids than I think I even have the capability of being.

4. It started becoming clear that he was used to taking turns, sharing, and generally having to interact with other kids. Tripp being an only child at the time, the probababilty of major bratiness was at an all time high. I realize that the more he was around other kids and the general structured environment of daycare, the better he got at home.

5 The constant sickness got better. Pretty much you will need to lock yourself into 1 entire year of the snots when your kid starts daycare. Hell, better yet, go ahead and pencil yourself in for a bimonthly appt with the pediatrician, and a once a month counseling session for your mother and mother-in-law with a therapist. They will both need to be regularly talked off the ledge that your child does not, in fact, need to be on an antibiotic salt lick.

Step away from the Amoxil, it's a virus!

So, eventually you just wise up and realize that your would quit wasting time feeling like crap for sending your child to a safe, fun, stimulating environment while you go try to be a productive member of society. You could totally do much worse. Watch Dateline for about 5 minutes to verify that. Daycares are monitered by the state, regularly inspected, and rated based on numerous factors. Do you realize that any dipsh#t can pop out a baby and stay home and raise them however they choose. So if that means letting them watch TV all day or eat a variety of Chips Ahoy products for every meal, that doesn't mean they are getting better care just because their mom is staying home with them.

Just like everything else in life, its the quality of time you spend with your kids, not the quantity. So step away from the ledge people, I am letting go of the daycare guilt, and you should too!