Comedy Through the Chaos: Parenting Edition

Hello, hello, hello. And happy Saturday to everybody there in the Cadre sphere. I am Ms. Shannon. I'm reaching behind me for a sock that I think sat behind me. But now I'm questioning reality. Ah, look, it is there. Hello, everybody. Hello. Hello. Hello. I hope that the week treated you well. If it did not, shame on it. Not shame on you. I'm going to put on some shoes, some footwear and go outside. I think today. I have not been out thus far this morning, but according to the weather app, sounds like it is lovely.

So let go see in real life. Hello. One percent better. Hello. Nice to see you. I'm Ms. Shannon. We're gonna take a walk. Hello. Go see what's going on outside in my backyard today. Welcome to the weekend edition of Comedy through the Chaos, our parenting edition. 1% better. Feel free to let me know if you are a parent yourself, if you parent. Hello. Hello. If you're a parent, if you are adjacent to parenting. I don't think I'll go that way. I'll go this way. Somebody is mowing, which is what I'm going to be doing later.

There will be mowing happening here as well. My yard is abundant. My yard is abundant because we've had a lot of rain here in the Twin Cities and so that has worked out as far as the foliage concerned. Hello, Amar. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hi everybody. Amar, I want to tell you specifically apologies for missing Thursday. So before I get to today's lesson, which kind of involves what happened on Thursday, I want to say explain Thursday. Thursday was the first day here in Minnesota of the Minnesota State Fair.

Our great Minnesota get together. It's an event of 12 days. Parent of five, mostly adult kids. Okay then this hopefully will make sense for you and I think that it might be something that you can pass along to the other folks in your multi generational group. 1%. So I'll get to that in a second. So I, amongst a bunch of other things, am a part time radio and TV show TV host here in the Twin Cities. So I am at the Minnesota State Fair doing some stuff at the TV station that I work at most days from 9am Central to 4pm Central.

My dad went, yes, there is a lot of people there. So it's a fun time but it is busy. So I had this grandiose plan of doing my Thursday live streams on while I was at our state Minnesota State Fair booth. And so I got there on Thursday and I was setting up and doing all of the things and people were bringing by new great Minnesota State fair foods. And it just got busy. And I know it gets busy. I'm used to busy. My life lives in the land of busy. So I'm doing all this stuff. Next thing you know, four o' clock's here, I get on the shuttle, I get home, I start writing my substack article.

So came home to busy, hung out with my kiddo. Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. Then Thursday night, it occurs to me, hey, Anna, I'm talking about what happened on Thursday. Thursday night I finished writing my sub stack. I write a little social media post to go along with it, do a quick video, and then I go, hey, I gotta remember to talk about this on my Thursday live stream. And it. The Thursday was such a blur. I forgot that I was living on Thursday. At the day which I am just gonna release. I was about to put a comment in the Cadre sphere about, sorry, I forgot today was today and decided, you know, I would just bring it up today on Saturday, I would just roll it to the next one and do my best to make sure that I was here and present for you on this Saturday morning.

I think it's interesting because the post that I had written that day was, or I had posted actually on Wednesday going into Thursday was about giving myself grace because my to do list was already mocking me like, trying to get all of that stuff done along with being at the Minnesota State Fair. Because sometimes just getting to the fair is an adventure. It can be quite arduous, just parking and navigating all of the people and the. The lanes and all of the things. So I was already talking about how it was clear that I was not going to get all of the things I wanted to get done this week done.

And I was just going to be okay with that and give myself some grace. So I kind of like that. My camera is a little dirty. I don't know how y' all think, but I feel like it gives me like that old school Doris Day glow. I just dated myself a lot. Amar, you probably need to Google Doris Day, but look it up, Anna, you probably too kind of say, go look up Doris Day. They used to have a special filter on the cameras and some of the films that she should do it. I did not get Sweet Martha's Cookies. I will get Sweet Martha's Cookies eventually.

I was fortunate to try a number of the every year. For those of you who aren't here in town, it's a big deal when we have new Minnesota State Fair foods. So there's a list. And this year I think there was 25 that might be being too short. So I did get to try a lot of the new Minnesota State Fair foods. My favorite one at 2, there was a falafel waffle that this restaurant called Baba's did. So it's a falafel that was, instead of its traditional shape, was pressed into a waffle with this wonderful tomatoes and hummus and all these things on it.

So that was lovely. One of my favorite local restaurants, El Burrito Mercado, did these things called flauta dippers. And so they were lovely. It's a big deal if you can make things either on a stick or incredibly portable. Those are the two that. That's what people normally like at the fair. Something innovative that's on a stick or incredibly portable. But they had some wonderful things. The shrimp toast is great, you know, from Union Monkinson this year. And I will get around to the cookies. Cookies are a staple that I usually do there.

And so that the weirdest thing that I have. And maybe I'll. I'll post this video. It's on my social media, but I'll put it into the Cadre chat as well. They made a thing. One innovative restaurant at the Minnesota State Fair made. If you're familiar with the peanut butter and jelly uncrustables, you can buy them and they look like little mini pies, but they're bred with peanut butter and jelly in the middle of them. And so it's something you can give to your kids to take intake normally, or you could eat them as an adult, do what you want, you know, kind of thing.

So one of the restaurants made an uncrust a burger. And so it's two uncrustables that are bat like fried. And those are the buns for the hamburger. And so I did try one of those. It was. I liked it because I like peanut butter and jelly. If you don't like peanut butter and jelly, full stop, you won't like it. It is incredibly peanut butter and jelly. The thing that I found with it that the uncrustables, because there's two of them, it makes it really rich. That's a lot of peanut butter and jelly.

And it overwhelmed the burger. I would have needed more burger, but the thing was already huge. So I Frankensteined it when I got home and cut up one of the uncrustables and put it and made it and liked it much better. But again, I'm not gonna go tell this restaurant to do it themselves. I had time to do that. So back to what else goes on at the fair. One of the. Of course, as I said, it's the great Minnesota get together. And so oodles and oodles of people go. And that means that lots of families go.

So you get to see a variety of generations that go there. As Amar said, you said your dad went there. So you'll see families from little kids to big kids to multi generational groups that are navigating this very complex space often. And I've been going there, if you count back to when I was an intern at a different radio station, I've been going to the fair for 25 years in a variety of different roles. So I've had the opportunity to watch families navigate this space a lot. And I've had the opportunity to go through it.

As you know, when I first started going there, I was a single person. I didn't have kids, you know, and so to watch how I've even evolved, like, it's not a place that I would take my son right now because it's way too overwhelming and not really his aesthetic anyway. Especially if you overlay some of the autism challenges that we have with some sensory issues. Way too chaotic. Not his jam. So not the kind of place we would go. And so watching. There was a lovely woman there with a tiny baby, you know, and I like watching tiny babies because it makes me remember how cute my kid used to be and all the stuff.

He's different cute now. I didn't mean to say that, like, I didn't think he was cute. He's just 17. It's different cute, but tiny, tiny baby. Like a six month old baby. This baby was adorable. Watching this mom do that, Watching families with double strollers that are navigating these busy streets and all of these things. And one of the things that really occurred to me a few years ago and really changed the way that I interact with certain families when I'm at the fair is this. I had. This is once.

My son at the time was around 12. And I had, you know, I was accustomed to taking pictures of him, but didn't take a lot of pictures of myself. And I read an article and it was called the Incredible Missing Moment. And it wasn't like moms were disappearing, but what it was was the phenomenon of there would be family photos, candid ones that people would take on their cell phones, all these times that you would see posted, and mom was hardly ever in the picture. And a lot of that was because mom was the one that was taking the picture.

So this particular article hit it from a couple of different perspectives, but the one that I'm going to really focus on is how we as parents show up for our families fully and wholly. And, you know, especially moms, but dads do this, too. That we go, okay, this is a great experience.