I’m never quite sure what to do about Father’s Day. Is it a time when daddy-o is supposed to spend the whole day bonding with his kid crew, or is it a day he should get a break from them?

After pondering the question for about five seconds, I decided to go with the bonding. Fact is, he spends a lot of time at work so doesn’t exactly need a ‘break’ from the kids. As such, I lined up a few dad and kid activities for the morning.

Breakfast in bed was not on the agenda, so the first activity was to send him off to his favourite greasy spoon with the three biggies followed by a trip to the golf store where he cashed in a gift certificate that was two-years-old. The rest of the day mostly involved daddy-o swimming in the backyard pool with the gang. Father’s Day is now wrapped up for another year.

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The latest entry in the ‘Real Housewives of . . . ‘ series is going to be set in New Jersey, where for a change of pace (not) we’ll get to watch rich, tacky, shallow women shop for size 0 designer clothes and fret about important priorities like redecorating their stadium-size powder rooms and getting a last-minute Botox appointment. This time I guess the difference will be even tackier accents and the vague suggestion of mafia ties, but overall it’s the same excuse for ‘real’ real housewives to snigger and feel superior: “I may not have that kind of budget, but I’m a better mom and I don’t sound like such an airhead on national television.”
Come on, we already have tons of shows where we can watch shallow, tacky people make idiots out of themselves, from reality competitions to daytime talk shows to most sitcoms. What about a ‘real housewives’ show featuring REAL people, with real problems, like how to keep your kids from bickering in front of your neighbors, or what you can make for dinner with 3 frozen chicken breasts and an expired jar of salsa? 
I can see it now - Real Housewives of San Mateo, featuring me and my neighbors as we cope with such thrilling challenges as an excursion to Costco (where I promise I’m only buying toilet paper and batteries!), or Carol loaning me her carpet cleaning machine even though I think my carpets are beyond hope. We don’t have any trampy neighbor to have affairs with the pool boys none of us can afford to hire, but there is a rather hunky UPS guy we can occasionally ogle, and instead of comparing notes about our designer shopping sprees, we can let each other know when there’s a sale at Old Navy, or a special on ground beef at Safeway.
Hmmm . . . I’m even bored, and it’s my life!, so I can understand why producers aren’t clamoring to make a reality show about reality. Watching normal people cope with typical problems we all face doesn’t give one that thrill of schaedenfraude (taking joy in the misfortunes of others - I still remember my SAT vocabulary!), because it’s fun to feel superior to superficial morons with too much time and money, even as we envy them, not just for the expensive trinkets but for having lives that are interesting enough to merit a TV show.
That’s my dirty little secret - I’m ashamed to admit that sometimes I wish I had a more glamorous, unusual life, even though I love my family and can even find joy in some of my more mundane moments. Oh, I know raising kids and teaching music (and all my other odd jobs) are much more important than getting on television because I’m an airhead with a sugar daddy, but every now and then we all yearn for a bit of glamour, something novel to break up the routine. I think I’ll go wild on my next trip to Costco and spring for some new socks.

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I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Ikea, the build-it-yourself furniture superstore. One the one hand, even before the recession I appreciated a bargain, and I like to think that even if I had $5,000 to spend on an end table, I wouldn’t be so wasteful. Walking through Ikea’s beautiful but maze-like showroom and seeing the ridiculously low prices gives me the same high I got the first time I went to Loehmann’s (back in the day when it was a real outlet with real discounts; heck, I went to the original one in the Bronx, where I fought for mirror space with an entire Mah Jongg club, only to emerge triumphantly with a beautiful lined wool coat for $40). 

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I am the classic pear shape: tiny upper body with a rounded lower body. I’ve never had breasts bigger than an ‘aa’ cup.

You can imagine how excited I was with my first pregnancy about getting “porn” breasts. I told my husband that I was going to buy a special lacy bra so he could take many a photo of me and my breasts. I even told my close male friends they could look at the photos—which sounds weird, and I guess it is weird but that’s how excited I was about getting big boobs.

In the end, my breasts only got big enough to fill an ‘a’ cup bra with a little spillage over the front. They grew, of course, when I started to breast feed but never enough fit into a maternity bra. (The photo is of when my breasts were at their biggest.)

PHOTO

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If you commented on the Name Game blog entry, keep watch on Caitlin’s “Mabel Files” (www.blog.mabel.ca) where she will soon be posting the winner of the Camp Pack. Caitlin takes care of all the official stuff and I get to have the blogging fun. Heck, I’m on maternity leave so it seems fair that I run the contest and someone else worries about monitoring entries, wouldn’t you say?

Although I’m on mat leave, I have not fallen off the face of the earth entirely - still blogging, checking facebook, on twitter, etc. To simply disappear from social networks and ignore good online discussion is not something this chatty mama is cut out for. Cocooning for an extended period of time off-line with my kiddos wouldn’t really work for me. And last I checked, my inbox didn’t get the memo that I’m on maternity leave.

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I know a woman named Iona Dick. Go on - say it out loud. The kicker is she took her husband’s surname when she married so actually decided to become Mrs. Iona Dick.

I have a friend whose little boy is named Owen Vary. Nice name, lovely kid. Two weeks ago, Owen’s poor mama got hit with the realization that his first initial with last name makes the word “ovary”. She is hoping the kids he ends up in high school with don’t clue in.

It’s fair to say that we Mabel mamas are mildly obsessed with baby naming. It’s a bit of a sport around the office. We get irrationally excited by names and you can often hear squealing in the Mabel’s Labels production area when someone comes across a new or unique name.

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