Toot! Toot! (Shameless Self-Promotion Alert)

Last week…?  Not the most stellar.  [CUE THE VIOLINS]  My cat died unexpectedly on Sunday.  My Grandma Kirby passed away on Friday.  And, perhaps most traumatically of all, I went to pour myself a bowl of Chocolate Cheerios on Thursday, only to realize I had finished the box the night before.

What I learned during this time of mourning:  The only thing sadder than my week, is the sight of a grown woman licking the dust off the inside of a cereal bag.

Which is why I was particularly delighted to receive some much-needed good news on Friday:  Popular parenting site Babble.com has honored The Laughing Stork as one of its “Top 50 Mom Blogs” and, cooler yet, as one of the top-10 funniest of the group (#7, to be exact — not that I’m, um, keeping track or anything).  Here is the write-up:

This is not a mom blog — no. Candy Kirby’s The Laughing Stork is a humor site, a literally laugh-out-loud humor site that just happens to reference the funny side of parenting. A former writer for The Bold and the Beautiful (hey, we all get our start somewhere), Candy covers everything from pop culture to her own relationship with her husband. And if it has a parenting angle and she can make a joke about it, she will.

This isn’t a blog that tackles the serious issues, and that’s why we love it so much. And Candy loves her readers right back — so much, in fact, that she’ll respond to your email, right after she finishes microwaving her daughter’s Hungry Man dinner!.

Pretty nice, huh?  It is so heartening to be recognized, especially when I see The Laughing Stork listed amongst such fabulous and more established sites — hey, wait, back up a sec.  Did they smirkingly say, “Hey, we all get our start somewhere”?  Oooohhhh, burn!  No love for B&B.  I guess some people don’t see the literary genius in dialogue such as:

SALLY:  I don’t give a rat’s behind about becoming the next Picasso.  Truth is, there’s only one thing I really need, one thing I really want — Spectra Fashions… (HOLDS UP PAINT-SPLATTERED HANDS) … back in my dirty little hands, where it belongs!

Yeah, okay, maybe Babble does have a point.  (That dialogue was, indeed, lifted from one of my old scripts.  I kid you not.)

So please join me in raising a glass of bubbly — or something stronger, if you’re already having a week like I did — for a virtual toast to Babble.com for lifting my spirits with this honor, to you, my dear readers, who make it all worthwhile, to all of the other “Mom Blogs” on the list (as well as the many wonderful blogs that prefer to fly under the radar), to Mr. Candy, Miss Skye, Ms. Marcy and Mr. Matty (R.I.P.) for providing me with endless material and, above all else, to keeping extra boxes of Chocolate Cheerios in the pantry.

Cheers!

Fun challenge for the day:  Find a way to casually work “I don’t give a rat’s behind about becoming the next Picasso” into conversation!