America! What Are You Thinking?

Sanjaya? I mean... c'mon! SANJAYA?

I put my hands up in disgust. I can no longer take the weeping and the moaning that comes from my daughter every Wednesday night after the American Idol results show. She has professed her love for Chris Richardson and will respectively vote for him her allotted 10 times each Tuesday night... but something is amiss when SANJAYA is still hanging in there!

I thought for sure he would have been booted with last week's faux mohawk hair but I was wrong.

I have figured out what is going on. Middle aged men have nothing better to do at work than devise plans to flood the phone lines voting for Sanjaya because they are so sick of their daughters and wives watching American Idol that they want to put a wrench in the works. You may be asking, "Why do you think this Cris?" Well... because that is what my husband and his cronies at work are doing!

One of his fellow workmates has even taken to sleeping on the couch every Tuesday night because after he hides the phone from his wife, he runs into the bathroom and votes for Sanjaya as many times as he can. When he emerges, he is locked out of his bedroom and so he does the sleep of shame on the couch. Somehow they think this is all hilarious!

My own husband has been physically tackled by my daughter and had the phone wrestled from his hands when he was trying to vote for Sanjaya. I am telling you-there is a war going on in our house and I do not see as calm a resolution as the British soldiers coming home from Iran happening here. I see more of a stand off that will include a clown suit and a water tower in my husband's future.

Men are weird. There, I said it. It is like they cannot handle the fact that for a couple of hours a week, something else is getting their wife and children's attention. For years now they have secretly been plotting the ruin of this show and finally, with the arrival of Sanjaya, they have figured out how to do it.

My daughter and I will have our revenge though... when the American Idol Tour comes along you can bet that we will be the first in line to buy tickets. We will buy enough tickets for our ENTIRE family to go-especially my husband, so that he can sit in the audience amid screaming girls and watch Sanjaya LIVE and IN PERSON! If that does not do him in, the fact that his hard earned money was used to buy the tickets to see Sanjaya will surely make him regret his evil plan. So, go ahead and keep plotting my darling husband... you have no idea what you are up against.

Pick ME! Pick ME!

OK, so I love to watch the Bachelor. I am not sure why because I get so pissed off every stinking time I view an episode, but I keep coming back to it-I just HAVE to know who will get proposed to in the end... I then open up a betting pool to see how long they will actually stay together-it pays for our mortgage every year, seriously!

I am always amazed at the people they chose to be on the Bachelor. I mean seriously... there has to be some kind of dysfunctional baggage that they are hiding if the Bachelor is good looking, physically fit, educated, a millionaire and knits baby booties in his spare time for little orphans in Nepal, yet he somehow has not managed to snag himself a wife on his own. Hmmmm-he probably has a horror for a mother and a drunk for a father and a brother like George Clinton who is in and out of jail-but they just hide that part of his life behind door number 3.

I always like the first episode. I sit and yell at the TV "LIFE IF NOT LIKE THIS!" I have never walked into a room and had up to 25 people wanting all of my attentions. As far as I know, this has never happened to my husband either-so the size of the ego that Mr. Bachelor must develop in this show is being studied by all reputable psychologists around the world I am sure. Personally, I believe that if he was not a jerk before the first episode... my guess is that his male jerk-gene will rear it's ugly head very soon, and they display this by letting him reject 10 of the lovely ladies who have dolled themselves up swearing their love and devotion to him.

Like the cigarette ad says "You've Come a Long Way Baby!" but apparently not long enough! The producers of this show do a fabulous job at searching the earth for beautiful women who have also found the cure for cancer-but have no self-esteem. Again I say that there must be some dysfunctional "my ex-boyfriend made me wear a french maid outfit" baggage happening there. Basically we are watching two beautiful people with emotional baggage try to fall in love on the television and survive. Not gonna happen people.

If I had met my husband and he said to me, "Look, I think you are great and I would love to kiss and hug you and take you on dates to exotic places... but I have these 24 other women who I am seeing as well." I would have been out of there faster than a speeding bullet! They have got it all wrong here... men are the competitive ones, not women. Women like to be the center of a man's universe (or at least made to feel that way) not jumping up and down trying to get his attention. This is why there are so many cat-fights on the Bachelor. They make these women revert back to junior high behavior.

As far as I know, the only couple to have survived a Bachelor show is Trista and Ryan-and that was the Bachelorette. This is because Trista had all attentions placed on her and Ryan was able to be the victor in the competition for her heart. He can probably care less about the other guys-because he won! He was able to mark his territory and felt like the hero. Women are different. We remember the other girls and that pisses us off. I admit it, I still will see red at the slightest mention of the girl my husband was seeing before he met me. Women do not want to be in competition-it is not a fun game to fight over a man. We want the man to come to the mill that we are working at in his full Military Dress Whites and sweep us off of our feet-making a spectacle of his admiration for us and us alone for all the other women to witness. We want to say "nah nah nah nah nah--he loves ME and only ME!" We do not want the other women thinking "sure, he picked you, but he kissed me, and her, and that girl, and even that girl over there... so big deal if he chose you-you can have those sloppy seconds!"

So, my prediction is that this Bachelor will kiss all the girls, make many of them cry at his rejection, make even more of them pull each other's hair and call each other names and he may even send a few to the psychiatric ward for evaluation. He will propose to someone in the end... and they will announce their split after all of the morning talk shows have them on as guests. It is what good TV is made of!

When Puberty Attacks!

My daughter is stuck... stuck somewhere between being a little girl and being a young woman. She has the men in this house completely confused let me tell you. Her poor brother does not know when it is safe to talk to her-some moments he may get his usual happy-go-lucky sister, and in the next breath he may get the girl from the Exorcist movie spinning her head completely around and vomiting on him. Her dad does not know when it is safe to go into her room anymore and has decided that it is best if he just waits her out.

I on the other hand, know exactly what she is going through and I have decided to wage this battle head on. I probably get most of the attitude thrown at me, and now I know what my mom felt like when I did it to her. The eye rolling, the arms crossed, the heavy sighs... those of you with tween daughters know exactly what I am talking about.

My daughter would rather have her fingernails pulled out by an ancient tribe than do any of the activities that I think of for our family. This week is the Cherry Blossom festival in DC. The trees are peaking TODAY! I asked her if she wanted to go downtown and stroll along the Basin and take in the beauty of it. Her reply (which is her reply to everything these days) "Do I have to? Can I just stay home? It sounds really boring. You mean, we just walk around and look at flowers? Please tell me that you have not made a definite decision that we are going. PLEASE!"

I will admit that I depend on her a lot. She helps out constantly in the house and rarely complains when her little sister tags along behind her outside. Some days I look at her and my heart is torn between allowing her the space to fly and holding on to her so that she does not get hurt by the evils in this world.

Heck... I am still in that attitude phase. Do women every grow out of it? The moods that creep up on you like a mugger and just morph you into a crazy person at the drop of a dime? I experienced this last night... I had a full day of Dr. visits and house cleaning and a three-year-old that decided that she did not want to wear shoes at all-or underpants. My son gives me the "I KNOW" response to everything I say and my oldest was already in her "OH no you didn't" head twirling mood when I blew a gasket. I was alone-except for the dog, who seems to always get the brunt of my bad moods (and she still loves me-amazing) My husband came home from work with the sniffles and retreated to bed at 6:45. That was the last straw I am sure. So I finished the dishes and instructed all children to stay as far away from me and they would a nuclear test site and settled down to watch the Bachelor. (Which I will post on tomorrow because I have far too many opinions on THAT to go into right now).

So today I am going to become my daughters worst nightmare and take them to see the Cherry Blossoms. I am going to take my camera and make her pose 756 times with her brother and sister and I may just make her hold my hand from time to time. Oh the HORROR! I am going to waddle my pregnant self all over rubbing my belly and moaning from time to time just to embarrass her (because there is nothing more embarrassing for her right now than my bursting belly) and I am even going to pack a lunch and bring a blanket so she has to sit and have a picnic with us. I am not sure which daughter I will get... the one who calls me "Mommy" still, or the one who calls me "@#$%@$" behind my back. I have my money on the one who calls me "Mommy" but with a slight eye roll.