|
|
||
|
the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
|
READING MATERIAL Not The End Of The World, Kate Atkinson. The stories are all vaguely interlinked, and I think I need to own the book because they are great, and invite re-reading. 2. The Normals, David Gilbert. This is easily the best novel I have read all year, which sounds like a huge deal until you remember that I spent most of this year reading nonfiction (mostly evolutionary psychology, biographies, and mommy-memoirs) or, alternately, flopping down on the couch post-Nora-bedtime with a glass of wine and some dumbshit television. Still, it is a really funny book with great writing on every single page. You should read it. CONVERSATIONS Me: That underwear Mom got us is the best ever. Me: Is Daddy big or small? Me: I'm a turkey. Me: I'm going to go take a nap. Usually Nora wakes up like this: she sings a little made-up song, then you hear her playing with stuffed animals ("Night-night Purple. Night-night Grover. Night-night cat. Wake up! Breakfast!"), then she makes a lot of random noises for a while, then she progresses to calling for Mommy. (Always Mommy for some reason, even though Daddy is the guy who gets her out of bed five days out of seven.) It is a long process, and I take full advantage of it on weekends by dozing in bed while she delivers her monologue over the baby monitor, or, more often (since I seem to have lost the ability to sleep past ROSY-FINGERED GODDAMN DAWN), by eating the World's Quietest Breakfast and then typing nonsense on the computer until she starts really insisting that it's morning. Yesterday, however, Nora woke up from a nap with a shriek and then full-on weeping, so of course I go running in her room, and she is standing there in the crib with real, actual tears running down her cheeks and she tells me: "Nora crying." Someone get the Dustbuster for my heart, please, because it's in pieces all over the rug. I had no luck in extracting an explanation for why "Nora [was] crying", but maybe a bad dream? I wonder what sort of disturbing dreams an almost-two-year-old has. In my mind all of Nora's dreams have a heavy black outline like the Maisy animation, but that is probably not the case. AN INTERRUPTION I would like to send a message to the ten or so well-meaning people who sent me links to studies about television being bad for children, etc. I may have given the wrong impression, by making multiple posts about Maisy and Blue's Clues and Sesame Street, that Nora is glued to the tube all day. She is not. Not at all. I may have also given the wrong impression, by generally seeming a bit less angry and defensive than usual, that I require any more guilt-inducing statistics, no matter how well-intentioned, about What I Am Doing Wrong w/r/t Parenting. I promise you that I can come up with that all on my own. ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS A SLACK-JAWED STUPOR I have not been outside yet, because the high temperature today was six degrees. Six! That is not enough degrees! I like winter, but my semi-manufactured reasons to go out (we're out of bananas, which the child eats at an alarming rate, plus I need to mail a letter*) were just not compelling enough to get me all bundled up and into all six of the degrees. *An actual letter! With an actual stamp! I have reached a rite of passage in the average American debtor's life: I am transferring a credit-card balance. Don't ask me why this couldn't be done electronically, but for some reason I had to fill out a balance transfer check and put it in an actual envelope. I have fucking amazing credit---I won't even tell you my FICO score because you will weep with envy---and I realized that the balance on my current and only credit card, while not gigantic by today's standards, is too big for me to deal with effectively. I pay more than the minimum and all that, but we are still using the card, so the whole credit situation is slippery and precarious and uncool, and makes me bite my nails because I am a freak like that. So I transferred most of the balance to a super-low-rate card, which I activated and then promptly destroyed, and I'll just treat the payments like a bill until it is all gone. HEY! THAT PARAGRAPH SURE WAS BORING! YOU WANT MORE? I thought not. ---mimi smartypants is dull like a knife. |
