Not Cool

Jon is home, so I have ignored you all.

I knew having a kid would ransack my cool points, but there's something sweet and young and starry eyed about being pregnant with your first baby, so I held onto this idea that even after the ransacking, I would still maintain a degree of the joie de vivre that causes people to say, "You have kids? I never would have guessed!" That was dumb of me.

I haven't gotten a mom haircut, I wear skinny jeans and I listen to Adele. But the inevitability of my loss of coolness keeps proving itself. Strollers are great cup holders, but walk into Anthropologie with a kid in a stroller and you have to be wearing a dress or harem pants in order to make up for it. Walk into a store with a kid and no stroller and there's nothing you can do to make up for it, because you're guaranteed to be grim-faced and wild-eyed from fighting the wildebeest in your arms, whose purpose in life is to rearrange the jewelry display and throw chic pottery at the sales associate.

Target is the new Anthropologie. They get me there. They have big red wildebeest holders with wheels.

Jon and I ran away as soon as his parents came into town. They watched Nate and we tried to ski. I'll elaborate on my first-timer skiing prowess another time, for your reading pleasure, but know that my parents have been charged with neglect, having never taught me to ski, so that now, at 26, I fall down the intermediate slope like a stretch armstrong doll, picking up snide comments from the people on the lift overhead when I ski horizontally up snowbanks and land on my head and my feet at the same time. I wish I was kidding.

Yesterday when the in-laws were in town and we decided to go to Torrey Pines to hike along the beach-front cliffs, I surveyed my outfit. I had on designer jeans - my only redeeming outfit choice - that are high heel-length. I can't wear them with flats. I wasn't about to wear wedges on a hike (although in retrospect, I should have) and I was comfortable. So I put on tennis shoes. With jeans. In public. Which would have been fine had we only gone hiking. But we got hungry. Hiking does that. So we went to PF Changs. With my mom outfit. Let it be understood that my mother-in-law, who is also a mom, had on a cute outfit with chic flats.

I already felt my momishness when we walked into the restaurant. My hair in a messy bun, my zipped up hoodie, my mom shoes, my toddler running and shrieking and raising... heck. Everyone else in heels and tiny skirts and liquid eyeliner. Had I remembered make up that morning? I couldn't remember. I escaped to the bathroom, where three tiny, wobbly-in-high-heels lipstick princesses preened in the mirror. I had, indeed, remembered make up that morning, as was evidenced by the mascara, raccooning under my eyes. I walked into the stall and realized my fly was already down. Had been down the whole afternoon. Because, you know, it matched my outfit.

Moral of the story: never leave your house.

Or take a cue from your mother-in-law and care enough before you leave the house looking like Wal-Mart, so that you don't conclude at the end of the evening that you should never leave your house. And then, make rice-krispies treats. They fix most mom-things. But don't share with your kid. He doesn't need the sugar. You, on the other hand, most definitely do. Sugar and one of those people that tell you what to wear and make sure you don't leave the house looking like what you are.