Melissa de la Cruz

Mel's Shopping Diary

What I’ve Been Up To

March 01, 2008

I’ve answered I think all the questions posted on The Compulsive Reader message boards, so go check it out --I spill a *little* about Revelations. You guys know I have a Blue Bloods story in this book, 666: Number of the Beast right??? If not, go check it out! It contains a story about what happened to Dylan after Blue Bloods and before Masquerade. Very cool.

I am deeeeep into Revelations. Sometimes I cackle because it is SO MUCH FUN to write it. Sometimes I have so much flopsweat that I can’t even think. Flopsweat is what actors get before they totally FLOP on stage, right? Also comedians can get it when their jokes BOMB. Ugh. So much pressure on this book! I think a lot of the pressure comes from ME. I think I’ve outlined a really cool story and I hope I live up to it. And all they hype. Something that I find kind of funny is that my then-editor for Blue Bloods, said “I think this book will live up to the hype” about that book, and at that point, the only one really talking up the book and hyping it up was, um, ME. I am my own cheerleader. Heh, heh.

So, anyway, the baby is upstairs in our bed. Yeah, she sleeps with us. She’s fifteen-and-a-half months and she’s our bedmate. Whatever. We are total wussies in the cry-it-out section of parenting. You know, the way you’re supposed to do it--just leave the kid in the crib and let her cry her lungs out until she passes out and understands that NO ONE will pick her up and bring her to Paradise (as in mama and dada’s nice warm bed). Yeah, we can’t do it. The first time we tried it, she REFUSED to lie down, instead she slept sitting up and we just watched the video monitor where she would kind of wobble as she slept and kept hitting her head on the crib rail. It would be like swaaay--wobble--hit! Up again--swaaay---wobble-hit! I was in TEARS by the time I ran to get her. So now Mike and I just live with cricks in our neck and bad muscle pain because we sleep hugging the sides of the bed while the baby lies HORIZONTALLY between us, hogging ALL the space.

You know, I’m just tired of everyone BASHING all the indulgent parents. Yeah, we should say no to the kid more. (And we DO say no. We say it so much that it’s HER favorite word.) But you know, all you read is how everyone is “helicoptering” and “hovering” and all the kids are “coddled” and babied. Whatever! This one article I read was sneering about how these college kids are calling their moms after a test to tell them how they did on it. Why is this such a bad thing??? Is that really SO terrible? That we love our kids SO much? I mean, we are most likely only going to have one child. So yes. She will be spoiled and coddled and pampered and she is our entire life. But that’s just the way it goes.

Of course, we also don’t want to raise a brat. And she is not a brat, she is a “diva” (my cousin’s word for her). I find I liked the way my parents raised me--with benign neglect. I don’t think my dad even paid attention to us for the first twelve years of our lives. They were busy having their own lives. But we always felt loved. And we always felt like we had our own lives, and our parents had their own lives, and everyone’s happy. So I have a little bit of the indulgent and a little bit of the neglect. She is alternately coddled and neglected, pampered and left to her own devices. Kind of the way I was raised, and I don’t think I came out too badly. I was a little brat myself when I was young. Hey, it’s good to be entitled. It makes you think you deserve good things in life--like your dreams coming true, and a good man, and a good job, and a nice family and a big house.

Anyway, it is way too late for this mommy blog, and I fear I’ve become one of THOSE parents. Also I have to share that my new obsession is Diablo Cody, the totally awesome hot and funny chick who wrote Juno and won the Academy Award wearing a leopard-print Dior dress and bitchin’ tattoos. How cool is she? I liked Juno a lot, but I really was intrigued by the vision in leopard and the Betty Page hair. I had to go get her book Candy Girl, about how she was a stripper. It was HEY-larious and then through the magic of Google I found her blog and she is just WAY too funny and awesome pawsome. If you are old enough, read her book, it’s a little x-rated and adult, so I am warning you, which probably would make you go and get it since that’s the kind of kid *I* was. Anyway, she smokes and drinks and writes about smoking and drinking which is so great. She is my new Internet best friend, in that I know more about her life than I do my real friends’ lives. Hey - I would know about their lives if they kept a blog! Haha.

xoxo
Mel