So this is happening. Are you mom enough, in mainstream media. It’s bad enough that the blogosphere is eye to its eyeballs in this load of crap; now Time is jumping the train.

Awesome. We disrespected each other enough that now everyone else disrespects us, too. *gold stars for everyone*

And before you go saying that this is Time! Exploiting us! let me point out that in seven and a half years in the mom blogging community, I have been called a child abuser/bad parent/not mom enough because I’ve:

spanked my kids, formula fed them, breast fed them, let them have Facebook accounts, needed to take anti-anxiety meds for PTSD because of actual child abusers, posted their pictures, vaccinated them, didn’t vaccinate them enough, written about being unprepared to have them when I did, left their alcoholic father, came back to their alcoholic father, moved them all over North America, co-slept, didn’t co-sleep, gave them cell phones….

I ha-a-a-a-te the mommy wars. I don’t play the mommy wars. I have absolutely no interest in how you raise your children, so long as you do. I also have absolutely no interest in what you think about how I raise mine.

Last week, I was interviewed by ABC News in conjunction with a 20/20 piece on “Xtreme Parents” regarding my sons’ participation in MMA (mixed martial arts), which I will defend to the teeth.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to defend it because, to my pleasant surprise, the woman who interviewed us did a really great job letting us simply tell our stories, and hopefully helped paint a better picture of the less mainstream sports like MMA, or bull-riding or monster truck driving or motocross (which happens to be on my sons’ to-try list), than John McCain did.

Hypocrisy aside: You know what is like human cockfighting? Elections. And the guys are way less buff.

My mother used to sing me that lime in the coconut song when I was a little girl, and I thought it was some diddy she’d made up because she was absolutely crazy. I was half-way correct.

The guy who did write that song was probably a little cookoo, too, but there is a fine line between crazy and genius and it looks a little something like this.

That is what happens when you have unexpected houseguests on a gorgeous spring afternoon in South Texas when your fridge is breaking so you have all the contents of your fridge in your freezer for safekeeping. That is a coconut limeade shaken over frozen blueberries and pineapples. That is a little slice of heaven.

And here’s how you make it.

If you Google search “get your kids to eat veggies,” you will get something over 18 million results. Apparently, this is an issue for people.

Personally, I’ve never once had to bribe/beg/force my kids to eat vegetables. I try to save my forcing/begging/bribing for back-walking. They’re only little once, people. Either way, I figured that I’d try to help at least ten of those 18 million people who don’t know how to get their kid to eat a mushroom. (Answer: put a pizza under it).

Shakespeare says that music is the food of love, but I agree more with Tarrant Riglio, that food is a love song we write those we cook for. Or, maybe, a gift we give every day to those we love. Except Hambuger Helper Day. That’s a gift momma gives herself.

Just like with any other gift, the presentation of food totally affects the way we think and feel about it. (Yes, even kids.) Nothing says, “I like you moderately” like showing up at the party with a present still in the Target bag (which I am almost always guilty of.)  Conversely, a great big ribbon on top of your gift, or $0.10 worth of homemade onion straws on top of your dinner, says, “You know what? I think you rock.”

I’ll admit: Being an Android user, I never understood the Instagram craze. I saw all the pictures on Twitter and Facebook but I didn’t really get it, until I got it. Last week, Instagram became Android compatible and while I fancy myself fairly fad-immune, this one is completely p0wning me.

Why? Because holy crap, the food porn.

My husband left this week to spend a few weeks at rehab, and that has absolutely no bearing on this post at all, except that it means I can cook whatever the hell I want now. I can also see whomever I choose.  I can eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant, but I am never, ever shaving my head bald, so don’t ask.

My husband really doesn’t like eating fish tacos, which explains a lot about the state of my marriage right now.  Also, his cholesterol levels.

Naturally, now that he’s in another country for the next few weeks, I am going to eat all the fish tacos I can get my hands on while I can. When the cat’s away, yo.

I was raised in one of those awesomely fun religions that doesn’t let you celebrate any holidays. I had my first birthday cake on my 19th birthday, my first visit from Santa was when I was 23, and I’ve never been able to thank the Easter bunny for anything.

Photo Credit Alisa Burke | alisaburke.blogspot.com

It turns out, there are a lot of things about celebrating holidays you really just have to learn from birth or they never make sense. Things like everything about Easter. It got so bad with me and Easter that I had to call in my mother in law for reinforcement, and if you have a mother in law like my mother in law, you’ll understand the Herculean effort it takes for me to say she can do anything better than I can.

But the fact of the matter is, I simply cannot dye eggs, and I need all the help I can get. If you do, too, these should give you some pointers. Or make you feel like a total failure. Either way, really.

You know how sometimes you walk into you kitchen, grab the glass of water sitting on the counter, and just chug it, but halfway through you realize it isn’t water at all but your kid’s six hour old, flat, warm 7-up? You know how then you have no choice at all but to spray the entire kitchen with it, because having something gross in your mouth is only half as bad as having something you didn’t expect in your mouth?

Eggs are kind of like that. My stepmother used to make deviled eggs for Thanksgiving and picnics and stuff, and while they looked exactly like you thought they should, when you bit into them you’d get the culinary equivalent of a Rob Zombie movie in your mouth. There were all of these conflicting flavors, and chunks.

Nothing that would eventually contain tiny little bones should ever, ever have chunks.

They also shouldn’t look like you buried them in the ground and forgot about them for a few weeks. While I was in China last fall, they offered me a tea egg, which is just a hard boiled egg steeped in soy sauce and black tea leaves, which is harmless enough except that it is a brown egg, and I took enough ServSafe courses in my day to know that you never, ever eat the brown egg. (Note: Watching someone eat a brown egg is almost as horrible as watching that same someone eat fetal chickens on that same trip.)

My point is that it’s not always just what something tastes like. Sometimes what it looks like and what it feels like are just as important, if not more. We eat with all of our senses and when we cook, we have to consider them, especially cooking something like an egg. Eggs are touchy subjects for people – I think because we all start off as them, so we have some ownership stake. We’re all just a rung up the food chain from being someone’s bacon-dip. However you like your eggs, they have to be *perfect* or you can’t eat them, right?  And while there’s a good amount of disconnect as to what a perfect egg is, there is only one way to make a perfect hard-boiled egg, and this is it.

Mom, these cookies are all smooshy and stuff. Um, that’s because I just took them out of the oven. What do you mean, oven? I baked them. *YOU* baked them?

Everyone is able to do one thing in life very, very horribly, and for me, that is baking cookies.

My mother couldn’t make anything that came out of a box. She could make the most complex, delicate fruit desserts but ask her to make you some Kraft dinner and you might as well invite all your friends over to check out the hot firefighters who are going to have to come extinguish your kitchen.

This seems to be something of a family curse, because as far as I’ve heard it told, cookies are way up at the top of the list of Things People Can Do In Their Sleep.  I couldn’t bake you a cookie if my life depended on it. I can’t make them from scratch, I can’t make them off a recipe, and I even managed to melt one of those tubes of cookie dough you buy in the refrigerated aisle of the store.

Santa even asked me to stop making cookies for him, and I am currently engaged in a sexual relationship with him. I think this means it’s time I seek help.

*Disclaimer: This is not a stack of cookies I baked myself; it is a stock photo I purchased. If it were cookies I’d baked, they would look burnt. Or dead.