Mommyfesto ― We Solemnly Swear ($%*!) . . . Because We Have Kids: a Book About the Reality of Parenting

The goal of parenting is to train your children to have slightly better manners than a dog. If you’ve achieved that by the end of day (or even if you’ve failed majestically trying), it is important to celebrate the little things. Like bedtime. And screw-top wine. And with Mommyfesto, by award-winning humor blogger Leanne Shirtliffe, you’ll learn the nitty-gritty about what it means to be a real parent. Without resorting to stereotypical “poo and pee jokes,” Shirtliffe finds humor in the insanity of raising children and celebrates using how-to-parent-like-an-expert books as paperweights for your child’s art collection in the recycling bin. Mommyfesto contains more than 150 realistic (and downright humorous) truths about parenting, such as:

A Band-Aid and a kiss solve most daily crises. So does talking like a pirate.
Expectations of child rearing should be thrown out the window. It’s better than throwing out your child.
If you can survive parented piano lessons, you can survive a zombie apocalypse.
And much more!

Mommyfesto offers parents the opportunity to laugh at the absurdity of childrearing and to realize there is no right way to do it. Blank pages in the back of the book encourage moms (and dads, too!) to add their beliefs—whether bizarre, funny, or even serious—to the book, making this a go-to guide for generations of crazed parents.


Leanne's blog, IronicMom.com, was recently declared the Best Humour Blog by the Canadian Weblog Awards, a juried competition. IronicMom.com garners 8,000–13,000 hits per month and has been featured on high-traffic sites such as The Christian Science Monitor, ProBlogger, Wordpress’ home page, Canadian Family, CBC, the Calgary Herald, and Sweet Mama. IronicMom.com was recognized as one of the top five new blogs by the Canadian Weblog Awards (2010) and as the top parenting blog in Calgary (a city of over 1 million people) and as the Most Laugh–Out–Loud Funny blog by Sweet Mama, a popular Canadian website.

Leanne Shirtliffe is an award-winning humor writer. She writes for the Huffington Post and Nickelodeon’s humor site NickMom.com and authored the book Don’t Lick the Minivan (Skyhorse 2013). When she’s not stopping her children from licking frozen flagpoles, Leanne teaches English to teenagers. You can read more about her misadventures at IronicMom.com. She lives in Alberta, Canada.