We are hooking up with Yeah Write #47 this week. Great blogs, great writers, great fun! Check it out!

Erin-  Oy, this week may qualify as the Everest for School Projects, but I do believe we have made it to base camp. This week has been non-stop. Ellen and I have both been up to our eyeballs in school projects.

Ellen- Well, if you have been up to your eyeballs, I guess I’ve been up to my armpits. I do only have two kids to your five, after all.

Erin – For the record, when we were planning said family, nobody mentioned school projects times 5. Factor that in, people! It should be right up there with college tuition and the cost of diapers.

And I am not feeling your math on this one. The proportions don’t seem right. I have 5. You have 2. I’m not seeing a 3/5 difference between the armpits and the eyeballs.

Ellen- I was dealing with epidemiology, laminar flow patterns, and Rube Goldberg machines. I think that closes the gap.

Erin- Well, I need a drink to even pretend that I want you to expand on that.

Ellen- Remember the drinking games in college? Ah, those were the days. We had such endless hours of time that we had to create games so that drinking lasted long enough to fill them.

Erin-  Ahh, those WERE the days! Loved the game “Never Have I Ever”! Somebody would start by making a statement that starts with “Never have I ever”. Then anybody who “had ever” had to drink.  I remember this being one of the more structured drinking games with rules and everything. There was even moral high ground: lying was strictly forboten.

Ellen- Holy Preciousness. You all can save your eye muscles the strain of the eye roll. I have you covered. I guess they liked their drinking games with contrived Shakespearean structure at Erin’s liberal arts college.

Erin-I think it had something to do with being run by Jesuits, but I’m just guessing.

Ellen- Anyway, I went to the University of Maryland during the period when they were transitioning from being a contender on Playboy’s Top Party School List to Not-Your-Safety-School.

Our games were not structured, and the only moral high ground was not to target your best friend’s boyfriend as your next hook-up. That being said, we also played ‘Never Have I Ever,” just without the integrity.

 Erin – Can you imagine if The Sisterhood crashed the party on those poor 20-somethings?

Ellen – Ooo, I’m envisioning “Never Have I Ever: The School Projects Edition.” We would either make those poor Innocents’ heads explode or exponentially increase their dedication to birth control use.

Clucking Adorable

Erin – It might go something like this:

Innocent 1: Never Have I Ever violated a farm animal.

Erin: (Take a drink) Check. I just shoved a rooster in a can.

Innocent 1: Did you just say you shoved a rooster up your can?

Table shouts: “Spill the story, spill the story.”

Erin: Puh-leez. We had to papier mâché a rooster for a third grade character in a can project.

Innocent 1: Well, that was a lot more boring than I thought it would be.

(Sideways glances among the Innocents. A few raised eyebrows.)

 Innocent 2: Never Have I Ever dabbled in bondage.

Ellen: (Takes a drink) Well, I may not technically qualify, but seeing as I already took the drink, I’m going to go for it. Yesterday, I had to scour the house for a pulley, steel cable, and duct tape so that Coco (13) could construct her Rube Goldberg machine. But, the rubric did specifically say the machine could not “imply profane, indecent, or lewd expressions,” so I’m going to take a penalty drink for game foul.

NOT Coco’s Rube Goldberg Machine

Innocent 1 whispers to Innocent 2: Wait, what did she say?

Innocent 2: I think she said that Rudy Goldberg, you know, from Econ class, puts roosters in bondage…

Innocent 3: Never Have I Ever worn knock-offs or discount. (Smirks as she pushes perfectly manicured hand through shiny, sleek hair)

Erin: (Takes a drink). Hunger games T-shirt for book report for seventh grader. Biddie(13) had to create original designs based on characters from the book, print her designs onto transfers and iron them on. They were originals, but you can’t get more discount than ink-jet transfers on Wal-Mart t-shirts.

Innocent 3: O. Kay. (looks at Innocents 1 and 2 with scarcely concealed horror)

Innocent 4: Never Have I Ever seen a musical. (Clearly lying or overcompensating for something.)

Ellen: Just hand me the bottle. I’m living in High School Musical, and Coco is only in 8^th grade. Last year, Leader of the Pack: 5 times. This year, Bye Bye Birdie: 5 times. I love you, Drama, oh yes I do.

Wait, I’ll take another party foul drink, because I actually do love it.

Innocent 5: Never Have I Ever abused any balls.

Ellen: Oh Sweetie. Party foul for wince-producing flirting and/or poor attempt at double entendre. On second thought, I’ll take the drink for my snarkalicious judgment. You’re young and perky; you can totally pull off a line like that.

Erin-whispers to Ellen: But only for about 5 more years. Snicker, snicker.

Innocent 2: Slow down on the party foul drinks, Lady. After this tequila, all we have is a garbage can full of grain and Kool-Aid.

Fraternity House Punch Bowl

Erin: (Takes a drink) Hey, back off. Do you want her to start talking about the Rube Goldberg thing again? Oh, and back to the balls,  fill me up, because I helped Charlie(11) cut an old foam ball in half to create a model of the animal cell.

Innocent 1: I don’t think that is what she meant…

Erin: It’s a DRINKING game (speaking slowly just in case she’s a little slow). Now pass the bottle.

Innocent 6 (clearly here only because her roommates think she spends too many Saturday nights at the library or babysitting): Never Will I Ever Force My Child to Pursue Something She is Not Passionate About.

The Sisterhood: GROAN!

Ellen and Erin: PARTY FOUL! No future tense. You don’t KNOW what you’ll do.

Ellen: Going to take two drinks for this one. Just to numb the pain. I forced Jellybean (11) to join Science Olympiad; to push her beyond her desires for perfection. I thought it was an activity where she could learn and create without worrying about the grade on the report card.  But I am paying for it. I am now teaching fifth graders epidemiology.

The Sisterhood: By unanimous vote, we vetoed the idea of hitting up Red Box and just having them watch Contagion.

Innocents: Next!

Erin: Never Have I Ever built a salinometer.

All of the Innocents in unison: WHO let all of these chicks in here!?!

Ellen (Takes a drink): Score a third drink for Science Olympiad. We constructed one out of drinking straws and modeling clay. It took two hours. I could have gotten one on Amazon for $15.95 in 15 seconds. AND it was eligible for Free Super Saving Shipping. I could have added that callous buffer I’ve had my eye on to the cart and been good to go.

We love you Amazon, oh yes we do!

I have advanced science degrees and six summers working in a marine biology lab on my resume and I’m having a hard time finding the worth in this. I have to avoid eye contact with the girls when I proclaim, “This is a great learning experience.”

Innocent 4: Maybe you should say it with jazz hands. Jazz hands make everything more convincing.

Innocent 2: Yeah,  you’ve never seen a musical! But more importantly, DON’T ENCOURAGE THEM!

Erin: At this point, we have finished off the bottle of tequila and have moved onto slurping up the garbage can of grain with the leftover drinking straws from the salinometer project.

The Sisterhood: Um, I think we’re about to get bounced from this shindig.

Ellen: You can throw us out, but if you procreate, we are your future.

Innocents run screaming from the room with hands over ears.

 Erin: Pipe down! We’re leaving. But just be grateful we didn’t bring the “Never Have I Ever: The Midnight Feedings/Mastitis/Explosive Poops Edition.”

So, in a previous blog with Erin, I wrote about the craziness of redoing Coco’s (13) room and the havoc it struck on the rest of the house. {Coco Room Apocalypse}  I now feel ready to defend, I mean explain, myself.  There had been an epidemic of teenage redecorating in her class and we were one of the last to fall victim.  We should have painted during the summer, but as Coco put it, “We were too busy living life.”  Well, we started living the high life of cleaning and sprucing up the week of Thanksgiving.  (I know, bad timing.  I already acknowledged this in the other post.)

So Jellybean (11) was helping me and chatting with me as I painted.  She says, “You should have known we would hate pink and purple when we were old.  I’m going to save time when I have kids and paint my girls’ rooms blue to start with.”

This indeed sounded like a good idea as I was drowning hummingbirds and butterflies in Caribbean Blue.  Coco, Frank, and I had already spent hours removing the trellis wallpaper border that completed the garden gazebo theme.

By the way, just don’t do wallpaper. The horror on the Home Depot clerk’s face when I began my request, “Where is the wallpaper…,” was only trumped by his relief when I ended the sentence with the word, “remover.”

Garden Gazebo Theme. Pregnancy hormones must have deluded me into thinking wallpaper border and stenciling were good ideas.

In my defense, Coco’s room was decorated 11 years ago when Jellybean overtook the nursery.  Eleven years.  My Coco is not so much a pack rat as a prolific creator and collector of stuff. She then tends to bury this stuff away and then promptly forget all about it.  So really, she is more of a happy-go-lucky squirrel than a nasty old rat.

So due to this squirreling, I am finding a treasure trove of Coco-ness shoved in boxes, books, and under furniture. My favorite find was the foreword to her first novel crediting her sister for inspiring the title.

I could go on (there was A LOT of stuff), but the specifics of my child’s preciousness doesn’t have to be detailed here. But, it all tugged at my heartstrings.  It also made me grateful that I had gotten pushed into the whole re-decorating slippery slope.  (And believe me; I did not embark on this project willingly.  You feel kinda attached to the dozens of pansies you lovingly hand-painted for your first born while six months pregnant with your second.  Hmmm… or maybe I just felt attached in the sense that I did not feel like sanding and priming all of those suckers.  I’m going to go with mother’s love over laziness, just for the sake of my next point).

So here is why I am grateful, even though I’m a little cracked from the whole snowballing project. Do you think that a surprise walk down memory lane would feel like warm nostalgia five years from now when Coco goes off to college??  No!  It would feel like sucker punches!  Sucker punches that could land me curled around a teddy bear longing to turn back time.

So I’m glad I didn’t have the forethought to decorate a 2 year-old’s room with her future teen self in mind. Otherwise, this massive clean-out might not have taken place until she leaped from the nest.  So criticize something else, Jellybean.  I’m letting Coco project HER view of self on her room and I’ve assembled a nice box of mementos that I can choose to open when I WANT that trip down memory lane.

So if you need me, I’ll be the one floating down the River “De-Nile” ignoring that Coco has 5 more years to squirrel away new landmines of preciousness for me to find.

Oh yeah, and in response to Jellybean’s pleas that her room, too, be repainted, I say, “In five years, all this can be yours.”

-Ellen

Finished product. It was worth it, right? Right!?!

Ellen- Get it?

[Blog]+[Birthday]=[bLirth-day].  Our blog went live and in the spirit of Sisterhood, we are sharing our bLirth story with you.

Erin- I still think we can call it a bLaunch…

Ellen- Ummmmm, no. Just no. Sounds like the noise the cat makes when she coughs up a hairball.  And, I am really feeling the pregnancy metaphor.  We had only been gestating this baby for 2 ½ months, but you all know that feels twice as long in pregnancy time.  This blog was draggggggging out through the holidays—HALLOWEENTHANKSGIVINGCHRISTMASNEWYEARS.   I was tired of the whole thing.   I was begging for some relief. The only thing missing was swollen ankles.

Erin- So we did what any sensible mom would do.  We kicked the blog under the bed with the dust bunnies and walked away. FOR A MONTH. I once tried to mention the blog to Ellen, and she almost stroked out begging me not to discuss it.

Ellen- But then we got our Christmas miracle.  Steve surprised Erin with a MacBook Air.

Erin- Forget that he broke our “Hey, it’s a frugal Christmas” agreement.  Forget that I felt huge guilt when he was opening his dixie cups and chapstick (For real. We were supposed to be frugal, People, and, that’s right, I wrapped them, too. What of it?).  I was already posting on Facebook from my shiny, new Mac.

This sweet man in one grand gesture gave me the biggest, best vote of confidence in our blog. With one click, I dragged our blog out from underneath the metaphorical bed and blew off the dust. I loaded our site with everything we had written and then some.

Ellen- We are giving Steve props for getting us back on track. We were going to make everything perfect. We were going to finally birth this baby.  So we did what every sensible mom does, we made a plan.  We even made a date, for scheduling a date, to create our Facebook page and Twitter account.  Then with the good fortune that has constantly shone on this project, Elizabeth, our graphic designer, emailed us our banner.  Oooo, we could take a step forward!  Then came the email from our Tech Angel, Colleen: “Ok, I just added your header – let me know if you think you’re ready to go.”

Ready to go!?! I’m not ready to be a blogger!  What do I know about blogging? I made all kinds of excuses to Colleen about why we were not ready: no social media buttons, no contact form, blah, blah, blah.

As with all good “birthing” plans, ours was not worth the computer file space it was residing in.  I woke up the next morning, logged onto the site, and right before my very eyes, I could see Colleen adding the social media buttons.  Colleen was addressing every excuse, um, I mean barrier, that was preventing us from taking this blog live.  The Sisterhood’s water had broken, and things were starting to move.

I was not entering this bLirth-ing room alone!  I picked up my phone to call Erin and… nothing. Direct to Voicemail.  No response to text.  No response to email.

Erin- To quote one text from Ellen: “I am dying of excitement.  Colleen is pimping out our site so we can go live!  AHHHHHH! Please call me when you get a chance . I will respectfully continue to blow up your phone with every new development. ”

Ellen is using an emoticon.  She means business, but she doesn’t want to yell at me.  Yet.  Good grief.

Ellen -  Soooo, no response still.  Whatever.  This thing was happening.  Over the next 6 hours I proceeded to add some “final touches” to the site.  This blog was not ready for prime time.  I was laboring in the bLirth-ing room alone, people!  A-lone!  I felt abandoned like an iPad on the day they launch version “so-much-better-than-the-one-you-just-maxed-your-credit-card-out-on-three-weeks-ago.”

Erin- You are such a PC. Don’t be a hater.

Meanwhile, I was exactly where I told her I would be— teaching Advanced Math to middle schoolers.  After 13 years at home, I was dipping my toe back into a classroom as a substitute.  No horror stories to tell, but I couldn’t have been more difficult to reach if I were on the moon or at the bottom of a well.  When class ended, I checked my phone.  Ellen was summoning me, in ABUNDANCE,  back to the blog.

Ellen- FINALLY, my phone rang.  Erin was like, “Hey, I got your four emails and ten texts during math class.  Deleted your Voicemail.  I guess we’re starting today.”  Someone needed to go to some bLirth-ing classes, because this was clearly not the enthusiastic, supportive response required.

Erin- Oh, I wanted to revel in our moment.  I did. But jumping back into the classroom was the easy part of my day.  When I got home, an afternoon was brewing unlike any I have had since the days of endless sippy cups and potty-training.  

Cue a rising jungle beat crescendo. Serious stuff was going down at home. And Ellen needed my input. A LOT.

On this of all days, my kids decided to revert to their alter-egos Whiny, Clingy, Punchy, Needy, and Snotty. 

Charlie was in a panic, because his report wouldn’t print. He was on the verge of a breakdown.  Apparently, he had lost all memory of how to choose printers from the menu bar. Click. Crisis averted.

RRRIIIINNNGGGG (or really, new/age zen crap stanza)

Ellen- What do you want our Twitter user name to be?

Erin- Simultaneously, Biddie lost it.  Middle School is a vicious creature and was having its way with her. I needed to talk her out of her tree.  Hug.  Crisis averted.

RRRIIIINNNGGGG

Ellen- You have to “Like” our Facebook page for me to easily make you an Admin.

Erin- Charlie, now buoyant from his printer triumph, was wrestling with Deacon and Eddie all over the house.  At one point, they were perched together on the back of a chair like spider monkeys wrapped in headlocks.  Mommy yell.  Boys sent to their corners. Crisis averted.

Ellen- Yeah, I heard that one go down over the phone.  She might be sugar-coating it a bit.

Erin- Then Ace joined the fun. He couldn’t find his soccer referee card that he needed to be recertified.  Not in his room, his ref bag, his wallet, the wash. He was hyperventilating into a bag. Found the website and got his ID # electronically. Crisis averted.

RRRIIINNNGGGG

Ellen- Do you care if we have a gravatar before we launch?

Erin- And then my parents pick THIS moment to call, AND they want to talk about booking our summer vacation,   AND they are not tech-savvy, AND they want my help.  Oy.  I might cry or kill someone.

Ellen- Erin is the best. In the middle of all that was going down in her home, she took every phone call to answer every question.  I did giggle directly in her ear that SHE is her parents’ tech guru.

Erin- This was not an ideal environment to be having a moment, even a great one like the birth of our blog, with Ellen.  But that’s the way life rolls. It’s coming whether you are ready or not.

Ellen-  So, in the midst of Erin’s maelstrom, on January 11, 2012 at 5:47pm, I got the text from Colleen that we were live.  We were the proud creators of a bouncing, brand-new blog!  As I gleefully watched the visit counter spiral upward, I was so grateful that Colleen “bLaunched” us from our nest.  We needed the push.

Erin- Aww, look at you, using “bLaunch.”  And I was grateful too. The Sisterhood Secret: By all means, plan, but (and we are totally stealing this from Nike), in the end,  JUST DO IT.  Time to get blogging!! Happy BLirth-day!

Ellen – It is January and my house has not seen complete order since the weekend before Thanksgiving. It is bringing me down.  The walls are closing in.  For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to honor Coco’s request to redo her bedroom in the manner befitting a teenager.  Here is the insanity: I started all this on the Monday before Thanksgiving.  Get me some Haldol because I am clearly psychotic. Even before the holidays began, I started out so far behind the eight ball that I was not even in the billiard hall.

Erin-My friend Ellen is one of the smartest people I know.  I am not blowing sunshine up her you-know-what, but it’s important to note this in light of this decision she made.  I understand her rationale. Truly, I do. Frank had extra time off the week before Thanksgiving, so she would have help. BUUUUTTTT, if she had asked me, I might have mentioned that decluttering a teen’s room (eight bags of trash, no lie), stripping wall-paper, repainting a room, picking out a new bed, painting old furniture to match the new room, and putting the whole damn thing back together IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HOLIDAYS might be a tall order, even for her.  She pulled it off, of course, and only had one meltdown much later in the holidays when Shutterfly’s site got twitchy as she was trying to finish her presents.

Ellen – Um, had more than one meltdown, but I try not to take every tantrum public.  And Erin is presenting the summary of the story as seen from the end of the tunnel of hindsight.  The project snowballed, people!  Snow! Balled!  We were just painting the room to match the comforter she got for her birthday this summer. I did not know I would be digging through the basement searching for the vanity that I remembered was left as a “gift” from the previous owners of our house, because Coco expressed interest in a $900 Pottery Barn Teen vanity.  I did not know that aforementioned vanity would take 8, yes 8, cans of spray paint to cover its dried-out surfaces.  I did not know that the first bed would come damaged.  I didn’t know; but I should have known.

HOWEVER, I have now found a scapegoat for all of my misery, and her name is Erin. It is really Erin’s fault all of this took place in November, because she was busy dragging me and my crew all over the countryside this summer making us have fun.  We should not have been splashing through waterfalls, we should have been painting!

BUT, this room project is going to be fodder for another blog because quite frankly, it is too soon.  Too soon!  So, what I want to talk about is how Erin keeps her zen in a house filled with 7 people, 4 of which are boys.  I did ask her advice.

Erin- I am not a neat person by design.  Ask my poor sister or my college roommates.  I tend toward disorder and chaos, but I was holding it together.  I was getting it done. The fifth kid was a game changer.  Our slight shift in number represented a cosmic shift in our universe. We had become the very embodiment of the scientific concept that systems left to themselves tend towards disorder. Um, yeah, and then some.  My newly super sized crew meant that I needed to learn some new skills and quick or we would be invited to star in the next episode of “Hoarders”.  Cue my lovely friend, Lauri, our organized Sister.  We all think she rocks.  She assessed the situation and gave me advice. Proud to say that we are now clean-as-you-go converts. Occasionally, we let this golden rule slide, and things start looking like a market in Calcutta in no time flat.

 The close proximity of so many people means that occasionally all you desire is to breathe your own air and listen to yourself think.  To this end, we also respect that one room in the house is the Oasis.  For us, it’s the master bedroom. No clutter, no mess, no dirty ugly reminders of the business taking place in the rest of the house.  I can’t be the evil ogre mom and outlaw food in the family room (I LOVE popcorn with my movies!) nor do I feel like harping on every errant shoe, belt, or ball.  But I will disappear into the Oasis and take a load off.  I will put my head down on a well-made bed and pick up a neatly stacked book from my bedside table and drift away for a few minutes.  Pure heaven.

Ellen- It is a wonderful system, but just listen to what it has spawned.  Loopholes developed. The order may be a Mirage.  But hey, I would settle for things looking good at a distant at this point.

Erin- So, one piece of advice was to make the beds every day. Great idea. Everything looks neat and tidy. Mental space opens up. Deep Breath and AHHHHH.  Well, my peeps did not get the memo. I was violating the Dymowski Law of Inertia.  They were going to resist this change in their momentum. My brilliant offspring, mostly because they are future men, have taken my edict to make beds and morphed it to their own ends.   They make their beds once a week and then sleep on top of their freshly made beds with whatever blankets they can find.   This is why I had to bring in the big guns.  There is a genetic laziness that could threaten our happy, little home if left unchecked.   

Ellen- I personally think it is an IQ test and that they passed.  But clearly the Sisterhood Secret is to clean-as-you-go, because it is easier to sweep up a mole hill than to sandblast a mountain.  I have used this technique, but like intense cardio, I have let it slide during the holidays.  But I defy anyone to say that this technique would have succeeded against the Coco Room Apocalypse.  If I can ever get to baseline again (take the Christmas decorations down) I swear I will once again clean-as -I -go.

And just in case you think I’m one of those uptight women that needs a Valium if the vacuum tracks aren’t lined up in the same direction or if you think I am using hyperbole for comedic effect; I have two words for you: photographic evidence.

In order to time the project so that Frank could help me take down the wallpaper, we just hauled everything out of Coco's room without sorting.

Coco had 11 years to squirrel away her treasures. But I do have to give her props that she readily tossed things when forced to do so.

 Ellen- Now excuse me, I have to go excavate for an Oasis.

Want to see how Coco’s room turned out? Click to Read More.

Erin: So we are spending A LOT of time together with this blog. We are also spending lots of time doing all of the other things we committed to doing BEFORE we decided to create The Sisterhood. This week is Bazaar Week for me. If you do not go to a school that runs a bazaar, bless your lucky stars. Insert any other school event that takes weeks to plan and nearly one hundred volunteers to pull off. The soundtrack of my life this week is basically my ringtone.

Ellen: Our time together means I am in the presence of her ringtone A LOT:  a new age/zen crap stanza.  But to be fair, it might not be the tune that bugs me so much as the fact that it is an evil lie!  This thing goes off constantly, and there is NOTHING zen about 97.9% of the calls that come through.

Erin: Remember the trailer for Family Guy where the little kid says, “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mommy, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom.” And the mom finally says, “what?” And he says, “Hi.”  Something about those calls really reminds me of that.

Ellen: So really it is not the tune, but the life-draining, joy-sucking requests that come in with every third call.  I’m sure of this because when I was an intern, I smashed my beeper against the wall during one particularly bad night of bouncing between the ER, labor and delivery, and the oncology ward.  I was not rewarded with a new beeper.  I had to put it back together with surgical tape and rubber bands.  As a result, my beep was transformed into a kind of sick mewling.  But that distorted “waa, waa” actually made me feel satisfied, like vengeance was mine. So it is not the noise, but what it brings.

Erin: And, to be honest, a lot of what it brings has the potential to make my eyes roll, but this is what I signed up for, so I listen and put out the fires, massage the egos, and move the event forward.  And I mainly try not to pass judgment. Let’s face it, some of the calls are ridiculous and unnecessary, and I am certain that if the woman on the other end had taken even two seconds to think, she would not have kick-started my new age/zen crap stanza into life.  (It’s a credit to my intrinsic coping mechanisms that I cannot recall an exact example of this. You are just going to have to trust me on this one.) So, I take my phone’s advice and go to the zen place.  I remember that these women are all trying to make their kids’ school a better place just like me.  I also note that we all have different limits of what we can juggle.  Some people can juggle 12 flaming torches interspersed with three buzzing chainsaws, while others are barely managing keeping three foam balls in the air.  There is no better, just different.

Ellen: And to take this one step further, as part of The Sisterhood, let’s all just agree to not pass judgment—about any of it—PERIOD.  Just because you work outside of the home AND are the treasurer for the parent organization, don’t pass judgment on how much a stay-at-home mother is volunteering at school.  She may be devoting hours to her church and taking care of a sick relative to boot.  And before anyone starts to feel superior, don’t judge the working mom who brings the store-bought cookies and never seems to participate.  This may be her 4^th kid in your elementary school and 15 years ago she was PTA president AND head of the winter bash, but now she is just tired and busy running two teenagers around to water polo, tai chi, and yodeling lessons six days a week. Hook a sister up, but give her a break.  We have different limits.  And here is the Sisterhood Secret: the most tolerable Sisters are those that are honest about their limits, but honor the commitments they have made.

But just in case it is the ringtone getting on my last nerve, any suggestions?  I was thinking “Brass Monkey” by the Beastie Boys.

So I fully realize that this post is taking place well after Halloween.  This is because during the week of Halloween, I and my equally computer illiterate friend, Erin, were trying to get this blog up and running.  The fact that we were spending HOURS trying to learn all of the computer science that we avoided in college, (oh wait, there was no freaking internet or blogs when we were in college), showcased how much precious time I was wasting on Halloween activities.

But despite the fact this “holiday” has come and gone, I still wanted to record for all of motherhood what took place in my house over a two, I repeat, two hour period.  Because yes, I do want a cookie.  So, in said time period, Jellybean (10) and I constructed a papier mache zombie wedding cake; I cooked dinner, edited a speech, braided hair (so Coco (13) could have wavy hair when delivering the speech,) mended a shirt (to be worn during the speech), folded laundry, and shortened the pinkie of a Michael Jackson glove.  So if you are like,” Ellen, you could have put away the Super Woman cape and passed on the laundry,” I have this response for you:  we all desperately needed clean underwear in our drawers. While I generally prefer to have my kids do the laundry; the facts were, Coco was writing her speech and Jellybean is not yet woman enough to multi-task to the level of working with flour paste and clean laundry simultaneously.

Wanna slice with the finger or the brain??

Now out of all of the tasks, I do have to admit that the papier mache was the most fun.  As you can see our zombie wedding cake was epic.

But the most annoying task was shortening the pinkie of the Michael Jackson glove that we ordered online for $10.  That stupid pinkie was as long as the ring finger.  Take a look at your own finger and you will realize how freaky that is!  Now before you judge me on the $10 glove, wrap your head around the fact that it was my ten year old daughter that was dressing up as Michael Jackson.  That is definitely on the spectacular side of awesome.  I will have to delve further into her Michael Jackson obsession at another time.

Now if it never entered your mind to question why I was making a papier mache zombie wedding cake, congratulations, you are a mother.  You were doing your own equally stupid things during Halloween, so I don’t seem that far off the bell curve to you.  At my daughter’s elementary school, they have this great event, started by a great teacher called Trunk-or -Treat.  Parents circle their cars at the fire company’s carnival grounds and the kids trick-or- treat from trunk- to- trunk.  Sounds simple, but what would be the fun if there was no competition involved?  Of course, we have to decorate the trunks!  It is in its fourth year and as with all good things it gets grander and grander.  The first year we opened our decoration box and threw a bunch of stuff in our trunk.  APPARENTLY, we were not really embracing the spirit of the whole thing.  My mommy tiara got a little tarnished.  The second year we did an 80’s theme, but alas, the older gentlemen judging the trunks were not feeling that “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”  The third year we won a trophy (that is still proudly displayed on the mantle) for “Kid Friendliest Theme.”  Check out the “Funky Monkey Hot Tub.”

We have a lot of monkeys.

You are looking at a winning trunk, Sister!

Well, the theme this year was “Zombie Wedding.”  (We watch way too much “Say Yes To The Dress” and “Cake Boss”). This involved constructing a zombie couple out of PVC pipe and the aforementioned cake.  We’ll just say I spent $100 on this glorious-ness since Frank has promised to read my blog at some point.  I swear, you give me PVC pipe, wire ties, duct tape, and fishing line and I can out-design MacGyver.  But oh my goodness, this dragged on my time so much that I had to practice deep breathing and drink wine to calm myself down.  The killer is that this event replaced a free and simple school Halloween parade.  Kids just brought their costumes to school and walked around the school yard; simple as that.  But would we really be in the 21^st century if we were allowed to keep things simple?

Zombie Implants: NOT FDA Approved

And just to give you some insight into Erin’s “fun-loving/not learning from my tribulations” psyche; she stole the idea for her school.  Oy!

Well, to bring this story to a close, we were indeed victorious.  Oh yeah, we won “Most Creative!” People were standing next to our creeps for photo ops like it was Disney World. Was it all worth it for the plastic trophy and $10 Wawa gift card?  I must admit, we are competitive enough to say, “Yes!”  But truth be told, Jellybean’s excitement and pride were pretty awesome, too.  I can hear the thump of one more brick mortared into the foundation of our relationship.  And here is the Sisterhood Secret: you  REALLY need that foundation to be strong by the time they reach their teens.  Just ask Coco, who wasn’t too cool to celebrate with the rest of us.

-Ellen