"Mommywood" by Tori Spelling with Hilary Lifton

My rating: 4 out of 5
How I came across this book: checked out of local library

Product Details
Hardcover: 243 pages
Publisher: Simon Spotlight Entertainment; First Edition edition (April 14, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 141659910X

Synopsis from Amazon.com

"If you thought Tinseltown was tough...


Tori Spelling might have grown up with everything a girl could wish for, but these days she's just another suburban working mom...whose toddler regularly recognizes her in the pages of Us Weekly. Welcome to Mommywood, where the stars are two feet tall and your neighbors know who you are before you move in.
Like most parents, Tori wants her children to have the one thing she didn't have as a kid -- a normal family. On their hit Oxygen reality show, Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood, the starlet and her husband Dean McDermott regularly wrestle dirty diapers, host the neighborhood block party, and tackle temper tantrums on the red carpet. But when the cameras aren't rolling, Tori's still having awkward run-ins with a former 90210 costar at a laser tag birthday party, scooping rogue poo out of the kiddie pool on a resort vacation, and racing to win back her pre-baby body before the media starts calling her fat. For all her suburban fantasies, Tori Spelling is no June Cleaver.

With the same down-to-earth wit that made her entertaining memoir sTORI telling a #1 New York Times bestseller, Tori tells the hilarious and humbling stories of life as a mom in the limelight. From learning to be the kind of parent her own mother never was to revealing what it's like to raise a family while everyone is watching, Mommywood is an irresistible snapshot of celebrity parenthood that you won't get from the paparazzi."

My thoughts:
After reading sTori Telling earlier this fall I wanted to give Mommywood a try and was excited to find it on the shelf at the library this week. I enjoyed reading about Tori's experiences being a mother and wondered how it might differ from my own. While some of her issues are due to her own celbrity status, a lot of her other struggles are ones all mothers deal with. While I really enjoyed sTori Telling I thought she came across as a bit more spoiled and self involved in this one. I still have never seen any of her reality shows, I guess reality tv and tv in general just isn't really my thing. I did see the beginning episodes of 90210 but I think I stopped watching before the end of teh series. I liked how she does so much for her children and tries to include them in everything. I do wonder what it is like to be a part of her life and have people reading about you in her book. She has often talked about her struggles with her own mother and it seems as though she has given up on having much of a relationship with her, but she also never mentions her brother. It made me wonder if there was a story there about why they aren't involved in each others lives. She mentions that she plans to write more books so I will most like tune back in to see what she has to say then.

In one scene she ends up abandoning her stroller because she can't figure out how to fold it down. While I do know how to fold my strollers I could understand her frustration, I jave a double stroller that sometimes folds perfectly and other times won't go all the way down and even after months of using it I still haven't figured out what the trick is. She had some cosmetic questions after her 3D ultrasoudn. I only had one of those done with one of my children but the way it looks the babies nose does look odd or out of proportion, when our baby was born she looked fine. I think maybe the nose just gets a bit squished in the womb and with a regular ultrsound you don't know. So, I found myself agreeing with her about some things related to being a mother while a lot of the celbrity stuff was issues I will never have to deal with adn don't miss.

This was a quick and fun read, kind of like the US Weeklies her son looks for her pictures in!