It’s the Jolliest Motherfucking Time of the Year

Raise your hand if you think I am the quintessential upper middle class mother who keeps my baby on a tight schedule, enrolls her in activities to simulate her physical and mental development, feeds her purely organic, balanced meals that do not come with a toy and overall sets the expectation of “perfect or nothing”.

 Put your goddamn hand down.  I have found a successful approach to mothering in the following meme:

 While Marlowe and I have been to a grand total of zero Mommy and Me classes, naps may or may not happen on any given day at any given time, I have placed popsicles within her reach inside of the freezer so that she can help herself to her little heart’s desire, and I’m slightly negligent in her supervision (she rolled off the bed last week and got her first shiner), I am obsessed with the idea of getting perfect pictures of her on holidays.  If you made it all the way through that sentence, congratulations.  It was a long one. 

I realized this on Halloween when Jeff asked my mom to make her a little old lady costume.  I wanted her to be a chicken.  Pick your battles, people.  Anyway, because my momma bear is fucking awesome at everything, she sewed a perfect costume.  Jeff engineered an awesome little old lady walker.  The whole setup was a 10.

Marlowe, ever the brat, could not get her shit together on Halloween to allow me even one decent picture.  She totally sucked.  Organic M&Ms couldn't even pacify her.  I was beyond annoyed and grumpy for the next two days over the failed execution of Little Old Lady and her inability to tolerate a costume.  So basically she was a totally normal kid that day and I was a bitch about it.  I feel like she is old enough to take some of the blame, but I'll let this one go. The point was, I didn’t get what I wanted, all of social media was sure to be disappointed and I was pissed.

Here is a picture of the inspiration, and here is a picture of the execution.  I like the other baby better.

Cute.

Jerk.

Moving on down the line of holidays, Thanksgiving I didn’t give a shit about because we flew into Orlando that morning, nobody served me breakfast vodka on the flight, it was not my Momma Bear's recipes and I was exhausted.  Just trust me when I say she was cute all weekend, which makes sense, because I have no pictures to prove it.  But, I don’t lie.

Until last Christmas (i.e. our first one with Marlowe) we never sent out a holiday card or anything like that.  But I’ll be damned if I was going to receive a bunch of them from friends and family and not try to trump them all with a picture of my nearly perfect family.  So, I strung my kid up in a bunch of lights , Marlowe cooed and batted her eyelashes the whole time, and Kellie fucking nailed it with her iPhone camera photo shoot.  Mission fucking accomplished, people.  It took like, 13 minutes and I giggled all the way through my Vistaprint checkout process.

This year I was certain we’d have another good outcome.  Obviously I had blacked out the horror of the Halloween Evening Debacle   Obviously I’m stupid.  Obviously it didn’t go well.

Jeff, eager to have me shut the fuck up about our Christmas card making process, sent me two possibilities while I went to a Celtics game.  Because Kyrie Irving is, in fact, more important than spending the evening with my family.  Go Celtics.  Anyway, the point here is that Jeff spent the evening on Goole and Pinterest and I spent the evening drinking beer and our collective effort led us to try the following two scenarios:

Adorable, right?

Here’s how our little angel executed the looks.

No Mommy.  Don't make me smell the pretty tree smells. 

No Mommy, I hate this farm with these cider donuts, hayride, Christmas love and my friends.

Oh you don't like the taste of your organic chemicals? Maybe you should stop eating them, let me make you a bubble beard and shut the fuck up about it.  

Nope.

I’m pessimistic that her modeling career will ever launch.  The 2016 holiday card was obviously where she peaked. 

So again I was all pissed off and ornery and sure that people would start to think less of me and my perfect family*.  I had no control over my less than cooperative subject and it wasn't my favorite experience.  

And let's be honest...this holiday bullshit is stressful.  What happened to the days when I came down the stairs to a mountain of presents, an elaborate breakfast and my parents’ annual poem that sent us on a scavenger hunt for whatever present they were most excited to give us.  Being the parent and coordinating all of this madness sucks.  I’d like more bacon, dad. Pass the Diet Pepsi, mom.  Also, we found our snowboards. Horrible hiding spot that year. 

*Sidebar: For those of you morons that don’t read sarcasm well, these references are a fucking joke.  One time I emptied our closet of all of Jeff’s clothes and explained to him that he didn’t live in our home anymore.  On another, he called me an absent wife.  On a third, we went 8 days without speaking. We argue our fair share, but he’s cute and handy so I keep him around.  I have no idea why he keeps me… probably my purely delightful personality.

This post is over now.  can you end on a sidebar?  Let me check the rules.  Yep. You can. 

You're welcome.  Interpret that however you'd like.