Jul
27
17 months: there is no resting. Ever.
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He beelines for the place where the hose was dripping and swishes his hand through the muddy water before slowly, contemplatively bringing his fingers to his mouth. Shooed from his dirt-eating, he scampers across the yard and before I can blink he’s reaching for a dog turd, his tiny brow furrowed in concentration.
We dress him in toddler-sized swim trunks and he joyously climbs the tiny built-in slide in the plastic play pool before his feet shoot out from under him and his body somehow goes completely horizontal in midair and he bangs his head with a sickening crash and there are screams and tears and cuddles and two seconds later, he’s climbing that fucking slide again.
No, Dylan, I say as he tries to escape with his father’s computer mouse. “WAHHHH!” he responds, and runs at top speed to the bookshelf and begins pulling books off the shelves, one after another. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
He creeps along the patio after a trundling black ant and carefully reaches out a pudgy index finger and accidentally smooshes it. He stares, nearly cross-eyed, and his finger is almost on his tongue when I swoop in. I reposition him and he howls with fury and locks his eyes on mine and reaches down and with vengeful, deliberate motions he quickly stuffs a passing tumbleweed of dog hair IN HIS MOUTH.
I’m bent over the dishwasher collecting forks and spoons when SMACK! something slaps me directly across the ass. I turn, and he’s standing there with a mile-wide grin, laughing so hard he’s swaying back and forth. In his hands is a large plastic spatula.
There is a long silence and even though I know better I revel in it a bit and when I finally go to look for him, I find him shoulder-deep in the toilet bowl. He’s so startled when I burst through the door he falls backwards onto his butt, then sits there smiling at me and starts chomping on his toilet-water-soaked fingers.
He falls off the front steps. The back porch. The raised portion of our backyard garden bed. A chair. Another chair. The wooden steps at the cabin in Oregon. The curb of the driveway. The sofa.
I catch him. I don’t. I let him fall. I run to save him at top speed. I absorb the impact of his skull heading earthward with the top of my foot. I watch him, wincing. I watch him, clapping.
He grunts his way onto the couch, then gets himself turned around, spreads his arms and sort of half-jumps, half-falls off, but not before saying, “De inny! An bee!” I goggle open mouthed as I realize he’s imitating his Buzz Lightyear-loving brother: to infinity, and beyond.
Jul
26
Après BlogHer
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BlogHer! Man, I don’t even know where to start. Let’s go at this thing photo-style.
On Friday afternoon I went on a one-hour boat tour, and that was definitely one of the highlights of the weekend—it was so interesting to hear about the amazing buildings that make up the Chicago skyline. Of course, I can’t tell you what any of them are because I promptly jettisoned all of the useful information from my skull about five minutes afterwards, but suffice to say: Chicago is cool.
I think this is the Sears tower, although I guess it’s now called the Willis tower or some such thing. On the right is River City, which looks like something from the cover of a 1967 sci-fi magazine. You too can live in the FUTURE!
This is the view from my hotel room, which totally made up for the fact that my shower didn’t drain and every morning I stood in several inches of human soup and fervently hoped that was my OWN hair floating by.
I walked down to the Navy Pier with Angella on Saturday morning and we saw this enormous Ferris Wheel and decided what the hell, let’s ride that sumbitch.
As our car slowly ascended to approximately ten million miles above the earth, both of us frantically whipped out our phones to—of course—Twitter about it. “Code brown! Code brown!” wrote Angella, which made me laugh so hard I nearly caused a Code Brown Incident of my very own (“Cleanup on Aisle Way the Fuck Above the Ground!”), but the funniest part was later, when Kristin sweetly and curiously asked if brown meant poo?
Here is one last photo, taken while juicily defecating in my pants, ergo the CODE BROWN, Kristin.
A few of the amazing women at BlogHer: Amy, Kate, Heather, Kristin, some shiny-faced doofus, and Angella. Amy’s baby Ezra is just out of view, which is for your own good, because looking at him directly triggers incapacitating feelings of SMOOSH. (Camera credit goes to Angella, who I hope will forgive me for stealing this picture outright from her Flickr page.)
I also ganked this photo of Angella’s, because it makes me smile all over again. I can’t even remember what was so funny, but dude, it was so goddamned funny. By the way, that’s Leah next to me and the reason her baby isn’t in the picture is because earlier that day I spread him with jam and devoured him WHOLE. God, it’s great to be around other people’s children, reveling in their charms while simultaneously experiencing the full-body relief of knowing it’s not MY problem if they poop or cry.
The best panel I went to by far was the one featuring Kate, who is exactly as mesmerizing when she speaks as she is when she writes. Which is saying a lot, you know?
Not only did I creepily accost this lovely woman for HOURS ON END about how great her cleavage looked and where could I buy a bra like that, huh huh huh huh, but then I took a picture of her boobies. And posted it on the internet.
The entrance to the Cheeseburgher party, which was a lot of fun and featured many, many cheeseburgers. Also people wearing cheeseburger bags as hats.
Proof I can pretty much dork up any photo I’m a part of. (Stolen from Kristin this time.)
And what have we here? So much to enjoy, really. The giant gaping mouth . . . the unicorn-cake, turning demurely away from my slavering maw . . . yes indeed. Wow.
I took this during the community keynote, and will you look at all those people? BlogHer is crazy and overwhelming and more fun than I could ever describe. I had an absolutely fantastic time and it wasn’t scary or weird or dramatic at all. I met so many wonderful people and reconnected with beloved friends and I even got to take an uninterrupted nap in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY and I really hope to be there again next year. I hope you’ll be there too.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with Bruce, the Guy Who Basically Crashed BlogHer for the Purpose of Meeting Women and Was Sadly Only Briefly Fooled By My Camera Ploy:
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