I am currently in a bet with my husband that I can have a good attitude for seven whole days.

Some of you just gasped! Wondering how anyone in their right mind could go seven whole days with a sunshine sparkle outlook on life.

Others of you gasped! Wondering what the hell my problem is that I have to make a bet with my husband to be a nice person for seven days.

You see, Cody jokes. A lot. He claims that it’s his duty to bug me since I never had a brother. However after dealing with boys since Kindergarten I’m well aware that it is a boys calling in life to bug girls. To find one to bug ’til death do you part. Except in my case it’s for time and all eternity. Eternity is a long time to be bugged y’all.

With all the bugging and the joking and the HA! HA! I can get a little miffed. A little ticked. A little annoyed. A little short. Pretty soon Bad Attitude Betty is at the door calling for Cody’s fresh blood. So I’m taking a week to practice a good attitude toward bugging. Not only from Cody, but from humidity, grumpy kids, piles of laundry and law school.

So far? I know for a fact that I married exactly whom I was supposed to, more on that gagtastic realization later. I also know that with all this humidity I haven’t had to buy a single bottle of lotion for two years. I’ve learned that when the resident three foot grump goes on tirade, she’s more than happy to hang out in her room for an hour and color her frustrations out. I finally found a laundry combination that actually has me looking forward to stuffing my face into basketfuls of freshly folded laundry. And law school? Dude. My husband is thisclose to finishing right near the top of his class in law school. LAW SCHOOL. Dude rocks my world.

At the end of seven days he will be making me a three course dinner (see that? CONFIDENCE!) involving crab in some form (not krab, crab. crab crab crab.)

Anybody else want to take the challenge? While I won’t share my crab, Cody makes a wicked mashed potato.

Blog burnout.

We’ve all suffered it.

We’ve all felt guilty about it.

Laaaaaaame.

I personally haven’t had much to write about. I took my kid to a horse show, to pick raspberries and to get her some new pants that go past her ankle bone. Last night we hit up the circus and today we’re trekking down to Louisville to go to the Temple.

While we’ve had fantastic time, I don’t really expect you to care a whole lot that I’ve eaten enough raspberries to make my fingers red or that packing away clothes the moosh has grown out of sent me into a heap of weepiness.

So I don’t write about it. Instead I live it. And I don’t feel guilty about it.

OH! There was a time. If my blog when longer than three days without a post? I’d start throwing myself in front of cars and purposely placing myself in awkward situations in hopes blog fodder would result.

Laaaaame.

It’s okay if you don’t want to write. It’s okay if you have nothing to write about. Personally I’m thankful when people value my time enough by not posting posts such as “HoHum, I have nothing to write about so, um, I like went to the store and grandma came over and we made cookies and LOOK! here’s a picture of my kid with something kind of funny on their head! Sorry this sucks so bad, I’m a sucky blogger wah wah.”

Shooshie.

Quit talking mean about yourself. LOVE yourself. Love your blog. Love your readers. Loooooove.

If you went to the store and made cookies with grandma all while you kid had something funny on their head? EMBRACE IT! Tie it together! Get that ol’ brain working! One fantastic FANTASTIC example of beautiful simple posting is Angela over at Moon Cookie. (Oh hai Angela! Hope you don’t mind, I just love you too much. You’re too wonderful not to share with the world.)

This brings me to guest posting. Some people poo-poo guest posts. However if you have unique readers that a fellow blogger doesn’t, and you want to share their wit! and funny! and talent! with your readers than go ahead, try it out. Take a blog nap while you’re at it. And if someone asks YOU to guest post but you’re already in the blog dumps? Say no. And for the love don’t feel guilty.

I personally have guest posted twice for ladies suffering from blog fizzle in the last week.

This one is about the Hello Kitty jammies that almost were.

And this one is about leather drama.

Funny side note, I emailed these posts to both ladies for them to publish at their leisure. The formatting somehow went all wonky on my One Plus Two post. However the formatting is just right on Don Mills Diva. You know what? I think I kind of sound like a raging drunk on Jen’s blog. People have complained about my SPACES! and my HARD RETURNS! But really? Hard returns make me what I am.

With motherhood, marriage and the loss of certain calendar spreads, it becomes more and more obvious that I will never be a lot of things. But with wifehood and motherhood also comes a new appreciation for what I can, and hopefully will accomplish.

I will never be the hot chick on the back of some guys motorcycle.

I will be the girl behind the bike of a little kid, teaching her how to ride without training wheels.

I will never be a cheerleader at the sidelines of an NFL game.

I will be the cheerleader at the sidelines of a little league game with juice boxes at the ready.

I will never be a famous singer.

I will get to sing duets in the car to Barbie soundtracks.

I will never bring men to their knees.

I will always have band-aids for skinned knees.

I will never cause a room to stop and stare when I enter.

I will cause tears to stop with nothing but a hug.

I will never win prestigious awards to frame.

I will get “I LOVE YOU MOM” written in crayon, maybe even Sharpie, on my wall.

I will never be the leading lady in a Hollywood blockbuster.

I will always be the only one who can make my husband his favorite meal the way he likes it.

I will probably never cure a disease or deliver a baby.

I will always show up  on doorsteps with casseroles for people who just got out of the hospital, lost a loved one or had a baby.

I will never make millions laugh with my “male candor and feminine wit”.

But I can always make my kid laugh so hard she can’t breathe.

I will never be featured in National Geographic.

I will always be featured on the walls of my own house and on the walls of grandma and grandpa back home.

I will never wrestle alligators.

I will wrestle wet naked babies in the bathtub or tantrum throwing toddlers in the aisles of Target.

I will never be a mom to millions.

But I will always be the mom to at least one.

*****

What will you never always be?

Man dudes, NaBloPoMo kicked my trash this year.

So in turn, I’m going to discuss kids kicking other kids trash.

It’s inevitable that when you put a bunch of kids under 6 together there will always be someone crying. Such was the case tonight at a neighborhood barbecue. Someone was always bawling because someone else took their stick and it was a special stick and because there will never be another stick so special in the history of sticks. Or someone threw dirt. Or someone looked at me funny. Or someone wouldn’t let me go down the slide. Or someone said I was a foofoo poopy head.

Oy.

Children.

The best part is that as parents we can watch from the sidelines and place bets on the playground brawls. Who’s going to stand up for themselves, who will best keep their composure, who’s going to cry first and who’s going straight to issuing a smackdown.

Sometimes despite the best of parental watches, something happens and no one’s around to see it right when it happens. You may see the kid go down, or you may be the first to hear a shrill shriek from a kid who’s been downed, but you’re not exactly sure how they got there.

This is where another superpower of parenthood kicks in.

You are able to deduce what happened from the scene of the crime. If there was a small slide involved and the child wailing from behind the slide is alone, chances are he or she just lost their grip and went bottoms up and got a little freaked out on the way down. However if there is another child nearby and the other child looks guilty, chances are there was a “taking turns” altercation and someone pushed someone else. However, as the parent you can never really place blame, because you didn’t see what happened and asking a three year old what happened is about as reliable as asking a dead goldfish which way is up.

So you kiss boo-boos, teary cheeks and bruised egos. You send them back out on the playground, because crap like this is going to be happening their whole life. Only at some point the playground disappears and your mom isn’t around to kiss it better.

Better learned now than in that awkward smelly teenage phase I say. (Which isn’t to say a hard playing three year old can’t work up a good stink. Whoo.)

Bye NaBloPoMo. I won’t really miss you. Sorry.

If you’re reading this it means that I am in the backseat of my car being driven to Ann Arbor Michigan to watch Utah hopefully beat Michigan at football. If Utah can win in the Big House it means that today will be one of the greatest days of Cody’s life.

Look for me on ESPN, oh, wait. That was last year.

Just know that on the long drive I won’t even need to take Dramamine to help me sleep.

Two law students will be in the front seats.Talking. About law school stuff.

I’ll be asleep before we leave our zip code.

The internets have come together to auction off over 165 items (165!) with all the proceeds going to Christian and Stephanies mounting hospital bills and family. (Want the full story, check here.)

So go over to Design Mom for a full list of everything biddable. I’m currently bidding on a handmade shawl. Dude, this stuff is AWESOME. And it all goes to a fantastic cause. I love the internets. LOVE.

Last week I went to the doctor in hopes of finding something to explain my big mysterious symptom.

Someday I’m going to befriend a doctor and somehow trick him into telling me the truth about patients like me.

And what kind of patient am I?

One that goes in with a symptom of “sleepiness.” Or “fatigue” if you don’t want to sound like such a baby.

“Can you expound on that?” asked the hot doctor.

“I’m really sleepy all the time. I eat well, I sleep well, I drink plenty of water, I don’t really drink  caffeine and yet I could curl up and take a six hour nap if you could just get me a pillow that isn’t wrapped in paper. Sorry dude, but all I have for you is sleepy.”

Then came the depression questions, if you have in your chart that you suffer from depression you know what the depression questions are.

“So do you have any hobbies?”

“What do you like to do?”

“Are you feeling withdrawn? Like you don’t want to be around people?”

“Any thoughts of hurting yourself or others?”

Now I’ve never had the depression questions when I haven’t been “in” for depression, they sounded kind of funny, like “Who would ever want to hurt themselves? And of course I want to be around people! I’m a people person! What kind of questions are these? I’m sleepy, not suicidal!”  And bless his little heart, this was the same fresh faced doctor that asked about my uh, p.., erm, uhh, uhm, er, uhhh, menses. I answered them of course, proving that it wasn’t depression that was turning me into a hibernating bear in the middle of the summer.

I told him I like to write (I left out the bit about “I like to write about my life on the internet for complete strangers” only becase that would have led to a whole other string of questions that I didn’t want to answer. If you’ve ever had to explain to someone that you blog (and sometimes even blog about hot doctors) then you know why I avoided the question.) I also told him I like to hang out with my kid and go on adventures, I like to take pictures, I like to bake, and I like to hang out with friends and like totally hang out at the mall and listen to my new NKOTB CD.

He asked how old my kid was. I told him.

“Well that’s probably why you’re tired, you have a lot going on.”

Oh, well. Now my life has a lot going on to the point of utter and complete exhaustion. Good to know, Cody, did you hear that? Mama needs a break. Now I’m not going to claim my life is easy, but it’s no Deadliest Catch either. I’ve been at this mothering gig full time for a few years now, I was just starting to to think it was getting easier, not harder.

After sucking blood out of me the doctor concluded that I have lovely blood without a hint of abnormalities.

Apparently I just, wait, how did he put it?  “Have a lot going on.”

Guess that’s a pretty fair diagnosis for someone who came in as “sleepy.”

Right?

The competition is on. And you’d better believe I’m representing.

Why you should vote for me (besides the strong desire to have me hanging on your wall for 28-31 days in 2009), YouTube style.

Here’s the link to the Hot Blogger Calendar poll.

Here’s the poll itself (3/4 of the way down-Moosh in Indy)