Four quick Nerdy Baby things:

1. The coloring books are here and they are awesome.

$12 available here or on the etsy shop here.
This might be the most me-ish thing I’ve ever made. Every page of it amuses me.

2. NEW specially-priced sets of ten prints.

Whatabargain! This is TEN prints for the price of 1 3/4 prints.

3. We’re having a super crazy back-to-school decorate-your-classroom poster sale. Teachers requested, mother approved! Click here to get four posters for the price of 1.8 posters plus free shipping.

4. I can’t remember the fourth thing.

5. Oh wait! I remember. I have about 20 blankets that we had printed as a test run. They are really cute, but we aren’t making more of them because I prefer to make things that are cute AND ALSO funny (to me). These are adorable, but not at all hilarious (to me).

Anyway, we’re selling them off on etsy. Would make a great baby shower gift for the biology geek in your life. Grab em here.

I had a sort of internal meltdown last week. I’m still recovering from — funny story — mono and so my physical and mental energy is low this summer. For an already lazy person, mono is like a metaphor that requires more energy to formulate than a person with mono would have.

Last week I was trying to make all kinds of decisions and everything ended up crunched together at the bottom of a steep hill in my brain. Usually I’m confident when making decisions, even (especially?) wrong ones. If I can gather information and then quiet my mind, I usually know what I need to do — boom, decided. There, done. But last week it felt like all this racket and too many questions and the more I worked on each decision, the more unsure of each one I felt until my noisy brain was buzzing about all consequences of all choices great and small until Kevin came home one afternoon to find me sitting at the dining room table studying print outs of four different online shopping carts. I was crunching through them with pen and calculator, trying to figure out which place has the true best deal. On stuff that was all a pretty good deal.

So yeah. Which $1.00 nonessential item should I buy oh no! And should we buy a house? And if so, where should we live for the next ten years? Should I sign the boys up for the expensive three-day camp they want to go to next week? What if they resent me forever for deciding that no, it’s too expensive? Should I make something new for dinner? Should we continue with home schooling? Which terrible plot against my uterus should I pursue? How many of this product should we stock? How much can we afford? BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ my brain was just a scrambled awful mess.

As the week went on, things got worse; I I was feeling like an emotional idiot and had decided that the problem with first-world life is choices. Choices are wonderful, but too many can be paralyzing. You don’t have to worry about this if you’re lucky enough to live in a tiny village in a developing nation.

Dear woman living in a third world village,
What should I cook for dinner tonight? I can’t decide! My family’s sick of Mexican food, and my youngest doesn’t care for stir fry. We could make spaghetti? But I’m not convinced that pasta has much nutritional value, especially since the boys don’t like much sauce. HELP!
Sincerely,
Cooking in California

Dear Cooking,
I understand. I find it easiest to make a meal plan at the start of each week. That saves me time because instead of deciding every day whether to cook Chinese food, Italian, or traditional American food, I can simply look at my meal planner and see at a glance that tonight I will be cooking rice. Again.

Dear woman living in a third world village,
While we are leery of buying for obvious reasons, this housing market is certainly a great opportunity that we don’t want to miss. The problem is deciding where we want to live! My husband’s job can take us anywhere in the country, and I work from home. There are things about this area that we don’t like, however the weather is nice and we do have friends here. What do you think? If we decide to buy a house, how should we decide where in the country to settle?
-Househunting in Hotlanta

Dear Hunting,
I’m not sure what you mean by housing market, but I can relate to this dilemma. A recent flood destroyed our home and our few belongings so I had to decide where in the whole of this giant earth to rebuild. After weighing the many options, I ended up making a scrap metal shelter in the place where my house had been. I figured, hey, it’s where your parents live, it’s where your grandparents live, it’s where every generation of your family has lived for at least 1200 years. Why mess with a good thing?

Dear woman living in a third world village,
Should I send my kids to a half-week of I Can Cook summer camp? They will love going! But it would cost more than $150 per child, and that seems like a lot to spend on something that’s over in just a couple of days. I feel guilty not sending them, but I worry about money if we do send them. Am I a terrible mother if I don’t let them go? How do we decide?
Mean mom in Minnosota

Dear Mean,
I started to help you write a list of pros and cons but honestly, this question is so offensive I can’t even formulate an answer. $150 per child would feed and clothe my kids into adulthood. I’m trying not to throw up thinking about the money you spend on bullshit.

Dear woman living in a third world village,
I have a noncancerous uterine growth that needs to be removed. I’m happy with our current family size, so no more babies for me! My doctor has given me so many options to think about. Should I have the growth removed in her office and then get an IUD? Should I try the sterilizing ablation procedure (with tubes tied) or just go for a hysterectomy and get it over with?
Sincerely,
Sick of my uterus

Dear Sick,
Jesus Christ, each of those options sounds like winning the lottery. Close your eyes and pick one!
You have all those choices and you are bitching because you don’t know what to doooo? How about we trade places and you come here to this dirt-floored corrugated tin shack and raise twelve malnourished children while I go to America and choose any one of a dozen amazing, safe, completely liberating procedures and bask in a life where I can control my own body and life? Seriously, what the hell is the matter with you?

Another guest post over at Little Ladies Who Lunch: Healthy meals for picky kids with lazy parents.

After nine years of blogging, I shouldn’t be nervous about writing my guest post over on Little Ladies Who Lunch. But I don’t want to mess up and write anything that will make Susan hate me and I don’t want to have her come back from her vacation to find that my entry on her blog horrified and offended her jillions of food-blog fans who are not only dropping her from their daily must-read list but are suing her personally because of what a bad job I did writing my guest post, so that the resulting scandal would lead her to have to spend every dime on court costs and then she and her four kids would end up living out on the street, huddled against a garbage can somewhere, clutching their adorable bento boxes into which she now must artfully arrange discarded banana peels and a mixture of sombody’s low-fat organic cream cheese and what looks to be maybe kale? while her youngest says “But why, mommy? Why did you have to let that bad lady write on your website?”

This is the nice, livable level of anxiety I’ve settled into thanks to 100mg daily of Zoloft.

So! I’d like to do my best. But there are a few things stacked against me.

First, as a Tex-Mexican I only know how to cook a handful of things and those things are: Tacos, Quesadillas, Enchiladas (both kinds), and salsa which sounds healthy until I pull out the fry daddy. Well you don’t eat salsa with a SPOON. We have to make chips.

Second, I have a lifelong strange and often hostile relationship with food. I do not enjoy trying new things. I do not like to eat anything slimy or wobbly, or food that pairs sweet things alongside salty things I don’t like to eat food that smells strong or tastes bland or comes from the ocean, or anything that is even a little bit tangy. I do not like to have anyone watch me eat. Basically I am everything that Jamie Oliver says is wrong with America. I don’t have an eating disorder or anything. I’m just a whiny, picky jerk who likes fat and sugar.

If you came here from Little Ladies Who lunch, at this point you are thinking what the hell? Why am I reading this then? I want to read about wonderful, adorable healthy and kid-friendly food! EXACTLY. That’s why I read it every day. I am very determined that my kids will not grow up to be picky, junk-loving jerks like me. They eat a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, lean meats, organic cheeses. They like healthy, whole-food sources of protein. They love plain yogurt. PLAIN. Do you know how many things would have to go horribly wrong in my life before I would eat plain yogurt? It would have to be somewhere in the second half of the movie Independence Day-levels of things going wrong. But they gobble it up alongside carrot slices and red grapes and grilled fish and everything because I have worked so very hard at faking like those things are delicious and trying new foods is amazing! And fun!

This backfires sometimes, they say then YOU try a bite Mama! And I say oh! Me? Well! Haha look over there! Mmmmm yes I put a big bite in my mouth right then while you looked away and gosh so yummy! Go ahead and judge me. I’m doing my best to stop the cycle here.

The other reason I’m intimidated is that Susan is a friend of mine and she is so sophisticated and fancy and just has her shit together in a way that I don’t. Her kitchen has all of the amazing gadgets and she knows what they are for. My kitchen has meal moths and I don’t know where they are coming from.

This is what Susan looks like:

And this is what her gorgeously put-together daughters look like.

And this is what I look like:

See why I’m nervous?