How did I not notice this before?

My bathroom sink is the color of a band-aid.



Anyway, today's the last day of NaBloPoMo. Here have been some of my favorite posts from the last month:

"my son is a wise little palooka, even if he poops in his pants from time to time." From wrekehavoc

"What I failed to realize was that when you cut yourself off from the other watermelon rasslers you start to feel like you're the only one in the pool. Getting pulled under the water with hands full of Crisco and no goddamn watermelon." From Mom O Matic

"I was concentrated on getting food into the child to soak up the alcohol." From True Confessions Of Developmental Delay Mommy

"Now when I look at my junior high self, the first two words that come to mind are still 'bad hair', but after that, I don't think I looked much dorkier than any of the other kids my age in 1977/78." From Churlish Figure

"Apparently, before I got pregnant I totally hated men and found that the most notable aspect of being a woman was how it made my soul ache, like, constantly." From Mighty Girl

"Life is good, dammit. Really, really good." From and I wasted all that birth control

And lastly:

From Fussy

Flu shots

The kids had flu shots yesterday and were incredibly brave about it, so we had chicken nuggets and donuts for dinner. Thea had hers while watching Dora, something we never do. (Dinner in front of the TV, that is. We watch a lot of Dora on the weekends.)



Liam had his ears checked, too. The doctor recommended we go back to the ENT specialist as soon as possible. I don't like the sound of that!

Here he's disemboweling an eclair.

"The Wigglies"?

My friend Sher was on the Today show on Friday. The segment was on recess, and the producers asked for her thoughts. She said primly, "Children should be bound to their desks all day and preferably should even work through lunch. If it's good enough for me at my job, it's good enough for those kindergartners."

No, of course not! You can watch it here, segment 6.

From Sher's blog:

baby, i'm a star. sorta.

ok, maybe not a star. not even a slight twinkle. but i ended up on the today show on friday, apparently. of course, when they filmed, i had just come home from the immunologist's, crying my eyes out all the way down the beltway. so my face has that just-cried-and-now-i'm-all-puffy look. but hey, at least i was coherent. after i am on camera, my friends jim and paula (and another mother i don't know who mentions "wigglies") are on it, too. they look much better.

Billy Idol is white hot

Popwatch puts Billy Idol's possibly slightly drunken "White Christmas" in the "things that make me die inside" category. I think they're nuts. What do you think?



Come on, look at how well he's aged! It's certainly no more ridiculous than White Wedding.

TMJ II?

Our future: Thea on guitar, Liam on drums? Todd would be so happy.

Much to Todd's delight, Thea's showing an interest in playing music. She played a few very experimental songs for Heather and Amy while they were here. When she finished, she would set her ukulele down and wait for the applause with a sweet, benevolent smile. If we clapped too early, she would say patiently, "I'm not done yet." She's a natural performer.

First steps

Liam took his first unassisted steps today at Sue's shower! Don's delightful friend Kathy got film of his second steps. It was pretty cute; he took a few steps and everyone applauded, so he sat down and clapped, too. (Maybe it was the copious amounts of wine I drank, but I'm getting a little misty again....) Oddly enough, Thea took her first steps on Thanksgiving, two years and two days ago.

Here he is just before taking his first steps.


The kids were getting a little rowdy. I asked Todd if we should put on some mind-numbing TV, and they all started cheering. This is five minutes into Diego and Dora saving a pack of wolves.


Here are Sue and Don opening presents. We made Sue open her presents in front of us all because we all went in on a painting for her. I'm sure she hated the spectacle, though. That's the price you pay for a really good gift.

They all went to college together

Alanna, Don, and Ed

Don and Ed first met in 5th grade. Alanna and Don used to work in the same computer lab in college and met again at a party at Tif's a couple years ago.

Thanksgiving wrap-up

Attempting to walk off 24 hours of tryptophan at every meal.

This was a great holiday. We had a lovely dinner at my place followed by drinks at the Nalezytys', who were hosting their annual Thanksgiving blow-out. I think all our breeder talk bored Heather and Amy, though they did decent job feigning interest in our in-depth discussions of ear tubes, c-sections, and blocked milk ducts, and I imagine with so many kids it was a little like having drinks at a dog pound for them. But it was still perfect to me.

Also perfect were Heather's holiday lasagna and this recipe for the best cranberry sauce ever. I've eaten several spoonfuls by itself. Delicious!

Garlicky Cranberry Chutney

Susan Stamberg calls this recipe "my truly favorite cranberry side dish." It's from Madhur Jaffrey's cookbook East/West Menus for Family and Friends (Harper & Row, 1987).

1-inch piece fresh ginger
3 cloves finely chopped garlic
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
4 tablespoons sugar
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper [At least double that is good, too]
l-pound can cranberry sauce with berries
1/2 teaspoon salt (or less)
ground black pepper

Cut ginger into paperthin slices, stack them together and cut into really thin slivers.

Combine ginger, garlic, vinegar, sugar and cayenne in a small pot. Bring to a simmer, simmer on medium flame about 15 minutes or until there are about four tablespoons of liquid left.

Add can of cranberry sauce, salt and pepper. Mix and bring to a simmer. Lumps are ok. Simmer on a gentle heat for about 10 minutes.

Cool, store and refrigerate.

This recipe for stuffing would have been amazing had I not burned it. I especially like the numeric rhythm of the ingredients.

VenturaMom's-Mom's Holiday Stuffing

1 C raisins
2 boxes of Mrs. Cubbison’s cubed herbed stuffing
3 onions diced
4 apples cubed or diced
5 celery stalks diced

Sauté all (except Mrs. Cubbison’s) in 1 stick of margarine or butter until onions are translucent.
Add both boxes of Mrs. Cubbison’s stuffing to a large covered casserole dish.
Pour 2 cans of chicken broth over stuffing, making sure to get it evenly dispersed.
Add sautéed stuff and mix well.

Bake for 1 ½ hours at 325 (covered for 1 hour, uncovered for final 30 min.)

Happy birthday, Dad!

Best part of the holidays

Thanksgiving

The aftermath

[The picture was taken two hours after dinner, but it could have been the next morning, too.]

Too close to home

Sher's blog reminded me, I want this shirt once it's not relevant enough to be funny.

Liam's one-year checkup

Todd took Liam to his one-year checkup yesterday. Everything looks pretty good. He still has an ear infection, poor little man, but not as bad as it was. He weighs 23 pounds (at the 49th percentile for weight) and is 32.5 inches (at the 97th percentile for height), and his head circumference is 18 inches (27th percentile; I have no idea what that means).

Here's a picture of him hating his coat this morning:



Thea didn't want to wear her coat, either.

Future bathroom progress

Here's the weekly renovation update. This kind of thing seems to move incredibly slowly, so there's not much to see. But theoretically we should be getting walls for it today. That would be nice. Maybe it'll contain the dust that coats everything downstairs.

Exhausted

Exhausted, originally uploaded by kellygo.

Turning one is hard work.

Here's a bit about our favorite blue-eyed boy:

Favorite foods: Palak paneer, pork carnitas, jambalaya, bananas, milk, ice water, chocolate
Favorite shows: Boohbah and Dora
Favorite toy: His walker
Most likely to make him laugh: Thea
Most likely to make him cry: Mommy, when I set him down
Personality: Fearless, charming, and good-natured

Cupcakes

These were buttermilk cake with chocolate frosting, courtesy Sheryl. They were AMAZING.

Mmm

Liam's first bite of chocolate-frosted cupcake on his first birthday. I hope this adequately conveys the experience. It was kind of like, "That looks tasty.... Wait, WHAT?!" As in, chocolate-covered deliciousness, where have you been all my life?

Thea at Liam's birthday party

It was a joint Rosie-Liam party, and was frankly more fun than a kid's party has a right to be.

Liam turns one!

The wrapping paper is a hit, of course.

Has it really been a year since he came into our lives? It was a fantastic, beautiful day a year ago. Everything had been carefully planned and went off without a hitch. I'm the luckiest mom on the planet. Happy birthday, sweetheart!

The idiots responsible for the War on Decongestants

As I said before, I'm very irritated about the new restrictions on pseudophedrine. And as the cold and flu season gears up, other people are getting ticked off, too. From Paul Boutin's blog, via Boing Boing:

Instructions for Americans

To buy original formula Sudafed, Wal-fed, or other pseudophedrine sinus medicine that actually works (not the new Sudafed PE), go to your supermarket or drugstore and look in the cold remedies sections where it used to be. They now have little fake boxes or cards you take to the pharmacist to say "I want one of these." The pharmacist checks your ID and you sign for it.

Why can't you buy Sudafed over the counter anymore?

The renewed USA PATRIOT Act signed into law in March includes a "Meth Act" aimed at reducing production of methamphetamines, which can be manufactured from pseudophedrine, aka Sudafed. That's why Sudafed changed their over-the-counter formula to Sudafed PE. You can still buy Sudafed original if you go to the pharmacist at Safeway or Walgreens. But you can only buy one box a day and three a month, and you need to present a photo ID and sign a log for the pharmacist. The idea is to keep meth dealers from buying Sudafed in quantity to cook it into methamphetamine. The bill was attached to the Patriot Act after co-authors Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Jim Talent (R-MO) were unable to get it passed by other means.

In case it's useful:

Contact Sentator Feinstein
By e-mail
Phone: (202) 224-3841
Fax: (202) 228-3954

[Talent was defeated in the last election.]

What's most upsetting, of course, is how our rights can be eroded (our right to free breath!) without much attention or fanfare.

UPDATE: Check out the comments here and on Boing Boing. It's a contentious topic. More info on Slate, MSNBC, and Frontline.

Ahh

I fill this with coffee at least twice a morning.

Best part of my morning

NaBloPoMo fatigue

We're rockers and rappers united and strong

South Africa has marriage equality before the U.S. Wow. I'm so happy for them, and embarrassed for us.

On a side note, South Africa has come so far politically in the last 20 years, hasn't it? It's amazing.

Conspicuously cute consumption

Since Liam and I were up at the ungodly hour of 5am, we got a lot done. He's been nebulized, fed, and changed, and is now playing while I NaBloPoMo. It's been hell week at work for the last two weeks and I think Todd's finally succumbing to the stomach bug, so it's actually quite nice to have a few quiet moments to myself. Even if the price was getting up at 5am.

Here are some shoes I recently bought Liam:


And an awesome t-shirt for Thea from the after-Halloween sale at Target:


The rest of the family just woke up. Well, this was short-lived....

My horrorscope for the week

Mercury trine Uranus - explosive exchanges!

Huh. It appears the writer has been in my stomach-bugged house this weekend.

Old dining room/Future bathroom

Old dining room/Future bathroom, originally uploaded by kellygo.

Todd says workers are coming over today to put up walls for our new bathroom. Woohoo! I'm not about to get optimistic about this being finished by Thanksgiving, but I do have a tiny glimmer of hope that it'll be done by Christmas.

I vote AWESOME!

New blogs:

• Molly's adoption LJ: a few fries short
• Andrea: N is for Native and Neurotic
• Alanna: tied to my apron strings
• Amy, who I lost touch with ages ago and stumbled upon recently: Clam Dampers
• Jennifer, who doesn't post often, but when she does it's amazing and smart: Laughable Lives
  

Blogs have become the best way to keep in touch with friends and family who you don't see very often or not often enough: Sad? Or AWESOME!

(By the way, if you read a lot of blogs or news sites, check out Bloglines.)

Watching Boohbah

Watching Boohbah, originally uploaded by kellygo.

Here the kids are watching Boohbah while we get Liam's nebulizer ready. Poor little man, he has rattly lungs, congestion, and an ear infection and is getting over a stomach bug (which I seem to have caught). A follow-up appointment on Monday for when he had his ear tubes put in indicated some hearing loss in the ear that's infected, so maybe that's what was causing it.

I can only take 5 days a year for family illnesses (before I start lying, of course) (ha ha, kidding!) (I hope that doesn't get me dooced), so Todd and I have been juggling schedules and lack of sleep.

God's Gonna Cut You Down

Some days are excessively difficult. In case I don't have time to collect my thoughts enough before midnight, here's something better, anyway:



If this song doesn't affect you, you are made of stone.

And by the way, wow, could they have fit any more cultural icons into the video?

Good week, and good riddance

I had a post about how it was, overall, a very good week, what with Rumsfeld resigning, the Federal Marriage Amendment being essentially dead, and Webb winning, which means the Democrats have control not only of the House but of the Senate, too. But then my son got a horrible, vomit-inducing cold and I had to go find some Pediacare, which is apparently such a threat to America that it must be sold behind the counter and only when you present valid photo ID and agree to have your information recorded. Who knows what will happen when the tiny bottle I bought runs out and I have to go get more. If I fail NaBloPoMo, it's because I've been arrested for suspicion of running a meth lab.

So anyway, instead of celebrating the paradigm shift in the country, I just want to say that Bush is such a freaking idiot and the U.S. Patriot Act is such an unbelievable assault on civil liberties that it's going to take years if not decades (if ever, even) to untangle all the domestic and foreign fuck-ups under his administration. Thanks a lot, asshole.

The news is good

Rick Santorum? Gone? We can still use santorum to mean the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex, though, right? Because I'm not giving that up. (Not that it comes up in conversation that often, but still.)

There's more good news across the country. Maryland, I'm very proud of you. Virginia, I'm giving you a stern look and shaking my head. The race between James Webb and George "Macaca" Allen should have been a landslide but is still too close to call, and the marriage amendment? Shameful and sad.

"I think I voted!"

Happy voting day! We had this grand idea about instituting a tradition of taking the kids to the polls with us and then going out for dinner to celebrate, with the idea that they'll grow up with voting just being something we do and then there are treats involved afterward. But since Liam was up until 1am and Thea woke up around 5am, we figured tonight will be melt-down city for us all and better not to inflict ourselves on an unsuspecting public. So it's solo-voting this year, tradition-instituting next year.

Here are some election day thoughts more lucid than mine from Scott "Dilbert" Adams' blog, which is actually quite smart and funny (I don't know why that surprises me):

I think about the history of ATMs when I hear all the nervous Nellies wetting their pants over electronic voting machines. I believe those worries are totally misplaced. Now don’t get me wrong – there’s a 100% chance that the voting machines will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get a worse government. It probably means that the choice of the next American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket, autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement?

Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let’s say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out of anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish.

The kids

The boys


The girls

Liam can crush this with one hand

Much to our surprise.

New Jersey rocks

Is New Jersey the place to be these days? From the Feminist Daily News Wire, 31 October 2006:

NJ Says No to Abstinence-Only Sex Ed

New Jersey announced last week that it will not accept $800,000 in federal funds to teach abstinence-only sex education. Sex education programs in states that receive the federal funds are not allowed to teach students about contraception, must describe sex before marriage as “potentially mentally and physically damaging,” and must teach that “sex within marriage is ‘the expected standard of sexual activity’,” the Associated Press and Kaiser Daily Women’s Health Policy report. According to the Associated Press, New Jersey officials wrote in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt that the requirements tied to the federal money violate the state’s sex education and AIDS education programs.

State Health Commissioner Fred Jacobs said of the state’s decision to refuse the funds, “Monogamy is not a bad idea, but having the government of New Jersey dictate these things for families is not something we wish to do… It isn’t the function of the state government to create standards [for sexual activity],” Kaiser Daily Women’s Health Policy reports.

New Jersey joins three other states – California, Maine, and Pennsylvania – that have rejected federal money for abstinence-only sex education. According to William Smith, a vice president of SIECUS writing for RHRealityCheck.org, almost $200 million is spent on abstinence-only education annually.

Fall has fallen

Have you been keeping up with what's going on in the not-quite-celebrity blogosphere? Yeesh. Not cool.

SO.... The trees in my yard (in an undisclosed location) are gorgeous old japanese maples. I love them.

School pictures

These crack me up.

Here Liam is lost in the woods. A kindly turtle has offered to help him find his way home ... for a price!


Thea may or may not be the reason Liam is lost.


No, clearly two kids who are this cute together have nothing but love for each other.




Liam still seems dubious.


By the way, these totally look air-brushed, don't they? Cute, but weirdly wax-like and a little unnatural. (Or maybe it's just the lighting.)

Thea's first time trick-or-treating

This was Thea's first Halloween trick-or-treating. Here's the back of her dragon costume from Saturday night.


Here she is wearing it yesterday morning, getting ready for daycare.

"Rowr!!"

Lila was piglet. Thea borrowed her dragon hat.


And this is Thea's very, very first time ever saying "Trick or treat!" and receiving candy for it. It slowly dawned on her that Halloween rocks!


She did get scared at one point by a kid in a creepy skeleton mask (as opposed to the happy, pretty, Day of the Dead skellies she's used to) and had to be rescued like Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard.



But overall, she had a blast. Liam also had a great time. He stayed behind with Sue and Todd to hand out candy to the kids. It was the first time in ages he got to play with any toy he wanted and do pretty much whatever he wanted without any older kids to harass him. A good night for all!