
"Look out!
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?







In the one and a half years I've been doing this blog, I've grown numb to the offers of the hundreds of spam comments I get each day.











Maybe it's the warm memories I have from visits to San Francisco. Or maybe it's the warmth spreading through me fron this early-Friday-afternoon Tanqueray and tonic and Trader Joe's Blackberry Crush blend I'm sipping up.







How cool would it be if your mom owned an ice-cream franchise?
Thanks to The Wonderful Husband's recent retail therapy, we have a fancy new digital cable system that lets us record programs automatically. So, like any decent parents would, we immediately filled the hard drive with children's programs—the gentle new "Curious George" on PBS, plenty of Sesame Street, and the one Disney show I like (really like): "Little Einsteins."




Today at lunchtime, Baby A asked for some 





So I check the webstats on this site more times each day than I brush my teeth or tell my husband I love him. In fact, my stat checks number about the same as my espresso drinks, which is to say, three, or four on a bad day.
Rumor has it that by the third or fourth kid, you give up worrying about perfectly clean hands. Now that Baby A is two and a half, I can understand. At some point, safety becomes more about making sure the child hasn't run out into the parking lot and less about keeping those little fingers sanitized.






How clean are the hands serving your family's food?
There's a
Update: NPR's Scott Horsley reported on this on November 13. 
Yesterday I got to speak with Shirlene Lopez, who last week was named president of
Just a brief thought for this evening. Try taking
Tip: Try carrying a set of chopsticks with you when you need your young child to focus on eating. Yesterday I took her to lunch at a Vietnamese noodle house—and it worked!
We've eaten out so many times lately that, even though it was Saturday night, we wanted to stay in. Our restaurant habits have been getting expensive (in total contradicton to 
You know when your kid says something so funny or cute that you decide maybe—just maybe—you'll let them live in your house a while longer? This in spite of their, say, horrid two-year-old tantrums and waking three times a night?
We got hacked! Hooray!
Happy Labor Day, everyone. I hope all of you got a chance to rest a bit and spend some family time.

NPR's "Morning Edition" today had 

There's a 

Okay. While I was posting that last story, Baby A was applying a whole sheet of stickers to my legs. (I'm wearing shorts.)



Early this morning, as I carried Baby A from her bedroom to ours, I reminded her to greet TWH with, "Happy Father's Day, Daddy!"
Are we born with some gene that compels us to yell into a fan and delight in the sound of our own voices, distorted and shot back at us?
That's it. 
In spite of what I told my parents when I was about eight ("I will NEVER cook!"), I really do like to cook. I love my gas range, my copper All-Clad pans, and the wealth of fresh options around here. (We live two minutes from a rockin' state farmer's market, and Whole Foods and The Fresh Market are wonderful.)

