Stressful Day

Long, stressful day today. Lots of cranky B time, poor little girl. She spent more time strapped into her car seat than she wanted to deal with.

But it should be a fun day tomorrow. Stay tuned for all the exciting details.

Playing With the New Toy

I've been wanting to get this for her for awhile. It's $50-$60 new, but no one has them in stock, including every website I could think of.

Then I googled it, and found one on craigslist for $20, less than three miles away from here. Score. The mister picked it up on his way home from work and we had it here tonight, the same day that I found it on craigslist.

It needed a little cleaning (obviously) but it's in marvelous shape and I wouldn't have thought twice about buying it if I'd seen it in a resale shop in this condition.

This toy gets the best reviews online, and there's about a million ways to play with it. It's your basic baby toy that makes a bunch of noise and delights the baby, plus she can use it to pull herself to a standing position.

As you can see, she took to it right away.

A Whole Nother Problem

Is "nother" a word? (Apparently, they've added it because of this execrable phrase that's come into popular use, "whole nother".)

Random House seems to have given it a pass, but I can't take it one more day. I just heard a very educated psychologist (although I suppose Tom Cruise would have something to say about her being a psychologist) on television say "whole nother". I don't even think she was trying to be "folksy", either. It was used as though it was impeccable grammatical structure.

Is it a lost cause? Are we damned to a lifetime of "like" and "whole nother"?

Another Find

It's a kitchen organizer!


It not only has a butterfly on the top, but it has two shelves on one third, a paper towel holder on another third, and a utensil organizer on the other third. Plus there are little cup hooks on the ends to hang other things on.

On top of it, it came with a wisk, two wooden spoons, and a wooden meat tenderizer (not pictured, they were in the dishwasher when the pics were taken). And it's on a lazy susan so you can spin it around. Boss!

How much would you pay? I found this when I went to old town yesterday to a craft/antique/collectibles store. It was on sale for... $4!!

Four bucks! Can you believe it? I've paid more than that for a wisk the same quality as the one that came with this organizer, plus I got all the other stuff too!

Now we need to paint the kitchen light yellow, and I want to make sunflower curtains for the kitchen window. I have a theme! Yay!

(None of you stinky boys reading this care about that at all, do you? Well, tough.)

SoaP Reviews?

Come on. I know one of you went and saw it. Give those of us who know it isn't worth a babysitter some love and tell me all the details in the comments. :)

The Latest Silliness

The HPV Vaccine "Debate"

I've been meaning to write about this for awhile but haven't been able to crystallize my feelings on it into one succinct, readable package. Now, Tristan Taormino has written it for me. (Warning: Her other columns may be the sort of thing some of you wouldn't appreciate at all, but she's dead on right about the HPV vaccine so I refuse to shy away from linking to her.)

The only thing that she left out is this: It is my firm belief that if a sexually transmitted virus caused prostate cancer in men and we had a vaccine for it, the vaccine would be encouraged and paid for by insurance without any hoo-hah or fanfare. Boys would get the vaccine along with the others they get sometime between the ages of nine and twelve, and no one would think twice about it.

Oh, but let our girls remain at risk to a form of cancer that we've found to be completely preventable. I still can't fathom why anyone would fight against access to the vaccine (because let's face it, for our nation's poor, if the choice is between paying the rent or for a vaccine, they'll choose to not live on the street and gamble on the HPV) because it is for a sexually-transmitted virus.

Yep, that needle sure is carte blanche to our daughters. No matter what else we say or teach them, the shot is a tacet, "go ahead". Every other moment that you've spent with them was wasted, because we all know how important the word of a needle is to a girl over everything they've learned from their parents growing up is. Never mind the fact that there are such horrors in the world like non-consentual sex. Nope, I'm sorry, girls. If you don't make it to your wedding night wearing your chastity ring, no matter whether it was consentual or not, we think you should have to take the risk of dying of cervical cancer because of it. We'll protect you from measels and mumps and whooping cough, from rubella and smallpox. But cervical cancer? Hey, if you get it, you brought it on yourself.

I dare anyone to give me a good reason why this isn't just madness. I just want to hop in a time machine and go live a couple hundred years in the future. Maybe by then another comet will come near enough to the Earth to make these modern-day dinosaurs extinct.

(Yes, I know the vaccine exists and it's perfectly legal for me to foot the bill and pay for a course of it to be administered to my daughter at the appropriate age. Rest assured that I will be doing just that. However, we could wipe out HPV in a few generations the way we wiped out other viruses if the use of the vaccine was wide-spread. The only way for that to happen is if the cost is covered by insurance, because to some people, $360 is still a lot of money to drop at the doctor's office.)

Let's All Welcome...

...Ceres, Pluto-Charon, and (??) Xena.

Shameless Mocking of Childhood Classics

So, yes, last night's entry was a bit vague. I was feeling very blah and vague, so that was an accurate representation of me at that moment. Thrilling, eh?

I have been meaning to write another entry for awhile though, and I never remember when I have typing access to the keyboard. (Much of my day is spent with a computer in the background upon which I can sometimes click to access content or (more likely) allow to go to the Da Vinci screensaver to entertain the B, but unless there is a husband or a nap involved, no typing.)

What is the deal with Goodnight Moon? Most of you parents out there know what book I'm talking about. It's a beloved childhood classic. We received copies of it in two different languages as baby presents. I have it memorized, because it's shockingly easy to memorize and it's easier to tell to a squirmy, sleepy child at the end of the day that way.

It's a cute little book with illustrations that I'm sure I'd get much more out of if I didn't simply tell the story from memory at bedtime most of the time. However, there are some things there that any second grade teacher would never let you get away with if you tried to turn it in as a project.

Early on in the book, "moon" is rhymed with...you guessed it..."moon". Now, I know it's hard to find things that rhyme with a complex sound like "-oon" (136 results at that link) but you really should try a little harder.

Shameless padding of book size is another problem. "And a picture of" and "the cow jumping over the moon" are spread over two pages. As I try to actually do a good reading, I'm never sure whether the break should be stressed in a dramatic way or if I should just blow through the sentence and read it as it would normally be read without the page break.

Then we get to the part that seems utterly phoned in. Once the little bunny or whatever he is starts saying good night to all the things in his room (yeah, let's encourage the kids trying to draw out bedtime by echoing this behavior as they grow up) there is an entire BLANK page that says "good night nobody".

Good night nobody? Are you serious? What sort of short cut is that? The first hundred times I read it (or so) I skipped that page because I felt too stupid saying it. How do you nuance that so that it makes sense? I've taken to throwing it in now, but only to preserve the pentameter.

Man, that sounds grumpy, but doesn't that stuff bother anyone else who reads that book to their kids? I keep telling her the story because it's supposed to be a classic, but I'll tell you what's a hundred times better: Gerald McBoing Boing. Now there's a rhyme scheme.

Let Me Save You All Some Time

blah blah blah blah baby

blah blah blah blah politics

blah blah blah blah goofy intarweb link

blah blah blah blah can't get motivated to lose the baby weight

There, that pretty much sums it up.

Army Crawler

Ah, so, the B is crawling now. It's a tummy-down army crawl, but she can make it work pretty well.

I'm suddenly an even busier woman.

Yikes.

I hear they eventually learn to walk, talk, and then talk back. Do they have to?

In My Eyes

My eyes have been twitching for the past few months, so I decided I should go for an eye exam and see if my prescription had changed. I figured it had in the three years since my last one, and my glasses are falling apart, anyway.

I had my appointment last night. I was asked about a million times if I wanted contacts, and I kept saying no.

"Your daughter grabs at your glasses, right? Wouldn't contacts be better?"

"No, because I barely get time to shower, much less put contacts in and take them out."

"Do it when she's napping."

"I don't really want them. I tried them before and they bothered my eyes. I don't like that sensation that there's something in my eye."

"Oh, the ones you had before must have been badly fitted. That feeling is supposed to go away shortly after you put them in."

"It never did. It was itchy and uncomfortable, and I can't imagine ever not being able to feel something, even something that narrow, that is sitting on your eyeball. I really don't want them."

Even with this conversation, I somehow managed to get talked into "trying them until my glasses arrive". (I had to go to a place that participated in the vision insurance plan we have, which wasn't one of the one-hour places I've always gone to before and walked out the same day with new glasses, which I prefer.)

They gave me a pair of contacts and a starter kit, and reminded me how to put them in and take them out. I left with them on my eyes, and by the time I got home, I wanted to pull my eyeballs out. I actually had a little panic attack trying to get those bastards out because I couldn't get the left one out and my reptile brain was screaming, "Get that thing off your eye! You'll go blind!"

I'm not even going to think about putting those things back in my eyes. I am so mad that I let myself get talked into trying it. Even this morning, my eyes still feel funny.

He must get a huge cut of the contacts money, plus all the fitting exams and whatnot. What he doesn't know is that, for the people who are pissed off at getting pressured, he'll never see those people again after they pick up their glasses. I'm never going back after I pick up my glasses, and if they even try to talk me into trying them again, I'm going to pick up my glasses and walk out mid-sentence.

Did I mention that they had all the insurance information wrong and kept trying to charge me for stuff that was covered? And tried to talk me into saving the insurance for the contacts instead of using it for the glasses? And tried to talk me into getting shitty glasses because "I'd be wearing the contacts all the time anyway?"

So mad.

Take That, You Ceiling Fan Hatin' &$*%&$%&

Ah, ha ha ha ha! I'm watching a rerun of Trading Spaces on the Discovery Home channel (okay, it's on in the background while I'm holding B's hands and walking her around the room...exhausting work, actually) and the people on the show just made one of those snooty designers put the ceiling fans back up.

Bwa ha ha. Fan's making a comeback. You can have my ceiling fan when you pry it out of my cold dead hands.

It's Not Really Her First Word

Quick, someone remind me that a first word has to be said with intention. She has to know she's saying "mama" for it to count.

'Cause part of me wants to do a little dance that she picked "ma" as her first babble syllable.

Happy Eight Monthday, B

Who Wants To Be a Superhero?

OMG. This is hilarious. Wonderfully absurd. Come for Stan Lee, stay for Major Victory, who strikes poses as he runs. I can't do it justice. It should make you laugh. I almost cried, I laughed so hard.