We think this post from a few years back is worth a Second Glance, especially since it’s spring break and we’re off frolicking with our kids. Enjoy!

Ahhhhh…spring break is finally here. Seems like we’ve been waiting for it since the day after school began last year.  A break from the routine of alarm clocks, bed times, endless homework, car pools, nagging.   I am as excited as the kids are.  It’s hard work to parent school children.  A lot of stress.   A lot of responsibility.  A lot of effort trying to  keep up with the  perfect parents who are probably busy trying to keep up with a whole other set of perfect parents.  It’s a vicious cycle…one from which I am ready for a break.  I went to bed last night with “visions” of  relaxation, going to the park, eating sand coated sandwiches  at the reservoir,  soaking up the first glorious rays of the summer soon to come.

It seems that my ‘visions” were slightly off, as I am now, on the first afternoon of spring break, staring forlornly out my window at snowflakes. Three inches of snowflakes to be  exact, and I fear there is more to come.  How could this happen?  How could Mother Nature be so cruel as to  single-handedly destroy MY spring break?  MY time to sit outside and read a frivolous paperback while the kids frolic. There will be no frolicking this week, only whining bored kids and a frustrated mom.  Snow has long ago worn out its welcome.  That happens at about the same time as the after Christmas sales wind down.  I have lost  count of how many times I have already heard today, “Mom, what can I do?”  It’s the same phrase I’ve been hearing for the past 3 months.  I want to say, “Go outside and frolic in the sun!”  Oh, wait a minute…there is no sun!

Thankfully, there is a little angel in the form of a 9 year old girl, who lives down the street.  She came over minutes ago to rescue my son from the gloom and doom pervading  my home.  They are now outside in full winter gear: snow pants, puffy coats, snow boots, hats and gloves.  I’m not joking! If I didn’t know better, I would think it was the middle of winter, not the first day of spring break.   I can see them playing outside in the snow.  Their cheeks are rosy.  They are laughing, throwing snowballs and generally having a great time.  Dare I say they might be frolicking?

Maybe I should take a lesson from the kids.  Maybe it’s time to roll with the punches, even if the punch means one more blast of winter.  If a couple of 9- year-olds can do it, so can I.

I say if  Mother Nature can break the unspoken spring break rule  of warmth, sunshine, and frolicking, well then it’s high time I break some rules as well.  Drastic measures are now called for.  I am now putting on a Michael Buble Christmas cd  in an attempt to lift my spirits.  This will mean breaking my set-in-stone Christmas music rule.   (I made a rule years ago that Christmas music could only be played from Thanksgiving Day until New Years Eve in an attempt the keep the music “special”. ) Strains of  “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” are now flowing through my house. Liz suggested presents and Santa cookies might be in order.  I say “Let’s not go nuts, here.”  Perhaps Liz does not realize what making sugar cookies entails. I mean it is Liz we’re talking about.  She’s probably on a first name basis with the employees at the local bakery, so how could she know!

I think chocolate chip cookies are a suitable substitute, and perhaps I can find some hidden for a rainy (snowy)  day dollar store treasures in a closet somewhere.  Maybe we’ll even blow up a beach ball and toss it around in the snow.   It’s spring break, after all…might as well have some fun frolicking!

-Kate

Since April Fools’ Day is coming up in a few days, we decided this post from two years ago is worth a Second Glance...

It’s finally here.  The day when I get to release my pent up immaturity…the day when it’s perfectly acceptable for me to feel mischievous and sneaky…the day when I get to be all the things I try to teach my kids not to be.

I must confess, when I was writing yesterday’s ridiculous story, I kind of creeped myself out.  Talk about a prank gone awry.   I’m still paying for that one and will be for many, many more years. Just kidding about the whole awry thing.  It’s a prank that went wonderfully right.  (See yesterday’s post)

Anyway, here’s my prank for this year. I decided to play is safe and work with food.   It’s a TV dinner of a drumstick, mashed potatoes & gravy, peas & carrots, corn on the cob, and a brownie with sprinkles for dessert, all in a disposable store bought foil tray.  Here’s the catch…it’s all made of cupcakes.

Here’s how I did it…

Brownie – It’s just a cupcake frosted in chocolate swirled frosting with sprinkles on top.

Peas & carrots – It’s a cupcake frosted in green frosting.  The peas are green runts and the carrots are orange starbursts cut into 4ths.  Just place both randomly on top of the frosting.

Mashed potatoes and gravy – It’s a cupcake frosted with white frosting with a dip in the middle like real potatoes would have. .  The gravy is caramel ice cream topping.  The butter is a yellow starburst.

Corn on the cob – This is 2 cupcakes frosted with yellow frosting.  The kernels are various yellow Jelly Belly’s placed in rows.  The butter is another yellow starburst.  Finish off with corn picks in the ends.

Drumstick – This one is a bit more tricky, but still doable.  Put a donut hole on top of the cupcake then cover the cupcake top & the donut hole with the frosting, filling in the spaces.  Then cover the frosting with crushed graham crackers.  The bone is white chocolate.  Just melt some white chocolate chips in the microwave and put into a zip lock baggie.  Cut off one tip of the bag and squeeze the melted chocolate onto waxed paper in the shape of a bone.  Once it cools,  just stick it into the cupcake.

Have fun fooling your family with this one!

Also, check out this other fun April Fools’ Day Food Prank:

More April Fools’ Day Food Pranks

- Kate

Maybe you’ve run into them. They’re the ones who hunt down every person who passes by their booth with a seemingly innocent, “May I ask you a question?”

Memorize this word, dear readers: No.

Because should you answer in the affirmative, or even acknowledge their presence, you’ll be sorry. Just ask my daughter Hannah.

She and one of her friends were spending the afternoon at the mall, with pockets full of birthday money and mall gift cards – a teenager’s paradise. All was well with the world.

Until they passed the kiosk from you know where and made eye contact with their new stalkers.

“Do you have acrylic nails?” they asked.

“No,” she answered.

“Good,” they said. I imagine they were cackling with delight as they grabbed her hand and began shining one of her nails with their “magic” buffer pad.

Within seconds, they revealed her nail that looked as if it had about 20 coats of super shine on it.

Then, they went in for the kill, and began writing up a receipt for the cost of the item, adding how they “usually charge $40 for the nail kit,” but for her, they’d knock off 10 bucks.

Next thing my daughter knew, she had a brand new nail kit, which included a buffer pad, cuticle oil and a bar of soap. She also had a receipt that carried the words, “All sales are FINAL. No exchanges or refunds.”

Of course, Hannah was crushed – mad at herself for being sucked into their evil little scheme, and mad at them for taking half her cash. Granted, it was a learning experience for her, albeit a bit pricey. It was also an eye opener for us both.

I called the mall after she arrived home, practically in tears over the whole episode. Apparently, they get hundreds of calls complaining about this kiosk on a regular basis. And for whatever reasons, no one does anything about their “business practices.”

I mentioned the incident to my neighbors, and the husband admitted to having fallen prey, as well. In fact, he’d purchased four (yes, four…) kits one day.

“She was hot!” was the only defense he could muster.

Men…

Anywho, since that day, we’ve developed a tried and true system for avoiding the nail girl plague. For the benefit of you, our readers, and your loved ones, here are the Top 10 ways to just say no:

1. Hold your cell phone to your ear and pretend to be carrying on a conversation.
2. Talk non-stop to the person you are with.
3. If you are shopping alone, grab the nearest shopper and start a conversation with them.
4. If the above methods fail, send a text message. Even if you run head first into another shopper, it’ll be better than getting sucked in by the nail stalkers.
5. Focus on the stores on the exterior walls as you walk, pretending to be interested.
6. Duck into one of these stores, wait for the stalker to reel in another unsuspecting shopper, then make your get-away.
7. Pretend like you don’t hear them (one of my favorites, which shouts, “You don’t exist, evil nail people.”
8. Know the kiosk locations (in our mall, there are at least two such kiosks, and strategically map out your store-to-store plan to avoid running into them
9. Don’t go to the mall.
10. Look them in the eye when they say, “May I ask you a question?” Just say, “No” – and whatever you do, keep walking!

-Liz

Tag along with Kate as she makes an attempt at being cool, hip and trendy.

Oxygen bars are all the rage these days among the young trendy yuppie types. While I’ll be the first to admit that I am neither young or trendy, I do occasionally try to be hip. My latest attempt at “hipness” involved putting pink plastic tubes up my nose and breathing  the scent of an orange grove, all while trying to relax and not look ridiculous.

Now in case you are reading this and thinking, “What in the sam hill is an oxygen bar?” here’s the Wiki definition:

“An oxygen bar is an establishment, or part of one, that sells oxygen for recreational use. Individual flavored scents may be added to enhance the experience. The flavors in an oxygen bar come from bubbling oxygen through bottles containing aromatic solutions before it reaches the nostrils.” ~Wikipedia

So my thinking is, ‘Why would someone pay good money to breath in scented oxygen?’ I mean, I can plug in an air freshener and breath all the scented air I want…for free. But never one  to be a party pooper, I tagged along with my daughter, her boyfriend and my husband. We made the trip because the boyfriend got injured in a wrestling match  and was having some trouble with his lungs. My husband (who always tries to be among the hip and trendy) heard about the injury and went straight into Dr. mode, telling boyfriend that the oxygen bar would help him heal more quickly.

We went to a salon called Solace. (You can typically find oxygen bars in salons, health clubs,tanning salons,resorts and on practically every corner in Las Vegas.)

First up at the oxygen bar, my daughter and her bf.

My daughter is looking at me with her “I can’t believe you are about to take a picture of me with plastic tubes up my nose” look, while the boyfriend is looking at me with his “Look how cool and trendy I am” look.

While they got their fill of oxygen, my husband and I got 15 wonderful, luxurious minutes in high tech full body massage chairs, each placed in a darkened quiet room. It was 15 minutes of pure heaven. In fact, I”m sincerely hoping that in heaven we each get our own personal full body massage chairs.

My 15 minutes were up much too quickly, as they pulled back my curtain and I was jolted out of my reverie. I mean really, you can’t put a busy mom of 7 kids in a dark quiet room for 15 minutes and think she’s going to leave willingly.

So off to the oxygen bar I headed. I sat on a stool and put the pastel pink oxygen tubes up my nostrils. They felt hard and plastic-y. Thinking I must have them in upside down, I took them out, turned them over and tried it again. Even more hard and plastic-y. Then as instructed, I put the tubes around my ears to hold it in place.  The right side, however kept slipping off. I now am thinking maybe my ears are lopsided?!

Anyway, I decided to push forward and attempt to relax and enjoy, first with the scent of lavender.  Not bad. A quick re-adjustment of  the tubes which were digging into my nasal passages and then on to the eucalyptus. Too medicine-y and hospital-like for my taste. ( With the twist of a switch we were able to control the scent of our oxygen.) Next scent, and my favorite by far, the orange groves.

I tried to relax, breath deeply and feel the oxygen flowing into my body, truly I did.  But I just could not get past the hard plastic up my nose enough to relax. However, my husband seemed to have no trouble in that department, as he appeared to be practically asleep on his stool. In fact, I thought he might just doze off and fall to the floor.

Here are the claimed benefits of breathing oxygen at an oxygen bar:

-Heightens concentration, alertness and memory

-Oxygen gives you energy!

-Oxygen is vital to your immune system, memory, thinking and sight

-Promotes healing and counters aging

-Strengthens your heart, reducing the risk of heart attacks

-Calms your mind and stabilizes your nervous system

-Speeds up the body’s recovery after physical exertion

-Provides a natural remedy for headaches, migraines and hangovers

-Relieves temporary altitude discomfort

-Improves digestion and cell metabolism

-Relieves muscle stiffness, support pre-athletic performance

-Lessens chronic fatigue syndrome and gives you better sleep patterns

Our verdicts:

The boyfriend: loved it. Thought the oxygen made it much easier to breath for the rest of the day.

The daughter: liked it, but not as much as the boyfriend. She was concerned about looking silly. But she said it made her feel good.

The husband: swears by it. Says he would go every week if he could. He says it helps him when he over-exerts himself.

Kate: ummm…maybe I’m just not cut out to be cool, hip and trendy.

Want to learn more about oxygen bars? Check out All About Oxygen.

I also found this…

“Scientific data says that purified oxygen does very little, as our blood is already saturated with 99% oxygen. Any effect that may occur would dissipate within a few minutes, as the blood re-circulates.

Although oxygen bars offer a respite from the many air pollutants found in large cities, many believe that it’s the same as stepping into any building or car with an air filtration system.

To quote an expert, “If your lungs are healthy, and you have no breathing difficulties, your body has all the oxygen it needs,” says George Boyer, MD, chief of pulmonary and critical care at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. “Taking in more is like going to the gas station and trying to fill a tank that’s already filled.”

The Truth About Oxygen Bars

Check out Kate’s other Adventures…

Kate Goes on an Adventure: with New Moon’s Laurent and Caius

Kate Goes on an Adventure: The Quest for a New Moon Mall Tour Wristband

Kate Goes on an Adventure: Demolition Derby

Kate Goes on an Adventure: Hot Air Ballooning

Kate Goes on an Adventure: Bonneville Salt Flats Speed Week

Related articles

• Increases Your Supply of Oxygen to Rejuvenate You at the Cellular Level (smarthome.com)
• 14 Interesting Facts About Oxygen (femaleimagination.wordpress.com)
• Beauty Byte: OGO Oxygenated Water (fabsugar.com)
• Oxygen discovered surrounding Saturn’s icy moon Dione (slashgear.com)

Rid the World of Fad Diets and Gimmicks Day follows on Jan. 18. While I think the originators of this day probably had the best of intentions, I don’t see this one ever happening. Fad diets and gimmicks have been around since food itself. Might I suggest that the best way to celebrate this one would be to drop any fad diet just for today – and dream of a world where you could eat whatever you wanted and dare anyone to stop you.

On Jan. 22 we celebrate Answer Your Cats Questions Day. In truth, I’d be more inclined to turn this one around on all the cats of the world. While I don’t presently own a cat, I do babysit the neighbor’s cat from time to time. And I have a few questions I’d like to ask. Things like:

• Why must you fly past me as I’m walking down the stairs? Do you really want to see me fall and break a limb? Is it that important that you’re always first to reach the first floor?
• Why do you jump on the counters when you are clearly aware that such activity is not tolerated?
• Why must you root through my cabinets every time I open a door? That’s just gross.
• Why must you always get into things you aren’t supposed to get into, then dash off with a look of feigned innocence as soon as you see me coming?
• Why don’t I trust you? Hmmm???

I suggest holding interrogations with any cats on your list on this day. I may even borrow the neighbor’s cat for a little celebratory fun. Anywho…

We round out the week with National Handwriting Day on Jan. 23.  In fact, Jan. 17-23 is National Handwriting Analysis Week. I think we can have a little fun with this one, too. Since I’d never urge you to do anything I wouldn’t do, I set out on a mission to find a good, free handwriting analyzer on the internet.

After going through several of the analyzers, I found this rather painless (and free) test that you may want to check out for fun. There are a slew of free handwriting analyzers on the internet, so if you have time, do a little surfing and use more than one analysis.

While I really learned nothing new, it did underscore some of my personality quirks with great accuracy. And since this holiday has its own week, you’ll have plenty of time to change your penmanship, should you feel so inclined.

That’s about it for this week, so until next week, get your party on!

dyeing your hair recharges your batteries.

In addition to making you look younger, coloring your hair makes you feel more energized. British researchers who measured how women felt before and after a dye job (even just to cover a few stray grays) discovered that 100% of the women experienced a surge in energy and confidence!

Changing your hair is the easiest way to transform yourself and replenish your zest for life, says Charla Krupp, author os How Not to Look Old.

~Woman’s World Magazine

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Oh man, I really need a vacation from my vacation. More precisely, a vacation after my vacation. I should probably tell you that I spend nine looong months of the year impatiently waiting for the warm, delicious, relaxing, rejuvenating  too short three months of summer. No homework for the kids (or the mom, come on ladies, you know exactly what I mean), no strict bedtimes, the water park just calling our names, beckoning us to frolic and play.

Without going on too much of a whining streak, let me just say that this was the summer that wasn’t, which quickly turned into the vacation that wasn’t.

So, here’s the whine. Feel free to skip it if you’d like. (Haha. Just kidding. Don’t skip it. It’s stuff you need to know.)

You see, I became a mother-in-law this summer, which means I became the mother of the bride, which means every waking moment (and many not-so-waking moments) were spent preparing for the big day, which in reality means crossing off those first six weeks of summer. (Don’t get me wrong, I loved almost every one of those minutes getting ready for the wedding and wouldn’t trade them for anything…but, they did use up half of the summer.)

And then as soon as the wedding was over, the next week and a half was spent helping my second oldest daughter gather all of her earthly belongings and loading them tetris-style into a U-haul to make the big move to Arizona to begin her first job as an English teacher. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, her move coincided with our vacation to Las Vegas, which is a mere two hour drive  from her destination of Kingman, AZ.

On the plus side, her U-haul didn’t get abducted during a week of hanging out in the condo parking lot in the city of sin. On the minus side, most of the vacation was spent house hunting, car shopping, driving, U-haul unloading, and worrying. On the double minus side, I had to leave my daughter behind in Arizona

It was in this state of mind that we headed home from our so-called vacation. About two hours into the drive on I-15, we entered Virgin Gorge, the hot, beautiful, hot, winding hot stretch between Mesquite, NV. and St. George, UT. Did I mention that it’s hot?

Halfway through the gorge our radiator cracked. Not good, but also not the end of the world. We figured we’d just pull off the road and call our auto protection service and have them send a tow. What we didn’t count on was that there was no cell service and it was HOT! 115 degrees hot, with nary a spec of shade. So I did what any desperate mom would do, I climbed to the top of a ridge, held my phone up to the heavens with a prayer in my heart and successfully texted my daughter with instructions to call our auto service to send us a tow.

And then we waited…and waited…and waited, and nothing happened. No tow truck appeared to rescue us. Why? Because our stupid dumb auto service representative (and his stupid dumb supervisor) couldn’t figure out how to over-ride the stupid dumb computer program to send a tow across the state line to an area without a zip code. We were six miles from the state line! Only six miles, people! How hard could it be?  My daughter, whom I had texted, was on the phone with a representative  for over an hour pleading our case and…nothing, nada, zilch. No tow truck.

An hour in 115 degrees.

I made the climb again and luckily for us a truck driver headed in the other direction saw me at the top of the ridge, waving my cell phone around like a mad woman. He honked at me and gave me a thumbs up, which I hoped meant that he planned on sending someone to the rescue.

And then we waited again. And waited some more. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent an hour and a half in 115 degrees with the the sun beating down on you (hopefully you haven’t), but let me tell you we felt like we were not far from possible heat stroke.

Then a miraculous thing happened.  All of the sudden in the cloudless blue sky, a little gray rain cloud appeared right above our car and rained on us. Call it luck. Call it coincidence. Call it happenstance. Call it good karma. Call it divine intervention (my personal choice). Call it whatever you want, but there it was, one  glorious little cloud raining on us, cooling us down. Giving us hope.

And then a kind-hearted Highway Patrolman came to our assistance, hooked tow ropes to our car and pulled us the six miles to the Utah border so the stupid dumb auto service could send a tow.

Thank heavens for little gray rainclouds. Literally. Thank you. And for alert truckers and a kind-hearted patrolman.

And to the auto protection service I say, “May you rot in the 115 degree heat in Virgin Gorge. Well, maybe not rot, exactly, but at least spend a few tortuous hours stuck there with no one to save the day.”

~Kate

P.S. I’m headed out to frolic and play. Maybe you should too.

Related articles

• Kate’s Escapades – Not now! I’m burying a young girl. (coffeebreakwithlizandkate.com)
• Kate’s Escapades – Do you believe in the Vacation Fairy? (coffeebreakwithlizandkate.com)
• Mega-colossal space raincloud found at moist black hole (go.theregister.com)
• Family Vacations In Arizona: A Huffington Post Travel Guide (huffingtonpost.com)

• Are Ticonderoga really the best pencils? (Turns out that  yes, they are. And much to my child’s chagrin, mechanical pencils are still off-limits.)
• Does our county actually have a large enough stock to supply each child with one large bottle of hand sanitizer?
• Will this be the year we discover whether or not demerits are issued if we buy a 48-count box of crayons instead of the 96-count box?
• Is the request for a set of ear buds just a lead up to the near future, when the school list includes a nice laptop computer?
• Do we really have what it takes to make it through fourth grade while maintaining our sanity as a family?
• Would home-schooling really drive me that crazy?

As it turns out, some of these questions will be answered tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’ll be doing my nails while I wait to see how the back-to-school shopping trip goes. Because my dad, in a gutsy show of courage, offered to take my son and my nephew shopping. I say,  “never look a gift horse in the mouth”. And why bother telling Dad beforehand that while my nephew’s list has a whopping five items on it, my son’s list has 21 items. That’s right – 21 (twenty-one) items. And that’s just the list from the fourth grade in general. The individual teacher lists have yet to surface.

So maybe it’s time to tweak this year’s back-to-school questions, in honor of my dad’s unflinching bravery:

• Was his offer to supply shop a knee-jerk reaction? Or did he really think this one through?
• Will he be able to maintain his own sanity more than 45 minutes in?
• Will he tell stories of walking five miles to school, uphill both ways, in three feet of snow?
• Will he still be speaking to any of us after this male-bonding adventure?

I have the strangest feeling that my second set of questions will be much easier to answer than the first. I’m just sayin’.

-Liz Follow @lizrants

As is typical with my daughter, she arrived in North Carolina making quite the grand entrance. I should’ve seen it coming I guess. The first sign that she was off to a rocky start came before she’d gotten out of the county: she’d forgotten the “welcome home” sign that she’d worked on so diligently. So she’d just have to hope Adam could pick her out in a crowd.

The night of Hannah’s arrival in North Carolina, she somehow managed to fall off the hotel room bed and wedge herself between the bed and the wall. Thankfully Lee and Cheryl were there to pull her out of the predicament. How she got there to begin with is anyone’s guess. And quite frankly, we’re probably better off not knowing the details…

All seemed well on Sunday, though. Until my phone rang about 6:30 p.m.

“Whatcha doing, Mother?”

“Um… nothing… what are you doing?”

“Um, well, I just got out of the emergency room.”

I’m sure you all know that in that moment, my head went wild with possible scenarios. Jelly fish? Sting Rays? Shark bite?!?!?! No. She’d been too calm for that one.

“I passed out,” she offered before I could start rattling off my theories.

They’d just left the beach after a day of fun and sun and made it as far as the outside shower area when Cheryl felt Hannah grab her shoulder. As Cheryl turned around, Hannah hit the wooden boards hard and fast, face down and out cold. Heat exhaustion.

Enter the stretcher, a neck brace and joy ride in the ambulance. I’m tellin’ ya, no one knows how to kick off a vacation quite like my daughter, huh?

Now awake and regaining her senses, she felt a tug on her hair, where the EMT was attempting to pull something out of her hair.

“You have a bird feather in your hair,” she told Hannah, who laughed and replied that she’d actually paid someone to put it there. (True story – and just for the record, dear reader and friend Niki says it’s a ring-tail lemur. You be the judge.)

She arrived at the emergency room in her swim suit (as did Cheryl and Lee) leaving enough sand along the trail for a decent castle. Some vital-sign testing, blood drawing and three hours later, she left the ER with orders to drink more water (who knew? right?). A lucky little soul she was that the fall didn’t knock out every tooth in the front of her braces-straightened pearly whites. That would’ve been a real sight for Adam’s homecoming…

Nevertheless, she’d (hopefully) reached No. 3 in the rule of threes. And about 9:15 p.m. Monday night, the moment she, Cheryl and Lee had impatiently waited on for months came, as Marine Lcpl. Adam H. arrived back home on U.S. soil. All was right in the world for my baby girl. Of course, they still have almost a week left in North Carolina, though. Let’s just hope Ms. Entertainment has done enough for one vacation.

-Liz
Follow @lizrants

Which could be an issue I need to re-address. Because I’m a tad bit prone to royal screw-ups, when left to my own devices. Like when I texted a friend after the November elections, assuming (oh, that evil word, assuming) that since he’d just texted me a minute earlier, I need not bother to make sure the open text message was his. Except that it wasn’t – it was a tweet from my favorite weather dude, one of three people  whose tweets are stupidly set up to come in as a text message and a tweet. (Who could’ve set it up like that?!?) So off goes my stupid tweet to the world at large (oops). Enter paralyzing panic, followed by damage control. Could I delete the tweet? Or was I about to label myself “@Dumb%ss” for all Twitterdom to see?

Let’s just say it is with great thanksgiving that I tell you any tweet can be deleted. It is with equally great thanksgiving that I tell you there was nothing colorful or otherwise damning in my first Twitter gaffe. My biggest problem was the egg all over my face, and even eggs will come off with enough soap and water.

Of course, there was also my small snafu earlier this week, when I texted a friend/tweeted the world this little gem: “Colton is getting ready in his sleep, so we’re running a few minutes late.” Had I learned nothing in the last eight months?

It momentarily crossed my mind to pretend that Colton sent it out to begin with:

“Mom blames 10-year-old for tweeting to her tweeple.”

OK, so that tactic probably won’t work. Because I’m thinking a 10-year-old’s savvy in the world of new technology trumps a 48-year-old’s every time. No one would buy that one. The more accurate headline would probably look something like this:

“Mom banned from Twitter, son given complete control over account. Source says Mom is prime example of the dangers of newbie tweeters.”

Such a scenario would be uber-saddening to me. Gaffes aside, I love Twitter. I thoroughly enjoy the people I follow, and am thankful to have some really cool people who follow me, too. So in my best Scarlet O’Hara voice, I announce that tomorrow is another day. I will master Twitter, as God as my witness! I will build my followers, tweet more often and with great savoir-faire. I’ll do so not only with one, but with two Twitter accounts. And I’ll drag Kate into the madness, too! Which is why  I’ve taken the liberty of leading by example. So now all you tweeters can read my rants (and occasional raves) in 140 characters or less  – find me here! Of course, this serves two purposes. Not only will it be great fun to talk coffee break on Twitter, I’ll have a back-up plan. Just in case Twitter decides my tweeting gaffes are enough to ban me from my primary account

-Liz