While I'm making Monty Python references anyway ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leEsz9ci5XE&mode=related&search=

Enlist Darth Vader to act as the Black Knight in Holy Grail, and you get this ...

Poised for world domination

"I'm going to muscle up to the edge of this pot, go voom and take over the whole back yard." - Zeke the Zucchini


"Look, matey, this zucchini wouldn't voom if I put 4,000 volts through it." heh.

Strawberries

At the farm market I am grabbing the season's first green peppers and tiny summer squash no bigger than my fingers, but Liza only has eyes for the quarts of strawberries. Before I can stop her, she's grabbed a berry and shoved it into her mouth, eyes opening wide in surprise as she gets her first bite of summer, grit and all. "Shtrawbewwy!" she says, dribbling juice from the corners of her mouth until she looks like an extra in a vampire movie. She hands the half-gnawed bit to me and wanders off to play in a mudpuddle while I pop the rest of the mangled berry into my mouth. It tastes sweet, then tart, then like water. It is furry, and gritty, and seedy. Despite the wet, cold weather today, if I close my eyes I can feel the sun on my face and the bugs on my legs, and I can almost hear the mice and snakes hiding among the plants. I'll take two quarts, please, and we'll be back this weekend to pick more.

Early girl

Recycling your old toys? Here's another thing to worry about

That's what happened when I tried to put the cap back on one of my old toys, a semi-flexible plastic "milk bottle" that came with five other bottles and a basket to carry them in. I didn't even squeeze hard, and my thumb went right through the side, causing it to shatter into nice, sharp, easily swallowed pieces. Luckily this happened after my toddler was in bed - we could have had a nice trip to the emergency room if she had done this herself and either impaled herself on the shards or eaten some of them.

I went through the remaining bottles and this happened with one of the other four I still had, so I pitched the whole set out.

So I guess when I pull out the toys I saved from my childhood, not only do I have to scrub off 30 years of dirt and check to make sure the pieces aren't choking hazards, I also have to make sure any plastic is still flexible enough to not shatter at the drop of a hat (or the squeeze of a thumb). Crud.

Weekend of extreme sinus drainage (and productivity)

Wednesday: Came down with the "something's been dripping down the back of my throat all day" sore throat, which usually signals the start of a week-long cold infestation.

Thursday: Sore throat continues, plus sinus headache and pain so bad I feel like throwing up. The pain laughs at the two kinds of cold medicine and pain relievers I throw at it. So, of course, I take Liza swimming at a friend's neighborhood pool. Thanks to me, the entire kid population of Camelot Farms will miss a good portion of next week's school. In my defense, at this point the symptoms were still indistinguishable from allergies.

Friday: Throat is better, but now I'm blowing my nose so often that the muscles in my neck and back hurt from the effort to get the approximately 14 gallons of stuff out of my body. Liza chooses today to turn into a whiny limpet. The only way I manage to bypass toddlercide is to make her watch Cinderella with me twice, and let her run around outside with the hose running full blast for an hour. Jason gets home from work, I retreat to bed and hide there until it's Liza's bedtime. After she goes to bed, I work on the stuffed dog that I've been knitting since we were in the hotel room. Because, you know, nothing takes your mind off of snot like working on a project you have grown to despise but are finishing because you've invested too much time in it to throw it out.

Saturday: My throat would be better, if I weren't hacking stuff up every five minutes. I talk to my mother on the phone, and she actually sounds worried. I tell her not to fret, at least now I can sing my daughter "Amazing Grace" in an additional lower octave, thanks to Sexy Cold Voice. Jason takes pity on me and goes out with Liza until lunchtime (thank you, saintly husband!), giving me time to finish the quilting on the first of two quilts for our guest bedroom. I'll have photos once I get the binding on. And I manage to make the valance for our kitchen window:

Afternoon is a blur of naps and looking through decorating books for ideas for our bedroom curtains. Jason went over to a friend's house Saturday night, and I knitted and crocheted until my fingers bled. Literally ... although I don't have a picture, unfortunately. I do, however, have pictures of The Dog From Hell, which seemed like such a good way to get rid of a lot of ugly brown yarn, and turned into the project that wouldn't die.

"What's so bad about that?" I hear you thinking. Well, that dog was made in about 30 different pieces, and despite the fact that I cut 60 rows of knitting out of the pattern when it was obvious things were getting out of hand, my boy is four feet long and weighs about five pounds. Here's Liza's first exposure to The Dog of Doom, just so you can get an idea of the scale:

Her actual comment while I was taking the picture? "Mama, help! Take it off! Take it off!" I think she was just ticked off because I put it in the way of her continuing to use the couch as a trampoline, but still.

Ahem. Anyway, Saturday night I also finished up two crochet projects from the bottom of my knitting bag, both made of yarn I had leftover from the zebra:

I've decided to call the penguin "Blotto," and the bear is "Claw." I can't tell you how perfect the beak is on the penguin - it turned out exactly the way I wanted it to.

Sunday I was on the mend, only expectorating twice an hour, although when I talked to my dad on the phone he thought I sounded awful. I had enough energy to work on a summer dress for Liza, which I completed in one naptime. A long naptime, and I still need to take in the waist some to make it fit right, but still. Damn, I'm good.

I'm not kidding when I say I have to take the waist in. Here it is, safety-pinned together in the back so I could judge how much I needed to take it in.

I have to cut off FIVE INCHES of the elastic that holds the waistband up in back, despite the fact that Liza's waist is only one inch smaller than the measurements on the package for this size. Stupid pattern designers.

And then Sunday night I started a new sweater for Liza, which should be big enough for her this winter. Given that the pattern is ridiculously complex and I've already messed it up twice in sixteen rows of the pattern, I'm going to need all the time between now and first frost just to get the thing done. I had to "watch" the episode of Heroes we had on DVR with my head buried in the pattern book, muttering under my breath "ONE perl perl TWO perl perl THREE perl ... damn, it was only supposed to be two. Okay, back on the left needle, guys. Hey, you! Don't you dare drop down one more row! I've got a crochet hook, and I'm not afraid to drag your sorry ass back up where you belong!" I firmly believe that the more I curse at a craft project, the faster it goes. If that's true, I predict I'll have this sonofabitch done next week.

And today I'm mostly healed, except for the hourly removal of great quantities of stuff from my nose. And I've managed to pull all the ugly trim off the basement wall before I even got out of my pajamas, and I got the first coat of paint on the walls during Liza's naptime. So if you'll excuse me, I have a second coat to apply. "Lupine," here I come!

Pearl

Sorry, MLF, but the veggies don't look as good from ground-level right now. I'm going to stick with the giantess vantage point, at least until I spot something interesting down lower.

Pretend this went up yesterday

Photo credit: Jolly Green Gretchen

buddies

signs of life

New photo series - from the garden

Because I'm having way too much fun with the macro setting on my camera and my brand new garden ...

Things I wish I'd never seen

Every now and again I find something on eBay that just makes me wish I'd gone to bed a few minutes sooner. Here's one:
http://cgi.ebay.com/2-3T-Sandi-Henry-National-Pageant-Swimsuit-Swimwear_W0QQitemZ180123383348QQihZ008QQcategoryZ15638QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Why on earth would anyone think a swimsuit pageant would be a fun activity for 2-YEAR-OLDS???? And who would spend $200 on a swimsuit for a 2-year-old? And how the hell did the seller get her daughter to sit still to put that much eye makeup on her (see second photo in the listing).

(since the listing is going to expire soon, here's the photo:

Check out the seller's other listings ... the one where her daughter is getting crowned and someone has to hold the crown on her head because her head's too small just makes me throw up a little in my mouth.

Turn a baby washtub into a stain removal center

I should have written this up ages ago, but I keep forgetting.

One of the first official "hacks" I performed as a parent involved the cheap little plastic washtub we got from the hospital - you know, the one they use to give the baby a bath at the hospital, and they can't sterilize them, so you get to take it home with you. Since we already had an official baby bathtub we'd gotten as a shower gift, we ended up turning the hospital tub into a stain removal center.

We kept the tub on the floor in our laundry room, and whenever one of Liza's pieces of clothes got stained, we'd throw it in the tub instead of the regular laundry. When the tub was full, I'd use a stain stick on all the stains, throw a scoop of OxyClean Baby into the tub, and fill it up with the hottest water I could get. I'd throw the clothes in and go so something else for an hour. When I was ready to start the clothes in the main washer, I'd pour the entire contents of the tub - clothes, water, and all - into the washer, along with the unstained clothes and detergent. And darned if 90% of the stains didn't come out!

This method had two benefits over some of my other options, which included soaking the clothes in a sink or in the washer itself. First of all, who wants to soak poop-stained clothes in a sink you're going to use for other stuff? Our laundry was in our bathroom, so I would have had to soak poopy pants in the sink where I wash my face and brush my teeth. Ick. And soaking clothes in the washer would have tied up the washer for an hour and used a lot more water.

Now that Liza's older and we don't have quite so many stains, the tub has been pressed into duty for a few other things, including puke bucket and place to put the kid when she's pooped in the tub. Not bad for an ugly plastic washtub we got for free!

When Jason's gone and I get really bored ...

I come up with fun new games. Good for upper arm strength, bad for lower back.

Recently

Liza and I went to the Cleveland Botanical Garden's flower show. It was hot. The flowers were pretty.

Liza enjoyed the children's garden ...... but not getting shot in the crotch by a fountain.

Jason went to China for a week, and all he brought back was this lousy dress for our daughter (you can tell she hates it).

Jason and I finally will have something about with my relatives at the family reunion - zucchini, Early Girl tomatoes, Better Boy tomatoes, sweet corn, cucumbers, brussels sprouts, broccoli, red peppers, jalapenos, cilantro, rosemary, yellow onions, nasturtiums, and marigolds. And two pales of peat moss, three bags of garden soil, a bag of vermiculite, two bags of sand, a bag of manure, and $30 worth of Trex decking. All in four square feet, plus one big honking pot for the zucchini.

My plan to get Liza to stop spitting water/food/milk/spit all over the place at every meal is finally working - she gets a temporary tattoo if she makes it through the whole day without spitting. Today she got her first tatt. Awww ....

Product recommendation - Purdy Corporation Colossus 1-3/4" Core Diameter Paint Roller Cover

Disclosure: My husband works for the company that manufactures these, so I'm lucky enough to have gotten my sample for free.

Two weeks ago:

"Check out what I brought home for when we paint the deck - it's the Colossus! I figured the deck is pretty rough, so I got the longest nap I could find ... it's inch-and-a-half."

"Inch-and-a-half? Like, three times longer than the nap on the rollers we normally use?"

"Yep. Looks like we're recycling shag carpet from the 70s."

"Cool. Can I call it the Afro-ller?"

"If it will make you paint any faster, sure."

This afternoon:

"So I spent an hour and a half last week painting a 10' section of deck railing with a brush, and you just did the same thing with the Afroller in 10 minutes?"

"We still need to touch up the little bits at the top and bottom that I couldn't reach, but otherwise, yeah, it's done."

"Dude, painting with a brush sucks. Long live the Afroller! Even if it does look like you're painting with a Lhasa Apso."

Tonight:

"Okay, so the Afroller sucks up an enormous amount of paint, and we have to go get another gallon to do the second coat on the deck. But another gallon of paint is what, $40? I think our time is worth a lot more than that."

"Liza, get the birdseed out of your mouth. Remember the nasty diapers you had when you ate sand last week while Daddy was in China? Birdseed will be even worse."

"Daddy at work! Took airplane! Faaaaar away! China!"

"No, sweetie, Daddy's right here, covered in green paint speckles, holding a green fuzzy dog on a pole."

*****

In summary: The Purdy Colossus roller covers have ridiculously deep nap, which means they hold a lot more paint than a thinner cover, and they can reach deeper into crevices and uneven surfaces. They do tend to be a little worse for shedding lint than some other brands, but if you're painting a deck, you're going to have a little lint/grass clippings/spiderwebs/acorns in there, anyway. They soak up a lot of paint, which means you may need to buy a little more than usual, but it will probably save you time overall. They're also a little harder to clean than a shorter-nap cover, but even with the extra cleanup time, it still saved us hours in time on this job. Colossus is a new line this year, but they seem to be available through both the Sherwin Williams stores and some major hardware/home improvement stores.

The verdict: If you've got to paint a shed, or a deck, or anything very uneven (like a textured ceiling), you should check these out. It should save you a lot of time ... plus, "Afroller" is fun to say.

Hmmm...

... did I shave this morning?

OR

Is it ripe in here, or is it just me?

Nostalgia

Here's where we were a year ago, give or take a week:
http://mind-flush.blogspot.com/2006/06/and-shes-off.html

And now she's walking and running (well, more of a gallop most of the time, but we're working on that), climbing and crawling, learning to do somersaults and (occasionally) walking on the balance beam with no extra support in her tumbling class. She still always wants to walk up stairs leading with the same leg, but will switch to the other leg if I ask her to, and she doesn't have to drag herself up with her arms anymore when she does it. She's even gone up by alternating legs for a few steps, which just looks so grownup it makes me ache.

When I asked her what today was, she said "Gym Day! See Penelope! And Sybil! No Matt - Matt's at Work. Daddy's at work, far away. .... parachute!" She's been singing the words she can remember to every song she's ever heard in one continuous mishmash loop (Barney is a dinosaur hmhmhmhmhmhmh Abc's and 123's and hmhmhmhmhFriend! hmhmhmh DO DAH! DO DAH! hmhmhmhmhm 5 miles long hmhmhm DO DAH! DO DAH! )and holding five-minute (somewhat one-sided) conversations with my mother on the telephone, turning to me out of nowhere and announcing "The chairs are upside-down" when the carpet cleaners had upended the chairs on top of the dining room table, spraying milk all over the expensive chair in our living room and smiling, saying "I'm sorry Mommy, spitting makes a BIIIIG mess!" in the happiest voice imaginable.

She sees the childproofing gate closed in the kitchen doorway and says "gate closed means stay out" and goes to play with her pretend kitchen in the dining room, where she cooks me a pot of beans and a chocolate ice cream cone and makes me fill her teapot with pretend water about 15 times in a row. She sees me painting the deck and says "Mommy colors on the wall?"

When asked what she wants for dinner, she will always, always reply either "grilled cheese" or "mac and cheese," so you'd better find a way to describe whatever you're serving as one of those two. Rice-a-roni? Just like mac and cheese, only pointier. Pita bread with hummous and feta? Special grilled cheese. Chicken soup? Granted special dispensation because it was the only "real" food we gave her during the stomach flu debacle a few months ago, and she was so grateful that now it's apparently ambrosial.

Also granted special dispensation - tofu and edamame, the boiled soybeans served as an appetizer in Japanese restaurants. She likes tofu so much that I have to order her bowl of miso soup with extra tofu - lots of extra tofu - just to keep her busy until the edamame arrive. The kid can blow through 2/3 of a serving of edamame (or "beans" as she calls them) in less time than it takes to write this, squeezing the pods so hard that they squirt across the table and occasionally across the room. She loves playing with chopsticks, and she thought it was just awesome when I was feeding her pieces of pickled ginger from my "sticks" earlier this week. She grabbed her pair and managed to actually fork some of the shredded cabbage plate decoration into her mouth, so pleased with her accidental success that she ate three or four mouthfuls before she realized what she was doing.

She has stopped demanding juice first thing in the morning, and instead drags all four (five? six?) members of the posse down to the kitchen and demands to show them her plants (the vegetable seedlings we planted earlier this week, which are sprouting in pots on the windowsill). At bedtime she tells me when she's too tired to read the usual number of books or sing the regular songs ... "Mommy, COVERS!" "No Amazing Grace ... night night, Mommy! Kiss bunny! Kiss Bob! Kiss Mingo! Kiss ... sheep? Sheep! Kiss Kitty! Kiss Pink Duck! Kiss Zebra! Kiss Mingo again! Sweet dreams!"

She sits through books with actual plots and, thank the lord, paragraphs, such as The Poky Little Puppy and The Story of Ferdinand. Henny Penny is a favorite this week, and I tickle her stomach to cue her to say the line "the sky is falling " in an increasingly silly voice. When her Pooh song book ran out of batteries in the middle of getting ready for bed tonight, she didn't throw a fit, just said okay when I told her we would buy more batteries tomorrow. If asked, she will "read" me one of the storybooks Jason brought home from Italy, which says things like "she is yellow, like the sun."

She loves the "numbers" Jason's mom got her for her birthday - a set of foam letters and numbers that you can stick to the wall of the tub. We started her out with just the numbers, but now that she knows all of those (and even counted to 15 one time), we give her a handful of letters each night to play with in the shower. She sticks them to the wall, mostly in the wrong direction, then lovingly adjusts them when I tell her what's wrong. At the end of the shower she has to line them up on the wall to make a word, all of the letters touching in a strange arc across the tile, all consonants with an occasional 1 or 7 thrown in for good measure. She loves to watch me write, spelling out the names of people we know on the AquaDoodle and pointing out each of the letters as I draw them. She holds her AquaDoodle pen as if she had been writing all her life, at least when she isn't squeezing it as hard as she can to make it leak dots of water all over the mat.

She has to ring the doorbell before she will go through the front door (thanks a lot, Jason). She rang it with the storm door shut the other day, and I told her it was just a little ring because of the door being closed. When I opened the door, she rang again and said "Now it's a BIIIIG ring!" Going to the mailbox is the daily after-nap ritual, and boy, is she ticked if we didn't get anything. The endless parade of school buses, mail trucks, delivery trucks, tree trimming trucks, garbage trucks, and cars of notable colors that pass our house are all commented on and apparently require confirmation - "yes, that is the garbage truck."

Whenever our car turns in to our development when we return from a trip, she announces "The New House!" Today when we went for a bicycle ride and I came into the development a different way, she leaned forward in her seat and started poking me in the back, yelling "Missed New House! Missed House!"

She loves my old Fisher-Price doctor kit, complete with funky-smelling oral thermometer and a blood pressure cuff with a dial that spins when you squeeze the bulb. I get examined thoroughly at least twice a day, including checks for reflexes on my boobs and eyeballs, and an oral exam that involves her attempting to ram the pretend otoscope down my throat. Oh, and shots, too, lots of shots, some of which she also gives to herself (how unsanitary!).

She calls the white skull-and-crossbones charms I put on her crocs, "crabs." When in doubt, any bird is a blue jay, a woodpecker, or a sea gull. Or a duck, of course.

It's just so weird that she's finally turning into a kid, someone with whom I can hold a conversation without having to feed her lines, someone who listens when I tell her things and picks them up right away. Tell her one day that this is your wrist, this is your elbow, this is your shoulder, and later that week she's liable to tell you she wants her sticker on her wrist, not her shirt.

She's busy all the time - I can definitely see why the Montessori folks call the various learning play activities "works," because she's serious about figuring this stuff out. I kept her busy for over an hour yesterday by handing her a garden hose and some different size buckets and cups ... she didn't need any guidance from me beyond moving the hose to a new spot on the lawn every 15 minutes or so to keep her from drowning, she just experimented with how to pour water from the hose into the containers, how to pour from one container to the other, what happens if I hold the hose over my head, holy crap that water is cold, oh look my feet are sinking into the lawn and I can make big muddy splashes if I jump up and down, etc.

I told her today that we were starting a new system, and if she could make it through a whole day without spitting (her new favorite pasttime), I'd give her a temporary tattoo. She sat there and listened to my whole explanation, looking at me the whole time, and examined the tattoos closely. We'll see if she can pull it off tomorrow, but at least for that moment, I'm pretty sure she understood the bargain.

Yes, it's been a good week, and yes, she still acts like a 2-year-old, turning selectively deaf when she doesn't feel like doing what I ask her to do, occasionally throwing herself on the floor and flailing to indicate her displeasure at the turn of events. But she's also gotten smart enough that if I come up with a reasonable explanation, she turns off the tantrum like a faucet and moves on, which is a refreshing change from the round-the-clock screamfests from her early months.

The kid who used to scream if anyone other than me even looked at her is now willing to (uneasily) let the waitress lift her into the high chair or the bus driver lift her up the stairs on the bus. When strangers talk to her she still does the "turn away and pretend I'm not here" thing, but she's smiling when she does it, and I think she does it more because she knows it's cute than because she's really shy. She actually answered two of the waitress' questions at dinner the other night. Instances of whiny cries of "mooooommmmmmmyyyyyyyy" while grabbing the lower half of my body and attempting to climb up my front have decreased markedly in the last month, as have night wakings and nights and naps where it's impossible to get her to sleep.

There are still plenty of moments (and days) when I could cheerfully wring her neck, but the rest of the time I'm glad she's around. Gives me an excuse to watch the first 15 minutes of Finding Nemo over and over again, if nothing else :)

Another reason my mother rocks

Tucked in with the yard-sale finds my mother sent for Liza was this little gem for me:

Explains a lot about my formative years, doesn't it? Needless to say, it's got a place of honor on the bulletin board over my desk.

Doing some cool things with strobe flashes

http://flickr.com/photos/quaketronics-tom/133155867/in/set-72057594114240438/

I love, love, love this photo. The rest of the series is interesting, but this one totally rocks.

Oh, and this one is cool, too, if only because it looks like the balloon is some evil flower about to eat her hand. Bwahahahaha
http://flickr.com/photos/quaketronics-tom/133163241/in/set-72057594114240438/

Oh, and this one ... "Und having made the incision with my bare hands, I vill reach into the chest cavity and remove the cancer like ... SO!"
http://flickr.com/photos/quaketronics-tom/133164535/in/set-72057594114240438/

Ooooh, and the symmetry on the balloon plus the goofy expression on the guy makes this one a winner.
http://flickr.com/photos/quaketronics-tom/133165138/in/set-72057594114240438/

You really need to just flip through the whole photoset. Wicked cool.