Ah, maternity clothes. I am SO over mine. I feel like I wear the same gigantic outfit every day and it’s making me crazy. If I have to pull on my black stretchy pants or my ever-tightening jorts one more time, well, I may just pull my hair out.
The upside is that I only have nine more weeks to go. The downside, is that even after those nine weeks, I’ll still be a porkchop with a gut, only one with no baby inside, just a puffy post-partum pooch. Whoopee! However, a newborn babe is a great belly blocker AND they’re just so darn cute that no new mom really cares what the hell they look like after popping the sweet tot out. In fact, last time around, I wouldn’t have cared if I sprouted a full grown Santa beard or a third arm after Ollie debuted; I was just content to stare at him for hours on end. And drink beer again. Yes, the return of alcohol definitely helped. It’s like I had beer goggles on when judging my own appearance, because I never seemed to mind the fact that I didn’t have kneecaps or ankles for a solid two weeks after delivery.
ANYWAY, one thing I’ve realized about maternity clothes, is that they make you look way more pregnant than normal clothes. I’ve basically reverted to wearing regular old J Crew tees because they are so much more flattering than these belly enhancing togas most maternity stores are peddling. Gone are the days of pregnant girls having to wear muumuus and jumpers, but still, most of the with-child gear on the market is pretty bad. Motherhood makes some nice stuff, but you have to sift through dozens of 100% rayon frocks to find one normal-looking dress.
In fact, some of the things I wore last time around I can’t even bring myself to wear as pajamas this time. Instead I’ve made a pile of unwanted items in the corner of my bedroom and Ollie has taken to playing hide and seek with them. Some of the items are so large that he can literally be lost in a blouse for nearly 30 minutes!!
Here's a particular skirt Ollie enjoys playing in. It's a cape, a shoot, a sail, and a garment -- all in one!
Today was my last day of work at Washington Life. It’s amazing to think that it’s been just shy of two years and today I put all my stuff in boxes and gave Kelly my emergency flashlight and stash of odd perfume. I will be starting a new job on Wednesday, which I’m thrilled about, but it is tough to say goodbye to the people who you spend more time with than your own family. Kelly and Ali are my work family (and probably legal spouses considering how close we sit) and I am going to miss them terribly.
I don’t know who in the journalism world declared it fine for everyone to sit on each other. Have you ever seen the newsroom of a major paper? You’re lucky enough to get a cubicle and even then, your neighbor is just a piece of plexiglass away. Well, Kelly, Ali and I were short a few pieces of plexiglass. We really should have just shared a chair and worked from one communal brain.
And that’s just part of the reason why I’m going to miss them so much. Today Ali told me that I should watch Jersey Shore to stay relevant and so that people don’t think I’m old. I grimaced at her when she said it, but it was probably some pretty good advice. I have been wondering why everyone is so intrigued by that pudgy girl in booty shorts who tans herself the color of a Halloween pumpkin.
Kelly is always reminding me to be a good human and loves to solve every single problem in the office. She probably sits around and rewires the place after work, that tech savvy gal, but when she’s there during the day, she really works her butt off.
The three of us started a fake sorority together. It’s called KAK (clever I know), and our symbol is the dove. We have bonded over bread binges, nights where we actually slept at the office, and bad theme parties. When I go out of town or to a meeting, Kel and Ali like to print enormous embarrassing pictures from my past and hide them in my drawers. The little dears. WIll anyone publicly humiliate me in such an adorable way at my next gig? I don’t know. But I do know that it has been amazing working with Kelly and Ali over the years and I know I will see them all the time. That’s why god invented happy hour after all.
Kelly and I at a black tie shenanigan. How I will miss basically sharing a chair with Kelly in our tiny office.
Ali was my intern for a year before she joined the squad and I was so lucky to have her! She is one of the only people on earth who can read my "I'm doing an interview" handwriting.
My dear friend Lauren who is like a sister to me, just had her first baby! And guess which moral-free cad they selected to be her godmother? Me, of course. I’m thrilled! Here is the thing about me and babies. I recognize their cuteness, but they kind of scare me. I mean they just need you so much. You can’t forget them somewhere or casually leave them on some shelf somewhere. You have to attach them to your boob and never let go. Scary!
I recognize that I’m pushing 30 and this whole mentality should probably change. Being around Stacey and seeing what an amazing (and fun!) mother she is to Ollie has really helped. She has made me realize that you can still have a life and have kids and be hot. And now that my friend Lauren has knighted me fairy godmother to her first born, I feel like my fear of leaving a baby on a shelf will diminish even more.
I actually love the idea of being a godmother or an aunt more than being a mother. This is probably due to the fact that you can swish in with a present and a kiss and get a lot of love. And also due to the fact that one of my favorite movies is Auntie Mame and well, Rosalind Russell just made being an aunt the most fabulous thing since the high heel. I can’t wait to take little Mairin to the baby spa for a teeny tiny mani pedi, or to the children’s museum to make a mold of her butt in hot wax or something like that. You know, the good stuff!
Thank you Lauren for trusting me to be Mairin’s godmother. I promise to do my very best!
When I think that Stacey and I considered doing a blog called “365 days without makeup!” I cringe. It actually makes me feel physically ill. Not that I cake it on like a Miss America contestant everyday, but still, nary a day goes by where I’m not wearing at least five products on my face (blush, lipstick, mascara, eye shadow and of course concealer).
Sometimes it’s even more than that. When I went to the Grammys, I counted 17 different substances on my face. And I had a rather good time shoving it all on there. But the thing I love the most about makeup is being able to paint away the flaws. Had a very small bump on your face that you decided to pinch until it became a volcano of grossness? Just shove some coverup on it and it’s as good as gone! Unsightly tattoo got you down? Slap on some liquid skin and bare it all.
My concealer of choice is by MAC and it is like miracle paint. This one winter a few years back, I had what I like to call a flesh eating rash. I used to put it in my introductions. Hello my name is Karin and I have a flesh eating rash on my face. My former intern Ashley can attest to this, as those were the first words I ever said to her. Turns out this rash was really just a case of insanely bad dry skin, but still, it was gross. That’s where the MAC concealer came in. I just smoothed that mush on there and the rash vanished!
Confession: wearing makeup is one of my favorite things about being female. When I think that men just have to wear their zits for the world to see, it makes me want to cry. That sounds really really shallow, but let’s just call it empathy. Lucky for me, I have the right chromosomes and the right concealer!
These are really the only men who get away with wearing makeup, so clearly if I was male I would be a WWF fighter.
I am not a big time TV watcher. Sometimes if I am doing something extremely mindless, I will turn it on as background noise. But most of the time I just scream, “why do I pay $150 a month for something I don’t turn on!!” And then I remember my guilty pleasures and sign on the line.
There are four things I will go nuts for on television: anything on the Lifetime network; the show Friday Night Lights; any beauty pageant at all; and all cheerleader reality shows, especially Cheerleader Nation. When actually written out, that makes me look like a very shallow Texan teenager with extremely high levels of estrogen.
This is not the case! I blame the cheerleading thing on years and years of competitive gymnastics as a kid. I remember flying through the air in a leotard and how much I loved it and curse the mid-atlantic region for not being a more cheerleader-friendly area. Surely, if I had grown up in Dallas I would have taken my gymnastics background and flipped and twisted my way through high school and college, like the gals on Cheerleader Nation.
I’m not exactly sure how I came across the Lifetime gem filmed in Lexington, Kentucky, but as soon as I did, I was hooked. And now the show is being re-aired! It just so happens that I have a kindred soul at work, as Ali is also manically obsessed with the show. When things are slow we recite cheers and google the crap out of all the girls who were on the national championship team. Chelsea! (knocked up and at the University of Kentucky), Amanda (cheering for Tennessee), Ryan (cheering for Alabama) and all the rest of them keep us entertained for hours.
And maybe even more than the girls, we love their coaches, Saleem and Ms. Martin. Today we discovered that Saleem has his own series of expert DVDs available on Amazon. I bet the award-winning coach can even teach lunatic magazine journalists how to cheer. As you can imagine, they are at the top of our Amazon wish lists. Go Dunbar!
Ryan, Mia, and Chelsea.
I just found out you can order Saleem's "Winning it All" cheerleading videos on Amazon. Tempted, tempted.
While I don’t watch a lot of TV because I sadly don’t have enough time (ggrrr journalism), one show that can really entertain me for hours is The Bachelorette. Since I also have a love for anything on Lifetime or chick flicks overflowing with estrogen, this doesn’t come as a huge surprise.
There is something that my feminist side really likes about the Bachelorette. I mean she has her own man harem. Isn’t that a lovely turn of events? The whole thing seems very girl power to me. What is more liberating and empowering than a dozen boys with nice pecks getting drunk and fighting over you?
This week Ali, this season’s bachelorette, and the gang were in Turkey and she found out that one of the contestants, Justin “Rated R” Rego, had not one but two girlfriends in his homeland of Canada. Gasp! Oh well, Ali has a zillion other guys to choose from. But even more fun than watching the show was talking about it at work today. Here are some of the choice tidbits of our conversation:
Washington Life Ali (not to be confused with the bachelorette of course): “You know people are calling her the ‘fat-chelorette.’ She’s gained a little weight being on the show. Course no surprise there, all they do is drink.”
Kevin: “Do they all have to get tested before going on the show?”
Ali: “On the new one they do. They don’t want any Hep B in the house.”
Kevin: “Ahhh, I suppose a hepatitis outbreak would be bad for the network. I hear 40 percent of Americans have that H disease.”
Ali: “Whatever, my favorite is Roberto.”
Me: “No! Chris L! The sensitive gardner who lost his mother.
Kevin: “What’s the name of that annoying one? You know, the weather midget.”
And all this joyful banter while we are on deadline. Only the Bachelorette could inspire us so!
Tis a tough life being the Bachelorette, always having to put your clothes back on and all.
Here is Ali with my favorite contestant, Chris L, a sensitive landscaper from Cape Cod.
It’s the anniversary of my bachelorette party! Six years ago this weekend, twelve of my girlfriends sent me off into wedded bliss with a bachelorette weekend to remember in Las Vegas.
Somehow, from the moment we landed at McCarren International, everything went our way. The 13 of us were treated like VIPs and ushered to the front of every line. We were given roped-off areas in clubs to sip bottles of bubbly that were on the house and even bumped into billionaire Mark Cuban poolside who bought all our cocktails and entertained us with his normalcy. We were shuttled around in a gas guzzling stretch yellow Hummer and enjoyed the people watching at the pool (or human soup as we called it). It was ridiculousness at its best, and I don’t pretend to have had such a wild weekend ever since.
The highlight of the trip, however, was our trip to Olympic Gardens (incidentally, the one and only strip club I’ve ever visited). Despite the male dancers being extremely attractive and well groomed (and probably 100% gay), I don’t think I have ever laughed as hard in my entire life. Whereas men probably go to strip clubs for totally different reason, women go to giggle hysterically at a guy in a banana hammock pretend he’s a rogue police officer with feathered handcuffs. To this day, the pictures we took that weekend make me laugh until I have tears in my eyes and I think I catch a faint whiff of musk scented body oil in the air and my throat burns with the memory of flaming body shots.
So in addition to the ridiculousness the strippers added to the trip, I am so grateful for my girlfriends for planning and attending such a debaucherous weekend!
Ironically, three months after this picture was taken, I began work as a religion teacher at a Catholic School in San Diego. On another note, I wonder, what is with this stripper's mismatched get-up? A visor and combat boots? I must have gotten shafted and landed the only straight dancer in the place!
Our entourage. Luckily, unlike The Hangover, everyone woke up the next morning with all their teeth.
I don’t know what the weather is like in your part of the world, but in DC you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. I am tempted to start stuffing ice in my clothes. I walk to lunch and seriously have dreams of working in a sarong and a bra. But I control myself. There are some gals in town who don’t feel the need though. And on the pages of the fabulous world of tabloids, there is so much retouched girl skin, it’s like we live in a nudist colony.
So I must ask an age old question: with all this flesh, where is the man candy? Well, anywhere Matthew McConaughey is. Even if he is not your type, as a red blooded American woman, I have to appreciate the fact that the man is always naked. And I mean always. I just Googled him and there was nary a stitch on him in any photo.
Luckily the zany character from Texas has a pretty decent bod. Good tan, penchant for board shorts, six pack abs. And he is ready for you to check it out! He is rather well known for cavorting in the (almost) buff with Lance Armstrong; those two may be the original bromance. But I think where I appreciated his bod the most was in the life-changing film, “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.” Matthew is forced to take off his shirt after he is splashed by some mud on his motorcycle and then what do you know, Kate Hudson and him get frisky in his parents’ bathroom. The man must have a clause in every movie. No nude scene, no muscles McConaughey. I’ll take it!
Typical Matthew pic. I bet he even goes shirtless to black-tie affairs.
Here he is not wearing a shirt in a venue where others are clothed. It's probably a state dinner.
Soooo I seem to post a lot about hair removal – tweezers, laser and now my beloved epilady! With all the excitement of having gotten laser hair removal, I seem to have forgotten about the divine little machine that saved me from being a gorilla in a bikini for years.
The epilady is like a little handheld electric shaver, but instead of just cutting your hair, little spinning tweezers of death pull it out from the roots. It’s like getting a very slow wax and is perfect for people who count activities like waterboarding and medieval torture as hobbies. So why use the spinning machine of despair? Because it can pull out even the shortest hairs and you don’t have to endure the horrid in-betweeny phase while in a bikini.
I have done some strange things with the epilady and have bought three in my life, all on different continents. I have evened out my weird hairline with it, removed my one and only thigh hair, and even tried it on Craig’s arm the other day to see if he could endure the pain (massive failure). And then of course there were all the times it saved me from being weird crotch stubble girl. Even though I now have the skin of a trained seal, I can’t get rid of my handy epilady. It’s so broken that I have to turn it on with a paperclip, but I don’t care. We’ve been through girl warfare together, and I will always keep it close to my heart…err armpit.
Ahh, the litte machine that saved me from being a human/ape. Or at least helped me yank the rogue knee hair when I forgot to shave. It's painful, yet amazing! Kind of like all cosmetic products for women.
So yesterday was our highest day of traffic ever on Naked Thanks, which of course thrilled Stacey and I. But what brought so many people to the site? Well, what brings the bulk of our readers every other day of course! Cougars. That’s right, c-o-u-g-a-r-s. The number one search term in Google to arrive at Naked Thanks is “cougar.” A whopping 53 percent of our traffic comes from that search.
Stacey, who I will now just call resident genius, had the foresight to thank her “cougar-friends” for a night on the town. Of course Stacey and her friends are still babes in the womb, but pish posh. This post was genius! There seems to be an amazing appetite out there for women of a certain age, and it’s bringing all these young randy lads to our site. Imagine just how disappointed they are when they see stationary and not too much flesh.
But I have to say, I kind of love that “cougar” is the gateway to Naked Thanks. I felt the same sense of pride when my friend told me that my name came up in Google when she searched “men’s underwear.” It’s not a Pulitzer, but it’s almost as good. And for Naked Thanks, it’s America’s men and their love for fine women of a certain age that bring ‘em to us. Rrrrrrrrr!
Courtney Cox, the starlet of Cougartown. Purrrr. If my boobs are even half that perky at age 45, I'll be thrilled.
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