Ronnie James Deodorant

The organization I work for just hosted its first Big Golf Event, complete with country music celebrity and catered lunch that gave me hideous (and hilarious) gas, volunteers with bling worth more than my car, and lots of lazing around in a rocker on the clubhouse porch. And once again I find myself in the Great Summer Deodorant Crisis, also known as the Summer of B.O. So don't be offended, because I'm not hugging ANYONE past eleven in the morning for at least the next four months. This is Tennessee, folks. It's already been in the upper eighties and it's not going to slow down.

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Bird has pee-peed in the potty twice in two days. The first time, she stood up in the bath and said "pee pee", so A. yanked her swiftly out of the tub and onto the potty, where she peed. And then we made a big joyful ruckus about the whole thing while she slipped and slid around in the puddle of bath water around the potty. She looked panicked at best. Maybe we should have toned it down a little bit-- two adults and one child is far over capacity in our tiny 1930s bathroom, where you can turn on the tub faucet, close the door, and wash your hands without ever leaving the toilet.

The second time was today, and it included some Easter-candy bribes and less fanfair. It happened while I was running the bath, and I let her run around naked while the tub finished filling. This event also included a poop in the laundry basket in the kitchen, somehow, in the few seconds between the joyous peeing and Bird hitting the bathwater. This is the second box-poop for our little housecat of a toddler, if you're keeping score.

Also, Bird got bit by another kid at daycare yesterday-- an anonymous kid, as the staff are not permitted to share the biter's identity with the bit-kid's mama, for fear that she would call up the biter's mama and give her an earful. At dinner, I was running through my usual battery of questions about Bird's day: Did you play with Jack? Did you play with Julian? Did you color with crayons? etc. (the answer is always "yes!") I asked, "What happened to your arm today?" and she said, "Abby. Bite. No bite, Abby."

So it was Abby, the kid new on the Toddler scene fresh from the nursery. Abby the biter. Birdy the snitch.

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My office has become a baby factory lately, with two of four employees pregnant. Which means less working and more talking about babies, which makes me want to dash to my car and go swoop Bird up from daycare, and also makes me want to be pregnant again. Just a little bit.

One of the people I work with has started keeping a blog detailing her pregnancy, and has shared this with the others in the office. And it was announced last week that "we should all get blogs!" and how blogger is free and easy, and all of that. It's like I'm the last person hiding behind the closet door in a grown-up game of hide-and-seek. My cover may be blown very soon. Not that I would especially care if any of these people were readers, but I do enjoy the separation of church and state as it is at present.

I'm off again to Chattanooga in the morning to visit patients, and charging the camera batteries as we speak. You know, just in case.