January 4th, 2011

PajamaJeans: A Mommy’s New BFF

My friends and I like to regale each other with stories of our personal parenting disasters. Maybe the omnipresent pressure to play the cookie-cutter, Martha Stewart, soccer mom has us hitting the sauce too hard or taking it out on a bag of Pirate Booty. But, we find that the soothing, “Oxytocin-like” release to friends is clearly much healthier.

Yes, it’s fun to look an equally disheveled mommy friend in the eye and say: “Shiiiiiiit! I forgot to bring in 32 organic cupcakes today!” (With no flour, dairy or peanuts in them.)

But my favorite mommy humiliation moments have always been the different stories about getting busted for wearing our pajamas to drop the kids off at school. Because who HASN’T tucked their pajamas into their rain boots, thrown on a ski jacket, and driven the kids to school? Forgetting, of course, that once you get there, you actually have to get out of the car in your pilled-up, hideous, cardinal-red flannel pajamas, and help your kids get their “whirling tornado” science project from the car into the auditorium for the science fair that night―ooops! Continue… »

By Annie Yearout

June 28th, 2009

Stop-Light Memories of Soccer Games Past

I was waiting at the intersection for the signal to turn green.  Suddenly, I heard sequels of laughter from the car next to me.  I turned and saw a Volvo station wagon full of girls in soccer uniforms.  They were about eleven or twelve chattering among themselves.  The mom driving was oblivious to the noise coming from the back seat of her car.

At first I was relieved it wasn’t me behind that steering wheel.  I couldn’t imagine driving one more carpool to one more soccer game.  For years I drove my two girls and their teammates to games all over the San Francisco Bay Area.  I spent many a weekend at tournaments, but one of the perks of endless hours of sitting through those games was comparing notes with the other moms about the whereabouts of our daughters. 

As our girls entered their teen years and boys and drugs circled their lives, we grew closer as a community of moms.  We began to rely on those weekend morning soccer games to review events from the night before.

Continue… »

By Marilee Stark