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The Top Sucky Mom Moments Holiday Edition…

December 19, 2016

 

It’s the holidays! A time for joy, togetherness, and celebration.

Which means it’s time to share my top sucky Mom moments of the holidays – whoot!

Drumroll please…

  1. The Elf on the F—Shelf

Oh, the Elf. A beloved holiday tradition where your children wake up happy and excited and go on a hunt around the house to find the Elf. He moves every night and flies back to Santa to tell him everything he’s learned about your beloved children.

Spoiler Alert: He doesn’t move anywhere. YOU, as the parent, are responsible for making sure he has a brand new hiding place EVERY SINGLE MORNING.

Yeah, let’s talk about this, shall we?

First off, my kids already suspect our Elf is not that special. You see, our Elf doesn’t move many times. When he does move, he’s in the same tired places like the lamp, the stocking, or on a wreath. That’s pretty much it. Now, my kids would be fine with this if they weren’t sharing information at school, and learning other mothers out there do it the RIGHT way. The Elf in other households move every day, and pop up in creative, exciting places, which you can see all over Facebook or Pinterest. Hey, kudos to the moms who do this, but can you tell your kids to keep it a secret? Because now mine are all like, “Mom, how come our Elf doesn’t fly back to Santa a lot?” or “Mom, how come our Elf is always on the same lamp and doesn’t do cool things like XXX at school?” or “Mom, is our Elf hurt? Is he mad at us? Is he not telling Santa we’re good? Did he lose his magic?”

To all the mothers out there, I have one final plea.

LET’S BE BAD ELF MOMS!! LET’S NOT MOVE THE ELF EVERY DAY!

This way, our children won’t expect much and when he does move—BAM. Magic! They also won’t care where he pops up! They’ll be grateful – like we were when we grew up and were lucky enough to get one lousy Barbie from Santa rather than expensive video games that cost a billion dollars, and there were no such things as Elf helpers that flew around, and if you misbehaved, you got COAL for real in your stocking!

  1. Cookies.

I hate baking cookies. I never do. Even when I was dead broke, I scrambled to find money under the couch cushions to pay someone to bake cookies for the classroom. Unfortunately, the holidays is a time where my boys are constantly talking about the cool cookies so and so’s Mom made, and why don’t we do cookies? And I’m not talking the log of Tollhouse you slop onto a pan and bake and they’re done. No, I’m talking serious stuff like Snickerdoodles, and sugar with amazing decorations, and gingerbread men and those awesome ones with the Hershey kiss stuck in the center.

They begged enough this year and my oldest one used the buzz word that always gets me. He said if we baked gingerbread cookies it could be valuable, quality FAMILY time. Of course, I paused at that and considered. I am always searching for quality family time. They finally wore me down and I purchased a mega gingerbread cookie kit and figured maybe it won’t be that bad.

Yeah, it was. It sucked. Family time wasn’t fun. First off, the kitchen was a disaster, with my dog scrambling for leftover candy pieces that spilled everywhere on the floor, and there was a million measuring ingredients and bowls out, and flour everywhere, and it took me an hour to find the right pans. Then the recipe didn’t work, and I ended up trying to get the dough to resemble something you could actually bake, and then they whined a lot about when they were ready and when they got to decorate. I didn’t have powder sugar so I had to google substitutes and ended up taking out the blender that’s only used for margaritas to blend granulated sugar to make powdered sugar. When we cut out the gingerbread men, they came out with broken arms and crooked legs and no heads. The icing bag exploded and by the time they were all done and decorated, the cookies were overdone and hard, the kitchen was a mess, and I had an hour’s worth of dishes.

They ate the heads off all of them and didn’t want the rest. But the worst part?

Even though they sucked, I ate every single last one of those stupid, overcooked, hard Gingerbread men. I consumed all these extra calories just because they were there!

Really? This is fun for you people? This is family time?

Sign me up for a board game where I can drink wine, or a Disney movie where I can snuggle under a blanket and not move.

  1. Snow

I hate snow. I should’ve been born in Florida but I’m too scared to leave New York cause it’s where I’ve been my whole life. What I really hate about snow is when the kids want to go out in it, and the real work begins.

What work, you ask?

Finding all the damn winter stuff, like snow suits and snow boots and waterproof gloves and scarves and hats. They are always too small, because who replaces that stuff they outgrow ON TIME?! So the older one stomps around with tight boots that hurt, and snow pants above his ankles and a beanie hat that probably gives him a headache. Then they beg me to go out and do FAMILY TIME  and build snowmen, so I have to give them excuses about all the important things I’m going to do while they play outside, and then lock myself in the office where I can drink my wine in peace and quiet. In my house, my children are not allowed outside unless they stay out for an entire hour. None of that crap where they go out for ten minutes and then you have to undress them, dry all the clothes, clean up the mess and make hot cocoa with marshmallows and whipped cream.

Not on my watch.

I set a timer and don’t let them in even to pee. That’s what snow is for.

 

  1. The Christmas List

I long for the days where there were toys and DVDs on the list. Things were so simple and beautiful back then. Easy. Now, I struggle with crazy detailed items such as Pokemon card Mega Mewto EX which you can only get on Ebay or used sellers on Amazon with no prime shipping and they’ll NEVER arrive before Xmas. And it has to be the EX, not the DX or the Y version or you just wasted your money. Then there’s the Pokemon stuffed animals to go with the cards, and most of them ship from Japan so if there’s a problem, you go back and forth in Japanese trying to translate they sent you the wrong version and you don’t even want your damn money back – you just WANT THE RIGHT STUFFIE TO FULFILL THE XMAS LIST!!!!

That’s it, peeps. My top four. I’m not a Grinch, but if we can just tweak these four items I may just get Mother of the Year Award.

Then again, maybe not.

WHAT’S YOUR WORST HOLIDAY MOMMY MOMENTS????

 

 

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  1. Cecille P says:

    Hilarious..especially #4. I can totally relate!! When I ordered the stuffed piplop & dragonite pokemon characters from Amazon, whoever packed/shipped the order was probably clueless as to what a pokemon is because we received travel mugs instead!!! I had a hard time trying not laugh while making my youngest stop crying. LOL

  2. Alicia Martinez says:

    Oh my gosh, where should I start!!! Ok so I don’t have an elf on the shelf because where I live, they must be pretty hard to come by since I can NEVER find one. But after reading your post, I would definitely be held to higher standards for making sure that thing is moved around creatively every freakin day and I just don’t have the time for that. So I guess not having it isn’t so bad. Especially when your trying to keep the magic notion alive that Santa IS real to your beloved kiddos but their non believing friends are out there saying, ” UGH UGH, he’s not real!
    It’s your mom n dad who buy all the presents.” ? Then you have to do damage control and explain that sometimes Santa asks mommy and daddy to help him. ? dodged another bullet there…

    I like baking, when I have the time. But I’m not gonna sit there and make 20 different cookie variaties for a bunch of 2ND graders. Too much work, besides they end up eating the store bought stuff that “Johnny’s mom” sent in, cause they end up liking those better! What a waste of time. Then my kiddo is heart broken cause his friends didn’t care for the ones he so lovingly picked out to make. Then I search for the right words to comfort him and tell him we can save these and put them out for Santa cause he’ll LOVE em!

    We don’t have snow in Houston TX (Although my kids would LOVE it to snow) but it can get pretty cold down here for us. We are used to steamy, 100° + weather down here cause we can jump in pool or go to the mall to keep cool. But a blustery 50° for us is COLD! My kids love playing outside, it’s not of question of can I go out to play, it’s a question of when are you coming in to get cleaned up! Then I have to layer them up so they can go out, then they start to peel layers off cauae they work up a sweat and end up with a cold once they’re out in it too long. Once they start sniffling, and sneezing they get whiney and then I do too.

    The god forsaken list…….
    So these guys do a pretty good job a making a list. Once Thanksgiving rolls around walmart and target put out the toy catalogs. I’ll grab a few of each, take them home and my kids make short work of cutting and gluing to make a wonderful colage of what they want for Christmas. It’s actually pretty neat and helpful. It shows exactly what the gift looks like and the cost. So no guessing there. I can snap a picture without making the list dissappear and share it with family members that want to help with the gift giving.
    I didn’t say finding the gifts was the easy part.

    The only thing I can think of to get me through, is that one day my darling boys will be grown and how much I will miss all of this when they’re grown and most of all, how funny and satisfying it will be to see them finally understand when they become parents themselves! ?

    Merry Christmas ya’ll! ?

    • Jennifer says:

      I adored these stories and YES, every moment is precious, even when I’m writing a blog complaining about it LOL!!! I also see the humor of it when looking back one day!

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