A weight has been lifted from my shoulders. A dreadful guilt has been appeased. I’m giddy and free because I AM COMPLETELY CAUGHT UP ON EMAIL!

That’s right. There are no longer any unanswered messages in my inbox calling to me like tell-tale hearts beating “why haven’t you replied to me? Why? Why? Why?” The silence is truly golden.

May I never get so far behind again.

Except.. OH CRAP! I forgot to email my brother on his birthday. Damnit.

*sigh*

I’ve checked my email about ten times since noon yesterday. Once I had a response to an email I’d sent earlier, but other than that, it has been, “Sorry, you don’t have any new mail.”

Sorry? Sorry? Whatever for? Oh Eudora, have you no idea how happy this makes me?

Most of you are reading this through livejournal, but I actually posted it on my blog on my domain (I use a pluging to make wordpress double as a livejournal client, so my posts appear both places), which I still keep because I am rather attached to it even though hardly anyone reads it there anymore (I just redesigned my domain though, go look). My blog’s main function lately has been to act as a comment spam magnet.

It’s been terrible. I thought I had problems before, so I set up a bunch of keywords to moderate, and I’d get a bunch of emails every now and then telling me that I had messages to moderate. The past few weeks I’ve had between fifty and several hundred of these “please moderate” messages every time I checked my email. It’s been driving me crazy, and it’s one of the main reasons I’m currently so horribly behind on email.

So yesterday morning I installed bad behavior. Glorious silence in my email! I don’t see a single piece of comment spam. I am so thrilled that I felt the need to bore all you talking about the details of my blog and email.

Erm.. actually this was all a long winded way of saying sorry to the people who I owe email too. And looking right now, there are a couple messages still in my inbox that I should have responded to over a month ago. But I’m going through it, and my goal is to be all caught up by the end of the day.

In other news, I just posted this in a forum, and I thought I’d copy it here:

After months of dragging items to stand on over to the light switch, my daughter can now reach it just by standing on her tippy-toes and stretching way, way up. I’m not quite sure why this makes me so inordinately proud.

She’s just growing so fast! I bought her new clothes yesterday too. Must take picture. Just now, we’re off to the store in search of popsicle molds.

I don’t usually post these, but I like the picture on this one.

Rock on, you’re a Ravenclaw! Intelligent,
level-headed, and mysterious, you can often be
found in the library, studying. You are smart and
get the best grades in your class. In fact,
you probably got all Outstandings on your O.W.L.s!
Your house is respectable and has a good
Quidditch team. The founder of your house was
Rowena Ravenclaw. Go Eagles!
(Art courtesy of Ayne Greensleeves)

An Intelligent Harry Potter House Sorting Quiz
brought to you by Quizilla

Via honorh. I always sort Ravenclaw too.

This is how M. spent his Father’s day last Sunday. With this new small stretch of fence, our backyard is now completely enclosed.

A certain someone can no longer run around to the front of the house whenever she wants. This means that I was able to lock her in with me yesterday afternoon while I weeded. As a result, my vegetable garden is finally ready to plant. And it’s only what.. almost July? Ah well. A short, small garden is better than no garden at all.

Speaking of gardening, look at this…

Oh no! Child labor!

That’s actually the front flower bed. We dug it up at the start of the month to put landscaping fabric beneath so that grass would quit growing under the edge and to replace the horrible dirt there with good topsoil. Perhaps my flowers will actually grow this year.

Just go look at this Ebay auction.

Heh! Payback’s a bitch, aint it?

An addendum to my earlier Rosie post – two before this one.

There’s another part to the story that pisses me off just as much as what Rosie said. It’s what pretty much everyone else seems to be saying.

I heard about this issue in the breastfeeding section of a parenting forum I frequent. It’s being talked about on several others by angry lactivists. However, if you google the story, as I did when I was looking for the video capture so I could see it myself, you’ll find tons of discussion on it, but most of it is not from lactivists or people who would normally be expected to comment on a breastfeeding issue. Instead it’s from far-right conservatives out to get Rosie.

I’ve heard similar stories plenty of times before. In one of the larger parenting forums I visit, I’ve seen several women post that they didn’t breastfeed or quit breastfeeding early because their husbands wanted the boobs back for themselves or were jealous of the baby or jealous of the mother or whatever. It’s just as bad when they do it as when Rosie does. But now none of these sites seem to want to admit that men do the same thing from time to time, and it’s suddenly all because Rosie is a second mother.

It has everything to do with Rosie being a terribly selfish and thoughtless person in this instance, the same as the many men who have done the same thing have been, and nothing at all to do with her being a lesbian. This is not typical of a same sex family any more than it is typical for a family with opposite sex parents.

And I did find a video to see what she said for myself. The site it was on (devoted to turning gays straight) and the commentary added to the video file were so offensive that I didn’t include it in the last post. You can google it yourself if you really want to see.

This is just amazing.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — Police say three lions rescued a 12-year-old girl kidnapped by men who wanted to force her into marriage, chasing off her abductors and guarding her until police and relatives tracked her down in a remote corner of Ethiopia.

But you know what is even scarier than the lions? This bit from later in the article:

In Ethiopia, kidnapping has long been part of the marriage custom, a tradition of sorrow and violence whose origins are murky.

The United Nations estimates that more than 70 percent of marriages in Ethiopia are by abduction, practiced in rural areas where the majority of the country’s 71 million people live.

I know these sorts of things go on all the time in parts of the world. But more than seventy percent?

Word is that Rosie Odonnell said on The View the other day that she made her partner quit breastfeeding their daughter after one month because she was angry and jealous that her partner got to bond with the child this way and she didn’t. She didn’t feel that she was depriving her daughter of anything. She also said that the hundreds of women who showed up for the nurse-in in protest of Barbara Walter’s comment and the many more who couldn’t come but were angry were just hormonal.

Rosie Odonnell has always been one of my favorite celebrities, but I’m finding it really hard to respect her after she’s said such stupid, selfish things.

Because she couldn’t get over her own issues, she increased her daughter’s risk of dying during her first year by twenty percent. She also increased the chances that her daughter will develop diabetes, food allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, cancer, and/or many other serious conditions.

Breastfeeding is a wonderful way to bond, but it isn’t the only way. She could have bonded just fine with cuddling - even cuddling while her partner breastfed. If she really felt she needed to feed the baby from time to time, her partner could have pumped milk for her to use. Her child isn’t getting anything extra because of this; she’s just lost something which can be very important to her health.

Heck, as a woman Rosie has a great advantage over fathers. She has the proper equipment. She could have used a supplementary nursing system to deliver the pumped milk, and it would have been almost as if she was breastfeeding the baby herself. Or she could have gotten a prescription for drugs which cause lactation and made her own equipment functional as some adoptive mothers do. Wouldn’t that be every babies dream? Have two nursing mothers and never having to wait because the one with the proper equipment happened to be in the bathroom or otherwise unavailable just then?

People have a right to have issues, and it’s a private family matter, etc. etc. I understand all that. Except it really isn’t just her business anymore when she’s announcing it on national television as if it were something to be proud of. She’s basically telling millions of viewers that breastfeeding isn’t important – that it has no real benefits, even – and that one can’t bond with a baby being breastfed by someone else. None of this is at all true.

Most babies on formula will do just fine, but there are some who will die as a result of not being breastfed, and more who will suffer from it. We can’t tell beforehand which babies will have these problems and which won’t, so as a society we need to take responsibility for all of them and do our best to make our society breastfeeding friendly so that every baby will have the best chance possible.

So how many of the 780 or so infants who will die in the US this year as a result of not being breastfeed should we assign Rosie the responsibility for?

We went to Boston Pizza tonight for dinner. That was mostly fine except they took my favorite pizza off the menu, so I tried to order what would be basically the same by adding different toppings, and it came to over twice what the pizza used to cost. And though we asked twice, they never brought out any crayons for Munchkin to play with. And the service was insanely slow.

But still, it was pretty much alright. My pizza was quite good, even if it was extremely expensive, and Munchkin loves the pasta dish we get her there.

Then it was time to go home. I took Munchkin out to the car first and then waited in the back seat with her until M finished paying the bill. Then since I was already back there, I thought I might as well squeeze in beside the car seat and ride next to her. That was fine and good until we arrived home and I pressed the button to unfasten my seatbelt and found that I was still strapped in.

I’d unfastened the belt holding the car seat instead. Fuck.

To understand just what a major pain in the ass this resulted in, you need a bit of history. Our car seat is an absolute snap to install with the lower anchors. Unfortunately, there are only anchor points for the outside seats and not for the safer center seat, though there is a tether there for a forward facing car seat.

We can’t imagine why they did it this way, but it means that any seat installed in the center must use the belt. Due to the bump in the middle of the seat, this is very difficult to do. For a long time, we had Munchkin behind the passenger seat which was both less safe and required the passenger seat to be so far forward that my knees were practically against the dash when I rode there. Then when she was eighteen months and just barely over the twenty-pound minimum we turned her forward (whenever we were out and she didn’t want to come home, she’d throw a temper tantrum and put her feat against he back of the vehicle seat making it very hard to get in) allowing me to put the passenger seat farther back but still leaving her in the less safe side seat.

When we were down visiting my parents in late April, I turned her backwards again because their car doesn’t have tether anchors and her seat requires them for forward facing. She did just fine. So when I got back up here we decided to turn her rearfacing in our car again since it really is way safer. This time we fought the good fight and by dint of much struggling and cursing we managed to get the seat installed pretty solidly in the center seat.

So you can imagine my horror when a moment of carelessness required that we do it all over again. It took us a good half an hour to get it in tight enough that it barely moves at all. At least she is safe once more though.

Then tonight, M took the cell phone out of his pocket to discover that something in there (a screw he’d picked up earlier left over from a bit of carpentry he was doing in our backyard, we think) broke the crystal display. Looking at it now, I can’t figure out how that could have happened because it seems pretty hard and well protected, but it is cracked across diagonally, and most of the bottom half doesn’t work so we can’t see caller ID or what number we are dialing. Very annoying.

I think there was something else I wanted to complain about, but Munchkin woke up in the middle of writing this, and it took me nearly two hours to get her back to sleep. Haven’t a clue what it was now.

Really, other than that, it was a pretty good day.

As darling Munchkin-girl, most likely intent on choking herself, reaches for some pennies carlessly tossed aside when emptying out a pocket:

Me: We really need to clean off that dresser.
Him: No, what we really need is for her to shrink a little.

The saddest part about this is that his idea seems about as likely as mine, given just how long I’ve been talking about baby-proofing the top of our dresser. I believe I first mentioned it when she learned to walk, so nine or so months now?

Since summer started, I’ve been keeping the window above the kitchen sink open most of the time. This means that the cats are constantly up on the counter because they love to sniff the fresh air through the screen.

To combat kitty paws on my clean counters, I’ve installed a “get down” alarm. A very cute blonde little alarm which will run over to the counter pointing at the offending kitty and calling out “get down, get down” until the cat jumps down. It’s hilarious. If she’s around the corner and doesn’t actually see the cat, I just have to tell her that there’s a cat on the counter, and she’ll go running into the kitchen.

“Get down” has been a favorite game for a few weeks now. The other day when we were out for our walk, she told a crow to get down off a chimney and another to get down off a streetlamp. She was a little confused about the cats for a while and was telling them to get down off of chairs and everything, but now she seems to have it mostly figured out as to where they are allowed and where they are not. She also will put her stuffed animals and dolls up on the counter or the table and tell them to get down from time to time.

My least favorite part of the game is that he likes to climb up on the table and tell herself to get down, giggling all the time. Of course she doesn’t actually get down on her own because that would be no fun. I have to get her down. And she’s just so cute that I am not enforcing the “no babies on the table” rule very well because as hard as I try to be stern with her, I just can’t help but smile.

- and so am I.

Last summer I went to the garden center and bought a bunch of annuals to plant in the flower bed out front. They then sat around for a week or so before I actually got around to planting them, but I remembered to water them, so that was fine.

Except I’d only bought enough to fill about three-quarters of the bed, which was larger than I’d realized. So I went back and bought more flowers. Once again they sat around and sat around, but this time they sat around a lot longer, and I neglected to water them as often as I should have, so they all died still in their pots. Tragedy. I was a murderer of innocent little flowers.

M. has been bugging me about this ever since I started talking about planting flowers a few weeks ago when I should have actually done it, late May being the generally accepted safe time to start planting this far north. So today I finally went to buy my flowers, and M started asking me if I’m really going to plant them today, and bugging me about how he expects a repeat of last year and I really should plant them as soon as we get home.

When we got home, the front yard was in full sun, and I decided that I’ll wait until later when it is shady to plant. He gave me this look as if he’s heard this all before.

“No, really, I will,” I insisted.

M. and Munchkin came out with me this evening when I really did go out to weed the bed then plant my flowers. Munchkin had her own little trowel and had great fun sticking it in the dirt, though she also whacked our newly-painted car with it (the newly-painted status of our car being something that I’ll have to remember to explain in another post.)

So I was weeding away when M looked up at the sky and warned me that it was going to rain.

“This won’t take long, I’ll finish in time,” I said with confidence, looking at the light gray sky in front of me. He points out the evil, nasty, scary cloud behind me, and I change that to: “I think I’ll finish in time.” A minute later I add a “maybe” to that as the first crack of thunder comes.

Of course the rain started just as I finished weeding. Really, really hard.

“Maybe I’ll just plant them tomorrow,” I said.

“You know you won’t,” M scoffed.

I gave him a dirty look because of course he was right.

So this is how I came to be planting flowers in the middle of a downpour while M. and Munchkin watched me from the shelter of the front step. Muchkin braved the rain to come help again after a bit, and she had great fun playing in the rain and splashing in puddles, though she also went King-Kong on my newly planted flowers at one point.

I was soaked to the bone in two minutes flat and it took me another twenty to finish, but all my flowers are planted again. The bad part? Once again, I didn’t buy enough. It’s back to the store tomorrow for me.

The challenge post just went online for this week’s queerditch_pub reminding me that I still haven’t posted my answers to last weeks challenge. I’ve edited them slightly since I posted them to the community – mostly the first one; I don’t think I made any change to the second one, and I only altered a few sentences in the third one. Here they are:

(Warning: Harry Potter fanfic lies within the cut.)

(  )

I haven’t decided yet whether or not I will participate tomorrow. I’d really like to because it has been great fun the past two weeks, but the theme for this week makes me wince.

Hee.

Munchkin keeps running over to one wall of the living room, hitting it with both hands, then turning around and sprinting across the room to do the same to the opposite wall. She’s been doing this for nearly five minutes now, just runnig back and forth between the walls and hitting them.

I love kids.