Anniversary Series: The Rejects

My little blog had an anniversary last week. 2 years! It's a pretty big deal. In fact, you know Joe Biden's recent f-bomb slip? Well, he wasn't talking about the Health Care Bill. And in the glorious blogging tradition of blogging about your own blog, I set out to do a Best Of kind of post, but discovered in my list of posts a treasure trove of forgotten and discarded unpublished posts. Eureka! What could be better for celebrating 2 years of mediocre and inconsistent blogging, bad photography, and pathetic blog designs (not a hint Courtney, just a statement of fact) than a collection of posts that were either so bad and/or boring I didn't even bother to publish them? LOVE blogging traditions! So every day I'll dig up one of the dejected posts and give a little explanation, synopsis, or apology. I might try to finish them, or just leave them as is-- now is that CRAZY or what?! I know, I know, you can't wait.

So let's get started.

Reject #1

Title: I Don't Like to Flaunt, but Sometimes I am Just Brilliant.

Like the other day when I thought that it would be a fantastic idea to take my kids to the Seattle Art Museum by myself, in the middle of dinner time. Because nobody else would be there right after work on Free Thursday right? And also because young kids LOVE being dragged around art museums right? Especially ones where you can't touch anything, and they have security guards everywhere, child-hating security guards to be specific, just waiting for some sinister 4 year old to reach out and contaminate something. And there's nothing that kids love more than walking (not running) around silently, looking at things that don't make any sense to them, right?

And afterward, (my brilliant plans continued) wouldn't it be fun to go to some funky burger joint that was on Oprah's list of "20 burgers you must eat or you'll die", or something like that. Because no one else would be at that sort of place wanting to eat Oprah's famous hamburgers right? I mean, hardly anyone even watches her show. And we all know how much kids love waiting for almost 30 minutes in a really crowded, small space for the kind of food they could get in .3 seconds at a certain other hamburger establishment that also has indoor playgrounds and cheap licensed-character toys? I was sure a disheveled mom and a gaggle of untidy kids would blend right in with the throngs of Seattle hipsters with their skinny jeans and disturbingly fringed hair. No one would even notice me there with three young children. Three cranky, hungry, whiny children. Right? The whole outing was a guaranteed recipe for shiny, happy, scrapbook-worthy photo-op memories, I was sure.

Right.

Yes, another successful family adventure. Most parents find it sufficient to simply look through a book about art with their children, or do a simple craft with them. Me? I don't stop until my kids are emotionally scarred and I've managed in just a few short hours to stunt their cultural development, and ensure that they will forever associate art with intense hunger pains and extreme boredom. But I'll make sure when I put the digitally altered pictures of them smiling at the museum in their scrapbooks, the caption will read:

Museum Day with Mom! We *heart* art! So much FUN!!


Notes: This was from February, and to be honest, I don't know why I didn't post this. I must have meant to add more to it, and by the time I got back to it I couldn't remember what it was. I didn't edit much, but I did add my favorite line: we *heart* art! And yes, it really was a miserable trip to the museum. Pretty much from the moment we walked in the door, my children concluded very loudly that I must have been smoking crack to take them to a such a boring place, and any attempt on my part to point out something interesting (Look kids! That looks neat! Oh wait, no-- that's just a garbage can) was met with blood curdling screams of "you're not my mommy!" By the time we got to the burger joint (Red Mill Burgers if you're local), it was after 7 and everyone was well beyond starving. I think the other patrons must have thought my kids were all having simultaneous seizures. Maybe they were. I was trying to pretend I didn't know who they belonged to. For the record though, there were some very nice people sitting next to us who kept drooling over Nate. Lucky for me that kid has some sort of endorphin-producing effect on most people: they just get kind of happy and loopy around him. He's better than dope that way. Anyway, it was in the middle of Red Mill, waiting for our (over-hyped) food with crazed children climbing all over me that the line about emotional scars and stunted cultural development came to my mind. I think it confirms for me that my most creative bursts come in the middle of complete chaos. Also that I should not trust Oprah when it comes to hamburgers.

See, isn't this fun?