Thank you US Weekly

My mom is a workaholic. She doesn't ever truly rest until her work is done.

My dad is a work hard, play hard kind of guy. (And before you go and have images of what "playing hard" looks like for my dad, let me paint a picture: It could be settling in for a four hour marathon of the food channel's Best Crab Shacks in America; staying up all night to compose music; umpiring tournaments for ASA softball; or writing down bad puns on a sheet of paper to use on waitresses when we're out to eat as a family.)

I fall somewhere in the middle.

If I'm working really hard at school, my housework and family obligations suffer. For instance: Grading papers while Elliott was taking a bath one day = every single toy (electronic, stuffed) ended up in the tub with him. And from September to June, Einstein just doesn't get walked.

If I'm feeling like my home is suffering, then school gets shortchanged. Assignments collect dust before I look at them and instead of spending four or five hours prepping lessons, I'm trying to find out how to make watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica relevant to our unit on contemporary literature. Okay, okay, I'm teasing. I wouldn't show them the whole season.

Could I do it all? Sure. And I'm certainly going to try. But let's not get crazy here...I'm not about to drive myself insane just for a small stack of vocab quizzes or for a small pile of laundry. If the students have to wait or we have to wear the same pants for a week...then so be it. Because I am the queen of taking time for myself. Sometimes I have to sneak it in. For example, it's time I make a confession: I lied to Matt about the intensity of my hemorrhoids in order to take long baths uninterrupted by children.

It was really brilliant on my part. Hemorrhoids are a valid ailment during and post-pregnancy netting myself several months of this trick. And what husband is going to say, "Another bath? Really? I'll go buy you some Preparation H or TUCKS for those things and we can cut back on our water bill."

It's only a pseudo-confession because Matt was already on to me. I said I was going to take a shower, 60 minutes later I emerged from our bathroom to two screaming kids and a stressed out husband.

Matt: What took you so long?
Me: [Hesitating] I was...shaving my legs?
Matt: Your legs still look like a Hobbit. You are a liar.
Me: Okay! Okay. When the water got cold, I crawled out and read US Weekly and ate a Cadbury Creme Egg.

Matt's says he has been on to me for a long time and allowed these escapades to go without comment as a testament of his love for me.

When it comes to what I want out of "Shelbi time", it's really simple:

- I want to read a magazine or a "candy" book (Sue Grafton, for example)
- I want to be warm (in front of a heater, in a bath...on a beach in Hawaii would be nice)
- I want a two liter of Diet 7-up/glass of red wine/Fresca/black coffee -- most often a combination of several of these beverages at once

There are variations to this theme. Sometimes I want to have "Mommy makes herself pretty time" which includes all of the above and then adds: Shaving legs, exfoliating, moisturizing, putting on a mud mask, applying make-up, curling hair, and then sitting around on my couch pretending someone is going to pick me up for a night out that didn't have to involve finding a babysitter or expressing milk in the passenger seat of a car. (Which is a far cry from making out with boys in the passenger seat of cars.)

During the ninth month of my pregnancy, I told Matt I needed to go grocery shopping and just came home with this:

And since Isaac's been born, I've acquired a pretty nice collection of US Weekly Magazines from each trip to Safeway that I've done sans Matt.

Adding these tabloids to my shopping cart is something I can do just for me. Of course, in the seven years I've been reading them, I've slowly lost touch with who some of these "celebrities" are -- but I don't care. The men are cute and the women don't have spit-up in their hair. I've never seen a "Stars are just like US" picture that showed an A-lister buying Starbucks with half of her shirt soaked from a faulty/leaky breast pad. (Oh yes, welcome to my TODAY. But the choice was go in with a wet shirt or no coffee. Which one would you choose?)

As a matter of fact, if Matt does the shopping by himself and I tell him to "bring me home a present" that is a code phrase for: You better come home with a magazine. When he buys me the magazine he knows that he's okaying the time I will need to read it too. Sometimes that means I will share a bathtub with a toddler who drives his cars up my back and points to moles I didn't even know I have and say, "Yuck." 

But when it means that I can find somewhere to hide while indulging in the lowest form of reading available to me...I'll forgo dishes, grading, and good parenting skills.

Every mom should have her one thing (for me, it's my several things) that she needs to sustain her. Hey, an US Weekly and a bottle of wine is cheaper than therapy.

Celebrity gossip, spring cleaning ideas, and amazing one-dish dinners? I've got you covered. Just need an hour alone...