Absurd

This morning:

Jellybean: "You can't wash your hair with milk!" cackle giggle snort

Me: huh?

Jellybean:  "You can't wash your hair with tea!" giggle chortle practically fall off the chair with glee...

Me: (catching on....) "No, you can't! You are soooooo silly....."

Jellybean: "I know."

Best diet plan, ever

One of the funniest things about having a mynah bird (I mean toddler) in the house is listening to their ever-expanding vocabulary.

Last Sunday dinner, for example, M asked Jellybean to eat or do something. Something she didn't want to do. So what did she do?

She gave him her famous frowny face, pointed a finger, and said "no daddy, UNACCEPTABLE."

Let's just say that I couldn't finish my dinner that night. I was too busy suppressing gales of laughter.

Career gal

A recent conversation between cousin H and Jellybean:

J: Goodbye. I'm off to work. (exiting stage right with a handbag over her arm)

H: Yeah? Where's work? (bemused)

J: Not here. (like, DUH)

My little jester

Jellybean is funny. The problem is, she knows it!

A few nights ago she was jumping up and down like an insane frog, or a Mexican jumping bean on speed, in our hallway. Her hair was flopping to and fro like a muppet show gone wild, and her knees were coming up to almost her chest with each dramatic hop.

The unadulterated glee in this physical activity was apparent due to her gleaming eyes and gigantic grin.

She looked adorable. And hilarious!

And she was REALLY making too much noise. The floorboards were creaking and I'm sure our neighbors thought we were repetitively dropping a bowling ball on our floor.

I admonished her to stop jumping, reminding her of the rule "no jumping after dark."

She stopped jumping, pausing to catch her breath, and announced "I'm funny!"

This one is SO going to see the inside of the principal's office at school.

Would sir like a mint?

So today, on the way home from school, Jellybean made a subway car of passengers laugh out loud.

How?

Well, as C2 related to me, he was holding Jellybean in his arms, standing in a somewhat crowded subway car, when she leaned in and sweetly told him he had "orangutan breath."

Is that a mouse in the wall?

Yesterday I was putting something by the door when a noxious smell overtook me. It was so gross I started inspecting (even sniffing) all 8 gazillion pairs of shoes and boots, to see if someone had stepped in dog poop and tracked it into the apartment. Then I had the sinking suspicion that a mouse had died inside the walls, and we'd be forced to endure the smell as the wee rodent's body rotted, then dried into inoffensive nothingness, over weeks if not months of time.

But no. The offending smell was.......Jellybean's backpack.

So we're (still! agh) potty training Jellybean. Some days she's damn near perfect. And....other days I end up washing out multiple sets of poopy underwear.

Each day at school, the Montessori sends home any accidents (poop or pee) - usually in a balled up, inside-out latex glove that holds the offending clothing inside of it. Pretty ingenious, if you ask me - but also kind of a pain to unravel.

Monday through Friday I have a wonderful babysitter, C2, that helps. He's very vigilant about taking the accidents out of the bag, so they don't linger in Jellybean's backpack.

And I check, too, when I pack her bag in the morning with her lunch.

Except somehow we missed two of them. They were tucked into a rarely used pocket of the backpack (which has more folds and fissures than the face of a nonagenarian living in Texas and eschewing sunblock).

Eeuw.

I'm not usually grossed out by things. I grew up discussing surgery at the dinner table with my mom (trained as a public health nurse), or helping to clean fish with my dad (the avid outdoorsman). If I had time, I'd actually watch the TV shows that film surgeries; I think that stuff is cool.

Smells, however? That is tougher. When I was pregnant, I could barely handle walking around outside in the summer, as sweaty folks walking past me smelled so repugnant it would make me gag.

I started to unwrap the balled up gloves....but I couldn't do it. Epic fail.

I wavered in my determination. My eyes watered and my courage failed me: I tossed them out. Sorry kid - those Hello Kitty undies went to a better place!

Bath time

The Aristocrats

Jellybean is hysterical.

Well, at least SHE thinks so.

See, the thing is, lately she's been telling 'jokes.'

She'll look at me (or M, or Monkey), and say something like this:

"Wooshoo gaga, mama pa mmmdada." Then she'll pause, waive her hand in the air with a declarative flourish (you know, like she's a freshman at college who's stayed up all night long having a really in-depth, heart-felt conversation about the meaning of gender in Shakespeare's sonnets, and VOILA she's made her point, dammit!), and then after about two seconds of dramatic silence.....

She'll start laughing.

Hard. Like, throw your head back and laugh until your belly aches hard.

It's so funny, that M and I start laughing, too! Convincing her that she's a comic genius....

I told one of the teachers at school that she's started to tell jokes....and before I could finish my story, one of the fathers said I should teach her The Aristocrats. Ha. Um, no. Not yet.

Backseat Driver

So, we recently got a new car. New to us (it's a used car), and definitely newer than the 2001 Passat we've been driving. We loved the Passat, and got another one, but boy - the changes between the two were pretty amazing.

We don't have a key, for example. It's a strange fob thing that you shove into a slot in the dashboard and it starts the car. Lord help us if that thing runs out of its battery!

And, even though it is a used car, it's a heckuva lot newer than the old one and therefore, the clutch is very different.

So different, in fact, that I stalled the car twice the first time I drove it.

No problem, really, as we were on a side street. Only Monkey was in the car with me. The first time I restarted the car, she didn't really make too much of it.

The second time, however, she told me that she thought we needed a new car, as that one was "broken."

My cousin H likes to bring it up and tease me, reminding me that my driving so under-impressed my eldest daughter she thought I broke the car.

Keep it up H, keep it up. Smart aleck. Guess it really does run in the family......

Chicken soup has nothing on this...

I caught some bug and am still not up to speed. The vertigo is gone and I can function, but I'm exhausted. Which is why I'll take medicine in any form, including love and laughter.

Monkey has been supplying both to me - it's better than chicken soup for what ails me!

I wasn't able to bring to girls into school Friday morning, so M did the duty (thanks love, I needed your help) and dropped them off at school.

When I picked the girls up that afternoon, I felt better but still pretty wretched. Just wrung-out and beat-up. But I got to tell you, when I went into the gym to grab Monkey she FLEW across the room, running into my arms and asking "mommy, do you feel better now?" It was awesome. Just pure love.

Then, on the way home, we were walking a bit slower than usual and I declined Monkey's offer to run with her (as I was carrying Jellybean in the ergo, plus all their stuff and my purse - the normal sherpa-mommy routine). She asked why and I explained that I wasn't feeling great.

She wanted to know why. So, I told her that I'd caught a bug.

"Hmmm. Well, I've caught a bug, too!" she declared. I confess, I thought that this conversation was not going to end well.

But, then she turned to me and brightly chirped "my bug is a ladybug - what's yours?"

I about fell over laughing. Thanks kid, that was exactly what I needed.

There's a bathroom on the right*

Monkey has been introduced to The Sound of Music, and she's in love.

"Is is a school night?" is the introductory question (since no TV or movies is allowed on a school night). As soon as she verifies that it isn't, she will ask to watch the "singing movie."

And, as we walk through the streets of the city on our commute to and from school, more often than not we're belting out "Doe a Deer" at the top of our lungs (to the amusement of most, the annoyance of some....).

The part that always makes me laugh is her mangled lyrics:

"Tea, a drink with jam and bread" has become "tea, a lick of garlic bread." It cracks me up every single time!

*sorry Creedence Clearwater Revival, but everyone gets your lyrics wrong!

That's my little brother, all right!

My (little) brother N and his (gorgeous) wife G live in Boulder, CO with their two impossibly adorable girls.

And, like all modern families, we stay in touch however we can. The best is when texts fly back and forth - often they are the spur of the moment snippets that make you laugh.

True to form, I got to laugh out loud when I got this text from G this past weekend:

*******************
We pulled into the Goodtimes drive-thru today and HP asked where we were. N replied "At the drive-thru." And HP said "At the beer store?" Apparently N has taken H to the drive-thru liquor store more than I was aware.

Nice.
*******************

Now, the part that made me laugh wasn't the fact that Daddy N got busted by HP - no, I laughed because my first thought was - they have drive-through liquor stores? Cool!

Um, yeah. Can you tell who I'm related to?