Best Playground Confidential of 2012

Here’s a round up of the best posts of the past year as decided by me.

But let’s first take a moment for all of the posts that could have been but never were. There was the greatly-anticipated-but-never-delivered-on follow up to my cloth diapering post. Suffice it to say that I have a bin full of dirty diapers and three empty Costco-sized boxes of disposable diapers under my change table right now. Whatever, I worked it for long enough. I also could have done a better job oversharing about my engorged breasts after I left my nursing baby behind to party network and learn at Blogher12.  I may yet write about how I self-diagnosed an aggressive form of skin cancer on my upper back that turned out to be — oh god, this is embarrassing — a bit of sensitivity to garment tags. It wasn’t just itchy, guys. It was hurty-itchy. I thought I was dying. And, you know, I may have bought just one more Ikea “as is” chair. It’s okay. I can stop whenever I want.

And now, drumroll.

The best of the year.

Cereal Binging

What happens when someone pours a mountain of Rice Krispies in front of a seven month old? Funny you should ask.

So there’s, like, a mountain of dry Rice Krispies on the high chair and Mary just face plants into it. Rice Krispies are flying everywhere and Mary comes up for air, grinning like no tomorrow, gumming huge mouthfuls of the stuff.

The Beaches

We piled all the kids in the car for burgers on the town and ran into a childless couple from our old life. I forgot about this one, but re-reading it now, I love it. It’s funny and true and surprisingly sweet.

At some point Irene did climb into the stroller and Ed wound up pushing her while I wore Mary and the gigantic diaper bag and held hands with Colum. There we were, in full-tilt parent mode, when we came across an old friend and his girlfriend enjoying a beer on a patio.

How Not to Shop (In Excruciating Detail)

I thought I could go to a Loblaws Superstore and shop for clothes and food in less than two hours. I thought I could do it with a baby. Learn from my mistakes.

Then I pulled on the pants and — OMG NO! I guess I didn’t look very closely at the rise, but I assumed that they would at least cover my ass and perhaps meet halfway to my belly button. I mean, I guess they “fit” in that they were the right size, but the way they just sat under my three-kids-and-twenty-extra-pounds-worth of belly pooch, kind of propping it up for display was not right. IT WAS NOT RIGHT.

Ten Years Today

I take a rare, heartfelt walk down memory lane on my ten year wedding anniversary.

It started when I noticed he was reading The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer, I guess. And he would sit in the hall outside the kitchen drawing up posters by hand for an open mike night that he would photocopy and tape to the window, and pin up in coffee joints all through the city. He’d host these nights and he’d read poetry and stories and sing songs with a guitar. People would come out and for a while those nights were really happening. Once I even got up and read something about a woman from Thunder Bay.

Birds!

A real life tragicomedy about a bird attack on my family. You really can’t make this stuff up.

Somehow, Ed managed to knock the bird off Irene and it lay dazed on the ground. She was shaken up despite my shining example of grace under fire, but otherwise unharmed. We began to gather our things again and I was walking Irene past the baby bird when WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?! I started screaming again, this time because a bird just flew into the back of my head and started pecking at me. Ed was trying to get me to calm down, everything’s all right, woman, and I was trying to explain that a bird had attacked my head. Then I saw it coming at me again.

Picnic Payback

Every year I have a post or two about how much I hate the heat. This year’s was a doozy.

 “Colum,” I called out, “Call Dad at work and tell him I’m sick.” I was shivering and sweating at once, my head was throbbing and the whole room was spinning. He finally made the call:

“Hi Dad.”

“Hi Colum. How are you?”

“Good.”

“How was swimming today?”

“It was good.”

Me, gasping from floor, “Tell him. Telllll him. Tell him.”

“Oh, mom’s sick. She’s on the floor.”

Why I Will Never Buy A Cottage

This was one of my most popular posts this year even though it’s completely different from what I normally do. Right, there may be something to that, huh? Anyway, those cottage people are serious about defending their insane expenditure of time and money and bug repellent.

The perpetual certainty of bad traffic going both to and from the cottage is only one of several reasons why I will never, ever, not even if I win the lottery, want anything to do with owning a cottage. I’m not trying to disparage anyone else’s lifestyle choice. (Or is it less of a choice and more like you’re just born that way, like homosexuality? I don’t understand how cottage people work.) I’m simply trying to point out that backwoods Ontario might not be the slice of paradise you think it is.

An Ode To A Dying Laptop

Can you believe I still haven’t replaced that thing? It started to work again and then finally, really and truly, died a few weeks ago.

Almost immediately your battery started sucking and I didn’t even get through that year without having to look for the nearest outlet at the library to write up my papers on metaphysics. The whopping 15GB of space on your C drive and the 30GB on your D drive weren’t very much six years ago and now they are laughably small. To make matters worse, you must have become infected with some sort of worm or virus or something about three or four years ago because your memory kept disappearing even though I never downloaded anything ever.

Camp LaGuardia: SOS

If you have to be stranded in an airport bar with anyone, you want it to be the Cocktail Deeva.

We snagged a window seat with a view of the tarmac — scenic! — and sought out the safest, most unscrew-up-able, menu items. No blue fin tuna or rib eye steak for us! We’re savvy enough to know better. And then our flight got delayed another hour and a half because WestJet never cancels flights, you see. They just keep on delaying them. And then our food came. That’s about when the desperation started setting in.

The Price of Free Toothpaste: Mom Blogging and Brand Ambassador Programs

An expose on the Proctor and Gamble unpaid mom blogger ambassador program. This ruffled quite a few feathers, but I still think I was fair.

But even if, hypothetically, they were willing to pay me, I still would have had a decision to make. They were asking me to become a brand ambassador, to link my name with their brands and to proudly display their badge on my blog. They were asking for an ongoing relationship in which I would be a mouthpiece for their brands. So even if they were offering to pay me (which they weren’t), I would have done a lot of research and asked a lot of questions before deciding if that was something I was willing to do.

What is a Period Like After You Have A Baby?

I kind of hit it out of the park with this one. It was re-published by Jezebel and is my most popular post ever. Oversharing alert in effect.

“Hey guys, Mommy just has to go to the bathroom, so why don’t you …”

“I have to go the bathroom!”

“Oh. Well … maybe just let Mommy and Mary go in first …”

” I have to GO PEE!!”

“You said the P word!”

“And if you guys can just wait here …”

“Me too! Me too! EMERGENCY!”

And that’s how I wound up in a three-stall bathroom with all of my children, a back-talking vagina and way-beyond-capacity tampon that was practically crowning.

The Santa Story

Let’s wrap this up with some sweet mall Santa pictures of my kids. Oh well, it was a nice thought.

The parking spot was totally legit, it turns out. Ed was just worried about the half dozen squad cars that had come to a squealing stop right beside our car and the armed police officers positioned around the jewelry store directly across the street from us. The kids were back in the car while Ed and I crouched down behind it like something out of Law and Order.

“So I can park here, right?” I said.

Thanks for reading. Your pageviews comments and feedback mean the world to me. I love blogging when I have the time and resources to do it well. Let’s hope we can keep this little corner of the internet afloat for another year.

Image courtesy the Library of Congress Flickr stream.