Blog Posts by Jen Singer

webphotographeer/iStockSometimes, they let me out of the house. Though I usually spend a lot of time at my desk in my home office, lately I've been going to booksignings and speaking engagements. I even appeared on TV and radio as the spokesmom for S'mores. (Hardest part: not being able to eat the S'mores that surrounded me for four hours.) Along the way, I've met some wonderful bloggers. Here are a few to check out until they let you out of the house:

Storked! (http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/blogs/storked) I met Storked's blogger, Christine Coppa, at a signing for her entertaining new memoir about single motherhood, "Rattled." She has chronicled her experience as the single mother of one boy, now a toddler, over at Storked! ever since she was pregnant. In posts like "Potty Training: I Need a Cocktail Stat," she admits she's simply trying not to lose her mind. A fashionista turned mom, Christine says she found an "unexpected pleasure of shopping for a swimsuit while six-and-a-half-months

Havet/iStockI know I need to get to the supermarket when I start reading foodie blogs. Right now, my fridge has some soup, leftover pizza and half a carton of milk, so that explains why this non-foodie has been eyeing up the mouth-watering pictures of pork chops and such at these great foodie blogs:

FoodMomiac (http://www.foodmomiac.com/) Danielle Altshuler Wiley is obsessed with food. "I'm one of those people who starts thinking about dinner as soon as I have completed my lunch." That's good for us, because Danielle's blog is filled with very doable recipes for such staples as macaroni salad (assuming you know what the heck turbinado sugar...apparently, sugar in the raw... is). I'll substitute with whatever's in my sugar bowl.) But this isn't just a food blog. It's also a mom blog. Danielle shows us what happened when she tried to capture her son's air guitar prowess on video, and she laments that she needs a life intern, because, she says, "I am completely incapable of keeping track of

Richard Goerg/iStockNo matter what kind of parent you are, you'll laugh a little or learn a little from these blogs by a crazy suburban mom, a SAHD with a British accent and a professional writer who focuses on body issues:

Crazy Suburban Mom (http://crazysuburbanmom.blogspot.com/) As of Thursday, Tracy Reinhardt's Hefty Bag Tally was at 5. That's how many garbage bags she'd gone through during her Jamaican Declutter Fest 2009, an attempt to clean out the house before she and her family leave for their vacation in Jamaica. She is, after all, a crazy suburban mom. The New Jersey mom says her clean laundry is never put away, so it "becomes part of the general daily clutter," and she believes that her positive thinking kept rain from falling on her son's graduation ceremony. Her blog is filled with photos of her junk she gives away and gems like this: "I became a vegetarian and remained one until my pregnancy forced me to eat baloney." And she asks the important questions we all want answers to, like

Moti Meiri/iStockHe didn't want to dance, and I don't blame him. Each fifth grade class was set to perform a song-and-dance for their graduation from D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Program), but my son really didn't want to. So his teacher said he could pace in the back with another boy who preferred to skip the dancing part. Meanwhile, I sat in the audience and held my breath.

Though it was technically a graduation from the program, it was also a de facto graduation from school. My son's fifth grade class will go on to the middle school across town in the fall, where, presumably, they'll need to know how to resist drugs. I doubt, however, that they'll need to know how to dance and sing anti-drug lyrics set to "I Will Survive." But the anti-drug program has nonetheless been successful at many schools across the country, and I'm glad that he participated in it.

On the morning of the program, I took a seat among the dozens and dozens of parents in the bleachers in the school gym, and watched

Debora Pisani/iStock.Maybe it's in the pile of papers that came home from school on Friday. Or maybe it's lost in the newspapers. Or most likely, maybe I recycled it. Either way, my dad's Father's Day present is missing and so, apparently, is what's left of my ability to organize.

My son, Nicholas, and I had created a comic strip based on my father's nickname: "Captain Red Pen." My brother had bestowed the title upon him back in high school after Dad had edited an essay he'd written for school, leaving the paper full of red ink. This was back before computers, so my brother had to type the entire thing all over again.

For Father's Day this year, Nick and I thought it would be fun to create, "The Adventures of Captain Red Pen." I wrote it and he illustrated it with the intention of presenting it to my dad on Father's Day. Only, we never made it to my parents' house on Sunday.

A week earlier, my fourth grader had suffered an eye injury, courtesy of an errant soccer ball kicked by an opposing

Chris Price/iStockIt's just that I don't think that a grown man should be doing that. Not in our family room. Not anywhere. But I know that it makes my husband happy, so I bite my tongue.

"I got you to Fiji," my husband, Pete, told one of our sons as he stood in front of our TV playing Excite Bots, a new virtual racing game for the Wii.

"Did you come in first?" our son asked, but my husband didn't answer him right away. He was too busy doing the thing that I find so unbecoming of a grown-up: "cranking" the Wii wheel repeatedly so that his virtual "bot," shaped like a bug of some sort, spins around and around to sound effects that sound like a cartoon airplane. Then he thrusts the wheel forward until his bot shoots ahead or floats like a butterfly or whatever. I can't watch. It just looks so silly.

"Yeah," Pete finally answered, and our son nodded in approval.

Perhaps a woman who professed her love for the Wii Fit shouldn't poke fun at a man who enjoys playing a video game now and

Jen SingerIt wasn't until one of the fifth graders started playing "Smoke on the Water" that I remembered it: This was the room where I'd spent the better part of four months trying to beat cancer. I remembered it, and then I promptly forgot it again, thanks to five kids, 26 chairs and one piano recital in my living room on a Sunday afternoon.

Two summers ago, I had holed up in our living room, hiding from a house full of construction workers, trying to "rest" after my chemotherapy sessions, despite the hammering on the other side of the wall. We had started construction six weeks before I found out that I had a tumor the size of a softball in my lung, the result of stage 3 non Hodgkin's lymphoma that had gone undetected for an estimated eight months.

But we didn't want to stop the construction. Besides, it was such a great metaphor for what was going on with me.

Until then, our living room was the place where the kids practiced playing the piano, where my husband and I

ObservePhoto/iStockLooking for a few good blogs to bookmark? Here's a mishmosh of the helpful, fun and just plain crazy:

Mom Writer's Literary Magazine Blog (http://www.momwriterslitmagblog.com/) The contributors to this magazine's blog say, "We are not looking for 'sugar-coated' material." In other words, they want to motherhood at its rawest and most honest. And you'll get plenty of that here. The editors, a group of wise and determined writers, offer advice to moms who write, including "This is one of the biggest sources of unhappiness - always thinking that you should be doing something else." But there's also tidbits on motherhood, including a list of texting abbreviations any parent of a teen/tween ought to know, and an entire section of rants. For solid writing (and life) advice, drop by this helpful blog (and check out the magazine) which says, "If you want something in your life to change, change your story."

Mom's Fortress of Solitude (http://www.momsgreatescape.blogspot.com/) Angela