pinterest | sensationalfamily

I haven’t written in awhile. Life picked up the pace on me. Work got busy, birthdays came and went, the weather got nice. During all that, Stampy and I have been having some quality time. I guess you can say I’ve been too busy living my life to write about it. But something happened to me today that I feel has happened to others, so I thought I would share. I felt the Pinterest guilt.

Tomorrow is Charlie’s Easter party at school and I’m one of the party moms. Naturally, I volunteered, or really stated, that I would bring the snack. Being the mom of a food allergy kid means I will always “volunteer” for that job. Up until today, I just assumed I would make cupcakes with pastel Eastery colored frosting. That sounded easy. I didn’t search recipes online or in cookbooks, I just planned on making chocolate cupcakes. Then today hit. I started at work at 7:30am, managed to finish up with just enough time to drive the mile to Molly’s school to for our parent/teacher conference, then to home for a quick lunch and out the door for a play date. Once we got home I was just too pooped to make cupcakes and frosting. So, I headed to Pinterest. Big mistake. Huge. After looking at numerous fun sweet treat options, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t have the time, energy or ingredients to make anything other than cupcakes or brownies. Brownies were the easier choice so BAM! brownies it was. Only something happened after I decided. I kept thinking that brownies just weren’t enough. How could I make brownies better? How could they be more Easter-y? I literally spent a good ten minutes contemplating this fact and starting to feel worse and worse about my decision to bake brownies.

Luckily, I snapped back into reality. I felt bad about making homemade brownies. I realized I hit a new level of crazy. A new level of mom-perfection guilt. I’m not even sure who I was trying to impress with anything. I’m taking food to twelve 2-3 year olds. I’m pretty sure that they don’t care what they get. I could probably give them anything that contained chocolate and/or sugar and they would be happy. So, I made brownies. Delicious, gooey, chocolately brownies. And I feel good about it.

I will continue to internet hoard though, because I do love Pinterest.

Dear Parents Magazine,

While I appreciate your monthly reading material that comes to my house, I’m having difficulty following you on Pinterest. I guess I usually just flip through your magazine, reading an article here and there and just looking at pretty pictures along the way. You always have the cutest babies and toddlers. However, on your Pinterest page I’m forced to read your captions on Pinterest and then I realize that I’ve been missing a lot of shenanigans while flipping through your magazine. For example, this jewel of a pin you had last week:

Now, I’m not saying that this isn’t a cute idea. I mean, probably to get my kids to do this would suck about a good hour of our day which I’m always looking for activities that occupy little hands for more than 10 minutes but I think you are overlooking a big problem in our house. My kids eat sandwiches, yes, but fancy ones? No. Charlie would’ve thrown all the Cheerios on the floor and proceeded to tap dance on them to create a nice sandy floor to roll on. Molly would end up screaming and in tears over the fact that her masterpiece wasn’t good enough and demanding that I sprinkle her Cheerios for her. Oh, and I also wouldn’t do it up to her standards so there would be more tears. This time from both of us. I’m sure at this point Charlie would be bored of his Cheerio dust and decide to mess up what Molly has been working on for 20 minutes to get “just right”. This leads to more tears, usually followed by “mean actions” and a time out. Did I mention my kids don’t eat vegetables? Charlie’s would be on the floor with his Cheerios and Molly would be telling me 800 times “I don’t like that” and insisting it be removed, then crying because her flower doesn’t have a stalk or leaves. Skip ahead through a few more arguments and time outs and we are now way past lunch time, nobody has eaten and I’m half a bottle of wine in and it’s only noon. So, while I like your idea of fancy food, I have to admit that my kids aren’t fancy and if it’s all the same we’ll stick to our plain old grape jelly sandwiches.

Sincerely,
Jamie, mom to Sensational Kids.

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I got the Pinterest guilt

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