mimi smartypants
Seriously, though: what's with the penguins?

flava flav did my laundry

Nose-eating seal!

Cheap legs! And…hunting knives.

Hotel review.

Now the whole damn family is sick, just when Nora is getting better, and while I knew that this was inevitable because of the way that children spread joy and cheer and GERMS AND PESTILENCE with their delightful smiles and GRUBBY, SNOT-SMEARED FINGERS, it is still bumming me out. LT's version of the virus seems to be more about the body aches and hacking cough, while I have the beta release that involves a thoracic cavity full of jam. Well, probably mucus, but it amuses me to pretend it is jam. I am taking this Tylenol Severe Congestion stuff, which brags that it delivers a “cool burst” sensation.

a. Why?
b. No really, why? These are not chewables, by the way, they are pills that you swallow. Which means that the “cool burst” sensation occurs somewhere in your throat/esophagus/stomach.
c. Seeing the words “chest congestion” and “burst” so close together on the box invariably leads to me thinking about that scene in Alien, which leads me to further personify my mucus as a parasitic extraterrestrial, which is not a good thing.
d. In practice, the “cool burst” is not so much a burst as a strangely numb center-of-chest sensation, which is actually fairly unpleasant. I thought medication was supposed to relieve your symptoms, not give you new ones.

My friend Sophie is sick too, but did that keep us from going out to a smoke-filled bar to see rock and roll? No! Should it have? Yes! Beer made me feel somewhat better in that it created a near-complete disconnect between my brain and my body, so whatever foul phlegm concoction the body coughed up was met with a sort of wry amusement, rather than pain/discomfort/disgust, by the brain. I was careful not to take medication before going to the show but the beer may still have interacted with leftover Robitussin remnants floating around my system, because the fishlike way that the Ponys drummer opened and closed his mouth, unconnected to any of the drumbeats, was way too fascinating to me.

The Tyrades were great though, not least because they were dressed like cartoon Mexicans. “But sir, that was a stuffed gorilla.”

BLAST FROM MY PSYCHO PAST!

I think I once wrote about my college problem with being compelled to shout “DEAD BIRD!” whenever I saw a certain dead bird. Yes, here it is. Although I deserve an award for “Most Improved” in the Pointless OCD Activities category (most days), I now have a new, similar problem. A few months ago, someone in my workplace donated a kidney to his son. Kid is fine, dad is fine, everyone is fine and it's a happy story. However, since I learned of this I cannot pass this guy in the lobby or elevator without thinking about the fact that he has only one kidney, which leads to the urge to yell, “MISSING SOMETHING?” So far I have not done so, which makes it better than the dead-bird thing at least. For now.

THE VERY BORING “WHAT I DID THIS WEEKEND” PART

1. Took Nora to one of the “My First Movie” shorts programs at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival. She adored the one about Domo-kun, and enjoyed most of the others except for one, which took place during a thunderstorm and was too scary. That's right, Nora is fascinated by stories about ferocious wolves (Riding Hood, Three Pigs) but cannot handle natural phenomena like thunderstorms. Whatever. It was kind of hilarious to be in a movie theater full of preschoolers asking endless questions about the action on the screen and adult caretakers whispering endless explanations.

2. Served Nora a little dish of microwaved frozen corn for the first time.

Nora: This corn is not on the cob.
Me: No, it's not.
Nora: Who, who, who, who loosened it?
Me: Um, I'm not really sure.
Nora: I think it was somebody at the factory who loosened it. That is the somebody's work. He goes to his work job and he says, “Okay, now I will loosen the corn!” And then he does. And then I eat it. The end.

3. Halloween, of course. Nora went trick-or-treating with friends in Lincoln Park, hitting all the fancy boutiques on Armitage (well, ain't we the quality!), which was kind of awesome, because we came home not only with candy but also with samples of beauty gunk from Kiehl's and Lush. She even won a prize for her doctor costume! I believe this was not so much due to the originality of the costume as the facts that no one can resist a kid in a lab coat, that there were very few kids in her age group, and that she pretended to give the judge a shot with her syringe.

4. Patted and rocked and ssshhhhh'd and explained eight million times that there is nothing scary about going to bed.

We tried to change too much at once, I think. Nora is now sleeping in a toddler bed, which necessitated a minor retooling of her room and removal of her white-noise machine, since it does not fit under the new bed and there is no place to plug it in where I won't worry about her getting up in the night and deciding to Experiment With Electricity. The new bed was initially met with great excitement and lots of pride about being a big kid (cribs are for babies!) but Nora got this wide-eyed “are you for real?” look on her face when I actually tucked her in for the first time. And then it started. She's scared. She needs me. She “will hear a noise” (yes kid, you probably will, it is unlikely you will go completely deaf upon getting into bed). She wants the door open/closed, lights and lullaby CD on/off, in many arcane combinations. She has all kinds of wacky suggestions: that she stay up and play until she feels sleepy (no), that she sleep in our bed (no), or that I sleep on the floor next to her bed (hell to the no). She is not simply fucking around, she really is scared (albeit in an Existentialism-For-Toddlers Nameless Dread kind of way), so I am uncomfortable with closing the door and letting her cry. Thus my evenings for the past few days have been half relaxation, and half taking care of Little Miss Anxiety until she finally passes out.

It will get better, I know this. In fact, it is already improving. And I got some inkling about what this was all about on Saturday night, when Nora had ramped up the crying and hiccupping to a near-hyperventilation level. She gasped out that she wanted me to rock her in the rocking chair, and when I did so, she cried, “I need a bottle!”

And then I started to cry myself. Because Nora hasn't had a bottle for a year and a half now. Which means that this big-girl bed, this big-girl life, is hard for her sometimes. I swear, we should give every kid under four a medal for keeping their shit together even 60% of the time, because they were BABIES just moments ago and now they have to do all this BIG STUFF. I am tearing up just typing about it.

Of course, I did not get Nora a bottle. But I did mentally throw all other plans for that evening out the window in favor of rocking and rocking and rocking my almost-not-a-baby.

—mimi smartypants needs a bottle too.