At Your Own Risk

Read this blog post at your own risk. I have PMS and hay fever, which is not a good combination. I'll do my best to be coherent.

Raising kids is tricky; some days you feel good about what you're doing and other days might as well be branded "epic fail." That's how I felt watching the footage of François' birthday and the piano. I should have listened to my instincts that day. He had a great birthday in all ways but one this year. It was a half-day at school, so we picked him up and took him on a shopping spree, then came home to the piano. Little kids are brutally honest with their emotions, and he wasn't into it that day. I should have shut it down. It made me ill to watch his reaction. It doesn't matter that he loves the piano, and his lessons, and even back on that day wanted Travis from NYFA to play all sorts of requests. One thing that did make me feel better was watching Episode 2 of Simon's webisodes.

Watching the scene with Jill was bittersweet. It's hard for me to analyze it as I'm so close to the situation and not objective at all, so I'm not going to. Each week I'm constantly reminded how much really happened during this period -- it was such a race to get from one situation to the next at that time that only now am I beginning to be able to digest it all. It will be very interesting to see what happens next. By the way, on a side note if you'd like to know what I made for lunch in that scene, the menu is here.

I'm not sure exactly how Kelly felt Ramona's text message was threatening, but it gives a good indication of how thin-skinned she can be. You need thicker skin than that to navigate a reality show without going bananas; that puts more than a few things in perspective. LOVED Sonja's impression of Ramona, except the only time Ramona says "darling" is when she is impersonating LuAnn. Next time I want to see Sonja do Kelly impersonating Simon.

Cindy got caught in a double whammy lie this week -- she tried to slither out of the Kelly/Sonja/Ramona situation, and she promised she wouldn't talk behind Ramona's back. Maybe in the moment she forgot that she's on TV and there's a record of all that. And why on earth did she care about who is or isn't on Sonja's payroll? That was weird and childish. In the end the lunch with Ramona and Kelly was fine.

I was totally bewildered when LuAnn pretended not to realize that Ramona had moved on from designing crosses. She sees her jewelry all the time. Maybe she just wasn't paying attention. Anyway, I'm getting tired of LuAnn being fake/nice face-to-face and doing a 180 the moment you're out of earshot.

Finally, Cindy and Ramona sat down. They are both strong women, and I could see Cindy really wanted to win, whatever "winning" means in this case. Ramona could have let Cindy speak more, and Cindy could have gotten off her Blackberry -- it seems like she grabs it whenever she wants to avoid a situation. Stalemate. To me, and I think this is what Sonja meant when she was talking about pecking orders, I was surprised that Cindy has been behaving this way because Ramona was her friend. Ramona built Cindy up over and over, told us all we'd love her, wanted us to welcome her and help her out, and Cindy responded to that by dumping on her. This is not to say that Cindy's a bad person; I don't think she is. To be fair, I hardly know her. I think she felt tremendous pressure coming into our gaggle of girls four years in, and went after the person she knew the best out of all of us. Whether that works out for her, we'll all get to see.

Thanks for reading, and please check out Thug in a Cocktail Dress, our fashion recap and Simon's webisode blog. You can also find us on Facebook as well as Simon's and my Twitter feeds. Big news will be forthcoming shortly about Simon's single "I Am Real", and if you would like to read more about the good, bad and ugly of raising kids in the city (a la that scene this week), check out our book. See you next week!