Bird Says

This evening, at the dinner table, while trying to stuff the sour cream lid down the neck of her shirt:

"Don' worry. I'm just putting it in my pocket. Dass all."

What I probably should not share

Sometimes I go into the bathroom at work and flip off the new boss from behind the door, both birds raised and blazing. It's quiet but I'm yelling.

Also, when I come home from a rotten day and A. is in an equally rotten mood, it does not double the rotten, but rather, makes rotten squared.

More City Mouse/ Country Mouse

Visited another small town today, got really lost, depended on the kindness of (many) strangers at (many) gas stations speckled around the big beautiful nowhere to get me where I needed to go.

Could not have picked a more perfect day to drive, wish I'd had my camera. And just when I was really getting my dream on about sitting on the front porch of a big white farm house in a cozy sweater with a cup of coffee on my favorite rocking chair, looking out over the cows and horses and goats to the fiery red and gold mountains in the distance, I drove past a ramshackle trailer, EXACTLY like the one in the Dancing Outlaw scene in which they go "muddin", with about 5 effed-up looking dudes in thermal flannel, a graveyard of cars on the hill, including the burned-out (?) shell of a school bus and fifty mangy dogs and random parts of things, and I kid you not, they stopped what they were doing and stared my car on down the road. I'm sure they're very nice people. (-ish?)But they freaked me out and gave my little country dream a big record scratch back into reality.

It was like moving except we still live here.

Today we decided to clean/ organize/ move part of the kitchen around, which set off a chain reaction that included my husband standing in the middle of the dining room (which Bird calls the "parlor") holding metal rods that were once a very large metro shelf, surrounded by dusty record albums and toys and shelving parts and unplugged stereo equipment with its guts hanging out, looking like he was going to cry. For my part of the organizing, I emptied and replaced and relocated everything in the few cabinets we do have, purging a few awkwardly shaped baking dishes (heart-shaped spring-form pan, anyone?) while Bird stood over an upside-down laundry basket and poured lentils from a measuring cup into about ten different teeny plastic containers. And all over the floor.

While I was moving shit from here to there and back again, I unearthed something so evil and allergic I don't know if I'll ever be the same, as I have been struck by a never-ending series of violent and unpredictable sneezes that make me think I might pee my pants every single time. Seriously, it has been hours, and the sneezes just keep coming. My head feels cloudy and drugged, maybe from the drugs. Time to have some tea. Aren't you glad I'll be posting every day?

No, I got them ALL cut.

First off, Bird told me one morning last week that she wanted to wear a belt. And we had this cute ribbon from one of her birthday gifts, so I tied it around her waist. She's worn it almost every day since.


So, here's our shaggy little peach before the haircut:


And now, all groomed up and grown up:


It has been kind of an adjustment, painfully cute as it is, because now I look at her and I think she might really be some kind of kid, not a shaggy toddler-baby. A kid.

Day Two and Still on the Wagon

Almost failed Nablopomo on my second day, but look at me! Not failing!

Today, Bird had her first real haircut-- a little buster brown hairdo, cute as a button. No pictures yet, because she was awarded a tootsie pop by the beauty shop lady, and therefore had no nap because she was high on sugar, so I had no shower. Which matters not. I didn't take pictures because she has been a grouch.

I visited a patient in a very small (and CUTE) town in Kentucky on Wednesday, and I started feeling my small-town itch (contrary to popular belief, the small-town itch is not something that gets passed around the cheerleading squad and the football team). I'm from a little burg, and sometimes I feel like I should be again. Like my family should be from a small place, because in my life, that's where families come from.

But then I start looking around for kids' haircut places online and get all caught up in some Sniparoo chain out by the mall where you pick from a menu of haircuts and they distract/ overstimulate/ snack your child into submission while they cut the hair. And I decide, "fuck it, we're going to Wayne's Unisex Salon on the big street across from Mrs. Winner's." And we walk in to a true, old-style beauty salon, where everybody's gossiping and sitting under helmet-dryers, and an old lady named Elaine pulls out a big padded booster seat so Birdy can sit in the special chair while she darts in and out of Bird's wee blonde mop with her scissors (with lightning accuracy for an old lady and a moving target, I might add), and everybody coos and pokes at Bird and makes a fuss. It might as well have been Littlesburg, Indiana, population 4000, where I grew up. And I think about the nice Egyptian guys that run the corner market and give me shit for smoking, and how I can walk to the post office, the grocery, daycare, and the library. And I realize I DO live in a small town, smack in the middle of this bustling city. And Birdy might actually get to be friends with a non-white child before college. AND I can buy beer on Sundays. So I'd say we're doing pretty well.

Here's Something to be Uneasy About

Yesterday at a Fazoli's in Bowling Green, Kentucky I had to tell the counter/ food prep staff that they were out of soap in the bathroom. I would like to think that the soap ran out during some kind of big bathroom rush that happened AFTER the last female employee washed her hands, but there is much uncertainty, as the restaurant was not busy and well after lunch rush, and there was about one female employee. Odds are she was the last one in. Out. guh.


Halloween Story:
Birdy had a monkey costume. A damn cute monkey costume. A damn cute monkey costume that she wore all day on Tuesday at daycare where she learned how to trick-or-treat proper-like. A damn cute monkey costume so damn cute and special that she made an extra phone call to my brother and sister-in-law to tell them all about it before dinner last night.

A damn cute monkey costume that must have been made of molten lava or creepy crawly bugs when A. went to put it on her after supper. She wouldn't even let one foot get in the one fuzzy little leg. NOoooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOONOTWearMonkeySuuuuuuuuuuuuit! with the wailing and the kicking and the tears.

So A. said, "That's fine. But if you want to go trick-or-treating, you need to dress up."

And she did. All by herself. She put on a tutu, a hat knit by my friend S., some butterfly wings, and one red glove.

We decided her costume was "Age Two."