Would you say this is weird?

"Hey Mummy, would you say this is weird?"  Says Rissa, upon her arrival home from school.  She pokes her head around the corner and sticks her tongue out of her mouth and makes this noise: "Lardl-lardl-lardl-lardl..."

"Yes.  I would say that is weird."

"How 'bout this?"

She ducks out of view for a second and then comes around the corner once more, her face screwed into a fishy semblance making this noise: "pwuh-pwuh-pwuh-pwuh..."

"That, too, is weird."

"Would you say they are equally weird...?

"As opposed to?"

"One being decidedly more weird."

"Let me see them again."

Like daugther like mother...

Ryan could come stay with me... I mean us...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2013/03/21/ryan-gosling-acting-break.html

I'm just saying.  You know, if Ryan Gosling really needs a break and someplace to chill.  He could chill in our attic.  It would be a no-stress environment for him.  I mean, apart from dealing with the mid-40s woman pretending she's all nonchalant, who just happens to be on the floor below him, imagining him doing pushups right before bed...  on top of her. 

I could be all caj...(that's short for casual, see, I'm hip)... I wouldn't fawn over him or anything, that would be so déclassé. Occasionally I'd invite him to a family dinner, "Ryan, we're having pot roast!  You in?"  Ask if he wants to go the library, that sort of thing.  Small provincial town - if he wore a ballcap I'm sure that folks wouldn't recognize him.  Just sayin.'

Poohsticks with Rissa

Poohsticks from A. A. Milnes' The House at Pooh Corner.  Illustration by E.H. Shepherd

 
We played Poohsticks last weekend.  We had to be careful, and not cross the bridge willy-nilly on account of the fact that, for a small country road in Lanark County, there's a lot of traffic.  David, Rissa and I gathered our sticks - made sure we weren't going to be squished flat by asshole drivers who don't follow the 40 km/h speed limit - and launched our precious playing pieces into the Tay River.   We ran to the other side of the bridge, waiting for our sticks to come out, but to no avail.  We saw... nothing.  Where did they go?  Who had won?  The sticks must have been too small.

"We need bigger sticks," said I.

"We need Pooh LOGS," said Rissa, in her Eureka voice.

David and I shared a glance.  "Ummmm... I don't think we want to call it Pooh LOGS..."

"Why not?" asked Rissa.

"Well, it kinda sounds as if we're throwing bowel movements over the bridge.  Or maybe like we're sitting on the edge of bridge and poohing over the side."

Rissa thought for a second.  "I'm totally going to call it Pooh Logs from now on."

We all are.

And that's why my nipples were hard...

Protecting the masses from my nipples.

  
NOT because I was all het up.   But because it was 12 freaking degrees in our house.   We got home from a weekend visiting my parents and walked into a house where I'm pretty sure I could see my breath.  And, as a direct consequence, my breasts.  Well, at least my nipples.  On account of the fact that my nipples were frozen into temperature sensitive bullets letting the world at large know that I was freezing.  And this, through a t-shirt bra this is supposed to hide one's nipples...  I was THAT cold.

Our boiler's automatic pilot light conked out.  So that meant that until Monday morning, we were wearing longjohns, pjs, bathrobes, extra socks with slippers and afghans.  (The blankets, not the dogs... although a big-ass hairy dog (or two) would have been great to have had on my lap.)  We lit a fire in our incredibly inefficient fireplace, cooked pizzas with the oven door open, filled the bathtub with near-boiling water and had space heaters pumping heat in our bedrooms.  I held a hot chocolate between my hands and, after consuming it, put my mittens back on.

Always the problem solvers, David and I decided to use some extra one-on-one friction last night... you know... to stay EXTRA warm.  There was no point in wasting those hard nipples, right?

I'm just a girl who can't say no...

This is NOT me eating something bad for me..

To chocolate.  And salty foods.  And apparently Rusty Nails...  My healthful ingesting self-control seems to be at an all-time low.  What the hell is wrong with me?

And what am I eating now?  Chocolate covered pretzels.  They were a gift.  How was the gifter to know they are my kryptonite?  Salty-wheaty-chocolatey-sugar-coma-inducing kryptonite.  I can feel my throat coating with phlegm and my stomach bloating already.  It's alright.  8 pretzels = only 140 calories.  Of course I've had probably 35 pretzels - not a problem - I just won't eat dinner. And I won't wash them down with that Rusty Nail that I was craving - or at least not a double Rusty Nail.  See?  I still have self-control!

Frenzied Feline Ferocity

Every morning outside our door, the cats lie in wait.  Pawing first.  Then head-butting.  Then heaving their shoulders into it.  Chirping, meowing, then yowling follows.  Lola's the yowler.  She yowls when Minuit growls then bites her.  Minuit is NOT a morning cat. Steve, our dopey orange male, runs up and down the upstairs hallway any time it seems that someone is close to rising from between the sheets.

We learned not to leave the door open.  Because if we leave the door open?  Then we basically live Simon's Cat  ... x 3 cats - one of whom, when she walks on your abdominal aorta, can actually make you pass out.  FYI - Simon Tofield's cat animation is pretty close to perfect - quite a feat with simple line drawings.

I HATE this part of being a Mom...

Detail from: http://www.etsy.com/listing/94665109/sick-girl-vfisit-by-mother-nun-1890s

I hate, hate, HATE - this part of being a Mom.  Rissa has a stomach bug.  She's so pale.  Almost as tall as me, yet as I'm smoothing her back while she woofs her cookies into the porcelain, I feel so freaking helpless.  She's a delicate woofer - no over-the-top gagging, just a complete emptying of her stomach contents.  She's fairly upbeat for having projectile vomited. 

"I broke my 7 year streak Mummy," she laments.  The last time she woofed her cookies was when we moved to this house.  She equates it with having eaten Cheezies while in the care of  her David's Moms - which isn't necessarily a bad thing - she hasn't touched Cheezies since then.  I sort of wish I'd had the same experience with ice cream when I was younger.

"Mummy, is this the flu?"

"No sweetie, it's not.  People call it the stomach flu, but it has nothing to do with the flu."

"Then why do they call it the flu?"

"Because someone made the mistake of calling it the flu a long time ago and now people no longer know the difference."

"You mean like when they say orangutan-g and nuc-u-lar?"  (My biggest pet peeve.  If you want to see my head explode talk about nucular orangutangs and you'll see it happen.)

The liquid children's diarrhea medicine (not to be mistake for children's liquid diarrhea medicine - which gives you an altogether more disgusting image...) we had on hand made her vomit and she can't swallow pills yet.  In between her half dozen trips to the bathroom last night, I was self-screening the noises in my own body.  Is this gas?  Is this the onset of bowel evacuation?

And today the hard part is going to be to try to keep her resting.

"You should be back in bed sweetie."

"But why?"

"Because you fell asleep at 1:30 a.m."

"I'm too hot to be in bed.  I'm going to stand out on the porch to cool down."

"No.  You're not.  Go down to the kitchen without slippers on, you be cold soon enough."

My debating whether or not I can leave her here for my 4 hours of work has now been answered - she's not going to rest.  She's going to stand naked on the porch and then develop pneumonia.  She needs a guard.  And maybe some snuggling.  And some bad tv watching.