Oh, let’s get political. Why not? Not really. I just want to talk about the bailout and all the conversation it’s generating. I will apologize upfront. My husband is a free market economist. We subscribe to The Economist. You can already see where this is going.

I listened to the partisan politics. Both sides screaming that the people should be getting the bailout, not the financial institutions. I’m not sure exactly how that would happen but wouldn’t that be awesome? A check in the mail for around $ 4,000 to every taxpayer?

I began to argue with my husband about the reasoning for the bailout. I mean, if my business goes under, there is no one to bail me out. With no expectations that the government is going to hand me a blank check, I make careful decisions. If my decisions are wrong, then it’s on me. My husband said that without money, the banks would have no money to loan. Money to loan to whom?
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I’m banging this post out on my two week old laptop. My laptop which, at this moment, is lighter because it lacks a space bar, numbers 1, 2, and 3, tab, shift lock, shift and maybe a function key? Let me say it again. NEW laptop.

It seems that while I took my 4 minutes to make lunch, The Baby took his 4 minutes to rapidly rip as many keys off my keyboard as he could before he got busted. That would be over 30. To say that I cried would be a mild understatement. This was my laptop that we couldn’t afford but that my husband said I needed because of all the trouble
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OK, that’s not how the saying goes but that is my life these days. All of those mailers I decided to do? I ended up with 624. While affixing address label number 618, I noticed the address said “Santa Monica Boulevard, Richmond, VA.”

You see where this is going. In case you don’t know, there is no Santa Monica Boulevard in Richmond. I know this personally. I should have been tipped off by the Hawaiian street names in Tennessee before that but I was too
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My friend Wendy is really trying to fix me. She is the one that brought me into the wild and crazy world of craft shows. She swears by craft shows. Once you get beyond all those people who pull out 9 million items from the back of a minivan and then proceed to sell thousands of dollars of items that sell for $2.50, it’s fairly uneventful.

The problem is, those craft show people? They know what they are doing.
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This post could also operate under the title “how that Ad Guy Josh ran up my credit card bill.”

Every once in a while around the internet you will see one of these pictures.

It’s usually in the right column of one of my favorite mom blogs. I’ll pay for blogads because they are a great way to remind people that I am around. I have always recovered my cost. But sometimes you just want to go all out with advertising. Make it big. Someone emailed me the other day and suggested I go print advertising in a baby magazine. I emailed her back with a copy of the media kit that said a 2 inch by 2 inch ad running once in a baby magazine costs $60,000.

$60,000.

Explain to me who is operating with that kind of budget? Clearly a lot of people because baby magazines are filled with advertisements. OK, so apparently there is a whole world of much cheaper “remnant ads” available when they have space to fill at the last minute, but we are still talking thousands.

I’m a one woman show. Well, two women, if you count Susie Sunshine as Chief Correspondent Girl. “Thousands” is not a word that fits in my budget. But I do have this funky little undisclosed political t-shirt side business with my friend Melissa that needed a little advertising. I contacted Big Ad Agency about doing online advertising on a news website that gets traffic that makes Dooce’s traffic look like my traffic at Mommy Needs a Cocktail.

Josh is a salesman. Josh must be working on commission. I should know this. But I fell for his sexy voice.

J: We do CPM. This will be perfect for your t-shirts.

He explained the complex formula used so that people like my husband who refresh the page 9,000 times every day won’t be using up all my clicks. I called everyone I knew and told them they had to stay off the website for the next 3 days because I didn’t want to be wasting my 2 million clicks on someone who isn’t going to buy a shirt. My partner in crime in this endeavor called me to say she hadn’t seen the ad yet. I called Josh to make sure it was up and running.

J: I can see it right now.
K: Thanks, Josh. Can you get off the site? I want my click back.

He laughed.

I sat back and waited for the money to roll in. And waited. And waited. And waited. With three orders after 18 hours, I could only describe my mental state as horrified and panicked.

Josh wasn’t feeling my panic. Probably because my credit card payment had cleared.

J: Well, you can only figure out these things by trial and error.

Um, that trial and error is a mortgage payment, you loser. Let’s try to make me feel a little better about this. I swapped out my photo and raised my frequency.

And the orders started flying into my inbox. At the end of my 72 hours, I had made my money back plus some more to fund our next advertising scheme.

But the 10 years of my life I lost from worrying that we had thrown the money down the toilet? I’d like that back. Lucky or brilliant? I’m not sure. You have to know your audience, realize that it may fall flat and identify your goals. So I didn’t make millions but Would I do it again? Someday I’ll tell you about that time I rolled an eight six times in a row at the craps table in Vegas…

When I was pregnant with The Baby, I can’t tell you how many people asked me if I had lost my mind.

“You are going to have two in diapers. On purpose.”

The funny thing is, I know myself fairly well. I’m not one of those moms who keeps getting knocked up because she LOVES babies. I have a friend who loves babies so much that she swears she will have 9. She says she can’t help herself. Me? Not so much. All those days of wondering if I was a total idiot because I have done everything I can think of and he is still crying. Those days when you hold them all day and they still don’t stop? What now? And then you cross that line and suddenly they TELL you what they want. It’s awesome. Even if what they want is 30 popsicles.

So I got lucky and was able to stack my babies on purpose. Believe me, I know I am lucky that it worked out that way. But I knew that for me, if I got a breath of freedom for just one moment, if it started to get what I perceived as “easier,” The Boy would have been an only child. Seriously. If only for the reason that it actually got HARDER than before but I was already pregnant again. That shipped had sailed.

Which means that now that the babysitter Bob the Builder can keep an eye on The Boy for a half hour while I get my act together, I now have a 16 month old who cannot, if his life depended on it, stay out of my stuff and out of my way. Yesterday he fell into a screen filled with brown ink. He looked up at me with his best, “How the heck did that happen” look and I looked at him with my death ray eyes. I JUST HAD ONE MORE SHIRT TO SCREEN PRINT. I turned around and he was standing on the counter. Danger? The Boy told me he was going to move all the stools out of the room so The Baby would be safe. The Baby took all the stools and pushed them back in the room and climbed back up on the counter.

“MOMMY!!!!!!!!!!”

Sometimes I think it might be better that I didn’t get a “break.” I mean, now I don’t know what I am missing, right?

I have a friend who says this exact same thing every single time I talk to her.

She moved away a few years ago but every once in a while we call each other up to see what’s up. She tells me what’s going on in her life and I tell her what is going on in mine. Without fail, she says, “I just don’t know how you do it.”

This is my friend that called me when her baby was four weeks old because she was bored out of her skull. Not the baby, the mother. She had just finished repotting all her plants and was well on her way to alphabetizing her bills. I am not lying. This fascinated me. When I had The Boy, I took that whole “sleep when the baby sleeps” to heart. For the first six months of his life, I had two naps a day. I was exhausted all the time. So this is my friend who had a baby a couple years after mine and she’s unflappable. And she wants to know how I do it every day.

This always cracks me up. It cracks me up because I feel like every single day I’m doing it even more half-assed than ever. A toddler, a preschooler and an ever growing business. I never admit to my friend that Dora used to be my best babysitter but then Bob the Builder gave her the boot in the Tivo smackdown. But now? Now that toddler has his legs. It is officially OVER yet again. Take this morning, for instance.

The phone rang as I was printing up shirts this morning. Printing up a shirt for a woman whose order was lost in the mail. I have apologized profusely for the Postal Service (and I thought those days were over) but this leaves me rushing to beat the clock of her must-have attire for a vacation. I answered the phone as I caught The Baby pulling off the top to the silver glitter ink.

“I’m calling about your shipping account with us. Is this a good time to call?”

Yeah, there is no such thing. Then The Boy walked into the room.

TB: Mom.Mom.Mom.Mom. Danyelle just called on your cell phone. I already talked to her. She wants you to call her.
K: You are three. What are you doing answering my phone?
TB: Mom. I ANSWERED your phone. I was watching my videos on your phone and it rang. You should call her back.
K: Well, thanks. You can be my new secretary. Wait, what videos were you watching?

The last time he helped himself to my I-Phone, he sent everyone in my inbox a Timbaland video from YouTube. Thank GOD it was that and not… Well, we all know what’s floating around on YouTube these days.

I turned around to find The Baby with fingers covered in silver ink. He was repainting my workshop with the silver ink. He had the glee of a bunch of 4th graders who have found a broken thermometer and are swirling a mound of mercury in their hands. Except we didn’t KNOW that mercury could kill us. Well, that and the silver ink is harmless.

I grabbed The Baby’s hands and wiped them furiously with paper towels. I turned around to find The Boy hanging on the end of the dryer, having successfully stopped the belt that is running shirts through to cure the ink. I look in to see a shirt smoking inside.

K: STOP!!! I MEAN, START THAT BACK UP.

The Baby runs past me to turn the belt completely off. Not the heater, just the belt. I turn it back on, he turns it on high. His brother comes around the dryer and jumps on my back. I am now holding both of them as I am crouched down, aiming a temperature gun in the dryer to see if the shirt has cured.

The phone rings again.

“We’d like to talk to you about your long distance service. Is this a good time?”

Yeah, I don’t know how I do it either.

A year ago I moved into the house I am living in now. Before this house, we lived in a shoe box closer to town. It was The Husband’s humble abode and I mournfully kissed my condo (even closer to town) goodbye and headed out to the ‘burbs upon holy matrimony. For better or worse. Sure we had practically the same square footage and mine was a one level condo and his was a two story colonial. It was filled with all his crap. I stuck my boxes of stuff in the basement and on those odd days when I remembered I had stuff, I glared at him with resentment. My 1,000 pound screen printing press lived up the street at my friend Cath’s house. I would go over to see it or play with it every once in a while. It was kind of like my printer was in prison and I was going for my once a month visit.

Then we moved to the country. The sticks, if you will. We moved here because by the light of my Maglite, in the utter darkness of no power, I came across the most amazing basement you have ever seen. It was PERFECT. The rest of the house? Eh. 1980’s borders? I spit on them. No washer or dryer? HA. That water pouring into the other side of the basement? No problem.

We moved in here and I set up shop. In the next 7 months, my business expanded. Yet I maintained my inability to organize.

This is how it looked.

Then Susie Sunshine came. She had me up til all hours of the night, sorting, organizing, cleaning, organizing, sorting. She explained ad nauseum how my life would be so much easier if I realized that I actually HAVE 3 dozen navy t-shirts so I really don’t need to order any more. When I say “ad nauseum,” I mean it in the nice “ad nauseum” kinda way. Either way, this is what we ended up with at the end of the weekend.

I had to cut out the counter because there was stuff I was supposed to clean off and I still haven’t. And that box on that wooden table? That’s not gonna go over will with Ms. Let’s Have Our Own Reality Show And Throw Most Of Your Junk Out.

My husband was so delirious, he started referring to her as my sister wife. In the good way, of course. And today? Today I got my work done in a reasonable amount of time. I didn’t even use the words, “If you were a box of 200 shirts, where would you be?” Now, if only I find my phone bill…

Oh, you really want to know who won, right? I tapped into my all-knowing random number picker on google and here are the winners. Kim (the first Kim to leave a comment) gets the Mommy Needs a Cocktail tee and ironically, Lynette (who apparently really needs it) gets the “My Mom Doesn’t Want Your Advice.” Oh, and Karen gets a MNAC tee because she said it was her birthday. WOOHOO!!!