Faster Than Kudzu

3 Conversations with Beautiful Maisy, who is Barely 5

Maisy: What are you doing, Daddy?
Daddy: Pulling the sheets off my bed.
Maisy: Why?
Daddy: So I can wash them.
Maisy: But Daddy…You don’t pee the bed!

Maisy: *despairing sigh*
Me: What’s up, buttercup?
Maisy: I will never be as pretty as a WEAL princess.
Me: Pish. You are prettier than any hundred princesses, and more important, you are kind and smart and strong and have a good heart.
Maisy: No! I looked at myself. In my Moo-er. And saw my face doesn’t look like Cinderella’s. I thought I might be lovely when I grewed up, but now I won’t.
Me: You won’t?
Maisy: *gently, as if letting me down easy* I’m your daughter. And Mommy? You are NOT as pretty as a WEAL princess.

*I look into the backseat and see Maisy regarding me with her downy brows knit into a scowl.*
Me: What?
Maisy: Did you STEAL me?
Me: WHAT?
Maisy: I just want to know if you borned me or stealed me.
Me: Um, I borned you. I mean, gave birth to you.
Maisy: How can I even KNOW that?
Me: *laughing* I have proof! Pictures! And sonograms! And witnesses!
Maisy: You might have stealed me.
Me: No, sweetie. People who steal babies are the worst sort of evil, disgusting people. To steal a baby you have to be so cruel and selfish! Do you think Daddy and I are evil?
*silence*
Me: Maisy?
*silence*
Me: Maisy Jane! Do you think Daddy and I are evil?
Maisy: Shhhh! I’m FINKING!

I Invented the Meltdown!

This is the first moment I have had to sit down since THURSDAY, oh best beloveds, so sorry the blog went dark, but I have not been here. I have been running around in circles with my head chicken-like-ily detached.

Chicken-like-ily is TOO a word. *glare*

Mr. Husband has left the building for nine days, and I am GRUMPY and single momming it ---May I just say, “ON MOTHER’S DAY!!!!” And while I say it I shall look especially aggrieved, and then you can all pick up teeny tiny violins or maybe even some mini-cellos and violas and make GENUINELY pitying eyes as you saw away at them? Because, while I have been playing a teeny tiny violin for MYSELF, it would sound better with the back up of a whole poignant-in-miniature string section.

I can’t tell you the WHOLE weekend, but here is a representative SAMPLE of WHY my head is chicken-like-ily detached. (STOP JUDGING ME! THAT IS SO A WORD!)

Schedule on Thursday afternoon:

3:30 – 4:30 PM Maisy’s dance recital dress rehearsal
5 Pick up my parents at my house
5:30 Be at Sam’s school for play

I was VERY excited about Sam’s play, which was about PIONEERS and gold rushes and steamboats and Texas and California and Armadillos and Teepees and the great railroads, and he was excited, too. VERY! He had had a small part as “The Steamboat Captain’s First Mate” and had spent the better part of April marching around the house yodeling, “ALL ABOARD! ALL ABOOOOAAARD! This boat is heading for The West down the Mississippi!”

BUT! Ten days before the play, the fifth grader playing one of the lead roles – Robert Fulton! The guy who invented the steamboat! Except he didn’t! He was actually the first guy who got one to really work, or made money having one or something very American like that! But still! And SAM was asked if he thought he could learn all the lines FAST and take over.

Now, Scott and I MET doing regional repertoire---met and became very best friends and never dated for seven years. I like to say he spent those years toiling in my father’s vineyards and that I’m just happy I didn’t have an old maid sister he had to marry first, but the truth is, he spent them toiling mostly on and behind stages with me. We never played romantically opposite each other, unless you count running around nearly naked in The Infamous Underwear Play
which I emphatically do not, and ANYWAY, Orton wasn’t exactly a ROMANTIC…Point is, my kids BOTH seem to have the theatre bug, and Sam knew the part in less than 48 hours and was, by all accounts, NAILING it and blowing minds at school with his authentic FULTON-ocity and Steamboatiness.

On Thursday morning, he Oh-So-Casually asked my husband, who was packing to LEAVE ME ALL ALONE ON MOTHER’S DAY (cue teeny orchestral wailings) “What did Robert Fulton look like?”

So we asked My Friend The Google, and the google showed us a man who spent ENTIRELY too much time carefully working his hair into artful little tousles, but who was otherwise unremarkable. (“He’s a little Percy Bysshe,” said Scott, who God bless him, has never actually PUT A PRODUCT other than shampoo onto his head and even seems to regard CONDITIONER with mild suspect) And that was the end of it.

But that casual sentence percolated around in my head all day and finally, just as we arrived harried but on time to Maisy’s rehearsal, with Sam’s curtain set to go up in less than two and EVERY MINUTE already filled with its allotted chore…The seeds of that question bloomed into a horror-blossom in my mind and I turned to Sam with a gimlet eye scything him open down unto his very bones and and said, “Why did you want to know what Robert Fulton looks like? DO YOU HAVE A COSTUME YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO WEAR???”

Him: Yes.
Me: Is the costume at SCHOOL?
Him: No. I have to bring it.
Me; WHAT! WHAT? OH LORDY WHAT IS THE COSTUME YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BRING?
Him: *shrug* Maybe I should dress like a old fashioned sailor? Because I DID invent the steamboat. Or maybe a businessman? Because I got very rich! I should just, you know, look like Robert Fulton.”

At which point my head exploded and the next few minutes are a merciful wash of black in my memory, but I am sure that thirty years from now my son’s therapist will be able to tell me what transpired, should I ever become curious…

After I re-attached my son’s head (which I had lopped off in a rage) I called my mother, who was in route from Alabama, and said, “Please exit in Douglasville and go to the mall and BUY A ROBERT FULTON COSTUME, I do not know, just --- he should look like an old fashioned business man. DO YER BEST!”

Anyway, my mother magically cobbled something together, and he looked great and stole the show and whatnot, and I guess, in the end, I should just shut up and be profoundly grateful he wasn’t cast as The Armadillo.

Better Than the Water Kind (a conversation with Beautiful Maisy, who is four)

Maisy: Do you believe in God?
Me: Yes, I do.
Maisy: Do you LOVE God?
Me: Yes, I do.
Maisy: Me too. I believe in God and love him so much that when I grow up, God will make me queen.
Me: … Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
Maisy: *pitch rising with excitement* And then I will pick the boy to marry, and that will make him KING! To marry me! And then when we get married I will KISS HIM! And flap and flap! *makes a kiss noise*
Me: I think we are watching too much Disney Princess craps.
Maisy: Mommy, when do I get wings?
Me: What?
Maisy: When do I get my MARRY Wings. Do I get them for being a grown up or for marrying with?
Me: Um, you don’t get wings when you get married.Or when you grow up.
Maisy: Do you have wings?
Me: …No.
Maisy: But you SAID you had wings! You SAID. When you married daddy you got WINGS.
Me: Like fairy wings?
Maisy: No.
Me: Like bird wings? Like angel wings?
Maisy: Yes, for flapping.
Me: Oh, honey, in a true and horrifically sappy way, your daddy DID give me wings. But not the flapping kind. The metaphorical kind. Honesty compels me to report that he is also the wind beneath them.
Maisy: *nonplussed silence*
Me: WAIT---- you mean on the bed yesterday???? When we watched Little Mermaid and talked about getting married????
Maisy: Yes.
Me: I said daddy gave me RINGS, Maisy. RINGS. See these? These are RINGS I got at my wedding to show that I belong to daddy forever, and I gave daddy one, to say he belongs to me.
Maisy: *clearly disappointed* Oh. …*perking up* Is that a WEAL diamond?

It IS a weal diamond, as a matter of fact, but I think she’d STILL rather have the wings.

And now, because you asked, even though----TRUST ME----the photo cannot do HALF justice to the bizarro reality, I present to you that catheaded walrus poodle, hunching resentfully beside his dish:

Disney, Day Home

The sad news: I have 3.5 toes per foot now. I wore the little one completely OFF and sanded my big one down to half its former glory hiking back and forth between Splash and Space Mountain as my son fast-passed first one and then the other. Were they all the way across the Magic Kingdom from each other? WHY, YES. THEY WERE. I am SO glad sandal season is over because it’s going to take all winter, wearing out a pumice stone, and an ocean of lotion to salvage them.

The other sad news: I have completely succumbed to marketing. I have AVOIDED Disney Princess toys as if they were manufactured from the carcasses of diseased weasels for two years now. Not with the same rabid hatred that I have avoided, say, THE BRATZ DOLLS (Scott calls them THE SLUTZ) but I have been proactive about steering Maisy toward Olivia the Pig gear and Dora Dora Dora the explorer and even Hello, Kitty whenever she has leaned toward DPs.

My editor has a girl child around Maisy’s age and after a protracted battle, she too succumbed to her daughter’s unwavering devotion to Princess gear, but she always ends the her reading of the princess tales by saying something like, “And so the prince and the princess decided to go to different schools and get good educations and travel and date other people and THEN they got married and lived happily ever after! THE END!” Because, face it, these are 16 year old chicks getting married off and--- Mulan a blessed aside--- their biggest claim to fame is prettiness.

BUT! BUT! BUT! THE PRINCESSES ARE SO SWEET. You could die of it. Seriously. It doesn’t help that they are played by adorable fresh faced college-aged girls. They speak in soft, high voices that are pink-wall level soothing. I think they should pipe in tapes of Princesses talking about goodness to the rooms of the criminally insane to stop recidivism. They are so patient and slow moving and kindly with the little children. AND! They all KNOW THEIR BACKSTORY, so if my son says, for example, “Are Iago and Aladdin still fighting?” they know how to ANSWER that in a way that seems to satisfy him. Which is more than I can do.

When we finally at last at last got to meet Maisy’s forever favorite, Cinderella, and Maisy got so So SO excited that her voice racheted up into a register so high that only dogs could hear her, Cinderella apparently READ HER LIPS and caught every word and answered her and stayed by our table for EXTRA, and she put a pink lipstick kiss on Maisy’s cheek. Maisy cried when we washed it off in the bath that night.

Here is Maisy losing her mind with happiness, my niece looking lovely as always, and my son looking hideously uncomfortable, his arms crossed defensively, his manhood impugned, as he is forced to stand by girly old Cinderella. See how he is looking off camera? He’s looking at me, and I am making a thunderous face and hissing, SMILE! COME ON SAM A REAL SMILE. PLEASE??? PLEASE???

As she was leaving, Cinderella bent down to Maisy’s level and looked directly into my daughter’s small open trusting bloom of a face, and she touched Maisy’s nose and said, “Always remember, Princess Maisy, your dreams CAN come true.” And she said it with total sincerity, and Maisy nodded with SUCH vigorous hope and belief that SOMEONE at the lunch table, I am not saying who, but SOMEONE had to hide their face in their napkin because they got a little watery.

That SAME someone later purchased Maisy a metric ton of Disney PINcess Princess trading pins with matching pink lariat AND a hot pink Satin Princess Gear Backpack.

“I needed a new backpack ANYWAY,” Maisy confided to the saleslady, “My big fat cat FREW UP on my Dora one. It was GWOSS.”)

This vacation was JUST what I needed. I feel like me again, except with callousy aching troll feet. It ended this way: We left the happiest place on earth and went to the CRAPPIEST place on earth, forever and henceforth defined as “ANY airport.” Before we even left the hotel lobby, Maisy turned into a 34 pound snoring piece of carry on luggage and Sam was running a fever. By the time we got home, five hours later than we were ‘sposed to, it was already today and both kids were sicksicksick as little dogs.

EARLY this morning, as we AT LAST came into the house, Maisy stirred and whispered, “Mama?”
I said, “Yes bunny?” and put my ear down near her mouth.
“In just a minute,” she said, “I want to go to go see Cindewella again at her castle.” Then her eyes opened a crack and she saw our front door. “Oh,” she said. “Look. We’re here now. Never mind. Imma go back to sleep.”

And she did.

Disney, Day One

Okay - I know about Disney. The corporate piracy, the awful dollarmongering, how Walt would be turning in his grave, how it is all one huge obscene tricksy commercial to sell action figures based on movies that will hopefully become lucrative franchises and yes, it is TRUE, they RUINED the TIKI ROOM by putting a bunch of bird puppets from Aladin and Lion King in it and MULTIPLE Johnny Depp lookalikes ---both human and animatronic --- are popping up on rides and floats and in gift shops in full-on Cap'n Jack Drag and and and I KNOW OKAY I KNOW.

It's still the happiest place on earth. Favorite moment so far: We saw Cap'n Hook mugging about, our first character sighting, and Maisy was LONGING to get his attention. She ran up behind him and tugged at his red velvet coat. He did not notice. She bounced up and down, sproingsproingsproing, saying CAPUN HOOK! CAPUN HOOK! HULLO IT IS ME, MAISY! Alas, the actor, who was no doubt sweltering in the hell of a 20 pound plastic head and a frock coat, did not hear her.

He turned around to walk toward us and almost ran her down. At the LAST second, he noticed her tiny personage in his way and and paused. He made "surprise hands" (elbows bent, palms forward, fingers spread) or rather he made ONE surprise hand and one surprise hook, and then bent down toward Maisy, reaching with his non-hook appendage to pat her head.

She saw that HUGE EVIL MUSTACHIO'ED HEAD as it came ZOOMING toward her. The LEER! The outsize black hat! The CRUEL PIRATE-Y TEETH!.....she screamed! Screamed like that little girl did in Aliens, a single toned high-pitched wail of complete terror, and then took off like a gazelle, FLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! We of course caught her up and soothed her immediately, but it was PRICELESS. We had no video cameras out, alas, but some chick standing nearby caught it on hers, so we expect Bob Sagett will be sharing it with America soon.

IN SHORT, I am having DISGUSTING amount of fun. It's EMBARRASSING to have this much fun living in a giant commercial. And yet and yet and yet...

Both my kids are FOAMING with pleasure at every new delight. NO one is getting crabby when they get overtired, and they have changed the FOOD. Sure there are still 10 dollar greasy hotdogs with limp fries, but for the same price you can also get fresh fruit and a chicken wrap, a veggie burger on a whole grain bun with baby carrots, or a VERY DECENT grilled chicken salad made with REAL lettuce (read: not iceberg) and tequila lime vinagrette. We are eating healthy and not having that overfed park bloat that can RUIN a vacation day. Eating this stuff, we parked around for 13 hours yesterday and came back to the resort tired but pleased and cheerful. Two other things set Disneyworld apart from other park-like facility:

1) The restrooms are cleaned constantly by troops of invisible and hyperactive fairies. Seriously. The toilets are cleaner than my toilets at home, the floors sparkle, the silver spigots where you wash your hands gleam like treasure. You could serve a lunch in these bathrooms.

2) NO ONE PHONES IT IN. No one. Every gravedigger in the Not-So-Scary Halloween pararde, every Princess, every pirate, every dancing zombie bride, every Jungle Cruise Guide, every SNACK VENDOR in a cowgirl outfit in Frontierland is Broadway musical style ON every second. They believe it. They SELL it. There is no irony, no sly wink-y "But of course, this is silly, and we do it for your yard-monkeys." They may be tiny prancing cogs in a huge and probably evil corporate machine, but before that, they are professionals, actors and dancers, and they ACT like it. It makes a world of difference. Their absolute commitment is permission for every adult in the park to act like a complete moron. To be eight years old again. And when Mickey stands in front of Cinderella's castle and asks us to, we affirm with absolute conviction that (as Maisy says) "Dweams DO come twue! Dweams DO come twue!"

If it makes you feel any better about my tatterered street cred, always a sketchy thing and now TAINTED with geek-o-riffic Mickey-love, let me reassure you that my cynical husband is suffering mildly, and would probably rather be golfing. TODAY = EPCOT! And lunch with FOUR REAL PRINCESSES. I am hoping like MAD for Ariel! Maisy wants Cindew-ella.

Last night, the kids got to park trick-or-treat in costume, and Scott accidentally had the camera set for a LONG expose time----so here is a little ghost pwincess, a ghost Jail Bird, and a VERY see through ghostly ninja. You can use this shot to play a fun game of "guess which child can not sit still for 5 seconds...."

Where the Oscar Will Go

After I worked out this morning, I went to find Maisy and help her pack three things that begin with the letter "a" into a carefully labeled lunch bag. The kid is FOUR, and already with the homework? OKAY THEN! I found her in her room sitting flat on her bottom, her feet out in front of her. Her nose was wrinkled, her mouth turned down and hanging open, and tears were standing out in her eyes.

Me: Oh honey, what's the matter!
Immediately her face snapped back to its usual cheerful expression.
Her: I'm not sad, Mommy. I'm practicing my feelings.

She showed me some more feelings she'd been practicing, willfully lighting her eyes up and releasing a perfect sunny-side-up smile to show "happy," contracting her whole face and making all her features seem smaller and closer together to show "mad," and then she widened her eyes and made her mouth be round and soft and small until she was palpably leaking sadness, OH! SUCH sadness. She made the face of one of those orphans or rained on kittens they painted on velvet in the 70's. Then she showed me mad again, the contraction of the face spiced up this time by a GROWL.
Her: "That face with a growl is WAGE, Mommy. WAGE is SUPER mad!"

My son, God love him, is quite a different creature. He's absolutely transparent. If he's sad or hurt you can SEE him visibly trying to squelch it, trying to be manly, but it leaks out in the set of his shoulders, in his held breath. I can read his every thought in his windowpane eyes. Sam can't shine ANYTHING on ---- he is literally the WORST liar in the history of the universe, which, speaking as his parent, I think is AWESOME.

This girl child is something else entirely. Spooky.

Words and Pictures

LAST NIGHT
Karen: There is nothing to eat in this house. I am going to have to go to the Midtown Night Against Crime Walk because they have free barbecue.
Me: BAHAHAHHAHAH Oh LORD, no. Go to Kroger.
Karen: I can't face driving. It will be fine. The sheet says I am just supposed to "gather in numbers" with my neighbors and we'll walk down the road arm in arm to protest the hookers.
Me: Down Piedmont?
Karen: Yeah, I know. It's mean and possibly dangerous. But they are having BBQ ribs and Peach Cobbler after. They got the Cobbler from Mary Mac's, so it should be a huge turn out. I doubt the hookers can take us.
Me: Just go to Kroger.
...
THIS MORNING
Karen: It RAINED last night. The Running Off the Hookers for Free Dinner Rally did not happen.
Me: Did you break down and go to Kroger?
Karen: No. You know what I had for dinner last night? A tortilla and a pickle.
Me: You folks in town are so glamorous! With your Hooker Spooking Walks and your Mexican-Pickle Fusion Cuisine!
Karen: I love Midtown.

YESTERDAY MORNING
*Maisy Jane bends down and gazes all soulful into the one eye of our cat, Franz Schubert. He gazes back.*

Maisy Jane: Mommy! Look! I'm charming the cat with my loveliness!
Me: That's nice. But you know what? I think maybe you are also charming him with your good heart. And your smart brain.
Maisy: ...No. He says it's my loveliness.

*sigh* But on the other hand...She is ridiculously lovely.

FOUR DAYS AGO

Scott: Maisy loves her cousin Daniel so much. She looks at him like he made the earth....It's a shame she had to execute him.

YESTERDAY NIGHT AGAIN

Me: Tomorrow is Dad's birthday. 66. Can you believe.
Scott: Well you've made one just like him. It's down in the basement right now, playing Sonic Riders.

Lord, he's right though----look, I've practically cloned my father:

Happy Birthday, Daddy.

The Terrible True Story of What Happened on Mother's Day

OIL UP YOUR PITY GLANDS, Oh My Best Beloveds, and prepare them to secrete great glutinous streams of sorrow upon my pitiful behalf...READY? Okay!

Sometimes when I am blogging, I get all fired ahead of myself and scribble-scrabble out several entries at once. Or if something is too long I will cut it in twain and post half one day and the other half the next. I had several entries BACKED UP waiting to post as Mother's Day approached, and so I caught up by posting them while I experienced what will NO DOUBT go down in record as the world's worst Mother's Day since Hallmark came up with the concept to increase their schlumpy May sales figures.

Let me set the scene for you.
1) Scott has left town for over a week. I am a single, Scottless parent and therefore I respond to stimili as if I have a 37% higher Mental Illness Number than my median average for spring.

2) The day before Mother's day, my son has a hideous but mercifully short-lived romance with a stomach virus. I am up all night, and by dawn, the virus has ditched him and taken up a passionate new interaction with me. In between calling for death, I am haunted by the knowledge that I will never sleep again, as Maisy is cuter than me, and Stomach Flu will no doubt leave me and take up with her.

By late afternoon, I am wrung out and sad, but stable. I am waiting for Maisy to begin being sick (and I will tell you, Best Beloveds, that she did INDEED oblige me....) and I am sitting hunched with misery in front of my computer, feebly pecking out a draft of chapter 10.

My son appears in the doorway. As you may recall we ditched our newts back into the pond from whence they came and replaced them with two charming gerbils named Snickers and Hotshot, and I was worried the massive cat might via means miraculous manage to defy the laws of gravity and physics and lumber up to the top of the counter and vivisect them. It would take a miracle, because this cat is now SO overweight that Dr. Phil is considering doing a Prime Time intervention show starring him, but I am a person of faith and therefore make room in the world for the possibility of miracles. So, I fretted about it a little. Well. Right. SO! Where were we? Sam had just appeared in my office doorway:

Sam: Mom? Remember our gerbils?
Me: *chilled with horror* I remember them, yes. Do you mean that in an "in memorium" way, or...
Sam: What?
Me: Yes, I remember them. Why do you ask?
Sam: I saw the one gerbil, and it was sitting on another gerbil.
Me: *relieved* Sammy, those gerbils are brothers and gerbils are very cuddley with their litter mates. I am sure the sat on gerbil is FINE.
Sam: No I mean. Snickers is sitting on a THIRD gerbil.
Me: Son, I am working here. That's not possible. Gerbils do not spontaneously generate.
Sam: Well, a third gerbil got IN somehow with them.
Me: Do you think maybe it is just sitting on a piece of cardboard he hasn't chewed up yet? And it LOOKS a little gerbil shaped?
Sam: No, I really think it is a third very small gerbil. Or two.
Me: That's not --- wait. What? VERY SMALL???
Sam: I REALLY think you should come look.

WARNING: Brace yourself, Bridget, for a raaaaawther graphic scene.

I head to the cage. Brother Gerbil number one is running in the wheel. FINE. Brother Gerbil number two, however, has about HALF of a FOURTH and VERY NEW gerbil protruding from his netherous gerbil-regions, and is spinning a third moist and yicky looking very new gerbil in his hands, cleaning it.

Sam: There's another one!
Me: That's certainly very....graphic! I think maybe the brothers need some privacy!

We repaired to our friend the internet to see what Very New Gerbils might need to be happy, and what a Brother Gerbil who is apparently recovering from the worlds most complete and successful sexual reassignment surgery EVER might need to be happy. Answer: To have the cage covered by a towel and be left strictly alone in a quiet room. I LOVED THAT ANSWER!

I rechristened the half of the downstairs with the gerbil cage in it "Philadelphia." (Because Philly is the city of....? Right.) No one was allowed to go into Philadelphia for four hours, (I used the enforced quiet to draft more) at which point I tiptoed in and made sure there was fresh water and did a quick count.

Eight. EIGHT. Yes. EIGHT small squirmy jelly beans were cuddled in a heap in a nest the brothers had constructed. Did you hear me say EIGHT? Because I said EIGHT.

The most horrifying thing is NOT that I have ten freakin' gerbils. The most horrifying thing is this: As I was COUNTING the babies, I noticed the brothers were behaving in an EXTREMELY innapropriate and NON-BROTHERLY manner, even if (as I suspect) one of the brothers is NOT a brother at all (and really the evidence is overwhelming at this point). It's not like it's any more appropriate to engage in such overly friendly STACKING behavior with one's sister, but take out that aspect even and it is HUGELY innapropriate to put the moves on a lady who JUST gave birth. EIGHT times. And yet. They were undeniably engaged thusly, and both seemed quite happy about it, and as a BONUS to their happiness, they were making STILL AND YET more gerbils. SO I have ten gerbils NOW, and an infinite number of POTENTIAL gerbils already baking.

And yes, it IS horrifying....and yet. THEY ARE SO CUTE! THEY ARE SO CUTE! They are now big enough to begin being socialized for people, which means we have to take them out and give them POSITIVE HAND TIME each day, and I have to tell you, they are made of velveteen and are so DEAR and BUSY and VITAL and MIGHTY and WEE. They lift my heart, these little very new unwanted wretched gerbils. I don't know how we will break the cycle of incestuous Deliverance gerbil love we seem to have going here because the internet says we cannot REMOVE the father gerbil when there is a new litter because the mother needs his help, and they make a new litter within 2 hours of delivering the LAST litter. Bit of a Catch 22.

We are working on a plan to break the cycle, I think involving removing the father and all MALE BABIES to one cage, ALL UP FOR ADOPTION, and then moving the weaned females to another cage and putting THEM all up for adoption too, and leaving the pregnant mother in the original cage with ONE weaned daughter gerbil as a helpmeet. We'll keep those two. It's simply dreadful, and if we mess up the sexing and get ANY male in with ANY female....GAHHHH! We could end up with two-headed poisonous gerbil freaks with flippers. But for NOW....

I LOVE ME SOME LITTLE BABY GERBILS. LOOKIT!

GRUMPLE

Laume asked me about HOW I work, the mechanics of fictioning, and I haven't had time to answer, so I am blogging it, thus killing two birds with one massive shot-gun blast to their smug, tweeting faces that woke me up with their INSIPID WARBLING at TOO-DAMN-EARLY:thirty this AM. (Here you say, GRUMPY MUCH? and I say, INDEED I AM.)

But first -- to Business.

I've heard from LESLIE, our Special! Guest! Blogger! and former B4B winner who writes The Clutter Museum, and she has the seven finalists for B4B! Trala. Remember, the winner will receive the adoration of the masses�, a link from my site, the right to be a Special! Guest! Blogger! should B4B continue, and, last but MOST, a piping hot fresh autographed copy of Kim Ponder's critically feted debut novel, The Art of Uncontrolled Flight

THUS SAGT LESLIE OF CLUTTER MUSEUM: "Here are my top seven selections for this month�s Blogging for Books. It was a tough decision to make!

Radioactive Girl
Kismet
I ended up here. . .how?
Random Outpourings
Give Me Something to Sing About
Inside My Head
Red Shoe Ramblings

Thanks again for everything. I received my copy of Fly on the Wall from E. Lockhart yesterday and I�m looking forward to reading it."

THANKS, LESLIE!

And now, back to my angst, back to my sturm, my drang, AND ALLOW ME TO SAY, it's going to be ALL STURM ALL THE TIME around here because The Bad Thing is happening again...Scott has left the building. FOR A WEEK. I am SO horrified. Scott is the balast in my boat, the endorphins in my blood stream, the anti-sturm, the soother of all sad babies, and sheet changer to my bowl holder when Maisy pukes ALL NIGHT LONG (like she did yesterday).

Life without him plainly SUCKS. It sucks WHOLE HAIRY GOATS. That's right, the ENTIRE goat, it sucks the goats down to nothing one by one, as if goats were LOZENGES, and continues to suck them even when the goats say, "Prithee good sir or madam, I beg that you please stop with this! I cry you mercy, for indeed, I lack air, trapped as I am here in your cavernous pink maw!" But the goats' entreaties are for NAUGHT. That's how much it sucks goats. (PS But don't worry about them because truly, if the goats could not get enough air, they would not be so capable of all the high-falutin' BACK-CHAT. So.)

SINCE I am too grumpy to do anything but talk dirty into the phone whenever people call claiming to have JUST A SURVEY....DIGRESSION. Actual Sample Conversation from yesterday, as close to word for word as memory allows:

Chirpy Girl: HI! Don't hang up! I'm not selling anything! I promise! I'm with something-family-something organization, and we're calling families to see what they think about all the violence and sex on television. Do you have small kids at home?
Grumpy me: *sour tone* Yes.
CG: Well, a lot of folks with kids at home are wondering what they can do to help clean up TV and make it family-friendly. Is that something you are concerned about?
GM: No. I love sex and violence.
CG: *pause....breath....nervous titter.* Yoyu're being sarcastic, right?
GM: No. I love it all. Very entertaining. Especially violence. Have you seen the Sopranos this season?
CG: Um...no, but---
GM: Oh DUDE, it's AWESOME. I miss Adrianna though --- they drove her out into the woods and shot her face off last season. You know what though? As much as I love the show, I don't let my nine year old watch it. I'm kooky that way. I just tell him no, because, like, I'm the parent. It's neat how that works out. I also don't let him watch Alan Shore sexually harass Parker Posey on Boston Legal, but man do *I* sure love it! Did you see it this week, when he cleared off the desk and said, "Let's just get this over with, shall we?" Um... Hello? Hello?

Yeah, she hung up. Can you imagine? I am not the ONLY one who is GRUMPY. But I am grumpy. OH! Also...incompetent.

LAST time Scott was out of town, here is an ACTUAL conversation my son had at school with his Gifted Program teacher, as GLEEFULLY reported to me during our parent teacher conference (The gifted teacher sat in on my conference with his regular teacher, saying, as she took her seat, "I don't susually sit in on these, but I HAD to meet the mother of SAM!" And she said it in the same tone she would have used had the words "mother of Sam" been replaced by "mother of a four-armed talking sea-monkey that shoots spooky magic spangles out its nose holes and eats people." ANYWAY, here is the conversation Sam had with her last time Scott left town.

Teacher: Sam, where is your lunch?
Sam: I get to buy HOT LUNCH today!!!!
T: Are you sure? You always bring your lunch.
S: Not this week. My DAD is out of town, and my MOM doesn't know how to make lunch.
T: ....Your mom doesn't... know how to make lunch.
S: Nope. She doesn't have a clue how.

THANKS, SON! As I told the gifted teacher, and I state again for the record here: I DO know how to make a (*#|*$^&|%# sack lunch. I simply CHOOSE NOT TO. When Scott is out of town, I cut out everything non-essential for survival and we live very simplified lives, because otherwise, *I* will begin to shoot spangles out my nose holes and eat people. Scott is an odd duck, really---I mean REALLY a VERY odd duck, first on how he persists on being married to a girl who dreams of having a global positioning system (and ON STAR!) installed directly into the central nervous system so I can find the way to my own bathroom without getting lost and wandering into a wall, and secondly in that he CLAIMS TO LIKE IT. I'm like the spangley purple satin high heeled shoe of wives: I'm fun, but I'm also excrutiatingly painful and I don't go with much. I am not the practical choice. I am SO not made by naturalizer. I am made by Steve Martin. (AND IF YOU GET THE REFERENCE YOU WIN A MONKEY!)

BAH! I have to go dig a hole in the backyard and sit in it and hope rain comes and drowns me. I can eat worms to pass the time. SCOTT! COME HOME! IT IS BAD HERE WITHOUT YOU AND I CAN'T DO NOTHIN' RIGHT....

Oh crap, didn't I start this by saying I was going to answer the interview questions Laume sent me? Let me scroll up and look... Yeah. See? Case in point.

Some Conversations With Maisy

She is a surprising little person. She is such a sunshiney little thing, so pretty and prancy-aroundy and cheerful with her small but excrutiatingly CARRYING voice, so high-pitched and relentless that we have nicknamed her Duck Quacky. Somethimes we forget the inner Maisy, and can go for for days with no understanding that there is a fierce and willful thing behind the pale curls and perfectly round blue eyes. She's mighty. She is a small force of nature. She's just so fluffy that it's easy to forget. I am working hard to not forget, or this child is going to be ruling my life before she is ten. Next week, beautiful Maisy who was barely two when I started this blog will be FOUR. YEARS. OLD.

She's also--- like me, like her father, like her brother--- just a little bit...odd.

This morning we had a VERY sincere conversation. She came staggering down the steps in her pink cow long johns and crept up into my lap. I hit save and cuddled her close. She was very sleep and solemn.

Me: Good morning. I am so happy to see my little girl. I love you!
Her: I love you too...you are my favorite mommy. But Mommy, don't forget. I am on Daddy's team.
Me; Well, that's a great team to be on, because your daddy is da bomb. Isn't Daddy da bomb?
Her: No. He's a horrible beast.
Me: *somewhat surprised* He is???
Her: Oh, yes. He never lets me do anyfing. Except there is one speck of nice in his brain. That's the piece that let me droozle the honey on my own sandwiches.

And then she hopped down and trotted off to find the horrible beast and tell him good morning.

OR like last night, at dinner, we were having a chat about whose fault it is that the cat is so dern fat.

Me: I blame certain small people who keep giving him food any time his bowl is empty.
Sam: I blame the cat---he asks, Mom. He keeps asking.
Scott: Well, you don't have to say yes. He can't open the bag and scoop out more food. I blame the short people with opposable thumbs.
Maisy: I blame the French.
*silence*
Me: What? What did you say? Did you say you blame the French?
Maisy: Yes. I blame the French.
Scott: Well, they do like their sauces, the French.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKAY. I have NO IDEA where that came from. But the cat IS fat, and while French WOMEN may never get fat, there is no bestselling book purporting the truth about French male felines. Perhaps some dude in a Chapeau is creeping in late at night and filling the cat's dish with foie gras and a nice cut of fillet with Bernaise. APPROPOS OF NOTHING: Did you know the literal translation for foie gras is "fatty liver?" I am thinking of heading to the courthouse and legally changing the cat's name to Foie Gras, because he is brownish and ruddy like a liver, and big enough to make three respectably sized cats.

But I cannot allow Maisy to go about blaming the cat's lard problem on FRANCE.... It used to be, whenever we saw the WARNER BROTHERS thing on a movie or whatnot, we would clap and hoot. But Warner sold Warner Books to a French company, and now we clap and hoot whenever we see anything French. Which, if we decide the CAT is fat due to French food we are going to have to clap and hoot every time he takes a bite, which means we will be clapping and hooting all the livelong day and night. Too exhausting.

I have decided to blame Germany...all the wursts, you understand.

MEANWHILE! I will have the B4B finalists for you TOMORROW. And may I say, I DO NOT envy DEBR of Red Shoe Ramblings., with 40+ entries to muck about with. I just finished reading the last one, and I could MAYBE narrow it to twenty. VIVA LA DELEGATION. LONG MAY DELEGATION REIGN!

Then Sarah Smiley, will have the unenviable task of choosing first, second and third place, and the winner will get a signed first edition of her book, GOING OVERBOARD

Snippet

Yesterday morning, Maisy woke up early and came down the hall and crept into bed with me.

CUDDLE ME! She demanded in her most grumptious voice. I gathered her in, a long skinny string of squirming, out-of-sorts toddler. She kept herself busy scraping her toenails down my leg and then fluffing me like a pillow. At last she got me suitably arranged for her comfort and her wiggling stopped. I lay in the dark with her folded up against me, smelling her strawberry shampoo and inoffensive baby morning breath. We had a little whispered conversation.

Me: You are my favorite little girl. I know a lot of little girls in this town, but you are my very, very favorite.
Her: *poking bottom lip out so far a bird could come perch on it* Yesterday you put your favorite little girl in time out.
Me: Yesterday my favorite little girl was naughty.
Her: .....I know. Sometimes I don't understand my heart.

You and me both, honey. You and me both.

I have a CRAM PACKED day as my son is receiving a MEDAL at school for STRAIGHT E-having....oh Lord, but I like that kid and his big spooky brain. SO my working day is cut short and I have a LOT to get done in the next 4 hours. I will shut up now and simply tell you that there isa long interview with me up on the blog of a fellow writer I genuinely admire, aka Nichelle Tramble. I tried to answer her questions seriously (which is always a stretch for me) because they were dern good questions. I mostly did not fail in this objective very much....

HAPPY FRIDAY!

3 and 8

I am lying in the bed, and Maisy creeps in beside me and says, "Are you awake, maaMAA?" She has taken to calling em that. I have no idea where she got it. The emphasis is on the second syllable, and the "a" sound is the same as in ran, NOT the sound in car. It sounds very French Boarding School, and it goes with her haircut.

Maisy: MaaMAA, pick one fing for my song about pertecking you.
Me: Okay. What are my choices.
Maisy: Acrobats.
Me: Is that it? Can't have more choices?
Maisy: Yes, okay. You can pick, Acrobats, or normal bats, or....Skwulls. (Authors note: I think this is Squirrels.)
Me: Hmm. I pick acrobats.
Maisy: (Singing) I'm pertecking you from acrobats, because we are good friends. OH! Amigo means friend, and you are my friend and that's because amigo means friend.
Me: (singing) But not SKWUUUUULLLLLLLS!
Maisy: MaaMAA! Stop ruining up my song!
Me: Oh, Sorry.
Maisy: (singing) But not SKWUUUUUUUUULLLLLS!
Me: That was a great song.
Maisy: I know. It was amazing. Now you can rub my back, please.

That's what 3 is like.

Sam is 8. He plays serious sports like basketball and does math now that I have to make his father help him with because it bores me so (I have to actually THINK ABOUT NUMBERS to see if his answer is right. UGH!) and calls me Mom when I please him and Mah-HOM when I embarrass him. Which I do often. He's smart....talks like a 40 year old accountant, you would not BELIEVE this kid's vocab. It comes from reading Roald Dahl and J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and Lemony Snicket. Also, he is on the principal's honor roll (Highest one) so he is also a good student as well as just havign the brain power to be one. He follows through.

BUT. HE IS NOT THREE.

Last week, I had a thing I had to do, so I missed taking him to school early on his Wee Deliver Day (Sam is a POSTMAN at his school---quite an honor.) which means he missed his weekly breakfast at Waffle House (a practice instituted by his father, by the way, which I am expected to continue in his father's absence, even though I am off simple carbs and have to get Maisy up at 5:30 too, and she weeps softly all the way there. Maisy likes to sleep until at LEAST seven) ANYWAY. I missed it. SO THIS week, I am on the phoe, the day before WEE DELIVER, and he comes in and hands me a note. I transcribe it for you here:

Dear Mom,
Please remembr that tomorow is Wee Deliver. Last week you caused me to be late. You have to take me to Waffle House. I do not want a repeat of last week.
Sam

Then I skinned him, ate his organ meats, and spanked what was left.

TO CONCLUDE: 8 is very different from 3.

And to my conclusion I add this pearl of wisdom-filled advice: Anyone whose age is not AT LEAST in double digits better NOT say to me, "I DO NOT WANT A REPEAT OF LAST WEEK" and still expect to live.

100 Thing About Sam

1) At birth, Sam weighed 11 pounds, 13 ounces.
2) He was also two weeks late.
3) He OWES me.
4) He was like, babe-zilla. All the other babies were about half his size. Twelve hours after birth, he could hold his head up.
5) When Sam was born, the doctor's were de-sliming him, and Scott got this odd, puzzled, musing look on his face, like he'd just noticed the kid had five eyes or a tail. I said, "What! What? IS HE OKAY IS HE OKAY?" And Scott said, "It's the strangest thing, I've only just met him, but he looks...familiar."
6) Later Scott realized he looked familiar because he looked like Scott, in all Scott's baby pictures.
7) He STILL looks just like Scott.
8) But if you just knick the surface, a big flood of me pours out---the kid is a Jackson down to the bone.
9) He CANNOT sing.
10) He does not realize this.
11) When he was three, Scott and I were standing in a park watching him play. Scott's mother was there, and the priest who married us, Edward, was there. Sam was up in this big jungle gym climber shaped like a pirate ship, standing like a captain at the wheel, heading into some imaginary adventure. Edward called up to him, "Where are you sailing off to, Sam?" And he called back, with no baby slurring, clear as day, "TO THE LIQUOR STORE!"
12) He is fierce.
13) He is loud. He has no volume under 5. Even his WHISPER is a big PUSH of air that people in Mississippi can hear if the wind is going right.
14) Last night a bunch of the younger kids at church got candy at their class, and I found him standing outside the class, eyeing the basket and saying in FAKE, HEARTY tones to the teacher, "Well, that sure is interesting candy! Shaped like fish? How FASCINATING. Where ever did you find such a thing?" and she, of course, filled his pockets with them.
15) I wanted to pinch his head off.
16) He really talks like that. Like a 35 year old accountant. He is the only 8 year old I know who says "perhaps you could talk me into an interest in that deal" when I say I he can have a little extra Video game time if he does a good job cleaning his room.
17) This is my fault. From the time he was born, I read 19th century fiction aloud to him.
18) I also went through a LONG phase when he was ababe-in-arms where I talked TO him as if he were a 40 year old accountant. "Well sir," I would say. "My goodness. The committee feels that we shoudl select the green OshKosh overalls for today's meeting. And this onesie. This is a power onesie. You will give 'em HELL today, sir, I feel convicted."
19) He has many, many, many pernicious cowlicks that are going to make him clinically insane when he is a teenager.
20) He cannot keep a shoe tied.
21) Not even one.
22) Not even for 30 seconds.
23) He has a remarkably kind heart under his blustery little boy propensities toward violence.
24) HE READS! He reads like I read, absolutely sucked in, so you can stand there saying, SAM? HEY SAM? SAMSAMSAM and he reads on, oblivious, ten miles into Narnia's strange landscape and still marching inland.
25) He thinks Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Lemony Snicket and Ian Ogilvy should be collectively known as "Da Bomb." They rock him down to electric avenue.
26) When he was six, he sank so so deep into a Lemony Snicket book while coming down the stairs to breakfast that he plummeted all the way to the bottom, tail over head over tail.
27) A week later, he did it again while reading a different book.
28) Two days later, he did it again.
29) I made a new rule: SAM SHALT NOT SIMULTANEOUSLY READ AND WALK DOWN THE STAIRS.
30) For several weekas after, I had to help him get in the habit of STOPPING reading, coming down the stairs, and resuming. He would look up, and I could see he was PHYSICALLY having to THINK about keeping his gaze lifted from the page.
31) Less than week later, I tumbled ALL THE FREAKIN' WAY DOWN the same stairs because I was reading I think Jane Austen. Heh.
32) SAM WAS SO HAPPY. He told me a zillion times, "NOW WE HAVE A NEW RULE ABOUT NO ONE CAN READ ON THE STAIRS, MOM. BECAUSE YOU FELL DOWN THE STAIRS, MOM. YOU WERE READING, WHICH, YOU KNOW, CAN PERHAPS BE DANGEROUS ON THE STIARS, MOM, AND THE YOU FELL DOWN, LIKE, ALL THE WAY, AND WE DEFINATELY NEED A NEW RULE FOR YOU, MOM."
33) He is my faithful ally in the war of wanting a parrot.
34) When I tell him he can't DO something, for example, stand on the upstairs landing and throw everything he owns over the bannister so it crashes into the foyer and smashes and breaks, just to "See what drops fastest, Mom," he will then go and FIND his sister, and tell her SHE is also forbidden to do this thing it never once occurred to her to do, and tell her with such VIM and SORROW, like he can't believe she will NEVER be allowed this pleasure, that she will weep and come to me begging can they just hurl SOME of their stuff over the bannister to smash and break in the foyer.
35) He has brown hair.
36) He had BLACK hair at birth, thick tons of it, but it grew in blonde underneath.
37) I don't mean the black fell out--- I mean the individual hairs that were black at birth began GROWING blonde. At one point, he had an inch of babyfine blonde hair with another inch of jet black hair on top of it. He had ROOTS. He looked like he was recovering from a goth-baby dye job.
38) He likes to TALK.
39) He has always liked to talk.
40) His first word was NOT "Mommy."
41) It was also not "Daddy."
42) It was "Kitty."
43) He said Kitty in his ninth month on earth and it was the only word he had for several weeks. He never stopped saying it. He woke up calling for the kitty. If the kitty was in the room, he said kitty to the kitty. If the kitty was not in the room, he called endlessly for the kitty to come. If the kitty came, he explained and re-explained to it that it was, indeed, a kitty. When the kitty got bored and left, he would yell KIIIIIITY KIIIITTY at the disappearing cat butt, like the cat's hind end was STELLA.
44) The cat at that time was a monstrous white behemoth named Wally Mavis, and Wally-Cat hated Sam and all Sam stood for and babies in general and the earth and all living things that crawled upon it's vile surface, except me, he liked me okay, and kibble, he LOVED kibble, but he hated everything else and REVILED Sam and Sam would stand in his play pen and YEARN palpably at Wally and Wally would turn his dead flat baleful gaze upon Sam and Wally was thinking, you could SEE him thinking, "If that kid says KITTY one more time, I am going to off myself."
45) He values the experience over the thing. That is to say, he would rather GO AND DO than HAVE. The zoo trip is more important than the overpriced zoo shop toy he might get at the end.
46) He is a geek-in-bud.
47) He loves space/sci-fi/fantasy.
48) He loves Anime.
49) He loves MMORPGs.
50) I suspect he is the kind of kid who will spend prom in a basement somewhere, rolling 30 sided dice to see if he gets the vorpal snicker-snack bonus on his plus three sword of orc-slaughtering hoe-downiness when he attacks that Balrog.
51) I, for one, think that is an EXCELLENT way to spend prom.
52) Yesterday he used the owrd pernicious in a sentence. Correctly.
53) He likes the newts. He REALLY wants his newt, Spotty, to be a male, even though all the blank eggsacks that show up and fade seem to indicate we have an all girl tank just now.
54) We had a bunch of folks from church over for supper and he was earnestly explaining to them that he thought Spotty was for sure a BOY newt, and one foolish guy who doesn't yet have children asked the 64,000 dollar question: "How can you tell Spotty is a boy," and Sam said, earnestly earnestly, "Well, the other day, the newts were stacked on each other, and Spotty was stacked on top of Fig, so I am pretty sure he is the boy."
55) There was dead silence.
56) Sam had recently been given a illustrated book called WHERE DID I COME FROM that explains, well, you know, where he came from, and where baby animals come from and etc.
57) He had apparently really logged some good hours reading it.
58) At least he didn't read it on the stairs.
59) He is a good big brother.
60) Mostly.
61) He REALLY wants me to understand how to play YU-GI-OH.
62) I REALLY do not want to ever understand that.
63) I will lay you 7-3 odds, right now, that my future daughter in law is going to be a tall blonde. He likes him some tall blondes.
64) Just now, however, girls are icky. There were a whole tribe of boys playing in our house and I could hear the buzz and babble of their conversation but not what was being said, and then Sam spoke in his super-sam volume, and all the parents, sitting around my den, distincly heard him say, "WHEN I AM PRESIDENT, I AM GOING TO MAKE ALL THE GIRLS EXCEPT MY MOM AND MAYBE MY SISTER GO LIVE ON AN ISLAND."
65) My husband immediately deadpanned, "And then we'll blow up the island!"
66) Even in 2005, at 8, he retains a shred or two of his delightful innocence.
67) The other day he came home and said, "Mom there is a RUMOR at school that Santa isn't real. Kerbin says that Santa is your parents. Is that true??"
68) I said, "What do you think?" Because I was NOT prepared.
69) He thought about it and then said, "I think Kerbin's full of it."
70) He still genuinely, no REALLY, thinks "Shut Up" is "a bad word."
71) If he leaves the house with five things, he will come home with two things, and one will be broken, and one will be a completely new thing that bears no relation to the original five.
72) Once when he was two I looked away for an INSTANT and when I looked back he had popped the child safety cap on the cat's heart pills and scattered them all over the floor and we did not know if he had eaten them, did not know how many there originally were, and he had to go to the ER and they ran a tube up his nose into his stomach to fill him with charcol to try and keep the pills from being digested and I said to the nurse, urgently, but calmly, "You need to tell me how serious it is. This medication---how serious can the effects be?" And I could see her hating to tell me, but she told me, "It can be very serious." And that wasn't good enough. I said, "Are you saying he could die?" And she said, "If he he took enough, I am saying his heart will stop." And my heart stopped.
73) He didn't take enough.
74) Another time, he choked on a bean and was SO choked he wasn't coughing, just silently dying with his arms waving and his eyes SO surprised, and Scott grabbed him up and I screamed, SCOTT FIX IT MAKE HIM BREATHE SCOTT YOU HAVE TO FIX IT NOW RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW.
75) Scott fixed it.
76) Like all 8 year old boys, Sam thinks he is immortal.
77) He has huge emotions that sweep through him in waves: He loves, he loathes, but never, never is the child lukewarm.
78) From the time he was three until the present, has had the best, loudest, clearest parenthetical YOU MORON I have ever not heard. When he talks down to you --- OH AND HE WILL --- because you have been sadly born too stupid to underastand YU-GI-OH, you can HEAR the unsaid YOU MORON so clearly, and it HANGS in the air, palpable and smelly, for HOURS.
79) When it is aimed at me, the parenthetical YOU MORON makes me want to pinch his little head RIGHT off.
80) He was born with true blue eyes. Not that cloudy, changeable newborn blue -- real blue.
81) They were my father's eyes.
82) They stayed true blue all the way until he was three.
83) I was so happy, because I loved seeing my father's eyes in my son's face, and everythign I read said that a babies eye color is set by the time they are three.
84) At four, they went relentlessly green.
85) Now they, like everything else about the kid, look just like Scott.
86) I like that, too. But I still treasure his baby pictures where he looks out guileless and pleased with my father's eyes.
87) He is good at SPORTS! Which, how did THAT happen? Except, I think he got that from my dad, which is nice since he gave up the eyes.
88) He hated the water from birth and screamed his way through bath time and refused to learn to swim until he was six, when he suddenly turned into Fearless Fish because he discovered there was such a thing as a Water Slide.
89) When he was three, he had an imaginary friend.
90) It was a cow.
91) It lived in the shed behind our house.
92) It was named, "Ontog."
93) When he was tiny, I used to carry him around and whisper and whisper into his ear, "You don't want to be a soldier. You want to be AN ARCHITECT!"
94) I have no idea what he will be when he grows up. None. Nada.
95) I can tell you this: It won't require huge organizational skills. He will immediately be fired from any job that requires him to not lose, say, important top secret documents. Or his coat.
96) I can tell you this, too: When he finds his niche in the world, it is going to be ODD, it is going to be nothing I have imagined for him, but he is going to love it and be successful at it. Because that's who he is, already. He seeks out odd spaces that suit him and he fills them up. He fills them to the brim.
97) I never knew how perilous a place the world is until Sam, my first child, the singular and living center of my heart, was let loose upon it.
98) A hideous change is coming, and coming, and coming soon: I will have to stop blogging about him. He will begin to not like it and to be embrarrased by my adoring gaze and his friends will be finding this blog via search engines and I may have to take the entire SAM RELATED loin fruit section DOWN. Maybe not this year Maybe not even next year. But soon.
99) This is because he is growing up, changing from little squirmy kid-thing into an actual person, the star of his own movie, and Sam's growing up is for me both a constantly defining miracle and the most heartbreaking thing to ever happen, all at once.
100) Luckily, the good outweighs the sorrow, because you know what? The person he is becoming? I really, really like him.

By Turns Enraged and Darlinated

Enraged because I am TRYING TO DRAFT A NOVEL HERE (I may have mentioned that, oh, 500 million times or so??) And MS Word keeps putting up a miniature CLIPBOARD in the middle of my text, a clipboard that appears between the lines, and if my mouse inadvertantly touches the clipboard, the wretched creature asks me if I want to "keep source formatting" or "match destination formatting" or "keep text only." My problems with this are several...

1) I do not know what ANY of those options mean.
2) No matter which option I pick, the clipboard nods smugly and REMAINS SQUATTING IN THE MIDDLE OF MY TEXT, I suppose in case I change my mind later and decide I realy DO want to "keep source formatting," NOT THAT I KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS.
3) THERE IS NOT AN OPTION called "Send the clipboard and all who support it directly to hell to be prodded by the pitchforks of smelly deamons until it is heartily sorry it EVER showed its smug nose." What kind of a menu doesn't include THAT, I ask you?
4) In fact, the only other choice"Apply style or formatting" which opens up a WHOLE ANOTHER MENU of options that a) I do not understand and B) still does not include "send clipboard to hell."

You may not think this is a big deal, BUT YOU WOULD BE WRONG. IT IS. IT IS. That clipboard is making me unable to work because when I am reading through the pages trying to catch the VOICE so I can draft the next section, I have all these CLIPBOARDS LOOKING AT ME. They are distracting, for one, and for two, I highly suspect the clipboards of being judgemental.

It's like when I used to be enraged by that horrid, relentlessly perky MS WORD HELPY PAPERCLIP who used to pop up every time I started a new chapter to say something like, "You seem to be writing a letter! May I assist you?"

I just want my SOFTWARE TO LEAVE ME ALONE and let me work. I do not want my software to have a personality or little pompous, yappy icons. I do not want my software to THINK IT IS SMARTER THAN ME. And if it IS smarter than me, I don't want to know.

On the other hand, I am darlinated. Yes. That's a word.

I recently read the galleys for a VERY funny and big-hearted memoir about a skeptical American who falls in love with a French man and marries him. It was a charming look into another culture, and the best part of the book, to me anyway, was when she brings him home, and the tables turn, and suddenly I am looking at my beloved Georgia through foreign eyes. (It's called Blame it on Paris by Laura Florand, and I will alert you when it gets close to release) SO after half a book of laughing my butt off at how VERY weird the French are, I end up laughing even harder as I saw exactly how weird WE are here, all while being hugely entertained by the story. Anyway, long story short, I sent in a blurb, and the author was apparently pleased with the blurb because she sent me a box of chocolates.

RIGHT AFTER she put the order in, she came over to read my blog and saw that I am OFF wine and chocolate, and so I get this letter apologizing, and then a day after that, this gorgeous box of the kind of chocolate that is 70% and and rich and bittery-thick with goodness arrives, and the chocolate is enveloping things like fig ganache and blood orange truffle and crystalized ginger and whipped French honey. This is the exact kind of chocolate you should NEVER apologize for. I am shamelessly eating it and pretending it doesn't count, because, trust me, this chocolate is NOT even in the same GENUS as a Halloween Mini-Twix. So far the WINNERS of taste with a CUTENESS BONUS, are the Chocolate Mice who are nestled in the box with their noses pointed charmingly up, as if asking to be dandled over my gaping maw by their satin tails and then devoured. I am SO happy to oblige them.

ANYWAY, the box came with a little BOOKLET with pictures and a key that explains in sumptuous language what sort of filling is inside the various shapes. So the other day, Maisy found the key, and she got in her "choir" position, feet together, eyes cast upwards toward heaven, and she held the chocolate booklet like it was sheet music, and began singing. Scott, that fast thinker, IMMEDIATELY hit record on the computer.

If you have a good con and a nice processor, you can hear Maisy's Song

To which I can only say....Amen.

The Counting of More Blessing. Yes. Just the One.

3) It is Operation Christmas Child week at my church, and we are doing our boxes today. You better BELIEVE I have no problem finding enough shoe boxes. We'll fill them up and take them to the drop off point. . Sam and Maisy do shoeboxes for a kid their own age and sex, and then Scott and I do boxes for teenagers (because they never get enough boxes for teenagers. Even in third world countries, teenagers are hard to shop for) and then we donate five bucks per box so they can ship them. Operation Christmas Child is nutritious for the souls of my overpriviliged little American monsters---they buy things THEY would like and put them in a box for a kid who didn't win the "where to be born" lotto and ended up in some tiny village where TB killed both parents before the kid was old enough to say his own name. As a bonus, it makes me think, "WOW, WHAT A WHINER I AM, letting the fact that I have TOO MUCH TO EAT upset me, and you know, here is some kid who is going to be happy to get a little box full of toothpaste and Lifesavers and art supplies from the dollar store." It's a big fat dose of perspective in my navel-gazing little corner of the Universe.

I have 100 ZILLION more things to be happy about, but the list is going to have to stay MENTAL. Maisy is awake and climbing me like I was a tree, and YOU KNOW WHAT, she usually sleeps until 7:30. HEH. Also, appropos of nothing, I think Maisy needs to launch her own brand of EMOTICONS (E-Maisy-cons??? Nahhhhh...) She has the most expressive little face. Like here is her SURPRISED! Emoticon, and may I say, TAKE THAT McCauley Culkin, you got NUTHIN' on Miss Maisy:

And here is her ANNOYED Emoticon:

And here is her BEYOND annoyed emoticon, which I like to call X-TREME RAGE BABY:

And this is the VERY FACE I am seeing right now, which can also be called her VIPEROUS "QUIT BLOGGING AND ME BREAKFAST" emoticon. So I better go!

What Those Holes Are For

Maisy saw this dime-sized, dark, yicky HOLE in one of the drop ceiling tiles at church and it upset her. She likes things tidy. And pink. So she was fussing and fretting about the hole to Scott.

Scott: Holes are not bad Maisy. Some holes are useful. Why, you have some very useful holes in your face, even.
Maisy: I DO NOT!
Scott; Yes, you do. Look here is a hole. *touches her mouth*
Maisy: *indignant* That is NOT A YICKY HOLE. That is my MOUTH.
Scott: Here is another hole *touches her ear*
Maisy: Daddy. That is NOT A HOLE. That is my ear.
Scott: And you have two holes in your nose.
Maisy: My nozrils!
Scott: Yes. And do you know what those are for?
Maisy: Yes! For putting my fingers in!

And she jammed her little digit up in there practically to the second knuckle, by way of demonstration.

Maisy has just been FULL OF IT recently. Like yesterday afternoon, right before I left for Jasper, I heard her call cheerfully from the den, "Mommy! I found some lizard!"

Some. Lizard. Chilling words, but it turned out to be a lizard-part-free hairball yacked up by the cat as a clever halloween prank. So far neither the total humongous lizard nor any shred of him has resurfaced. May it always be thus.

Strange Attractions

Mir is here for the nonce -- we are doing our own private version of BlogHer with Kira who is joining us on Friday. We've spent the day doing my second favorite kind of shopping, i.e. "fingering things you can't afford to buy and googling at things you can't even afford to finger." *grin* We went to a lot of little weirdo gallery-ish antique-y shops in Midtown and then Virginia Highlands, .

Meanwhile, in case you hadn't picked up on it, we're both a little ... odd. There was this ABC show called Relativity that was on in mid-nineties; Only three people watched, so they cancelled it. We discovered, much to our delight, that we were two of the watchers. (Here's the third guy....)

We also discovered, much to our chagrin, that we both secretly (well it WAS secretly) think that Stephen Collins is sexy. Okay, well, no. Mir said cute, or maybe attractive. I upped the anti to sexy. BUT HE IS. In a strange way. As I said to Mir, he's sexy the way Ward Cleaver would have been sexy, if Ward Cleaver had been sexy at all.

Here's a little known Stephen "Smokin' Daddy-O" Collins fact: He also writes thrillers...

MEANWHILE, in absolutely unrelated news, I have this old ROBOT toy. He is about three feet tall and SO old. I got him when I was three, because my seven year old brother got one from Santa, and I wanted one too...*sigh* Anyway, I always loved that Robot. I named him "Robot" and he was my friend. Sam recently found him in my mom's attic and brought him home, but he pretty much broke the horns off of him and then forgot him. Maisy, however, LOOOOOOOVES Robot. She thinks Robot is the bomb. Sadly, she impugns Robot's personal dignity, AND she may be giving him a gender identity crisis...this is what I found in the playroom this morning:

Like Weeds

My valiant man-child marched off to third grade today, armed only with a Batman lunch box and a extra scoop of chutzpah. Lord, Lord. They better be nice to him.

And Maisy, this long tall creature I STILL call "The Baby" is about to start preschool. Who let this happen?

Maisy has climbed up in my lap while I am trying to type this, and I'm thinking about how I used to type one handed with her tiny limp rag of a sleeping body nestled in the crook of my arm. Now having her in my lap....it's like trying to type while holding a box of weasels. With no lid. And the weasels are liquored up.

She LOVES to climb up into my office chair with me and mountain-climb my body while I work at the computer, marching over and around me. Then she'll wedge herself into the crevasse between my back and the chair's back, and dig her little fisties deep into my hair.
MAMA! She'll trumpet in her relentless, duck-quacky voice, I AM GOING TO MAKE YOUR HAIR VERY STYLISH NOW!
And then she'll yank big hunks out because, apparently, patchy bald spots are all the rage for pre-school hair this year. Yoik.

And by the WAY? When did I become MAMA? I was always MOMMY to Sam, and now of course he is much too cool and groovy to call anyone MOMMY. I am MOM. But Maisy named me Mama herself and I secretly kinda like it, even though it makes me feel a little bit like I should dip snuff and shuck corn. She says it in this weird may, like maa maa -- Both a's sounding like the a in CAN and a little pause in between the syllables. The only other word she says like that is "baby," so that it comes out as baa baa. THIS IS MY BAA BAA, MAA MAA. It is inexplicably dear to me.

But I look at Sam, so mighty and independent and already so fundamentally gone from me. Already so much his own person. And I am Mah-ohm to him now so often as I CRUELLY ENJOY thwarting his very good ideas, like, say jumping off the roof into the azalea bushes ("I would hold an umbrella, MAH-OHM. Like a PARACHUTE, Mah-ohm. And Mah-ohm, the bushes would CATCH ME.")

SO this is a short entry. In part because it's taking me forever to type because my hair is being pulled out and this little face keeps coming between me and the screen, blowing goldfish-cracker-breath up my nose and yacketing about "Busserfly catching." And in other part because I am going to stop typing and take my daughter out to mutilate harmless bugs now. I have to. In a couple of years ---years that that will pass in what seems like a span of days ---- she'll be too busy and important to want me to.

Two Notes/Two Conversations

NOTE 1: I am on the road, so if you e-mailed me in the last week or plan to e-mail me in the next few days, you may not hear back for a goodly chunk of time.

Note 2: I have HELL DAY on Saturday -- oil up your pity glands and excrete some genuine sorrow on my sad, sad, sad behalf. I have to get up at about oh-dark-thirty and drive 5 hours to Dothan to do a signing that I booked when my family vacation was in DESTIN. Then Hurricane Dennis removed the house we had rented from the earth only 2 weeks before we were set to leave, so my dad called the travel agent and he found us a desperation lake house we can have with a pontoon boat and all manner of fun-ness...BUT IT IS IN THE SMOKEY MOUNTAINS. Heh. So instead of leaving the signing and driving 90 minutes to the beach house, I leave the signing, go BACK the way I came, and drive for ANOTHER 9.5 hours. I am SO unamused. The good news is, the desperation lake house has internet, so I will be blogging from vacation. The BAD news is...IT IS DIAL UP. UGH! I might as well gnaw raw meat and give up opposable thumbs.(I am a technology snob, and completely SPOILED by cable.)

Conversation 1:

I cannot believe how many of you filthy minded people have sent e-mails to ask me to tell you SPECIFICALLY what A-Very-Bad-Word-Indeed I used on the phone with my editor. AND THEN my sainted mother asked me what word it was last night. Lordy. But my 13 year old nephew sometimes reads this blog, so I ain't saying. It is bad role modeling to even admit I said it, much less break it DOWN.

Tell you what, I will paraphrase the conversation and you can figure out from context what word it was, how is that for a compromise? And dearest nephew, please note the word CRAP fits in there with grammatically correct perfection. Thank you.

Editor: But can you elocute?
Me: I can elocute the A-Very-Bad-Word-Indeed out of anything running.
Editor: You are completely off the chain. Did you just say you could elocute the A-Very-Bad-Word-Indeed out of anything running?
Me: I don't know. I wasn't listening.

That's pretty close, but I can tell it is a paraphase becausemy editor did NOT say elocute because elocute is not technically a word. But it started with an E. Also, my editor lives in the north-east and she would never say "Off the chain." I don't know what they say for off the chain up there. I do know this: Down here if you are in the market and you pass someone who has irked you and you go by them without seeming to realize that you know them or even that they exist, that's called "cutting dead." As in "I cut Frieda dead in the market today." My editor hadn't heard that one. Up there, if you have successfully cut someone dead you say, "I beat her to the ignore." Which cracks me up -- I added it to my lexicon.

conversation 2:

Maisy climbed in the bed with me yesterday morning and snuggled up close for a talk.

Maisy: Mommy, I love you.
Me: I love YOU.
Maisy: I think you are GWEAT.
Me: I think YOU are great.
Masiy: Mommy, you are so beautiful.
Me: Maisy, YOU are so beautiful.

Then she rolled away from me onto her back, kicked her legs joyously up into the air and then let them fall back down akimbo and yelled, "OH MY GOODNESS, MOMMY! WE ARE SO BEAUTIFUL!"

And we were.

Riddle Me This

My daughter has reached the age where she wants to tell jokes.

I remember when Sam reached the joke-telling watershed. To a three year old boy, NOTHING is funnier than a notoriously gaseous dog releasing a trumpet-like toot and then staring at his own bottom in surprise as if to say, What's going on back THERE? This dog, Lord love him, was SO stupid that his own gas surprised and amazed him EVERY TIME, and the humor of it never faded for Sam. They were a pair.

So many of the jokes Sam told at 3 and 4 had *cough* similar thematic elements.

3 Year Old Sam: What did the monkey say to another monkey?
Me: I don't know.
3 Year Old Sam: BUTT! *laughs until something ruptures*

Or he would tell jokes that made absolutely no sense to anyone but himself.

3 Year Old Sam: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Me: I don't know.
3 year Old Sam: GOBBLE! SNARK! HOOPENPOOP! *laughs until something ruptures*

Now Sam has reached the age where he checks 101 joke books out of the library, memorizes them all, and then tells them ceaselessly in a long string, over and over, every time we get in the car. It's like going to Kroger with Henny Youngman.

Sam: What did the duck eat with his soup?
Me: Quackers.
Sam: *laughs hysterically* Yeah! Quackers! GET IT? Because a duck says QUACK, but you eat CRACKers. Get it? Get it?
Me: I get it.
Sam: What did the ghost have for breakfast?
Me: Booberry waffles. Sam you told these exact same jokes yesterday.
Sam: *laughs hysterically* Yeah, get it? Because ghosts say BOO! Get it?
Me: And the day before, And the day before.
Sam: What did the guitar say to the rock star?
Me: Please smash me into insensate chunks before he begins the elephant jokes.
Sam: No, he said, "quit picking on me." I don't get that one.
Me: Well, see, musicians use a---
Sam: What animal talks the most?
Me: The boy-child.
Sam: No, the YAK. GET IT? The YAK! *laughs hysterically* Like, YACK! Get it?

And so on. But now Maisy wants in on the action. She doesn't quite get the concept, but she gets the FORMAT.

Maisy: I have a riddle for you.
Me: Okay, Sam, hush a sec, let Maisy have a turn.
Sam: *grumble grumble*
Maisy: What does the donkey say?
Me: I don't know.
Maisy: HEE HAW! HEE HAW!
Sam: *outraged* Mom, that's not EVEN a riddle.
Maisy: I have another riddle for you.
Me: Okay.
Maisy: What does the donkey say?
Sam: That's not a riddle, Maisy.
Me: I don't know.
Maisy: HEE HAW! HEE HAW!
Sam: No, Maisy, a riddle goes like this. Why did the elephant cross the road?
Me: *Drives us off a cliff to avoid knowing even one more elephant joke.*

But last night, when Scott was putting Maisy to bed, she abandoned her Donkey riddle (which she has been telling ceaselessly for days and days now) and came up with a new one---she;s getting closer. It may not be technically FUNNY, and it may not technically MAKE SENSE, but at least this one has that kernel of truth that resides in the center of all good riddles:

Maisy: What is gooder than a pony?
Scott: I don't know.
Maisy: *leaning in and whispering in his ear* I am!

It Got Quiet

Sorry. Things have been spooky on the home front. Remember when Maisy got to take that FUN Ambulance ride for her febrile seizure? Well. She apparently gave up "Breathing Properly" for Lent and didn't tell anyone. Instead she saved her little secret for Wednesday night near midnight, when she woke up screaming whenever she could get enough air to scream. Which wasn't often. Scott heard her by SOME MIRACLE STRAIGHT FROM GOD. We tried to get her airways open, failed, and called 911 while she thrashed and struggled and gasped and wheezed and reddened and faded in and out. Once again fire trucks and ambulances decended, oxygen and albuterol were supplied, and I in my pajama top sat weeping and singing LITTLE BUNNY FOO FOO over and over again in the back of an ambulance as it wailed and sped to the hospital.

SHE IS FINE. Of course she is fine. Or I wouldn't be here telling you about it. It was a bad, sudden onset of evil croup, and once again we followed up with the pediatrician and once again he assured us this is a healthy little girl and an isolated incident which is no one's fault except mine for being a terrible mother. Then he hit me.

Okay no, that didn't happen. BUT, I am having BAD CAVEMAN MAGICAL JINX thoughts. Do you have that suspicious VOODOO gland in your brain? The one which, no matter what happens, can find a way where it is absolutely YOUR fault and clearly the result of your actions? This can work directly, in an ALMOST RATIONAL cause and effect way, as in: "This is my fault because I didn't have a humidifier going in the baby's room,"even though the REASON you didn't have a humidifier in the baby's room is because you just read this LONG LONG THREAD on your mom-writers e-mail list about how humidifiers can actually CAUSE terrible illness because they get MOLDY and DISEASEY and disseminate illness into the air, AND you know DARN WELL that if you HAD had the humidifier going on the room you would now be saying, "Oh this is because I had the humidifier going and I might as well have taken a BAGGY FULL OF CROUP AND MUCUS AND DEATH and stuffed it by hand right into her throat and lungs!"

And that's not even the worst of it, because at least that MAKES RATIONAL SENSE. The worst is the late at night when the baby is in your bed because you are too scared that she will suddenly STOP BREATHING for no reason (now that there is precedent) and at first you can't sleep because her feet are stuffed into spleen and her exploring fingers keep creeping up your nostrils, but then she falls asleep and you lie there STILL not sleeping. You listen to her lungs processing air, in and out perfectly, her whole little body the walking definition of miraculous as all her little parts pump and heave and digest and burble.

She is so lovely, smooth skin gleaming in the light of the Glow Worm bedtime pal you are squeezing so his head lights up to let you see the rise and fall of her small, sturdy chest and you think, "The humidifier had nothing to do with it. This is YOUR FAULT---COSMICALLY. You are self-involved and awful and all you think about is YOUR BOOK and you just left town for a month to do book promo and you are leaving for another 6 weeks and this is the UNIVERSE saying YOU DO NOT DESERVE THIS CHILD you TOWN-LEAVER, you BOOK-OBSESSOR. You did this, and you DESERVE THIS FEAR and what you should do is STOP EVERYTHING, your writing, your friends, your work, your sleeping, your marriage, JUST STOP and you should stand over her and her brother every moment, vigilent, you must live to watch their lungs work, because this was a wake-up call to make you understand NOTHING else matters but that those two small hearts keep pumping, the four lungs pulling air in and out, and PS you are a BAD BAD MOTHER and YOU LET THIS HAPPEN because YOU. LOOKED. AWAY.

Here in the daylight, I know that's not true. Its croup, not karma, not judgement, it's a meaningless blip of malfunction in an otherwise healthy little growing body. But my love for her, my huge and paralyzing love for her, makes me search so hard for meaning. If I can make it MY FAULT, then I can control it. I can then do whatever must be done to propitiate the croup gods and keep her safe, keep her breathing, keep her happy and unharmed in a cheerful pink world where I can control all the elements and my baby is never at the mercy of that which is random.

Girls and Boys Together

I am off to Nashville, but I have to tell you this JUST REALLY FAST:

Beautiful Maisy who is only two goes to a playschool two mornings a week. Yesterday, she was walking down the hall with her little friend Alex. I love Alex. He is the sweetest boy. Just sweet straight through. He is even tempered and smart with an engaging smattering of freckles. There is an odd DELIBERATENESS to Alex. He thinks things all the way through before deciding on a course of action, and he is doing this AT THREE.

I like his FOLKS, too. His dad is my lawyer, and his mom is an an astronomer---both biiiiiiiiiiiiig smarties. (His dad won 50,000 dollars and change on Jeopardy.) So Alex has great genes, and Maisy ADORES him. She will come home from playschool and say, "Ayex is my favowite fend!" If this was 1,000 years ago, Scott and I would be sending Alex's parents unblemished goats and fruit baskets and trying to work out the marriage contract.

SO anyway, Alex and Maisy were walking down the hall toward the playroom together, and Maisy was carrying her little frog backpack.

Maisy: This backpack is too heavy fow me!
Scott: Hand it here, princess.
Maisy: No, fank you.
Alex: I can carry it!

Maisy passed the backpack over, and marched on. She tossed her dad a little COY look over her shoulder.

Maisy: Ayex is MIGHTY!
Alex: *chest swells, stride lengthens, commences VISIBLE PREENING activity*

I do NOT know where she gets it. Does anyone know ANYTHING about the care and feeding of belles? Because I think I may have birthed one...

Little Ill Pill

Maisy has Miscellaneous Low-Grade Toddler Fever and is languishing in my bed, breathing germs deep deep deep into the woof and weave of my pillow, watching Dee-Dee-Dora the Susplora, and suffering. I am a nervous wreck. I do not want to give her motrin for a mild case of the viral whatnots---if I give her motrin she will buck up and prance all over the house unstoppably cheerful and not let her body have ANY down time and she won't get well.

If I withhold the motrin, she will stay in bed and actually let her little body fight of the infection and be FINE in the morning...BUT. I am gun shy. That seizure, remember?? Happened because of mild viral whatnot, and I can't keep my brain from going down BAD PATHS, saying, what if what if what if...what if it spikes and she against ALL odds has another one and ends up in the emergency all day having brain scans and chest X-rays, thus sowing the seeds for a future doctor-hospital-phobia which means she will catch a double dose of my homeopathic fringe lunacy which will lead to her giving birth to my grandchildren in a water tank in an ashram while her scraggly bearded life-mate squats nearby, snorting echinacea and doing tantric pain chants to help her with the "discomfort" which will so enrage her that she'll climb out dripping and in stage three labor to kill him with the ceremonial hatchet the doula stuck under the water tank to "cut the pain in half." AND WHO COULD BLAME HER?

I better just give her the motrin.

THE PLOG (Sounds Like an Irish Band...)

I thought I was the only person who thinks the proper response to nasal conjestion is "jam a bunch of tissues up the nose holes." But no, turns out Mir does too. AT WORK, even. Me? I only do it in my house. OR DID. While I had that bacterial bronchitis and was SO ill for SO long, my daughter got obsessed with my trailing tissue-wads.

She ANTHROPOMORPHIZED them by declaring the tissues to be nice, funny, smart, and named them (collectively) THE PLOG. Which I think is singular, actually. Sort of like THE BORG but with mucus. She asked endless questions about The Plog.
YOU GOTS THE PLOG, MOMMY?
WHY IS THAT THE PLOG, MOMMY?
CAN I HAVE THE PLOG, MOMMY?

She tried to get it to be "fends" with her, or maybe she was thinking of it as a little germ-infested pet. She kept GRABBING for it, trying to POP IT OUT and KEEP IT. When she wasn't talking about it, WHICH WAS NEVER, so scratch that opening and I shall try again: When LUNCH would happen and her mouth would be full so she couldn't talk about it for 7 - 10 seconds at a stretch, she would sit ruminating her sandwich and POINTING AT THE PLOG. Then she would swallow and say "I SEE THE PLOG!" I bet she DREAMED about the dern thing.

I eventually took THE PLOG out and let my nose run and immediately my entire face CHAPPED OFF. I needed a little PLACE where me and my plog could BE ALONE and UNMOLESTED, but it didn't happen.

SO! Since I cannot PLOG IN PEACE, I plan to never be ill again no matter what, and I have an arsenal of products to help me. AND THEY WORK. Okay, they can't stop BACTERIAL BRONCHITIS, but they MURDER little viral things, eradicating the illness while it is pink and blind and squirming and helpless. I use them all in rotation, depending...

Halls Defense Lozenges (aka delicious candy) - Take every day during cold season.
COLD EASE lozenges (aka The Butt-Awful Death Mouth) - Take if someone with a cold touches you, enters the room you are in and their AIR touches you, or if you feel the slightest tickle of impending misery.
ZYCAM (aka Nose-Sniffy) - Tale at the first sign of a cold if you cannot bear having Butt-Awful Death Mouth--EVEN THOUGH BADM is a more effective product.
Airbourne (aka Tang From Hell) Take before a flight, a meeting, or entering a room with multiple children in it -- in short, before you get the big ride at the CARNIVAL OF GERMS.

Go Thou and be healthy, and COME BACK TOMORROW for the second installment of 3 questions!

Admittedly My Fault...

The new working title is MAGGOTS IN HATS. Thanks, Deb.

I HAVE SENTIENT MOLD plotting world domination in my toilets because I am reading so much and writing when I am not reading, and working out when I am not reading and writing because the bronchitis KICKED MY BUTT and I need to be strong and healthy before I go on the road again and and and. I feel like a very EARNEST hamster in a wheel, a SQUEEKY wheel that goes WREE WREE WREE, and I am always DOING but never get anything DONE. But at least wheel-running is fun and I am a hamster so how bright can I be? Maybe I don't KNOW I am not getting anywhere.

MEANWHILE, I am troubled by GENETICS. Specifically, my OWN, because my ELDEST child has been thoroughly poisoned by my pernicious genes. It is a truism around here that if I leave the house with three inanimate objects in my care, I will come home with two, and one of them will be broken. BUT HE IS WORSE THAN ME. He will come home with one, and it will be attached by a string of its guts to his shoe and he will be dragging it along with no idea it is there. Of course, he IS only seven. BUT IT MAKES ME CRAZY! CRAZY I SAY!

This morning I put all his birthday party invitations in his folder.
Me: Go put this folder in your backpack.
Him: *takes folder* Last night I found the real tomb of Tal Rasha! But there were all these fakes first and it took me, Mom, five days, Mom, to find it. But then---
Me: Sam. Stop. Look at me. GO, right now. Put that folder in YOUR BACKPACK.
Him: What folder?
Me; THE ONE YOU ARE HOLDING.
Him: *Takes three steps, stops, stuff folder under arm and drops to his knees* MOM! LOOK! IT IS MY BLUE EYES WHITE DRAGON! Oh Man! I thought I loaned that card to Joe and I---
Me: SAM! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! PUT! THAT! FOLDER! IN! YOUR! BACKPACK!
Him: *acting like I am a MORON* Geez, you don't have to YELL. I WAS already. *marches off dejectedly*
Me: *calling after him* GO PUT IT DIRECTLY IN THE BACK PACK. RIGHT THIS SECOND!
Him: *mutters things under his breath, probably about my parentage.*
Me: ARE YOU PUTTING IT???
Him: *calling back to me* I am PUTTING IT.

Guess what?
I JUST FOUND THE FOLDER UNDER A CHAIR IN THE BREAKFAST NOOK.
Someone please explain that to me.
Oh, right. He's my kid.

So I dashed down to the bus stop IN MY SOCKS and the bus was there ALREADY so I GRABBED his scruff as he was boarding and put the folder into his backpack myself while giving him the MONSTROUS pointy eye. Then I walked home with FROZEN feet.

Me: WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH THAT KID???
Scott: You know what we are going to. We will keep nudging him and helping him and reminding him and teaching him and eventually he will grow up and marry someone and it will be HER problem.

HA! In other words, I need to get over it because that kid is NOT going to change.
Lord knows I haven't.

In Which Everything is JUST FINE

I've been at the emergency room all afternoon with Beautiful Maisy. She had a FEBRILE SEIZURE which is -- as it turns out -- very common and harmless and indicative of NOTHING BAD and just a thing that happens to little kids sometimes if their fever spikes.

But when I walked into my bedroom to check on her this morning (she had chosen to watch Dora the Explorer there) and found her convulsing and spitting up foam with her eyes rolling around independent of each other, breathing in herky gasps and unable to respond, it didn't SEEM like nothing. It seemed like imminent death and/or brain damage and horror and the whole world shrunk to a pinhole with her perfect face at the epicenter and nothing else mattered.

One. Hella. Bad. Day.
Except not, because she is FINE. She is GOOD and FINE and CHIRPY, even. I have aged 10 years, but SHE is fine and you know what? That's all I give two craps about today. Thanks.

In Fours

This morning, at FOUR am, I got up and put on FOUR inch heels (although I have no one to blame for that, that was MY good idea) and got on the first of FOUR flights that would take me to lunch in TEXAS and then back home in less than twenty FOUR hours.

I have a LOT to tell you.
BUT, as I came in the door at 11 PM, Maisy was shrieking MOMMY?!?! I WANT TO SEE YOU?!?!?! SO I went to her room and picked her up and she promptly puked all down my front.

Glamorous jet-setting has OFFICIALLY left the building.

For the record,
I HAVE PICTURES! AND MANY TEXAS THINGS TO SAY!
Including a theory about how you could get your car to smell like THOUSANDS OF CATTLE!

I will say these things tomorrow.
Right now I have to go hold a bowl to catch the foul eruptions of My Real Life, AKA she who is very feverish and displeased, AKA small she-person I love to distraction.

I am happy to be home, puke and all.

Enter Simon Michael

1) This is THE VERY LAST DAY to register for the drawing!

2) I have to type blog entires into WORD PAD now, instead of word, or I get all those weird ??? for quotation marks. I haven't opened word pad in probably 6 years...When Sam was very small, not even 2, he liked to be allowed type nonsense into wordpad using 72 point font. When I would sit down to open the program for him, he would crow, "STAWT! PWOGGAM! SUCCESORIES! WAR PAB! And now every time I open WAR PAB! to blog, I hear his long-gone baby voice cheering me as I wend my way through the menu.

3) We got a visitor. An EXCEPTIONALLY cute a furry darling dear precious delightful visitor with trembly whiskers and bright, black eyes and a roly-poly tear-drop of a body covered in sweet gray fuzz. Same body was, I assume, ALSO covered in Hanta Virus and Salmonella and no doubt he had racing stripes of bubonic plague decorating his diseased little tongue.

He was sitting in the middle of the KITCHEN waiting for a chance to LICK MY CHILDREN. When he saw us, the adults and the cat, he ran under the stove. We pulled the stove out and looked at him as he squatted adorably on his little fat haunches, licking viral death onto his teeny-fingered pink paws and then spreading it all over his ears.

SAM: Oh! His name is Simon Michael! Can we KEEP him??
Maisy: Lookit! It a MAW-ZEE! Dat Maw-zee! He like me!

So, obviously we couldn't kill him. I mean, he had a NAME. And the good sense to like Maisy. I am not sure I could have killed him ANYWAY, I mean...LOOK at him. Very adorable for a filthy plague ridden vermin:

Several things happened then, all at once.
Simon Michael ran out from under the stove.
The cat ran at Simon Michael.
I grabbed the cat from behind and...
Have you ever grabbed a cat that was not ready to be grabbed and surprised him? I mean REALLY, TRULY surprised him, down on the cellular level? Well, if so, then you know what I mean when I say that Schubert exploded. He just went BOOM. He leapt four feet up into the air and his eye bugged out and his four limbs and his tail all FLAILED around in completely unrelated directions and he screamed like an angry peacock and then ZOOM, Schubert fled the scene.
Simon Michael went RACING into the breakfast room.
Sam yelled, HE IS GETTING AWAY!
Maisy just yelled, excited.
And Scott, THE AMAZING SCOTT, Scott who used to do close magic to charm his niece and nephew, Scott who has won pool tournaments, Scott who apparently traded HIS IMMORTAL SOUL for superhuman hand-eye coordination, picked up a plastic mixing bowl and THREW IT, threw it open side down as if it were a frisbee, sent it spinning in a perfect arc, five feet or more through the air, and Ladies and Gentlemen, as God is my witness, SCOTT RINGED THE MOUSE.

"Well then," said Scott, absolutely matter of fact, "Let me get a piece of cardboard."
"Okay," I said. "And then let's get chopsticks and you can pluck flies out of the air."
And Sam said, "REALLY?"

We slid a piece of cardboard under the bowl and then flipped it over, and there was Simon Michael, neatly trapped in tupperware. The kids fed him Honey Bunches of Oats and cornbread with butter and honey while we all got dressed. I went to check on poor Schubert and found him holed up in my office, still PUFFY and oddly large looking. He glared at me balefully and then went back to grooming, trying to get his electrified fur to go back down.

And then we drove MILES AND MILES out to this old horse trail where I used to ride, WAY FAR from the barn (and the barn cats) in this quiet portion that goes by a meadow and and a stream and where charming little birdies are contractually obligated warble, and into this Idyllic Woodland Heaven released him, far from buildings and humanity. Fare thee well, Simon Michael.

But! I do not believe in A MOUSE. There is NEVER "a" mouse. There are always...MICE. SO we have to do SOMETHING ---something like TRAPS or AN EXTERMINATOR since our one-eyed cat's morbid obesity and poor depth perception make him an EXTREMELY INEFFECTIVE mouser. So. That's problem ONE. Problem two is, the kids really want PET FANCY MICE now, the NON-PLAGUE BEARING kind. Seems SICK to actively SEEK TO ANNIHILATE some mice while putting OTHERS in a habitrail and feeding them on buttered cornbread...

PEE ESS! "Diseased little tongue" is a Kira-ism. You should go VOTE FOR HER BLOG, KIWORDS, over at the BoBs! Her blog is one I NEVER miss.

BABY IN PERIL!

Today Miss Maisy launched a full-scale NAP ANNIHILATION CAMPAIGN, and THE NAP was declared to be an enemy of the people. She introduced into a congress a BILL whereby the time previously set aside for NAP would be instead devoted to rampant lollipop consumption and cat-torturing. Congress, made up of Sam, approved. But the the president, made up of me-n-Scott said, HA HA NICE TRY---VEEEEETO! And stuffed her little buns into the bed.

We took her to bed, and she protested mightily, but her cries for mercy fell like grass seed upon the stony, barren soil of our hearts, and there they withered. She was given a doll and a drink and left there.

A few minutes later we heard her yelling HELP! HELP! HELP! at the top of her little voice. The top of Maisy's voice is like unto the top of Kilimanjaro in that it is VERY VERY VERY high, and like VOLUME KNOB SETTING ELEVEN, in that it is VERY loud. One louder than ten, in fact.

HELP! HELP! HELP! We naturally assumed she had dropped her sippy cup, and went to assist her.

She had not, in fact, dropped her sippy cup. Maisy's little bed is nestled in a bay window, and she had climbed up to stand on TOP of her headboard. Then she had inserted her entire body in between the blinds and the window. She was spreadeagled there, her little hands BRACED into the sides of the window to help her maintain balance, and her face pressed desperately into the glass. She was looking down at the street and crying out for rescue from the populace. A small crowd of neighborhood children had gathered in our yard and were staring up at her as she plaintively bleated at volume 11 for rescue from the horrors we were perpetrating upon her tiny person. Namely, NAP TIME. But the kids didn't KNOW that and I SHUDDER to imagine the dinnertable conversations going on RIGHT NOW in the houses surrounding us.

If Child Protective Services doesn't come by and snatch up my children before I can thrust them into shoes and head out to see Lemony Snicket, I am going to call this a good day.

On Christmas Day in the Morning

Last night we went to the candlelight services and our congregation performed an act of faith SO GREAT AND AMAZING it makes snake handlers look like TOTAL WUSSIES: They handed my son a LIT CANDLE. The fact that the building is still standing this morning proves the existence of a Benevolent Lord.

When we got home, we set out a tray of Peanut Butter Trumpets and Fudge and Cocoa (and some insulin) and sure enough, this morning�IT WAS ALL GONE! Even Sam�s NOTE to Santa was gone (Deer Santa, We beleve in you 100 pecent, with a lot of crismast spirit, Love, Sam and Maisy.)

The fat man with the red suit dropped in whilst we were sleeping and gobbled the goodies down. In return he left enough loot to momentarily sate even the most rapacious inner chamber of the heart of Capitalism! Unfortunately, he could not figure out how to WRAP The Gift of the Holy Spirit, so Sam was out of luck on that one. Other requests were fulfilled (thanks to a generous donation of A GAMEBOY ADVANCE by the BJ and Papa Grandparent Foundation for Xtreme Child Spoilage) and there also appeared a SCOOTER and the requested MASK OF LIGHT TOY.

Thanks to the same foundation, those of us who are two and very beautiful and Maisy got to become �a really, really fairy princess ballerina,� as she told me, nine thousand times, in an excited voice that got higher with each repetition until by the end only dogs could hear her.

DIGRESSION: fellow shoe-hounds---Peep my moderately hot ankle boots!

AND AS YOU MAY HAVE GUESSED, the foundation did not stop with the GRANDKIDS, but spoiled us too---WITH A DIGICAM. WOO HOO! So this blog is about to get a bit more ILLUSTRATED! THANKS SANTA!

And of course, of course, OF COURSE, Santa left everyone in this house ALL MANNER OF BOOKS.
I can only hope he did the same for you.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

Bewormed!

I am UNDER ATTACK! Under ATTACK, I say! Some stupid virus searches google for vulnerable code and then attacks PHP sites, and now my site keeps going down and reverting and when it came back up yesterday the attack-worm had changed EVERY ' and " to a ? so the whole site looks like it was designed by CRACKSMOKING PUNCUATION ANARCHISTS.

You can't get the virus by VISITING the site though, and my personal computer is not infected -- it's a virus that attacks the saved uploaded files on the web. Weird.
And it isn�t the blameless lambs at dot easy�I hereby apologize to my web hosts for having moderately satisfying fantasies about eating them...They are trying to fix it from their end and I am supposed to upload some HTML but getting it patched is beyond both my ken and Scott�s. SO it WILL be fixed soon�.we hope. We just are not sure HOW. Meanwhile I am archiving all blog entries on my hard drive so I can stick them back up if they get eaten, and I am NOT going to spend five hours fixing catagories until I can actually SAVE RELIABLY.

I want to tell you about Sam�s letter to Santa but I already blogged it ONCE and then the WORM ate it and so trying to tell it NOW I keep trying to remember how I told it before instead of just TELLING it, BAH! But anyway, here it is:

Sam brought me his letter to Santa the other day, and the words �Gameboy Advance� appeared at least three times and then he mentioned some MASK OF LIGHT Leggo set he wants and at the end he wrote, �And I want the gift of the Holy Spirit.�

So he hands it to me and I read it and when I get to the end I look down at him and he says in THE most BUTT-kissing little PIOUS voice, I mean DRIPPING SMARM AND UNCTIOUS SAINTLINESS, �And Mom, if Santa can only bring me ONE THING�I hope it�s the Holy Spirit.�

And the Oscar goes to�me, for nodding calmly and saying, �I better go mail this,� before turning tail and running for my office where, once the doors were safely shut, I fell howling to the floor and rolled and WEPT with silent laughter.

But that is what seven-years-old is like. Seven is Political. Two is different Two works like this:

My dad loves this weird fruit salad with coconut and sour cream in it, and I made the mistake of giving some to Maisy for breakfast.

She put a bite in and then spewed it back all over the table while her mouth contorted into a rictus of AGONIZED DISBELIEF. She had the same expression you might make if a diseased RAT had just licked your tongue. As soon as she had cleared the last offending molecule from her mouth she lowered her eyebrows thunderously and said, �That�s GWOSS!�

So I gave her waffles, and she sucked them down in a sugar-syrup ecstacy and I said, �Are the waffles gwoss?� and she said, �Oh no! The Wapples are HAPPY!�

See, no guile�yet.

IN OTHER NEWS -- Just after Christmas there will be a DRAWING! TRA LA! ARCs will be involved. Stay tuned!

Sunday's child is full of...something

Yesterday at church....Sam, Sam, OH Sam, my beloved eldest child, practically my clone, myself in small male clothing....let's just say, he had a day.

Yesterday was the performance of our church's annual MUSICAL CHRISTMAS PAGEANT. Sam was a Wiseman.

They did a number from the pageant at church to whet everyone's appetite. Sam googled and flailed around all during the song, nothing unusual there, but then AFTER the song, the liturgist made the GRAVE ERROR of asking the kids what we should pray about this Christmas season.

Angelic Child One: Pray for Santa to come! *laughter from crowd*
Angelic Child Two: Pray for my family! *"awwww," from crowd*
MY kid: Pray no one comes and shoots my cat's OTHER eye out. WITH A GUN. *horrified silence*

THEN at the Pageant, in the very middle of MARY and JOSEPHS touching DUET, my son discovered a BOOGER was lurking deep, deep, DEEP in the recesses of his nose. He went after it with a will, mounting an excavation team of fingers that left sinus territory and ENTERED HIS BRAIN. They emerged victorious just as Mary was warbling, "Why me? I am just an ordinary girl!"

As Joseph sang, "Why here? In this ordinary town," my son was looking long and meditatively at his newly retrieved booger. He brought it toward his face and there was a tense moment where I was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN HE WAS GOING TO EAT IT, but he was just bringing it closer to his eye so he could read the hidden text inscribed deep within its fascinating folds. Eventually he smeared it down his pants leg, looked up, realized he was IN A MUSICAL CHRISTMAS PAGEANT, sang three lines, and did two dance steps, and fell off the bleachers.

And so on.

Repenting Etc.

I regret to inform you that Thanksgiving will not be held next year. Because I ate it.

That�s right, I ate the ENTIRE holiday. There wasn�t even enough Thanksgiving left to spread on some Wonderbread with some whole-berry cran sauce and make a decent sandwich. Sad, huh. *Burp*

TODAY I am suffering deep, deep feelings of repentful penitence and I did my usual 30 minutes of step in the morning and then went jogging after lunch and then came home and did weights and BY THE WAY, when I say �lunch� I mean �some leaves, with a side of ice chips.� And this routine shall continue until I divest my buttocks of the snarfed up holiday.

But�IT WAS SO SO SO WORTH IT. My sister-in-law made these Brussels sprouts in butter with leeks and Prosciutto that could SERIOUSLY make the most hard-hearted of atheists fall weeping to their knees to admit there is a God.

I KNOW! You are thinking �Ugh. No but�you had Fat Potato FatFat and Meatful Turkey and giblet gravy and Sister Schubert�s yeast rolls AND YOUR GREAT AUNT GLADYS� HOMEMADE PECAN PIE with BLUEBELL ICE CREAM and you are nattering on about the�Brussels sprouts.� And to this I say. Yes. Trust me. They were the best part of the meal, and there were NO slouchers at this table. It is ALL in the butter. As long as the recipe calls for more BUTTER than actual vegetable, and as long as you follow the recipe and don�t try to muck around with MARGERINE, it�s all good, baby. Add the salted bacony goodness of the prosciutto and the mild bite of the leeks...perfection.

Appropos of nothing: Spell check CLEARLY has no taste buds and thinks that when I say Prosciutto I mean Prostitute.

Also not necessarily Apropos, but certainly worth SEVERAL thousand words, I have to show you THE CREATURE that will be returned to me should someone steal my eldest child. An AMBER ALERT will be released, and THIS PICTURE will be broadcast all over the airways. The Police will take a quick run down to South America and grab whatever monkey ate THE VERY MOST COCAINE and return it to me in lieu of my son. Who by the way? Will henceforth be known as �Calvin.�

That is all.

More Great Big (Damp Nasty Germy) Love

Okay � this won�t make a lot of sense if you do not know about the GREAT! BIG! LOVE! So click already. Go on. Take the link. Double Dog Dare Ya.

The Great Big Love faded over the summer. They just didn�t SEE each other. But then � fall came, and our family and the family of beautiful Caroline went to the movies. So we get there and it�s PACKED and there are few places with seats for all us and Sam keeps us milling out in the aisle and won�t let us sit. We try to go in the aisle and he blocks us and foams rabidly and rearranges us all in terrible, nonsensical, yet ultra-casual ways until we figured out what he WANTED. Which was to sit by beautiful Caroline. And so, once we were all arranged THUSLY, he subsided and allowed us to troop in.

And Caroline was a great sport about it, really. She�s eleven and blooming and interested in lipgloss and he is a scabby-kneed creature who spends half his time as a ninja, slaughtering imaginary bug-people. So, it�s not like I see a big immediate FUTURE here. But if the kid wants to sit by her in the movies and moon, and if it does not mortify beautiful Caroline, then fine! Whatever.

Now, Caroline has very long hair. It�s streaky and pale and falls a good five inches below her shoulder blades. After the movie, the bottom half of her long luxurious locks were � wet. More than wet. Her hair was SOAKING. So her mom asks her what happened to her hair and she doesn�t want to say, and she doesn�t want to say. Until finally she cracks and says.

ALL THROUGH THE FILM, Sam was STEALNG little pieces of her hair and stuffing them surreptitiously into his mouth. He spent the ENTIRE FILM sucking covertly on the ends of her HAIR. And she would notice and take the piece of hair BACK, and then, a few minutes later, when she was rendered helpless and inattentive by a good action sequence, his little grubby paw would creep over and get another strand and tuck it into his mouth.

And I was thinking, LORD! BUT! MEN! ARE! WEIRD! Even in tiny BABY form they are just�.weird. But then I reconsidered and OKAY, yes, that is BIZARRE. But maybe it isn�t