Today is the one-year anniversary of UncoolMom.com, and in honor of it I thought I’d give you updates on items from the past year where I promised to “keep you posted”.  Here are a few:  

-In May, my youngest child’s elementary school was the first school in Texas to close due to swine flu, and Emmie spent the week off teaching herself to play an acoustic guitar she bought at Target.  Did she ever get the dreaded H1N1? No, but her older sister did this fall.  Tamiflu worked wonders for Allison and amazingly the rest of us never got it.  Meanwhile, Emmie is doing a great job of teaching herself to play that guitar (with help from Uncle Steve) and now has an electric one, a Les Paul guitar that my husband found on Craig’s List.  For her birthday, we had Cousin Ted hide it inside his own guitar bag, with a birthday note and ribbons, so when she was at his house and they eagerly went to get out “his guitar” to play, there it was. Loved that look of surprise on her face!!  The down side is that she is so into rock music now, it is almost scary.  My husband introduced her to Guns ‘n Roses once on YouTube and now Slash is her hero.  Which makes it harder for her to play classical music on the piano…

Yes, Emmie is still being “forced” to take piano lessons as a trade-off for being allowed to participate in the all-encompassing sport of gymnastics. In one of my first posts, To Practice or Not To Practice, I mentioned several reasons for not allowing her to quit, one of them being that it became evident pretty quickly in her piano studies that she has a gift in playing and memorization.  I am even more convinced of that today.  I can’t let her quit.  And, I keep hearing from adults who tell me they wish they'd kept at it. Emmie would probably like it more if her teacher gave her rock songs to play instead of classical, but that's not an option at present. So, most of the time, she gets her piano practicing done without a fuss so she can get on to other things (like playing the guitar).  And I know she must secretly like how she sounds when her fingers get flying-- I've heard her play even when it's not time to practice.  We tell her, it’s a great foundation for rock, you would have never been able to teach yourself guitar without the chord foundations of piano, it's supposed to help your brain with math, blah, blah, blah…look at Eddie Van Halen, he likes Mozart so much, he named his son after him.  "Eddie who?"

-In July I blogged about my kids’ picky eating habits and my quest to get them to eat more vegetables and try new things.  I still haven’t tried anything from Jessica Seinfeld’s cookbook, where you hide pureed vegetables in things like chocolate brownies.  At present, I’m still in the “I’m cooking what I want to eat” mode that I got into in December and the kids are on their own if they don’t like it.  I’m really enjoying that.  I can actually cut out healthy and exotic (i.e. more than three ingredients) recipes from the food section of the newspaper now instead of saying to myself, “I’ll be able to cook that in about ten years...” Usually there’s something in the week’s menus they like and if not, we still have plenty of chicken nuggets and mac ‘n cheese on hand that they make themselves.  Surely they’re going to get sick of that soon?

-In August, I wrote about the ups and downs of living in Texas in a post entitled It's A Different World and mentioned that Emmie’s Scout troop was invited to participate in a flag ceremony at a Kay Bailey Hutchison for Governor rally. They did participate, and it was a lot of fun for them (not to mention good bar-b-que). They made it on every local news broadcast that night—here’s a link to one of them.  (Emmie is the one with her mouth hanging open as Sen. Hutchison walks on stage :0) The news is still using that footage occasionally as the governor's race heats up...  and no, I don't think I heard that dreaded Toby Keith song while I was at the rally, but I was having too much fun people-watching to really notice.

-In November, in a post entitled, Maybe We Should Just Buy A Rooster, the focus was on waking up a sleepy teenager.  Well, Allison just received, as a Christmas present, yet another “creative device” to help in this area—an Ipod docking station with an alarm that plays the Ipod and has a “mattress shaker” on an attached cord that’s supposed to be hidden under the mattress.  I’m not sure it’s going to help.  She’s already told me she’s not going to use the mattress shaker, since she’s placing the whole thing on a table that’s “too far from the bed”.  But hey, having this cool new device inspired her to re-arrange her room and clean it up—and if she starts doing that on a regular basis, it will be worth every penny spent on it, even if it doesn’t wake her up!

Also in November, I wrote about trying to make the holidays less stressful, and about encouraging Allison to give gifts.  While I still found myself shopping for a few things on Christmas Eve, I did get a huge amount done ahead of time, thanks to the Internet.  And, miracle of miracles, Allison bought gifts for everyone in the family.  I really didn’t think it was going to happen—that money-saving Christmas cookie tin I gave her never saw any action.  But the Sunday before Christmas, she got a 12-hour babysitting job, 10 a.m.-10 p.m., and earned $90.  She had enough to buy gifts for her friends, too, something she was even more excited about than buying for her family.  “They always get something for me,” she said.  “Now I can finally get something for them!” I wish one of her friends was named Savings Account...

New adventures await for 2010.  The next big high school dance is called Black and White, a “girls-ask-guys” type of thing where everyone dresses in, you guessed it, black and white, and already Allison and her friends are cooking up, some literally, creative ways to ask the guys (and I thought that over-the-top stuff was just for Homecoming!).  (I think this is all a crutch to avoid face-to-face confrontation, you know, real human interaction where you actually look at someone and ask, "Will you go to the dance with me?).  Emmie’s first gymnastics meet is in 10 days (yep, I greatly underestimated her determination at staying on the team).  Andy and I are running the technical/backstage side of the elementary school talent show in a couple months (he’d love to have a gong and act like his hero Chuck Barris, but that’s not going to happen…).  Allison recently found out she made it on the high school drill team (Argh! More cowboy, er, I mean cowgirl hats! And boots!).  My 30^th High School Reunion is this summer (hey, remember the 80’s?), and now that Luke the Dog just learned how to shake hands, he is destined for far greater feats of intelligence.  (Okay, that last line so closely resembles a corny holiday letter, I’d better close fast.) I'm still totally uncool in the eyes of my kids, still driving that bad (or should I say, rad) minivan, and still trying to keep a smile on my face (amidst clenched teeth) when the roller coaster goes down, knowing that it always goes up again.  Happy New Year, and stay tuned!