Last week while my mom was visiting, she, my girl and I went to Panera for dinner before Ma sweetly took my girl home so I could have a few hours to work on PARKER CLEAVES. As we ate, I found myself completely overtaken with the conversation of the two women behind me, who were filling out some sort of Bible-related workbooks. 

Their conversation was HILARIOUS and not intentionally at all. I sat there, nodding and smiling at my mom and daughter because they thought they were talking to me, but they were not. They were talking at me while I listened with all my might to the women as they discussed their answers to the workbook questions. 

When we were done eating, we walked out into the parking lot and I told my mom and daughter what they'd been saying. My mom laughed out loud. 

Me: "I'm totally blogging this."

My Conscience My Daughter: "Mommy, what if they saw it?"

Me: "How would they see it? They don't know me. Plus, I don't know their names." (fully aware of how completely wrong and backward this conversation is)

My Conscience My Daughter: "MOMMY."

Me: "Twitter?"

My Conscience My Daughter: "MOOOOMMMMY."

Me: "Okay, fine."

So I told the story in my editorial meeting to my co-workers, and we laughed and laughed. And see, I found a way to blog it without violating the spirit of my daughter's wise words. The best part about this story: Right before I started eavesdropping, I was telling my daughter she can't have her own blog until she's 25. 

I'll just find a way to work that conversation into dialogue in PARKER CLEAVES.

Summer starts early in Kansas City. My daughter's school gets out this week. The pool opens this weekend. The severe weather is already here. 

I just signed my daughter up for the summer reading program at the local library. Summer reading programs were my savior when I was a kid -- I remember the excitement of being rewarded for doing something I liked to do, anyway. I thought, this must be what it is like for athletes! 

Even though I no longer have an official summer break, the approach of that stretch of long evenings and heat-shimmering days still makes me happy. The first hot day has me staring longingly at the pool floaties. Smelling them, just because they smell like summer, like splashing and sunscreen and stacks of books and time to read them. 

We cut every activity except swimming lessons in summer and try not to make any plans that don't involve the lake or the pool or a backyard. Despite those measures, summer always shoots by way too fast, and here my girl just turned nine and we've had half her childhood summers already. 

The windows are open now, and I can smell the cut grass and hear the birds calling to each other, saying hurry, hurry, summer's almost here. 

Summer starts early in Kansas City. My daughter's school gets out this week. The pool opens this weekend. The severe weather is already here. 

I just signed my daughter up for the summer reading program at the local library. Summer reading programs were my savior when I was a kid -- I remember the excitement of being rewarded for doing something I liked to do, anyway. I thought, this must be what it is like for athletes! 

Even though I no longer have an official summer break, the approach of that stretch of long evenings and heat-shimmering days still makes me happy. The first hot day has me staring longingly at the pool floaties. Smelling them, just because they smell like summer, like splashing and sunscreen and stacks of books and time to read them. 

We cut every activity except swimming lessons in summer and try not to make any plans that don't involve the lake or the pool or a backyard. Despite those measures, summer always shoots by way too fast, and here my girl just turned nine and we've had half her childhood summers already. 

The windows are open now, and I can smell the cut grass and hear the birds calling to each other, saying hurry, hurry, summer's almost here. 

Podcast is here -- talking all about Listen to Your Mother! 

The Kansas City Listen to Your Mother show is this Saturday, May 11, at 7 pm at Unity Temple on the Plaza. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door. Unless you win two here.

Now that my conference is over, I'm starting to get really nervous for the show. I've heard all my castmates' performances, and they are both hilarious and heartbreaking. If you're local, I highly recommend the show, and not just because a portion of the proceeds go to the Rose Brooks Center. 

What is Listen to Your Mother, you ask? It's a group of women performing essays on motherhood, daughterhood and what it means to participate in this part of the human condition. The show will be around ninety minutes, and afterwards I promise you will leave a changed person for what you have heard.

I'll also be selling and signing my young adult novel, THE OBVIOUS GAME, and my parenting anthology, SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK, afterward. I'm reordering bookplates so hopefully they will be in by then. If you have a copy and you just want a signature, bring it on down. Some of my castmates will be selling their books, as well, so if you're interested, please bring small bills. Most of us aren't equipped with debit card thingies. 

So! If you want to win a pair of tickets, please leave a comment here. Every comment counts as one entry. I'll close entries on this Thursday, May 9 at 5 pm CT. I hope to see you at Unity Temple on Saturday! 

It's the fifth anniversary of the publication of my parenting anthology, SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK, this year, and so in honor of Mother's Day coming up, I rang up two of my contributors -- Alice Bradley and Eden Kennedy -- who went on to write their own parenting tome, LET'S PANIC ABOUT BABIES. We decided what might be really fun to do in a veiled attempt to remind you our books make excellent Mother's Day gifts for the lovelies in your life is update you on one of our vignettes from SIFTW and ponder which bit of baby advice from LPAB works for tweens, which we all now have.

SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK, Edited by Rita Arens -- buy it here!

I'm going to update my essay, "Sleep Cycles." (p. 25) Originally I included these stages of adult sleep cycles: 1) Alcohol-induced 2) Insomnia-Related 3) The Love Bug 4) New Baby-Induced 5) Toddler-Induced. Clearly, I had a toddler when I wrote this post. There are all sorts of other reasons you can't sleep after becoming a parent. 

My daughter is now nine. Since the Toddler-Induced days, I've also experienced the following sleep disturbances:

6) Growing-Child-in-My-Bed-Induced. My daughter has slept through the night since she was around four or five. It was a gradual thing, when the waking up and crying three times a night became waking up and walking into my bedroom once a night to try to crawl in where it was warm. At first, I gave in (it was always my side of the bed she approached, of course) and let her crawl in, only to find her elbow in my ear, her bony butt in my hip and the amount of body heat with me in the middle unable to crawl out from under the covers or even slip out a temperature-regulating foot stifling. This led to the next stage.

7) Trying-to-Sleep-in-a-Twin-Bed-Induced. When she showed up in the middle of the night, I'd take her back to her own bed and lie down with her, thinking of course I would get up and go back to my own, queen-sized bed in a few minutes. Of course, inevitably I'd lie down, fall asleep, and then be on that dividing line between too tired and too lazy to go back to my own bed even though trying to get any sleep with a grade-school-aged child in a twin bed is just plain ridiculous.

8) Sleepover-Induced. Whether there's an extra kid in my house or my girl is somewhere other than her own bed, I just don't sleep so well, period. I'm going to absolutely die when she goes to college.

I haven't yet gotten to the stages of driving- and dating-induced sleep problems. God help me when I do.

LET'S PANIC ABOUT BABIES! By Alice Bradley & Eden M. Kennedy -- buy it here!

NOW. For the LPAB baby advice that applies to a tween. 

Ahem.

I'm staring at "This Is Overly Difficult, and I Have Changed My Mind." (p. 142) I hope Eden and Alice don't mind if I update their advice for tweens.

Having a baby tween will:

• Win you the approval of the far right Update! As long as you don't end up with a pregnant tween!
• Allow you to start one of those "mommy blogs" everyone's been talking about Update! You'll realize when your kid hits around six OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE? I'M A FUCKING LIFESTYLE BLOGGER. THERE ARE NO MOMMYBLOGS.
• Give you an excuse to expose your nipples in public Update! Give you an excuse to revisit the eighties when your daughter asks for neon socks.
• Allow you to catch up on all those episodes of Sesame Street you've missed. Update! Allow you to catch on to all that is wrong with Disney programming for tweens.
• Exercise your arms from hours of vigorous stroller-pushing and baby-rocking. Update! Exercise your jaws from all those hours of teeth grinding. 
• Provide you with someone to blame for all those thwarted ambitions. There is no need for an update here. Move along.

Read Eden's post here and Alice's post here. And don't forget how lovely books are, especially for pregnant people, new moms, or anyone who prefers to laugh rather than to cry when thinking about children. Who wants to win a set of both books? One entry for each comment, every comment counts, enter as often as you like. I'll ship the winner the books directly from Amazon. The contest ends at noon CT on Monday, May 6 to ship in time for Mother's Day!

UPDATE: Congratulations, Julia! I'll be contacting you for your address. You win both copies!

Yesterday, I went over to Erin Margolin's house to do a practice run-through of the Kansas City Listen to Your Mother show. Basically there are somewhere near a dozen of us, and we're all performing a short essay we wrote about motherhood, daughterhood or some mix of the two. Before we started, Co-Director Laura Seymour was all, "Hey, is anyone good at opening champagne?"

I've worked at four restaurants and a dog track. So I was all, "I AM." There was nervous tittering, because let's face it -- most of us didn't know each other and we were in someone's basement drinking champagne and preparing to expose our innermost secrets in preparation for taking the entire show live in a few weeks. WHAT'S TO BE NERVOUS ABOUT?

So there I was, test-driving my new gray-and-orange-striped-Calvin-Klein-from-Marshall's dress that is super-crazy tight but also super-crazy comfortable, my jacket to hide my nervous-armpit-sweating habit and my Kanye mail-order-discount glasses. The last five champagne bottles I've opened have had a pop, but I've always been able to hold onto the cork. If I didn't know Erin better, I'd suspect her of shaking this bottle all the way home from Costco, because when I opened it, the cork shot out of my hand and the champagne came spraying out so fast I was covered in it, down to my dripping glasses, in nanoseconds. 

It was champagne hubris, y'all. 

It's fortunate that I have an extremely high tolerance for making an ass of myself, because I was COVERED in champagne. My right armpit smelled like New Year's Eve 1998. Still, I cleaned myself up and sipped a little of that champagne while I listened to a bunch of new friends read some truly amazing essays. I laughed, I cried, I wore champagne with pride.

Our show is going to be on Saturday, May 11 from 7-9.  A portion of the proceeds from ticket sales go to the Rose Brooks Center, and there will be a representative from Rose Brooks at the performance to answer your questions about that organization.

A few of us (me included) will be selling our books there afterward. I'll be selling SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK for $10 and THE OBVIOUS GAME for $15, cash or check only. I'll also have some bookplates for THE OBVIOUS GAME in case you already bought it and are like I DON'T WANT TO BUY IT AGAIN I JUST FORGOT TO BRING IT SO PLEASE SIGN THIS STICKER FOR ME AND IT'LL BE ALL GOOD. 'Cause that's the glory of bookplates! Which are really just address labels, but don't tell! The little angel will be assisting me, and she glories in that role, so even if you don't want a book, please stop by and say hi if you are there.

DJ Nibbles loves LTYM.

---

In other Mother's Day news, there's a special promo code and a $50 gift card giveaway over on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews for custom, kid-artwork-inspired iPhone cases. (Twofer)

Scene: Elementary school PTA fundraiser

I shifted from foot to foot. I'd been volunteering for an hour more than my expected 5-6:15 shift. I was hot, and tired, and hungry, and surrounded by children who I did not birth who wanted the soda I was selling but didn't have any money. And they were dressed as their favorite celebrities.

I smiled brightly as much as I could, not wanting to scare them with my inner monologue.

Then she walked past. Probably a sixth grader, dressed as I assume Taylor Swift complete with shocking red lipstick imperfectly applied. She looked at the soda.

"I wish I had money," she said. "It mocks me."

I smiled for real, because that girl is my kind of people.

Setting: Waiting for school bus

Her: Your breath smells like coffee.

Me: Your hair smells like hair.

Her: Your coat smells like cold.

Me: Good one.