Lame Mom of the Year - early returns

Ah, Valentine's Day, the first true opportunity of the year to retain my Lame Mom crown. Sure Mayhem's birthday is in January, but the fact that I did absolutely nothing for it in his class can be excused by the fact that his birthday was on a Saturday & his class only meets Tues-Thurs. Valentine's Day though is on a Thursday, so I get 2 chances to utterly fail to meet the expectations of others.

I know there are moms out there that genuinely enjoy making elaborate V-day cards & goodie bags for their kids' classmates. They get a great sense of creative satisfaction from cutting, gluing, glittering & stuffing their creations.  They don't care what others are doing, they are enjoying themselves.  On the opposite end there are the moms who are too busy to bother. They buy the 99 cents pack of 25 cards at Target and write names on them, end of story. They don't care what others are doing & are too busy to find out anyway.  Then there are those of us in the middle. Some care a great deal what others are doing & consider it a competition and some don't want to care but can't help hearing the others comparing the efforts of others & feeling vaguely guilty that we have time to do something creative but just don't want too & therefor often find our guilt prodding us into stuffing heart shaped erasers & small pencils into red bags we've highlighted with silver glitter glue while bitching to ourselves about the whole thing.

Not that I am speaking from my own experience. I am Lame Mom. I have the time & even the personal creativity to do these things but I chose to be lazy & buy the 99 cent cards. It is the choice to not do things I am perfectly capable of doing that makes me Lame. I have friends though that feel enormous social pressure from other moms to meet the personalized creativity standards. One of them is busy making heart shaped rice crispy treats that will be wrapped in pink saran wrap & tied with red heart bows, as I type. She doesn't really want to make them, but feels she must. Strange thing, peer pressure. Even when you see it, and acknowledge it, it's still so hard to step away from it. Even as a pregnant 35 year old woman with a college degree, professional job and 2 kids of your own.

I did make the effort to go & look at the card aisle, rather than just simply grab the cards from the Dollar Spot rack. So, I walked the whole length of Target, which is really going above & beyond what I had planned to do. I ended up buying valentine cards with prefilled candy boxes attached to them. I can't decide if that makes me more or less lame than buying the 99 cent cards. On the one hand it seems less because a minor effort was made & there is more to it than a flimsy square of paper. On the other hand it seems more because I am acknowledging that there is so much more I could do and so obviously refusing to do it.

But what really makes me the Lamest Mom Ever this V day is the fact that I do not know the names of all the kids in my sons' classes and there are only 8 kids in each class, including my own. Havoc has been able to name everyone in his class but Mayhem is no help at all. He's just as likely to name kids in Havoc's class as name the ones in his own. So all the cards just say "from Mayhem" on them.  Yep, Lame Mom.