Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Grandma's Catalog is Selling Dildos

For years, I've ordered "Santa Letter" service from them. Your order the service and they send a form letter from Santa with your child's name on it and other small personalized details included. It gives your kid the illusion that Santa himself is writing to them, knows their name and actually cares if they have been bad or good, for goodness sake.



My kid learned a little more from the Walter Drake catalog this year.



Being Christmas time, my daughter thumbs through all the catalogs that we receive in the mail and uses a marker to tick off things in the "Want" category. I encourage this. It makes my shopping life easier. The Walter Drake catalog is a bit boring in the toy department, seeing as its what I usually categorize as a Grandma catalog, but my daughter will leave no stone unturned during the Christmas season and goes through every catalog that we receive, and every one that Grandma gets, too.


For most of my life, I remember my mother getting the Walter Drake catalog. It is the type of magazine style catalog that sells Christmas Cards with religious messages, silky hair-caps to keep your 'do in place while you sleep, compression socks for your legs and kitchen gadgets to make your culinary life a little easier. My mother has boxes of Walter Drake Christmas Cards that she still sends out every year.




This year, as my oldest daughter sat at the kitchen counter reviewing the Walter Drake Holiday Offerings, near the end of the magazine her little eyebrows knitted together.

"Weird," she said, putting the catalog down and retreating to the couch to read Percy Jackson.



I picked up the magazine and started going through it to see if she left me any hints as to what she may want to get from Santa this year.



I wasn't expecting the selection of Dildos on page 47.




Sandwiched between the ads for Diabetes Compression Gloves to relieve chronic pain and extra foam cushioning to make your Wheel Chair more comfortable, there was a selection of Erotic Toys. The "Don Wand, the Gigi and the new, waterproof 9 inch want with 5 attachments and eight vibrating patters.



I am really hoping that my 8 year old was too bored to get passed the more pedestrian "Skinny Wallet" and the "Under the Eye Lift Serum." I'm not sure that she got to the Dildo page. I'm a little scared to ask.



My 3 year old thumbed through the magazine, too. So did Grandma, to whom the catalog was sent in the first place.



I will never, ever consider Walter Drake to be a Grandma Catalog again. At least not the kind of Grandma I can envision without wincing.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Know your Place!!

The first day of the official Indoor Soccer season began with new uniforms, on a new field, under a massive, new air-formed dome. Which, incidentally, smelled like "new pool float."

We were so excited about Abby's first game on a premier team and she was mentally and physically ready, willing and able.

How did she do???????????????????????????????????

I think "unmitigated disaster" would be kinda fair. Painful to watch, painful to look at, painful to be there. Having only really played one defensive position for the past two years, the poor kid had no idea what the coach meant when he told her different positions.
When he told her to mark up to a certain player on the other team, she nodded her head but wouldn't cross the halfway line to mark up. She was suppossed to be on on side of the field in a new position, but didn't understand and went to another side by mistake. When she realized her mistake, I thought she was going to cry out there. Hundreds of people, three fields, kids who are AWESOME players kickin her butt and she was just trying to figure out her place in it all.
Poor kid. We'll work on knowing positions and getting her confidence back up so that she can go kick butt like she normally does.
Until then, remember what it was like to be the only kid out there who didn't know your place? I had that memory in vivid detail today.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Back to Funny

"Evie, what happened today that made us laugh really really hard?"

"My bup."

"Excuse me?"

"My bup. It always makes you laugh, Mommy."

"It does?"

"Yes. Cuz its so cute."

So, other than Evie's butt, which is that cute, here were other funny things that happened today:

1. I remembered, vividly, how slippery the rocks are at Hammonnassett Beach. That was about a millisecond before I remembered how cold the water is in November. That was a microsecond before I fell in and remembered how much I dislike wet, sandy, clingy clothes stuck to me.

At the same exact time, I recalled how much I loved the beach. Every sandy, wet, cold, slippery bit of it.

2. On the way home, my brother had a look of happy exhaustion that melted from his face, replaced horror and regret.
"Oh, God. I forgot to take the huge snails out of the bucket after I showed Evie."




I got some great pictures of my mom and Evie and Don having a beach picnic at sunset and a lot of "prippy prippy shells."