Dear Wacky Mommy:

I would like some advice about (gasp!) love n’ stuff, and since you have a great relationship with that great guy Wacky Daddy, I thought you might oblige.

I pretty much swore off men a few years ago. Not just, “I-had-a-bad-breakup-and-I’m-swearing-off-men-for-a-while” kind of thing, but a whole “after much soul searching, I have concluded that I need to be on my own to just work on ME for a while.” Also, I am very busy and barely managing to keep my own life afloat so why mix another person and relationship/problems/time commitment in there?

Then (in a moment of lonliness-induced weakness,) I filled out an eHarmony profile. I did this mostly with the thought of “Yeah, right, like I will meet anyone who will be interested in me, so why not?” The problem is, I did! In fact, I met two very nice men. I’ve been e-mailing and chatting with them and now it is about time to decide whether to meet face to face. (We’ve exchanged pictures.)

Now I have all these decisions: Do I start dating? If so, how do I make time for it? (Am Busy Single Mom). How can I tell if he is a psycho freak and/or pedophile as they do not have categories for this on eHarmony? Where should we meet, if we should meet at all? Help!

Signed,

Lucy Lovelorn

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“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”

— Thornton Wilder

Do you read Amalah’s blog? You should, if you don’t.

It is much more lively than mine. Also, she frequently posts pictures of Noah, her extremely cute baby, and you’ll never get that here. Wacky Mommy is much too verbose for pix. When her little guy was born she got approximately 8,052 posts congratulating her and her honey of a husband, Jason. Anyhoo — her maternity leave is up and she’s heading back to work, and of course this opens up the whole “If you don’t stay home with your kids you are evil and suck” discussion. Rilly, does any discussion get stupider than that one? Here’s my input:

re: Kasey, an Amalah reader who is all nyah, nyah, why have kids if you don’t want to stay home with them? She said, and I quote, “You will have what, a whole two hours after dinner to play mommy, right?”

My response: I “play mommy” at home with my two kids and we are lucky if we get two hours of playtime a day. Because I am a busy girl cooking food they refuse to eat (“That is some yucky kind of food, Mommy!” — Wacky Boy. Another WB quote: “You are the kind of bad mommy who never feeds her kids.” This, when I was making him homemade mac and cheese. Little ingrate!), cleaning up puke (dog/cat/kid), washing peed-on laundry, doing yardwork, trying to, maybe, do an hour of g.d. yoga so I can stay limber enough to keep up with my babies, volunteering at school and in the community (cuz I’ve got oodles of free time, right? so of course I’ll do the PTA newsletter, go on field trips, do neighborhood clean-ups, help build playgrounds, spend time in the class, etc.) and…

(this part was a surprise for me) staying at home is like any other g.d. job. Except you go more in debt with just one income. Woo-hoo! I do love the “lovebucks.” (Wacky Boy just came in to give kisses.) But staying home full-time isn’t like when you take a snow day and lie around in your jammies. It’s a job. My kids were mad at me all day long today and it wasn’t cuz I was “abandoning” them. It’s cuz I didn’t let them eat cookies all day in their jammies. I forced them to get dressed and go to the library and Santaland and they howled like I was torturing them. They got over it. Kids can deal, they do it well.

Be supportive, Kasey, would you? We’re all just trying to do our best.

Kisses, Amalah, and all you other mothers, from the whole Wacky Family. Happy Year of the Dog! Aroooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…

From our friend Homer J —

“I’ve always wondered if there was a god. And now I know there is — and it’s me.”

An old friend of mine, who was something of a screw-up, worked at a place where they were all screw-ups. He fit right in. It may have been a papermill, I cannot recall. It was some big factory-type establishment, at any rate, with lots of big, limb-threatening equipment. Which makes this little anecdote all the creepier.

Their company motto: “We do it nice, cuz we do it twice.” Yes, that’s right. They re-did every single job they undertook cuz they just couldn’t get shit right the first time.

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Whew, Hockey God got an earful yesterday.

From Wacky Boy, as he resisted, well, everything: “This is what I call cooperating.” (ie — he was completely refusing to cooperate.)

From Wacky Girl, when WD was trying to talk to her: “You don’t understand the life of a woman.” (His response: “No, and I never will.”)

more, more, more…

Dear Wacky Mommy:

Too Poor to Pay Attention

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Dear WackyMommy:

Help! My boys are acting like my brothers did when they were their age. This would be okay, but my brothers grew up to be total geeks! Are my boys destined to be total geeks too? Or can I change this? If so, how?

Signed,

My-Mother-Was-More-Neurotic-Than-Yours

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“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

— Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)