Years of my own experience should have clued me in, but until I had a daughter and bought her a cute 1-piece cherry-patterned swimsuit from Target, I hadn’t fully realized that 1-piece swimsuits are REALLY CHALLENGING to pee in. It can be a little tricky to find a cute non-bikini 2-piece for a toddler girl, especially at the BEGINNING OF JULY when summer is OVER.
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Oh hey, another holiday is looming around the corner, BLEAH. I mean, oh, Valentine’s Day, my FAVORITE, I choo-choo-choose YOU!

(BLEAH.)

Please just tell me I’m not supposed to send in Valentines to my 3-year-old’s preschool. The teachers would warn us about this, right? Or is it just one of those Things that Good Parents Know About? ARRRGH.

While I’m stewing over the possibility of needing to make cards for a classroom of kids whose names my son cannot be trusted to accurately pronounce (one girl has been known in our household as “Prafarsha” forever, because that’s what he said her name was. FALSE), please enjoy some Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas for Guys, should you be shopping for the occasion.
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As a sort of follow-up to the topic of home workout DVDs, let’s do one more post on the subject of exercise and health, if you can possibly stand it. It’s still January, after all, and I don’t know about you but I’m still 1) trying to work off the epic number of cookies I consumed in December, and 2) baking more cookies because what else am I going to do with the leftover bag of milk chocolate morsels, other than eat them by the handful, not that, ha ha, I have done such a thing less than 24 hours ago. (MMMPH.)

I’m not sure there’s really anything that makes exercise easy, at least for me, but I do have some go-to items that make it more fun, or comfortable, or . . . well, I don’t know. Less sucky? Let’s go with that.
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Do you realize that Christmas Eve is one week from today?  I’m making a list of gifts that have been given to ME in the past year, gifts that were a success and that you might want to consider buying for someone on your list.

My brother and sister-in-law gave me several pairs of earrings from the Etsy shop Kneehighs-n-Pigtails, and I LOVE them.  They’re so classy and dressy if you’re looking classy and dressy, but they look chic and awesome with t-shirt and jeans, too.
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So. November. About seven weeks left until the winter holidays. TIME TO PANIC.

Or for those of us who lovvvvve gift-buying, time to YAY! Time to start spending time every day prowling around looking for deals. Time to start placing orders and squirreling them away, and forgetting what’s already there, and ending up with too much for some people and not enough for others! Yay!

And this means I only have about seven Tuesdays left to share gift ideas and great finds with you, and
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If you like pink, October is a good time to shop:  a lot of pink stuff is available for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  If you’re like me, you like supporting that cause and also really like the way it justifies a purchase.

Coffee-Mate is offering a pink mug for $12.95; $5.00 is donated.
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I recently received a request to cover gym bags as a topic, which made me happy because O, how I love looking at bags. Diaper, laptop, purse, it doesn’t matter — bags are one of my favorite things to web-window-shop.

I actually could use a new gym bag, since I’ve just been carrying my purse when I go to work out. It’s a tote shape so it works decently for carrying the things I need (iPod, towel, water bottle, keys) but I do notice I’m the only person mincing around the weight room with a, you know, purse. I have a largish duffle bag I could use, but that seems like overkill — I don’t change at the gym, so I don’t need to bring along clothes, shoes, and toiletries.

Don’t you think I need a new bag? COME ON TELL ME I NEED TO SHOP FOR A NEW BAG.

Ahem. Anyway, here are some bags (big and small) I’ve been looking at:
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So Mother’s Day is coming up, traditionally the time of year when lots of women secretly hope for amazingly thoughtful gifts from their spouses and receive . . . well, it’s the thought that counts, right? My own husband has a poor track record with this holiday, one year claiming that it didn’t ‘make any sense’ to get me anything until our son was old enough to pick it out.

(Aw, sweetie, guess what else doesn’t make sense? HAVING SEX AGAIN EVER.)

I don’t lust too heavily after gifts consisting of little blue Tiffany boxes because to be honest, I’d rather have a whole crapload of Amazon gift certificates so I can buy all the makeup, comic books, and DVDs that I want. However, ’tis the season to talk jewelry, so I thought I’d run down some of the top ticket traditional sparkly-things, and see what you think about them:

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Back in 2005 I bought myself a Mommytags necklace when Riley was born, and now that I’ve got a second child (is that ever going to seem completely normal to me, the notion that I have not a child but children?) I need to get myself a third tag with Dylan’s birth date on there. I suppose at that point it won’t quite have the same military vibe (which I love, because hello, as mothers have we not all joined some sort of poop-smeared Special Forces Brute Squad?), but I dig that piece of jewelry. It’s got just the right feel for me: not too froufrou, perfect for t-shirts and dresses alike.

I like the idea of customized jewelry but there’s a lot of cheesy stuff out there, apparently targeting the cheery holiday sweater crowd. I did some browsing around to see what was available that didn’t seem like it should come with a shot of insulin (note to jewelry makers: if your website automatically starts playing sappy music upon loading, most of us can’t hit the Back button fast enough. Welcome to 2008, where web design should not hold a person down and dry-hump their leg); here are a few of the items that caught my eye:

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I’m kind of stepping into Susan’s territory with today’s subject, but I’m hoping to once again use my own need for help as a launchpad for a Milk & Cookies entry. Sure, if I were some sort of “expert” with “useful advice”, I might actually provide “decent blog content”, but —

Uh, yeah. I’ve got nowhere to go with that. Let’s just segue directly to the topic at hand, okay? I want to talk about clothes, specifically the sort of uber-comfortable clothing you wear around the house. Even more specifically, the sort of uber-comfortable clothing that actually makes you feel pretty good about how you look, and that you could wear outside of the house if need be without shame.

See, I’m about to go on maternity leave, and I’m thinking ahead to those days of being at home . . . and I’d like to avoid falling into the trap I did last time, when I continually waited until 4 PM to brush my teeth and slopped around in giant baggy sweatpants all day. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—and it is in fact a survival necessity in those first weeks—but man, it gets depressing after a while. I’d like to stock up on some pretty, comfy essentials for staying home for the next few months, when I’ll be taking care of a baby, a toddler, working when possible, and hopefully staying sane in the process.

Some non-ugly, forgiving-to-the-post-partum-body items I’ve come across:

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