Joy at 8:30 AM

This morning, Dutch and I were washing our hands in a public bathroom,* and I looked over at her to see her smiling to herself as she dried her hands with a paper towel. "What are you smiling about?" I asked her, and she said, still smiling, "I just... I... I'm just happy!"


* Dutch now goes into her own stall and manages her business by herself, one of many I'm-A-Big-Girl-Now changes she's instigated in the last few months.

Procrastinating!

I really am sorry about this stream of half-assed posts. I've got a billion deadlines this week, and I'm coping with my usual combination of magical thinking, wasting time on the internets, and finally just-in-time-slapping-stuff-together.

While procrastinating, I read this article and I just want to say how lucky I am, and how lucky Dutch and Anaximander are.

I half-heard something on the radio the other day about the need to invest in our future as a society ("spending to save" was the theme, I think). We should be investing in education, health care, child-care, and so on. Not in building roads.

More movies. Sorry.

Movies from Valentine's Day, illustrating the kind of mild weirdness in which I am immersed every day:






Here's the link to the screen cleaner, if you want to try it for yourself. Thanks, Santa Cruz Auntie!

How to fly

Today was beautiful, and Dutch and I went to the playground (Cook was off playing frisbee). I walked there, myself. Dutch refused to limit herself to such a plebeian mode of travel.





The "cape" is a tattered remnant of the duvet cover I used as a kid. Dutch has used it for a few years, but it finally gave way and has been turned into a number of amazing things.

Induced demand

I'm (very slowly and badly) writing a paper on road diets and I caught myself humming a song, which turned out to be Little Boxes, by Malvina Reynolds.


I LOVE when my brain makes connections without my help.



Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/yuan2003/1874818708/

"Next in line... yellow!"

Happy Valentine's Day!

Anticipation

I read something (that I now can't find) a while back on happiness. The article said that people's happiness is not so much tied in to the actual happy event, but to the anticipation of happiness, and the memory of happiness. We get much more pleasure out of the peripheral experience than out of the (usually brief) event itself.

Dutch is milking every drop of joy out of her candy necklace. She's had it in her possession for several days, and is fully aware that she doesn't get to eat it until tomorrow, but she likes to take it out of its little box and study it, and yesterday I found her blissfully sniffing it. She talks about it a lot, too, and about how fantastically, unfathomably, deliriously wonderful it's going to be to actually get to eat it.

As the person who ordained that she couldn't eat it until tomorrow (mostly because I wanted to contain The Stickiness), and then waited only until after her bedtime the day the packages came to eat a pile of candy myself, I feel that I should probably be practicing what I preach. I would probably be happier.

the sweetness

We got two lavish Valentine's Day packages today, from some of our loves. Dutch was in paroxysms of delight, saying "Oh! My goodness! I've wanted this MY WHOLE LIFE!!!!" over every other item. Her most treasured goodies are a candy necklace* and a fuzzy hooded sweatshirt with hearts on it.
Early Happy Valentine's Day to all of you. May the universe shower you with whatever your equivalent of a candy necklace may be.


* I think these are totally disgusting, but Dutch has apparently desperately wanted one ever since some moment in the recentish past when Jasmine brought one to daycare and made everybody horribly jealous.

Quick transitions

Last night Dutch complained at bedtime of feeling sick, and she was convincing enough that Cook and I spent some time negotiating who was going to stay home with her for how long.* This morning, she trotted into our bedroom about 10 minutes before the alarm was due to go off, interrupting my dream about trying to set up a trampoline with the guidance of a manual that said on the cover "Required: Lifetime of Construction Experience,"** and she said "Mom! There is a buzzing in my belly, and a pounding in my heart!"

I said "Uuuuggghhhhhh? Hmmmm?" Then she came right up to my face and I squinted at her groggily, trying to figure out if we were in the midst of a medical crisis (ie if I was about to be barfed on), or if she was just making up some spiffy song lyrics. There was a significant pause, and then she beamed at me and said "Hey! Mom! Know what I really like? Bacon! I really like how it tastes, and I love how it looks!"

So I think she's okay.



* "So I'll go in at 7:30 and get some stuff off my hard drive, and then I'll come back and work at home while you go in for the four meetings you have today, and then you should call me and maybe we can swap so I can bring in that report I'm supposed to turn in..." Modern parenting. The Cleavers never had to do this.

** This seems like a seriously unsubtle message from my subconscious that I feel that I am unequipped to deal with some major project on which I have embarked. It's a tossup whether the relevant project is one of the classes I'm taking, school in general, adulthood in general, parenting in general....

Whoa

I'm busy.

Jiggety jig

We're home. There's a huge pile of laundry, grocery shopping, etc to do now, and no time to do it in. Where is my personal assistant?!!

The weirdest part of our trip was that we flew home during the Super Bowl. Most of the passengers were watching the game, and the airline gave out one free cocktail per person. People got a little rowdy toward the end of the flight, which coincided neatly with the end of the game, when there were a few signal interruptions. Steelers fans made some noise, but Arizona fans tended to clap very loudly rather than vocalize anything. 

Meanwhile, Dutch drank sugary  cranberry juice and watched the Puppy Bowl. She was riveted; she even listened to whatever sort of audio went with it on Cook's headphones.