I would like to think that I’d exercise restraint if I were having a baby in this social media saturated world — but who am I kidding? I’d do much worse than just a few Facebook updates. I would Twitter the whole thing! I am guessing it might go something like this:

OMG! Just started timing contractions. Totally on schedule. This is going to be soooo great. Can’t wait to start breathing exercises!

Contractions are starting to hurt. Husband wants to go to the hospital but I’m calling the doula. No drugs!
Dang this hurts!
Breathing exercises not providing much relief. Contractions are WAY worse than in pictures.

Couldn’t wait for doula.
Threw up on the way to hospital. Husband totally freaking out.

Trying to Tweet in the tub w/o wrecking phone. Making strange noises, like a hurt cow.

Laboring in water is overrated.
Tub now freezing but it hurts too bad to get out. WTF? Who thought of this?

Okay – way better now. Drugs will do that. Something with ‘cain’ in the name took the edge off. Waiting for my epidural!!!!

ROTFLMAO – Dr. Feelgood just asked if I was in the middle of a contraction! Ha! I’ll show him a contraction!

… to read the rest visit www.afterthebubbly.com

After working for two hours, my computer angrily displayed the message that I had better switch over to real power before my battery died. Afraid to lose any portion of the Important Masterpiece I had been writing, I immediately checked everything—the plug that goes into the computer, the black box it feeds into, and the wall socket. All plugged in. My machine died. I switched outlets. Nothing. Over and over I powered up and the computer shut back into hibernation—trying, I assume, to save what little juice was left in its battery. Finally, it made a high pitched wheezing sound and then gave up humoring me completely.

I’m dead already! ….

Read the rest of this great post at www.afterthebubbly.com

Lela Davidson’s award-winning column, After the Bubbly, appears regularly in Peekaboo magazine, and periodically in other magazines throughout the country. She is the parenting columnist on HubPages.com and a regular contributor to ParentingSquad.com. She loves ALL her machines and tries to treat them nicely. Find out more on her wildly entertaining blog, www.afterthebubbly.com. Or just Google her. She loves to be Googled.

I Resolve to gain weight.
This should be a fun one. Who wants to be skinny anyway? Just think of all the new shopping I’ll get to do when I can no longer zip my jeans—to say nothing of the joy of Brie and chocolate. And once I gain all that weight, I’m going to start a foundation similar to Locks of Love, except instead of donating hair to cancer patients, we’ll get lipo-sucked and donate the results to runway models.

I Resolve to stop working out.
It might be difficult to find the time to not exercise, but a little determination goes a long way. Marathons of the Real Housewives on Bravo will help. And hello—double bonus, no workout clothes means less laundry! Who needs extra energy and long life?

I Resolve to start smoking.
So many people smoke, I’m starting to wonder what I’m missing. Seriously, if it’s so hard to quit it must be pretty good, right? However, I’ve heard smoking helps keep the weight off so this could make my resolution to gain weight more difficult. I’m willing to take the chance. Besides, considering the state of my retirement account, a shorter life expectancy makes sense. …. Read the rest of this post at www.afterthebubbly.com.

Lela Davidson is an award-winning writer living in Northwest Arkansas with her husband and two children. Catch more of the fun at www.afterthebubbly.com.

Still, me with my optimism and the deceptively simple recipe with its butter and eggs. It was a pound cake. What could possibly go wrong?

For the record:
1. You could be out of flour. Turns out this is a baking deal breaker. Who knew?
2. You could decide to get some bang for your bake by doubling the recipe. However, now that you have flour, all those ingredients don’t neatly fit into your fancy mixer—the one that still matches your kitchen even though you haven’t it used since the last time you were delusional enough to bake something, which was a couple of Christmases ago.
3. You could neglect to ask—before getting started—what exactly is a tube pan?

To read the rest of “While Baking” visit read more online at www.afterthebubbly.com

Two weeks before the show, I received a note from the music teacher saying that because my child had been chosen to be a turkey, I needed to cover a white t-shirt completely with feathers. Use a hot glue gun, it said. The tone had a distinct air of condescension: if you’re not able to make the costume, please call the music teacher. That’s a dare if I’ve ever heard one.

I’m not too interested in competing with other moms via my child, but I’m also not one to back down from a challenge. I skipped off like a good mommy to Hobby Lobby where an entire aisle is devoted to feathers. These are not cheap, especially the turkey-appropriate colors like brown, white, and black. How badly could a fuchsia and chartreuse turkey stand out from the crowd anyway? I compromised, buying one packet of the good feathers and a value pack for filler.

… To read the rest visit www.afterthebubbly.com

My mother tells a story about her mother, who would tell her children that if they didn’t behave she would run off to Tucumcari, New Mexico where they couldn’t find her. To which my mother calmly responded that they most certainly would find her – in Tucumcari, New Mexico.

My mom shouted similar warnings to my brother and me as kids. She told us that she would run away and never return. We didn’t have reason to believe her empty threats, but then again, you never knew. Moms are crazy like that. Our mothers and grandmothers didn’t mess with balance – work-life or otherwise. They didn’t have spa days or antidepressants or Oprah. They just woke up in the morning and did what needed doing. And if they lost it once in a while, well, they were entitled.

To be Continued in the Sept. Issue of Peekaboo or online at www.afterthebubbly.com.

About an hour later I had to run an urgent errand. (It was probably something as important as a grocery run for string cheese.) Because my husband was out of town, I had another car to drive, one which did not have pink goo oozing out of it. However, I chose to drive the leaky car. It started and drove fine, until the thermometer light came on. I tensed up when it started to blink, even though I had no idea what that meant.

If I designed cars, there would be a light that said, Pull Over. And if you didn’t immediately comply, another light would come on that said, NOW! If you still didn’t get the hint, the car would turn itself off. But my car doesn’t have this handy imaginary feature. Despite the warning light, my trip was uneventful. I finished my urgent errand and drove home.

The next afternoon, after loading into my car five children, four snorkels, two masks, a box of crackers, forty-five fruit snacks, a gross of beach towels, and enough juice to flood a small country, the car wouldn’t start. I tried again while the children whined, hot and cranky. Clearly this was another urgent situation so I did what I had to do. I switched cars and went to the pool.

The rough part was calling my husband. “Do you want to hear the bad news?” I asked.

“Bad news?” I told him about the harmless-smelling gunk, the flashing red thermometer, and the non-starting car. Luckily I married a man who remains calm in the face of all manner of mechanical trouble.

“So was the car leaking while you were driving?”

“No,” I said. “It was in the garage.”

“And the light, when was that flashing?”

Here’s where things started to turn against me. “Oh, well see, I needed to go to the –“

“You drove the car?”

… Read the rest of this story in the June Issue of Peekaboo or at afterthebubbly.blogspot.com

“Anyone in the house smoke?” she asked.

“No,” I said, totally telling the truth.

“Mom!” My five-year-old daughter looked at me wide-eyed, as if I’d said a bad word. Then she turned from me to her new role model, the kind and presumably honest lady doctor. “My dad smokes.”

“Busted!” said the doctor.

Cut to me backpedaling and using way too many words to explain away my husband’s weekly cigar. Or was it nightly? Either way, he smoked outside so it didn’t really count. Right?

“Right,” the doctor assured. She was nice, unlike the little traitor I’d been feeding for half a decade.

That brush with not-even-bad behavior made me want to let out a rebel yell. Being a grown up can be so lame. It reminded me of a pool party, where, by the time the cops showed up, we had dwindled to a dozen thirty-somethings around a half empty keg singing really bad karaoke. Back in the day, I rocked a pretty hard ‘Love Shack Baby’, but that involved way more alcohol than my adult liver cares to process.

There I was, having fun in a mature and non-rebellious way, drinking beer not purchased by anyone’s older sister or boyfriend, but by tax paying and law abiding adults. We’d started to gather up our bags and say our good byes when two young officers appeared inside the gate. I would have sworn they were strippers. (That, or our host had put them up to it to make us all feel younger and badder.) But they were completely serious.

After interrupting a particularly heartbreaking rendition of Prince’s ‘Kiss’ they said to the homeowners – and I quote – “Don’t make us come back out here.” Had someone been watching Cops? I ached for the DJ to cue up that Bad Boys song. What-chou Gonna Do? The guy who had to stop mid-Falsetto looked like my eight-year-old when I say lights out. Just a little longer? Pleeeeeze!

Read the rest of this great tale at http://afterthebubbly.blogspot.com/

This is the story of one Easter Eve a few years ago. I lay in bed trying to fall asleep amid some low level tension caused by the nagging feeling that something just wasn’t quite right. Suddenly I bolted up, frightening my husband out of a sound snore.

“Oh crap!” I said, “I’ve got to do the Easter baskets!” I got up, turned on lights, rummaged through the guest room closet for baskets and candy, and set about making the sweetest little tokens of love from the Easter Bunny. I put them in the kids’ doorways and went back to bed, where the father of my children was sleeping just as peacefully as before my crisis.

In the morning the kids came to our room to show us their loot. My then six-year-old daughter looked up at me with genuine curiosity. “I wonder why the Easter Bunny gave us the same baskets as last year?”

Note: If you’ve been reading this column long, you already know that the Easter Bunny is a touch stingy. She doesn’t really see the point in buying new baskets year after year, and this was the year she decided to test her theory that the kids wouldn’t really notice anyway.

“Mom?” my daughter asked, “Are YOU the Easter Bunny?” Leave it to the little one.

I shook my head and offered up a little snort. “Do I look like I’ve been out all morning hopping around dropping off Easter baskets?”

She eyed me, weighing whether or not to push the matter. She was holding a bag of sugar after all. Finally, the little lawyer-in-training just wouldn’t let it go. “It’s just that you said the Easter Bunny was a girl AND the Easter Bunny knows what kind of books we like AND —-“

To read the rest pick up the April issue of Peekaboo Magazine or visit http://afterthebubbly.blogspot.com.

As I inch toward forty, the biological clock still ticks. Instead of ‘have-a-baby-have-a-baby’, it now says ‘just-one-more-just-one-more.’ I fanaticize that if I had another baby, I’d do everything right this time. I would coordinate perfect outfits, put on makeup, and shower every day. I indulge this dream for about a minute before I remember the sleepless nights, continuous feeding, and far-flung emotions. Between post-partum, PMS, and peri-menopause I can’t imagine what older moms are going through. I’m pretty sure if you knocked on their doors at nine in the morning, they wouldn’t be red carpet ready.

Despite the reality of baby rearing, glitz and ease is exactly what we see in those magazines we peek at in line at the grocery store. People may complain that Hollywood glamorizes young pregnancy by holding up Jamie Lynn Spears and Ashlee Simpson as role models, but I’m more offended by the forty-is-the-new-twenty-two celebrities that are selling us regular women a bill of goods.

* Gorgeous Naomi Watts recently gave birth to a second son at age forty. She claims to have lost all her baby weight breastfeeding. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the live-in personal chefs and trainers.

Read the rest of this story at http://afterthebubbly.blogspot.com.