Life as I know it...

Here's a series of events from my last 48 hours:

• 8:20 a.m. Wed.: Drop Cesar at airport for his 4 nights away male bonding trip to Arizona w/ his dad and brother.
• 8:50-5:00 Wed: Work blah, blah, blah
• 5:20 Wed: Pick up Leila dear at daycare
• 5:30-8:30 Wed.: Nice and normal evening routine w/ Leila
• 8:45 Wed.: Rejoice in the fact that I can have a glass of wine and Brie cheese for dinner since Cesar's away
• 9:05 Wed.: Call mom to catch up
• 9:30 Wed.: Enter kitchen to top off glass of wine while still conversing with mom and see big ass cockroach making its way around periphery of kitchen floor -- enter bag protecting Cesar's golf shoes and grab one to aim at cockroach -- lob said shoe and hit, but only enough so to amputate a leg -- cockroach stunned enough so that I can reach Raid under sink and spray half a bottle on it -- cockroach crawls under dishwasher to hopefully perish.
• 10:30 Wed.: Lay head to pillow
• 12:50a.m. Wed/Thurs: Leila cries out & continues crying/calling for mom -- go to comfort her and realize by touch that she has a fever -- bring her to bed with mom.
• 5:00a.m. Thurs.: Mommy! Change my diaper (we're working on pottie training & she's finally telling me when a wet diap. bothers her) -- Ok, sweetie, but it's still dark and ni-ni time so we're going back to sleep when we're done
• 5:01 Thurs.: Put a band aid on the boo boo on my foot
• 5:03 Thurs: Take the band aid OFF
• 5:05-6:40 Thurs: Sleep
• 6:40 Thurs: Sneak out of bed and leave Leila asleep
• 6:55 Thurs: Peak back in on Leila and she awakes -- window of opportunity to shower gone -- take temperature & it's still just under 101 -- no day care/work today --doctor??
• 7:00 - 8:30 Thurs.: give Leila Tylenol/milk -- watch Wiggles, Higgleytown Heroes & Curious George
• 8:30 Thurs.: Make Dr.'s appt. for 10
• 10:00 Thurs.: She's very wheezy - the infection/fever is coming from the lungs...So, like, Bronchitis? Actually, more likely a little Pneumonia. Pneu-whatinthehecknow? What 2yr old gets Pneumonia in early September???
• 11:00-6:20 Thurs.: Fill prescriptions - go to coffee shop for cupcake (i.e.: frosting) and a bit of play - go home to nebulize - nap - nebulize - watch PBS Kids - Play with Play Dough - Papa drops in on way home from work to check on patient.
• 6:30 Thurs.: Vaguely stated to Papa and no one in particular "yeah, there's kind of this dead roachie smell in the kitchen - I think its carcass is under the dishwasher still..." and Papa says "a dead roach shouldn't smell" and I say "huh?, how bout you pull out that drawer under my stove to check for any dead mice?" and BINGO! Mouse trapped mouse # 9!! We went through a couple weeks there with nothing... Here we go again....
• Meanwhile in Sedona Arizona...Hey babe - I'm on the 17th hole - I'll call you back in about an hour.........AAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bath Time Shenanigans

The goggles and floaties getup in the bath is completely her own doing....

A Heartbreaking Work...

Read this book. Seriously. As soon as you have the chance. I'm no Oprah, but you could put my stamp of approval right alongside hers. In this day and age, it should be required reading for every adult on the planet. Yes, it is dreary, dark, depressing, haunting, hopeless...Strike that, it is actually not hopeless and that is the simple beauty of it.

In a landscape completely obliterated either by nuclear fallout or natural disaster (McCarthy is purposefully vague about the causal event, which renders its aftermath even more effective) an unnamed man, "Papa", and his young son, born in the days following the disaster, fight to survive if only for each other. It is their bond, their unwavering love, their commitment to remain the "good guys" and "carry the fire" in a world that seems to have no place left for good that carries the plot and left me such an emotional wreck. If you have a child, you will certainly want to hug him or her to you and not let go on completion of this book. Yes, I was the freak on the metro last night choking back tears as I devoured the last 20 pages. Please check it out. Even if you're short on time to read, it is a very fast read. The prose is spare and minimal and there are no chapter breaks to slow you down. And if you are very improbably a hater, direct your animus to Oprah, not I. I'm just the sappy, sentimental parent who is not ready for the apocalypse!

A picture is worth...

Here's that priceless shot of Fiddy in reaction to Brit's "performance" that I was earlier talking about:
I think my face looked about the same until I bust out laughing, loudly, when I saw him. Oh, that is the funny I tell you!

The train...

... is wrecked. Jack-knifed. Totaled. Beyond Repair. Perez Hilton's open letter to Britney says it all, but wow, that was reeaallllyyy bad! The best part about the "performance" was seeing the "what the eff? " faces in the audience on the likes of 50 Cent and Diddy. That was priceless. And in her heinous get up, she even made me feel good about the state of my body. Seriously. I even stood in front of my full length mirror in my bra and panties afterword and contemplated how OK I look in comparison. Of course, the badness before my eyes also led me to have one more glass of wine than I should have, so I'll blame those calories on Brit! Yes, I'll probably still belt out "gimme gimme...gimme more..." when it comes on in the car. Though I may want to be careful when I'm carting Leila around because that's not necessarily a refrain I want to hear out of her mouth regularly. The latest lyrics she picked up from my driving performances were those to Umbrella. It's a trip to do the "ella, ella, ella eh eh eh"s with her.

And aside from watching garbage on TV (we did do some quality Rome watching as well - there is some unbelievable shizz going down in season 2!) the most fun I had all weekend was using my Dyson. Trust me. You don't know how amusing and satisfying it is to vacuum cobwebs out of hard to reach corners until you've done so with a Dyson. There was some marathon play dough play in the mix as well. I think I'm good and ready for the temperatures to get just a little bit cooler so we can start doing some fun outdoor outings like apple picking.

Alexandria Shout Out

Meant to post this earlier in the week. It's not often you open the weekend NY Times dining section to see "Next Stop Alexandria, Va. A Town Takes Its Place at the Culinary Table..." Hometown pride y'all! I can certainly speak for Rustico and its fine, fine beer collection as it's only a short stagger from our house. As well as for Eamonn's and its fine, fine battered cod and chips. And one of these days I'll find a special occasion (and an influx of cash) to sample restaurant Eve...

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/travel/02nextstop.html

And in real news...

...that I somehow don't find surprising in the least!

IRAQ -- BUSH KNEW BEFORE INVASION THAT SADDAM HAD NO WMD: Two former CIA officers have confirmed to Salon that President Bush was told in Sept. 2002 that Saddam Hussein did not possess any weapons of mass destruction. According to the officer, CIA director George Tenet provided Bush with top-secret information that "detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissible material, which they didn't, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons." Bush reportedly dismissed the warning immediately. According to one of the officers, "Bush didn't give a f*ck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up." Tenet never brought up the information again; in fact, only a few months later he infamously referred to the case that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction as a "slam dunk." The intelligence about the lack of weapons of mass destruction was never provided to Congress before their vote to authorize military operations in March 2003, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair depended on this faulty information to make his decision to support the Iraq war. "Blair was duped," said one of the CIA officers. "He was shown the altered report." Even though Bush finally publicly admitted in 2004 that "Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there," he continued to believe that they were. In his new book on Bush, Robert Draper writes that the President repeated conviction that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction "to Andy Card all the way up until Card's departure in April 2006."