Sunday Summary

* My mother is in town, dunking Babycakes in a wading pool in the front yard, buck naked. The baby is buck naked, not my mom, who is fully clothed.

* Three little tiny sprouts have emerged in my Garden of Grief. Are they sunflowers? Weeds? I don't know, but I'm sure glad to have them. The garden gets an extreme amount of sun every day, so even though I water it twice a day, I fear the soil has not been moist enough to germinate the seeds I planted during my peak of grief. Now I'm WAY too lazy to cut up plastic garbage bags and place them with rocks over the G.o.G. so that the seeds will stay moist and germinate, as my mother has advised.

* This miscarriage has been nothing but a heartbreaking bother: My hair has fallen out, I've re-developed the pregnancy-related allergy to my wedding ring, I got a ring of chub around my middle, not to mention pimples, oh and BEING SAD ALL THE TIME. Heartbreaking pain in the ass.

* I have programmed my iPod for the first time, and now I drive around town inattentively, singing John Denver tunes I paid 99 cents for on iTunes.
These include: "Thank God I'm a Country Boy!" "Matthew" and "Rhymes and Reasons." Incidentally, when my friend M. and I went to the John Denver concert in 1991, we were dismayed when he pulled up in a black limousine, as he specifically directs AGAINST black limousines in "Thank God I'm a Country Boy!"

* We tried out "The Little Gym" -- a competitor to "Gymboree." It's basically the same schtick -- throwing kids in parachutes and making them jump on puffy crap -- but at the end of every song, instead of singing "Here at Gymboree!" they sing "At the LITTLE GYM!" Hub-D and I have started singing "At the LITTLE GYM" at the end of everything we say, as in: "This diaper is filled with black blueberry poo!... at the LITTLE GYM!"

* My office STILL reeks like raccoon hide. He hasn't been in the house for weeks, and yet it smells like he's on my lap right now.

* We have gone soft from living in the suburbs. Yesterday we went to a housewarming party at the home a friend bought within the housing projects in the city. If Hub-D and I were cats, we would have been creeping around, bellies low to ground, with our ears pinned back and huge pupils -- on high alert for danger. I'm just not used to that area anymore, even though I used to bike through it every night on my way home from work.

* I think it is entirely possible to spend all of one's life in the kitchen. There is always something to do there, be it choppin' or cookin' or cleanin'. Babycakes is all for spending the rest of our lives in the kitchen, particularly as she grows taller and is able to reach increasingly fascinating drawers. Yesterday, she located the CANDLE drawer for the first time, and gnawed her way through the soy candles I found on eBay. Where does one put one's candles and plastic bags and 409 when one has a baby? I've babyproofed the cabinet with the garbage can and Raid, but there are so many gray areas... the glass measuring cup? I don't KNOW.

* I'm starting to really WANT some things that I didn't want before. Is it the suburbs' influence, or is because I'm almost 35? I want a puppy or some other young, impressionable dog who will not bite my child, and I want a bigger car, like, say a RAV-4. See, we were going to get a bigger car when I got pregnant (because two car seats will NOT fit in the Camry), but now we're in suspense -- will I get pregnant again? And in the meantime, do we have to subsist on one vehicle? Is it totally lazy to have two cars? And the dog thing, is that complete insanity?

* My child, who is 10 months old, wears a 4 1/2 EW shoe. And the shoe STILL has to be stretched by the store to make it fit her foot. Is it OK that I am SUPER PROUD of my child's Sasquatch-esque tootsies?

* I don't know what to do with my life right now. Babycakes still wants to hang with me, kind of, although I'm a little boring, and she'd rather rip all of the flaps off of her Elmo book if it's all the same to me. And the office is running GREAT without me most of the time because Hub-D is doing so many things I used to. See, this was the time I had sketched into my grand LIFE PLAN for gestating another baby. But I'm not, so I'm kind of adrift. What do I do? Last night I picked up a "Better Homes and Gardens Baby Scrapbooking Guide" and I started totally salivating over the interesting ways you can preserve your child's early years. They even had a little scrapbooking FRAME for the positive pregnancy test. I had to close the book at that point because positive pregnancy tests still make me sad.

* Finally, did you know that COWS and BULLS populate most of the hiking trails in our area? I think it's AWESOME, but my mother, who knows about 1000 times more about livestock than I do, thinks it's scary.

I'll close with John Denver's "Rhymes and Reasons." I miss you, John, you limo-ridin' hippie...

"You wonder where we're going
Where's the rhyme and where's the reason?
And it's you who cannot accept,
It is here we must begin
To seek the wisdom of the children
And the graceful way of flowers in the wind."