Tag Archives: camera

Winning With A Side Of Mom Shaming

We had the best time running our photo caption contest. All of the entries were so good that one might say they brought sunshine on a cloudy day. I may or may not be watching the weather report while writing this. So without further ado, the winner is…

This one by Katy Morgan wrote our judging criteria for us – it actually made us laugh out loud the first, second, and third times we read it. And you are in luck because she writes a blog, so you don’t have to limit yourself to this little slice of hilarity, you can skip on over to Katy In A Corner and enjoy the whole Awesome Pie!

Now we have been questioned by more than one person, whether or not this photo might be a wee (wink, wink) bit embarrassing for the boys. Well, how should we put this? Um, NO! These imps set this up. We have chosen not to show our kids faces, so we often take “blog” pictures. Erin’s boys OFFERED to pose for this picture after her Christmas card worthy photo shoot. They turned around, she clicked, and only saw the full design of their mischief upon uploading. We called it “How Bloggers’ Kids Get Their Revenge”.

So exploitation tizzy resolved? No? Then we are all in luck because the vehicle of our penance has hit the interwebz in the form of Mom Shaming. Like all good things cyber, it is a spin-off of a spin-off. Through my exhaustive research it appears to have started with Dog Shaming. Then Mommy Shorts morphed it into Baby Shaming. (We can feel your panties bunching through our routers, relax and check it out.) And now The Divine Secrets Of a Domestic Diva balanced the scales of justice and brought us Mom Shaming.

Ellen: History lesson over. I was going to make you a time line, but I used my last scrap of poster board to make my sign of shame.

If you look closely you can see the light shining through my sign to reveal that it is a dollar bill visual aid. So not only have I outed myself, I re-purposed, too! That has GOT to be worth double penance points.

Erin: So Ellen calls me as I’m walking through the door from my JOB into a house full of disgruntled kids to make my own sign.

Ellen: Priorities. Two photo fails and five hours later, she succeeds in making her own little cultural contribution to the webz.

What’s the big deal you say? Just you wait.

Erin: This is my dirty little clean laundry secret. Everyone is always telling me how organized I am because…

Ellen: Basically you keep five kids fed, dressed, and delivered places approximately on time?

Erin: YES! But this bag of socks is the bane of my existence and the sucker of untold amounts of time out of my life.

Ellen: You certainly are being dramatic for a little internet funny.

Erin: Remember the five kids? Every. Single. Morning. They come traipsing into my room to rummage through this bag, strew its contents across my floor, and scrabble like chickens over the pickin’s. My fourth grader complained the other day about how much his feet hurt. On one foot he had a sock that barely reached his heel and on the other foot he had a man-sized sock pulled up to his knee!

Ellen: Surely there is a simple solution to this. Have you tried giving each family member their own lingerie bag to put their…

Erin: Stop! Yes, I’ve tried that! But we just ended up with bags of single socks!

Steve and I have tried paying them 10 cent per pair matched, but they putter out at about $1.20 and drift away.

We’ve tried Sock Folding Movie Night, but everyone starts to feign illness or sleep to get out of it.

We’ve thrown them away and started over, but . . . IT. JUST. KEEPS. COMING. BACK.

Ellen: Like a cyst?

Erin: No! Because from what I understand, Dr. WebMD, you can surgically remove a cyst. There is not cure for this! It is truly my shame.

Ellen: Shame seasoned with a fair amount of hypocrisy.

Erin: Are you REALLY throwing gasoline into the boiler of my steam train of shame?

Ellen: Don’t you remember writing about your room being your oasis? It sounds like you could really only achieve that Nirvana with a maid, laundry service, and a pitcher of whiskey sours.

But you know what? I think we need one more shaming meme to complete this penance.

Erin: I don’t know if I can stand much more catharsis, but . . .

Ellen: So to complete my confession, while I’m posting pictures like this, prompting people sing my praises in our comments section…

Don’t you wish you could be awesome like me?

Ellen: Swing the camera a mere 90 degrees and this is the view into my dining room . . .

Or maybe you don’t.

Erin: Gavel slammed. Hail Mary, penance complete.

If you want to join in on the fun, hop on over to the Blogging While Mom Facebook Page and add your own confession. It’ll be a relief, we swear.

Share it real good . . .

The First Ever Sisterhood Photo Caption Contest

45 Replies

Winner, winner, chicken dinner! It’s been a good week here at The Sisterhood. Our Britely flipbook won us $1000! Check it out, it’ll change your life.

It feels good to win so we thought we would share the magic. So let’s see; $1000 minus the taxes, minus the reimbursement of our pockets for blog expenses, minus the cost of a venti skim latte and a large diet coke . . . leaves us $25 to spend on a Starbucks Gift Card for you!

Can we get a holla for caffeine!

So now that we got you all excited, here’s all you have to do. Caption our photo! Erin’s post How Bloggers’ Kids Get Their Revenge was a sleeper hit, but as some people pointed out, it was screaming for a caption.

The Rules

They are made by us and our decisions are final! (Have to admit, feeling a little drunk with power. We should have done this sooner.)

Leave your entry in the comment section, but make it PG or cleaner. We reserve the right to delete any entries that we deem inappropriate.
Only captions entered into the comment section of this blog will be considered. If you write them on our Facebook page, on Twitter, or tell us in person, they will NOT count as entries. And we will be annoyed.
You can enter more than once. Why not? We understand the wish to edit for brilliance after you hit publish.
It would be super awesome if you subscribed to our blog. (Right there in the upper right where the space to enter your email is located. Obviously.)
It would be super duper awesome if you liked us on Facebook. (Surely you can’t miss that in the sidebar.)
All judging will be done by Ellen and Erin with liberal input from our spouses. All decisions are final. All entries become property of Sisterhood of the Sensible Moms to be reproduced and shared on the interwebz at our whim.
We are not responsible for a damaged delivery or lack of delivery of your prize. (Let’s all relax. It’s a $25 gift card.)

Contest will run from RIGHT NOW until midnight EST on Tuesday, October 2, 2012. We will announce the winner on Wednesday, October 3, 2012.

Now make us laugh and pray that we can actually come out of this still talking to each other.

Share it real good . . .

Real Enough

15 Replies

Ellen: One of the best parts about blogging is the opportunity for self-reflection…

Erin: …with an audience and a spotlight.

Ellen: So let it be known that these Sensible Moms recognize the irony…

With cameras this pretty, can you blame us for getting a little snap-happy?

Erin: …or, at the very least, the contradiction that while we have a “Love Our Nikons” category in our sidebar, the gorgeous pictures of our kids stay safely nestled on our hard drives.

Ellen: We could give you a little song and dance about the reasons why, but it’s summer—who has the time? And precious really does make us gag. The simple reason why our kids’ names are changed and their faces are veiled? They asked us to do it.

Erin: This decision to keep the kids anonymous definitely sparks some eye rolls and brings on some “tsk, tsk-ing” from those we know in our real lives as well as those we know on the interwebz.

There seems to be two camps on this issue of privacy. In one camp, there are the completely transparent, totally honest bloggers. You get it all and prettier pictures too. In the other camp, there are the rest of us, who think we are presenting it “real enough”. You can just thank us now for setting up camp where we did because if Ellen and I were in the first camp, you would be reading actual transcripts of our conversations.

Ellen: And trust us, you don’t want that.

Erin: But truthfully, once we knew how the crew felt, we threw this guideline about protecting their identities in with some other rules and guidelines we (Read: Ellen) drew up to define the boundaries. Quite frankly, the United Nations would do well to take some lessons from us on peace-keeping and negotiating, but that’s a story for another day.

"Thank you, Ellen and Erin! You have successfully negotiated world peace!"

Ellen: We are not so naive as to think that someone couldn’t find us if they had enough gumption to execute five mouse clicks, but dang it, our blog is not going to pop up when future employers Google our kids’ names.

We’re just not going to lay out SEO terms for them; they’re going to have to work for it.

Erin: This decision for anonymity also stems from the fact that we didn’t start our blog until many of our peeps were fully formed people (albeit small people) with ideas of their own (Oh, the joy of the self-actualized child!!). We didn’t have to imagine what it would be like for them to have opinions about what we wrote, because they gave it to us. By the bucketfuls.

Ellen: Quite frankly, their mothers could have taught them to use a little more tact, but we get it. Some of our kids already have their own Facebook pages and therefore their own online identities. We are dancing, if not in the same ballroom, in the same hotel.

Erin: One of our parenting principles is to respect our kids by respecting their boundaries. Our job is to guide ’em and grow ’em, not take their mess viral. Occasionally, they even thank us for this!

Ellen: It stems from the understanding that our kids, while ours, don’t really belong to us and that includes their identities and their stories. They are people first and blog material second.

I still wince when I remember what I overheard my mom share about my life over the phone. I thank the Guardian Angels of Adolescence that she did not have access to the internet.

Erin: Dooce, the “Queen of Mommy Bloggers”, who makes millions, gets 100,000 hits a day, and has been blogging since 2002 said this to her family:

“I will never write anything that I wouldn’t say to your face, with 50 people watching.”

Ellen: Um, ditto. If it’s good enough for Dooce, then it’s good enough for us. She had to learn the hard way. We’re going to learn from her missteps.

Erin: The only thing I would add in regards to our kids is this: “I will never tell your story without your approval.” The people who know us best aren’t fooled by our thin aliases. They know EXACTLY who we are offering up on a platter.

Please don't tell them they have this much power. They're already hard to live with.

Ellen: The veto stamp has already altered our writing. We wrote an article about setting boundaries with your kids and how “No” is your friend. It had great balance between the girl and boy perspective.

Erin: But in the end, my son Ace (15), just didn’t want us to share his anecdote.

Ellen: It was an anecdote that complemented the story I shared about Coco (13), but since he didn’t want it told, we cut it.

Erin: And it changed the flavor of the post. People still responded to the piece in the ways we had hoped they would, but it missed out in one big way: we lost the point that these issues affect boys too.

Ellen: So now some poor souls are wandering around thinking they are off the drama hook, because they only have sons.

Erin: I almost feel guilty.

Ellen: We may have done the blogosphere a disservice with that one, but we did our kids a righteous.

Erin: Another big reason we don’t show our kids’ faces is that although we are moms who blog—our blog itself is not primarily about our children. It is, at its heart, about the great human experience of parenting, about friendship as the salve that makes this experience a whole lot easier, and even a little about being a woman in the world today.

Ellen: So I MIGHT have just felt my gag reflex tickled, but really, it’s true.

Erin: Whatever. We sensible girls really dig trying to find the humor in the mundane and familiar. Fourteen years at home with your kids will really do that to you.

Ellen: In fact, when we came up with our idea to start a blog, we batted around a couple of different ideas, but they all boiled down to this one: the idea that funny and sensible are not mutually exclusive.

Erin: So our goal is to share our sensibility and to entertain with our humor. We crack each other up constantly. It’s time the rest of you got in on the fun. We are just not going to do it at the expense of our kids.

Ellen: Or our relationships with them. We can always decide to share more, but we can never erase what is released. Because even more so than diamonds, the internet is forever.

How 'bout this for real? We took pictures of the backs of our kids' heads before we started blogging. They are gorgeous from all angles.

Share it real good . . .

Picture This

62 Replies

It was as beautiful a spring morning as ever was. A ray of sun filtered through Erin’s kitchen window spotlighting the telephone handset resting on the table. The two friends were uncharacteristically quiet as they sipped their coffee and the cat curled up on Ellen’s lap.

The phone rings and time seems to slow down as Ellen grabs Erin’s hand. “Well, answer it. You know your voicemail is full and they won’t be able to leave a message,” Ellen says.

Erin punches the button and lifts it to her ear. Even so, Ellen can hear, “Congratulations, your loan has been approved.” The radiant smile on Erin’s face confirms what she overheard. Ellen leaps to her feet, unceremoniously tipping the cat to the floor, to give her friend a hug.

Ellen proclaims, “Halleluiah, the kids can their get school pictures taken!”

Erin– Well at least that is how it feels. I have FIVE kids. Five kids, people. And my father who adores school pictures. I take beautiful shots of my kids at the beach and the park. They are natural and expressive photographs and he likes them, but he LOVES the pictures taken by “professionals” in front of official backgrounds.

Ellen– You mean the lapis lazuli vomit swirl background? Really?

Erin– Something about the official-ness of it must speak to his judicially ordered heart. And we get the full package for him: the 8 x10 for the homestead stairwell and the 5 x7 for the courthouse office.

Ellen – Well, at least someone likes them. I swear I spend a fortune every year, and they just sit in my china cabinet undistributed because they just aren’t a good product. (And, honestly, I let some things slip through the cracks.) I just feel so guilty if I don’t purchase them for some reason, like I’m making some larger public statement about how much I love and value my kids.

Erin– I got your guilt. This, from Eddie’s preschool teacher, who nunned me up real good: “Just because he is the fifth child doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy the picture package.”

Ellen – Ouch!

Erin– Oh, it gets better. I caved and paid for the pictures. Then. . .

Sister Mary Tarnish-My-Tiara says, “Everyone had wonderful pictures! You are going to be so excited to see them.” Long pause. “Except for Eddie. We had to take his picture 35 times, and the entire class was late to library because of it.”

Ellen– Did you get the bonus didn’t-want-to-make-eye-contact-staring-awkwardly-and-silently-at-the-ground pantomime from the rest of the moms because you were being scolded? By a nun.

Erin– But the end result was just as I predicted: a sourpuss picture of a disgruntled preschooler. I can get that any day of the week just by telling him no. I don’t need it staring out of a frame at me.

Ellen – I know that look. He seems to get it when we mention blogging, too. Poor tortured 4 year old.

Erin – But the real subliminal message to the world that we might not have our shizz together comes when the third grader wears his sports goggles in the class picture. That’s right. My sons, the future Rhodes Scholars, decided to play war THE NIGHT BEFORE class pictures, and, as any parent with 15 minutes of experience could tell you, things got ugly. And fast.

Luckily, the only casualties were Deacon’s glasses and my patience.

Ellen– Luckily, really!?! That seems to be an understatement, Pollyanna.

Erin– Okay, we weren’t really lucky. Deacon’s eyes cross without his corrective eyewear, so a pic without glasses was never an option. I called the optometrist! But, denied! I can still hear them chuckling at the ridiculousness of my emergency request of making super special prescription glasses in 30 minutes. That’s right. I could hear THEM sharing the can-you-believe-what-this-crazy-mom-just-asked laugh—it was worthy of a group giggle.

My last resort without time or luck on our side were his sports goggles. His big, black, thick goggles complete with strap around the back. While I may cherish this picture and the fond, fond memories it brings, the other moms definitely looked askance at me afterward. And offered up fashion advice. Lots of it.

Erin models the goggles. Saying, “Not tonight honey,” without saying a word.

Ellen – The pressure of the class picture can make you crack. And you just keep telling yourself that message is subliminal. Those bad boys shout out, “This family is really just a steaming ball of hot mess.” Those pictures can’t be hidden in the china closet. They are up for worldwide distribution.

Erin– No one is feeling you more than me right now, Sister.

Ellen– There is the whole what to wear thing EVEN when there is no vanity involved. I’m not talking prissy girls throwing tantrums because they don’t have a shirt to perfectly match the blue of their eyes. I’m talking school-wants-to-make-everything-a-pain-in-my tuckus -because-no-one can-crosscheck-a-calendar.

School Admins: Ruining Mornings Since Little House on the Prairie

Erin – I’m just gonna say it OUT LOUD: Jostens and Lifetouch are the cartels, but the schools are the Dr. Evil kingpins pulling the strings and making us dance.

Ellen – For real! For the spring round of pictures, Jellybean (11) got the form for the April 13^th pictures on April 10^th. After coming off of spring break, this did not jump to the top of my priority list.

Flash to the morning of pictures and Jellybean comes down dressed like a hobo ready to clean out the garage.

“Honey, today is picture day. Why are you wearing old sweat pants?”

Jellybean-“Because it is the fitness test today in gym.”

Seriously, I’m shelling out $30 for pictures (cheapest substantial package) and the school scheduled the fitness test on the same day?

“Honey, they are taking the CLASS picture today. We can’t have you distributed to multiple households looking like a refugee. Or like one of Erin’s offspring. What about that cute dress you wore on vacation?”

Jellybean- (possibly a little tearful from me calling her a refugee) “But we have to do push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups. I can’t wear a skirt!”

Ellen- “So what time is gym?”

Jellybean – “First period.”

Of course it is. (In elementary school, they don’t get to change for gym.)

Ellen- “So you’re telling me that no matter what you wear, you’ll be a hot mess anyway by the time pictures roll around?”

Oy.

Ellen– So tick tock goes the clock, we go upstairs and settle on a embellished tank with a sweater, jeans, and Converse. Whatever, I surrender. The kicker? The gym teacher was absent so the fitness test was cancelled. Winner? The school for messing up my morning for no reason except its own evil entertainment.

Erin – Seriously, we have 7 kids between us so the ~~complaints~~ reminiscing could go on forever. Let’s not forget that school pictures cornered you into highlighting Coco’s hair. But you do have to love the comedy in school pictures, too.

Ellen – I’m glad you can laugh. What about the tragedy of it all??

Erin – Oh wait a minute. WHAT ABOUT WHAT WE OVERCAME!

Ellen – That’s what I’m saying!

Erin – I modeled the sports goggles. My pride is not an issue for this post.

Erin

Ellen – One of the first things Erin said when she handed me this picture? “Can you believe they didn’t even straighten my necklace?” Yes, that was exactly the first thing I was incredulous about.

Erin – Whatever. Your turn.

Ellen – I’m actually proud about how far I have come.

Erin – You should be.

Ellen’s 7th Grade Picture. Believe me, the resolution is good enough.

Ellen – So clearly Erin is classier than me. I chose the group picture because I was not going down alone. We will close with Josten’s Mission Statement because, really, I would like for the whole blogosphere to tell them to suck it.

Jostens’ Mission Statement

Supporting your mission is our mission.

We take great care in passionately helping people:

Express themselves

Celebrate experiences and traditions

Recognize achievements

Share their stories

Erin – Just one more thing I would like to add: Creating images that will cause your offspring to roll on the floor laughing at you with glee in their eyes. Have at them, Blogosphere!