Shut UP!

That’s what I said when I saw this ‘08 Tahoe Hybrid and all it’s fancy shmancy features.
I said it when I saw the reverse camera and the XM touch screen radio and the GPS and the tire pressure monitor.

Well, read BlogHer or Bust! to find out just how opulent and extravagant a $52,780 car can be.

Image Source: Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me

Laurie Toby Edison of Body Impolitic asked me to guest blog. I submitted Body Image: No Name Calling about how I try to teach Ainsley that the habit of self-deprecation is wrong and carries a real cost to the self-esteem.

Thanks to Laurie for the opportunity. Laurie will be sitting on the BlogHer panel about body image with me in San Francisco in July.

Please stop by and read it while I decompress from my political trip and spend extra time with my kids – they missed me.

There’s another reason to leave the kids every once in a while – you can’t …read more

“Tracee, Zack is over at my house. A man brought him to the door and said he almost ran him over with his truck. He says if it happens again he’s going to call the police!”

“AACK! Zack What? How? Outside? I’m on my way!”

Evidently, my two-year-old son knows how to work the latch – and unhook the “security bungee cord” – on the gate.

He knew exactly where he was going too. He knows this little boy down the street that he rarely gets to play with. He was deliberately headed to his house, and when the man found …read more

Brain washing, outside polygamist cults, is an underrated and legitimate method with some great applications.
Potty training would be one of them.
Call me crazy – I’m sure half of you will, but that would be no different than any other day – I’m trying to potty train my 2-year-old son.
For his second birthday we gave him the Potty Training (Baby Signs) and some big boy underwear. The kit has a “choo choo train” theme. Get it? “potty train.” I was more excited than he was.
I realize common parenting advice says not to push it and to “wait till they’re ready,” but …read more

My family really shines on Mother’s Day. Especially my husband, who always puts a lot of effort into getting the children involved in doing something creative for me.

I woke to pancakes with whipped cream and strawberries, an 8X11 photo of my children spelling out each letter of “Happy Mother’s Day” in my office and “I Love You” in the kitchen.

I also got a small deep freeze!

Ainsley sang me as song called, My Mom.

I H-E-A-R-T my family.

I hope your Mother’s Day was as good as mine.
Image Source: So Sioux Me

My 2-year-old has taken to expressing indignation at all commercials.

He hands us the remote and demands that we fast forward.

Even my 6-year-old daughter, Ainsley, is confused about how this happened.

It’s LIVE TV Zack. You have to watch the commercials. Geez, she’ll tell him.

I mean, hasn’t everyone on the planet lived with commercials since television was invented?

Everyone except the new people who have never known television without a DVR, I guess.

It’s a unique generational experience. I am grateful for the miraculous invention that has revolutionized television and that I can get for only $5 a month. I experience a little …read more

I am increasingly uncomfortable and pissed off at the amount of time the media is spending on Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

I go to church every week. I have for several years, after about a decade of never going to church. I was raised in a home where I went to church every week.

I have yet to sit in a church and agree with the religious leader speaking. It just hasn’t happened to me.

For 2-3 years my husband and I sat in a church where we, or at least I, disagreed with nearly everything the pastor said. Nearly everything. We …read more

If you talk to people you’ll hear all about how the world is going to hell because parents aren’t watching their children anymore. I can hardly go to church, have lunch or momchat on the playground without hearing this come up.

Irresponsible parents do everything from let their children play with the neighbors to allowing their children to watch commercials on TV.

Don’t parents know commercials are full of sex and mass murderers inhabit next door.

It’s such a load of crap. It’s revisionist history really.

When I was a child my parents might not see me and my brothers for HOURS. We …read more

We went on a marriage retreat with a ropes course this weekend.

One of the challenges was to climb to the top of a telephone pole, stand on a platform at the top and then jump to a trapeze bar parallel to the pole, pretty far away. There’s a rope harness to keep you from falling to the ground.

I went first. I’m doing this. I can do anything. I am safe. I am brave. I’m going to jump. I’m doing this. I carried on an internal dialogue all the way up.

I wasn’t nervous till I got to the very top …read more