Bon Jovi Cologne, $300, and YouTube

That is not the beginning, or even the punchline, of a funny (or even very bad) joke. It is a short list of some of the things I’ve been working on that haven’t appeared on this site.

“Man Smell” is an essay I wrote about my surprise and dismay when my first born son started emitting unmistakable boy-scented body odor starting at age 6! It is published on Mamalode, a web and print magazine that features funny and moving essays about parenthood. The more clicks I get, the more I get paid. It’s not my ideal revenue structure, and I was hoping the essay would have been chosen for the print mag, but it’s a start. Many people have found it funny and I dare say, especially those who have or have had or have been little boys.

The $300 is a rounded up figure – the amount over budget we found ourselves after three months of tracking our spending and attempting to stick within said budget. I chronicle this journey at Mint’s blog – Mint is a free online and mobile budgeting tool created by Intuit, who also makes Quicken and Quickbooks and other financial software tools. Their blog, Mintlife, publishes helpful articles about personal finances every day. My series is a first person account of one family’s decision to get control of its spending, called “American Family Budget.” (Start from the bottom to follow the story from the beginning.) Sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it’s funny, and sometimes it just makes you feel less alone.

YouTube – I listed this because soon I will be adding the video of my appearance in Expressing Motherhood, the stage show in which 12 women write and perform their own stories about parenting or being parented, to my channel. You should subscribe (just click the orange “subscribe” button that appears to the right just under the header photo), because when I finally get the balls to watch the clip and upload it, you will be alerted so that you can see it. If you didn’t make it to Hollywood for any of the 8 performances because you either live far away or you were just too busy or it just wasn’t that interesting to you at the time, this is where you can click and watch and say “Whew, I dodged a bullet with that one” or “Dammit. I totally regret skipping this!”