Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Confessions of a Give-Away Slut


Yes, I read "Confessions of a Pioneer Woman." No, I am not going to make it a link back to her already fabulously popular 2 year old blog. No! I'm not jealous. She and Dooce deserve thousands of comments and huge ad revenues. I'm totally fine with it. Really. Incidentally, Dooce will be a featured mommy blogger on the Today Show tomorrow. Seriously, she does not need my plug.

Pioneer Woman is giving away a coffee maker today and I left my comment in hopes of being randomly selected to win the coffee maker. I make horrible coffee. Actually, I don't even drink coffee. My idea of good coffee is decaffeinated Nescafé with lots of milk. But I want to be a winner. Guess what? My comment number is the same number of the lucky woman who won a $500 gift card yesterday. I am commentator #1708. What are the odds of the random generator picking that number 2 days in a row? Zip.


How do you make long division interesting? The answer is: Elaborate tales that involve zombies. If 21 friends came to your house and they had to eat 7,000 cakes in order to keep zombies from destroying all video games in the world, how many cakes would each friend have to eat?

While I made homemade macaroni and cheese, Alex illustrated the ensuing mayhem of 21 people racing to consume 7,000 cakes while zombies are being quashed by video game characters and giant Lego figures. The mac 'n' cheese had fresh Italian herbs and grated Romano and Mozzarella cheeses over penne and I baked it in the oven to give it a nice crisp crust. When I served Maria she looked appalled and said, "I want real food."

Heck, yes, I can mommy blog with the best of them.


Here is Maria. When I write my posts and export my photos to the server, Maria likes to sit in my lap. She brings me things. Little papers, lotion, an apple, an orange peel, a red glove, a pencil sharpener, a bottle cap, stones, a bandage, and cups of tea.


Geoff promised her a pony if she poops in the toilet. A pony! It was enough to make me want to wet my pants until I can negotiate a chicken. Just kidding. I shouldn't have to say that I am "kidding," but I never know when people will decide to take me seriously. And some readers lurkers will see this as proof positive that they were right to disown me.


There's a lot I would like to say. There is a lot I could confess. I want to be a winner and I want to have long shiny hair. I want to keep a clean house, but I don't want to do the actual cleaning. I want lose weight, disdain food, regularly visit an aesthetician, read novels and retain facts about politics, economics, history and html. I want to let go of the past, live in the moment and smile in the face of the unknown.

6 comments:

Anna Banana said...

You win the prize! The noble prize, the putziler prize, AND the Mother's Day prize. Have a great Mother's Day week. You know they changed it to a week, right?

village mama said...

Chica, fu*$ the free coffee maker!

You've already won way too many lotteries in this lifetime: your children are gorgeous, Geoff is hot, you are a classic divine beauty and you are hilarious.

lifeinredshoes said...

I would totally pe my pants if my husband would let me have a chicken! Worth every drop.

Jennifer said...

The zombie math reminds me of a problem that the children in our 5th grade level math class at school are given -- it's called "the million problem." The children are challenged to come up with a question that (1) involves a million of something and (2) involves some mathematical aspect of that million of something. This year's kids came up with questions such as "Are one million sheets of toilet paper heavier than 4 pounds?" "Will one million M&Ms, arranged flat (like tiles) cover an area larger that the school's soccer field?" They had to estimate their answer and then design an experiment/project to arrive at their answer -- without ever actually having one million of anything to work with. So the toilet paper guy used a sensitive scale to measure as many sheets of toilet paper as it took to get a weight result he could work with and then used multiplication to prove than a million sheets would weigh significantly more than 4 pounds. The M&M girl made a grid using something like 200 M&Ms, measured it, used the perimeter measurements of the field, etc., and found that a million M&Ms would in fact cover an area 7.5 times the size of the field. Anyway, it's a great way to give children facility for working with very large numbers and figuring out how to apply math to solve problems.

A coffee maker would just take up room to produce something you don't even like -- feh. Right there with you on the clean house without cleaning, the shiny hair, the novels, the politics.... my own list would be pretty long too. You do so much so well, though, that no one but you would even guess you'd have a list like that.

village mama said...

Chica, hope your coffee-maker-prize-hangover is over.
XO

amy smith said...

oohhh, if you figure out how to have a clean house without actually doing the cleaning, please share. :)