Mommy Bloggers?! Phooey!

Nothing like starting a brand new year by stirring up a little trouble, huh? I’m thinking this might be my first installment of “Things That Bother Me More Than They Should.” And away we go . . .

Since I've been on Twitter, I've noticed that you can't swing a dead cat or a dirty diaper, not that I have either, without hitting a mommy blogger or a mommy blog. To which I say, "Mommy bloggers?! Phooey!” (Why do my fingers keep trying to type "booger" instead of "blogger?") What I want to know is where are the grandma bloggers, the granny gurus, the super-nana-logues?

I did a quick search for granny bloggers and discovered a few grandma-types blogging, but I have to say I was seriously disappointed. Oh, there are some very nice grandmas dispensing bits of wisdom, gardening tips, and recipes, but I was expecting some fire, some spunk, some pizzazz. After all, we grandmas were mommies long before mommies were cool. We were stay-at-home moms, working moms, and single working moms blazing trails, and juggling husbands, houses, jobs, kids, pets, cranky appliances, AWOL babysitters, and rattletrap cars eons before you could Google potty-training or order pizza online. Most of us didn’t even have microwave ovens. And just who do you think invented the 5-second rule and multi-tasking? Uh, huh, we cool.

We were cool even before our mommy days. Throughout junior high and high school, we protested for our God-given right to play sports. We checked the rule books and nowhere did it say you had to be a boy to play, so we started showing up for try-outs and having sit-ins (look it up), and we eventually got a brand new law and our own girls’ teams. In my high school, we even went after the FFA (Future Farmers of America). My best friend was the first girl they allowed into that particular boys’ club in high school. I would have joined, but I didn’t have a passionate desire to learn how to weld or about passionate farm critters.

Most of us grew up in homes with only one phone, which was usually in the kitchen. We were so cool we could come out of our rooms, slide down the hall sideways, execute a sharp turn, go around the wall at the end of the hall, slide into the kitchen, and still get it by the third ring. That’s cool. But I digress. Back to mommies.

As mommies we totally had it goin’ on. We didn’t have those fancy baby monitors and web cams to keep an ear and an eye on the little mon … uh, angels. No, we had to depend entirely on our spidey mommy senses to determine if that sound was our 2-year-old stuffing the entire Sunday paper into the toilet or if that smell was our 5-year-old lemon-oiling the dog. I got so good I could determine, over the sound of running water while in the shower, if that gnawing sound was the cat on the counter trying to open the package of defrosting ground beef or if the baby was teething on the crib rails.

There were no such things as DVD players and acres of kiddie DVD’s to keep the curtain-climbers from climbing the curtains. No, we had those precious wind-up toys that played the same song or animal sounds over and over and over until they “accidentally” fell into the bathtub. Woops! There were no blinged-out baby exercisers with 82 doo-dads attached to keep baby amused. We had regular baby walkers which had tiny plastic trays attached, to which we would tie an assortment of baby rattles and teething rings, which generally kept baby amused for about 3.4 minutes.

The best toy and colic calmer in our house was the cat. He would position himself under the baby swing, so that the baby’s feet would brush across his back as the baby swung back and forth. They both adored that swing. The cat finally accepted baby as a reasonably useful thing to have around, and the baby giggled uncontrollably. Peace reigned. Sometimes for as long as 15 minutes.

Oh, the blogs we could have written.

Grandmas are so cool, we already know all the words for the songs on Guitar Hero – Legends of Rock. We’ve been rockin’ out to those sounds for years. We’re so cool we never completely abandoned bell bottom jeans. We knew they’d be back.

It might be a little tougher to maintain our coolness now that power surges have us waking up at 3:00AM feeling like our hair is on fire, or when certain . . . uh, shifts in body composition make us wonder if we should carry a sign that says “Watch for Falling Body Parts,” but never doubt that coolness lies just below the surface. Beauty is skin-deep, but coolness goes all the way to the bone, baby. We grandmas are some cool beans. And our mommy blogs would have kicked your mommy blog’s bootay.