It’s been busy for us.  Work.  Putting the house on the market.  Everything.  This makes me stop.  Every time I watch it I get all glowy and my heart swells up.  Charlotte learned “You Are My Sunshine” at school and regales us with it often.  I can’t get enough of how she says “shunshine.”

You are our light, sweet girl.  We love your song.

We’ll be gone a few days.  Greyson and I are taking off on a little trip.  I’m so excited I could burst.  We’re basically making my geek pilgrimage to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  I promise to Instagram, Vine and Tweet my way through.  I also promise to wear my Time Turner necklace.  Yep, I have one haters.  Don’t hate.  See you soon!

Dear Daughter,

Your addiction has effected me negatively in the following ways:

• You can’t sit down to a meal at our home or go to a restaurant without getting a fix.  We as a family should be able to dine together without you having to have a drink every time.  
• When you drink you act differently, most often a hyper sugar high, followed by a tear filled-crash.
• I can no longer watch you fumble and get frustrated with the plastic straw in the carton.
• I have seen you scream and throw your carton on the Barnes & Noble train table, splashing your drink all over the Thomas the Tank Engine.
• I find cartons in your car seat and by your high chair.
• Your addiction makes me feel like I am failing you as a mother if I don’t give you what you want.
• If you don’t get a drink you throw a fit and cry until you do.  As your mother, I can no longer listen to your wails for “chokate milk!”

I am here today asking you to get help.   I will no longer be an enabler.  I will not be the person who fuels your addiction any more.  I can’t stand by and watch you douse Thomas & Friends in a sugar-fueled rage.  I no longer will let you pick a carton from the Starbucks cooler thinking it is “just this once.”  I now know that Ovaltine is not any better, it just made me feel better to give it to you because it had “vitamins.”

Sometimes I blame myself because I breast fed you for a year and I have to think the only thing as delicious as my milk is chocolate milk.

Please accept the gift of help we are offering you today.  We are now a “dry” home, free of sugar laced milk.  You will now only drink plain milk and water.  I know sometimes they give you juice at school and I can live with that, but we will no longer have chocolate milk in our house.

I love you and I want what is best for your teeth and our sanity as a family.

Love,

Mama

P.S. If this is ever really for drugs and not a tongue-in-cheek blog post, I will drag your butt to rehab.  If you refuse, I will send you to jail because I’m not putting up with that crap.  Consider chocolate milk your warning.

#@&*!  I have the worst #$&^*#$ head cold I have ever had in my entire %&#$*&@ life.  Ahh!

Why all the cursing?  Well, one for thing I feel terrible and I can’t breathe through my nose.  But, really I’m cussing up a storm because it’s Fat Tuesday.  I need to get it out of my system.  For Lent I’m giving up cuss words.  Yep, our darling girl is getting into the repeating phase.  Greyson and I mean well, but we let the foul language fly on many an occasion.  In his mind, what else is he supposed to say when a running back fumbles the ball?

I give you a football watching quote from my better half: “You #$&^*#$,  %*&&^, hold on to the God #@*&#$ ball!

Pretty bad, huh?  Yeah, I’m not much better when my Internet connection is slow or I drop an armload of something I should have taken in two trips. You get the idea.

It’s not just the repeating.  Charlotte is also saying “Was dat?” to everything she sees and “Was dat?” whenever we say a new word she doesn’t recognize.  I imagine phrases like the ones above would be repeated eagerly followed by a “Was dat?”

I thought about a swear jar where we have to put in money every time we say a cuss word, but that $%*# is expensive.  So, I figure a good start would be this solemn six week observance.  We’re not Catholic, but I figure the Holy Father would approve.

$%*&!  That’s right!  The Pope quit!  ::sigh::  I guess we’ll do it anyway.  That way maybe our kid won’t have a mouth so foul it needs to be stuffed with King Cake.

I’ve told you all before about how we have the greatest, most amazeballs people for friends.  (They would laugh at my use of the term “amazeballs” and subsequently make fun of me.)

We had this band of jokers over to our place for the “Big Game” last night.  I wonder if the National Football League will grab me by my amazeballs if I call it what it was.  It was the Beyonce concert!  I’m kidding.  We had our friends over to watch the Super Bowl.

Charlotte had a bit of a cough and runny nose.  Charlotte’s friend Josh, a fellow two-year-old, came over too.  I warned his parents of her slight cold symptoms and they had no problem with this.  They are both daycare kids and it’s February, after all.  Colds are just part of their lives like sippy cups and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

Murphy’s Law of parental party planning states: “The child will seem fine all day and then when the doorbell rings she will hack all over everyone.  If your guests are enjoying food with paper plates on their laps, the child will walk by and cough on their eye level entrees.

I apologize in advance to our friends for their colds.  Please remember what amazeballs friends we are.

Come for the beer, stay for the boogers.

This is a collection of some of Charlotte’s newest things:

Do you see a theme?  Well played Disney marketers, well played.  Good job getting your characters on everything from the cup my kid drinks from to the training pants on her little hiney.  Disney has an even further reach than the toddler department.  I’m interested to see what’s next.  I’m not picking on Disney, exclusively.  Sesame Street seems to have their hands on preschool merchandise as well.  You should see all the Elmo stuff in our house.  The thing that has been sticking  out to me lately is PRINCESS.

She loves those snow boots.  I’m a good little suburbanite mommy so we searched the aisles of Target for the perfect pair.  I gave her the choice of all the boots on the shelf and she said “Pincess!”  We went to a 3-year-old girl’s party this weekend.  Princess theme.

Hmm.  I’m not sure how I feel about all this.  I’ve read the criticism of the whole princess industry and how it’s making our daughters image obsessed, subservient prince-seekers who will end up on the pole if we let them watch The Little Mermaid.  I’m worried I’ll have to start dressing like Pam on “The Office.”  She was “Dr. Cinderella” for Halloween to show her daughter positive princess role models.

Courtesy: NBC

I love princess stuff.  Love it.  I can try to deny it, but I’m a pink, glittery girl-girl at heart and always have been.  We watched “Tangled” this weekend because I LOVE THAT MOVIE!  Of course Charlotte loved it too.  I find the more recent princess movies have much stronger, more confident female leads then classics like “Snow White” and “Cinderella.”  I think they send better messages.

I took a class in college called Gender and Media Culture and it ruined every story for me, ever.  This is the class where we had to watch “The Accused” and “Boys Don’t Cry.”  We got to analyze the rape scenes and discuss how the Cinderella Syndrome is a worldwide epidemic, forever infecting women’s psyches.  Apparently all the princess fairy tales of our youth are the reason women end up contestants on “The Bachelor” because the only thing they’ve ever been told is that they have to find a man to be happy.  Oh, did you know that EVERYTHING is a metaphor for deflowering a virgin girl?  I didn’t either until I took this class.

So, you see my dilemma.  I decided to take it easy and just go with it.  She’s just a little girl and princesses are just a part of that.  If I make a big deal about it, it becomes a big deal.

She got that “Tangled” book pictured above with a little hair clip of Rapunzel’s hair.  I showed her how it lit up and you put it in your hair.  I was never more proud of her after what she did next.  She didn’t want it in her hair.  She took it and made it a stethoscope.  She “listened” to our hearts before making it the thing doctors use to look in your ears.  Then she said, “I doctor!”

I don’t think I’ll need to dress like Dr. Cinderella after all.  My little princess is already practicing medicine.