Or Dial 1-888-MOMHELP: M.O.M. (Mom Operating Manual) * by Doreen Cronin

DAILY CARE AND MAINTENANCE

Regardless of the type of mom you have, there are many things you can do to ensure many years of trouble-free operation.

The Daily Basics. The essentials for a highly functional mom are Sleep, Nutrition, Exercise, and Water, or SNEW for short.

To ensure peak performance, your mom needs eight hours of PEACEFUL, UNINTERRUPTED SLEEP each night. This will never happen, but it is important to set goals. Check your mom's sleeping area and REMOVE any of the following: Small Children, Pets, Sharp Metal Objects, Laundry, Cold Pizza. Remarkably, despite their size, moms can sleep on as little as three inches of bed. (Science has no explanation for this.) Your mom is not getting enough sleep if...

1) She has packed you a lunch of unsweetened cocoa and a raw egg.
2) She has crawled into the trunk of the car.
3) She is licking the bottom of her coffee cup.

Doreen Cronin's tongue-in-cheek M.O.M. (Mom Operating Manual) (Atheneum, 2011), drolly illustrated by Laura Cornell, has everything the savvy kid needs to know about mom-keeping--care and feeding (don't let her eat stuff found under the sofa cushions), exercise (weight training opportunities include lifting the sofa to find your homework, shoes, [fill in the blank]) and grooming (keep critical comments to yourself!).

And when the feared Mom Meltdown threatens, Cronin offers detailed instructions for the RESET of Mom (Some advice: Avoid the ever-popular game of I Can Cluck Like A Chicken Longer Than You Can and choose the Quiet Game as long as you can carry it off. If all else fails, a witty performance of "Cranky Pants" (to the tune of "Mary Had A Little Lamb:" as in "Why do you wear cranky pants?.... Breathe deep and count to ten.")will usually make even the most fried mom laugh--at least long enough for any kids in her vicinity to make themselves scarce.

Current moms and grandmoms--who tend to have LONG memories--will find this book a total hoot--for Mothers Day or any day. As Kirkus Reviews knowledgeably points out, "In this era of Tiger Mothers, attachment parenting, the mommy track and The Three-Martini Playdate, Cronin and Cornell's collaboration will strike a nerve with moms looking for a laugh and a bit of validation—if only they can find the time to read it!"

If you handle them correctly, tend to their basic needs (which are minimal) and refer to the care manual with regularity, you mom should be operating at peak performance for years to come.

*Batteries not included
.

Little Gander Wanders: Little Goose by David Mraz and Margot Apple

What is the essence of a mother? Authors and poets and artists have pondered the subject, but few have approached it from the viewpoint of a gosling.

Little Goose liked pebbles and puddles, marbles and bubbles.

Baskets and buckets, and balls that roll.

He liked the number 8 and the letter O, and how things made his eyes go 'round and 'round without ever stopping.

"What is it about those things?" he wondered.

Little Goose runs off to tell his mother that he is going on a quest of find out why he likes round things so much. "The world is a big place," she advises, "But if you keep one wing over water, your wing and the water will bring you home to me."

Little Goose finds things that go 'round and 'round as he circumnavigates the pond. Turtle has a nice round rock on which to sun himself. Frog has flies which circle his head, and Mouse has his little round burrow beneath a round mousehole entryway. But Little Goose finds the round rock too slippery. The flies' buzzing around his head just make him dizzy, and Mouse's small house is too tight even for a tiny gosling.

It is only when he makes his way around the whole pond that he finds himself back where his mother is nibbling in the sedge along the edge, and when she greets him with a big hug, wrapping her feathered wings 'round and 'round him, Little Goose suddenly realizes why round things appeal to him so much.

It was his mama's wings, soft as ever, that made him cozy and comfy and happy all over, from side to side and bottom to top, that went around and around him, and that never stopped.

Margot Apple's soft, textured pencil drawings and David Mraz' gentle story make Little Goose, with its theme of the essence of motherhood, a good choice for Mother's Day story times.

Margot Apple is also the noted illustrator of those rhyming toddler favorites, the Sheep in a Jeep series.

The Nanny: The Perfect Stranger: The Truth about Mothers and Nannies by Lucy Kaylin

The very word nanny conjures up less than reassuring images, what with overdressed tv sitcom nannies, scary horror movie nannies, and take-charge reality show nannies who whip whole dysfunctional families into shape on a weekly basis. Lucy Kaylin, editor of Marie Claire describes them all in her new book The Perfect Stranger: The Truth about Mothers and Nannies. Kaylin recounts her own ambiguity about handing her newborn over to surrogate care:

"I said, 'No stranger can watch my baby....' Then about two weeks later, I was like, okay, we've got to start interviewing people."

Out of her own experience, Kaylin was led to interview working mothers and nanny/babysitters and found much ambivalence on both sides about the process of giving over children to another person's keeping for a significant part of the child's life. Yet she suggests that the mother-nanny relationship is often as important as the nanny-child relationship. Kaylin takes a clear-eyed look through the magnifying glass (and sometimes through the video cam) at the bad and the beautiful of the relationship between mothers and the women who take their place daily in the raising of their children.

Kaylin's book is less a how-to on hiring and keeping good caretakers than it is a respectful but reporterly look at the feelings and assessments of professional nannies and the women they work for. Finding and keeping that "perfect stranger," that Mary Poppins, apparently is not always an easy or comfortable process for either woman, but it is the most important job a working mother may ever have. Kaylin's book is, as one reviewer has said, "a valuable resource to any mother facing the challenge of hiring, well, herself."

A book with similar scope is Jessica Auerbach's And Nanny Makes Three: Mothers and Nannies Tell the Truth About Work, Love, Money, and Each Other, which features interviews with parents and caretakers, anecdotes, and some analysis of the difficulties and potential problems and exploitations between the two in dealing with the push and pull of daily life. Other books include Susan Carleon's The Nanny Book: The Smart Parent's Guide to Hiring, Firing, and Every Sticky Situation In Between, a guidebook to the whole process, from hiring to grocery shopping to handling the flirtatious sitter; and Searching for Mary Poppins: Women Write about the Intense Relationship between Mothers and Nannies a collection of twenty-four women's essays on hiring, working with, and keeping their children's caretakers.