Have a Snack, Mommy?

I was singing a hymn in church on Sunday and holding Diana (her first birthday is tomorrow!). She was playing with my necklace - once you have kids, jewelry is mostly worn for the entertainment value you can get out of it. She is a very curious, experimental little girl whose favorite new tricks involve putting shapes through similarly shaped holes and then getting them out and repeating the exercise.
I guess my mouth looked like a good shape hole or I looked hungry; she reached up and stuck my pendant into my mouth as I sang!

Innocent Children's Songs

Once you become a parent and your child reaches 2 or 3 years old, say goodbye to listening to your personal preference in music. :-)
In the car, we have an entire CD case of selections for our listening pleasure(?), all consisting of kids' songs. Raffi, Wiggleworms, Philadelphia Chickens, Ralph's World, Dr. Seuss recordings, .... They are not too bad at first, but since they are relatively short songs, you quickly find yourself listening to the same songs for the second and third times.
Some of the songs are original and are actually entertaining. And then there are the albums of all the songs you have known forever like "Mary Had a Little Lamb", etc. In fact, we have one just titled Childrens' Favorites Sing-A-Long. It contains the basic fare of songs like "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain," "This Old Man Played Knick-Knack," "London Bridges", and others. Seems like a very innocent CD, sung by a children's choir in very impressive harmony and with good enunciation. The words, for a group, are very clear. And this is one where they've really researched and have multiple verses to songs that most of us have only ever heard one verse.
So it all seems innocuous enough until we get into "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." The words to the second verse are as follows:
Rip, Rip, Rip your pants,
Gently down the seams,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Hear the Ladies scream.
What???!! And, of course, the best part is that I reacted with considerable surprise to this, resulting in the immediate memorization of every word of the song by Rebecca 3.8 (that means 3 years, 8 months old, a convention borrowed from my favorite blog for entertaining reading: dubiousquality.blogspot.com).
She sings along with it and cackles in amusement every time that song plays. For the second and third and gazillionth time.

Stupid Thieves

I think that is an oxymoron. It is never an intelligent thing to steal. I get a kick out of stories that tell of the low IQ of thieves.
Today's example: A few days ago I read a story on CNN of 2 men finding treasure buried in their yard. During some yard work (three weeks ago), Barry Billcliff, 27, and Timothy Crebase, 22, were digging up a tree and hit a wooden box containing bank notes and bills dated back to the early 1900's. After having a local coin shop appraise the find, they were ecstatic to discover it was worth $50-75 thousand dollars. The story was no big thriller, just caught my eye and generated a, "Cool." Who wouldn't want to find a lost, buried treasure in their back yard? But I went on with my life and never would have thought of the event again except a headline caught my eye this morning.
"Men who claimed to find buried treasure arrested"
I guess they couldn't get their story straight, and police got interested. Turns out they supposedly stole the bank notes from a house they were roofing. CNN reports:
The men's stories, though, prompted some suspicions because of discrepancies. The depth of the buried crate, for example, ranged from 9 inches to 2 feet.
The men also gave conflicting reasons for digging in the yard of the house Crebase rents.
They told one reporter they were digging a hole to plant a tree.
In other reports, they said they were trying to remove a small tree or dig up the roots of a shrub that was damaging the home's foundation.
How hard would it be to talk for 60 seconds and decide what the story was going to be? Planting a tree or digging one up - simple choice, but very different options. Just pick one!
Stupid!

Powerless

There is nothing that makes me feel more out of control than when a child is sick with some illness that includes vomiting. It is this great unknown, unseen, waiting to pounce evil that nothing can control.
When Becca (now 3 yrs and 8 months) was 2 yrs and 7 months, we were on a vacation to St. Louis to visit friends when she threw up all over the blocks at the Magic House (children's science museum). We surmise now that it was food poisoning, but in any case, for the following 8 or 9 hours, she vomited every hour or so. We were staying in a hotel and soon went through all the towels and linens provided in the room plus a few more the staff kindly supplied. It was a long, sleepless night [Did I mention that I was 7 months pregnant at the time?]. My husband found the laundry facility and ran a few loads including her light-up tennis shoes that never lit up after their vomit bath that day. We left for home the next morning even though our vacation was only half over.
It really is a sad and painful memory today. But the absolutely worst part was that each time she began to throw up and we rushed her sagging little body to the toilet, she somehow thought that we were causing her to vomit. She would push the bowl away and say, "No, I don't want to throw up again!!" In her mind, being put over the toilet caused the retching. I have never felt so powerless to help my baby in my life. Her weak little protests just tore at my heart.
So, Becca is again sick and threw up last night. A kind of terror seizes me and makes me feel powerless. I'm so sorry, Baby!

Modern day Titanic

A cruise ship just reached New York City after being hit by a 70-foot wave in the middle of the night on its way back from the Bahamas. It flooded cabins, broke windows, tossed furniture, knocked hot tubs overboard. Wow!!
You would never get me back on a cruise ship.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/04/18/ship.diverted.ap/index.html

Chartreuse pee update

Ok, so this game continues. It isn't having any great impact - Becca wets her pants more than she makes it to the toilet dry, but that is a different issue. Today, we learned how three-yr-old games can backfire on you.
We were eating dinner at Olive Garden and my husband Dan needed to use the restroom. He asked Becca if she needed to pee (we offer, send, beg, carry her to the potty whenever an opportunity is presented to us). She said no, but she would come along and call out characters for him. He declined, but she was insistent.
The men's room was empty when they arrived, and Dan breathed a sigh of relief. Too soon. Just as he was finishing and Becca announced, "You peed on Joey!" the door opened and in came others needing the restroom. Dan was very embarrassed. Ok, he is correcting me - that should read a little embarrassed.

Now he is trying to convince me to rewrite that. ;-)

Our deliverypersons do not carry change for more than $20!!!

Last night, my baby brother (age 24) was attacked while he was delivering pizzas. He said he walked past a weird looking man and then heard some rustling a moment before a baseball bat connected with his skull just below his ear. The people in the apartment for whom the pizza was destined heard the crack of that first hit and opened their door. As the men (there were 2 of them) proceeded to hit him several more times in the shoulder and head and knee, the apartment's residents phoned 911 and police arrived.
I guess my brother should thank God that he has a hard head. First, it made a loud enough crack to alert help and second, after a cat scan showed no permanent damage, we know it was hard enough to protect him. I thank God he is, or at least will be, okay. Praise You, Lord!
He says he will continue to deliver pizzas because it pays very well. I know I would not be able to do it.

You peed on chartreuse!

When you have a 3-year-old, you have to be very creative. You have to make her believe that she wants to do something, or she won't do it.
When Rebecca started delaying her trips to the bathroom until she'd begun to leak EVERY SINGLE TIME, and we were going through 5 or 6 pairs of panties a day, we had to invent a way to get her to go of her own free will. So was born the Race to See What You'd Pee On. Her father said, "Can you beat me to the potty? I'm going to get there first." When the novelty wore off it became, "Becca, I am going to call out numbers and see how fast you can pee!" And when that grew old, "I'll call out colors. See what color you're on when you pee.... Blue! Red! Purple! Chartreuse! .... You peed on chartreuse!" Later versions involved types of dogs, Winnie-the-Pooh characters, colors in foreign languages, DragonTales characters, etc.
"You peed on Tigger!"
"You peed on amarillo!"
"You peed on turquoise!"
And Rebecca began to develop favorites. If it was colors, she wanted to pee on chartreuse. If it was Pooh characters, she wanted it to be Lumpy (the heffalump from the newest movie). And sometimes we have to guess correctly and time that character for the instant after we hear the toilet lid hit the tank.
She really likes the color chartreuse. So one day she said she just wanted us to call that color. So... "Chartreuse! Chartreuse! Chartreuse! ...." until she peed and then, "You peed on chartreuse! Yea!" We were having a race just like this one. She requested an all-chartreuse dash to the potty. She took off towards the bathroom and my husband was screaming out "Chartreuse!" over and over. We heard the lid hit the tank and the following explosion of urine like the sound of Niagara Falls and then, "But I wanted to pee on Orange!"

Why Does This Make CNN.com?

I do not understand why CNN would waste time on stuff like this.
A turtle in Indiana was the only pet to survive a horrendous fire that destroyed a pet shop and 8 other businesses. And now the owner says the face of Satan can be seen in the turtle's shell.
What kind of *?%#! is that? I can't even believe that a reporter gave this the time of day. There's even a picture of what looks like a perfectly normal turtle shell to me.
"The marking on the shell was like the devil wanted us to know he was down there," Bryan Dora said." (that's the store owner)
Give me a break!

McKenzie Mattingly

In January 2004, an undercover officer shot and killed a man during a drug buy (a sting operation) that went wrong. The officer was white; the deceased was black. There was incredible outrage that a race-inspired murder had been committed. The white officer was put on trial for murder and fired from the (Louisville) Jefferson County police force. He was later acquitted.
I was not there; I do not know what happened. I was not on the jury who acquitted him. But 12 people - 12 average people, pulled from their everyday lives and consulted on the matter - decided the officer was innocent of any wrongdoing. So, I can only conclude that the facts point to that conclusion.
So, a dedicated officer lost his job and had his picture plastered over the media and had his name slandered. After the acquittal, the police chief refused to give him back his job. I personally don't think that he could have returned to the force and been effective at the job after all the conflict. It would have been so hard to do, but he deserved that opportunity because our legal system declared he'd done nothing wrong. So, he pursued that job and that right. And today, he gave it up. Today, McKenzie Mattingly settled his case: he was reinstated, immediately resigned (as required by the settlement) and will receive $60K back pay.
Good for you, McKenzie!
McKenzie Mattingly "is now pursueing other types of business ventures" according to TheLouisvilleChannel.com. In fact, I got a letter in the mail from his lawn care service asking if I want him to trim my bushes or aerate my lawn. I wouldn't have even recognized the name, but my neighbor pointed it out.
I wonder if he enjoys lawn care as much as undercover police work.

A Funny Joke

Rebecca (age 3 years and 6 months) told a really funny joke this week. She tells jokes a lot and we have to pretend to be tickled by them because she tries really hard and is only 3. Then she came up with this one.
Rebecca: Knock, knock.
Dan: Who's there?
Rebecca: Choolah [She takes great pleasure in making up words, using them, and then informing us of their meaning.]
Dan: Choolah who?
Rebecca: [A pause as she stumbles over some sounds and clearly doesn't have a final line prepared] Uh, well,.... Give me a water buffalo and I will let you sleep!
We looked at each other and absolutely cracked up. It was just so 'out there' that it was truly funny. She was so excited that we were treated to the same joke over and over and over. And at that point, we were back to faking it.

My Evening of Trial

A few nights ago, I had an evening that ..., well, I don't really know how to describe it except to describe it:
My husband was putting our infant to bed, and I was assigned the three-year-old's bedtime management. She has been a handful for the last 2 weeks - a reaction to her father being out of town for 4 days at a dermatology conference in New Orleans. (As she called it, "the country of New Orleans.") There are a few required steps to this routine such as using the toilet, putting on jammies, brushing teeth and bedtime snacking.
She was, of course, very agreeable to the bedtime snacking part. And only that part.
I herded her into the bathroom to go the potty, and she was convinced over only minor struggles to sit and pee. At that point, I discovered that she had not arrived in time and needed new panties to replace the wet ones. I was a bit upset (this has been happening a lot) and gave her a lecture about how disappointed I was and how I knew that she could get to the bathroom on time and how big girls know how to use the potty.... I guess this whole thing ticked her off. When I got back with the new undies, she was standing IN THE TOILET which, of course, hadn't been flushed. And giggling at me when I just gaped at her for a moment.
In the process of getting her out and trying to dry off her feet with the hand towel - the first thing in reach - she kicked me with a pee-covered foot. [At this point, I began to chant out loud to myself, "I will not hit you. I will not hit you."] So I told her she was going to bed right then without any more bedtime snack. I believe I carried her up the stairs to the bathroom to brush her teeth while she verbally protested.
I pretty much had to pry open her mouth and brush her teeth myself. She did not enjoy this, and I'm sure it was not a very effective cleaning. Then I was putting her into her pajamas when she bit me. Several times, although she was doing that whole watching me as she did it to see my reaction and not really biting whole-heartedly.
I promptly picked her up and carried her to her room, dropped her on the bed and told her goodnight while closing the door. In her only wise move of the night, she never came out.