Book Recommendation

I saw a clip of the Today Show online featuring a book called "Stop Dressing Your Six Year Old Like a Skank." Needless to say that caught my eye and after a search on Amazon.com I found that Celia Riverbark has written 3 books about life in the South. I think anyone could enjoy the books, but if you are from the South, you'll enjoy them even more. Here is an excerpt from her book "We're Just Like You, Only Prettier":
Chuck E. Cheese's
Where a Kid Can Be a Kid While Mommie Gets Hammered on Watered-Down Bud Light
Having a child at age forty meant that I managed to get through my entire twenties and thirties without setting foot in Chuck E. Cheese's, a kid wonderland where the star is an oversized, bucktoothed rat.
But when Sophie had a birthday coming up, she begged for her party to be at the giant rat's crib ("Where a Kid Can Be a Real Pain"). Kids love Chuck E. They practically hold up tiny Bic lighters to coax him out of the kitchen and onto the stage, where he gyrates his fat furry butt to happy songs that are best listened to through a beer haze.
It cracks me up that this wholesome family joint serves beer by the pitcher but then I think the idea is that you'll get so 'faced you end up tacking on a couple of extra hours to sober up. Meanwhile, your kid is pumping tokens into the whack-a-mole with the flushed desperation of a SAS-shoe wearing senior at the nickel slots in Atlantic City.
Of course, the silver lining here is that, for every token, you earn "tickets" that can be redeemed for a prize before you leae. I don't want to imply that this is a rip-off, but the last time we went, I calculated that we spent $44.89 for a hot pink curly drinking straw. Of course, that's because we only had 5,580 tickets. To actually get enough tickets to claim the foot-tall stuffed Chuck E. at the "prize redemption" counter, you'd have to physically move into the building and play stomp-the-spider and skee-ball until you were old enough to develop cataracts, erectile dysfunction and an inexplicable fondness for aspic.
At Sophie's birthday party, the kids chanted "Chuck E.! Chuck E.! Chuck E.!" until his royal rodentness finally emerged waving both arms to the kids, Nixon style. Several of the little girls visibly swooned and I feared they would have to be revived with red pepper flakes, which are on every table to add flavor to the "pizza."
If only the parents shared the excitement. From the moment my daughter's party invitations went out, parent-friends had the same underwhelmed tone as they called to flatly recite "We wouldn't miss it." Down to the last one, they rallied with genuine cheer, saying "Well, at least there's beer!"
Oh, but not nearly enough.
Don't get me wrong. This place is a kid's dream: games, ball crawls, tubes to get stuck in (I'm convinced there are still a few toddlers stuck in there from the late '80s somewhere just waiting to be freed and find out whatever happened to Wham!).
There are sing-along videos, a stage show with giant dancing animals, "Hi-waiian" punch, the works. One of my daughter's friends surveyed the surroundings and somberly announced, "It just don't get no better'n this."
Oh sure it do, if you're over eight, in which case you pretty much think if you hear Chuck's theme song one more time you'll start chewing youw own body parts just so you can quietly disappear.
When we arrived for the big party, I saw the beautifully appointed table for twenty in the distance and smugly congratulated myself on letting the rat do the heavy lifting this year. It was magnificent: neon sparkly derby hats holding color-coordinated helium balloons, confetti, party whistles. Stunning!
Unfortunately, it wasn't ourt table.
No, no. Our daughter's table was the one next to it with a paper plate and cup at each place setting and no balloons. It looked as if Tiny Tim had booked a party on the same day as Bill Gates's kid.
"Oh! The mom brought all those things," explained the relentlessly perky party attendant when I asked why it looked as if we would be serving piping hot bowls of gruel at our table.
"Listen, toots," I growled at her. "March your skinny butt back there, round up eight dzen balloons, and start blowing. Get rat-face to help you." She scampered away with fear in her eyes.
Our table started taking shape but then I noticed the competition had THREE videographers setting up tripods and a cake with the birthday boy's likeness fashioned out of tinted sugars.
"Who does he think he is? A Kennedy? I hissed to my husband, who just hung his head and stuffed our $7.99 disposable camera back in his pants pocket.
I was starting to feel major mom guilt. After all, we hadn't taken our kid to Disney World that summer nly because I was put off by a news report that some of the costumed characters were suing the company laundry, which was, you guessed it, a Mickey Mouse operation. The employees said their poorly washed costumes had even given them body lice and scabies.
As I explained to my daughter, once you've heard that Snow White's crabby, the fantasy loses its luster. ("Somedaaaaay my ointment will come.")
And now, our videographer, a pitiful-looking table, and a cake that would only feed twenty kids if it was sliced thin enough to see through.
Once again, I had flunked the Mommy wars, a sort of self-imposed and unspoken awfulness that we suffer, a sick something that shows up at the worst times. Like in church a few weeks ago, when a beaming little family stepped forward to have their kid baptized and the minister shared that the tot was wearing "a baptismal gown that was worn by her great-great grandmother." "What?" I huffed to my seatmate. "They couldn't afford a new one?"
I first noticed the Mommy wars a couple of Halloweens ago. Halloween is a silly holiday that I used to ignore except for a last-grab of Tootsie Pops on the way home from work at 8:00pm.
All that changes with kids. Halloween is much bigger, for instance, than my sturdy favorite: Thanksgiving Day. Halloween is sexy with witches, black cats, bloody ghouls. Thanksgiving was, like my daughter's table at Chuck E. Cheese's, an obvious also-ran, a dollar-store "Barbee," the one that's supposed to be just like a real Barbie but whose legs always snap ff before you can get her to the car.
(My idea? Combine the Halloween and Thanksgiving into a mid-November "Hallothanks Day" where everybody dresses up as pilgrims and goes door to door trick-or-treating for maize.)
The Mommy Wars kick into high gear at Halloween. My daughter was invited to seven Halloween parties last year. By the time we got to the last one, her Little Mermaid costume looked like it had taken a detour through the Chicken of the Sea factory.
Halloween, as I see it, is just another chance fr the Stepford Moms to do the superior dance over those of us who are craft-impaired.
While dutifully cutting plastic milk cartons they've saved for a year into ghostly luminaria or making a chocolate graveyard cake with Milano cookie headstones, I'm wondering why the hell anybody would need to BUY cobwebs.
Back in the day, Halloween meant that my sister and I would wear a sheet or a foil crown and traipse to the school carnival for an hour or two to admire the spaghetti "intestines" and grape "brains" at the eighth-graders' Spook House.
Today, the Supermoms who host a haunted-house party are so competitive that I wouldn't be surprised if the human head platter was, well, a human head on a platter.
The mom competition continues through Christmas of course. My mom-friends and I have an unspoken, and completely unhealthy, contest for the Perfect Family Christmas Card Photo.
I'm still seething over last year's card from my friend who dressed her sons as wise men, she and her hubby as Mary and Joseph and her newborn son, lying in a makeshift manger, as the Christ Child. The Christ Child! It's not like he can ever be an elf after that.
If I were catty, I'd point out to her that it is doubtful that the Christ Child actually had enough money to wear Hanna Andersson swaddling clothes. I'd also be unable to resist speculating that this woman is so competitive she only conceived a fourth child so she could complete her long-dreamed-of Bethlehem diorama.
Although she may have gone too far with her baby Kyle/Jesus, I have to admit that the simple sitting-with-the-drunken-and-slightly-lecherous-mall-Santa card photo isn't enough anymore.
I'm really tired of the baby Santa suits, too. These are the same kids who were pumpkins at Halloween. I'll be they grow up resentful and anorexic with an irrational fear of oversized produce.
Last year, the card competition seized me and I dressed my daughter as a holly-topped candy cane and stuck her on the beach. In the cold. At high tide.
I can still hear her screams in my sleep.
Before Sophie was born, most of the cards we received were oversized, unfeeling, painfully tasteful cards from other childless boomers or the insurance company. Makes me feel all warm and mushy inside just thinking about the prestamped-in-gold signatures.
Today, our refrigerator looks like the pediatrician's bulletin board, each friend's holiday photo more elaborate that the one before it.
The Mommy Wars have sealed it as far as I'm concerned: Next year, it's Dad as the Grinch and daughter as Cindy Lou Who, complete with a teacup Krazy-glued to her scalp.
Now there's another buck or two hundred in the therapy jar.
I was thinking about all this as I stood with my daughter, watching her blow out birthday candles that were poked haphazardly into the frosting instead of placed in heirloom sterling silver holders like freak boy's were over at the next table.
Maybe it was time to simply say no and jump ff this silly, mad carousel of competition.
"Mommy." My daughter looked up at me with shining eyes while Chuck E. himself held her tiny hand in his enormous and somewhat matted, paw. "Can we have a backyard party next year? With just cakew and ice cream and pin the tail on the donkey? Nothing fancy, just me and five or six of my best friends?"
Oh, I'm sorry. That's not what she said. What she said was, "Where's my pony? That boy over there said he's getting a pony today. I want my pony!"
"I'm sorry, honey," I said a little too loud. "Only children who are adopted can get ponies for their birthday."
So sue me. Sometimes it's just more fun t be naughty than nice.

--Rachel