"You know you're a mom when" quotes.

"Mom? Do you have these frog stickers for any particular reason?"
"I'm just saving them for a rainy day."

"We'll eat as soon as the dinosaurs are cooked."

"I think we'll give the Aston Martin to someone else."

Perfectly reasonable

Today we had a great checker at Trader Joe's who made conversation with Meg. I found it pretty entertaining.

"What's your favorite color?"
"Green, and red, and turquoise."
"What's your favorite animal?"
"A TYRANNOSAURUS REX! It's a dinosaur," she explained.
She nodded. "I know. It's a big dinosaur. If you were stuck on a desert island, what would you want to take with you?"
Meg considered. "Sunscreen. If it was a hot desert island."

Helpful distinctions

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting a tomato into fruit salad.

Knowledge is also knowing that a pterodactyl is not a dinosaur, because pterodactyls can fly. Wisdom is not putting pterodactyls into fruit salad.

(My apologies to Pinterest and whoever originally made the point about fruit salad.)

"Daddy, I think what you really are is a battleasaurus." Meg

What we did in August

We just got back from spending most of August with my family. We had lots of fun! Kate turned eleven months old while we were out there and didn't so much achieve milestones as speed-crawl past them. She sprouted two upper teeth, went from slow-crawling to the aforementioned speed-crawl, and started pulling up. And cruising on objects. And walking with assistance. She also smiled at everyone and blinked her huge blue eyes at them. She made lots of friends.

Meg, meanwhile, reveled in all those outdoorsy New Mexican things to do. We hunted shell fossils in the mountains, played in mountain streams, dug up dinosaur bones out of my sister's yard, camped and roasted marshmallows in my parents' backyard, observed the recent flood damage at Bandelier, picked and identified wildflowers for our flower prints, and went to the museum and archaeological site where they dig up Clovis points. In between times she played with grandparents and cousins, amused herself in the wading pool, and arranged dinosaurs on otherwise normal tablescapes. A good time was had by all, I think.

Top Ten Activities that Don't Involve Cleaning

I spend a lot... a lot... of time cleaning, but that's not very interesting to blog about. So, in lieu of fascinating tales about scrubbing, I thought you might be mildly entertained by some of Meg's and my other activities.

1. Put glitter on shoes. She had a pair of worn-out Sunday shoes, so I painted them with turquoise craft paint and turquoise glitter glue, with silver glitter glue for the touches. It turned out surprisingly well, though the craft paint cracked in a couple places, so I touched those up with turquoise nail polish. Then, I had a pair of hot pink flats in dismal shape, so I touched them up with permanent marker (red, since I didn't have hot pink) and kraft glue and pink glitter. They aren't done yet, due to a severe glitter shortage.

2. Put glitter glue on dinosaur coloring pages. Using glitter glue is not to be confused with putting glue and glitter on things, an activity to be undertaken only with great care and trepidation, because if you put glue and glitter on anything, it'll be on everything. Meg wasn't even in the room when I glue-and-glittered the pink shoes and she got glitter all over her face. Though, small girls may just have a magnetic attraction to glitter. Glitter glue, on the other hand, comes in little squirt bottles and is almost tidy.

3. Tickle Kate. You might have trouble with this if you don't have a Kate, but it's so satisfying. She grins and giggles and generally sparkles brighter than glitter, which is saying a lot.

4. Do something with the semi-forbidden drinking straws, the pretty much forbidden yarn, the theoretically controlled scotch tape, the kid scissors, and rubber bands.

5. Build a bow and arrows. Today, for instance, we built a bow out of a paper towel tube and a belt. It only shot invisible arrows and somehow wasn't all that satisfying. Then we made a better bow out of her inflatable horse, a rubber band, and the rarely permitted straws. I fletched straws and they were pretty awesome.

6. Make up your own words to whatever you're singing. Today Meg rejiggered the "Timmy Time" theme song to become a Franklin the Turtle theme song.

7. Line up toys. We've been doing this for about three and a half years now and it never gets old. We have some new variations. Now we like to line up Little People animals for Kate to grab, line Imaginexts up just out of her reach for her not to grab, and line dinosaurs up precariously dangling off of things.

8. Embellish a boring shirt. I recommend sparkly fabric paint (see glitter glue, above, but you have to use the kind intended for fabric). I also recommend fabric, lace, and the cunning use of scissors - though maybe not all at once. Today I cut off the ugly neckline ribbing off a t-shirt and it not only looked better without ugly ribbing, but somewhat astonishingly, it actually fit better. The only trouble with this activity is that soon you run out of boring shirts.

9. String beads. The trick to this is to only have awesome beads in your stash, and then the creations will turn out gorgeous and look high-end and quite wearable and possibly even giftable. Plastic pony beads always look like plastic pony beads, which is why I let Meg use my nicer beads. Sometimes. She made me a rather cool necklace the other day out of brass wire and big pink beads that looked like it might have come from Anthropologie.

10. Hang out while Jonathan computes. You never know what might turn up.

Me: Why are there people yelling in Spanish?
Jonathan: It's Italian. I don't know. And one of them is waving a sea bass. ::reading the news story:: "He was eventually ejected by Deputy House Speaker Luigi Di Maio after failed attempts to make him stop waving the fish."

Danger

"As Galadriel said, what's done cannot be... wait a minute!" Jonathan
"Do you mean Lady Macbeth?" Me

"Well, look closely so that next time you see apatosaurus tracks, you'll recognize them." Me

I think we need one of those "It has been [] days since the last dinosaur incident" signs around here. Last night Meg was putting dinos into their basket with force, and nearly skewered my hand with somebody's sharp tail. Ouch. It's a dangerous world in here!

Dracorex hogwartsia

So there's a dinosaur called Dracorex hogwartsia. They found the skull and a handful of vertebrae in South Dakota and thought it looked like a Hogwarts dragon.

However, it's probably just a misunderstood youthful pachycephalosaurus. But the name is cool while it lasts.

A pink dinosaur cake with jelly beans

Meg had a birthday on the 30th (as she does every year), and this was definitely a year of prioritizing. In a perfect world, we'd have invited friends, the presents would have been wrapped ahead of time (with ribbons too and actual bows), we'd have fixed a special dinner of foods she likes best, and I'd have been able to find and hang streamers.

However. This year I had to choose whether to fix a cake or dinner, and the cake won. We had a makeshift dinner of fish sticks and acorn squash which is weird but nobody cared, because it was a pretty epic cake. Ever since she turned three, a whole year, she's been requesting a pink cake - a DINOSAUR cake - with jelly beans. How did that work, you may ask? We baked chocolate cake in regular round cake pans, spread cream cheese between the layers, and made a really excellent strawberry buttercream frosting. It was all cream cheese, butter, powdered sugar, and pureed fresh strawberries. Next time I'll chill the frosting to thicken it before I put it on, but it was so good. Then Meg washed her hands and decorated her pink cake with toy dinosaurs, run-through-the-dishwasher-first-thank-you-very-much, and filled in the gaps with jelly beans.

I also prioritized wrapping all her presents without bows over getting half the presents wrapped with bows. I only had her "naptime" to wrap in, and Meg didn't care about ribbon. She cared about ripping paper off, and did so with aplomb. It was an excellent birthday. Meg even got to skype with both sets of grandparents and an aunt and an uncle and her cousin, who JUST started walking (yay James)! So that was pretty fun.

We found out later that the washing of the dinosaurs kind of went badly, though. Meg helped arrange dinosaurs in the top rack and I didn't realize she had included the grows-in-water parasaurolophus. She thought he needed a bath.

Never, ever, ever, put a grows-in-water toy though your dishwasher. Never.

Jonathan recovered the body, looking very much like a drowned victim who'd been underwater too long, and we've been picking styrofoam dinosaur bits off all our dishes for two loads now. It's pretty disgusting. I actually resorted to hand-washing things until we get the dishwasher grate cleaned out, which tells you the situation is serious.

But for all that, we have a delightful four-year-old and you've never had such a wonderful pink dinosaur cake with jelly beans. I think that cake will go down in family history.

Counting on dinosaurs

This afternoon, on the phone, Meg's aunt asked how many dinosaurs she had. Meg immediately dropped the conversation to go and count them. This is not to be undertaken lightly, and her aunt had to go before the process was complete, but she assured Meg I could and would text her with the answer as soon as there was one. Eventually Meg looked up at me.

"Thirty-five."
I observed two dragons, Daniel the tiger, and a really large housefly lined up with the dinosaurs. I could see dragons and a gigantic bug being considered dinos, okay, but...
"Is that including the tiger?"
"Yeah."
"Don't include the tiger when you're counting dinosaurs."
"Why not?"
"Because he's not a dinosaur."
"Oh. Well, I'm just using him as a dinosaur."
Maybe Daniel is an honorary saber-tooth tiger. I suggested she count again.
"Thirty-eight!"

There are tyrannosaurs and then there are brontosauruses

This afternoon Meg handed me her dry erase board and requested that I draw her a dinosaur.

"Why don't you draw a dinosaur?"
"I don't know how!"

That seemed like a pretty good reason, so I drew her a brontosaurus. Those are within my artistic abilities, but Meg wailed because it wasn't a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

"You didn't ask for a tyrannosaurus! You asked for a dinosaur, and I gave you a dinosaur!"
"But it's a brontosaurus!"

I explained that when you ask someone to do something for you, and you throw a fit about how they do it, they aren't going to want to do anything for you again. Meg didn't hear me; she was too overwhelmed by this parental betrayal, that I should have drawn her a brontosaurus and think it was a good enough dinosaur. In this life, there are tyrannosaurs and there are brontosauruses. Obviously.

The dino and the toothbrush

Meg brushes her own teeth, at this point, mostly. She has a dinosaur toothbrush holder which adds a lot of zest to her ablutions. Yesterday we had a discussion when I noticed a lot of... was that toothpaste?... around the teeth of the dinosaur toothbrush holder. I explained that she didn't need to brush its teeth; her toothbrush is just for her. Then I rinsed the toothpaste out of its mouth to reduce temptation. (The jobs you never expect, going into parenthood.)

This evening, toothbrushing seemed to take suspiciously long.

"You're not brushing the dinosaur's teeth, are you, Meg?"
Pause.
"No... I'm just brushing the rest of him."

Going on an airplane

I emerged from the shower to see Meg stuffing animals into a bag.

"I'm going on an airplane!" she informed me.
"Oh, fun!" I said. "Where are you going?"
"To Iceland, to find more dinosaurs."
"Can I come too?" I asked.
"Sure!" she said. Then, reassessing: "But you have to take that towel off your head first."

Babies, dinosaurs. Babies, dinosaurs.

Meg has a special announcement. We had our 20-week ultrasound this week, and she says... "I get a baby sister! And that is very good." She says she will share her crib with the baby, and maybe her dinosaurs; though other times she talks about putting the dinosaurs way up high so her sister won't chew on them.

But we weren't talking about sisters at breakfast. We had much more urgent matters to discuss, like dinosaurs.
"I'm not Miss B---! I'm Karen Cretoxycon!"
I looked at Jonathan. "Did you know your daughter is Karen Cretoxycon?" Meg giggled. "Did you mean Cretoxyrhina?"
"Yes!"
Jonathan looked lost. He doesn't get Dinosaur Train references yet.

Then Meg wandered off and started singing.
"The King was in his counting house, counting out his money
The Queen was in her parlor, eating bread and honey
The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes
When along came a dickey bird and nipped off her nose
And the nose spoke sternly to the velociraptor!"

Then I told her to go to the bathroom and find some big girl underwear. This was apparently too much for Karen Cretoxycon, because she got as far as the (closed) bathroom door and wailed, "I CAN'T FIND IT!"

Small doings

Quote of the day: "Edmund is a bad pentaceratops." Meg
Me: "Edmund isn't a pentaceratops at all, bad or otherwise." He's her friend.
Meg: "Yes he is! He's a pentaceratops!"
Usually she's better at identifying dinosaurs than that.

In non-dinosaur news, we had macaroni and cheese with salad for lunch. Meg ate her salad happily and I had to force her to try a bite of the macaroni.

In other news, my summer shoe collection has kept shrinking. One can't really wear boots year-round, and I keep outgrowing or wearing out my old sneakers and sandals. My pink flowered Converses bit the dust ages ago and these days the whole brand is too narrow for me. I looked at Keds, which do come in cute gingham print, but they weren't that inspiring. Mostly what's available right now is neon running shoes, which would be fine if I liked running, looking like I go running, or neon. I'd really rather have something a little more... discreet. Dressy. Versatile. So today I found a lovely pair of leopard-and-gold sneakers. I saw them and decided they spoke to my soul AND would match pretty much all my casual clothes, which is a little terrifying, but there you have it. They were on clearance. I can't imagine why.

I hear it's just a stage

I'm actually not sure whether staying home and doing housework all day makes the house any cleaner, net, than going out and about. If we're out, at least the home mess stays stable. If we're in, all that Meggie energy gets channeled into her toys so that whichever room I clean, there's another one getting methodically turned into a disaster. We seem to generate more trash and laundry at home, too (especially during potty training), and I know I generate more dishes to wash if I cook.

Staying home and cleaning does change the distribution of the mess, though. Instead of dirty dishes I get tastefully assorted roomsful of dinosaurs, stuffed animals, and easter eggs, and the laundry baskets fill up with clean clothes rather than dirty. I guess that's worth it?

A visit from a leprechaun

This year the St. Patrick's Day ...leprechaun? left us treasure to find when we got up in the morning. It was in a treasure chest and everything.

Meg has been praying regularly for God to send her more dinosaurs, and He must have told the leprechaun, because there was a parasaurolophus in there. There was also a pack of stickers; we figured those must be for Meg too.

We also found a red glass guacamole bowl, a Wallace and Gromit movie, and quite a bit of chocolate coinage in gold and green. The gold ones were American coins, but the green ones had big shamrocks on the back, so those must be what leprechauns use. We were glad they shared.

For breakfast I fixed us green milk, which Meg thought was about the awesomest ever, and Lucky Charms cereal, which she turned up her nose at. I finally explained she didn't have to eat the marshmallows if she didn't want to. Then we all found green outfits for church.  And afterwards, we watched the VeggieTales St. Patrick's Day segment (Fanciful Flannelgraphs with Lutfi!). I've always liked that one.

I think it made a big impression on Meg. After her nap, she asked, "Is it still St. Patrick's day?" And this morning, again, "Is it still St. Patrick's day?" Furthermore, she's changed her regular prayer. Now she's asking for "A whole treasure of dinosaurs." She would particularly like a coelophysis, pteranodon, and a pterodactyl.

My dino girl

I did a search for  "dinosaur" on Pinterest, much to Meg's delight. I may, possibly, have created a monster.

"Oh, cute! More dinosaurs! I should wuv to play wif some of those! ...No, I don't want to eat any of your bread. I'm busy scrolling." Meg

A dinosaur's home is the castle?

Meg was playing with her castle and dinosaurs, doing all the voices.
"Go in, go in."
"Why are you in my house?"
"We're not in your house, we're just... it's our house. Dinosaurs are nice!"

It amused me!

I come across all kinds of fun stuff. Today, it was this interview with Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter movies. She's talking about her upcoming death scene, in which she's dueling Molly Weasley (one of the awesomest scenes of the entire book series), and fell right off a table backwards. Hee!

Also fabulous - the career of Wallace Shawn, or as one blogger put it, Wallace "Princess Bride" Shawn. He IS Vizzini! In addition to a great many other parts, he's a regular voice for the Pixar movies, doing such classics as Rex the Dinosaur and the evil insurance boss from The Incredibles. He also did some Star Trek, Stargate SG-1, The Revenge of Kitty Galore, a Kung Fu Panda spin-off, an American Girls movie, Ally McBeal, and, oddly enough, Freud in something called "Hotel New Hampshire." He has fun. IMDB is great.

This morning I had on my old long white linen skirt and an equally aged blue t-shirt with pink flip-flops - nothing fancy, believe me, though it coordinated with Meg's outfit. So we were out for our walk and I was pushing the stroller along, when we noticed a semi parked in the neighborhood. It looked like a moving truck, but the side had some faded lettering that appeared to read, "Complete cage fighting," which was different. About then the driver stuck his head out and said, "Hi, how ya doin'?" "Hi!" I called back. "Do you need directions, or are you good?" "No, I'm good. I just thought I'd say hi because I liked your dress!"

I'm not sure what to say to that!

King Kong

We actually went Monday, but you know how there's a lag time on these things. I liked it. I didn't watch the icky parts, I think I jumped every time a giant bug appeared, I made comments at Josh and he made good comments at me (i.e. he only mocked things that needed mocking), and I liked it.

I liked Chad Denham. He was so incredibly unreliable, and his eulogies made us gag, but he had a winning way about him. And I liked his approach to video cameras. He reminded us of a certain Hitman.

Naomi Watts was excellent. She was, to start with, pretty enough to pull off the role. And to continue with, she did a good job varying the wide-eyed/sad/awestruck look that she was required to use in every scene with Kong. It's harder acting when you have no lines to work with.

I did wonder why her arms didn't both break when Kong yanked her off the ropes. And surely she should have had more scrapes and bruises, running through the jungle in that thin little outfit, and being manhandled (ape-handled?) all the time. And her makeup stayed awfully good. But at least she got a little dirty.

Jack Driscoll --ah! ::happy moment:: I really liked him. He was a playwright. That's a good start, right there. He went through that entire jungle to rescue the girl. Jungles are good for men, unless of course they kill them. (Be heroic or be squished.) He defied a giant gorilla to get her--even better. He refused to profit off Kong being taken back to America. He was nice, heroic, and an all-round Good Guy. He can stay.

The cinematography was awesome cool. I liked the dinosaurs. And the dialogue, what there was of it, was quite tolerably well done. The swearing wasn't especially offensive. I could almost ignore it.

But the question did arise: what was the movie about? There seemed to be several thesis statements floating about. That would win it a C from Dr. Hake ("no thesis statement, or multiple conflicting theses"). These are the top contenders, in my opinion:

"Beauty is irresistible to men and beasts."

"Mystery is ruined when you can sell it for the price of admission."

"Dinosaurs and giant bugs don't like video tape."

"The native doesn't want chocolate."

"Monkeys must beware beauty."

"Jump, or you'll have to write in a cage."

Someone also suggested something about courtship, but I wasn't quite clear how to formulate that one. "If you drag the girl through the jungle, she'll only want to leave, but if you rescue her from the one dragging her through the jungle, she'll love you forever"? "Silent strength is no match for skill with a typewriter"? "A beautiful vista improves any relationship"?