Oops.

If you're seven-and-a-half months pregnant, you might want to think twice about emailing your friends a link to an amusing article, using the article's headline as the subject line. Especially if said headline reads as follows:

Baby won't wait; arrives in driveway

Handy

I've been on bit of a book-organizing bender lately, which is why, despite not normally being much of an impulse shopper, I had to order two sets of these bookends for Sam's room as soon as I saw them on Apartment Therapy this morning:

If you don't agree that they're ten different flavours of awesome, I don't want to know about it.

More From the "Context is Everything" Department

More things my toddler has said in public that were hard to explain to strangers (numbers 287 through 291):

"I need to keep my face on to keep my head warm."
"Daddy fell down the basement stairs and was eaten by the dryer."
"The Buddha is not a dinosaur or a monster or a Komodo dragon."
"I have to take your head to Home Depot and use your eyes to buy tools."
"There's a Canadian on your leg."

Catching Up

Goodness. Looks like I left the Christmas tree up a little late this year. How embarrassing.

I hope you all had a great holiday, however you chose to celebrate -- or not celebrate -- it, and that your new year has proved satisfactory, at the very least, so far. Mine was pretty good, and the new year seems A-OK so far. I don't have any resolutions or anything, other than, you know, popping out another baby and trying not to go batshit crazy. Those seem attainable, I think.

Since I feel like some catch-up is in order, a few life events of note:

• Our cat Lulu had to be put down a couple of days after Christmas. She was sixteen years old, blind, mostly deaf, incontinent, and suffered from high blood pressure and lymphoma. She started to fail noticeably before Christmas and things went downhill quickly one day. We were sad, and yeah, the timing sure sucked, but we were glad that at least we were all at home for the holidays so that we could monitor her closely and then say goodbye properly. She was the sweetest cat you could imagine, and she was sweet all the way up to the end. I was worried that she'd be afraid, but she went peacefully. Rusty gave her a proper Dickensian burial in the backyard in the cold, sleeting, dark-grey late afternoon.
  
  
• On a more upbeat note, gestation continues apace. We're counting down the final ten weeks, which is kind of shocking, all the more so because we haven't done anything to get ready. We figure we'll pick up some diapers in early March.
  
  
• Oh, but get this: my doctor, whom I've been seeing for ten years and I really like, forgot to tell me that she's no longer doing deliveries. I just found this out two weeks ago. Argh, right? Fortunately, I've always been interested in the idea of midwifery, and even more fortunately, my good friend Anne-Marie happens to work for an excellent midwifery clinic and got me in the door quickly, and now I'm all set to go. Nonplussed? Moi? Bah! My midwife also permanently endeared herself to me, via my sense of medical vanity, by looking at my records and exclaiming about my unbelievably awesome hemaglobin. Everyone has to be good at something, right? In my case it would seem to be absorbing iron. You can't tell it to look at me, but I'm socking away minerals like a mofo over here.
  
  
• I've been freelancing since September, when I landed a big contract for a website for the Discovery Channel, which launched a month ago. I'm the solo site editor, which has been awesome and challenging and again awesome (because dude, it's the DISCOVERY CHANNEL, yo). It's probably the perfect project for me to cut my freelance teeth on, and the timing couldn't have been better, as it wraps up about three weeks before my due date. (If you're wondering, yes, I do occasionally find it uncomfortable to sit with this horseshoe up my ass.)
  
  
• Despite the fact that both Rusty and I have been gunned, work-wise, we've been doing a LOT of work around the house for the past month... cleaning, purging, organizing, painting, and getting really familiar with the floorplan of the nearest IKEA. One of the highlights of all our work is that we finally -- FINALLY! -- got new bookshelves in the kitchen, replacing our crappy old utility shelves with a much nicer set of Billy shelves (with the height extender, which I highly recommend for that authentic library look). To jog your memory, here are the old shelves. And here are the new ones:

• Despite all this other stuff, I don't know how but I've actually managed to read a lot of books. I'll get around to recapping my remaining books from 2007 one of these days. Who knows, I may even throw in a top ten list or something like that. And then, man, I've got to nail the ones I've read so far in 2008, or else they're going to totally get on top of me.

Am I the only person who's ever looked forward to her maternity leave so that she'll finally get a chance to friggin' relax?

The Books in 2007

It was a nutty year, but I did make it to 50 books. What the remaining seven books are, however, is a mystery that will forever be lost in the gritty sands of time. I sure hope they were good.

43. Happenstance
42. Jane Eyre
41. The Dharma Bums
40. Prep
39. Diary of a South Beach Party Girl
38. Season of the Witch
35-37. The Freddy trilogy
30-34. The Wrinkle in Time series
29. Arthur and George
28. Youth in Revolt
27. Shooting an Elephant
26. After Dark
25. Home from the Vinyl Cafe
24. Vinyl Cafe Diaries
23. Einstein's Monsters
22. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
21. The Line of Beauty
20. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
19. A Curtain of Green and Other Stories
18. Dream Angus
17. Espresso Tales
16. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
15. The Good Husband of Zebra Drive
14. House of Meetings
13. Lullabies for Little Criminals
12. How to Cook a Wolf
11. Consider the Oyster
10. Serve It Forth
9. Down and Out in Paris and London
8. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
7. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
6. The Sea
5. 44 Scotland Street
4. The Year of Magical Thinking
3. Girl, 20
2. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures
1. The Van

Merry Merry!

My very best wishes for peace and happiness to you all. May your turkey be moist, may your socks stay dry, and may you have all the books you can read, now and in the new year.

[Photo from IJM]

Next Up: Beowulf

Ever since young Master Sam sat raptly through an entire reading of Green Eggs and Ham at the age of four months, the works of Dr. Seuss have been in pretty heavy rotation around our house. This could explain why, when one of his grandmothers asked him who would be coming down the chimney at Christmas, he immediately responded with "The Grinch!"

I knew Sam was a fan of the Grinch and his holiday-thwarting shenanigans, but I didn't realize how big a fan until I overheard him reciting the following to himself, verbatim, while he was noodling around with his toy cars:

And the Grinch grabbed the tree, and he started to shove,
When he heard a small sound like the coo of a dove.
He turned around fast, and he saw a small Who!
Little Cindy-Lou Who, who was not more than two.

The Grinch had been caught by this little Who daughter,
Who'd got out of bed for a cup of cold water.
She stared at the Grinch and said, "Santy Claus, why,
Why are you taking our Christmas tree? WHY?"

But, you know, that old Grinch was so smart and so slick,
He thought up a lie, and he thought it up quick!
"Why, my sweet little tot," the fake Santy Claus lied,
"There's a light on this tree that won't light on one side.
So I'm taking it home to my workshop, my dear.
I'll fix it up there. Then I'll bring it back here."

And his fib fooled the child. Then he patted her head
And he got her a drink and he sent he to bed.
And when Cindy-Lou Who went to bed with her cup,
HE went to the chimney and stuffed the tree up!

Then the last thing he took
Was the log for their fire.
Then he went up the chimney himself, the old liar.
On their walls he left nothing but hooks, and some wire.

And the one speck of food
That he left in the house
Was a crumb that was even too small for a mouse.

Then he did the same thing
To the other Whos' houses,
Leaving crumbs
Much too small
For the other Whos' mouses!

Now if only this awesome toddler brain power could be channelled into something like, say, learning not to poop his pants.

Storytelling Tip #381: Respect Your Audience

"How did bedtime go?"
"Fine."
"Did you tell more stories from Star Wars?"
"That's getting kind of old, so I decided to mix it up by using the characters in regular fairy tales."
"So what story did you tell?"
"Jack and the Beanstalk. But I used Luke Skywalker instead of Jack. And he gets the magic beans from Obi Wan Kenobi, when he goes into town to try to sell the family's droid. And then when he climbs up the beanstalk, the Death Star is at the top."
"I... see. How did it go over?"
"He really liked it. But I was really tired, so when I got to the part with the goose that lays the golden egg, I accidentally made it say quack-quack. And then he got really upset and was all, 'Geese don't say quack-quack! Geese say honk-honk!'"
"Well, he has a point."
"Sure, but it kind of seemed like we'd agreed on a fair degree of suspension of disbelief."
"But only if you're being creative. Like, maybe you could have gotten away with it if you'd had the goose go woof-woof or moo-moo, or something like that."
"True. Woof-woof would have been creatively absurd."
"Exactly. Quack-quack is just sloppy."