not much to see around here

I gave myself a blog vacation day yesterday and was about to take another, but had second thoughts. This is what comes from errant second thoughts: nothing good.



Chip rubbed my neck and shoulders for nearly fifteen minutes last night and it was heavenly. And then he said, "I'm probably not doing much good. I'm going to stop now." Oh, please don't.



I am dipping into another bout of sewing machine madness. I'm not sure if it's the weather or my mad desire to have curtains up in Alice's room (ones WITHOUT pins in them, call me crazy) or just plain Crazy. Actually, I do know what it is: Just Plain Crazy. Clearly.



Last night I spent twenty minutes positioning and repositioning white fleece dots on a red fleece background (a future soft pillow to put in Alice's room - she doesn't sleep with one unless you count Herp and we haven't talked about Herp here yet but we will because he deserves his very own post - but anyway, Alice loves a good smooshy pillow to roll around on the floor with and she's particularly fond of this red fleece and who am I to not oblige her?). So I kept moving these dots around, hoping to find placement that would feel right. My goal: haphazard without overlapping, no discernable pattern, devil-may-care without having anything look messy, I don't ask for much, right? After moving the dots and pinning them for the 17th time I asked Chip what he thought, "Oh I can see a pattern." Another five minutes moving them around and again with Chip's response, "Um... yeah, still a pattern." So another five minutes of repostioning when I finally just stopped myself, took a breath and told him I was done. And this: "I hate myself." So then Chip looks at the dots... my final design... and he says, "Yep, still see a pattern."



Yesterday Chip spent the entire day wearing half a mustache. He had shaved half of it off during his shower and sort of forgot the other half. Until about eight hours later.



We've hit a particularly heinous stage in mother-daughter communication that I'm calling the grunt-scream-and-point (not necessarily in that order). It goes like this:

Alice (toddles into kitchen and begins to madly point in the general direction of the kitchen cabinet): UH!!! UH!!! UH!!! UH-UH-UH!!!
Whimsy (dragging herself into the kitchen to discern what magical item could possibly be denoted with UH): What do you want, sweetie?
Alice (more pointing, appears to be gesturing to the butter dish): UH!!! UH!!!! UH!!!
Whimsy (grabbing the butter dish): Are you telling me you want BUTTER? I don't think you want BUTTER. How about some Chex? (pulls cereal box out of cupboard)
Alice (with the bitter face of RAGE): NONONONONONONONO!!!!!!!!! UH!!! UH!!! UH!!!! (shakes hand in front of my leg as if to say, again, ABSOLUTELY NOT, WOMAN)
Whimsy (continues to grab various items and gets the same finger waving screaming NONONONONO until she finally just walks away): I don't know what you want, duder.
Alice: SCREAM.

It's a non-stop laughfest around here, folks. I refuse to be short order cook or butler/maid person serving a pint-sized Mussolini who can only jesture and scream. But... it's sort of taking my will to LIVE. It's not just in the kitchen, either. She walks around the house and starts pointing to imaginary UH UH UH items all the time. I secretly wonder if she's seeing these invisible horns of plenty that are carrying all the most favorite items in her universe and I'm all, "What?"



One day Alice is going to ask me about dumb things I did once-upon-a-time. I'm going to show her this post. Dumb enough.



One day Alice is going to ask me if I ever put weird pictures of her up in public areas for all the world to see and I'm going to show her this post. (And then I'm going to tell her that I was a wonderful, patient mother and she owes me some very large favors. The noise that goes along with that face isn't so great.)



This is what comes from blogging when you should be taking a vacation day.