Who ever invented the "throw pillow"

must have had a toddler. This is the game we play all day long.


...and whatever philosophy was behind the naming of the pillows -- I'll bet it also applies to stuffed animals, books, and toys in general.

One of my mom's "momisms"

It was something she said ALL of the time. When I got older, and I learned how much it pissed her off when I mocked her, I am sure I must have mocked her on this one time and again.

Only now, as an adult, quickly approaching my own era of "momisms," do I realize she stole it from Yoda. The crazy part is, she wasn't even really a Star Wars fan. She put it into her own words, of course -- she had to make it less Yoda-ish and more mom-ish.

Powerful words, Mom. Powerful. They came from a green puppet.

What the hell?

I have deleted several people off of my YIM list today. Why do they keep coming back? Is it because I'm on their list? They sign on and it puts them back on mine? WTF?

Silly girl...

So, Avery knows the sounds of several animals. She's been meowing and woofing for months. I've been trying to teach her new sounds, but the easy ones are usually the ones she attempts. I've tried to do "ribbit" for frog, "cock-a-doodle-doo" for rooster, and "hee-haw" for donkey. She knows all those animals by sight, and can pick them out of a book. But she won't attempt the sounds.

Anyway, the other night, I was quizzing her on all the sounds she knows, and she was nailing them all, one after another. Then, out of nowhere, I asked her "What does a baby say?" and she immediately responded "Mama, mama." I have no clue where that came from! I never taught it to her, and she rarely even points to me as "mama," let alone calls me "Mama." So weird!

So, I tried to duplicate it today, and sure enough, she said "Mama, mama" again for me.

Rain, rain, go away!

Okay, now I know I'm already spoiled by living where I live -- our cold weather is pretty mild and doesn't last long. BUT, I was mentally prepared for it to rain for basically the entire month of February. That's usually the month that we get rain. Today is the last day of February, and the rain has just begun. It rained all night long. Wah.



Oh, and, good thing my husband has the sprinklers set to run. By the time I realized it, they were on their last cycle. I shut them off, but it didn't save us much water.


Pre-Avery days would have meant hot chocolate and naps on the couch on a day like this. The problem now is, Avery doesn't understand that we can't go outside and play like we usually do. She's already stood in front of the sliding glass door and cried 5-6 times and it's only 8am. MUST. FIND. ENTERTAINMENT.

My blog's "Word Cloud"

I copied this from Windy. It's a sampling of the most used words on my blog. Pretty cool!


Click here to create a "Word Cloud" for your blog.

The Living Desert

Yesterday, our little family headed out to the Palm Springs area to visit The Living Desert. We figured it was warm, sunny, and not too far a trip for a last minute outing. We had fun.

Avery immediately made her entrance. Everyone knew she was there as she waved and yelled "Hi" to all the other visitors. She grabbed the map immediately to find where the giraffes were located. Fortunately, we found them fairly quickly. Whew.


On our way to the giraffes, we saw several things... an enormous model train exhibit, meerkats, zebras, a cheetah, and ostriches. Avery seemed to enjoy the meerkats most because they came right up to the side of the cage and put on a little show.

I didn't take many pictures of the model train exhibit, because they just wouldn't do it justice. This was about a fourth of the exhibit... it was huge!



Then we got to the giraffes -- Avery loved them. There are several animals she can pick out of books, and giraffes are certainly one of them.


Next we moved on to the butterfly exhibit. There were probably a hundred butterflies alive and flying around -- with several hundred more set to hatch within days. It was very cool... I'd never seen a live butterfly exhibit before. They had a sign displayed with the types of butterflies included, and I actually saw a couple I'd never seen before. They are tough to capture on camera, however.




Before moving on, we sat for a while and just watched the butterflies all around us. It was a cool experience.


We also had to snap a picture of Avery with the body of a monarch :)


We moved on from that exhibit, and saw some other desert animals -- an eagle, bobcats, and a badger.


Avery had a great time being her crazy self, and fell fast asleep in the car on the way home.


We'll be back to the Living Desert, but not until next winter! It was hot there yesterday, and it's only February still!

Happy Birthday Tyler :)

Today is my little (big) brother's 30th birthday. We're going to my mom's house for a party. Thank God it starts at 5pm, because I'll be wiped by 8. Pictures to come! Here we are for his birthday three years ago...

To Wong Foo:

Your Chinese food sucks!

Some colleagues and I went out for Chinese take out yesterday. Against my better judgement, I went along with their idea of going to a little hole in the wall Chinese food joint. I was a little scared, and rightly so. The food was terrible.

It's actually not called "Wong Foo," but "Weng Fu." Maybe I should have sounded it out a little more to turn it into "Wrong Food." Bleck!

I took about three bites and could have thrown up. NEVER again will I mess with hole in the wall Chinese food joints. Its only saving grace was the "A" they proudly displayed in the window from the Health Department. Too bad the "A" wasn't for how the food tasted.

Ick ick ick.

"I'm not fit to touch...

...the hem of his garment."

Every year, while transitioning from studying Ancient Egypt to Ancient Israel, I show my students "The Ten Commandments." Yes, the one with Charlton Heston. Yes, it's cheesy. Somehow, though, my students seem to enjoy it.

Anyway, my point here is, I haven't even started to show it to them this year, and already I've thought about some of the famous lines from the movie, most of which are said by Mr. Heston in true Hestonian style. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you've missed a vital portion of cheesy film line history. Go forth and rent a DVD. There are plenty to choose from. Many you've probably heard of.

The one line that always sticks out to me from "The Ten Commandments" isn't actually said by Mr. Heston, though. It's said by the woman who plays his Hebrew mother. Forgive me, I'm not going to link you to IMDb for that one. They're discussing whether or not to tell Moses that she is his real mother, and she says "I'm not fit to touch the hem of his garment."

You can imagine my utter surprise the first time I heard this line in the movie. Or maybe you can't. Anyway, it stuck out to me more than even "So shall it be written, so shall it be done," which must get said 422 times throughout the course of the very long movie. What struck me about the 'hem of his garment' quote was that it's a line in a Cake song. I'd heard the Cake song before I'd seen "The Ten Commandments," or else I hadn't paid attention to that one line in the movie before.

My point in all of this is, last week, as I made lesson plans for the weeks to come, I wrote down that we'll be watching "The Ten Commandments" in a few weeks, and instantly I started to hum the Cake song. That was last Wednesday. Today is Sunday. The song is still in my head. Grrrr.

...and we survived on bread and water alone...

So Avery stayed the night at my mom's house last night. I went to pick her up today, hung out for a while, then headed home. I was hoping that Avery would sleep on the car ride home. She fell asleep about 30 minutes into my 40 minute drive.

At minute 32 I got a flat tire. On the freeway overpass. Bad part of town. Yeah.

I called my husband, who thankfully works in the bad part of town and wasn't far away. He got all rescue hero on me and was there in 11 minutes flat. Avery still slept soundly in her carseat as my husband took all the 'stuff' out of the trunk, got the spare tire ready for replacing, had all the tools laid out, jacked up the car.

Then he realized that the most simple tool was missing -- an Allen wrench sort of gizmo to remove the lugnut locks. We brainstormed a minute, couldn't find a solution, so he decided to drive a few miles to a VW dealership to seek help. He figured SURELY they'd have this tool there.

Twenty minutes later he returns with nothing but an aggrivated look on his face and tells me I'm going to have to drive the car to the VW dealership. They don't have the lugnut key he needs, except for their master copy, and they aren't about to let him borrow it on good faith. Too bad he didn't have Avery to leave as collateral.

Kidding.

Fortunately, I had run over a bolt, and it was still lodged in my tire, keeping most of the air in. It wasn't fun to drive on, so thankfully the dealership was literally right on the other side of the freeway.

I followed him over there, all the while listening to the bump of my tire and the wailing of the child in the carseat. Upon arrival I headed straight for the customer service waiting area, toting the diaper bag and the child.

Thank GOD I had taken the grocery store up on its offer of 2 for 1 croissants this morning. I had croissant #2 left over and it had Avery's name all over it. I was also thankful for the soda machine which had bottles of cold wonderful water for sale.

So we sat in the waiting area, croissant and water bottle to entertain the grouch child, and waited for my poor husband to change my tire directly in front of the VW service center in the rain.

Yes, you're right, it was a shitty day. I even had to endure golf on the TV in the waiting area. Bastards.

One redeeming incident was that I let Avery take a black ball-point pen and color all over the VW dealership's copy of today's newspaper. Mua hua hua. That's what they get for forgetting to include our lugnut wrench in our spare tire kit. Fuckers.

My poor, neglected dogs...

There was a time when my dogs could roam the house. They could lay where they wanted, even on the couch. Then Avery came and things had to change. First we disallowed them from the couch. It was easy. We just kept kicking them off of it, and after a week or so, we had no more problems. When we got new couches, there was no worrying that they'd get onto them.

Then we stopped allowing them on the carpet. When Avery started crawling, I couldn't deal with the dog hair anymore, so no more carpet for them. That wasn't tough as really the only carpet is in the bedrooms (and the pool room). The hard part was keeping them off of the area rug in the living room.

So, we started putting up a baby gate to keep them in the dining room/kitchen area/laundry room. They are happy to be there. They are still a part of things, they can see all that's going on, they have their dog beds to lay on instead of carpet.

Here's why they're poor and neglected. At night, they used to be able to sleep anywhere they wanted in our room. Now they've been relegated to our closet.



When it's time to go bed, I tell them "Let's go night-night," and they slowly, reluctantly walk to our room and into the closet. Some nights I'll even think Murphy has come, and then I come back out to the kitchen and he's still laying on his bed there. You'd think they'd like sleeping in our room in the closet -- it's sort of like the den thing -- like their own little space. It could also just be that Murphy doesn't want to get up and move when he's already comfortable. What a lazy ass.

I have never been so freaking tired...

in my life. All I want to do is sleep. I am trying to be productive, and it's just not happening. I did manage to sweep and mop the floor, which is not an easy task at my house, but I had lots of laundry to do today too and it's all still sitting in piles. Blah. I am only this pregnant. How can that little thing take ALL of my energy?

Of course, my tummy isn't quite that flat... here it is as of a week and a half ago. It is a bit bigger now. I guess the good part is it'll be quicker to get to the "I look pregnant" stage and I won't have to be in the "I just look fat" stage for as long.

Picture of the Moment...

Ain't it sweet?

Thanks to my friend DJ...

I've found another blog to read. Beware those that aren't fans of "The Bachelor." You'll not only be bored silly, you'll be confused as hell.

In light of recent events...

Please do NOT give this person any information about me. I don't know her and I don't know how she got my picture. Freaky internet stalkers! Tee hee...

Take your best guess...

In case you're wondering, I got it wrong.

It's a good thing I don't bitch about work here...

I think I could have been dooced today. I'm still reeling a little from something that happened to me and a little blog-shy. I don't really have much to say on the subject, except that I think I might have an internet stalker. I guess it's a little wake-up call to remind me that not everyone on the internet tells the truth and has good intentions. Oh, and that some people are completely and totally insane.