We beat him there by a few minutes—just long enough to run to the bathroom and wash hands after an hour of cricket-chasing at a nearby park. (Can I say how happy I was to have a warmish sunny day at last?) This is Baby A waiting patiently for his arrival:

Hope your Wednesday was this good, too.

We've never been big on not playing with food—within reason. Throwing it? Making intentional messes? No way. But a little thing like this? I can deal. Everyone needs a little levity.

Switching gears completely: Can I tell you how sweet things are right at this moment?

I'm sitting on our bed, listening to the rain outside (rain! in the South! the grass may yet survive!) as Baby A and The Wonderful Husband finish the second book in the My Father's Dragon series. (It's awesome for early chapter-book readers...or listeners.)

Our next baby is tumbling around inside me, managing somehow to thump me hard in the back on my left and poke out on my right side at the same time. At just twenty-one weeks along, it has already been a big mover and shaker for quite some time; TWH jokes that he or she is going to roundhouse its way out of the womb.

I'm in the last stages of a big chunk of freelance work—an annual report for an institute within a major university nearby—and the deadlines have kept me from posting here much over the past week or two. I'm looking forward to finishing. Think it will be the last big project I take on before the baby arrives around the first of July. (And that, THAT, will be the big project for at least three or four months afterwards. That and the quest for sleep.)

TWH and Baby A have finished the book now and are talking about it. There's a map inside the cover, and she's telling him which islands are which. I know from reading the earlier chapters that she has them wrong, but what does it matter? TWH lets it go. Sunday night, when we started this book, Baby A nuzzled down into my side and turned to me with an unmatched look of excitement on her face. I recognized it and something inside my chest went all warm: She was incredibly excited to be on the verge of starting a new book.

I'm so grateful she feels that, too. We do get lucky and pass on some of the good stuff, don't we?

But, uh, no.

So it's a great feeling to be part of one of his newest launches, the mommy blogs page of the beta of Alltop.com. That's a screen shot of the page above—see how clean and simple it is? The idea is to give readers all the sites related to a given topic, from politics to sports to parenting. Here's how Kawasaki puts it:

I am the CEO of a company called Nononina. We recently released a website that is a collection of 'single-page aggregations' organized by topics such as Fashion, Celebrities, Sports, Gaming, Macintosh, Science, Green, and Autos.

Just go to the mommy blogs area, right here, to find current feeds from Quick Serve Kids and lots of other incredibly interesting and talented writers—Dooce, White Trash Moms, Not Calm (dot com), and lots of others well worth your visit.

Bookmark, rinse, repeat. And tell your friends.

The amount of beef—143 million pounds—is roughly enough for two hamburgers for each man, woman and child in the United States.

Then let's add in the fact that a big chunk of the recalled meat went to vulnerable populations (not that all Americans shouldn't expect food safety regulations be followed):

About 37 million pounds of the recalled meat went to school lunch programs and other federal nutrition programs since October 2006, said Ron Vogel of the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service.

Next, let's think about the real dangers posed by this event. I'm a layperson and all, but I know that downer cows are more likely to carry the prions that cause mad cow disease, which can cause Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. That's when people get the same symptoms as mad cows. And die, always. And it can take many years for the symptoms to show up. By that time, who can say whether this incident was the cause?

Another more immediate danger is e. Coli contamination. Poisoning shouldn't happen if the meat is cooked properly. But why should we have to worry more about it? Why isn't our food safety system (ahem, HELLO, USDA) monitoring these things more closely? Can I hereby request that my tax dollars that are currently going to shoot the daylights out of Iraq be diverted to keeping our own food safer? 'Cause it's pretty clear we don't have enough supervision on the ground here.

If my family and I were vegetarian, I'd be very happy there was no chance we'd eaten this beef. But we're not. And I don't think I could be.

So, again, I'm renewing my commitment to buying our meats from small farms that care for their animals well, feed them right, and practice clean, humane slaughter. (I know. It's not humane. But there it is.) I'll also buy meats from the Niman Ranch Cooperative, which I know holds its farmers to strict standards. I won't buy from the "naturally raised" brands in the larger retailers because the guidelines for that label are fuzzy. I don't trust them.

Still I can't rule out the occasional burger out somewhere. I can't help digging the burgers at Five Guys and at a little burger stand up the street. But I think we'll limit those to once a month or so.

PunditMom covers the topic well on the DC Metro Moms blog.

I'd love to see more of the major restaurant chains address food safety. Jack in the Box and In-n-Out have stepped up. Where's everyone else? Hello, McDonald's? Burger King? Large companies can do so much to reassure the public and change safety policy for the better.

Where are you, Forces for Good? How much prodding do you need to make sure (or at least to reassure us that you're making sure) our food is safe and our animals are treated right?

So, readers, how has this news affected your thinking? Not at all? A lot? Let me know.

da da da DA da DA DA!...

Valentine's cookies that were three years in the making!

This batch didn't really take three years. They just represent three years' worth of trying. Since Baby A was born more than three years ago, I've tried to make iced cookies for some holiday, ANY holiday. But I'd always be too busy—getting ready, cleaning the house, managing a stupid workload, packing up to drive somewhere. Today, though, it happened.

It wasn't too hard; I used this easy recipe for no-chill sugar cookies, and Baby A was able to stick with me for much of the pouring and mixing. She even rolled a few balls of dough for the cookie sheets, although they weren't too ball-shaped. ("Look, it's a cookie snake!" she told me. Snakes are a current obsession, in a good way.)

Once the cookies were out of the oven, she even sprinkled on some sprinkles, when she wasn't sprinkling them straight into her mouth. (There must be a gene for that.) But she also had to work in a number of laps around the house, as well as a re-creation of the "It's a Hard-Knock Life" scene from the Annie movie.

That's okay. We did it. And even though these cookies couldn't ever grace a magazine page, I now feel like the most bada$$ combination of Martha Stewart and Rachel Ray you evah seen. Mom goal #187.3: check.

And to little E. in Alexandria: these cookie pictures go out to you. See, Baby A wanted so, so badly to send you some of her Valentine's cookies. It took a lot of gentle explaining that the cookies could not travel through the mail, that they'd break into tiny pieces as they made their way up there. So know that your buddy wanted to send you a gift on this Valentine's Day.

Nice going, Baby A. By contrast, this is the wrong way.

Can you believe that story?

Dude! I did it first! But I included all kinds of fast food.

Find out what kind of fast food you are. For realz.

Let me know whether or not you agree with your results....

So the Super Bowl is on, and like millions of other indifferent football fans out there, I'll be running back and forth from the TV room to catch the commercials. (Turns out I could just catch them later on Myspace.)

Seems this year KFC's parent company, Yum Brands, didn't want to spring for the cost of Super Bowl airtime—or thinks it has found a clever way around the expense, which, if you're wondering, is $2.7 million price for a 30-second ad. Presumably the company might have used the time to promote its Hot Wings product, pictured above.

Instead, KFC is offering to make a $260,000 charity donation in the name of any player who scores during the game and does the chicken dance in the end zone.

Mmmm hmmm. Right. There have been some pretty silly dances so far, but I don't think any of them qualifies as the Chicken Dance quite yet. (Instructional video included!)

KFC spokesman Rick Maynard was quoted in MarketingDaily earlier this week: "There are lots of ways to advertise. We think this is unique, and will get people talking about something that might take place during the game itself."

Talk about expensive: If you wanted to have your Super Bowl experience in person, ticket prices reached a record level this year—$4,190—although the average price was expected to go down closer to game day.

Now can it come to my city?

And just when you think your child won't ever lighten your day with some bathroom humor, you get a song like this: "I went some at school, and some at the Y, yeah,/ Poopy poopy, poopy, poopitypoopitypoopity POOP!" (copyright 2008, Baby A, just in case you were thinking of pirating that one).

Aaaaaaaanyway, seems it goes the same way with expanding their palates, too. Here's one writer, over at the lovely Babble site, who's taking that whole process in stride.

And that's cool. All things in time, right?

Then when we stopped for coffee, I let her have a hot chocolate in the hopes I could read a politics story in the newspaper. She went back to the counter, asked the barista if she could please borrow a pen, and came back and wrote her name on her paper cup.

Then, because she couldn't do the whole thing, she asked me to please complete her thought. Per her instructions, I had to turn what she had written into "NOT A. but DOROTHY." It turned out like this:

This kid.... Today, though, today has been maelstrom-free so far. It's been great.

She's all, "Mommy, you LOVE radio! Especially NPR! And you love Duke! Yay! This will be FUN!"

But here's how it actually goes, copied from a sympathy-pleading email to my husband, who often doesn't understand why I want to take a break from talking for a little while after he gets home in the evenings:

we missed the whole game, though, in no small part because a. WOULD NOT STOP TALKING as i tried to listen on the radio on the way home. here is a two-minute slice:

"he's dribbling? that means bouncing the ball, right? devils scored! did the other team loss, er, loser, um, not win yet? seventy is more than fifty-five, right? duke has seventy. that's more. the man said duke THREW THE BALL AWAY? so he put it in the trash can? why would he do that? how can they play the game if the ball is thrown away? OH NO! can someone get it back? do they have extra basketballs to use? just an expression? what means an expression? does duke have the ball now? what color is the other team? is it clemson? they're orange. or is it temple? is it the grey team we saw the other day, um, um, um, gorgetown? i'll be a cheerleader! goooooo, duke! dukedukedukedukeduke duuuuuuuuukkkkke!"

i swear i've never head a person so capable of keeping up a nonstop stream-of-consciousness chatter. so then i'm Mean Mom, punching off the radio and yelling, "SHUSH! just listen!" over and over but it's like she is on speed and can't stop her mouth.

la la la la la la....

So why haven't restaurant chains caught on to this notion? Imagine how well a dipping-inspired meal would do on kids' meal menus. Parents would snap it up, service would be easy, and these things have a pretty decent fridge or shelf life. Yes, McDonald's offers Apple Dippers (pictured above), but they're caramel. That's dessert. Why not expand upon the idea? Take your yogurt sauce, or the hummus or peanut butter that's already on your menu, serve with carrot sticks or graham cracker sticks, and voila: toddler meal.

Hello? Menu R&D departments at restaurant chains? Here's a hint from the real world that could revolutionize your kids' menus.

The only thing better than the set of arches on the horizon was the time we pulled over at a rest stop on the South Carolina-Georgia border and ate a surreal picnic of hard-boiled Easter Eggs. (Fortunately, this was an actual Easter trip.) What, break, peel, and eat these works of art? At a picnic table? Here?My parents must have been truly desperate for a stop.

Heather Armstrong of Dooce remembers McDonald's and road-trip details as their family sets off on an impromptu road trip to California. She's funny enough to make your latte shoot out of your nose--as you might already know--but the best part of this post for me was realizing other couples actually do fight. Badly. And get over it fast.

If McDonald's wasn't your family's regular road-trip stop, what was?

What's up with the difficulty of planning meals and shopping lists when there are little kiddos around? Grocery lists become just one more bit of proof that I can't think through anything from start to finish these days. I try, really I do, but it's just frustrating. And that's before the shopping trip, which always ends up feeling like a freakin' marathon event.

Jessica Ashley, better known around the blogging world as author of the Sassafrass blog, knows your pain. And mine. She's got a great post at Strollerderby today. It'll make you think, Okay. It's not just me. And then she links to inspirational posts from bloggers who do manage not only to get it done, but to blog about how they did it, and how we can do it, too. (Props. Mad props.) There's CityMama, and Foodmomiac, and Adventures of Bittyman, and An Ordinary Mom, and Mommy Cracked.

There's more inspiration for you here at Quick Serve Kids...scroll down and look under "More, Please" on the right-hand side.

Lately I've been using my iPhone (what is it NOT useful for?) to keep a running grocery list that I'm sure to have with me. That image above is my most recent version. (Too bad the phone can't help me make better blog graphics. Sigh....) As you can see, it's, um, pretty short. From there, I'll grab two more kinds of groceries: staples we always keep on hand (cheese, pasta sauce, fresh fruit) and things that look good at the moment or inspire some thoughts for that night's meal. The cart is never full, though. I like to keep it fresher than that.

What's your strategy for keeping the pantry and fridge reasonably stocked? Or do you let take-out take care of it?

Speaking of this whole struggle, this is probably a good time to catch up on our family's own quick-serve trend--which is sharply away from quick-serve patronage. It's not part of any kind of campaign, or really anything purposeful at all. For a while, Chick-fil-A, Panera, and a couple other concepts were figuring into our mealtimes once or twice a week. Lately, though, we're doing a lot of home cooking. I like the variety, and home is snuggly and relaxing when it's 20 degrees outside.

If we do go to a chain these days, it's Chipotle. There are more locations near us now, which makes it convenient (which, duh, is our point). The food there is fresh and delicious, the wait time is near zero, and I love love love the natural and organic consciousness that company is pushing. Go here and click on Manifesto. Note as you read that this quick-serve chain actually recommends you read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. How's that for confidence in its mission?

Hint: Next time you're at Chipotle (what? you haven't been? GO!), ask for the Parents' Menu. It's a slip of paper with suggestions for scaling down the chain's menu to feed kids appropriately. How cool is that? Instead of supplanting their menu with chicken nuggets, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese, as if kids shouldn't like Southwestern food, Chipotle helps you instead plan a kid-sized version of a normal meal.

Sweet. We actually visited Chipotle two days in a row recently. But mostly, lately, we've been doing a lot of cooking at home. It just feels right.

Hmmmm, why all the pickiness? Why the strange domesticity?

Could it be...

I'm nesting?