Queen of Spain Blog

2 Days Until Christmas, in case you didn’t know

December 23, 2007 by Queen of Spain 11 Comments

2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas! 2 days until Christmas!!!!!

I’ve heard that about 50 times and we just woke up about 4 minutes ago.

I love having children in the throws of the “Santa ages” of childhood but HolyMaryMotherofGAWD I’m pretty sure my son’s head is going to EXPLODE before he’ll ever wake up Tuesday morning.

He’s obsessed. He’s also truly, and honestly, to his toes worried Santa won’t bring him something because he’s been bad.Yeah, cue the “awwwwwwwwww.” I mean, I only torture him like any other good American parent would. “Santa is watching, don’t you dare hit your sister.” “Santa heard that lie Count Waffles and I’m pretty sure you’re on the naughty list.”

With panic in his eyes before bed last night he actually asked me if *I* thought he had been good enough to warrant a gift from St. Nick. “Oh honey, I’m sure you’re just fine…don’t worry,” I said immediately regretting it if only for the pure leverage it’s given me these past few weeks.

Terrible, I know. He’s 4.5 though, he’s in trouble all the damn time.

When I was a kid we had the house on Christmas morning where everyone was up before dawn and my parents made us lay there awake and wait for the sun. It was unlike any torture known to man. I would call it worse than waterboaring.

My brother and I would be in our beds, flat on our backs, with eyes as wide as saucers and stare at the ceiling until my Mom or Dad would say, “Ok.” We’d throw our blankets off and race downstairs as fast as our tiny feet could go.

It’s 2 days before Christmas and my son is awake a good 2 hours earlier than usual bouncing off the walls. It’s like he’s had 6 cups of coffee. Like he’s got Santa fever and the only cure is more jingle bells.

He’s an addict and I don’t think any of us are sleeping until he crashes in a pile of unwrapped presents in about 48 hours.

I think the excitement and joy of this age is one thing, the sheer insanity and uberhyper activity was something entirely lost on my parent brain until about a week ago when he began to twitch.

I guess many of you may lecture me about hyping this holiday and it being all about toys and gifts and gimme gimme gimme. In all fairness, you’re an idiot. I haven’t done anything more or less than most parents do this time of year and we’ve had plenty of talks about giving and kindness and gifts not being important.

That being said he’s just shy of 5-years old and the boy believes. He believes some magic, white-bearded guy is bringing him toys. The holy grail of childhood. For one day a year he gets to have a candy and cookie laced toy-fest and the only thing stopping him is his ability to whack his sister on the head with a balloon and piss off Mom with his lazy cleaning skills. He believes, and it’s freaking magic people. It’s that warm, fuzzy magic that only comes when you’re a kid and Santa is coming. The entirely pure and innocent joy.

As a parent I’ve actually thought long and hard about this whole thing (why yes, as a matter of fact, I do think long and hard about my parenting decisions) and I’m totally fine with it. There are only so many years of Santa belief and I don’t really give a damn if that makes you think I’m spoiling my child or teaching him the wrong lesson. There are only so many years of pure magic on Christmas morning when you wake to find gifts have just appeared under your tree. There are only so many years when you can’t sleep from excitement and wait and wonder with hope and some panic if that one special thing is waiting there for you on that one special morning.

It will all be gone faster than a blink and he and I are going to enjoy every insomniac moment of it, dammit.

In fact, I’m letting him have Christmas cookies for breakfast while we wrap gifts. Then, with any luck, he’ll crash from the sugar high and I can get some sleep.

Filed Under: Count Waffles, kill me now, Merry Merry, Stepford Crazies

Boobs On Ice

December 20, 2007 by Queen of Spain 4 Comments

My Friend Susan is undergoing breast cancer surgery Friday. For those who don’t know Susan she’s Second Life and Twitter’s resident Nana. That’s right, Susan keeps my mouth in check.

This isn’t our first brush with Second Life and cancer. Some of you might notice the WHY MOMMY badge in my sidebar over there. I’m proud BlogHer brought their conference onto Second Life because WHY MOMMY got to participate while she continued her fight.

As for Susan, some of you may have heard the story that she used a frozen pea ice pack to comfort her owies during the first days of testing and diagnosis. It started very simply, with friends on twitter changing their little icons to reflect a “peas” theme. So now we’re all showing our support for her, one way or another, and I’d be pea-sed if you’d join me:

Filed Under: Feeling YaYa, Queen's Photrade

I Feel Bad For Lynne Spears

December 19, 2007 by Queen of Spain 27 Comments

Maybe I’m having a weak moment. I don’t know, but everyone is slamming this woman now that we all know her 16-year old (ala Zoey 101’s) Jamie Lynne Spears is knocked up.

They film that up here by me. The Spears contingent is in town a lot.

The Mom of Britney and Jamie Lynne is being torn to shreds because it would appear both her little darlings are total fuck-ups. Ouch. Ok, so Lynne was in the midst of writing a parenting book, and apparently the publisher is known for “inspirational books and Bibles”- so you know there won’t be any 16-year olds heading to Planned Parenthood in this family.

As I sit here today and watch everyone on daytime tv slam the Mom, and around the blogosphere, etc. I’m wondering at what point we get to be upset with Britney and Jamie Lynne. Sure, 16 is young…crazy young-but not unheard of in 2007. My Mom was pregnant with me at 18. Go on over and talk to Kelly (aka Mocha Momma) about teen pregnancy.

Let’s add in these are two celebrity kids. Drug use and criminal activity is one thing, but your daughters procreating like bunnies, while not exactly responsible, isn’t really the end of the world here.

I’m by no means absolving parents of responsibility here. I just wonder how much we really know about Lynne Spears and her parenting tactics. The bottom line is: we don’t know shit. She might be the total church-going, supportive, doing-the-best-she-can kinda mom.

I don’t know about you, but I was having sex by 16. Something CERTAINLY could have happened. I can’t say my parents didn’t teach me all the things I needed to know and I didn’t have a solid foundation when it came to sex and responsibility. No excuses there. They told me. I knew.

Birth control still could have failed. I could have had a ‘moment’ of passionate irresponsibility. We alllllllllllllll could have.

So while I’m not ready to pat Lynne on the back and tell her “hey, good job!” I’m certainly not going to bitch like some crows circling overhead. We’re all Moms here. We’ve all fucked up. We’ve also all had sex, and sometimes rather irresponsibility.

Yeah, I feel bad for Lynne Spears. I hope everything works out, because her daughter is going to need support and that family needs to be stronger than it appears splashed all over the rags at the grocery store.

Frankly I’m finding all the blog laughing and pointing fingers and being snarky about a 16-year old getting pregnant rather high school. It’s the holidays after all, and I don’t care WHO this family is or HOW much money they have, babies are never easy. They aren’t easy for me under the best of circumstances at 33-years-old and certainly can’t be easy for a teenage.

Keep shaking your heads and making your jokes if you want, personally I think you need to shut up and grow up.

Filed Under: Holding Court, Royal Rant, Stepford Crazies

Follow Queen Around the Web…and eat

December 18, 2007 by Queen of Spain 8 Comments

As many of you know I’m Photrade.com’s Evangelist and Blogging Consultant. That means I’m working for a start-up and learning about all sorts of fun things like…um…start-ups. Now, we’re in Beta, invite only. That means you need to be invited to test our beta. (I’m not explaining this because I think you’re dumb, I’m explaining because before I started doing all this, someone had to explain it to me.)

So while I love me some social media, I was unwise in the ways of the start-up, unless you count BlogHer...but you get what I mean. Sure I am in Second Life and jump around the web, but I never really grabbed onto and found myself cheering for a start-up like I do Photrade….but you guys know that….and I just said “cheering” but it’s 2am and I take no responsibility for myself right now…

Right around the time I started really getting to know and love the ways of a web start up, I began to Twitter. Of course I was on FaceBook until they sucked, brought the tit brigade to Myspace and tend to dabble on blogs all over the damn place.

Enter my two new toys- Utterz and Seesmic. Now, some of you have heard (or is it ‘herd’) me Utter over on Twitter. Basically you can phone in a tweet. Or a blog post. Or just an Utter that can post at Utterz. I love it. I can tweet and post while no where near my computer. I also got to meet Sim from Utterz at Blog World Expo in Vegas and we bonded over cow tits and lemondrops (I’m not kidding) and I can’t wait to see what they have in store.

I’m new to Seesmic and am still confused, but blaming it on my noobieness. The idea is to auto-video post (I think) to twitter or wherever and to have a “conversation” with those people you are seesmic-ing with…I think. Either way…all of this came in handy today while I made about 14 dozen cookies for many of you….

I Twittered how I was making cookies…who wants some? I got my invite to Seesmic (they are an “alpha” site-don’t ask me what the hell that means other than it comes before my Photrade baby’s Beta) and then I did some Seesmic’s on the cookie ( or ‘twookies’ as I dubbed them) progress.

I used Photrade to document the fun.

I Uttered for good measure.

…and TADA!…a blog post on my twookie mania in multi-media goodness. Or badness if you were hoping for porn.

Filed Under: Queen's Photrade

Don’t Look At Me

December 16, 2007 by Queen of Spain 17 Comments

…since I’m feeling spunky…

I think I’ll tell you what happened at dinner tonight, only because we’ve been talking about my daughter’s new toy.

My mother called us during dinner. This is nothing new, my mother calls at least three times a day. She asked what we were eating. She asked what the kids were doing at school this week.

So while scarfing down my crab cakes and caesar salad, I told her that this was the kids’ last week of preschool before break and on Friday their holiday-laced preschool lives would culminate in a celebration of Baby Jesus’ birthday. No, really. They do a birthday party for Jesus (as I learned a few years back) as this is the easiest way for the kids’ to understand the meaning of Christmas and it’s complete with a cake and everything.

So, before you start in on me: yes, I did send my kids to a Christian preschool. Mainly because it’s a really good preschool and they are pretty God “light” so we assumed anything they got out of it could easily be tamed at home.

Back to dinner. And the phone call.

Just as the words “baby jesus birthday” fly out of my mouth my 4.5 year old yells “BUT HE’S NOT REAL!”

To which, my always thinking husband GAFFFAWWWFS at very loudly. A very Santa BELLY laugh which has the kid grinning from ear-to-ear and me giggling because it was so crazyily inappropriate and everyone at the table was now laughing.

Yes, my son exclaims that Jesus is NOT real and we all cackle.

My confused mother on speaker phone is going “what? who’s not real? what? what did he say?” and we’re giggling too loudly to hear her.

The Kaiser then tells Count Waffles that is the BEST joke he’s ever told and HIGH FIVE! To which I reply…woah, but that is NOT a joke we’re going to tell at school, ok? They won’t think that’s funny at school. In fact, a lot of people won’t think it’s funny that you don’t think Jesus is real.

To which my smartass kid says “but he’s NOT real.”

To which my husband high fives him again.

To which I roll my eyes and tell my Mom we have to go.

So yeah, go ahead and be offended. This time though, yell at the Kaiser, not me.

p.s. Yes, I’m fully expecting a note home from preschool after Friday’s party.

Filed Under: Count Waffles, Kaiser, kill me now

I’m Running Out of Energy

December 14, 2007 by Queen of Spain 22 Comments

So yeah, I’m a little annoyed. That’s me using grown-up words because I’m on my best behavior here. But this one is personal (when aren’t they, you say…)
Many of you know I’ve been working on yet another mystery project for BlogHer. Well, cats out of the bag, as it were…and I’ve been busting my rather round buns on Election ’08.

BlogHer Co-Founder Lisa Stone has a very calm (something I don’t do well) and rational (something I do from time to time) post asking our community what they want/would like to see over at BlogHer for Election ’08. The part in her post that reads:

“Oct 2007:
-BlogHer invites Candidates Clinton, Edwards, Obama, (Democrats) and Giuliani, McCain, Romney and Thompson (Republicans) to answer Voter Manifesto questions on-camera, including an offer to fly to the U.S. location of the candidate’s choice and be interviewed for 15 minutes by a member of her or his own political party, by either Editor Morra Aarons or Editor Mary Katharine Ham (also of Townhall.com). No candidate accepts.
-BlogHer co-sponsors 10questions.com, a techpresident.com initiative co-sponsored by The New York Times and MSNBC.

Nov 2007:
–BlogHer re-invites candidates to answer Voter Manifesto questions on-camera. No candidate accepts.
-BlogHer members submit questions to 10questions.

Dec 2007: BlogHer re-invites candidates.-Candidates John Edwards and Mike Huckabee submit answers to 10questions.com. Candidate Ron Paul also agrees to participate, according to the site.
– Sen. Obama tours Iowa with Oprah Winfrey and his campaign launches “Women for Obama”:

The parts I highlighted up there? “BlogHer invites, BlogHer re-invites, BlogHer re-invites…” yeah, that’s me. And by “re-invite” it was, Erin busting out her long-ago-used news reporter skills to annoy campaigns. Of course I did a bit more than that too (my technical term here is PRODUCER and Field Reporter) the gist of it is me being told over and over and over and over again how important women are in this election yet being denied over and over and over again by every single presidential candidate running’s email, phone, or email and phone aide type person.

Annoyed. Yes. Yes I am.

We were handing them 7.6 million blogher readers on a golden blogher platter (while using our Butterball potholders, of course) the majority of them the WOMEN THEY WANT TO VOTE FOR THEM and interest by the candidates has been, shall we say…less than enthusiastic. We even offered them hosts from their own parties (Morra Aarons-Mele and Mary Katharine Ham, why YES you DO see them on CNN).

And I wonder why I still have to write about feeling ignored as a woman voter. By being patronized because Obama and Oprah have teamed up. By once again feeling like I was patted on the ass and sent to go cook in the kitchen. They can market to us, sure…but can they just TALK to us? We’re women, we want you to sit down and chat along WITH your stats and stances. We’re WOMEN, we want you to answer the tough questions about healthcare and education AND Iraq. We’re not afraid to talk about the economy and choice. Hell, one of you running is even ONE OF US, and is well aware we are no longer just reading the Style section and worried about whatever it is our husband’s tell us to worry about.

I also know one thing, deep down to my Queenly toes…these candidates will get possibly the fairest interview and most diplomatic handling that is currently on their agendas. Bar None. BlogHer has made sure of it, BlogHer is alllll about it, BlogHer tends to roll this way with EVERYTHING. So not only is this a great opportunity to reach their target demo, it’s one of the safest interviews they’ll ever have. Will we pitch softballs? No, but they’ve seen our Voter Manifesto, they know what we’re asking.

One thing keeps sticking with me throughout this whole, frustrating process-Oprah has 8 million viewers, BlogHer has 7.6 million readers.

We’re a nonpartisan dot com.

Yes, I’m annoyed. And quickly losing faith in this election process. I really want my faith back. I really want to believe.

I’m annoyed. And I’m waiting.

Go take the BlogHer survey. Make your voice heard.

Demand they pay attention. Our questions will NOT be ignored.

Filed Under: BlogHer, BlogHer.org, Feeling YaYa, Men and their duckcamps, Queenie Backup, Royal Rant

…and for her latest trick

December 11, 2007 by Queen of Spain 17 Comments

Baby Jesus (the girl, by the way) can now balance on a head and FLY through the air during a game of catch. Beats being face down in a bowl of milk. I think.

Filed Under: kill me now, Princess Peanut, Royal Kinfolk

I TRIED to Tell You: Why OPRAH Matters

December 9, 2007 by Queen of Spain 8 Comments

Back in October of last year I posted a piece here on HuffPo after I had watched a then, undeclared, Senator Obama sit with Oprah.

“Oprah is talking to Obama about the possibility of him running for President in 2008. And I’m ignoring the cries of ‘WHERE IS SPONGEBOB!’ to hear the answer.

A daytime talk show host is pushing politics on her show…and this mother is not only listening intently, but sitting on the edge of her seat to hear the banter.

Welcome to the new spin on campaigning, and the new breed of Mom voter. Get used to politicians and their wives on Oprah being watched by educated homemakers with tattoos and outspoken opinions. Get used to this making many people uncomfortable.”

Now we see Ms. Winfrey and the candidate stumping and it’s working.

Go ahead and shake your head that some talk show host is making a difference in the ’08 election. Go ahead and roll your eyes that these mothers and women care.

Fellow BlogHer Morra Aarons-Mele writes, “If you follow politics, you’ve no doubt heard that unmarried women represent a holy grail of voters: 50 million or so likely Democrats that year after year, flirt with voting and political activism, but don’t commit. This cycle, they’re dubbed the ‘Sex and the City voters.’ To woo these women, the establishment provides celebrities, and catchy spots laced with sexual innuendo–ooh, winking about their first time! Voting, that is.

My friend and Democratic pollster Margie Omero sent me the post about the Single Anxious Female frame. She noted to me, ‘Women, across marital status groups, vote at a higher rate than do men. But the coverage stemming from concern about ‘Single Anxious Women’ (even called the ‘Sex in the City Voter’) not only doesn’t reflect the data, it trivializes women.’ Even in 2007, women are pitched civics lessons as if we can only relate to global affairs if the issues are dressed in sexy shoes, just folks style dishing, or are at lunch with Samantha, Carrie and the girls.”

I suppose there is an argument to be make about gimmicks and celebrities being busted out for votes. I also think there is an argument to be made that Oprah is trusted and speaks to most women.

Marty Kaplan writes, “…Oprah may actually be the twenty-first century’s de facto national anchor. She really does channel — and change — Middle America.”

A national anchor that has the ear of just about every American woman I know.

Go ahead and laugh if you want, or be disgusted by “some celebrity” making a difference. Maybe you don’t care for her charity work or maybe you don’t like that she is wealthy and powerful. Maybe you don’t like that she does it with women top of mind. Whatever the reason, I suggest you take notice. As I mentioned in October,

“According to Women’s Voices. Women Vote. 20 million women did not vote in the last election. That’s 20 million women.

I’m guessing Oprah can reach a few of those 20 million women. I’m guessing Mommybloggers can reach a few of those 20 million women. I’m guessing the honesty and hopefulness of a young Senator can reach a few of those 20 million women.

I’m guessing YOU had better redefine that tiny box of yours to include 20 million different kinds of woman. We’re not clear cut. We’re not all Donna Reed. We’re not all what you think a woman should be. What a mother should be. What a sister should be. What a daughter, aunt, girlfriend, or Oprah watcher should be.

But we sure as hell can vote.”

I caution you to realize this does not only apply to Obama. As BlogHer’s Catherine Morgan points out, there are over 300 women discussing politics in blogs. Even my much-ridiculed Mommyblogger circle is educated and in on the act.

I’m tired of the snickering from those who find this less-than-serious politics. I’m tired of the feeling women voters are “cute” and entranced by Oprah or Hillary’s new hair-do.

I suggest the main stream media and other writers, political campaigns, and candidates themselves learn a lesson from the Oprah effect. As I’ve heard BlogHer Co-founder Lisa Stone say many times about many different things, “ignore us at your own peril.”

*cross posted at the Huffington Post, Erin Kotecki Vest also blogs at Queen of Spain blog and BlogHer.com

Filed Under: BlogHer, BlogHer.org, Feeling YaYa, Queenie Backup