Just when I thought Fiona couldn’t get any cuter…
Jul 17, 2011 Posted From My Phone
Fiona is writing a TV show. She spent all morning making a packet for each character, including drawing what each should look like and adjectives to describe them, like “happy,” “smart,” and my personal favorite, “inberest.”
Now she’s auditioning her stuffed animals for the parts. I could die from the cuteness overload.
Originally posted on SelfishMom, from Amy’s cell phone (so please excuse any weird formatting). All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0 . Please see Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Today’s agenda: diva edition
Jun 29, 2011 Today's Agenda
The first half of this day promises to be lazy…at least for the kids. It’s their first day of summer vacation so I’m going to ask nothing of them except basic hygiene.
Later, though, we head to Fiona’s big singing performance! She was in an after-school chorus this year, and the director, Ian Jones, thought that it was important to have all of his students (from several different schools around the city and all different age groups) experience performing in a “real” theater. He raised over $3,000 to rent out Long Island University’s Kumble Theater (actually not on Long Island, but near us in Brooklyn), and tonight is the big night.
Check out this video, a little sneak peek from this past weekend at the Fort Greene Festival:
Of course, poor Jake is stuck with us at the theater from 3:30 on, so I’m hoping the iPad can amuse him for that long.
And when we get back, late tonight, I will start packing for our trip to Buffalo, something I should’ve been doing all week. And I’ll be packing lots of pants, because I never did make it out of the house yesterday for a wax while the kids were in school. I know, tiny violins…
UPDATE: Oh, and I almost forgot: later today I’ll be posting the last part of my Cape May/Congress Hall review series. It really was an amazing place – I can’t wait to go back!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Randomosity, What the hell is THAT? edition
Jun 26, 2011 Randomosity
I find the weirdest bugs in our downstairs bathroom. I don’t even want to know what this one is.
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Michelle Obama is my hero. Now I’m just waiting for a few particular Republicans to find a way to criticize the First Lady for being physically fit.
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Fiona performed with her school chorus at the Fort Greene Festival yesterday. They were adorable.
It was a warm-up for this coming Wednesday June 29th, at 7pm, when they perform at LIU’s Kumble Theater, along with the other students of Fiona’s awesome choral director, Ian Jones (don’t tell him, but every mom has a crush on him; that’s him on the left playing keyboards). If you’re in Brooklyn and want to come see some really enthusiastic and talented students, from pre-K kids all the way up to high school students, tickets are only $5.
Email Ian Jones for more info and to purchase tickets.
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I can now, if I want to (and why wouldn’t I?!?), get my very own dot selfishmom url. Like, my blog could be blog.selfishmom. Of course, the application fee is $185k, which is a slight increase from the $20/year I’m paying now for SelfishMom.com. Still…
Expect a slew of .Coke, .BMW, and .Microsoft urls. And, of course, .Trump. Because he just won’t be able to resist.
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You have almost a year to save up for a trip to Vegas for your guy for Father’s Day, so that he can do this.
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Please note: if you’re planning on scamming passers-by out of cash by telling them that your baby died and you need money for the funeral, try to figure out – and memorize – the salient details first, like the baby’s birthday, and deathday, and the hospital where he died, and his doctor’s name. Slackers.
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Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Randomosity: Don’t pull my finger edition
Jun 25, 2011 Randomosity
So there’s something wrong with my finger. About six weeks ago it developed a big callous-like thing on one side next to the nail. It was fairly painful when touched so after a few days I tried to trim the hard skin off with nail clippers, but under the hard skin was just more hard skin and pain. So I left it alone for a month and it got worse.
Everyone who’s looked at it says it looks like a hangnail gone bad, but there was no hangnail to start with. I went to the doctor a week ago and she didn’t know what to make of it either. She gave me a course of antibiotics and a referral to a dermatologist. The antibiotics are now done and it still hurts – actually I think it’s worse. I can hardly type with that finger and if I accidentally hit it on something it’s scream-worthy. The earliest appointment I could get with the dermatologist is a month away and I’m starting to think that by then they’ll tell me “What took you so long? Now we have to amputate your finger.”
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By tomorrow afternoon Fiona will have a nice little credit on her resume: opening for Mos Def. The school chorus she’s in is singing at the Fort Greene festival.
The funny thing is, the festival’s poster says that there’s a “Suggestive Donation” of $3. So I’m not sure if there should be kids there at all.
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This is all Steven Slater’s fault.
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If you haven’t gotten your free download of “Go the Fuck to Sleep” as read by Samuel L. Jackson, drop everything and do it now.
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If you haven’t seen the video yet of the woman who gets pretty irate on a Metro-North train when an employee asks her to quiet down and stop using profanity, it’s pretty funny in an “Oh My God I’m glad some of the stupid shit I’ve done wasn’t recorded” way. She keeps insisting that she’s very well educated, which just makes her sound dumb. But even funnier is what wasn’t on the video:
According to the person who filmed this, after the altercation the conductor got on the loudspeaker and reminded everyone to speak softly and not use profanity on the train, "especially those people who went to Harvard or Yale or are from Westport."
You can watch the video on Gawker.
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Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Today’s agenda: fancy clothes edition
Jun 23, 2011 Posted From My Phone, Today's Agenda
This morning as I was racing around trying to get out of the house, Fiona asked me why I was dressed so fancy. I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt, no make-up, one eyebrow over-plucked, and I desperately wish I’d gotten up ten minutes earlier to do my hair.
It’s probably because I almost always walk her to school in slept-in sweats. But this morning, since I need an extra little boost of confidence, I’m choosing to believe it’s because I look good.
And why the “fancy” clothes? Today I’m honored and excited to be speaking on a panel at CE week, an event in NYC put on by the same people who do the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. So yeah, I’m super excited. Luckily I’m not talking about tech, since my most insightful tech comments lately seem to be along the lines of “Oooh, pretty and shiny.” What can I say, my brain’s on summer vacation already.
No, instead, Rebecca Nancy and I will be talking about how to work best with mom bloggers, a subject I’m very comfortable talking about (although a few people to whom I owe posts might be snickering).
After that, I’ll try to see as much of the rest of the conference as I can, then get the kids from school and flip a coin about whether I should catch up on housework or work work first. Fun!
Originally posted on SelfishMom, from Amy’s cell phone (so please excuse any weird formatting). All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0 . Please see Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
A stylist yesterday, a doctor the day before that, a house builder today…until the earthquake hits
Mar 14, 2011 Kids
For the longest time, Fiona wanted to be a stylist when she grew up. I think it started about a year ago: she suggested that I pair some green earrings with my dress, I said “Great choice, Fiona, you should be a stylist!” and she decided right then and there that she was going to be a stylist when she grew up (it wasn’t until a few weeks later that she asked me what a stylist was). Much talk of dresses and shoes and awards shows later, she started branching out. At this point, she changes what she wants to be daily, sometimes hourly. It makes me happy and a little teary to see her so excited about all the possibilities before her.
Yesterday morning Fiona and I were finishing up breakfast, and she asked me what I wanted her to build. A house, I said. “OK. But I need Daddy’s tools.” (We’ll just gloss over the fact that most of them are mine, I guess that’s for another post.) Once I disabused her of the notion that she could use tools to build me an actual house, she told me she’d build it out of something else.
A little while later I found her wrestling with the big kitchen scissors and a cardboard box. Before she lost a finger I offered to cut for her, and she had me cut off several dozen little rectangles. Next time I stopped by, she was painting them to look like bricks. Different colored bricks for each wall. Her industriousness blows me away.
Later in the car, I was telling this story to my husband, and he said “So Fiona, you’re going to be a builder now?”
“Yes. At least until the earthquake hits and we all die.”
Whomp.
We’d talked about it a little. She’d seen it on the news, and I explained to her about how the earth is like a bunch of big puzzle pieces trying to fit together, and luckily we don’t live near any of the pieces that are banging up against each other hard enough to make buildings fall down. She’s not buying it. She genuinely scared.
When the twin towers fell Jake was only five weeks old, and Fiona hadn’t even occurred to me yet. It brought my brain back to a place it hadn’t really been since I was in elementary school and “The Day After” was on TV. I was convinced for a while that there really wasn’t any point to doing anything productive, because I was going to die in a nuclear attack long before I’d have to find a job anyway (of course, this may have been my brain’s way of trying to get out of homework). That kind of hopelessness is a hard thing for a kid to shake.
It will fade eventually though, and be replaced with something else. She’s simply a worrier. There always has to be something on the horizon waiting to eat her or destroy her house or take her family. Last week, it was zombies. Before that, it was ghosts. I kind of miss them. They were easier to deal with than something as real as an earthquake and a tsunami.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Tags: Earthquake, Fiona
A beautiful mistake
Mar 4, 2011 Kids
Fiona and I have been scrambling the last couple of days to finish a school project that was due this morning, about African American inventors. We’d been looking up inventions online Wednesday when we discovered that the potato chip was invented when someone accidentally cut the potatoes too thin for French fries (actually, further research says that it wasn’t accidental, that it was an extreme reaction to a restaurant customer who kept complaining that the fries were too thick, but the first explanation fits better with my story…).
This morning as we were putting the finishing touches on the project – printing out pictures of each inventor – I told her that two of them simply didn’t have pictures. They lived a long time ago when not everybody had their picture taken, one of them even before cameras were invented.
Fiona found this fascinating and confusing. Her six-year-old brain couldn’t quite understand how someone could invent something as amazing and complex as a camera. She asked me how exactly someone invented the camera. “Did they try and try and try until they got it, or was it a beautiful mistake like the potato chip?”
A beautiful mistake. I love it. That will become a permanent part of my vocabulary.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Tags: Fiona
Mommy-daughter spa time
Feb 16, 2011 Kids
Fiona and I are having some really great Mommy-daughter time. This afternoon we got manicures, pedicures and massages. Yes, I know, totally indulgent for a first grader. But it’s just so much fun! (Yeah, that’s a Barbie bandage on my toe, it’s all I had in my purse, OK?)
Fiona’s been getting her fingernails painted for as long as I can remember. After getting a haircut, for five dollars extra, the ladies at my salon will paint cute flowers and designs on her nails. But those aren’t manicures – no buffing, no soaking, no massaging.
Her first mini spa day was last summer. We were an hour from home with two hours to kill, the timing wasn’t right for a movie, we weren’t hungry, and it was pouring rain. So, I got the bright idea to take her for a little spa time. The ladies laughed as she sat in the giant pedicure chair, but Fiona just ate it up. She was totally in her element. Then, as our nails were drying, we got fifteen minutes shoulder massages. And I created a monster.
Now she begs to go to the spa with me (I’m quite the spa whore myself). This is only the third time we’ve done this, but believe me, she would go every week. I didn’t discover the wonders of spas until I was an adult. In NYC, it’s just too cheap not to do it often. I can get a manicure, pedicure and chair massage for $40 near my house, less if I go on Tuesdays. So, I indulge myself. It’s heavenly.
Before bed tonight, to continue the beauty theme, I let Fiona do my make-up and hair. Is there a reality show for six-year-old make-up artists? Because she didn’t do too bad a job! Almost as good as I would’ve done. Seriously. I totally suck at make-up.
(Do you like the hair? I think I remember Boy George wearing his in that style when I was in eighth grade, but I’m not sure what Fiona’s inspiration was.)
So, I’ll try to wait a few months before I take her spa-ing with me again. But it will be hard. She’s a fun spa buddy.
Originally posted on SelfishMom.com. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
