It's the fifth anniversary of the publication of my parenting anthology, SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK, this year, and so in honor of Mother's Day coming up, I rang up two of my contributors -- Alice Bradley and Eden Kennedy -- who went on to write their own parenting tome, LET'S PANIC ABOUT BABIES. We decided what might be really fun to do in a veiled attempt to remind you our books make excellent Mother's Day gifts for the lovelies in your life is update you on one of our vignettes from SIFTW and ponder which bit of baby advice from LPAB works for tweens, which we all now have.

SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK, Edited by Rita Arens -- buy it here!

I'm going to update my essay, "Sleep Cycles." (p. 25) Originally I included these stages of adult sleep cycles: 1) Alcohol-induced 2) Insomnia-Related 3) The Love Bug 4) New Baby-Induced 5) Toddler-Induced. Clearly, I had a toddler when I wrote this post. There are all sorts of other reasons you can't sleep after becoming a parent. 

My daughter is now nine. Since the Toddler-Induced days, I've also experienced the following sleep disturbances:

6) Growing-Child-in-My-Bed-Induced. My daughter has slept through the night since she was around four or five. It was a gradual thing, when the waking up and crying three times a night became waking up and walking into my bedroom once a night to try to crawl in where it was warm. At first, I gave in (it was always my side of the bed she approached, of course) and let her crawl in, only to find her elbow in my ear, her bony butt in my hip and the amount of body heat with me in the middle unable to crawl out from under the covers or even slip out a temperature-regulating foot stifling. This led to the next stage.

7) Trying-to-Sleep-in-a-Twin-Bed-Induced. When she showed up in the middle of the night, I'd take her back to her own bed and lie down with her, thinking of course I would get up and go back to my own, queen-sized bed in a few minutes. Of course, inevitably I'd lie down, fall asleep, and then be on that dividing line between too tired and too lazy to go back to my own bed even though trying to get any sleep with a grade-school-aged child in a twin bed is just plain ridiculous.

8) Sleepover-Induced. Whether there's an extra kid in my house or my girl is somewhere other than her own bed, I just don't sleep so well, period. I'm going to absolutely die when she goes to college.

I haven't yet gotten to the stages of driving- and dating-induced sleep problems. God help me when I do.

LET'S PANIC ABOUT BABIES! By Alice Bradley & Eden M. Kennedy -- buy it here!

NOW. For the LPAB baby advice that applies to a tween. 

Ahem.

I'm staring at "This Is Overly Difficult, and I Have Changed My Mind." (p. 142) I hope Eden and Alice don't mind if I update their advice for tweens.

Having a baby tween will:

• Win you the approval of the far right Update! As long as you don't end up with a pregnant tween!
• Allow you to start one of those "mommy blogs" everyone's been talking about Update! You'll realize when your kid hits around six OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE? I'M A FUCKING LIFESTYLE BLOGGER. THERE ARE NO MOMMYBLOGS.
• Give you an excuse to expose your nipples in public Update! Give you an excuse to revisit the eighties when your daughter asks for neon socks.
• Allow you to catch up on all those episodes of Sesame Street you've missed. Update! Allow you to catch on to all that is wrong with Disney programming for tweens.
• Exercise your arms from hours of vigorous stroller-pushing and baby-rocking. Update! Exercise your jaws from all those hours of teeth grinding. 
• Provide you with someone to blame for all those thwarted ambitions. There is no need for an update here. Move along.

Read Eden's post here and Alice's post here. And don't forget how lovely books are, especially for pregnant people, new moms, or anyone who prefers to laugh rather than to cry when thinking about children. Who wants to win a set of both books? One entry for each comment, every comment counts, enter as often as you like. I'll ship the winner the books directly from Amazon. The contest ends at noon CT on Monday, May 6 to ship in time for Mother's Day!

UPDATE: Congratulations, Julia! I'll be contacting you for your address. You win both copies!

So for the past two weeks I have had the my-diamond-shoes-are-pinching-my-feet problem of a kitchen remodel. We've been in Chateau Travolta for five years, and this baby has been a long time coming. For the past two weekends, Beloved and I have ripped out soffits, torn out cabinets and nearly severed our hot water pipe (on accident, that last one). We've also had much use of the world's most fun tool, the fubar.

Now that we've found the linoleum under our linoleum and chiseled away the offensive tile in the foyer, the rebuild began this morning when the cabinet guys arrived. And listen, I can handle the barely veiled disdain and the insinuation that I might be more concerned with the color of screws than weight distribution, but the belching. One of these guys has belched 17 times in the past five hours, and he was gone for a while for lunch. None of the other guys has said a word. 

Are they so accustomed to his extra air that they don't notice it anymore?

Or is this part of the trade-off? No office politics, you can belch whenever you want, but you might end up arthritic early from the manual labor? I'm thinking of Office Space, clearly, but is it real?

I know plenty of people who work with their hands, and I can't imagine them walking into someone's house while they are there and belching every four seconds. Please tell me it's just this guy.

That is all.

Yesterday, I went over to Erin Margolin's house to do a practice run-through of the Kansas City Listen to Your Mother show. Basically there are somewhere near a dozen of us, and we're all performing a short essay we wrote about motherhood, daughterhood or some mix of the two. Before we started, Co-Director Laura Seymour was all, "Hey, is anyone good at opening champagne?"

I've worked at four restaurants and a dog track. So I was all, "I AM." There was nervous tittering, because let's face it -- most of us didn't know each other and we were in someone's basement drinking champagne and preparing to expose our innermost secrets in preparation for taking the entire show live in a few weeks. WHAT'S TO BE NERVOUS ABOUT?

So there I was, test-driving my new gray-and-orange-striped-Calvin-Klein-from-Marshall's dress that is super-crazy tight but also super-crazy comfortable, my jacket to hide my nervous-armpit-sweating habit and my Kanye mail-order-discount glasses. The last five champagne bottles I've opened have had a pop, but I've always been able to hold onto the cork. If I didn't know Erin better, I'd suspect her of shaking this bottle all the way home from Costco, because when I opened it, the cork shot out of my hand and the champagne came spraying out so fast I was covered in it, down to my dripping glasses, in nanoseconds. 

It was champagne hubris, y'all. 

It's fortunate that I have an extremely high tolerance for making an ass of myself, because I was COVERED in champagne. My right armpit smelled like New Year's Eve 1998. Still, I cleaned myself up and sipped a little of that champagne while I listened to a bunch of new friends read some truly amazing essays. I laughed, I cried, I wore champagne with pride.

Our show is going to be on Saturday, May 11 from 7-9.  A portion of the proceeds from ticket sales go to the Rose Brooks Center, and there will be a representative from Rose Brooks at the performance to answer your questions about that organization.

A few of us (me included) will be selling our books there afterward. I'll be selling SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK for $10 and THE OBVIOUS GAME for $15, cash or check only. I'll also have some bookplates for THE OBVIOUS GAME in case you already bought it and are like I DON'T WANT TO BUY IT AGAIN I JUST FORGOT TO BRING IT SO PLEASE SIGN THIS STICKER FOR ME AND IT'LL BE ALL GOOD. 'Cause that's the glory of bookplates! Which are really just address labels, but don't tell! The little angel will be assisting me, and she glories in that role, so even if you don't want a book, please stop by and say hi if you are there.

DJ Nibbles loves LTYM.

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In other Mother's Day news, there's a special promo code and a $50 gift card giveaway over on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews for custom, kid-artwork-inspired iPhone cases. (Twofer)

The little angel and I popped some tags last night. Want to see what I got?

Though there are many times since I started working for BlogHer I've wished I could look away from Twitter and the news, paying attention to the world is an occupational hazard for me. And I have anxiety disorder and many times intrusive thoughts, which means I find it difficult to stop thinking about the horrible thing that has happened and worrying it will happen again, and then about the people to whom it happened, worrying, worrying into a spiral that leaves me with racing heart and seizing gut, and in those times I find it difficult to model coping skills for my daughter (although, as with Newtown, we've kept the TV off around her and will only talk to her about it if she brings it up, because we prefer to shield her from unnecessary news of this kind). I know I can't change the world we live in, and awareness of all the horror that goes on in the world only gets higher with each posting online. This won't change, and my girl will probably have ten times as much coming at her from all corners of the world by the time she is my age. I need to get the anxiety under control, and I need to teach her how to filter her world the way my mother taught me how to check a garment for holes before buying it. This is our world now.

So here's how you look at this picture.

Image credit: hahatango on Flickr

The runner in the yellow shoes and other spectators on the ground with someone hurt.

The guy holding the small child, taking him away from the scene.

The spectators in the yellow and black jackets leaning over to help.

The guy in jeans who took off his shirt, probably to make a tourniquet.

The police in yellow vests waching over the scene making sure there was no riot.

We can't shut out the world in the window. We have to be aware of our surroundings. But we can hold the right focus on these events. We can look at the majority of people in the picture who just wanted to help. 

Scene: Elementary school PTA fundraiser

I shifted from foot to foot. I'd been volunteering for an hour more than my expected 5-6:15 shift. I was hot, and tired, and hungry, and surrounded by children who I did not birth who wanted the soda I was selling but didn't have any money. And they were dressed as their favorite celebrities.

I smiled brightly as much as I could, not wanting to scare them with my inner monologue.

Then she walked past. Probably a sixth grader, dressed as I assume Taylor Swift complete with shocking red lipstick imperfectly applied. She looked at the soda.

"I wish I had money," she said. "It mocks me."

I smiled for real, because that girl is my kind of people.

There is a present on the very last slide.

We're doing some stuff to the kitchen in Chateau Travolta. I know, we've been doing stuff to it for the past five years, but this time, it's personal. As such, I have over half of the stuff that was in our cupboards sitting in tubs in my office, where I work. This is a little like working in the back storage area of Goodwill. As someone who gets anxious with too much clutter, I've found it's important to not look backwards, much as a mountain climber should not look down.

As I was taking the stuff out of the drawers and cupboards, I was tempted to donate more than half of it. We've been working from about one-fourth of our normal stash of tableware, and except that it's not the cute stuff, I've barely noticed. Beloved and I are of different minds about kitchenware.

I'm a slash-and-burn minimalist about pretty much everything but books. He's a yes-we-do-need-to-keep-eight-Pyrex-bowls type. If I let him have his way, he'd have at least twenty more one-use kitchen appliances than we have. I question the need for even a waffle iron. We have a waffle iron, and also a milkshake maker. (!)

Today I was reading Tanis Miller's ode to Tupperware, and I thought how funny our relationships to our food preparation and storage accouterments are. I fear many of my cupboards, because things have a tendency of falling on my head -- PARTICULARLY TUPPERWARE. And also, occasionally, chocolate chips, because all the baking stuff is stuffed into one tiny upper cupboard. I live in fear of the day the open baking soda box will submit to gravity.

Does one need eight Pyrex bowls? Am I alone in my disdain for 32 drinking glasses?