Tuesdays with Sadie

7:45 A.M.-She's chosen a glorious time to wake up. We celebrate by going downstairs and playing a game of peek a boo with a blanket. For the record, I accidentally typed, peek a poo, which is also a game that you get to play often when you have a child.

8:15-8:42-Breakfast. Most of breakfast is fine, perhaps a bit easier than it used to be. However, when she gets bored, she puts her hand at the back of her head and pulls at her hair. Cute trick right? looking like a mad scientist and all, except that her hands are generally covered in cottage cheese, yogurt, mashed up bread with peanut butter on it etc., which makes it a little less charming. And then, to top the damn thing off, as I'm pulling it out of her hair she's learning that it's good to pull on her hair, which just reinforces the vicious cycle of cottage cheese hair.

At some point during breakfast the cottage cheese also spilled all over the floor and dirtied up the fridge. The real nasty part of which was cleaning it up from a certain spot on our floor where I remember the gray matter of a mouse being splattered a few months earlier, and this question keeps running through my mind that S asked the morning of, "Did you clean it up?" And I'm now racking my brain/mentally vomiting and wondering, "Did I clean it up?" The moral to the story is, always clean your floors.

9:15-10:40-She takes a nap. That means I'm free to get everything done that I can't when she's awake. However, this just winds up making nap time a whirlwind tour of cleaning, laundry, etc. and a kind of, what am I doing with my life vs. what should I be doing with my life on steroids. I read some Montaigne called, "On Education," which I'd recommend to anyone. Note: maybe not women as in Montaigne's day they weren't highly valued. His name is Michele though.

1040-3:15-A variety of tasks. I feed her lunch, welcome the guy who is fixing the heater into the house, play peek a boo and two rounds of peek a poo. I tell her how wonderful it is when she holds up whatever object she's currently got hold of, blocks, books, square felt toy, and looks at me expectantly/excitedly. The guy who's servicing the heater is down there for like an hour, but he says there were not problems. I suspect that he was taking a nap.

Later, I start the diapers, stare depressedly at the wreck of a living room and try to snap off a blog post. She's got longer hair these days, and it's either a bit wavy, or it's just what happens when you apply enough cottage cheese to your hair. She's also got five teeth that are displayed in her happy little smile/the occasional time that I'm sitting on the couch and she sees my toes, which she takes as free license to chomp away, and, as it turns out, teeth hurt.

We play catch with a ball for a while, and I'm not sure if she throws like a girl or like a baby. She takes my cell phone when S calls and holds it up to me excitedly before briefly eating it, and, upon being discouraged, she starts crying, which means that it's nap time. I read her brown bear, brown bear for roughly the one thousandth time while she shoves my hand aside, so she can turn to the last page with all the animals listed. S went to the library and picked up ten new books, but lil s still finds her way to Brown Bear, probably because she wants me to go insane. It's working.