Archives for March 2006

I have a good group of orders for the DYM shirts in both styles. If you want to get an order to me, please email me by late Friday night. I will be putting in my order and sending payment insturctions this weekend. Thanks!

Laylee: Who’s your dad?
Me: Papa.
Laylee: Who’s my dad? (I promise her parentage is not in question.)
Me: Dan Daring
Laylee: So he’s your dad too.
Me: Nope he’s not.
Laylee: You and me are in the same family and he’s the dad so he’s your dad too. (Again, I promise…)

Laylee: I want to tweeze these few pears out of my chin.
Me: You don’t have any pears on your chin.
Laylee: Yes I do and I can’t find my tweezers. Can I borrow yours?

Laylee: Is daddy getting me ice cream?
Me: Yes.
Laylee: I want my ice cream cone.
Me: Oh. He’s getting you an ice cream sundae.
Laylee (hysterical): But I want some ice cream TODAY!

Laylee: Are we going to see Daddy at MegaCorp?
Me: Yes.
Laylee: It’s not called MegaCorp.
Me: Oh, really?
Laylee: Yeah. It’s called WORK-A-CORP! (giggling) Because you go there to WORK! Bwa-ha-ha-ha.

All of these conversations occurred today and I thought I’d share, for those of you not living with your own personal miniature comedienne.

Dan asked me later whether or not I went on to explain that there are two kinds of “sundaes,” one being a day of the week and the other a type of ice cream treat. I told him I didn’t have the energy to explain the intricacies of the wonderful world of homonyms this afternoon at McD’s.

I also did not have the energy or frankly the verbal skills to explain the concept of narcissism, and the fact that I don’t think the real Snow White suffers from it to the point of wanting to wear underpants bearing her own likeness.

My little “Snow White,” as she insists on being called, wants to wear the same pair of Snow White underwear every single day. Being a person over the age of three, I can foresee certain difficulties inherent in this course of action. I have explained all of these to her.

What I’d really like to say is, “Do you think Snow White is so narcissistic as to imprint her own smiling face on all of her underwear? No. She most likely has undies covered in little flowers, birdies or fields of grass.”

“Now the queen on the other hand… the queen would definitely wear wicked-queen-with-the-green-face underpants. She cares about no one but herself. Who would you rather be like?”

I am a firm believer in the power of lists. Long before I saw an article in Real Simple Magazine about lists and their wonderfulness, I had been using lists to organize, schedule and catalogue my life.

There are the lists of the number of times Dan has kissed me in the rain. Those are short lists. Some longer lists could contain data such as the types and colors of lint I have pulled out of Magoo’s mouth and the number of things we’ve told Laylee “princesses always do” to get her to do them.

Here are a few of the real lists I keep that help me maintain order and sanity (“Ha ha,” you say.) in my life. Most of these I keep on my PDA so I can pull them up or add to them anytime, anywhere.

1. All of the gifts we have given to family members for the past several years for all occasions — this one keeps me out of trouble. Giving the same type of gift to the same family member two years in a row is embarrassing. “Oops. We’d better return that one to Canada. It says here we got Papa a jade grizzly bear LAST Father’s Day.”

2. Menu plans — saves choosing what’s for dinner every night and makes number 3 easier.

3. Shopping lists — I keep a separate shopping list for any store I go to more than a couple of times per year. If I think, “Next time we’re at Marvin’s House of Bait and Breakfast Foods, I’d better get fish hooks,” I create a list for MHBBF and write down ‘fish hooks’.

4. Vacation lists — this one I’m stealing from that Real Simple article from some time last year. The idea is to make a Vacation 100 list at the end of your adventure. If you’re like me, you’re too busy having fun on vacation, or cleaning sand out of small people’s crevices, to keep a travel journal. When all the sand is put back in the ocean and you’re safely back in your living room, get the family together and make a list of 100 memories from the trip. It can be a bullet-style list. Some can be long and some just a few words:

-Magoo touched the ocean for the first time, not that impressed
-Rita’s Water Ice (pronounced ‘wudder ice’) was delicious and we discussed opening a franchise in Washington.
-Laylee screamed whenever a wave came up to her
-Magoo met Papa for the first time.
-There was a street named after Mom.

5. Books to read

6. Books I have read

These lists allow me to throw away many little scraps of paper and stop me from asking the questions, “What did we say we needed? Who gave us that nasty fruit cake ule log last year and how are we gonna retaliate next December?”

What lists do you keep and why?

Somewhere there was a clog in the pipeline. Somewhere between the executives at Focus Features and the millions of screaming female fans across the country, somebody clogged up the works.

We want repressed passion. We want it in our living rooms. We want it in widescreen and we want it yesterday. When Pride and Prejudice was released on Tuesday, I rushed to the store to pick up my copy.

Okay, I did a whole bunch of stuff around the house, took Magoo for his nine month checkup, wrote a blog post, played with my kids, fed them a meal or two, put them to bed, left them with Dan, did the grocery shopping and THEN rushed to the store to pick up my copy.

By 9pm on Tuesday night, there was nary a copy to be had. All the stores around here were sold out. I tried again and again throughout the week and NADA. Then on Friday, Dan the beloved husband found me a copy at Best Buy and the peasants rejoiced. I’m so glad he’s secure enough in his manhood to walk in there and demand his Pride and his Prejudice.

I have now shared the joy with Laylee a couple of times and if you ask her now, she will tell you how much she likes Pride and Predadiss. She especially likes the dancing where they all “dress up like princesses.”

I did not always have this love of the Austen. For years I resisted her Jane-ness. All the girly girls in high school LOVED her and I was so entrenched in my role as a tomboy that I refused to read her books or watch her movies.

Working one summer during college at a camp in the Florida Keys, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and a great bargain bookstore a few islands away. I purchased anthologies of Dickens and Austen and read Pride and Prejudice for the first time as I baked and fried away my afternoons in the greasy kitchen.

I fell instantly in love with her writing style. She has such a dry sense of humor and such an amazing gift for sparse and witty dialogue. Her characters are so rich and appealing. I was actually disappointed that I liked her so much. I have always struggled against the mainstream, having to be literally force-read Harry Potter the first time because I didn’t want to like a book that had such a huge following.

I prefer to discover secret treasures.

But, secret or no, there’s a reason people like Jane Austen and I’m very comfortable in my seat on this bandwagon. How comfortable? Well, here’s a picture of me gettin’ friendly with Jane at her museum in Bath, England — pronounced Bawth.

A shout out to the Jane-a-nator…and to Dan for sending me to visit her in England and bringing her to visit me in my living room.

I think Laylee has her first crush. She has become increasingly impressed with the musical stylings of a certain Michael Bublé. Every time we get in the car, the radio comes on and she says, “I wanna listen to The Quando Quando Guy, the guy who says ”quando quando.’”

She LOVES his duet rendition of Quando Quando Quando with Nelly Furtado. I’ll even play other songs from the disc and she says, “That’s the Quando Quando Guy! Why isn’t he saying Quando Quando?!”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s from Canada. Canadians are like that.”

Lately she’s been asking to “look at” the Quando Quando Guy while listening to him sing the Quando Quando song. This involves me handing her the CD case so she can gaze lovingly into his face and periodically laugh a flirtatious little laugh and say to him, “Oh. He he he. It’s the Quando Quando Guy,” and clench the case fast to her bosom.

Speaking of bosoms, particularly nursing ones, I’ve been getting requests for plus size Daring Young Mom T-Shirts so I will do a separate order of the pink Adult Women’s T’s in various sizes, same price as the ringer T’s. Again, email me your size preference and when I get all the orders together the end of next week, I’ll send you payment information.

Phew! I made it through our medical marathon with nary a tardy on the family chart. In the past 2 weeks, we’ve been to the pediatrician 6 times, the ER twice, and a little visit with my therapist, just for a boost.

I also got a boost in the form of an Immunity Boost at Jamba Juice. When they asked me which type of “free” boost I wanted (I love when they call something free when you just paid $4 for some whipped bananas and pineapple sherbet), I asked myself the same question I always ask when faced with a major decision in life — What would I do if I were on Survivor?

Fiber? Protien? I don’t think so. Immunity please.

Well, they can take their Immunity Boost and gently place it where the wheat grass don’t grow because I’ve been fighting a raging head and chest cold for three days. (I was actually sick when I got the Jamba Juice and sort of hoping it would act as a life restoring elixir so I do not blame Jamba Juice or any of their subsidiaries for the large chunks of phlegm currently lodged in my body cavity.)

You’ve already heard about the ER visits and subsequent checkups so let’s give the HIPAA people a heart attack and divulge the rest of our medical history online.

Magoo’s 9 month checkup went well. He was so crazy, 90th percentile-like, and mobile during the visit that when the doctor left, she said “I’ll see you at his 15-month checkup.” I said, “Don’t you want to see us when he turns one in June?” She said she had completely forgotten that this wasn’t his 1 year checkup.

She recommended a book that she said contains a list of age-appropriate stages for boys, things that are annoying but “normal” because they’re male. It’s called The Wonder of Boys and I scored parenting brownie points by telling her I’d already picked it up at a garage sale for 50 cents but hadn’t gotten around to reading it yet. I think it’s time to start.

My therapist told me it was fine to bring Magoo to my appointment this week. I haven’t been in to see her in months and either he’s changed a lot or she’s recently filled her office with objects of chaos and destruction.

He pretty much ransacked the place, eating dirt from her plants, finding an old balloon to suck on, smacking a small fan on the ground, turning on the fan, unplugging the fan, turning the lights off and on by unplugging them and plugging them back in, drooling on furniture, emptying trashcans, etc. She was very sweet and said it didn’t bother her but that our sessions might be more productive without him. I would be less distracted. Um, yeah.

Today we finally had Laylee’s 3 year checkup. She weighs exactly 30 lbs and is just over 3 feet tall. She appears to like the number 3. She did not like the shot quite so much, so we went for some consolation ice cream.

It was at the beloved DQ where I gathered evidence for why I would be the best person to replace Shannon as the Blogger Who Most Makes You Want To Have Kids should she be unable to fulfill her obligations for any reason.

Laylee was dressed as the Snow White (named in part for her white beard and mustache of ice cream) with bright orange psychedelic-print stretch pants underneath and pink clogs. Magoo was an avacado-encrusted-melon-headed-jail-breakin’ specimen of the “wonder of boyhood”, knocking over ice cream and lunging repeatedly towards Laylee just to see if he could make her cry and drop her cone. I looked like a SAHM cliché, wet hair in a mommy-tail, no makeup and clothes just one step above pajamas (I seriously considered wearing the PJs and claiming The Plague as my excuse).

With all of this going on at our table, the DQ employee still could not get enough of Laylee and Magoo. She even went so far as to say, “MAN! I wanna have a baby so bad.”

Disclaimer: DQ offers no “immunity boosts” of any kind, free or unemancipated.

…when you drop it on the kitchen floor and you need to use it to get dinner out to your dinner group members in a few hours and would rather eat nails than go to Target and buy another one because you’re sick as a flippin’ dog.

It shatters into a million tiny pieces all over the kitchen floor and all over the hall carpet. Just a little scientific fact to make your day more enjoyable. I should submitt something to Wikipedia about that.

Another piece of info — Due to Karen’s latest tragedy and because I like you all so much and am so grateful for the way you “shared the love” in last month’s awards, I’m gonna do a bulk order of the Daring Young Mom pink Ringer T’s .

The small writing on the shirts says “Dare to love without limits. Dare to adore your job. Dare to be Fabulous.”

The normal price is 17.99 plus shipping. If I do a bulk order and then mail them out myself, I can drop that down to $17.00 total, including shipping. Of course, I then make no money for my vacation fund, but I’d just like to see you all decked out.

If you want one, please email me your size preference and I’ll include you in the order. They are basically juniors sizes so buy one size up from what you would normally wear.

(ex. An extra large is still a little more “daring” than I’m comfortable with on a person who’s a 35F — yes that’s a real size according to Wanda-with-the-tape-measure-and-the-chart at the local breastfeeding supply store)

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, there’s no geeky web address on the back. I’m not asking you to be a personal billboard for my site. I just want you to look and feel as Daring as you are!

I’ll leave the order open for a week before I send it in.