Go over to my review page for notes from M’s first circus and get a discount code for your own tickets.

Mark has a man cold* so he stayed home from work yesterday.  When I called to check on him around 4:30 and see if he needed me to pick anything up on the way home he said no.  But then, just before he hung up I asked “You’re going to pick up M, right?” (Because pick-up is his gig, I do morning drop off).  He answered “Oh…I wasn’t planning on it – can you do it?” Thus began my crazy evening.

This was the day we needed to pick up the prints of M’s 3 year old photos by 6:00 and there was no way it was going to happen if I stayed in the office until 5:00 and had to go pick her up. I went and told my very kind, understanding and generous boss (who is also a mother and wife totally gets it and I love working for her) who said I could leave early.  I go to get the girl who had yet another potty accident (a story to be blogged about later) and was wearing some of her back-up pants.  These happened to be hand-me-down leggings that are about 6 years old, faded, dated and about 4 inches too short.  Oops! Guess it’s time to restock the daycare cubby with new clothes in the correct size.

So I load up my little ragamuffin-in-flood-pants and realize I need the payment paperwork in order to actually pick up the photo prints.  So I head home, calling Mark to tell him to meet me in the driveway with the papers – which he had in his laptop bag as this was his chore to do – and a snack of peanut butter crackers for M.  Then we retrace our path back northeast and I recognize that taking the expressway during rush hour would mean certain failure so I hit the back roads.  I pull into the parking lot of the Target where the photo studio is located at about 5:30 (don’t judge – I had a massive coupon and the photos are way better then I expected. Cheap formal photos are a good thing).  As I get the girl out of her carseat I find that she did not so much eat her snack as lick off the peanut butter and discard the crackers all over the back seat.  Wonderful.

We hurry inside and I drag her past Halloween and princess displays (why does Cinderella have to be on everything?) to the Photo Studio.  I love the photos and as I’m admiring them I don’t see M pull a couple of sheets off the counter and proceed to mark them up with peanut butter smears.  The very nice Target lady offers to re-print them for free; I will just need to pick them up in 10 days.  Awesome. 

I grab some meds for the man-cold and do a quick look at the toddler girls clothing section where I find a pile of knit pants on clearance for $2.  New daycare back-up pants – Score!  Some of the prints are kind of fugly up but I load up with 4 of them, at least they will be long enough for her.  During the 2 minutes I am choosing the pants, M is wandering in and out of the clothing racks and I find her stuck in the center of one.  I haul her out and we walk the gauntlet that is the front of the store (again with all the princess stuff!) and I have to physically drag her away from the rack of shiny pink princess purses to get in line.  Here M promptly latches on to some $5 princess mini-doll and I have to bribe her to put it back. 

Back out to the parking lot where I’m trying to juggle 2 bags while keeping a firm grip on M’s hand and simultaneously trying not to crease the envelopes of photo prints.  I buckle her in the car and call Mark to ask about dinner.  It’s already 6:00 and M is hungry. He doesn’t want anything so I tell him that we are going to stop somewhere for dinner. 

Because it lacks any forethought or planning I decide to just turn into a McDonalds and M is ecstatic at the thought of her Happy Meal toy.  As we are crossing the parking lot I glimpse our reflection in a window. Her with wild hair, too-short pants and bright pink shoes; me with ill-fitting maternity pants (I don’t need them yet but the thought of an elastic waist sounded good that morning…but they are truly horrible pants), my in-need-of-a-cut hair pulled into a haphazard and crooked ponytail and my makeup is long gone.  We were quite the motley pair and I had to laugh at our image.  Once inside the first set of doors, M pried loose from my grip and ran straight into the inner glass door.  She hit so hard she bounced off and all I could do was laugh…really hard.   She wasn’t hurt and didn’t shed a tear but was a bit stunned, and she couldn’t figure out why I was laughing.  I scooped her up and we held each other tight, both of us laughing out loud for a minute.

She kept bringing up her run-in with the door throughout dinner and the whole episode made me purposely slow down and enjoy my one-on-one time with her. The rest of the night was pretty uneventful, but given the unhurried pace of my girl’s eating we didn’t get home until 7 which is the start of bedtime.  As I sat in her room for the next hour, waiting for her to fall asleep (again, a post for another day) I kept thinking over the 2 ½ hours we spent, just my girl and me, and had to smile.  From our disheveled appearance to my constant chirping of “hold my hand!” and “you need to listen!” it was a rushed and exhausting round of errands. But, of all things, a leisurely dinner at a fast food joint gave me a little perspective.  Sounds like a perfect evening to me.

*he really is pretty sick, but the man-cold stereotype still holds true.

——-
Don’t forget I’m giving away a 4-pack of tix to the opening night of Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey’s “Zing Zang Zoom” at the Q over on my review page. You have one more day to enter!

There is a little contest for Cleveland-area folks over on my reviews page.  If you are a local, go see what you can win!

I’m guest blogging about the re-entry to the real world after a vacation over at Chef’s Widow today.  Go check it out.

Three years ago today, exactly at the time I am writing this, M was born after about 4 hours of labor.  She gave me an easy pregnancy and had a pretty easy birth. 3:03 PM on September 23.  I really do think 3 is her magic number.

Today she’s not so easy but my goodness is she a lot of fun.  Her imaginative stories, her budding love for jokes, an impressive memory and the constant singing have her dad and me laughing all day.  It’s not all rosy – she tends to not listen (at all), still has multiple potty accidents each week and hates to go to sleep – but the good far outweighs the bad.

Right now she LOVES to be outside – which is why our beach vacation was so perfect – and is getting really into drawing.  She likes to play tag and hide-and-seek and ride her tricycle and put stickers on anything and everything.  She is really into princess stories but we do our best to make sure things aren’t all-princess-all-the-time.  She would eat spaghetti everyday if we let her. She loves to change up the words in a song to see if we are paying attention. Every night we have to act out Sandra Boynton’s Barnyard Dance before settling down to sleep.

I really can’t get enough kisses from her each day. Her curls are wild because she refuses to wear barrettes or pigtails. She loves to twirl and dance. She’s our Magpie and she’s THREE!

Still around…this past week was crazy.  A night in Green Bay, WI (smaller then I thought, flat, lots of cheese) along with getting back into the swing of the school schedule and random life has kept me away from this blog.

We are getting ready for our fall trip to Hilton Head and we cannot wait – last year we went in late October and it was nice but too chilly to swim outside.  This year it should be in the low 80s everyday.  And since Labor Day will have passed, we expect it to be just as empty as last year.  So this coming week will include a ton of laundry, packing, making lists and trying to get the house into shape before departure.  One week after we get home will be M’s 3rd (THRID!! OMG!) birthday party, so there’s a lot to do.

Posting will most likely be sparse for the next 2 weeks – but I’ll never be far away from the crack that is Twitter.

Yes, I know…I said I don’t like posting about politics.  But you know what? I just can’t sit here anymore and be branded by some as “brainwashed” or be told I “drank the kool-aid” because I happen to believe that universal healthcare is a good thing.  I work in a hospital and everyday I see and hear from both sides – the extremely rich who come here from all corners of the world and the poor and grateful who have leveraged every penny of credit to afford treatment.

And right now, the thought rattling around in my head (which was inspired by this post, which doesn’t directly make the same connection) is “If we were talking about education, would the argument be different?”  Because, just like healthcare, no where in the Constitution does it say that I as a tax payer have to pay for public schools.  And it doesn’t say anywhere in that document that the US has to provide free and compulsory schooling to everyone. Education itself isn’t even mentioned in the Constitution or the Amendments.

But we do pay for it even if you don’t use it or like it. It’s a “public option” if you will and while some may choose to pay additional funds to send kids to a private school, we as a society provide a State and Federal government-run school system for every child in the country.  And yet, I hear no one yelling “that’s blatant Socialism!” over our education system.

Our system of public education has downfalls, that’s for sure.  Here in Ohio our schools are still illegally funded after our funding system via local property taxes was declared by the courts to be unconstitutional in 1997.  And yet we still continue to pay our taxes year after year and only really grumble when a new levy comes up. Public schools have not destroyed the private school system. 89% of kids in this state use the public option of schooling while the other 11% still pay into the public funding structure and pay additional funds to attend private schools. Choices exist even in a government-run compulsory education system.

I used to work for one of those private schools.  Not every kid there is a rich kid.  There are plenty who have families who leveraged every penny of credit and aid to afford tuition. But when the going got tough they weren’t faced with the option of no schooling at all – they had the public system to fall back on. If their kid was diagnosed with a learning disability that the private school couldn’t handle, they weren’t told “tough luck –it’s a pre-existing condition. Good luck finding help.” And no one has ever had to have a car wash to send their kid to kindergarten.

It can be argued that both education and healthcare are answers to the call to “promote the general welfare” of our people as laid out in the preamble of the Constitution. So why are some people so perfectly happy to accept one and say they are “terrified” of the other?

Many, many thanks to my hubby who worked late into the night for the last couple of weeks to give me a new design for this blog.  I love it and think it much better reflects me and my style (and lets face it, that old knitting background was false advertising since I haven’t knit anything for like 3 years).

You might also notice the new column for BlogHer Ads over to the right.  I applied to be a part of the ad network when I started this blog over a year ago and was recently invited to join.  Yes, I will (eventually) get money from those ads, but it really is just pennies and will help offset the hosting cost for the blog.

Anyway – hope you like the new digs!

I love me some Diet Coke.  I can’t function without it.  I get mad when a restaurant offers Pepsi when I order a Diet Coke because ewwww; it’s DC or nothing, baby.  My co-workers know I’m in my cube each morning when they hear the crack and hiss of my first can opening. I need my daily dose of caffeine and coffee gives me heartburn. Plus I only like coffee that’s loaded up with cream and sugar – not the healthiest choice. I know aspartame is awful for you and DC is all chemicals but as I think KickyBoots has so rightfully pointed out in the past: there is nothing like the sweet burn of aspartame at the back of your throat to get you going.

The problem is I drink a lot of Diet Coke.  If it’s available I will drink it until it’s gone.  I drink a lot of fluids every day (60-90 oz) and if there is DC around I will guzzle it down before I have any water. A couple of weeks ago, after cracking open my 4th or 5th DC of the day I realized how much I was vibrating.  And I wasn’t sleeping well, either.  Hmmmm…maybe it was time to cut back on the DC?

So, I started to wean myself down to one 20 oz. bottle a day. Then I ran out and didn’t buy any more.  I’ve done this before; I detoxed off DC and stayed off the junk for nearly 2 years before I tumbled off the wagon straight into a vat of its bubbly goodness. So I knew I could do it again. The caffeine withdrawal sucked.  I had headaches and was so very tired – like cat nap after work tired.  But then the fog began to clear and the headaches went away.  I’m drinking a ton of water and iced tea in place of my usual daily 6-pack and I’m not so tired anymore.  Except for 3:00 PM each afternoon, then I would give my right pinkie for a cold Diet Coke.  But, so far I haven’t caved.

I’m not sure how long this will last but in the meantime my drink of choice is iced tea or water flavored with cucumber and lemon.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel a tear well up in my eye when I see Diet Coke on a menu.