hi, i think i have a blog?

so let's see, what has gone on in the past 3 weeks or so....

1) wile has become even more enamored of the phone, and now wants to call gwen all the time. to thier credit—more gwen's than wile's—they actually manage to have conversations of a sort. he says hi, she says hi, she tells him what she's been up to, he says "yeah" in the appropriate places.... aw, reminds me of my phone conversations with stephen the first couple of years we were dating!

2) my grandmother told my dad that if i didn't cut wile's hair, all of the kids were going to laugh at him on the first day of kindergarten.

3) someone peed in the vestibule under our stoop. peed! a human being! peed! essentially on my house! a while back the gate that usually closes off the vestibule rusted off the hinge that had probably been supporting it since the hoover administration, and we had been a bit slow in getting it fixed. so one day i'm in the living room and i hear diane, our neighbor from down the block, calling to me through the window. i hop outside, and she tells me that the day before she had been taking one of her walks to the corner bodega and saw a woman squatting in our vestibule! she yelled at her to get the hell out, and the woman told her it wasn't her house and to mind her own business, but diane is not someone to be reckoned with, and told the pisser that it might as well be her house, it was her block, and she best get her ass off our property. so the woman did, bellyaching the whole time, and diane made her wipe up the pee and asked her why in the hell she chose our vestibule when there were several perfectly good vacant lots, alleyways, and construction sites not a block away. the woman handed diane her sob story about getting out of rehab and not being able to make it and so on, so diane walked her back to her own house, gave her some food and a clean pair of underpants and told her never to set foot on our block again. i can't say i would have been so kind if i'd been the one to discover her....

4) wile watched shrek at aunt peggy's house ad now will not shut up about the big yellow guy and the donkey.

5) wile's infatuation with the yellow diapers has reached dangerously high levels. one morning after we managed to get him in to a red diaper, he told stephen "wile pee in red diapy, dada put on yellow diapy." soon he will learn to be less vocal about his conniving.

6) stephen started dvr-ing csi, which is in syndication on spike (the "network for men", god help us), and i just can't break free from its tractor beam. so i know much more about epithelials and gsr and blunt force trauma and marg helgenberger's hair than i ever dreamed i would. [one gigantic bonus to watching old csi episodes: seeing julie cooper as "lady heather", dominatrix.]

7) i cashed in my childhood savings bonds and got this:



wile calls it "mama's laptopooter"

and, since the loaner i had from stephen's mom was filled up with a couple of gallons of flood water, i went on ebay and got this too:



and just for good measure, this:



which, if you don't know, is a serger, a fancy kind of sewing machine.

8) we got a "kristen tree", and put up "kristen lights" on the porch. questionable pronunciation aside, wile grasped the concept of "kristen"—presents—with no problem, and took in the santa myth after only one telling. big guy in sled brings me presents? i'll buy that, no prob.

9) truck was reunited with his long lost love, the purple chenille blanket, which had been buried in the blanket basket for almost a year. i think all of wile's stuffed animals can sleep with both eyes shut again now.

10) wile now answers in the affirmative by saying "yeah, sure!"

11) the weekend before christmas wile and i were both felled by a stomach virus, thankfully not at the same time—he took the first 24 hours, i took the second, and somehow stephen escaped unscathed. it was a fairly routine barf-fest, but it did leave us with one of my favorite pictures ever. wile was sitting up on the island in the dining room drinking a cup of tea between barfs—he likes to sit on the counter and watch me while i do kitchen stuff, i think i'd been putting almond butter on my toast. he wanted to stay up there, so i sat down in a nearby chair to check my email, and when i looked up a couple of minutes later, i saw this:


dead asleep. (don't worry, i moved him to the couch after i took the picture and stopped laughing at him.)


12) i didn't feel i'd gotten my fill of barfing for the month, so i let wile eat five (five!) "hotadogs" for lunch on christmas day.



he didn't barf, but i held my breath the rest of the day.