By Annie

Problem: Husband has a super early meeting and is long gone, Kid 1 is in the nasty throes of hormonal tweenhood, Kid 2 is down for the count with a double ear infection and a violent stomach bug, and Kid 3 is tired.

Plus, you’ve bought yourself 10 minutes to transform into a savvy marketing boss. Just hold off on treating yourself to a cupcake… blue tongues go over better in preschool than they do in pitch meetings. 

By Annie 

OK, OK, I get it. The 100th Day of School celebration is a marvelous idea from a pedagogical standpoint. It’s a timely opportunity for cross-curriculum learning centered on a common theme that allows for reflection, creativity and all the math. I was totally on board last year when Henry was in kindergarten, if a little confused by this relatively newfangled milestone. Admittedly, Henry was only partially on board:

But let me tell you, mamas, my enthusiasm was partly due to the fact that I assumed this 100 Day extravaganza was just a kindergarten thing. Imagine my shock and horror when the 100 Day papers started coming home in the almighty folder last week. And the first grade teachers? They are upping the game. Now we have to make a project (entirely at home in our free time) that uses 100 of any object AND the kids are supposed to dress up like they are 100 years old, which surely makes for some totes adorabs social media posts but is truly about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. What does a 100 year old look like? Wear? And how does that translate into actual clothing and accessories my 7-year-old boy can don for a day? Especially when I shoot down his request for a pipe? And is there something at best reductive and at worst ageist and offensive about this whole concept? Welp. Now in addition to the 3,117 things I need to accomplish in any given week as a parent of three school-age children and who also has a full-time job an hour away in the middle of a winter, I get to figure this out.

Fortunately, Henry is two steps ahead of me.

“Aren’t most people dead by the time they’re 100?” he asks, after the pipe idea is nixed.

“Yes,” I say, and his eyes light up with that mischievous glint that melts my cold heart every time.

“Can I go as a zombie then?”

We already have a zombie costume from Halloween. My heart flutters. I will try to say no… but, mamas? I can’t be 100 percent certain that I will.  

By Annie

​In hindsight, it was a simple request. 

Each child needs to bring a peeled, cubed apple to make applesauce in class. 

Certainly not one that should have resulted in me, quite literally, with my face buried in the kitchen counter, cheerful note clutched in my cold, shaking hands. I was caught in that thorny pause, you know, the one when you’re deciding if you’re going to collapse into tears of defeat or kick it into full-on rage-bitch mode. 

Peeled and cubed! I uttered under why breath, when my husband gingerly approached me, no doubt wondering if this was the moment everyone who knows me has been suspecting all along, the moment I actually have a psychotic break. Because all the school papers. 

PEELED AND CUBED! I holler, rage-bitch emerging. My husband listened sympathetically while I ranted, but… I knew. I knew the apple request was not obscene. This wasn’t a mental split. It was just a Wednesday. 

It was a simple request, really, well within reason of the first grade teachers. Only… it was two days before said apple – peeled and cubed – was due, and I didn’t have any apples. Not even a shriveled yellow one that had been kicking around the fridge for a couple weeks. We were completely apple-less. Procuring an apple – peeled and cubed – would require a trip to the grocery store, the nearest of which is 15 minutes away, and it was already a full 20 minutes past bedtime, and the following day was, as it always is with two full-time working parents with hour commutes and three school-aged kids, jam-packed.  

(And yes, that’s right, I said didn’t have an apple. Go ahead and judge me, assholes. I tried telling my tween just yesterday that apples are like “nature’s candy” and, let’s just say, it wasn’t well received. Unless, maybe you like profanity from 11-year-olds.) 

By Annie

Dear Ms. Hayes,

Your latest post for POPSUGAR caught my eye. Not because it hit on some hot button parenting issue that's close to my heart, but because the topic just seemed so absurd. Surely, I thought, there must be more to this than meets the eye. So, I clicked. I read. And I marveled that  A. someone published this and B. you really do seem this bent out of shape over the fact that moms are referring to their kids as… kids. 

Der… huh?

Yep. Apparently this quick informal noun isolates my child, positions him as nuisance or a brat (um, have you met my kids?), and detracts from the hundreds of hours I invested in selecting just the right name (which, incidentally, I never expected to be compensated for by a set number of times the chosen name was spoken).

My kid is a special flower, damn it, and his intricately researched name shall be used! 

OK, OK, let’s just take a giant step back and reenter the MOTY world for a hot second. We use “kid” a lot in our space (e.g. “My kid is being an asshole today” or “My kid peed on his sister’s face this morning.”) And it’s not just, as you flippantly suggest, because those three li’l letters are easy to type. “Kid” is actually a nuanced usage common to the discourse community of relaxed, non-helicopter, free-range-leaning parents. It’s part of our lexicon, and it bears a certain welcome edginess that, when tossed around by a leggings-wearing, disposable-coffee-toting mama, cues me into the fact that, hey, this lady is perhaps just a little bit brash and whole lot awesome. 

“Kid” says, sure, maybe this mama tries her darnedest to feed her kids organic kale smoothies peed out by Gaia herself every day while they all craft alliterative haikus around the breakfast table… but she’s not above Dunkin' Donuts and cartoons. 

By Annie

Let me start by saying that I love the Reading Fair. In fact, I adore it and everything it stands for. This former English major turned MFA student turned failing memoirist/adjunct composition instructor and now copy director at a small ad agency is just thrilled by the way it inspires kids to read. To read! To eschew YouTube tutorials and Musical.ly drivel and crawl inside the dogeared pages of actual chapter books? Yeah... pure wizardry. And the Reading Fair doesn’t just inspire kids to read but also to think critically about story structures and to create utterly unique visualizations of their budding analyses out of the very materials that elementary school magic is made of – trifold poster boards, construction paper and rubber cement. 

​You see, Fifth Grade Reading Fair Powers That Be, it is my deep affection for the Reading Fair and all its didactic glory that made me feel so betrayed when the assignment guidelines for your fine event came home in my daughter’s backpack, and I read your closing line on the instruction sheet:

By Annie

The last week of school for 2017 is approaching and, in addition to panicking about what to do with all this extra kid energy for the next two weeks, many MOTYs are also scrambling to pick up last-minute Christmas gifts for our kids’ teachers. What a lovely gesture, right? Giving a small token of appreciation to the adults who nurture and educate our children during the many hours they are in school. Right?? 

Wrong. 

Apparently, as a quick Google search will show you, there are all sorts of dos and don’ts when it comes to teacher gifts. All those ideas you thought were super cute (… or at least feebly passable)? Well, they are total shit. Here’s why:

Mugs – Teachers love coffee. Point taken. They don't love 37 mugs per year, nor do they have the shelf space in their homes or teacher lounges to store them.
​
Ornaments – Can you possibly, with your non-teacher brain, fathom just how many ornaments an elementary school teacher accumulates over the span of his or her career? Take 25 students (minimum) and multiply that by 35 years (minimum) and then you can begin to calculate a rough estimate of the gross proportions of offensively superfluous ornaments any one teacher may receive in his or her lifetime. 
​
Christmas decor – How about a nice little holiday decor for the home? Sound good? Um, who the actual fuck do you think you are, assuming you understand this relative stranger’s personal aesthetic within the sacred cove of his or her own home? Nice try, asshole.

By Annie

By Annie

By Annie

​I started running again after my third child was born. It was those damn last 15 pounds that did it. After my first two kids, the weight just fell off. I didn’t exercise. I didn't diet. Yep, I was that annoying chick who just nursed my babies and lived my blissful size 0 life. But after stretching and collapsing a third time, my torso and thighs, defiant and defeated, simply gave up. I spent a few months cursing my way through bitter elliptical workouts in the basement before I finally decided I hated my body enough to run.
 
More specifically, what sparked my return to running was my best friend from graduate school. After facing similar post-partum body issues (along with a startling dash of PPD), she talked me into signing up for a 5K with her. We were several years out of grad school by then, each plodding along in the plastic-coated business world that felt foreign to us, two women who’d spent some of our most inspiring years settling into the pea-green couch in our university’s English department, discussing Shakespeare and logical fallacies. We were submerged in work and baby fog, busy, surrounded by new faces and complex obligations. Living a half an hour from each other, we seemed to find less and less time and reason to see one another. Until running. Suddenly we had everything to talk about again – techniques, training tips, protein goals – and all the other stuff that we love so much in each other just folded right back in. I run because it’s too easy to let good friends slip away. 

By Annie

Someday, my kitchen will not be filled with five bodies at 7:27 a.m., approximately seven minutes post intended departure time as I try to weave my way through chaos and humans, frantically packing my lunch and searching for the lid to my travel mug. Someday, there will be no tiny bodies sprawled out on the floor in front of the heating vents. Someday, there will be no ranting almost-tween sugaring her morning tea, no dog anticipating scraps of bread and lunch meat. Someday there will be no couch cushion cover air-drying on the chair after a toddler pissed on it in her sleep, no crusty booster seat on the table, no clutter, no screeching, no obstacle course to get from one side of the room to the other. I will be disproportionately wistful and will pause to look at the empty spaces...

But this morning, can everyone just get out of my face already? I'm late. I want my coffee. And I want to sit in the silence of my messy car as it carries me an hour away from home.