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Anyone else heard about that very very special coffee bean that is allegedly roasted in the digestive system of a civet? Probably an urban legend, but just as appalling either way? In some random stroke of parallel evolution, Bonzo has now created a game where his pillow pet ("Baby Ocho") does exactly the same thing. When Baby Ocho eats small toys, Mardi Gras necklaces, or alphabet blocks, the resulting mix is called "pigspah," and it is either made of bad piggies or eaten by bad piggies. Possibly both.

My kid seems to spend his days swimming in plot bunnies for Angry Birds fic. In the whole of AO3, I can find only one Angry Birds fic. Perhaps I should create a pseudonym and begin transcribing.

27 hours earlier, I attended a birthday party downtown, thrown by and for those folks you see flitting from club to club in Lincoln Park. I was handed a ridiculous seven drink tickets, found a bunch of work acquaintances, and proceeded to fortify myself with bacon-wrapped dates and tiny umbrella drinks. (The umbrellas were tiny; the drinks were unfortunately rather large.) Bad: I lost my earrings somewhere on the trip home. Good: I managed to come home with my purse, my honor, and my professional reputation mostly intact, despite all my best efforts to the contrary.

Bonzo and I held down the fort this morning while C was at church. I was more than happy to sit on the couch and listen to Angry Birds stories while I recuperated, except that he kept talking about what the pigs would eat. Pig noodles! Pig sandwiches! Pig lunches are prepared by putting the pigs themselves in a mailbox ("without a stick," Bonzo emphasizes), inside a cooler, and then letting them roast in the oven for 20 minutes. I'm proud to have held my own in a conversation about food this morning.

The Doomtree tour is starting! I have finally found the group for which I want to quit my job and leave my family and become a groupie. I'm absolutely smitten: I am reading Annie Dillard for Dessa's book club, I've got a playlist devoted to POS on constant repeat, and yesterday I considered the mechanics of knitting a "wings and teeth" logo into some of my winter gear. (Because they're from Minnesota! Get it? The frost-bitten center of the American map? Oh, maybe that's just me.)

Other than that, there's too much winter in my winter. I am on the verge of doing some big things, but everything is still locked underground and I'm having a hard time believing that there's anything alive down there that will ever turn green and leafy. I have stories in my head but I don't want to put them down on paper because they will be clumsy, lopsided. I'm willing to grow things, but haven't yet mastered the finer points of fertilizer, pruning shears, or patience. Gah.

First rule of LJDW: post first, read colleagues later. My brilliant post is gone. Instead, I shall saddle you with this somewhat-less-brilliant post.

We *will* have a birthday party tomorrow. It will not rain. I am nervous and edgy about this whole experience but it is going to turn out just fine.

I had another rotten day at work, as is recently my wont, and let it bleed into the rest of my lovely day. Then I read that my friend at church, Ron, passed away this week. I read from our minister's statement that he was about twenty years older than I'd assumed, and I knew he was not in great health. I'm still shocked and sad. And suddenly I'm questioning why on earth I care what other people think of me, or how they can be so vicious and impulsive when good people are dying, every day of the week, and we are so wrapped in our own drama that we don't even notice.

***

My child turns four today. I remember being awake at this time of night, in the hospital with C sleeping on the couch next to me, and dimly realizing that the infant that I'd pulled over to hold wasn't a doll or a pet or a test, but an impossibly small person and a new member of my family. Today, he is a delightful, witty, stubborn-as-hell little boy, who can only be considered "my baby" in that metaphorical way. I feel proud that we both made it this far and pretty excited for what comes next.

From Bonzo tonight:

There's something growing in my tummy.
It's a fruit.

There's something growing in turtle's tummy.
It's a vegetable.

I am waiting with bated breath for the birthday playdate this week, to find out which of Bonzo's preschool friends' mommies is pregnant. There has been a LOT of "I'm sick because something is growing in my tummy" talk. It is not coming from me.

In other news, I have been writing. I have been writing and deleting blog posts, I have been writing difficult emails, I have been writing checks and grocery lists, and I have *not* been writing writing samples. I have about three days to get to work on this. OY, let's get moving here!

The first time I heard that Starbucks had a drive thru option was when my father explained it to me, while driving me to a minor surgery at 5 am a few days before Christmas. He needed a caffeine fix, and even though Dad was from out of town, he had an instinct about where to find his coffee at any time of day. I was nervous, didn't want to be sick, and hadn't gotten to eat any breakfast. He saw that I was miserable and kept trying to get me to eat some of the whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles off his mocha, not seeming to understand that it was just going to make my day worse.

On the first weekend of our road trip binge this month, we were driving out to Cincinnati during Bug's naptime. I got too woozy to drive and thought that a drive thru would be less likely to wake him up than a stop. I ordered a frou-frou coffee drink with whipped cream, and C ordered a coffee and a cup of ice. C adds ice and does something complicated with his drink, I count the change and pull away, C spills the coffee all over his lap, the seat, and the floor. He screams and swears, Bug wakes up, I pull over, more swearing, Bug sees the whipped cream and starts whining for a milkshake of his own, and we spend the next 20 minutes yelling at each other.

S-bux, your coffee may be sugary and delicious, you may claim than our "relationship" goes deeper than just coffee, and you would be right. And you are totally not worth it. We're done.

C made me cry tonight by telling me that our son said, "I don't want mommy to go. I want the two of us to stick like glue!"

C was really impressed that Bonzo had used a simile. I cried because that's the phrase I use to reassure him that I'm not going anywhere, that we will be spending the whole day with one another. (Sometimes I sneak off during naptime for groceries or the gym. I still cheat him, even on this.) I've been incredibly distracted with work over the last few months, and often when I tell him I'm paying attention or I'll be right back he looks at me and calls bravo sierra in his little four-year-old way.

It's not easy to communicate with someone that age; they do not understand abstract concepts, they make up arbitrary rules (because they see us doing it, and are building heuristics by the minute) and they can always totally spot when someone is not telling them the whole unvarnished truth. Bonzo is even able to call me out on it, and honesty has never really been one of my virtues as a parent.

Repetition works well; he's comforted to hear that we will "stick like glue" and he will often settle, just a little, at night when I tell him the poem shred about "I love you top to bottom, inside and outside, happy and sad, awake and asleep, day and night, sleep tight, good night". When he was just a few months old and I was saying goodbye to him at baby school, I would sing him a made-up song about me wanting to stay with him and flying a kite out to see him. I still pull out our song every once in a while for a difficult goodbye.

I know I'm rearing a geek, and that soon my "inside jokes" will be replaced with quotes from Star Trek or The Princess Bride or whatever the kids will be watching in 2019. I'm already beginning to feel like we understand each other slightly less as he gets older, and wonder if we'll always have the ability to speak in code, or if someday we will only talk that way.

Tonight at 7:45 pm at the corner of North Ave and Wells St, three men stopped car traffic in all directions to let two Canadian geese and a dozen goslings cross the street. All the nightclubbers and the commuters stopped, in various states of patience, as the clan waddled somewhat diagonally across the crosswalk, eastbound towards the lake. One of the motorists honked. One of the geese honked. And then the light turned red and everyone sat through another turn at the intersection as the geese and their guardian angels waddled away.

I have a blue necklace with glass beads that my dad bought for me and Bonzo as a "nursing" necklace... it's really sturdy and designed for babies to tug on. He used to play with it before he could sit up on his own. Tonight he took it off my neck, unclasped it, put it on his own neck, and clasped it up again. He's just like a grown up.

So tonight, after days and days of nibbling daintily at his food, Bonzo decides to chow down on barley, squash, and black bean soup. He loves dumping the barley (which is actually a casserole) into the soup, and took two refills on the black bean soup. My favorite part was when he asked me--politely! every time!--for more raisins, and at one point invited them into his soup. "C'mon in!" he said. Awwww.

In the absence of any other cool present, we gave him a tiny spoonful of caramel for a "treat" tonight after holding up his end of the potty agreement. NOTE TO SELF: do not give sugar/corn syrup/butter/cream mixture to preschooler. He went from zero to manic in about thirty-five seconds, and then couldn't stop giggling long enough to put on his pj's or read a story or go to sleep. When I left him, he was singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to himself in bed. "Call me Little Star, Mommy! Say, good night, Little Star!"

I really love his songs lately. I love his little off-key preschooler voice, and the way he hums and whispers to himself while he's playing alone. I wish I could get inside his head, sometimes. Other times, I wish he'd take his fractious little self and sober up enough to have a full two minutes of listening. It all depends on the day.

I miss that time when only geeks were writing about their personal life on the internet, and we could all hide behind this scrim of semi-anonymity. Now that we have the entire continuum of LinkedIn-Facebook-Twitter-Blogger-LJ-MySpace running, no one knows where home base is and there's too much threat involved in posting any personal details.

Or possibly I only feel this way because I've now watched so many foolish people post so many foolish things in public. Confidential to everybody: if you have partied so hard over the weekend that you're planning on calling in sick on Monday, you should NOT post those plans to Facebook. It's also really helpful if you check your PTO balance first, rather than risking disciplinary action/having to call me in the morning.

I was reading over the blog's early days and getting all wistful this morning. I miss those days. I also went to church today and heard Brian's message about "Would Jesus be on Facebook?" and thus the internet has been on my mind all day long. (Best moment of the church: my friend who is volunteering in the RE classrooms this month could not be there in person for the sermon, so she read it on her iPhone while the kids were on the playground. Case in point.)

Anyway, I had a great weekend playing/cleaning/knitting/not talking to people, and I'm thrilled to have my boys back. I made caramel tonight, and I found three almost-finished knitting projects that are going back into rotation. I love my friends. That is all.

This weekend we headed to Decatur to see how things had changed and how they stayed the same. We caught a football game, taught Bonzo how to tackle, played with tiny fans that flashed messages. We broke in a giant attic playroom, made some coffee cake, went to a railway museum, climbed on a steam engine or two, rode in the top of a caboose, ate ice cream, managed to buy a week's worth of clothes for Bonzo at a consignment shop for the cash I had in my wallet.

Awesome weekend.

Lately I've been bemoaning the fact that I never write public posts anymore. It's time to work on that.

We went out to the Brookfield Zoo today with some friends of ours for Lambda Legal's "Day Out at the Zoo". We had never been there before, and hoped to see an elephant or two. As it turned out, the elephant was closed for cleaning (I believe it was actually in training or taking a bath or something) but we did see rhinos, goats, geese, raccoons, stingrays, and a tiny horse. Bonzo was worried about the horse and wanted to know where its mother was. Brookfield seems to be an older zoo, and parts of it were showing its age. But the organization really knew how to do an employee recognition event... we got a parking pass, a ride on the carousel, free admission to all the "extras" like the stingrays and the family zoo and the children's zoo (not the same thing, surprisingly) and so forth. I believe the only thing we paid for was the goat feed. All the employees seemed to be enjoying each other's company. I should really take notes.

And, this afternoon I finally got nail polish remover. Life is good.

All the preschoolers are going to the pet shop, going right away. What does Thomas want? A cat. What does Regan want? A hamster. What does Doug want? A squid.

That's right, folks, giant squid.

***
Back to how to wreck your evening using nail polish:
1) Morning: Paint toenails in order to wear sandals (ill-advised after Labor Day anyway)
2) Morning: Paint preschooler's toes in order to convince him to get off the potty.
3) Evening: Decide that your fingernails should be painted the same color as toes. Paint fingers with two coats of purple nail polish during kid's bath.
4) Decide to touch up a toe and spill polish all over bath mat, tub, and marble floor.
5) Write off bath mat. Clean floor with toilet paper, then acetone, and then water. Extract kid from tub.
6) Kid spills water over entire floor. Clean up water.
7) Examine grody and matted nails, shake out the last drops of nail polish reomover and hope it will remove all 10 nails' worth.
8) On nail #4, flick nail polish remover into eye and spend 10 minutes flushing with water.
9) Snap at kid when he asks to have remaining toes painted purple.

So here's the question: stop before work and buy more nail polish remover, or try to repaint fingernails and pretend the whole thing never happened?

(a night time conversation between Daddy and Bonzo)

I have an elephant. My elephant's gonna keep growing bigger and he's going to grow up and be a big elephant, bigger than me.

(Daddy: Bigger than me?)

Yeah. He's going to be bigger than you, and we'll use him every day, and he's going to be real.

And every night I ask my elephant if he wants a blanket, and he always wants a blanket. (Pats the blanket.) Don't touch my elephant.

Busy day at work: My friends stood outside for a couple hours worrying about explosives, but just ended up with a nasty disruption. I called all my parents, proactively, in case they had happened on the earlier internet headlines which referenced a "bomb scare". I tried to explain it to one of my friends, but it didn't make sense out loud.

Bug has been all slapstick, with emphasis on the "slap" lately. He's so much in his head lately that he's doing goofy things like bouncing off walls. He's also a little lean on cause-and-effect lately, as evidenced by his gazing into the nozzle of the water hose before pulling the trigger. (Priceless. Where is my optically-embedded video camera when I need it?) He biffs and bashes like a train, he flops like a fish, he trots around the house singing tuneless little scraps of song. His tantrums are still really fierce, but somewhat less frequent. We are finally gaining a little bit of enthusiasm on the whole topic of underpants. He cooks in the bathtub; he's now pretty fluent in making cakes (especially chocolate almond cakes), lemonade, pie, and ice cream. He still loves trains, train stories, train noises, train stickers, and trains. In short, he's just pretty awesome.

We seem to have a spot on Super-Duper Preschool, visiting tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.

Bonzo has gotten the point of gifting. Tonight in the bath, he wrapped up a cup with a lid in a ratty old washcloth and said, "It's a present for Daddy! It will be surprising and he will really like it! It's a surprise! It's a present! It's just what he wants!"

We called in Daddy to unwrap the present, and lo, he was pleased. It was liquid nitrogen ice cream! And then we all made the ice-cream-making noise (this comes complete with hand motions). We also all played hide and seek, then Bonzo offered to help me find my lost earring. He's just so darn cute, so articulate, so reasonable, that when he falls on the ground yelling in a tantrum he shocks me every time. But we've all been mellow the last few weeks, which is a treat.

I'm considering a preschool that's right next to work, which would involve me and Bonzo taking the train together five days a week. What do you think, internets? He's confirmed in a spot. We would start in September. Our other choice is right next to C's work. Both of these places refuse to call C, apparently because he has a penis or something, and are calling me as the decisionmaker of the toddler. Err, preschooler. So I guess this is up to me? (gulp)

I'm thinking of installing a Roslin-esque whiteboard in my cube with the number of souls on board. (I'm collecting data for three different reports, all of which want basically to know that.) For those of you know BSG, is that quirky or creepy?

Bonzo report: he corrected me last week, saying "Few is three, and a couple is two." How and where did he pick that up? Who taught him that? After coming back from Decatur he also ate chicken and onion rings with strawberry jam. Dinner of champions.

My Dad is married again! He and Laurel had a lovely, brief ceremony at the courthouse, and on the way out we swung by the food court and got pink lemonade and iced tea with which to toast. We have returned from sunny CA and it is hard to get back into everyday life. I miss seafood and sea lions. I miss our suite, which was (quite literally) bigger than our condo. But there's good work to be done here, and someone needs to keep doing it, so I guess that's me.

Last night I stayed up too late, what with the data entry and the murder mystery, and woke up disoriented at a college-student kind of hour. I had a vague memory of a nightmare about dusting. Then, the vague dream came back to me in force just a few minutes ago:

For whatever reason, our new CEO (and her child) had moved into my household. She had been a mostly non-intrusive guest, but after a week or two she left me a note on our chalkboard stating that there would be someone arriving that evening to inspect the house and go through the yarn. I was to clean up the household and make sure the yarn was accessible and organized.

I panicked a little, looked around at all the dust, considered dusting using one of the balls of yarn, and then realized that would be more trouble than it was worth. I found the ball of shiny red yarn I've been searching for and began swatching with it. Then I realized there was no way I was going to get everything done inside of ninety minutes but that I needed to make a significant dent in the problem before she returned and got angry with me. I kept making piles of "give away" yarn but couldn't ever get them out of the house.

I have such a boring brain... all the dreams are pretty transparently about my areas of anxiety. Couldn't I get a good mystery to decode once in a while?

Is it wrong to peel off and re-use an uncanceled stamp? Is it more wrong if that stamp has already been through the postal system once than if you stuck it to a letter you meant to send to someone and never did? Is it wrong if you have scores of unused and unusable stamps squirreled away, more than equaling the amount of postage you just swiped? These are the ethical questions bother me from time to time.

Added guilt: although I’m a fan of neflix and the postcard, I mail real letters so infrequently that I had to go look up the first-class postage rate to see which of my stamps are still valid. (Answer: none, except those stupid liberty bells. I peeled the stamps.)

If the USPS cuts Saturday service next year, I will feel I have only myself to blame.

Also, I have about two more days before my thank-you notes become so stale as to become embarrassing.

"Wow, Bonzo, you're lucky. My mother never let me eat while I was on her head."

"There are 8 million people in the Chicagoland area, and Stephanie knows 1.5 million of them."

Bonzo, trying to get me back into the room: "Knock knock, who's there? Nobody." "I don't want the not-choices. I want the other choice. I want orangeie juicie!"

Last night after hanging out with my fabulous bud I found the first fireflies I've seen all year. Hooray! Fireflies! It's summer!

I have not even thought about the birthday party we're throwing on Saturday.

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