crunchier than grape nuts

I was recently invited to join a "Crunchy Moms Group" on Facebook. (If you don't know what that is, Google "crunchy mama". Yes, now. The rest of us will wait.)

Now that you know what a Crunchy Mom is, you should know ... I am not one. But I joined the group anyway, because it seemed like the polite thing to do.

I feel like such a fraud.

I am not crunchy; I'm caffeinated.

Crunchy moms are granola women who make their own soap and wear hand-made calico peasant skirts and love farm animals. They hug trees, listen to twinkle ding-dong music, go braless, and consider flip-flops as dress shoes. They braid their hair, bravely venture out in public without makeup, grow their own mushrooms, and clean their houses - and their bodies - with nothing but baking soda and vinegar.

I, on the other hand, wear deoderant. Yeah, the aluminum-laden, cancer-causing regular kind. I tried to give it up.

I ordered an all-natural, Jasmine-Lemon Grass Crystal Essence from hippiestuff.org. My bout with that lasted precisely 37 stinky days when I decided a long, healthy life ALONE, reeking of Jasmine-Lemon Grass BODY ODOR wasn't as fulfilling as the risk of a shorter pleasant-smelling life with an active social calendar.

Clearly, I am NOT a Crunchy Mom. Pseudo-crunchy at best, dipped in a little organic coconut oil.

Although, a couple of days after I joined the Crunchy Mom group, someone posted a "How Crunchy Are You?" quiz. (And you KNOW I can't pass up a good quiz.) Okay, so I was a co-sleeping, partial-cloth-diapering, non-vaxing, homebirthing, homeschooling, non-medicating, organic-baby-food-making, recycling rebel whose youngest self-weaned at 30 months. Oh yeah, and I'm a doula.

QUIZ SCORE: "Granola Earth Mama". The only thing that saved me from a perfect score of "Crunchier than Grape Nuts" is that I paint my toenails and shave my armpits.

Well, most of the time.

Still...L'oreal is my best friend, I haven't worn a peasant skirt since 1977, the only mushroom I ever grew was behind the toilet in our humid Georgia apartment, and thanks to Mary-Katherine Gallagher the thought of tree-hugging kinda freaks me out.

All things considered, maybe I am a little crunchy. Crispy perhaps. Half-baked more likely.

But for all of my truly crunchy friends out there, I AM proud to announce that I'm growing organic onions in my spring salad garden. Oh wait, that's not a salad garden... that's a flower bed.

Never mind.

my life as a newspaper - second edition

HEADLINE NEWS:
A school official replaced a child's "unsatisfactory" sack lunch with ... chicken nuggets. Seriously? Yeah. Watch THIS .

The REALLY ridiculous part to this (beside the fact that school lunches are among the worst of the worst nutritionally), is that kids will only eat what they are taught to eat at home. I eat lunch most Wednesdays with a group of 20 second graders - not ONCE in the entire school year has ANY of them ever chosen a vegetable (usually green beans and carrots are the offerings) when they go through the lunch line. OCCASIONALLY a few of them will pick up a piece of fruit. OFTEN many of them will use their pocket change to buy an extra bag of chips or a Capri Sun to supplement their chicken nugget, instant-mashed-potato, white roll and chocolate milk cafeteria lunch.

HUMAN INTEREST:
Speaking of children, Mayah and I were Skyping the other day, discussing arachnology*, optimism* and astronomy*, the depths of which exhausted her little 18-month-old brain, and she fell asleep. Her lovely mom and I continued to talk for a bit about more mundane subjects like nutrition and parenting, then we said our goodbyes. A bit later, I got a text that read, "Mayah just woke up very confused about why her M.E. is not still on the computer!" Needless to say, M.E. logged back on and said goodbye with waving and "I love you" signing and kiss blowing.

*arachnology = Itsy Bitsy Spider
*optimism = If You're Happy and You Know It
*astronomy = Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star

CLASSIFIED:
Speaking of texting, because my son does not properly know how to express his emotions with anything other than sarcasm, he texts me horrible things when he travels so I will know he made it to his destination safely. Our last exchange read something like this:
Kevin: I died in a car crash.
Me: Well, I certainly hope you were wearing clean underwear.
Kevin: I was ... BEFORE the crash.

LIFESTYLE:
Speaking of underwear, Kacey nap-dreamed that I was an out-of-control wedding planner at my niece's wedding. In the dream, I got mad at Kacey and threw her bridesmaid dress into the hall and made her wear a sports bra and a black leather mini-skirt, which of course, is completely ridiculous. No self-respecting wedding planner would allow a bridesmaid to upstage the bride.

OBITUARIES:
Speaking of leather, Norman Mailer is dead. Not the author - though he is dead too as of about 4 years ago. The Norman (and) Mailer I'm referring to were cows. 'Norman', after the calf Billy Crystal brought home in the movie City Slickers, and 'Mailer' because once you have a cow named Norman, the two writers in the family saw it as the obvious, and humorous, second choice. Anyway, Norman and Mailer recently took a one-way trip to visit the butcher, after which Kevin confessed to his father that he once punched Mailer dead in the nose when the cow tried to kick him. When his father expressed disdain, Kevin said, "Dad, the cows are hamburger now. Just think of what I did as 'pre-tenderizing'."

A few nights later, as I was eating some Norman Mailer spaghetti, Sara M. asked me if I was thinking about the cows as I ate it. I said, "Yes. I'm thinking, 'You're DELICIOUS.'"

EDITORIAL:
Speaking of hooved animals ... I think Deer Crossing signs are discriminatory. They're really Buck Crossing signs. That's why you almost exclusively see does as roadkill, because we aren't properly warned to look out for them.

Besides that, I'm pretty sure the antlers on these signs are backwards.