Because I had nothing better to do while driving in a raging snowstorm in the Wal-Mart parking lot

"Mommy, are you still sick?"

"What? I don't remember telling you I was sick. Why do you think I am sick?"

"Because ... because ... because yesterday you had blood in your panties."

sigh. "Oh, sweetie, that doesn't mean Mommy is sick."

****

Ever try to explain menstruation to a 2-year-old? While driving? In a snowstorm? On a day when you're short on both sleep and caffeine?

Yeah, let's not do that again.

3:45 playtime

When she's nap-free, Liza's afternoon play sort of degenerates into "let's lay around on the floor and whine and refuse to even entertain the idea of laying in a bed."

I love the fact that the construction of the doll gives it massive cellulite deposits on the backs of its thighs. Who says dolls don't portray realistic representations of average women?

Not what it sounds like

Strangely enough, you buy "impregnator" at the hardware store, not Fertility 'R Us.

I snagged a treasury on etsy

http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=31145/

geez, I really need to go to bed. Somebody please look at this and tell me if it makes any sense at all. 'Night, all!

Anyone want to guess why I'm posting this today?

Great moments in parenting history

9am

"Dad, I've got friends coming to the house in 15 minutes and there's a squirrel dying right in front of our front door. What do I do?"

"Hit in with a shovel and put it in the trashcan."

"..."

"Or have them come in the back door."

**********

With a little gentle coersion from a broom, the squirrel slunk behind the snowshovel on our front porch and proceded to twitch for the next hour before finally succumbing sometime during Liza's dance lesson. I'm a little sad about it, because I have a feeling this was Gimpy, the squirrel who spent the whole summer walking instead of bounding. Nothing makes a squirrel look more rodent-like than walking. Stupid tree rats.

I'm not sure which is more disturbing, the mental image of me trying to whack a dying squirrel in the head with a snowshovel (which I didn't do), or the memory trying to pick up a frozen squirrel carcass with that same snowshovel (which I did ). And the whole time I was thinking, Dude, there's a vacant house in foreclosure right next door. You couldn't go die on their front porch?

America's Funniest Home Videos, here we come

Liza's going to be a flowergirl in Jason's sister's wedding in July, and my mother-in-law is anxious to get the dresses ordered post haste. So today we braved the weather to go try on a couple sizes of dresses that are similar in style to the one Susan has picked out, so that we can make a best guess about what size Liza might be six months from now. Her Royal Highness was in favor of the "fancy dress store," especially the platform in front of the mirror.




And for you, Susie, some stills, which should take less than four hours to download:

Did I mention the snow?

Not a drift. We actually had 13" of snow at 9am. And it kept snowing!

I'm not sure, but it might have been a good idea to clean off the car yesterday, rather than waiting until we ran out of food today and had to go to the grocery store.

Snowpants required for a trip to the grocery. You can tell she hates it, right?

Artsy from etsy

See, dear? This is why I needed the mobile, so I could have something cheerful to look at in February when I am procrastinating the snowblowing by cutting out 400,000 swaddling blankets for the shop.

8" deep and counting (sigh)

Breakfast

When it looks like this on my back deck ...

... the only suitable breakfast is toast dipped in hot cocoa. The nipper agrees.

Children's book recommendations

Liza and I were running errands this morning and my attempt at rewarding her good behavior with a trip to the pet store went horribly, horribly wrong when the pet store was - horrors! - closed for remodeling. In an attempt to staunch the flow of tears and snot, we stopped by the Borders outlet store next door, where I promised her we could at least look at pictures of puppies, since the real ones were unavailable.

Thirty minutes of her banging tunelessly on a Little People xylophone book at least allowed me some time to browse through children's books that don't require a home equity line of credit to purchase. And I found two that I just love, love, love, and Liza does, too.


The first one is The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds. Basically, it's about a girl who tells her art teacher she's no good at art, and the teacher inspires her to create a different kind of art, and at the end the girl passes that on to another kid. The whole thing is really simple - a sentence or two per page, with watercolor illustrations throughout. But it's got a great message about how art doesn't have to be a realistic drawing or sculpture, and the illustrations are so nifty I want to frame them and hang them all over my studio. Really, use the online reader tool on Amazon and browse through them ... I just love how this book looks. Anyhow, this would be great for kids who are just getting started with art or for older kids who have been getting frustrated because they can't duplicate the art they see around them.

Same theme, same author, different book: Ish, by Peter H. Reynolds. This time, it's a boy whose brother laughs at his drawings because they don't look exactly like what he's trying to draw, and the boy wants to give up drawing, but his sister shows him that looking "Vase-ish" is fine, and it lets the boy explore a whole different style of art. Again, great for young artists or those who are frustrated perfectionists, because the "ish" paintings are really cool despite not being photographically realistic portrayals of the objects.

One thing that I like about both of these books is that the characters aren't rich white kids - the girl in The Dot is named Vashti, and the boy in Ish is Ramon. There's nothing particularly multicultural beyond the names and the less-than-albino skin color, but it's still nice to see in a kids' book.

I recognized this author's work from the book Someday, which he coauthored with Alison McGhee and which my mother-in-law gave us at Thanksgiving. It's a beautiful book in the same vein as The Giving Tree, in that it makes me bawl like a baby if I read it to the kid during certain days of the month. Mother has hopes for her little girl, who grows up and moves away and remembers her mother when she's an old woman ... blah blah blah sniff bawl. Liza loves it, and I do too, except for the bawling involved, so I was glad to find some new books by the same illustrator so I can enjoy his paintings without dripping on them.

Anyhoo, The Dot and Ish are available at Borders outlet stores for about $4 in hardback.

Happy blogiversary to me!

http://mind-flush.blogspot.com/2006/02/our-little-cardshark.html

Two years (and counting) of prattling about poop, projects, and profanity. I'm profoundly proud (sniff!)

Recipe - Tomato Gorgonzola Soup

Here's the soup recipe that won rave reviews when we took it to the Wendlings' house for dinner last night. I wish I could give credit to the author, but I photocopied it out of a cookbook and there's no title information on the page. Sorry!

Oh, and we used Feta cheese because I was too cheap to spring for Gorgonzola.

Tomato Gorgonzola Soup (serves 6)

1/2 pound bacon, chopped
1 cup onion, diced
1/2 cup celery, diced
1 tablespoon butter
2 1/2 cups canned plum tomatoes, chopped
2 cups chicken stock
1/4 cup white wine
1 cup V-8 juice
1/2 cup tomato paste
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon thyme
1 bay leaf
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup Gorgonzola cheese, crumbled
1/4 cup fresh basil

slurry: 1/4 cup flour and 1/2 cup cold water.

1. In a large pot, saute the bacon, onions and celery in the butter until they are tender. Drain off the fat.
2. Add all of the remaining ingredients EXCEPT the slurry, Gorgonzola and basil. Simmer for approximately 45 minutes.
3. Make the slurry with flour and water, whisking the flour slowly into the water. Be sure the slurry has no lumps.
4. Add the slurry to the soup and use a whisk to mix it as it thickens.
5. Simmer for 15 more minutes, or until the flour taste is gone.
6. Add the crumbled Gorgonzola cheese and fresh basil.

Sorry, but this is just pretty

Super-secret project under development at Lazy Mama HQ. Codename: YoMama.

Trust me, if you happen to know that those round things are called "yoyos," it's hilarious.

ParentHack - Letting a toddler SAFELY cut things in the kitchen

So the kid wants to help in the kitchen, but lacks the dexterity or wrist strength to wield even a table knife safely? Try the hard-boiled egg slicer - you know, the thing with the wires that slice through the egg? (I linked to a site that has a nice picture - ours cost maybe $2 at a discount store, not the $17 this place charges.)

Our not-quite-three-year-old uses it to slice eggs, mushrooms, zucchini, and cooked potato - and that was just for tonight's dinner. You could probably also use it on soft cheese or any soft cooked veggie, but we haven't had a chance to try that yet.

This is a great way to let the kid help - they'd have to be downright determined to hurt themselves, but it's so easy that most kids can handle it by themselves. Plus, it cuts five or six slices at a time, so it takes a lot less time than letting the kid whack at it with a bread knife.

Also - blunt-nosed scissors work well to cut up things big-leafed things like spinach or lettuce. You can even use them on things like canned tomatoes - just be prepared for the mess :)

Total

Total lunar eclipse, that is. Here's what it looked like from my front stoop:

8:45pm

9:15pm

my gawd, how cool is it that you can see it's a shadow in this photo? I love my camera (and tripod)!

9:30pm

Gonna have to move my tripod for the next shot - stupid moon moving into the stupid branches

That dot in the lower left is something bright - Saturn? Jupiter? Star? that the etsy folks have noticed.

9:45pm

ooh, spooky!

10pm

10:30pm

11pm

Check out how much the moon has moved in the picture compared to Saturn (lower left) since 10pm:

Compare modes - this one was shot in nighttime:

This one was shot a minute later from the same spot, only in landscape mode:

Now I'm kinda wishing I'd done the rest of them in landscape ... they wouldn't have been as nice and red, but I think the details would have been crisper. Oh, well - I'll file that away in the back of my brain for next time I need to photograph a full lunar eclipse :)

Okay, folks, I'm off to bed. Here's hoping the little girl and her uber-snotty nose let me sleep tonight ...

One of those weeks already

Monday - Liza gets her first case of croup. Mild, but still bad enough that she startles herself awake every time she coughs, screaming bloody murder, which doesn't help the barking noise coming out of her throat. It literally took me 45 minutes to calm her down enough after nap to get her to drink apple juice, which normally she will knock old ladies and kittens out of the way to get. Other than the horrible barking cough and an almost laughably quick falling asleep at nap and bedtime, she was fine.

Tuesday - Croup cough is replaced with an almost-normal cough, which is sporadic and seems to get much better with steam, so it's "let's take an hour-long bath at 10am" day. She's pretty chipper all day, right up until bedtime, when her nose starts to run. Every time she sneezes, she wakes herself up wailing, and we have to go in and wipe her off and calm her down, only to have her sneeze 10 minutes later and have to repeat the whole procedure. After like the fourth episode of this, which was punctuated by screams of "I want to sleep in Mom's bed!" and "I need a kleenex!" we gave in and brought her to bed with us. She settled right down, which is unusual for her, and proceded to start radiating heat like a freakin' furnace. I don't think she had a temperature - it's just that she's normally so hot when she sleeps that she wakes up drenched in sweat a couple times a week. The 400-degree child insisted in remaining in bodily contact with me at all times, preferably with hundreds of square inches of body involved, and she had really bad cold breath. She slept like a log, but I'm not sure whether Jason or I got more than an hour or two of sleep, what with all the shoving her over, taking off bedclothes, shoving her over, taking off pajamas, shoving her over, etc. At least she had the decency to go back to sleep after Jason got up this morning.

Wednesday - all snot, all the time. I mean, ginormous quantities of snot. Now, I'm used to runny noses, I'm even inured to the occasional snot bubble ... but I've never seen a kid so comprehensively snotty that when they sneeze, they get a foot-long souvenir hanging down their face and onto their pajamas. Every. Time. She. Sneezes. I have no idea where it's all coming from - maybe some hidden snot fountain down in her leg or something? I swear, it's like a bad special effect in an even worse gross-out movie.

And Benadryl doesn't do jack against whatever this is.

At least she can tell when she's going to sneeze, so we're working on the whole "sneeze into a kleenex or I will beat you like a government mule" training, but so far we've only made it to "Mom! Moooooooooom! I need a Bless You! I'm going to Bless You!" at which point I back away and dive for the tissue box so I'm prepared to clean up the aftermath. I had her hair pulled back in a ponytail all morning, but I know she's going to wake up from her nap with a 1/4" thick layer of crusty hair on at least one cheek, which I will have to soak off while she writhes around and screams and claws at my face with her razor-sharp, virus-encrusted fingernails.

I have washed my hands approximately 400,032 times so far today, and I'm still spreading virus on every surface I touch. There is literally no way to keep up with it - I mean, I had to wipe her nose 8 times WHILE I FIXED LUNCH (I counted). It's just not feasible to wash my hands that often and still expect to have any skin attached at the end of the day. And she can wipe her nose occasionally, but it ends up smeared all across her face, and that's just a case of chapped skin followed by impetigo waiting to happen, and I really don't want to deal with that, because speaking from years of childhood experience, that shit hurts.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go douse my sheets with bleach, soak myself in Lysol, and suck down as many Crystal Light Immunity Defense drinks as I can manage between now and 3:30. And take a nap - I couldn't even get in a catnap during the 14 videos we've watched today because I had to wipe her nose every 48 seconds.

Edited at 2:13pm to add: Great. She made it for almost an hour before she woke up screaming in a pool of her own snot. Gotta go back in there - again - and bail her out. My crystal ball says we'll be ordering takeout tonight ...

Wanna see my latested finished project?

It's a dress for Liza, with a crocheted top and fabric skirt, with a crocheted ruffle at the bottom. If you want more detail than that (or a picture of more than just her back), you'll have to visit my other blog: http://lazymamadesigns.blogspot.com/2008/02/making-progress-on-list.html

Know what I love?

I love that fact that at least 1% of the people who read my blog each day ended up here because they googled "baby poop stain removal," or something similar. Hey, it doesn't matter what I'm famous for, as long as I'm famous, right?

What's up with that?

I think Cleveland is competing in some sort of international Weird Weather marathon or something. How else would you explain the last 24 hours ...

• Yesterday when we went downtown to a matinee of Wicked** we had to brave 40 mph winds. By the time we left to pick up Liza, it was 50 degrees. In February. In Cleveland.


• Last night there was a thunderstorm, with rain so hard it drowned out the white noise machine in our bedroom and so much thunder and lightning that Liza was in bed chanting to herself, "I am not afraid of thunder. I am not afraid of thunder. I am not afraid of thunder."


• This morning it was snowing those big, fat, fluffy snowflakes that have so little weight and so much surface area that it takes each one an hour and a half to hit the ground, after many repeated attempts and side trips to snow UP.


• This afternoon it was snowing furiously in the bright sunshine.


• Right now it's blizzarding outside, only it's so warm that the snow melts immediately whenever it touches anything. I'm looking forward to scraping this mess off the windshield tomorrow morning.

** See how casually I worked that in there, exactly as if I haven't been dying with anticipation for the last two weeks, since Jason pulled the old "Don't plan anything for next Sunday afternoon" trick. Getting the tickets was a tremendously thoughtful thing to do, and not just because I've seen the charge on our credit card bill, and boy, was it tremendous. No, he actually came up with this on his own, with no hinting around from me, and he even had to use his super-secret corporate contacts in order to find tickets when he learned the shows happening when he was in town were already sold out. The show was a lot of fun, and not just because it was my first chance to break out the high heels in a loooooong time. If you've got a chance to go, take it - it was a beautiful production. Not that you can tell from my blurry cell phone picture of the curtain before the show ...