Hypocrite Mommy, and proud of it.

Before I ever got pregnant, there were a few things I swore I would never do when I had a child. I tried to keep the list very short, because I know people always say "well, my kid will never..." and that never works out well. I never swore that my kid wouldn't watch TV, because I watched more TV as a child than is recommended by every form of parenting expert out there, and I still had/have a very active imagination. I never said I would force my child to be a vegetarian, although I prefer he not eat mammals. That didn't work out of course, my dear friend Dana introduced him to pig in the form of ring bologna and he never looked back. But that's fine, I wasn't planning to force my dietary preferences on him (except when it comes to rice. I don't want my kid eating something that looks like maggots. Ewwwwww!).

But there were a few things that I swore I'd never do or let him do. The first is put a TV in his room before he was at least ten. My reasoning was that no child actually needs to have electronics in their room at age two. No two year old should be sitting alone in their room anyway. I thought having a TV before he even started real school would make him spoiled. Who am I kidding? The house already looks like an extremely fertile Toys R Us had wild, passionate sex with Amazon and delivered a healthy litter of bunnies, which then exploded all over the house. The boy is the epitome of spoiled. So Friday, after much thought (mostly because it was easier to just pretend I was mulling it over rather than actually get off my ass and rearrange the boy's entire room), I caved. My son is now the proud second-hand owner of a spare 20" flat screen TV. My darling almost-four year old can now watch his countless educational programs (see previous post) from the comfort of his very own Spiderman bed, cuddled up in his Spiderman blanket, surrounded by his Spiderman decals. The Spiderman franchise really should be paying my kid for all the advertising he gives them. Note that I do not even have a flat screen TV because I can't afford one big enough to thoroughly enjoy such educational programming as Supernatural, Ghost Whisperer, and Bones. We originally bought the crappy, not even HD, flat screen so that I could watch DVD's in my room since the soon-to-be-ex would never give up the decent-sized one in the living room.

The second thing I swore I'd never do is take my kid to the circus. Circus' are cruel. Elephants, camels, and bears do not belong in small cages, being hustled from town to town on a silly train, forced to perform in front of a live audience. Plus, even the non-animal abusing circus' have clowns. I think we all know my stance on clowns. If not, you need to read back a bit further. To recap- clowns are bad, evil lurks behind that painted grin, and I'm not entirely convinced they don't think I'd make a good supper. So the circus has two very strong, very legitimate strikes against it. Guess what I'm doing on May 20? Yup. Taking my sweet little boy and his sociopathic imaginary friend to the circus. In fact, we're combining my fear of clowns and disdain for animal torture with something else I love so much- driving to Camelback Mountain, around hairpin turns, possibly in the dark if I can't make the early show, and trying to find parking in a lot that was clearly designed for people who can actually grasp the concept of backing out of spaces less than six inches from the bumper of the next car. Have we discussed my driving issues yet?

So there it is. Two things I swore would never happen, and both are happening in the same month. I'm a hypocrite. I openly admit it. But whatever, my kid is happy, which is all that really matters to me. Also, Zee Zee the sociopath is happy, which means she may not carve me into small pieces while I sleep.