"Tutu!"

A only speaks a couple of dozen words, but one we hear all day long is "tutu." She wants to wear it all the time.

Proximidade Award

I'm thankful for all my blog readers, but I was especially touched to be honored by one of them this week. Shari from Two Times the Fun (can you tell she's the mother of twins?) awarded me this badge.
This blog invests and believes in the PROXIMITY - nearness in space, time and relationships! These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind of bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.
Perhaps something got lost in the translation? Anyway, I'm not going to nominate eight, but here are three of my favorite undiscovered bloggers.
Little Bigfoot, my sister, who is now expecting her second little bigfoot
Minding Mizz, my best friend from high school, who's now minding two boys
Su La Li, Chicago Moms Blog contributor and mother of two girls

On the Thankgiving menu

Turkey with molasses butter from Real Simple
Smashed potatoes from Cooks Illustrated
My own fruited bread stuffing
Butternut squash souffle from Family Fun
Cranberry-apricot sauce
Julie's green salad
Challah
Pear cherry pie from Martha Stewart

Men of Movember

I work with many of these guys, all of whom are growing moustaches this November to raise prostate cancer awareness and funds. Buy their calendar; it's for a good cause!

menofmovember.com

My vagina smells like Teen Spirit

After 20 months of period-free living (pregnancy and breastfeeding can do that to a girl), I welcomed home Aunt Flo. But Aunt Flo was a changed woman. No longer the unobtrusive house guest content to drop in for a couple of days, she was a bitchy, demanding visitor who required I stock my cabinets full of feminine hygiene products and my kitchen with copious quantities of chocolate.

You see, I got fitted for an IUD, and the hormone-free Paragardhas a well-earned reputation for causing heavy periods. So heavy, in fact, that I had to purchase my very first box of super tampons. But even the green wrappers weren't cutting it, so I stood in the sanitary aisle at Walgreen's, wondering if I dare try super plus.

I flashed back to middle school, remembering how horrifyingly giant my Mom's square-topped cardboard applicator Super Tampax looked to my 13-year-old virgin self. But I'm not that girl anymore. Hell, I pushed an 8 lb baby out of my hoo-ha. Certainly I can manage the orange wrapped super plus.

Only I grabbed the wrong box by mistake. I took home an 18 count box offreshly scented Super Plus Tampax, and didn't notice my error until bedtime. "Honey," I said as I crawled into bed, "if you catch a whiff of cheap perfume under the covers, it's coming from my vagina." Indeed, I could detect a faint scent, reminiscent, perhaps of Teen Spirit deodorant. Or toilet bowl cleaner.

Now I don't believe in artificially fragrancing my lady parts. I don't do it on the days when they might see some action, and I definitely don't see the point when Aunt Flo's spending the night.

We're not always this uncivilized

Spaghetti slob from almaklein on Vimeo.
Yes, she started dinner in a bib, I swear.

These are a few of her favorite things...

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.
A show. With singing. High school teenagers.
Tickets and darkness. A curtains and stage.
These are the things that my 4 year old craves.

With nothing much shaking Sunday afternoon, Julie and I took our older kiddos to a local high school production of The Sound of Music. We left at intermission (not that the girls were any the wiser) as 1 1/2 hours of singing Nazis in a warm auditorium had left them nearly comatose.

In all fairness, though, before she started nodding off in my lap, Z was transfixed. "Are they all high schoolers?" she kept whispering to me, wide-eyed with wonder at all teenagers are capable of. "Yes," I answered, "except for the four littlest Van Trapps and the head Nun." Who , incidentally looked an awful lot like a real Mother Superior. Trinity is a Catholic high school, but she could have been the lunch lady for all I know. In any case, she possessed perhaps the worst singing voice I've ever heard.

My daughter, the very busy creative director

Josh dropped Z off at my office yesterday afternoon around 3pm, which meant she got to experience ad agency cube life lite for 2 hours.

First, she stopped by people's cubicles to say hi. In Holly's office she was given an old Blackberry and invited in to color on jumbo Post-It boards with permanent markers! Tara regaled her with medical stories and Maggie and Rachel offered her Andrea's workspace, complete with computer and telephone. Mags also taught her how to call people's extensions, unleashing a new beast, the telephone dialing 4-year-old.

Wondering why my daughter had no interest in hanging with Mommy, I went looking for her.

"Hi, Mommy! Mommy, pretend you're the girl and I'm the Mommy and you're visiting me at work."
"Hi, Mommy."
"Say, 'What are you doing, Mommy?'"
"What are you doing, Mommy?"
"I'm very busy on my Blackberry and my computer and my phone. Wait! My phone is ringing! Hello? What are you doing?" She puts down the phone. "Oh, wait! I need to order a pizza!"
A moment later...
"Okay, say 'Will you play with me, Mommy?'"
"Will you play with me, Mommy?"
"No, I can't play with you because I'm working. Now, pretend we're home. Say 'Mommy, I don't want you to go to work today."
"Mommy, don't go to work today. Stay home with me."
"No, I have to go to work so I can pay bills. Telephone bills. I have to pay bills on my computer at work. Now, little girl, if you go to school and have lunch and take a nap, your dad will pick you up and stop at home for 10 minutes and then he'll take you to my work. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Now you can leave. I'm going to stay here with Maggie and Rachel. Hey, what's inside this Hello Kitty cup?"

A very sobering birth story

Unfortunately the author of this post didn't have the birth she'd always wanted. But she has her life; and she's thankful for that.

One point that frequently gets missed in the hoopla over home birth is that hospitals, as flawed as they may be, are equipped to save lives.

I wish more hospitals and OBGyns supported natural childbirth. I was lucky to have my VBAC in an alternative birthing center within a hospital, but I recently found out that the midwife practice I used has lost their coverage for VBACs. I guess I pushed out A just in time.

Finally, some good parenting advice

Was I unreasonable to expect cheerfulness, cooperation and about two dozen fewer tears from Z this morning as I attempted to get her dressed, groomed, shod and next door to drop her little sister off at day care?

Apparently, yes. According to this Slate article, our expectations of our children's psychological abilities, even more than of their physical abilities, are typically much too high. Meaning Z became emotionally unhinged because she couldn't cope with having to share a toy with her sister and deal with pants that were too loose and practically falling down and share my lap with her sister and comply with my instructions to put on her damn coat already and stop standing in the doorway letting all the cold air blow in!

Must Watch: Campbell's vs. Progresso

A girl and her automobile

Speaking of cars, no one is buying any. Do you think the government should bail out American car companies? Naturally my agency is pushing employees to support a bailout since GM is a major client.

The Motrin debacle makes the NY Times

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but there's a very special circle in Hell for those who scorn the heaviest users of social networking: connected moms.

NY Times: Moms and Motrin

Baby A is 16 months old today

My not so little girl is off the bottle and off the boob (although not by choice) and sleeping better than ever. Last night (and I sure hope I'm not jinxing this by blogging), she slept from 6:50 p.m. to 6:20 a.m!

She's adding new words to her vocabulary every day and it's clear she understands most of what we're saying. She's also started mimicking her sister and other bigger kids. On Saturday she watched Z play hide and go seek with a couple of friends and she lined up against the wall and put her hands over her eyes as they counted to 20.

Motrin pisses of a whole mess of moms

Myself included.

Aside from wondering what bullshit agency put together an ad this moronic (hello, there are working moms in the ad world; you could hire one), I don't have anything to add to this momversation that hasn't been tweeted or blogged ad nauseum. I didn't check Twitter once this weekend, so I'm a little late to the game.

So read this from Her Bad Mother, this from Mom-101 (also an ad creative) and this from Ms. Adventures in Babywearing herself.

By the way, Motrin, I'd need a whole lot more headache pills if I didn't keep wearing Baby A. Half the time she on my hip or in the Ergo, it's because she'd started throwing an ear-piercing "up" tantrum at my feet!

A very granola holiday

This won't be the first holiday where friends and family will receive handmade gifts. In high school I was really into ceramics and everyone got a hand-thrown bowl or mug. In my twenties I knit, so elementary-level hats and scarves made their way into holiday care packages.

I've experimented with layered cookie mix jars, iPhoto mini albums, boxes of cookies (driedels and menorahs sprinkled with blue sugar) and years and years worth of homemade rubber stamp holiday cards.

But my list is getting longer, my budget's getting smaller and I need a gift that Z can help me make.

So my goal this year is to gift granola. I'm experimenting with recipes (a little Epicurious and a little Mom) and a test batch is baking in the oven as I write this. It smells heavenly.

Share your homemade holiday gifts at this Klutz-sponsored blog blast from Parent Bloggers Network).

On the train with a drunkard

If only the 25 cent fare increase announced today would help remove crazy people with open, giant cans of beer from the CTA. I would mind so much, but he's been mumbling obscenities for the past 20 minutes.

In case you can't tell, I have a Blackberry now.

This post breaks my heart

Jill from the NJ Moms Blog posted today about how her experience being sexually abused as a child has shaped her parenting choices. She admits she's overprotective, but goes on to say she'd never let her daughter go to a friend's house if only the child's dad is home. Too bad if the kid's got a stay-at-home dad or a single father, she just won't do it.

Jill's story is devastating--she was molested by her (now late) stepbrother and received no support from her family when she finally came forward--but I believe she's sending the wrong message to her daughter. She's telling her no men can be trusted. All men are suspect. And she's making it hard for guys like Josh, who are the primary caregivers and playdate supervisors for little girls of their own.

Perhaps its my belief in the fundamental goodness of people, but I'd rather teach my girls to trust their instincts (while keeping the parts of their bodies covered by a swimsuit private) than fear the worst in every boy or man.

The View

News flash: women like to talk. A lot. I don't know that the daytime women's gabfest has shown much more depth this year than it has in previous, but the women of The View did earn some grudging respect for asking the Presidential candidates hard questions during the election. And daily clips of Elisabeth Hasselbeck losing her shit and/or getting yelled at by the rest of the crew meant that Americans beyond the SAHM target got to be on a first-name basis with Whoopi, Babwa, Joy and Sherri.

And when there's fame, comedy is sure to follow. I saw The Spew, an improv send-up of The View with a group of friends Sunday night at ComedySportz. It's funny--well worth the $10 ticket charge and its been extended for two more weeks.

And there's also this from Target: Women.

Yes, I'm finally weaning my baby

I never thought I'd end up nursing A until she was pushing 16 months of age, but time flies with number two and Josh and I were just too damned lazy to make the effort (at 5:30am, mind you) to wean her. But with some encouragement from my sister, we're finally doing it. For the past two mornings, Josh has picked our little early riser out of her crib and marched her straight downstairs for breakfast! Hopefully she'll forget about my boobs sooner rather than later and I can stop worrying about her angrily sticking her hands down my shirt in public.

But it's not just us parents who are hitting the milestones. A's had a virtual word explosion in the last week. After months of Mama, cat, dog, mine, bye, night-night, agua and not much else, A's been surprising us with all kinds of pronouncements. Among her new words are mine, bird, house, car, vroom-vroom, bag, brush, juice, woof-woof, baby, banana and snack. And she's named her beloved pacifier "nah."