Cookie Magazine

I like mom magazines as much as anyone and when a new one hits the market, it’s very likely I will check it out. I think the one in question came to us via some frequent flyer points we were needing to use up and didn’t have enough to actually merit travel.

Enter Cookie.

Ummmm, yeah. Where to start?

I’m not exactly sure how to express my disdain for it’s earliest issues. Let’s just say that despite the fact that I don’t consider myself a pauper, I just don’t find it to be LIKELY that me or any of my mommy friends will ever be cavorting around in three thousand dollar dresses, like the “moms” in their photo shoot. I certainly don’t wear them out on picnics while I roll around on the grass with my children, either.

In fact, a grass stain on a three thousand dollar dress might make me commit hari-kiri.

I also don’t find it to be a big help for them to feature products that I look up online only to discover that they only have their currency in Lira. I get it. Foreign is chic. Not practical, but chic, for sure.

I don’t think, however, that thousand dollar strollers are practical or even reasonable to promote (and yes I push around a Peg Perego Twin Aria which I admit does not fall into the category of cheap strollers) but my kids aren’t about to pull Louis Vuitton luggage through the airport and I don’t actually know anyone who has the luxury of choosing the airport they fly into based on the airlines that fly there.

I’m sure it rocks being able to say “You know I don’t care for Midway, Lufthansa doesn’t fly into there” but do normal people actually do that? (Writer’s note: Lufthansa might fly into Midway. I didn’t check).

The whole thing is elitist to the point of absurdity. I realize that me and my proletariat kind might simply be envious, but it just sort of offends me.

For example, I’m offended by the notion that their family camping spread features all the ways to electrify your experience - because your kid can’t go a couple of days without his iPod or his DVD player.

Apparently kids in their demographic don’t play with kites or balsa wood planes or play board games. Come to think of it, why bother going camping at all? Just buy the kid a new DVD, send them to their room and tell them it’s “camping day.” That almost seems simpler to me.

In all fairness, Cookie is getting better. There were actually some recent articles that didn’t make me rage and I even laughed at some stuff in the last issue; good laughing as opposed to the eyerolling kind of laughing…

But I’m still not sure who their audience is. Maybe if Paris Hilton had a baby, her housekeeper would pick up a copy of it for the nanny to read or something.

I do like escapism. I just don’t like being patronized, which is sort of how it feels as I’m reading it. As if I’m being shown how inadequate our lifestyle is; how lacking in appropriate gear my parenting inventory really is…

I can almost hear them, “We are Cookie. Resistance is futile. Prepare to assimilate.”