Sunday, May 29, 2011

Today Nathan Ate a Spider

The child is teething. He has cut one tooth and is working (violently and with much angst) on the second. Coincidentally, he has a cold.

There is no rest for the weary.

(I'm talking about me.)

So this morning, while his just-got-back-from-a-month-long-work-up Dad was on the ship, making sure fire doesn't destroy the helo (or something like that), Nate and I skipped church and were playing at the coffee table. He's just learning to pull himself up and it's a lot of exercise for the both of us while he figures it out.

Nathan has Go-go-gadget arms. Their reach is longer than their length.

I had moved most everything out of his way.

Perhaps a half hour before all this, I'd seen a tiny (TINY) spider crawling on the coffee table and debated killing it. Why should I? It was too small to bite anybody and I kill every other spider, so why not leave one? Anyway, I smooshed it with a tiny-spider-sized scrap of paper.

You can see where this is going.

In one of his various chin-ups, he landed on the floor and started fussing. When I picked him up, I realized he had a tiny-spider-sized scrap of paper in his mouth. I pulled the sopping piece out and looked for the smooshed spider, which was, of course, missing.

So Nathan ate a spider today.

Unfortunately, it seems to have had no positive homeopathic effects on his teething pain.

Maybe crickets?

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Power Struggle

The two puppies are fighting over Henry's bone...



One puppy gives up and goes for the evidence...

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

From Now Until Maternity


Gluttony is okay when it's that or... oh I don't know... selling your son on Craigslist because he's decided to boycott sleep.

Because let's face it. When gluttony was listed with really bad things like murder and wearing white after labor day, the church hadn't taken deployment into consideration, which turns otherwise rational, mild-mannered mommies into Temporarily Single Mommies. And single parents have a free pass when it comes to gluttony.

Because they're tired and they could be selling their children on Craigslist, which, let's be honest, results in a much longer purgatory sentence.

I remember a conversation in college where I responded sensitively to a friend who was expressing how tired she was because her newborn daughter kept her up all night by saying, "Well, at least being up all night helps burn off baby weight, right?"

Oh yes. I am that sensitive.

She replied that it did not, because if she was up, she was hungry and snacked. So she gained more weight.

I'm not sure that I agree, however. I think that the stress of being woken up from peaceful dreams of watching your children go off to college to the jarring reality of trying to comfort an infant whose only problem is boredom is stressful enough to burn extra calories (I assume that little life experience leads to boring dreams. I have no proof, but it explains so much).

Which also makes gluttony acceptable. In fact, I believe it changes the nature of the beast, so that overeating is no longer gluttony, but survival.

Survival. Do it for your kids.

Or do it because of them.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Lawn Saga 23

The grass still grows and I still have to mow the weeds.

Yesterday I had a squadron wives meeting at the house, so I had to pretend to be put-together, which includes having some sort of control over the backyard. I knew I could artfully place the curtains so that I wouldn't have to mow the entire lawn, but I still had to mow the visible and Nathan was not asleep.

So I stuck him in laundry basket with some toys and sat him next to Henry on the patio.He did great. He looked up every so often to make sure I was still pushing around the noisy thing and chewed on stuff the rest of the time. He even threw a toy overboard.

The curtain trick, by the by, did great too. I'm going to have to mow the rest of the lawn sometime, but not today. Today I make amends to my son for sticking him in a laundry basket on the back patio like a redneck woman from lower Alabama.