Be it further resolved...

Be it further resolved that in 2006 we will read more blogs. Hey, we hardly got going until November for our '05 count. This resolution might actually be achievable.

It has been very gratifying for the mo-wo team to show up on blog-rolls on some really class sites we love in the last few weeks. We are looking at our very modest "May we recommend" list and we will see if we can actually produce something representative, yet still realistic. Something overstated, yet reserved. We understand there is some annual audit and pop quiz on blog contents every August. Is that true? Seems important to keep a close eye on you people.

In preparation we submit today the following report of the blogs we read and something on why we read them. Two notes. 1.) These are NOT in any order whatsoever. Honestly, I took out my old classification textbooks to employ an algorithm of filing that is COMPLETELY random. 2.) This list is not comprehensive.

Daddytypes
Pretty much this was the gateway blog. It is attractive and informative. It gives any mo-wo a vital insight into the evolution of the weird animal known as the modern North American dad. The blog roll here is really serious and was the initial link to many other of the current faves. Targeted at the consumer.

Sweetjuniper!
When I developed my fleeting interest in spying on modern dads in their natural environment of course I got hooked on Sweetjuniper! I even overlooked my longstanding hatred of the exclamation point to become a serious disciple of this blog because... Have you seen this kid??? She is soooooo darling. Many know that the compelling dialogue the tag team of Dee and Dub provide.

.. Plus this was the first place I ever posted a comment, had to do with some citation practice I was worried about. Sometimes librarians get a sense that a bit of research is awry and we just have to speak up... Yes, we are a lot more like Spiderman than you think....Anyway it is impossible for us to stay silent when the senses are tingling so I opened up my big yap and was officially off the lurkers list. Dee gave a pretty comprehensive response so from then on I have simply read regularly because I am really polite.

Oh yes AND because this guy makes the p-man completely crazy most of the time.

Morphing into Mama
It is right there in the why I blog, blog, blog page, people. MIM so succinctly notes that children are individuals we come to know. I simply cannot get enough contact with people who procreate AND grasp this concept. It is common to be knee deep in parents at any kid event who talk about their offspring as empty vessels they are busting their butts to fill with baby einsteinery and pure foods. Pick any post and read this mom... you can't help but agree this is simply the best mommy blog out there, except for all the others that are also good.

We have no comment on the ass photo.. somethings are just too easy. We're not saying that about the ass, just the... never mind.

Sarcastic Journalist
This blog name begins with 'S' and as indicated in an earlier entry blogs that begin with 'S' are REALLY GOOD! Our blog does not begin with 'S'. SJ is really sarcastic, too, which is important. Being true to our membership in the roadrunner/bugsbunny-generation sarcasm is our reason to live. Oh, and she told me how to blog. Plus I often think she is the secret fourth sister of my really really best friend who though she is not on the really at all yet internet is still really cool.

Finally, this woman is going to attempt two-under-two about 6 months ahead of us. We would be idiots not to keep tabs on her when it is so easy.

Misfithaufrau
Oh my god, the name the name! We might add that Frau-Frau has some personal and lifestyle traits that are similar to some dear ones we have who should get off their rear-ends and blog. Its like a holiday everyday, catching up with cousin X or X-university pal Y... Except you do it all on your own schedule and there are no hostess gifts.

What is a hostess gift anyway?

Dooce
Please see the referenced PhD thesis defense. Or don't

Metrodad
Because this guy makes the p-man smirk a lot. I don't want the man to get too many more frownlines. That and have you read these posts? Smart, eclectic, nice graphics... We can't even bring ourselves to resent that this guy who still gets to drink single malts.

Bitemycookie
The baby, the style, the tagline, and the content. Sometimes short and pithy.. oft times longer and agonizingly, sidesplittingly funny. Hate to miss a day.

It was here that we learned to not build our blog with typepad.

The Homesick Home Blog
L. is too smart -- don't you know? Early on she piqued my interest when she stood up for mom's being individuals. Right when I really started struggling with the dynamics of work and childrearing here was this clever lady to hear out on the topic.. and one telling the one-size-fits-all freaks to shut it. Since then she's been sending me into my impression of a bobble-head doll basked in the glow of my laptop pretty much nightly. And, she's really nice, too, eh.

Andrea in Japan
The porn! The porn! I work for a school district and we -- of course -- like to maintain a really high functioning filter for the benefit of the tender little children... er, or their parents, kind of hard to tell. On my first visit from my workstation I rec'd the following message:
"You have tried to access a web page which is filtered by it's content.
URL: andreainjapan.blogspot.com
Category: Pornography
To have the rating of this web page re-evaluated please contact the Helpdesk."

We are destined to love this blog as soon as we find the smut.

Laid Off Dad
This appears to be a misnomer at present. Another sharp cookie able to distill his days as a parent into humorous posts. Not above toilet humour. This is essential for p-man.

Then there is blog A and blog B; last week I really developed a dedication to this great blog... So much to see out there. Oh, you know we were just going over the fact the other day that this experience is a bit like being at a really big, great cocktail party. You just know you are going to go home knowing you missed a chat with someone excellent! Looks like 2006 will be a busy year. Fresh press on the black dress there p-man...

Simple Rules for Children

After my expulsion from kindergarten I was sent to a local RC-run school for some book learnin' and discipline (but not the good type). Among the many fine lessons I learned there (how to recite the rosary, how to feed and clean a catamite), how to submit to authority meekly and without the need for beatings, and of course the top ten list of dos and don'ts (well, just don'ts). As a child (as opposed to "as a childish adult") I found these ten things to be, for the most part, remote and meaningless: Why would I covet my neighbour's wife? I'm six. Now, of course, I view this list as something of a road map.

Since I have no plans to send baby e to an RC school, or a school run by some other assortment of sexually repressed men in dresses, the big ten will have to wait until they can be contextualized. In the meantime, I intend to produce a list of Simple Rules for Children, which I'll introduce to e, that are by no means meant to codify social norms, even if they do, nor are they intended to usurp the role of any deity, deities, their heirs, assigns, or agents, in keeping us mortals in line. Nope. I will, if you're out there, take suggestions which I will likely ignore or attempt to appropriate.

Simple Rule #1: Paint not these walls with the contents of thine diaper.

PMO

Groovy

Among the many fine material items received by my thankfully oblivious daughter this Christmas (ooo, crinkly paper...) was "Nicole" who is, the manufacturers assure me, a "Groovy Girl". The toy company is named "Manhattan Toys LC" or some-such thing and appears to be located in the bustling Manhattan-like metropolis of Butte, Montana, or Minneapolis, Minnesota and therefore is to be believed. I had ample time to inspect this doll today, near the end of daddy daycare week, in between bouts of baby e screaming out for mama, baba, uncle, olga, and toddlers from her daycare as I futilely attempted to coax her to nap, and paroxysmic sobbing on the part of the author, er, typist as the not-napping continued for severeal hours.

On preliminary inspection, Nicole appears to be a reasonably safe doll. She/it is made of some type of textile product, comes with furniture (a "Cheeky Chair"), a "Snazzy Sleeper" (which is a bag), as well as four itty-bitty cute little folded up product-advertising brochures. These are not, of themselves, offensive or improper in any way. Au contraire, interweb, it is thanks to advertising that I am able to purchase products which assuage my feelings of inadequacy. As an example of all that is groovy, one brochure identifies several niche Groovies for fat babies (Supersize Daphne!), boys who like to play with dolls (Groovy Boys Brandon and Blake), and mutants (Myra Mermaid). Very inclusive. Pierre Trudeau would approve. I love PET. Resistance is futile.

However, this rapturous advertising-induced bliss was not to last. I became uneasy as I read along.

One brochure adverts to the existence of other "Groovy" people with names I would not give to a cat, or even a pet rock (Hi, this is my rock, Darci. She will show you to your table). It the identifies Groovy Accessories (Snack Stuff, Mane Mania), Groovy Pets (Peeksie Poochie, Dorissa Dolphin [keep a dolphin in your tub, you normal people, and the rest of you, with your Paris Hilton swag, keep it in the dolphin tank daddy had built in your yard]), Groovy Gear, Groovy Style, and so on. Some Gear: Supernova Sofa, Bombastic Bunk Bed, and other Grooviness named by a laughable lab of alliterative assholes.

So, in between crying jags and feelings of deep parenting and product-supply inadequacy (obviously the root cause of e's insomnia), I observed further dolls' names on another of the brochures. I read all the names- no Nicole. I re-read the first- no Nicoles, not even among the porcine or the mutated. Nicole exists nowhere in the written Grooviness, only in the hands of my sleep-proof offspring, staring at me with her big, shiny, brown eyes, ignoring for the moment the Grooviness all around her in favour of the cross-species dressing bear-rabbit friend, as I ponder the import of the Nicole no-Nicole issue while the snot turns to crystal on my upper lip (with apologies to Arthur Lee) and I realise, I realise just for an instant, the purpose of the brochures is not merely to sell us on further Grooviness, not merely to induce the feeling that we are lacking something we desperately need as we aspire to materialist completion, no, the brochure informs us that while we are partaking of Grooviness, we do not possess a Grooviness worthy of publishing, a Grooviness on par with the unheld riches which await, at a store near you! I come to terms with the fact that I cannot and will not ever be a better parent on account of whatever things I try to stuff into my holes, or imagined holes, or e's (figuratively speaking).

Of course, it could be the Groovy people don't bother advertising to the owners of Groovy Doll X the benefits of the doll they are holding in hand, which benefits should be palpable. That's probably it.

P-man out.

Be it resolved...

What a windfall we got this Christmas... Quite simply put our daughter got the best Christmas present ever!

Through some rather tortuous twists of fate my dear cousin trouped out from the prairie for Christmas this year. This is unheard of. The delight of all this is that our girl had three energetic-baby-loving-girl cousins to play with her for the entirety of Christmas dinner, etc. I have NEVER heard so much laughing.

Before setting to write this I would have said I could not remember if I was a part of so much laughing when I was the smallest of my clutch of 6 silly cousins many many years ago. But of course I can remember it. I do know the holiday nostalgia for those days when we all goofed up every family event. I guess I can recall how unlike other kids I know who were devoid of these unique relations I actually liked it when our family got together, all what 22 of us? Yep we were a crowd once you factored in the spinster aunts, in-law childless great-uncles/aunties, etc. etc.

I was so glad for our girl to have this gift for Christmas I could not have imagined anything more wonderful.

And, it puts a good helping of gratitude into the twist of fate that will have her share her next Christmas with a little brother or sister, too. Seems a nice juncture to put my fears of this development aside and face the new year with a very special new year's resolution.

Sushi Rice and Shelled Peas with a side, er aside

A quick update on the large orange noodle-eating cat.

I have discovered, of late, further feline dietary supplements. (I know, as I veer off onto some kind of parenthetical byway, off course from the post, rapidly becoming lost on this disused and deservedly neglected avenue, that this is not a CAT BLOG, wherein the human author undertakes any number of clever conceits, such as pretending to communicate in the voice of the cat, who of course makes numerous wry observations about its humans, or to speak as to the state of mind of the cat, which is as futile as trying to describe god, or better yet, to maintain the blog for the purpose of displaying numerous photos of the cat or cats in a variety of costumes into which the cat did not place itself, but which would appear to the uninitiated to be a somewhat unusual expression of the human desire to anthropomorphise our surroundings, nonetheless, it has been a slow day here with the baby e, who is a healthy, happy [in spite of her father's disposition], and sociable [again] little girl who met her three girl cousins from Calgary and had a magnificent time playing and whatever it is these little humans do, while the parents nibbled their way through the Turkey of the Gobi and a wild mushroom gravy more suitable for asphalt repair than eating, while trying not to engage the Catholic at the table in a rather menacing debate about how multiculturalism has no place at Christmas because it is Christmas damnit and not "Holiday" and so on while we looked away as if from the untreated psych patient asking for coin on the Skytrain which is a really bad name for an elevated train if you ask me, it should have been Battlestar Transit Authority Train X-2, but no, it is Skytrain with a side of Terry Jacks and the Strawberry Alarm Clock which is the gayest name ever, not to say gay is anything but happy, no, because it is happy, but rather to tie in with the earlier-mentioned, eye-averting dinner table conversation subject, and to observe I read in Atlantic that Christian is the new gay in Hollywood, so nibble on that one, o moral majority, while we choke down a stuffing so dry it could be used to soak up oil spills in the North Sea, but which HAS NO APPRECIABLE EFFECT ON THE GRAVY and the cat, well the cat has taken to eating something other than the horrible dry lumps we feed him and the comestible and non-comestible items mentioned some time ago.) These are: green peas (shelled), sticky rice, gift wrapping, and pasta (any kind).

In any event, we hope you are having, or have had, a wonderful (non- or) denominational event (or non-event, if you prefer just don't raise the subject at the table).

P-man out

Best card

Winner of the best card so far has come from the Wonder Woman.

Like the idiot I am..

As a couple we have never shopped well, as individuals not much better, but 'tis the season.

In about 2 hours on Saturday I made some really good headway street shopping down the road but still it seemed necessary to do a family shop Sunday. Big mistake... well mistake anyway. So three stops were the plan. Local birdseed store. Seriously! We know a look of folks who are koo-koo about winged beings. Then large outdoor lifestyle adventure co-op store. Finally, sizable drug store for all forms of candy for stockings along with some basic provisions like poo wrap and the like.

So we made 2 out of 3. Is that respectable?

Le Magasin du Caw-Caw was a down right hit with all the great stuff, the nice people.. I mean this store even had a CAT. I should have got everyone sing-song clocks and suet! I would have had it made.

Stop 2 was to be fair only half bad but that was bad enuf' for us... Sort of uncovered all the weaknesses of this parental team. We could not work together; we had no realistic plan for our time. While we had done 'advance selection' with the online catalogue we still got quite rattled. Not being naturally tough outdoorsy types like our many admirable friends we were disoriented quickly inside the store. P-man was hypnotized by all the tattoos and I was similarly entranced by the many piercings that seemed to somehow connect man and earth in some inspiring new way. Grappling gear seems to be taking a very interesting new turn as the halfway point of the naughts fade. But I digress. I digress, therefore I am, which was the problem.

So here are, a pair of pale, flabby aliens, dropped into this bustling mecca of product supply for adventuresome acts of health we know very little about. Our little one thought the place is pretty cool too until we tried to put her in the 8-in-1 baby-backpack-knapsack-paddywhack-utility muffin kitchen and shower radio device. The shower radio elements were supplied by the baby e as a torrent of baby invective bounced off the interiors of our skulls and the cavernous interior of the outdoor fun store while the inked and the holed were startled out of their reveries for long enough to remember where they kept their emergency store of chronic and why they will fuck only for recreation, filmic, and scientific purposes, while we paused to consider that we will be outnumbered when #2 arrives in July. Mistakes in planning, execution, like the Sunday special were why our quota had been pegged at one.

I do admit the core meltdown was all my fault. We were in the kidswear buying Miss Fancy some togs for Christmas and all was going swimmingly. She had been smiling at everyone and drinking what was left of her milk. Then like the idiot I am I let her out of the stroller! Ahhh... Well not immediately -- at first she tried on one of her new hats, loved it. Ok this is a rare and unusual planet where granola is tasty and toddlers wear hats willingly. Once out of the stroller Miss Fancy nicely visited with other kids produced by the mountain people, in spite of her genetic makeup. But things started to unravel when we had to chose between two coats. The basket of purchases, the snacks spilling from pockets, the potential new purchases, the toys, the purse, and the child with her new found friends. It was too much for rookies like us. Some plan needed to hatched to occupy the child.

Then like the idiot I am I let her play with the stroller. This is a rickety umbrella stroller, like the one the kids pass around on daycare days. I tend to think it is a positive thing to encourage our girl towards all those otherwise gag-inducing gender stereotype mothering games now that No. 2 is due. So I let her play with the stroller. But in the store - what was I thinking? She swiftly took off for the sock aisles and deftly crashed into many many ankles, each time offering a ringing declaration of the fun in the collision -- BING! If not ankles, then merch. displays, where her little craft would run aground. To her credit, she was determined to correct her steering issues herself. To our detriment, any efforts to assist were met with a new, keening, scream which sent the granola-buds to their VW vans for a quick hit.

Gawd what have I done. So what is our exit strategy? I ask. P-man gives me the face George Dubya has everytime Dick Cheney points out that someday US Troops will have to be pulled out of Iraq. Oh no.

Thank goodness daddy takes the child and a snack and leaves me to sort out shopping. We did in fact conclude the shopping, pay, and transport the stuff and toddler to the car with little fuss after.

Needless to say we are out of toilet paper at our house, which in concert with a recent poo blog, puts p-man in mind of a time when he went over 7 hours with a shit in his pants. Like the song goes "I passed out on some old lady's lawn and lost control of my bodily functions." Mmmm.

Blood in the sand

O Gods of free internet therapy,
Hear my supplication,
And bring me succour.

It is a clear and frosty day here in V. I just enjoyed the indescribable pleasure of rocking and singing baby e to sleep. I will soon recaffeinate my grey cottage-cheesy brain. All is well at the moment, before the invocation of the binary deities, which is entirely gratuitous, and unless you are some kind of Gaimanesque cultist, entirely unlikely to be of any utility.*

Scant minutes ago I was prepared to gut myself with a letter opener. mo-wo is out and I am on dad patrol with e, enjoying a fun clamber up the handicap ramp-angled park apparatus, a healthy face-first self-propelled slide down the shiny entry-level slide, observing with joy the swing up, swing back, swing up, swing back, and with horror the fall, face first (without any self-preservational movement of hands to block the face) into the cold hard sand of the playground. I froze where I crouched. She froze, in her cherry-blossom Michelin man snowsuit, face down in the sand. I picked her up, her nose filed with sand, her sand-filled mouth erupting in piteous cries, and then the BLOOD, O THE BLOOD! It was like a scene from a Bruce Campbell movie, but without the high-brow script, the sand and the blood gobbing out of e's mouth onto her suit, bloodying the fuzzy white collar of her hood, the cries piercing the still air of the park... Within a few minutes e was nibbling happily on an arrowroot biscuit and I was placing the letter-opener back in the drawer with the jonestown koolaid mix.

Yep, for a while I was feeling pretty concerned for e's well being and as negligent as I have ever felt (and I have been very, very negligent). There were witnesses to my crime but I have silenced them. I am only telling you, internet, on the presumption that this post will remain largely unobserved. That, and I need to practice before mo-wo returns home.

p-man.


* A brief note to the internet gods: please forgive me for doubting your existence. Please do not send me to binary hell, however that is coded, and please bring our city the Stanley Cup. Accomplishment of the latter will, incidentally, suffice as a proof of the former.

Chatterbox

I have never made a secret of the fact my FAVorite part of your growth is your language development. I knew that one day you'd begin walking but it seemed to me not as exciting. Walking, god willing, you will have from that day forward. I feel you can spend your lifetime learning to say new things.


When you were barely out of your newborn yelling stage you started telling us bedtime stories. You began to desire our full attention at bedtime and instead of wailing, you gurgled, growled and sang out your thoughts on how your day went. Not long after you started to tell me about the zuzu's and the lola's at the, then pleasant, diaper changes. I hung on every word.




Following that you perfected your greetings to all the pleasant folks. Speaking out about your enthusiasm at the sight of daddy or baba with your voice and body. I remember my surprise when we were working on the laundry and you got a good hold of that blue shirt and combined both the idea of boo behind the shirt with the idea of ownership, clearly telling me dada.


You know it's pretty annoying. It has been a year yet boo is still the #1 game. I mean, get some new material, would ya baby girl?


For a while after you were so intent on standing and crawling that you seemed to lose your voice. I was distraught, and a little lonely. I called it 'the quiet period'. Not one of my faves. After that you would drench your clothing quite regularly with triumphant spittle-laden declarations of your new found skills. Look at me I'm standing! Hey, I can bounce! Screech screech screech. We coined your authentic Indian name, Eleanor-Ten-Eagles.


I am proud that your are a good communicator. I love to hear you, not just learning the words of your favorite books, but now beginning to sing them out in their traditional tunes. Old MacDonald NEVER sounded so good. My short list of best utterances still are, caw, bum, zip and hooonney. So you say honey because I use it for you. But then this last month you started saying money and... what the ech is up with that???

All dressed and you know the rest

Where do we go now? It has been 6 weeks searching for a new daycare... 20 calls found 3 good leads. 3 good leads have become 3 dead ends. Next, an ad in the paper; one more interview on Saturday. We keep looking.

PS. Can you believe those guys are playing tennis the day we are all dressed up to go to the Christmas party? It's not all Canada up here in Canada.

Festive sausage plate of gratuitous links

This is the berry-carrier typing. mo-wo and I have just returned from my employer's Christmas/Seasonal Event/Merry Non-Denominational Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms-Day dinner at a local steak house (we prefer to eat our vegetables second-hand) where we received a considerable shock.

We were advised this weekend is the last weekend before Christmas (or whatever you call it). Is this true?

Our shopping plans, made on the drive home from New Westminster, amount to "everyone will get chocolate". I endorse the one-store shopping plan but feel limited by the choco-option. We could purchase cheese, and wish people a 'merry cheesemas", or to the local vendor of prophylactics. Merry Jizzmas, everyone.

PM

Norman

This is the titular male of this family knuckling away at the keyboard praying the spell check device is active and growing teary as yet another run on sentence emanates from the aforementioned knuckles. It's a hard-knock life. I have no irises in my eyes!

I am sure this is all very meta-something and last semester's post-modernism is this year's post-structuralist-something something teleology, semiotics, I don't know. It's last year's orange, which is this year's stinky pile of blue dust and what I am trying to say is that the blog world is like some kind of Orwellian crack, but you know, I can stop any time I want, I just don't want to. Got $5? So, I'm the guy who stayed in the cave too long. The universe has been basking in the warm pixel glow of blog-lives, forming communities, sharing experiences, finding ways to sell out (please tell me how) while I have been re-re-viewing my Hunter VHS collection in the fake-wood paneled basement, alone and unwashed.

So now we're reading these blogs about people's lives and it's pretty visceral, no? People I don't know, who appear to obtain (in most cases) no direct remuneration for their efforts, sharing details about their shaved/unshaved pudenda, bowel movements, their fears, hopes, and all that horrible stuff. I have born witness to freaky shit from folks to whom the separation of church and state represents a gross error in judgment, people who may actually like certain thespians who have novel ideas regarding vitamins (I LOVE VITAMINS! VITAMINNNS!). It is rather fascinating in a car-accident-rubbernecking kind of way. It isn't as if I have a clue what I'm saying here, but there must be a certain freedom to entering this forum, to the revealing or re-veiling of a personal archetype, a version of oneself designed for public consumption, a self controlled by its author, much unlike one's self. Neal Stephenson's avatars without nunchuk skills. I'm typing myself into existence now and it's great!

Preamble aside I am compelled to comment on a recent posting on another site which, like this one, is at least notionally dedicated to a child, and which, unlike this one, has readers. Rather than vent to the author, who will reply and be mean, I will hide my response in plain sight in the onterweb where no-one will read it. I LOVE BLOGS! The author, who is a young man, a parent, a lawyer, and a professional baby-blog-typer, commonly riffs on parenting in a manner reminiscent of some great american writer I've never heard of. He's the Norman Mailer of baby blogs, but taller. In any event, I have on occasion enjoyed reading about his life and his cute little kid and all that kind of freaky blog stuff, but the other day this author spouted off this claptrap that, while ostensibly cloaked in a knowing wink of 'irony' and a knowing tongue in cheek, has upset me and made me cry. Irony is a literary device. It is not a life device. A dildo is a life device.

The essence of the message is "listen to me I'm really smart" and that I can live with, that's the avatar. I want to be that avatar. The message behind it, the text of the message, was "Jeez, people I know know I am not a consumer, I am UNTAINTED by crass consumerism, I grow vegetables in my own fecal matter... I am pure, but listen to me now, meek readers: this Christmas you must consume, and consume american, don't go to a chain store and buy stuff made in other countries, nope, buy american and here are some products I will shill for right now and some handy interweb linkage, and buy this stuff, don't buy the other stuff, and I know what I am talking about, I blog at a web site blog-thing that targets baby products at people like you, my dear readers." The author then provides some handy justifications for his stance touting isolationist policies, like the illegitimate love-child of Woodrow Wilson and John Kerry, in a manner which guarantees we'll never be able to sell our beef in Wisconsin again. Or cute little cow dolls in santa hats. Granted, I have paraphrased the original posting, and I have done so unfairly, but I am not writing this to be fair. It's therapeutic!

So, what I would blog to this avatar, if I had the 'nads to do so, would be:

Shut up you silly little man. Stuff is stuff, wherever it's made. Buying is buying and there are enough people instructing me on what to purchase, when, where, and so on. Let people live their lives as best they can without somebody else telling them what to do, especially you, you simulated human...

or words to that effect. Of course, in so doing, I'd be yet another voice telling that young man what to do, and apparently I resent that. I should add I read his site voluntarily, I could've stopped anytime and didn't, but it's his fault I got pissed off. Yep.

P-man out.

Tis the season

So the holidays approach - time to throw all semblance of the schedule to the wind and begin experimenting with 'how flexible' the girl is.

So tonight I decided to drive around for an hour after daycare in some pretty snotty traffic.
Flexibility rating for the girl: excellent.
The level of whining: remarkably low in face of well planned in flight snacks easily and consistently delivered thanks to the lack of forward motion.

Destination was dinner at grandmother's. Grandmother intransigent about the fussiness of the child-eater still presents fancy dinner food and child destroys mountain of rice pilaf with a fork -- and eats nothing.
Flexibility rating: poor but predictable.
Parental recovery with applesauce, cookie, and bread.

The Ministry folks will be onto us now. Apparently MoWo needed to decompress so I drove home with the little one. A quaint feature of our city is that the 'burb in which the in-laws reside is connected to the city by a 4-lane tunnel. In the morning three lanes are open, and then, later, one lane, and urban planning, and vegetable madness... who cares. Traffic was rather dense and I assumed the princess of applesauce would get bored, upset, vocal. I would respond by becoming, in turn, pleading, incoherent, incontinent.

As it was we chatted about the dome light, hats, and 'Barry' (the cross-species-dressing bear-rabbit). We listened to the hockey game on the radio. Baby e fell asleep and I listened to her breathe (in between plays of course- go 'nucks!) and in any event the beauty of the moment is obscured by language, or the banality of my description. Version 2: My baby slept as we rode home. My heart smiled. Version 3: baby baby baby don't let the social workers get their wayyyy. P-man out.

In the air

White Rain makes fun spheres.

The Village Green

This is the p-man. Still can't figure out the me-blog component of the mothership.

It snowed recently here in the Pacific Southwest, er, Vancouver. The city was nearly paralyzed by the oh, 1.5 centimetres of cold yicky snow. Camaros litter the ditches, the strains of Dokken and fokken Pioneer stereos fading, as the Motomaster batteries crank their last.

But enough of me and my involuntary forays into public transit. This is about the kid! At least nominally.

It's already obvious where we're going here which is to the park, to where the snow is, to go and look at and sit in and touch and occasionally nibble at the snow. Watch out where those huskies go, baby E. So there we are, in the snow, baby layered up like a cross between heyday Cyndi Lauper (?) and that art nun from tv, me in tennis shoes and my Isaac Hayes caftan (TM) trying to scrape up enough snow to make a snowball (the skiff of snow being insufficient to manufacture of a snow dwarf, or snow fetus) but we persevered, we did, getting white and then wet. Baby's first snow. I imagine her asking: why am wearing all this to sit on the grass?

Good times.

Truth is out there

While baby e puts in an extra hour at daycare today her parental units did some work with a relationshipologist. You know a counsellor, shrink, ANALYST. Yeah that's what we need, papa-man, an analyst. I believe I put the task out as "we are failing to sustain an adequate range of communication strategies in response to the challenges our newfound life is offering us."

So when is this guy going to tell me if I should move or renovate my house? Should I quite my job or take 2yr leave? And, where's that new daycare I need. This guy is useless. Should have known. It was some other guy who got me in all this trouble in the first place.

NEWSFLASH: Just read on the bosh Britney is seeing a psychic thank god the truth is out there. Come on Madam Vasso