The other day I had a rare hour to myself at the used bookstore, and as I was happily digging through a pile of dusty memoirs, I found myself thinking, "Hey! I should see if they have any of those awful Magic Treehouse books I hate reading to my kid."

(Nothing against the prolific and successful Magic Treehouse author, mind you, it's just that I really dislike those stories. But my 6-year-old loves them, and so almost every night I read him that series. From Buffalo Before Breakfast to Polar Bears Past Bedtime, I dutifully visit the land of Jack and Annie, although I've been thinking of publishing a parody book titled Seriously Stilted Sentence Structures at Sunset.)

That's how things are now: I get a chance to be totally self-indulgent, and I end up doing something for my damn wiener kids. I'm not saying I've become a more generous, selfless person since parenthood—I'm saying parenthood causes chemical alterations to your brain, and not always in a good way.

We were huddled on cramped folding chairs in a frigid room, all of us craning to watch the solemn ceremony we'd been waiting for all morning: the Presenting of the New Belt, Which Is a Lot Like the Old Belt, Except OMFG This One Has a Green Stripe. The karate teacher—excuse me, Sensei—had just handed the much-anticipated new belt to my 6-year-old while I furiously snapped photos, and now he'd turned to the next belt recipient.

"Your daughter's next," my husband told the woman next to us, who was awkwardly balancing a camera and a small pigtailed toddler. "Do you want us to help so you can take pictures?"

There was a small flurry of activity, a bunch of thank yous, and somehow I ended up with the little girl on my own lap while her mom aimed the camera at her big sister.

When my kids were smaller, it seems like I was always pointing the video camera in their direction. First steps, first words, first deliberate face-plant into a chocolate birthday cake (that would be my older son) ... I tried to get as much footage as possible back then, because I knew how amazing it would be to revisit those early moments when they were older.

I'm so glad I did this, because now I don't have to rely solely on my treacherous memory for some of those milestones. I can watch both my sons learn how to walk, over and over. (And I cry like a giant dork every single time.)

Lately I haven't been using the camera as much. They're moving too fast, for one thing. It seems like we're all too busy to stop and press record (not that that's a bad thing).

So I recently started a new video project, just for fun. I call it the How to Do Everything Series—one which involves, mainly, my kindergartner doing what he likes to do best: tell you the right way to do things.

It's January, and the gyms are packed with the freshly-resolved. In the wake of holiday overindulgence, some of us are newly focused on our health and fitness goals for the year ahead.

Which is the politically correct way of saying what's really true: that I ate 40 million cookies, candy, crackers, and other assorted treats during the last few months and now I have some weight to lose.

Not weight, actually. Fat. I have some extra FAT on my body, and I would like to get rid of it. I keep hearing about how fat is a bad word now and it's horribly offensive and no one should say it ever, but give me a break. I ate too much and I worked out too little and I gained some pounds (of FAT) that I am now working to get rid of via exercise and another bad word: a DIET.

And damn it, I'm tired of hearing that I'm contributing to the anti-fat stigma by saying this. Or that I'm saying you're fat. Or that I have expressed any opinion whatsoever about anyone's body other than my own.

My husband and I are hiding in our 6-year-old's bed. His comforter is pulled over our faces, and we're lying in the dark breathing stale, slightly pee-smelling air. Somewhere off in another corner of the house, we hear our kids giggling and yelling, "18, 19, 20 ... ready or not, here we come!"

Soon the boys are bumbling through the hall, laughing and pulling open doors, looking for us. My husband feels around in the bedclothes for my hand and takes it. "This is our life now," he whispers, and I can hear the wry grin in his voice.

We are quiet and still in our son's bed. Buried under a blanket, listening to the voices of our children.

I followed a link over to a post in the CafeMom forums a couple weeks ago, and I confess that I did so entirely because of the title. I kind of hate when I click things that I KNOW are going to make me crazy, but it's like when someone says, "Oh my god, this smells awful," and I'm all, OH LET ME SMELL IT TOO. Why, self?

Anyway, the post is titled "I think the death of the SAHM ruined this country" and the author posted the opinion that if "more women would/were able to stay home and raise their children this world would be a better place."

That's not actually the part that made me crazy, though. It was the follow-up comments, which featured the argument that anyone can be a SAHM—if they know how to manage a budget.

Okay. Can we talk about little boys and the horrible relentless brain-bludgeoning noises they make?

I'm glad we can chat about this via the Internet because if we were sitting down in personl my entire side of the conversation would go like this: "Yes, I—DYLAN STOP SCREAMING. Anyway, the thing is that—RILEY GO IN THE OTHER ROOM IF YOU WANT TO MAKE THAT SOUND. Sorry! As I was—GODDAMN IT YOU TWO I SAID KNOCK IT OFF."

I have this ongoing argument with myself regarding my children's rambunctiousness. Here are my opposing viewpoints:

I was slamming dishes around in the kitchen after dinner one evening a couple weeks ago, completely frustrated from a long day of kid-wrangling. It had been a school conference day and the weather was miserable and I was at my wits' end with children running around the house making their endless pshew pshew pshew noises and leaving piles of toys and socks and half-eaten yogurt containers everywhere they went.

In the midst of my grumpy much-needed venting about my day, my husband said, "Wow, so you'd make a really great stay-at-home mom, huh?"

And then? I killed him. No, really: I am writing this from jail, although I expect to be released any minute now because WHAT JURY WOULD CONVICT ME.