I'm not a regular mom, I'm a cool mom

Sometimes, I wish that I were a fun mom. You know the type, the women that seem to have endless time and energy to play with their children, decorate things with them, build things with them actually make the things that they see in Martha Stewart Kids and other equally idealistic and unreasonable magazines. They must design their lives around making life fun for their kids.

No, I am not a fun mom.

I've decided that it's because I'm too selfish. I want to be able to do what I want to do too often. I'm ok with it, they'll get over it. Children are incredibly resilient, thank goodness. Most of the interactions I have with the girls involve telling them to stop bothering each other, stop bothering me, stop making messes, start cleaning up and other similar not fun things. One of Jane's favorite lines (that I hear about 20 times a day) is...

"Mom! I'm NOT having ANY FUN!"

I've told her that I don't try anymore because she never has any fun and I've actually found that when I use reverse psychology on her and tell her that I'm going to try to do everything that I can make sure her day is as boring as possible, she goes out of her way to have as much fun as possible. It's amazing. Does that kind of manipulation qualify as child abuse?

Every so often, when I'm feeling particularly energetic, I make an attempt to do something fun and then I take pictures of it to post on my blog so that anyone that sees it will think that I do that kind of stuff all time. I'm deceiving them all.

I don't know if was the sun or the fact that I'm feeling well rested after being able to put a long week behind me with a great night's sleep last night (comparatively speaking, always comparatively speaking), but today....I was feeling fun.

So I thought to myself "what does a fun mom do?" and it came to me that I've seen a lot of women post about these muffin tin lunches that they make for their kids. If you're a little behind the fun mom times, you fill little mini muffin tins with different foods so that your children can enjoy a full shmorgasbord of little kid food AND eat a nutritious lunch without noticing. Kids are such suckers, they'll eat just about anything as long as it looks cute, that is until they have time to realize they don't like it. This is why you limit the intake of each item to a couple of bites and provide lots of items. Brent and I used to use that trick on Lizzy when she was on her hunger strike last year. We'd give her a nibble of cheese, and spoonful of yogurt, a single fishy cracker, etc., until we hoped she'd had enough food to keep her alive. Where were the fun moms and their muffin tins then? Huh?

But I digress.

I don't have the necessary mini muffin tins, but I did have these silicone ones that my grandma gave me and while it didn't provide nearly the number of options I would have liked, it looked pretty.





They even got a whole hearted "WOW!" out of Jane when she saw what she was eating for lunch.



And the girls ate pretty well too.

Success! Until next time, Fun Mom. Right now, I've got to get back to being boring.