This weekend Dan and I watched Justin Bieber: Never Say Never for our hot date night. I pitched it to him as “a chance to let the magic of documentary film transport us into the world of a strange and interesting new culture.”

Also, he would get to sit really close to me for two hours. Also, he would get to see Jaden Smith perform his first live rap solo at Madison Square Garden. Most people don’t get to perform their first live rap solo at Madison Square Garden but. He’s. That. Good. So there’s that.

I was mostly watching it because a friend dropped it off and told me I had to, because it was directed by Jon M. Chu of Step Up 2: “The Streets” and Step Up 3: “The D” fame, and because of purple.

I won’t bore you with all the details and doubtless you’ve all seen it already.

*cough* American Classic *cough*

I will say that tears were shed as we watched it. To protect the privacy of those involved, I will not tell you by whom the tears were shed or what type of emotions were behind them. I will tell you that the movie makes me question my fashion choices. There’s just something about those bedazzled hoodies… like baby, baby, baby, ooooooh.

When you’re writing a novel, there’s a blurry line between fiction and reality. I infuse my story with aspects of places and characters I have known. My heroine has characteristics I possess or wish I possessed.

Some of my best plotting comes while I work out. I have a playlist of songs on my Zune I’ve chosen to help get me in the right mood to write and I listen to it and get pumped up, brainstorming ideas and visualizing scenes I plan to incorporate in later chapters.

This week I was out walking with Wanda in the stroller when I noticed a man walking ahead of me wearing a backpack. He seemed out of place in our neighborhood and I felt a strange vibe coming from him. He was going the way we were going but he was walking slightly slower than me. He kept stealing glances behind him, keeping me on his radar. He was slowing down and I was gaining on him. Was he letting me gain on him?

In a psychotic fit of imagination, I thought, “If he tries to pull anything funny when I pass him, he will be so surprised by the beat-down I will give him.” In my mind, I planned out the fight scene and just how thoroughly I would shut him down.

I continued on my way, getting closer, still feeling a strange vibe that something was going to go down when I caught up to him, still imagining how I would triumph.

About 30 feet from him, I had the sudden realization that I was not a character in my book, that I was a very real 32-year-old woman with a baby in a stroller and almost zero martial arts training. This realization was disappointing. I turned down a side street to avoid the confrontation.

Yeah. Maybe plotting should only be done when walking in a controlled environment.

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I don’t watch Dr. Phil anymore. There was a time when I was a new mom with one baby when I would watch me a little of the doctor and the Oprah, of a weekday afternoon. But those days are no more. I’m too busy. I feel like I’ve seen it all before and if I haven’t seen it, it’s probably not something I need to be seeing.

I just don’t watch TV during the days.

But I’m glad someone does because a friend of mine was watching Dr. Phil and he highlighted a new diet program. Yes. I know. And I was talking to this friend about being at the absolute end, END of my rope with my body and the weighing what I did when I was full term with Wanda even though there’s no baby inside, and MOM ARE YOU SURE THERE’S NOT A BABY INSIDE, yes I’m sure. I could stand to lose over fifty pounds.

It’s called the 17-Day-Diet and I hate diets and it sounds cheesy and the book looks cheesy and the doctor who designed it wears a lot of product in his hair but the concepts make sense. It’s about learning to eat less and eat the right foods by eliminating a lot of things from your diet and then adding them back in slowly in 17-day cycles.

Photo credit: xenia from morguefile.com

So for phase one I’m eating lean meats and lots of vegetables and fruits, probiotic dairy and a small amount of healthy fat. That’s it. I’ve done this for 2 days and that means 15 more to go before I decide if I want to move on to phase 2 or stop. I can commit to anything for 17 days.

I’ll let you know how it goes. So far I feel really good. I haven’t been hungry, although I’ve had some cravings. My energy is good and weight is tumbling off. It’s designed to be a fast, healthy weight loss so I’ll let you know how much I lose after the first cycle.

Today I didn’t make it to the gym or out walking and then Laylee came home barfing from school so I was stuck inside on a gorgeous sunny day. I decided to get my exercise from the DVD that came with the book.

The exercise instructor was chattering away about how great I was doing and what to move next and just how I should shake it. Noticing her perky, patronizing tone, Laylee said, “Mom? It’s weird. It sounds like she’s talking to kids.”

And it really did, which is sad because why do we talk to kids like that? Nobody really likes to be talked to in that voice, especially when they’re sweating like a ham.

“Don’t believe me? Come with me to the library where I’ll yell out loud, throw a fit, hit some kids during story time and then fling my body down the stairs. I promise it will be convincing.” [Read the whole post at Parenting.com]

I should never be allowed to read books to children in public. [read more @Parenting.com]

While we were on vacation in Utah my cell phone disappeared. “Oh,” you might think, “That’s a shame. Good thing it was just a cell phone.” The problem is it was not just a cell phone. That little black brick was our family’s Mobile Command Center. Since 2006 I’ve used it and its older brother before it to keep track of and control nearly every aspect of our family’s lives.

I’m currently using my sister’s old Razor and although it’s very cute and I’m really grateful to borrow it, it’s missing a few of the things that I’ve come to feel are necessary in a Mobile Family Command Center. Here is a partial list:

-Auto-sync calendaring connecting my phone calendar with my home calendar and Dan’s work, phone and home calendars

-A complete list of every contact I may ever need with their phone numbers and addresses included that auto-syncs over the air waves as soon as I update it

-Documents and spreadsheets of just about any piece of information I could want

-Full-text scriptures

-Internet access

-All kinds of applications that do all kinds of things I don’t really need but have learned to depend on.

-Email

-Cool personal ringtones for all my family members and friends

-A slide-out qwerty keyboard for text messaging

-Navigation

-Digital UNO

Don’t forget the fact that I feel kind of violated that someone is walking around with pictures and video of my kids I don’t have backups for, all of my recipes, emails and a lot of personal information.

When we realized it was really gone, like gone gone, like obvious-someone-had-pocketed-it gone, Dan sent out a command to do a remote wipe of all my data from the phone. We got a message back saying the wipe was successful when someone turned the phone on at about 4:30am the morning after it disappeared so that gives me comfort.

Now I’ve got my Razor and a paper calendar that I’m madly filling in with all my info from outlook and I feel so old-school. Remember this? At that point I had just begun my dive into techno-mom-dom. I’m really quite dependent now and I’m actively seeking a new phone.

The PR people from Verizon asked me a while ago if I wanted to try out a few of their smart phones and possibly review them. Now that I’m actually considering which phone to buy I think that’s a great idea so for the next several weeks I’ll be trying out some cool new devices and if I find anything worth telling, I’ll let you know.

My breached Command Center was an HTC Touch Pro from Verizon running Windows Mobile. In our area we get much better reception with Verizon than our friends who have other providers. The customer service has always been decent and most of our family members use Verizon so calls to them are free.

I have to say I was not uber impressed with the customer service we got when I lost my phone. For one thing, they could not perform a remote data wipe or track the phone’s GPS. For another, the guy at the call center told me that if the phone were turned in, they had no system in place for finding me and returning it based on the phone’s serial number. Through further investigation I found out that this was false. A kid named Dean in the West Valley store told me that they always do their best to get returned phones back to their rightful owners.

They were also unable to reactivate my service to my new/used phone until the following day because we had already deactivated, reactivated and deactivated the stolen phone that day and there is a hard-coded limit on the number of times you can do that. Apparently no supervisor has the power to override this so I was phoneless on vacation for a full day. I know, WAAAH, right? Still, it seemed strange to me and no one could give a good explanation as to why the policy was in place.

Still, we’re fairly loyal to Verizon and to phones that can play nice with Outlook. So, I’m on the hunt. Any suggestions?

My house is filled with books. Like Elizabeth Bennet fictionally before me, I do not consider myself a “great reader.” I just love books. I love to buy them, check them out from the library, smell them, attempt to write them, touch them, look at them and occasionally dive in and read them. My house is filled with books.

My house is filled with books and there are over a hundred I have yet to read. I will find myself at a bookstore, online, at a garage sale, in the grocery store, staring at a book and it will pull me in with its tractor beam of knowledge. “I will be so much smarter, more interesting, happier, taller if I own that book,” my self says to myself. I then purchase the book and hold it and pet it and love it and put it on the shelf or in a pile by my bed where books go to die. My house is filled with books.

My house is filled with books and every so often I think it’s time to part ways with a few of them. Some have been sent to me to review and once I started to skim them, I realized that I was not interested in reading them. I don’t feel right selling a book that was sent to me for a review but went unreviewed because I did not think it would interest my readers. I don’t want to make money on that kind of booty so I keep the books. Some I think might be interesting to someone, somewhere, sometime and deep down in my heart I want to be the one to provide that perfect book to the person who wants it. In my pre-child bearing life I was a librarian. My house is filled with books.

My house is filled with books and I have truly convinced myself that I need to keep the collection going so that in post-apocalyptic Washington, my house can become the town library. I will sort and label and catalog all the books, even the ones I don’t like, because others on my street might like them. Should I keep the book on animal anatomy? Well. There’s a vet on my street and he might be post-apocalyptically interested in my animal anatomy book, especially if his books are all destroyed in the blast. My house is filled with books.

Today I made a decision.

Any book that I am only keeping around IN CASE I find myself in the position of being The Librarian of the Apocalypse is no longer welcome in my home. Today my house became filled with about 60 fewer books. When the apocalypse comes, you’d better have your own copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting because mine’s heading out the door. And also, what you can actually expect when you’re expecting during the apocalypse will probably not be covered in the edition I currently have on tap.

Although we are far from “junior,” my sister and I made a run through the gauntlet of the Juniors department at Kohl’s recently. We were looking for shirts and sweaters and started in the Misses department but found that Vera Wang discriminates against women who have butts and whose breasts do not resemble those of an emaciated teenage boy. We found Vera Wangs, granny sweaters and everything in between but nothing was just right so we headed to the weird department.

In general, my size precludes me from shopping there at all but every once in a while I find an XL with my name on it. Pants are completely out of the question. Not only am I unable to fit my rear into any of the pants in juniors, NO ONE is able to fit their rear into any of the pants in juniors, not their whole rear anyway.

All of the clothes in Juniors seem to be made for a person with a 4 foot long torso, a 3 inch tall butt, and legs with the circumference of spaghetti sticks. The person must also be averse to consuming anything but unsweetened lemon juice. The current designs are mostly made up of faux vintage 80s rock star attire and pink and black items with skulls and crossbones on them. I am not a pirate, an 80s rock star, a misshapen freak of nature, or a 65 lb anorexic runway model interested in displaying plumber bum. So the pickins were slim.

We did however each find a normalish sweater we liked if we were willing to tolerate the brand names “Say What?!” and “It’s Our Time.” It struck me that each of these brands could also work in a senior citizens’ department, as in, “Say what, Sonny?! I can’t hear a word that’s coming out of your mouth.” Or perhaps a slogan for Depends, as in, “It’s our time. Why let embarrassing leaks stop us from doing the activities that are important to us?”

We’ve been showing the kids our favorite Christmas movies. Most have been smashing successes. Home Alone, although funny to Laylee, came across as a total horror movie to Magoo. If you’re planning on watching it with your little ones this holiday season, please ask yourself the following.

1. Is your child afraid of abandonment and/or being left alone with no parental support for days on end?
2. Do you like the idea of your child watching another child yell, “I hate you,” to his parents?
3. Is your child afraid of the dark or afraid of murderers with bloody hands, large menacing shovels and trashcans full of salt that turn their victims’ bodies into mummies?
4. Do you want to give your child 100 different ideas for ways to destroy your house?
5. Is your child sensitive to watching another child being ignored, bullied, belittled, yelled at and in all other ways verbally abused?
6. Do you want to teach your child an important lesson about organized crime back in the days of black and white, where a mobster will count to 10 (incorrectly) before “pumping your guts full of lead” with a loud and terrifying round of blasts from a machine gun, while smoking a cigar and emitting an evil cackle over your lifeless body?
7. Does your child ever suffer from nightmares that “bad guys” are roaming the streets plotting ways to break into your house?
8. Do you want your child to suffer from those nightmares?
9. Do you want to explain what a porn stash is?
10. Do you want to explain what the phrase “French babes don’t shave their pits” means?
11. Are you looking for a good way to talk to your children about shoplifting and/or vandalism?

Luckily Laylee was old enough to discern the difference between a funny bad guy and a scary bad guy. Luckily I’m pretty quick with a mute button. But seriously, what was funny when I was 12 is not so much of funny when I’m the mother of a 4-year-old. I’ve got to prescreen these things.

So things are moving along. Wanda is aging rapidly. We’ve moved her out of our room and I’ve decided it’s time to purchase some new Snazzy Jammies.

The problem is – I hate buying Snazzy Jammies. Now if you go to the Snazzy Jammie store to buy them, it’s not embarrassing because everyone in the store is there for the same reason, but who wants to spend that kind of money which only goes to pay for more of those life-sized posters right next to the kids’ play area at the mall?

No. When I’m looking for Snazzy Jammies, I usually look at Target or Kohl’s.

The problem is – Most people at Target and Kohl’s are not purchasing Snazzy Jammies. They are there looking for rain boots or a kitchen timer, maybe a roll of scotch tape. I like all of those things as much as the next person and so I usually try to camouflage my Snazzy Jammie purchase by spending way too much on sundries but, really, you cannot totally camouflage SJs. You just can’t.

A piece of Snazzy fabric may stick out from under your bag of diapers, giving your Snazzy-Jammy-Wearing ways away to curious bystanders. And at some point the checker will have to pull them out of their hiding place under the bathmat on the conveyer belt to scan them. She can either scan them discreetly or hold them up to the light, taking the hanger out with an eye-catching flourish and turning them from side to side in order to check out just how Snazzy they are. I’ve had both. I prefer discreet.

And I always feel like she’s looking at me a little too hard. Maybe she’s wondering if Snazzy Jammies should even come in the size I’m purchasing. So what if I’m wearing no makeup, have my hair in a bun and am sporting sweat pants. A woman carrying a mom-purse so big that it sets off the flashing “fasten seatbelt” light when she puts it on the passenger seat of her mini-van is still entitled to feel Snazzy once in a while. I think it’s in the constitution somewhere… or at the very least one of the amendments.