Am I the only one in the world who isn’t watching Lost?

I don’t want to be our only hope! Uh, I crumble under pressure! Let’s have another hope.

Willow in “Becoming, Part I

So I”m up at not-quite-six in the mornign because my back hurts and I can’t sleep. Don’t like this at all.

It’s a good think I came across the random Buffy quote generator by way of the blue board because if it weren’t for that I would either have to go find something productive to do or go back to bed.

Anya, apart from your incredibly uninfectious enthusiasm, have you anything else to contribute?

Giles in “Chosen”

Hee.

Nevermind. I’m going back to bed.

Cynthia Tucker is awesome. For the record, there is nothing in this column that I don’t agree with completely.

This morning I couldn’t find my vitamins. This afternoon I found them in the freezer when I went to take a can of orange juice out to thaw. I have no idea how it happened.

I do know how the remote for the VCR almost ended up in the washing machine. Muchkin girl was helping me sort laundry in the living room, and she just loves putting things in baskets or boxes. I caught it just in time to grab it from the folds of a shirt that was heading into the machine.

I had three or four more examples of extremely strange/stupid things from today that I was going to submit as further evidence that this week has driven away my mind, but I can’t remember them now. Perhaps that is more evidence in itself?

In other news, it turns out that I am still doing the single parent thing after all. M has been working hard all week and hardly sleeping, so after driving four hours to his parents’ house (not quite half way home from where he was) he didn ‘t feel up to coming the rest of the way and stayed the night. He’ll be home tomorrow. He swears that he will get an early start.

M will be home again tonight. Thank goodness.

How the heck am I supposed to go downstairs to put laundry in or clean the poor cats’ litter when there is no one else here to watch little-miss-troublemaker-extraordinaire? On Wednesday she didn’t even take a nap!

To top it off, she decided that this week would be a good time to officially turn into a little monkey. She’s so proud of herself for learning to climb up on the coffee table and the couch that she thinks she needs to do both all of the time. She doesn’t understand why Mommy doesn’t seem to be too happy with these accomplishments. Of course, she also believes that the proper thing to do once one has climbed on a piece furniture is to attempt to fling onself off it headfirst so as to give Mommy a heart attack. Standing up on the coffee table and doing a little dance is also great fun.

She has decided that she wants to be a miniature nudist full time now, so diaper changes are no fun these days. The part where the diaper comes of is okay. The part where a new one goes on is not so good. She has become an expert at squirming away. Last night after battling her for a bit I gave up and thought that ten minutes or so without a diaper usually doesn’t do any harm, and I was planning on using the carpet shampooer in the living room this weekend anyway and thus it would be no big deal if it did do hearm, so I let her go free.

I working on a project on the table and keeping one eye on her when she suddenly like magic she went from standing by the couch to bouncing on the couch. I went to get her down before she broke her neck (another sure way to induce temper tantrum) and loe and behold, my couch had a wet spot. I scrubbed at it, but how in the world am I supposed to clean that out of thick cushions?

Of course, this week has also been good in that she is finally more interested in books for more than just their nutritional value or the fun of making me fish chewed up paper and cardboard out of her mouth before she chokes. She lets me read to her now! Yay!

Only seven more hours now - if he comes home on time.

There is this house down the street where the grass is long and ragged and the dandelions rule. As much as I love nature, I also feel that a lawn is not nature, and so if you are going to have one to begin with you might as well keep it neat. I’ve had some bad thoughts about the people who lived there, people who I’d never set eyes on. Since this is an area largely populated by younger people, I imagined them as lazy slobs who sat around drinking beer in front of the television all of the time.

It turns out that there was no they, just she, and she is quite a nice lady. She’s older with adult children who don’t live at home, and she doesn’t bother keeping her lawn up because she works twelve hour days and she just doesn’t have the time or energy. I can understand that. I can forgive that. Her yard no longer seems an eyesore.

We had quite a nice talk tonight. She happened to be heading in just as Munchkin and I walked by on our evening walk, and she flagged us down to introduce herself. She oohed and awed over the cuteness of Munchkin girl as is proper behavior for anyone who has the privilege to meet the cutest little girl in the world.

I make a big deal about always giving people the benefit of the doubt and assuming there is something I don’t know and making excuses for people because in this harsh world it is far better to give someone latitude that they may not deserve than it is to judge them unfairly. But then I completely forget to do it. Practice what I preach? Me?

Note to self: you never know all the factors that may be involved. Try to be more understanding. It makes the world turn smoother.

M’s father and brother fired the idiot they had working for them (which actually sped things up as they no longer had to correct his mistakes), and so were left shorthanded. As we really could use the extra money, M is using a week of his vacation time to go out and help them. As his job involves much sitting at a computer, he claimed that he was looking forward to having bit of a break and getting back into manual labor for a bit. Now that he is there, he isn’t so certain about this.

Munchkin Girl and I are all alone here tonight and tomorrow night and so forth until Saturday. As the current job is quite a ways from, well, anywhere, they will be staying on the site. It wouldn’t be any sort of place for a little girl to hang out.

He just left at noon today. It’s only for a week. And even if he were here, he would have gone ot bed by now, and he wouldn’t be here most of the day tomorrow or the next day, etc. So why does it feel so lonely around here?

My little girl seems to have formed a container of diaper wipes. The cat knocked it off her dresser a couple of days ago, and now she’s been carrying it around the house with her all weekend. It’s probably not the best toy for her, and I should put it back out of her reach, but she’s been having so much fun with it that I just haven’t had the hear to.

Strange.

It’s empty anyway. We don’t have much use for disposable wipes around here. I keep a few in the diaper bag for convenience when we are out, but we use cloth wipes when at home. Before she was born I bought some flannel (about the cost of two packages of disposable wipes) and cut it into squares and zig-zagged around the edges to prevent fraying. They’ve worked great.

And speaking of poor planning..

Some people have inner children. I have an inner idiot who unfortunately escapes far too frequently from the padded room in which I try to contain her. Today she snuck out and carelessly dropped the diaper bag and purse in the driveway on the way to install Munchkin-Girl in the car seat. She claims that she had every intention of going back to get them (she had been carrying stuff awquardly and something had to fall; better the bags than the baby), but I don’t believe her. I know how she likes to make trouble.

Did I mention that she dropped them right behind the car?

Fortunately the tupperware container containing Cheerios was the only casualty. It was shattered into about a zillion pieces, and the diaper bag is now full of Cherrio-dust.

I’d like to say that I have her safely trapped once again in the padded cell in the deepest recess of my brain, but I fear that she may have escaped into my husband. He kindly got the stroller out of the trunk to me, but then while wrapped up in conversation he started pushing it to the store and made it several feet before I called him back so that I could put Munchkin-Girl in it.

If we hadn’t gone to war in Iraq…

Osama and al-Qaida might be gone or rendered less effective. We cut and ran to Iraq, without accomplishing that vital mission, leaving the country that sheltered Osama to be fought over, again, by warlords of the drug trade and the crazily puritanical Taliban.

One of eight things that might have been had we not gone to war in Iraq from Richard Reeve’s Sept 13, 2004 column If We Hadn’t Gone to War in Iraq.

And here is another one:

The United States would still be admired in most places and a feared superpower everywhere — perhaps even liked a bit. Iraq, like Vietnam, has revealed the limits of our power, allowing enemies everywhere to mock us.

Ever heard of pin firing? It’s a rather cruel, in my opinion, theraputic treatment sometimes used on horses that have chronic injuries such as bowed tendons. It involves inserting a very hot probe multiple times to make the injury accute thereby increaseing blood flow which promotes healing. Basically the idea is to cause injury which will eventually strengthen the leg. Based on what I’ve seen in the news about what is going on with Al Queda (when they say anything at all), it seems like it unfortunately might be an apt metaphore for the war on terror.

I wish we’d focused on hunting Al Queda right to extinction. It seems unbelievable that we couldn’t just have wiped them off the face of the earth. But we didn’t, and they are still out there, and, as evil as he is, I personally don’t feel safer knowing that we knocked Saddam Hussein to his knees never to rise again. The world should have been a better place with one despot down, but chaos and disorder and factions and fighting don’t seem to be much of a step up.

I thought that it was a bit early when I was in Value Village a few weeks ago and saw that they had the Haloween stuff out already.

Then I discoverd that Cosco has Christmas stuff out already.

Whatever happened to waiting until at least Thanksgiving?

Sheesh.

Like inkdot, when I read this, I can only nod and agree completely.

‘Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?’

‘What other reason could there be?’ Colonel Gerineldo Marquez answered. ‘For the great Liberal party.’

‘You’re lucky because you know hwy,’ he answered. ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’ve come to realize only just now that I’m fighting because of pride.’

‘That’s bad,’ Colonel Gerineldo Marquez said.

Colonel Aureliano Buendia was amused at his alarm. ‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘But in any case, it’s better than not knowing hwy you’re fighting.’ He looked at him in the eyes and added with a smile:

‘Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn’t have any meaning for anyone.’

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitdue, page 140

Oh how much she’s grown up in just a year…

Happy birthday, my beautiful little Munchkin Girl.

It is 4:07 in the AM, and don’t ask what I am doing up. I should be sleeping.

Exactly one year ago I was up at this hour as well, and I most definately wasn’t having any fun. It would also be at least eighteen hours until I got any sleep at all, and a couple of days before I got any real sleep.

My prospects for sleep look much better this time. I’m heading off to bed in just a minute, as a matter of fact.

It was all worth it though, of course. And a part of me - and not a small part either - does wish that I could go back in time a year (well, a year minus sixteen hours or so.. there are certain parts that I definately don’t feel the need to relive if it can be helped) and experience it all again.

It just goes by too fast.

My baby is growing up. She is becoming positively self sufficient. Now not only can she feed herself and feed me, but she can get her own meals.

We have a couple of cabinets in our kitchen that we haven’t found a way to childproof yet . We are constantly having to fish her out of them. Today she dragged her box of cheerios out and spilled them all over the floor. She then sat there in the middle of the mess happily eating them and looking quite pleased at her accomplishment.

Until her father (I was here on the computer) put an end to it, that is. I had just swept a little before, but my floors still are’t that clean.

PHOTO: When Nerds Protest The RNC.

The conversation in the replies is just as funny as the picture itself. I must be a bit of a nerd too.

Muchkin Girl and I stayed up too late and were up in the middle of the night for a while (a diaper needed changing, and going from sleep to diaper change when she still wants to be sleeping generally causes upset that takes a bit of time to recover from). As a result, we slept in quite late . As in I’ve been up about fifteen minutes now. She’s still sleeping.

M was gone when I got up. This is fine, except the reason for my waking was the phone ringing. That would have been fine to, as it was quite late to still be sleeping, except the phone was for him. And now I am feeling rather like an idiot.

You see, I get a little confused when I first wake up. Since I was aware enough to know that he wasn’t home, I told the caller (and old friend) that he was at work and gave that number.

Hello self? You’re an idiot. It’s Saturday. He’s out playing hockey, not at work. It’s always so much fun looking like an idiot.

Just hit post on that last bit and then wandered out to the living room to catch the end of Conan, which I failed to do as it turns out that my computer clock is slow and Conan had already ended several minutes previously. I did, however, catch one of those stupid little “the more you know” public service thingamabobs that NBC does.

This one commented on how we always want to be there for our kids twenty-four-seven and now you could be through the wonders of the V-Chip. To find out more, go to blah blah blah.

Methinks that someone is missing the point and a little confused on what “be there” means. Using a V-chip is not being there for your kids. It’s using an electric babysitter so that you don’t have to actually be there to supervise them.

There is quite a difference.

Back in the days before we knew what it was like to actually have a child rather than just to have one on the way, there was quite a bit of discussion in this household as to what diapering option we should use. A book on fatherhood that M bought spelled out the options as 1: disposables 2: diaper service 3: cloth washed at home and 4: au natural/unfurnished basement/ whatever you want to call it.

I was set on option number three. M wasn’t so sure and was leaning toward option 2, which I felt was a huge waste of money (twenty-two bucks a week). Option two was his choice when I could get him to seriously discuss it anyway. Most of the time he would insist that we were going with option number four.

It certainly seemed like a joke. It was to us anyway, and I’m sure the book meant it that way. Since then though, I’ve been reading more and more articles such as NATURAL this one where it is taken quite seriously.

I wish I could say that I was in tune with my daughter enough that we could try something like this, but alas, I just don’t think it is true. And somehow it is making me feel like a little less of a matter that I can’t tell when my baby has to go while all those other women can. Not that much less of a mother though. I’m still pretty darn good, out of tune with potty issues or not.

Wouldn’t it be nice though? It’s getting to be more and more of a battle each time to change the diaper of Little-Miss-Can’t-Sit-Still-For-Two-Seconds-Together.
Her favorite game is running off mid diaper change. I seem to have a miniature nudist on my hands.

Perhaps we should replace all our floors with easy to mop tile? I can see option number four as being a possibility in that case…