Beauty Pageants For Children

Beauty pageants for kids, a lot of people seem to think they are plain evil but I’m here to testify that they can be a really fun family activity, If you don’t believe me, read Delta Burke’s autobiography “Delta Style.”

When my oldest two daughters were little, I put them in dancing lessons – for grace and energy and something to do in the community. They would dance in shows several weekends each year, wear several different special costumes and we’d do their hair and make up.

We moved away from that area by the time my youngest daughter Mindy was old enough for dancing school and our new community didn’t have one. So she participated in pageants and cheerleading and it was all pretty much the same thing - family fun on the weekends that involved costumes and performing, with hair and makeup being done.

It takes major bucks though. It usually starts by spotting an ad in the local paper for a little local pageant. It doesn’t cost that much, you buy a dress, they compete, there are plenty of trophys and ribbons and the occasional crown tossed around and *voila* you are hooked! If your child is a winner, you are expected to enter them in the national pageant and that’s where it gets expensive. There’s the travel expenses of course, the entry fee, buying a page in the program, staying at the host hotel for a certain number of nights, fees for all the little sub categories, several changes of outfits – some that aren’t even worn on stage. It costs as much as a family vacation.

You can’t do things in halves either - the clothes have to be pageant quality. And several outfits are needed, such as interview, talent, swimsuit, evening gown, western wear, etc.

Mindy loved doing them and after grad school she came home to stay with me for a few weeks. I was living in Las Vegas then. She found out about a beauty pageant being held in town and thought she’d like to do it for old time’s sake while she was still young enough to qualify. The pageant folks were excited because they needed more entries in the older girl category but insisted that she’d have to book a hotel room for 3 nights in order to enter. We could afford the entry fee and she had the clothes but that hotel room put it right out of our range.

Oh well, I’m glad we were able to pull it off while she was growing up. And let me tell you, if a kid doesn’t want to do it … whatever “it” is (dance, cheerleading, pageants, piano lessons, sports … whatever) no force on earth can get them to do it. Several factors in the universe have to come in to play for a child to succeed at an activity - willingness on child's part, parental support, expendable income, talent/brains/beauty, it can never be just something the parent's want.

Jon & Kate Plus 8 - The Final Season?

If you watched the March 23rd episode, J&K seemed to be about to address the rumours about their marital woes at the end of the season finale. Instead it was about the problems the couple are experiencing dealing with fame. Kate is handling it great (who knew?) and Jon is not dealing with it so well. I have my doubts about that. It can't be nice going out in public with 8 little kids you are trying to keep track of while people are undoubtedly calling them by names and reaching for them. But Kate says she loves it, so there you go.

I think it's probably the money she loves. Rumours of them earning in the mid to high 5 figures for each episode would certainly make the situation more bearable for me!

We've all watched this couple morph into very different people than they were 3 years ago. Their body language on the interview couch has been dismal for weeks now. They give love seats a bad name - sitting side by side, but never touching.

Jon is pretty difficult to read but he doesn't seem to be enjoying his kids as much as he used to. The episodes of him holding down the fort while Kate is away on business trips are pretty grim as evidenced by the recent “walk through the woods” (a.k. in fandom as the "Forced Deathmarch") that he dragged the kids out on. There was clearly no joy in mudville. He no longer seems to enjoy playing with the 'tups.

I think it was first obvious that things had changed with Kate during the puppy-buying episode. There were no family meals, the kids were eating while Jon & Kate each stood off at the side. Kate unveiled her new mod look when she stepped out of the van - long black coat, high heeled boots, etc. Not very mumsy like. Then she kept bellowing about how she had picked out "her" puppies. Also while she was chatting afterwards with the dog breeder, I remember thinking "Is she really flirting with him? Right in front of Jon???"

Could America's favorite family really be breaking up? Jon is probably secure in the knowledge that everyone who watches the show will understand why he left that shrew of a wife. What he isn’t counting on would be the backlash – people love those kids and don’t want to see them go through a divorce plus he'd be leaving Kate with 8 kids, aged 8 and under and that could make her more sympathetic.

Kate is not someone I’d want to divorce. And you can’t help feeling for those kids. How would they cope when Daddy is no longer “a part of their daily lives”? What do you think?

Crockpot

I love crockpots. I love finding an unappetizing piece of meat in the “Manager’s Special” section at the grocery store, throw it in the crockpot, add some seasoning or rub or sauce or marinade, plug it in and turn it on low and there you go. Last night I threw a pkg of chicken thighs in with a bottle of sesame ginger dressing. I cooked some frozen veggies with chicken stock in the 2nd crockpot and had rice going in the rice cooker. It made an excellent dinner with enough left over for Tupperware containers for 3 work lunches. Also, it's easy to blow a fuse on our stove top if you get too many burners going at once, but the crockpots don't do that.

I bought my sister-in-law Jennifer a crockpot once and she wanted recipes. I explained to her that you throw in a piece of meat, a can of soup and *voila* 8 hours later you have dinner, not to mention the fun of being at work all day knowing that your dinner will be hot and ready for you when you get home.

She only looked perturbed (she’s from Connecticut, what can I say …) and promptly went out and bought herself a crockpot cookbook. Was Martha Stewart from Connecticut? I suspect so.

I found a wonderful blog that I heartily recommend http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/. It’s a years worth of crockpot recipes and fun facts and really captures the pioneer spirit that a true crockpotter must have.

Steve Martin

My Big Splurge ...

It’s been a while since I bought a Starbucks coffee, so I was pleased to see that they have these new little green swirly stick things that stick in the hole in the lid so that it doesn’t slosh around in the car. It’s really cool.

My cup had printed on it

The Way I See It #112

which was a quote by Steve Martin Comedian and writer.

He wrote: If you’ve got a dollar and you spend twenty-nine cents on a loaf of bread, you’ve got seventy-one cents left. But if you’ve got seventeen grand and you spend twenty-nine cents on a loaf of bread, you’ve still got seventeen grand. There’s a math lesson for you.

The Way I See It, Steve Martin hasn’t bought a loaf of bread in a very long time.

Barry Manilow

Back when I was young and well off…well, doing better than I am now … I used to do Barry Manilow. Well, I didn’t exactly DO him but you know what I mean. I was definitely a world class Fanilow. I traveled around the country going to see him. I went to conventions, concerts, etc. I didn’t keep track but I would estimate that I probably saw at least a 100 concerts and that’s a conservative estimate.

It was good clean fun during my family raising years. When the kids went to their Dad’s for vacation, off my friends and I would go. This went on from 1980 through the mid-90’s. Then concert tickets went into the triple digits and I dug in my heels and refused to pay those prices. I read a quote in a financial book “The more you feed an addiction, the stronger it becomes.” This was my addiction and I went off of it cold turkey.

To my surprise, I found that I missed the other fans more than I missed Barry. I mean how many times can you pay big bucks to see Barry Manilow sing "I Write the Songs", you know? I was always mindful of whether I was getting enough bang for my buck during my heyday and I’m glad I stopped before my addiction became just a mindless habit.

Would I like to have the money back I spent on my hobby? Not for the concerts, each show was a delight but yes, I wish I hadn’t spent so much on travel, conventions, fan clubs, dressing room decorating, photo taking, etc. Some of it was just plain stupid. But I don’t regret those days or the life long friendships that resulted.

Amazingly, the friendships continue. I have friends all over the United States and Europe and my youngest daughter (who inherited my wanderlust) has taken advantage of these connections to couch surf her way around the world.

Big Love

We sprung for HBO & Showtime and somehow hit it so that we are paying less now for the same package we had two years ago.

I am in love with HBO and Showtime On Demand! You can click on Series or Movies and watch whatever you want whenever you want.

I was able to catch up on all last seasons Lword episodes and just caught the first episode of Season 3 on Big Love. OMG I love that show! They managed to pretty much show the entire ensemble of actors. It looks like everyone is back to reprise their roles. Even the oldest Henrickson daughter who played Meryl Streep’s daughter in Mamma Mia is back. And a stellar ensemble of actors it is.

The show is a series about a polygamist family trying to live a mainstream life and blend in with their friends and neighbors. They keep getting called back to Juniper Creek though, a traditional polygamist compound a two hour drive away from their Utah neighborhood. A strange concept for a dramatic series but definitely timely and highly entertaining!

One of the most interesting characters is the Henrickson ‘Sister Wife’ #2 Nicky Grant. Being the compound patriarch Roman Grant's daughter and born & raised in Juniper Creek, she’s really straddling both worlds while battling her own addictions of shopping & gambling.

So in the opener last night they showed a snippet from seasons past of the elder Roman Grant saying something romantic to the young girl slated to be his next wife. It jarringly reminded me of Hugh Hefner interacting with The Girls Next Door.

It looks like there might be a Wife #4 for ole’ Bill Henrickson. The woman he’s been haphazardly courting finally bedded him and that convinced her to give polygamy a try. I swear this show makes everyone want to give polygamy a try! At least polygamists hold on to the old wives instead of giving them the heave ho when they are ready for something new and different.

The financial obligations of maintaining such huge families would be horrendous, of course but if you think about it there would be a lot of able bodied adults to bring home paychecks.

Prepaid VISA Cards

For Christmas I was given a couple of prepaid VISA cards. I found that I could order stuff online and pay for it with these cards, rather than my debit card. The advantage to this is tremendous.

Frequently when you order something and pay with your VISA, you are somehow giving the company permission to send you more product periodically and for them to thus help themselves to another chunk of money out of your account without warning. I had this happen to me several times, which is why I now go over my bank statements with a fine tooth comb.

One of the offenders was Lauren Bacall cosmetics. They send you all kinds of shit monthly once you’ve ordered their main item, the round makeup set compact (which in all fairness I have to add is a great product!)

Other companies that have continued to dip into my bank account once I’ve ordered from them are travel clubs, magazine subscriptions, gourmet food orders, credit report agencies, etc. It’s very insidious and sneaky, many many times even after reading the fine print I didn’t realize that this was an ongoing thing that I was agreeing to.

One of the ways they get you is to offer you something amazing … a free airplane ticket for trying their travel club, for example. You can cancel within 30 days without having to give back the ticket … that sort of thing. I stumbled into that by opening a bank account once. The travel club was presented as a “free service” that came with the account.

By paying for anything you order online with a prepaid VISA card, you aren’t allowing anyone access to your bank account or line of credit. All you are risking is the $100 (or whatever amount) that you used to buy the card initially. From now on, I intend to buy a $100 VISA card when I get paid once a month and use it for all online ordering.

Another thing I do is to once a year destroy my old ATM debit VISA card and order a new one with a new account number. Even going over my statements carefully, you can miss things plus it helps to clean out the cobwebs and avoid identity theft.

Another way to use prepaid cards is as a budgeting tool, especially for those of us who are paid once a month. Rather than keep envelopes of cash in your purse - it's too easy to grab from envelopes for impulse buying - instead I'll put $20 on my Starbucks card, buy a gas card to the station I frequent most often, buy a Trader Joe's card to use throughout the month. It's the same thing as buying prepaid cell phones. When the card is used up, no more luxury items until next month.

My friend Breann has a $500 limit on a visa card. Once that card is used up, that's it. That's her spending money for the month. A clever idea I haven't tried yet.