Aug
15
August 15, 2006
Yesterday was my stay-at-home-with-Riley day, and instead of hanging around the house I packed up his backpack (ba pa!) and took him to the nearby Kelsey Creek Park, which features a farm with actual farm animals. That was a really good time; Riley was goggling at everything from the pack and I took my camera along to snap photos of this and that. Later I took him to Whole Foods, which wasn’t so thrilling for me, but he definitely seemed to enjoy all the activity and intriguing sights (“Look, sweetie, non-hydrogenated organic vegan butter substitute!”).
All in all a busy, fun day with the boy. For one of the first times, I felt like I was doing the weekday-mom thing in a way that really worked. Does that make any kind of sense? I just mean it wasn’t boring or frustrating and I wasn’t spending my time trying to keep Riley occupied while I did another beshitted load of laundry, for god’s sake.
Hey! Speaking of housekeeping, how much am I loving the Roomba? THIS MUCH. I can see how it might not work well in every type of household, but for our small living areas and hardwood floors it does a bang-up job. I set up the house (close doors, move chairs out of the way, set up its little wall-perimeter gadget) and turn it on before I leave. When I get back? Clean, dust-free, hairless floors. Even JB reluctantly admits to the Roomba’s awesomeness, although he remains slightly paranoid about its hidden robot directives.
Dog shares JB’s suspicions, although in her popcorn-kernel-sized brain she’s probably just wondering if it contains Mystery Food Items.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, as she has recently learned that certain furniture objects always provide a robust variety of snack options.
Speaking of JB (I hereby declare today Awkward Segue Day!), after watching Jesus is Magic with me on Saturday he confessed to having developed a non-insignificant crush on Sarah Silverman. “She’s hot,” he said, dreamily. So now my husband is in love with a hot girl who’s not only funny as hell (seriously, her standup in that video will make you cry actual liquid tears of laughter. The skits, not so much.) but is SKINNY, too. In retaliation I think I should be allowed one (1) makeout session with…oh, let’s say George Clooney, because not only is he ridiculously, classically hot, but doesn’t Clooney seem like he would murmur something spectacularly witty in your ear before laying into you like his lips and tongue were trained by top secret military kissing operatives?
What else…oh, I was going to ask your opinions on a couple things. Don’t you love being my personal life-advisor? (PLEASE SAY YES.)
Thing the first: can you recommend something new music-wise for me to listen to? I am currently liking Tom Petty’s most recent album but it’s the first thing I’ve bought in months and my iPod rotation is staaale. I like almost any genre so don’t hold back with the suggestions. Save my commute, for I have been forced to listen to Seattle radio lately. Which, ugh.
Thing the second: I’m thinking about getting this dining room set that we saw over the weekend at a local furniture shop. The table is made of oak, and has four black granite pieces on top. The pieces can be removed from the table for cleaning. It maybe sounds weird and I’m not sure if it’s totally ugly or really awesome, but I wondered if granite is easily cracked (by a hot plate, say), or stained? Have you any granite horror stories?
God. BORING. Let’s just go to some baby photos, shall we?
Note the ear-hold going on here. Hee.
People, this kid is going to be walking soon. WALK. ING.
I sure got a lot of shit for buying this pool thingie, but who’s laughing now? Um, well, technically no one is, but Riley’s smiling, by god.
Taken while hiking near Tiger Mountain on Sunday. Our first hike in the woods with the boy, very cool. “Cool” meaning “hotter than Hades”, actually, maybe next time it’ll be more temperate and we’ll last more than twenty minutes.
Finally, proof that we are unfit parents who, by having damning photographic evidence of tossing the boy skyward after a full meal of apricots, deserve every predictable outcome of said tossing episode, including the part that necessitated fifteen Wet Wipes and a healthy application of Pledge Multi-Surface spray.
Aug
13
August 13, 2006
From the time when Riley was but a tiny zygote, working on his mitotic cell division processes in order to properly develop the future ability to spray wet half-chewed turkey directly into his mother’s eye, I dreamed of the day that I would read to my baby. In my mind I pictured a tender tableau: mother and child bent over a book together, my lifelong love of stories and words passing on to my son.
Well, I don’t know about other people’s babies, but Riley apparently missed the memo that storytime was supposed to be a Touching Hallmark Moment™. Until recently, Riley has regarded books not as magical portals to imagination and wonder, but rather as big flat toys to be whacked, batted at, and grabbed. The fact that his mother’s voice was droning on and on while the flat toys were present was merely a distraction, and my efforts at turning pages or holding the book upright were inevitably met with howls of frustration. The idea of reading to him before bed was laughable, because getting out a book was a sure-fire way to crank him up to eleven (“Hey! It’s the flat toy again! I must rip it apart and gnaw its moist remains!”).
Lately, though, he’s been quieting down and tolerating the passive role of being read to at night. He seems to especially like a Baby Einstein book called Good Night Mimi (which, by the way, has the ugliest artwork of any child’s book I’ve ever seen and looking at it night after night is boring Mimi-shaped-holes into my temporal lobe), and on a few occasions he’s actually drifted gently off to sleep directly after a bedtime story, which is one of those ridiculously wonderful fairtytale parenting moments where you start firehosing rainbows and sunshine out your ass and making plans for a bunkbed…until ten minutes later when he wakes back up and starts rattling a cup against his crib bars and wailing “ATTICA! ATTICA!”.
He still prefers the tactile qualities of books, maybe because, uh, he’s a baby. You know, he’s all “I have only a tenuous grip on language” and “I find colors and pictures fascinating and I want to touch them” and “I pooped an enormous quantity of digested pears inside my pants”. So when our neighbor gave him a book that has both pictures, words, AND sounds (there’s a battery-operated little strip down one side that makes various noises) I figured it would be a bit hit.
As I expected, Riley loves this book. It’s called Big Noisy Trucks and Diggers Demolition, and it’s a licensed product of, I am not making this up, Caterpillar Inc. I suppose the gender-stereotypical equivalent marketed for little girls would be Fluffy Pink Ponies and Their Sparkly Anorexic Math-Hating Princess Friends.
Anyway, we were looking at Big Noisy Etc and pushing the obnoxious noise-making buttons (one of them sounds exactly like the robotic grind of the Terminator from the first movie, when he’s just the metal skeleton), when I started noticing that the text was a little…well, suggestive. The more I read, the more my eyebrows climbed up into my forehead, until I turned to JB and said, “Is it just me, or–” and he said “This book is making me feel funny. IN MY PANTS.”
BLOW THE HORN, it reads. RAISE THE LONG BOOM. START HAMMERING. SAY “READY TO UNLOAD”.
Really now. Someone pass me my salts.
When I finished snickering about “loads” and “hammering” I started wondering if any of Riley’s other books contained such questionable material. It turns out the answer is yes, yes, YES, OH GOD YES!
For instance:
Dora the Explorer says, this one time? In band camp? I stuck mi flauta in my–
Also:
From Sock Monkey Goes to Hollywood. Sock Monkey Has a Hot Tub Orgy With a Bunch of Sex-Crazed Baboons, more like.
And:
Spermatozoa in My First 1-2-3 Play Book. Sure, it says “tadpoles” but I think we all know what that image depicts: the microscopic view of any Extended Stay Hotel’s bedspread.
(Yes, still bitter, why do you ask?)
Let’s not forget:
Freight Train, going through “tunnels”, if you know what I mean. And I think you do. (Photo slightly edited through careful image clarification process.)
Finally, we have:
Where Is Baby’s Belly Button, asking the question no one wants the answer to.
Sure, you can tell me I have a filthy mind and I enjoy twisting innocent children’s literature into questionable jokes that are offensive at best, and you’d probably be right…or are you? Maybe there’s a hidden agenda at work here, and it’s time to wake up, America, to the load that’s being released onto today’s youth.
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