We did it! We did the local Two Mile Fun Walk! Walking two miles is really no big deal for us seasoned walkers except that we did it without our beloved jogging stroller!!! That stupid $@#@$% stroller.

Granted, the stroller was a freebie and we do leave it outside in the weather day in and day out. So it should be no surprise that all the wheels are cracked from sun damage. On most days the tires are nearly flat but it hobbles along pretty well anyway. It takes us over sand, grass, rock and gravel. It’s probably been on more adventures than most strollers just because of it’s superior light frame, the giant bike-sized wheels and the fact that I’m not afraid to get it dirty. It’s a freebie, who cares! It’s an off-roading stroller and we love it. Yeah, it veers a little to the left but I make it work.

On the morning of the race Bug and I got up super early. We slathered on sun screen, scraped a brush through our hair, ate a quick power breakfast and then rolled to the nearest gas station to pump up the tires. I’m pretty good at this tire-pumping business. We probably do it once a month. All the tires really needed air but the left one was particularly bad because the valve stem was sideways and you know what that means. It’s probably cut by the metal frame of the wheel. But whatever. We pumped it up and hoped for the best.

Five minutes later we were wheeling our way around the crowd at the start line. The Women’s 5K race is before the Fun Walk and people were everywhere smiling, laughing and cheering. It’s very easy to get caught up in the excitement of the big race. I did notice that the stroller was leaning to the left but it always does that a little bit so I ignored it. Besides here we were in the middle of all the excitement. It’s fun! Race day! Woo hoo!

Then a nice lady pointed out my very very very flat left tire. I looked down and it was the saddest thing I have ever seen. Cracked rubber riding on metal. No wonder Bug was almost falling out the left side of the stroller. So I did what anyone would do. I parked that sad miserable jogger stroller by a trash can and got in line for the race/walk anyway. It’s not like anybody is going to steal a very faded jogger stroller with a bum wheel.

My only concern was whether or not I could make it to the finish line carrying Bug. I knew she’d walk/run a lot of it but she is NOT the world’s fasted walker. Thankfully there were a lot of other kids running the fun walk too so she tried her best to keep up with them. It helped a lot.

We had so much fun. I don’t know why I worried so hard. I did have to carry her quite a bit but it was fun and the camaraderie you enjoy while walking and talking with the other participants completely takes your mind off how much your arms might be aching from carrying a thirty-one pound child. And really, she is pretty light. She grabs onto me like a monkey and we walk along more balanced than you’d expect. I know I’m lucky. I’ve held other kids her size before and they were an instant backache.

We made it all the way to the end and made some new friends along the way. I love this race and I hope to keep doing it for as long as we live here. It’s such a great family-oriented event and you feel super healthy and relaxed for the rest of the day. I wish I could do this every day. Maybe next year Bug will run the whole thing. My dream is that we do a marathon together someday. That would be the ultimate.

And of course we’ll get tattoos when we finish. It’s tradition!

I forgot I did have some photos of Bug decorating the tree. She hung all the sticky old candy canes (from last year? the year before maybe?) in her eye-view of course. Then the next three days we spent haggling over why she couldn’t eat them all day long. Finally, frustrated with my little negotiator, I threw them out. They were so gross. Not that letting a toddler eat a candy cane with all the sticky drool coating her chin and clothes is any less gross but I just felt bad letting her eat dust from last year’s Christmas.

I promised we’d buy some new ones at the grocery store. Which we did, of course. But I bought the little tiny ones that are not shrink-wrapped and funny thing, they don’t hang on the tree very well. Oh well. I guess they’ll just have to stay in the cupboard out of sight. Bah humbug. I’ll break them out for special treats so they don’t get all dusty for next year and repeat the whole cycle.

Here she is eating one. That kid loves candy canes. My mom says I did too when I was her age. I guess it’s not such a bad thing as long as she eats her broccoli too.

I’ve been trying to get a good picture of her in front of the tree for my yearly calendar that I give to the grandparents but I’ve been very unsuccessful. She’s not my little poser anymore. If I ask her to smile, she gives me her “Eba eyes” frown or runs away cackling. Getting her to hold still in low light is pretty much impossible. I should just take a picture of her as a blur and call it a day.

This one is sort of cute but not really Christmas-y enough even though she is holding an ornament. Those are the iron-on transfer-paper ornaments we made last year. I wish I felt like making them again. It would be neat to have photos for each year. I haven’t been very motivated lately. Not to worry though, usually great bursts of motivation follow lulls of mediocrity. I probably just need to lay off the sugar. I’ve been eating so much crap lately.

Speaking of eating a lot of cookies…yesterday was the Christmas walk in our little town. All the vendors come out and hand out cups of hot cocoa and cookies. There are bounce houses for the kids and bands playing live music on every corner. It’s pretty festive and loud. Forget trying to take a nap while it is going on. The town pretty much forces you to get out and enjoy Christmas—which is a good thing really.

This year was the first year that Bug and I actually “walked” the whole thing. I remember last year we strollered and the year before she fit in the baby carrier. I miss those days already. Funny how things change so much every year. More and more I’m finding that the stroller is more of a hindrance than a help. She always wants to walk anyway. She doesn’t keep up as much as I’d like (She is the worst lollygagger ever!) but I’m trying to learn how to slow down anyway.

I find myself getting so impatient with her as she wants to circle every tree we come across and pick every dandelion. I just have to tell myself that some day I’ll miss these years. Someday she will be impatient with me so I need to be kind and let her have her time. I think I read somewhere that you can’t really force a toddler to walk fast anyway. If you have the time, you’re better off just letting them dawdle and go along with the adventure of it. It’s hard for me though. Especially when I’m carrying her seven half-eaten cookies, a bottle of water, three balloons, my purse that is overflowing with all those things we might need and my coat that has become too hot to wear. Patience, thy name is motherhood.

So anyway, that was fun. She loved the bounce houses. She loved the petting zoo and she LOVED the live music. I wish I had caught a photo of her dancing. But I was so loaded down with carrying everything I had a hard time being spontaneous with the camera. Excuses, excuses I know.

She really loves music. Part of me wonders if she might express her creativity (that’s in her genes) through music. I’ve plunked at the piano for years but I’m not really any good. I know Toby is musical even though he doesn’t play any instruments. He has a terrible knack for remembering tunes so well that they drive him insane. Isn’t that weird? He actually hates listening to songs that have strong melodies because they get stuck in his head so bad. I personally don’t have that problem so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

When we were listening to one band play, Bug was keeping time by swaying from side to side. The lead singer noticed and warned me that I might have a musician on my hands. I don’t know if he’s right. I think most kids are good at keeping time but I do know that Bug definitely has a penchant for music. She picks up tunes so fast and is always on key, often better than the adults.

Enough about that. I wanted to write more but she is dunking her pahs in her breakfast yogurt and now I have a mess to clean up. Later!

I think somebody told me a long time ago not to go to the local pumpkin patch in the morning because it is bombarded with all the schoolchildren on field trips. Of course I forgot this little bit of information when we headed off yesterday morning. Even if I had remembered it, I might have ignored that advice anyway because my day is ruled with an iron fist by The Nap Schedule. I’m a slave to The Nap Schedule.

Stupid naps.

We have to do everything before eleven in the morning because if we don’t and Baby Bug falls asleep in the car on the way back from wherever we went, then that is the END of the nap as I know it. No time to work on my computer, no time for freelance, no time to work on a blog post…pretty much no time for me. Which is a very very long day for me and my grumpy toddler. I try to avoid it when I can.

We made it to the pumpkin patch and back for The Nap but we were a little worse for it. I think I’m over the local pumpkin patch. It’s still great and I would send anyone off to see it for an adventure but I’m done with it. The smaller patches are just as much fun and you spend less money.

I don’t want to bad mouth the local farm at all because they are working very hard with the community to do a lot of good. They offer organic fruits and vegetables and I think they even have some kind of program where you can get a box of vegetables and fruit a week (I need to look into that more). They offer a lot of activities for kids. They’ve got the educational field trip streamlined down to Disneyland levels of crowd control.

I think that’s where they are losing me: the crowd control. I felt very shuffled along with the crowd but we weren’t part of a group so we didn’t get the group benefits. No free pumpkin for Baby Bug. Of course I could buy one for her (and I would have but they were pretty sad rotten pumpkins to pick from). The employees tried really hard to include us but the groups ruled the day. And I understand that.

The groups were fun too. Bug loves other kids. I’m just not so fond of them myself. I love kids. Just not hordes of them all at one time. I just want to meander along and look at things with my toddler and not get clobbered by a gang of seven-year-olds.

When we did break away from the crowds, everything seemed so trampled and picked-over. I thought we were early in the season but I guess I don’t know squat. There are a lot of pumpkins still but more than half of them are rotten. Maybe it was just a bad year with the heat.

So I paid eight bucks to ride on the wagon and feed the goats. We didn’t even buy a pumpkin. I’ve seen better ones at the grocery store. But I don’t mean this to be a big rant about how dumb the local pumpkin patch is. It’s just better if you don’t have high expectations. We needed something to do to pass the time and this was fun.

It was worth it for the petting zoo. Bug has been really into petting goats lately. That was one time that I was glad I was not part of a school group. They came in and swarmed the animals and then after ten minutes or so they were shuffled out again. I know if Bug had been part of the group she would have been so sad to be forced to leave. So I let her stay and stay and stay. Because we could! What a privilege! We can hang out with goats all day!

As long as it doesn’t run into nap time of course.

The other day, as I was hustling Baby Bug out the door with a cup of coffee in one hand and her buttered waffle (that she refused to eat) in the other, I saw my landlady’s tell-tale half orange half brown curly head out of the corner of my eye. She was lurking at the bottom of the stairs as she is wont to do. She always does this. As I tried to talk Baby Bug into wearing shoes (which is like trying to push water up hill), my crazy landlady quickly disappeared around the side of our house.

I did what I always do. I pretended I didn’t see her. I’ve learned over time that visiting with my landlady never goes well. You could be the most perfect tenant on earth with nothing to talk about other than how much you love living here (in spite of your ten-year-old rug that is covered in so many stains that it scares your friends and neighbors away) and she will turn the conversation around to some thing that you need to do in order to keep her property nice and then she’ll tell you that you look like you are putting on weight. Are you expecting another child? etc etc…

She does it every time. She’s just funny that way. It’s not like she means to be mean. In fact, she is quite doting and will tell you that you are her favorite tenant. She even gave us $50 off our rent as a present when Baby Bug was born. She does things like that. But she’s also like that Grandmother who smothers you with love and then sticks you in the back with a giant guilt-trip covered knife. Except in her case, she would stick you with the knife in the front because she’s not that subtle.

I chalk it up to her foreignness. She comes from Guatemala and according to her, she became a wealthy landowner scrubbing one toilet at a time. I believe her. She’s very tenacious like that. If she wants something done, it gets done. I’ve seen her in action. When she hired men to put in new stairs for us and a new floor in the kitchen after the plumbing debacle, she rattled off strings of staccato Spanish that made them quiver in their boots. She’s only five feet tall but she means business.

Usually our conversations with her run along the lines of: You-should-take-better-care-of-my-falling-down-piece-of-property-because-I-am-very-nice-to-you-and-let-you-live-here-for-very-cheap-rent. Which is true. So we endure her crazy requests. Like the time she made me get rid of my garden because some of the leaves of my plants touched the wall and THE BUGS could crawl up those leaves and into her house! Or that time she handed us a 12 oz. can of bug killer to get rid of the termites that infest every house in our neighborhood and swarm like bees every time the weather gets above 80 degrees… I could go on and on…

Anyway, you get the picture. She’s just whacky. But you have to love her because we do pay half of what everyone else pays in rent around here. She spends half the year in Florida visiting her sister and only shows up every six months or so with some crazy request. As long as we never have to ask her to repair anything, we’re fine. We have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. We fix our own problems, usually.

So back to my story.

I finally got Bug into her shoes. We’re clambering down the stairs, me holding my coffee with the buttered waffle balanced on top and Bug bouncing off my other hand like a tether ball. It’s our usual controlled-fall-down-the-stairs routine. I was about ready to toss the waffle into the trash at the bottom of the stairs but of course Bug had not eaten anything for breakfast that day (part of her every-other-day food strike) and I knew the minute I got rid of it she would start crying that buttered waffles are the only thing on earth that she would eat. I’ve been through this before.

I turn the corner to head to my car and who do I see? My landlady of course. She’s calling my cell phone on her cell phone but my cell gets no coverage within a mile of my house, so her call is not going through.

“Oh hi!” she says. “I was just trying to call you.”

I smile and try to make small talk while Baby Bug runs around me like crazy and I end up dropping her buttered waffle face down on the dirty cement. Could my morning get any worse? Of course it could! Ha ha!

In her usual style, my landlady gets right down to business. Apparently, someone in the neighborhood has called her to complain about the “graffiti” that Baby Bug and I chalked on the sub wall that divides our alley from the restaurant we live behind. According to “someone anonymous,” our chalk drawings of cute little cats are bringing down the neighborhood. (What?!!)

It’s like the Crips and the Bloods moved in and any minute now we are going to set up shop selling crack! If you look really hard you can see the cats I drew are pointing to the meth lab (with their eyes!). See these wipes in my diaper satchel? They’re actually soaked in LSD.

Sigh.

I’m being sarcastic, in case it wasn’t obvious. Sometimes these things don’t read as well as they sound in my head. But seriously, what harm are my little kid drawings doing to anyone? What kind of neighborhood do we live in if we can’t draw chalk on the sidewalk and occasionally up the side of a dirty old cement wall?!! Is it any worse than the urine stench from all the people who stop their limousines here to use our alley as their own personal hidden bathroom?

I told her as much and she shook her head in agreement. What kind of crazy world do we live in? Orange County, obviously. You can’t own a car older than ten years around here without people raising their eyebrows, but if you want to molest your children in private that’s totally okay. If you don’t mow your lawn they run you out of town with pitchforks. Good thing we don’t have a lawn.

I’ve been thinking about her claim though. It just seems a bit fishy. Why would someone anonymous call her to complain about graffiti near our property? She lives on the next block over. How do they know she owns our apartment? Are these things registered with the city? Did the city call her? Why wouldn’t the city just give us a ticket? It all seems very weird.

Especially since she just happened to be on our property anyway to let in a plumber into our neighbor’s house (also her tenant). While she was there she took the liberty to rearrange my watering hose, break off a few leaves from some of the plants that were dangerously near the stucco walls of our house and pretty much meddle with things.

She just bugs.

I’m thinking she didn’t like my silly cartoon drawings and made up this story about someone anonymous calling to complain. It’s not exactly her straightforward style but it is whacky, which is very much like her.

Regardless, the chalk drawings have been up there since Memorial Day. I don’t think they were hurting anything but maybe it was time to take them down anyway. They have been there all summer. Maybe in someone else’s eyes I am that neighbor who puts up a million tacky Greek goddess statues (of which my landlady has two).

I don’t like my landlady. She’s not my favorite person in the world to talk to. But if washing the chalk cats off the cement wall keeps her out of my hair, I’ll do it. I’ll do just about anything for cheap rent.

And yes, she did tell me I looked like I’ve been putting on weight and my skin is too dark like I’ve been out in the sun too much. She’s right. I have. I have been eating pancakes every morning with abandon and genetics are a bitch. Her truthfulness hurts like a dump truck running over my toe but if she can’t tell me, who can? So I’m just going to write about it here, try to drop 250 calories from my daily intake and dodge her next time I see her.

We live on an alley. I’ve mentioned it before. It’s just part of living around here. No yard, no grass, some city-planted trees and a bunch of cement! Poor us. But hey, the ocean is just five blocks away so I guess I can get over the lack of a real yard to play in. It could be worse. We could live in the city with no yard, no grass and no ocean. I think we’ll survive.

Before I had Baby Bug, I wondered what it would be like to raise a child here. When I was a kid we always had a huge back yard. There was always a garden, some form of a rusty old swing set, a treehouse, plenty of mud and dozens of neighborhood kids to run the streets with. We lived on a barely-paved, dead-end street in the country. We never worried about cars running us over, let alone a cement truck barreling down the highway. I don’t think I even knew what a jackhammer was until I moved here.

So what do you do when you have a restless child who wants to play outside but you can’t just push her out the door into your relatively safe backyard? After you’ve gone to the park and the beach about seventeen million times, you start to look for other options.

We like to take walks in the alley. There are neighbors we can visit and all sorts of things to explore. There are trash cans to peek into (from a distance of course—nothing gross), cracks to follow, rocks to collect, dandelions to pick…we find things to do. She finds things to do. I just follow her and mutter to myself about my lack of cell phone coverage.

My latest fun thing to do in the alley is to collect found objects. I’m sort of picky about what I will stick in my pocket though. No leaves or rocks or anything natural. I like to pick up old rusty washers and nuts and bolts, paper clips and screws. It’s silly I guess, but I think it’s fun. In my mind I’m going to create an art piece with these someday. I don’t have enough yet to even begin anything but someday I will. That is if Toby doesn’t find and toss my collection first—he thinks I’m nuts. I guess I’m just a scavenger. But really, I’m probably saving someone from a flat tire so you could think of it as a good deed.

It’s not really the best project for Baby Bug yet. I don’t mean to encourage her to pick up dirty, oily, possibly sharp things. It’s fine because she’s way more interested in finding rocks and leaves anyway. But it does help me to keep my head from exploding when she wants to go anywhere but in a straight line while we are out walking. I’ve always liked collecting things. It’s like hunting for sea shells but without the fear of getting a ticket from the beach police.

(Yes, they will give you a ticket here if you collect shells. Of course an odd one in your pocket now and then isn’t going to get you into trouble but they really don’t want you disturbing the natural habitat—which is understandable, sadly. People are always walking around and squishing the poor little sea animals that live in the tide pools. )

Collecting old nuts and bolts and discarded pieces of junk isn’t going to get anybody into trouble as far as I know. As long as it isn’t smelly and stinky and going to take up space in our house, it should be a perfectly harmless hobby. Someday this collection is going to be a huge collage of cool pieces of junk: 100% recycled art! Maybe it’s hard to visualize but I can see birds with paperclip wings and washer eyelids with marbles for eyes. Screws and nails might be the sharp ragged grass. Who knows, it might just be a big collage of junk that nobody wants all glued together in one piece. But it will be fun. It will be a lesson in reclaiming what has been discarded.

I’ve also been wanting to do this at the beach too but with plastic found objects instead of metal. The beach is always filled with brightly colored bottle caps and twisty ties and tumbled who-knows-whats. That will have to be another blog post though because we haven’t done it yet and I have no photos!

Stay tuned!

Isn’t it a nice day to play…CROQUET!? When I look at these pictures, I feel like I’m writing a parody post for stuff white people like. I’m sure you can play this game in the inner city too (if you can find some grass to stick your little hoopty-hoop thingys in) but whenever I think of croquet, I always think of stuffy white people wearing summer sweaters and sipping lemonade on the lawn.

Which is why we were playing it at Whoorl’s house!

Just kidding! Whoorl is a hoot, as I’m sure you know. There is nothing stuffy about her. I want to move to her street. There are three or four houses that have lush green lawns butting up to each other and when the sun starts going down, everybody comes out of their houses and just hangs out outside. They talk and joke and their kids play together on the lawn. People bring you cocktails just because you are sitting there. It’s like the American dream come true over there. Sometimes music even comes out of the sky and the credits of your life start rolling down from the horizon.

Meanwhile, back at my house, we have no yard and cement to play on. Maybe that gives us street cred or something but between you and me it is boring in the summertime. Patios are great and all but there is nothing like running around outside in bare feet and not having to worry about stepping on bottle caps and broken pieces of glass. So we like to go to Whoorl’s. Especially when she has new toys to play with.

The kids had so much fun with this snake sprinkler thing. I think Whoorl is going to write about it on Parent Dish soon. She’ll give you the full scoop. I will just add my two cents and say that it was super fun and very toddler-friendly. If I had a lawn, I would buy one of these things. I would have the greenest lawn ever. I might even have a swamp.

After the sprinkler session, and a good nap for two tuckered-out kids, we dressed them up like little JCrew models and let them have at it with wooden mallets. Then we sipped some cocktails and took photos—which may or may not have a lot to do with how much fun the whole evening was.

Cheers to long summer days and friends who live close by and serve refreshments!

NaBloPoMo Day Three

I was ready to post letters tonight but somehow, magically at the stroke of nine p.m., I became incredibly tired. I hate it when this happens. At least I didn’t fall asleep putting Baby Bug to bed. I do that all the time and then I get nothing done. It’s pathetic though. I drank a whole cup of coffee at five and I swear I could fall asleep in less than seven minutes if I put my head down right now.

Maybe I’m tired today because I spent a marathon three hours at the Duck Pond with Baby Bug. It sounds like fun, right? Nice weather, ducks, water, a park, a fun kid… what could go wrong?

A mom who is paranoid that her kid is going to topple over head first into the pond, is what could go wrong. Baby Bug is not known for her steadiness on her feet and she falls head first at home all the time without a pond. I was just waiting for it to happen and I think my shoulders are a mass of knotted muscles because of it.

I had told Toby how much fun Baby Bug has been having lately when we go on walks together. Actually, to be completely honest, I was complaining about how getting anywhere takes a million years because she has to examine every rock, stick and leaf. And then when she does finally catch up to me, she often decides she wants to go back the other way and I spend a lot of time calling her to hurry up and stay by mommy.

Toddlers are toddlers and they will do what they do. I’m learning the hard way that if you force them to do things your way (ie: walk forward in a straight line) they will buckle and balk, scream and yell, twist and shout in every imaginable combination until your eyeballs roll back in your head and you are convinced that letting them win just this one battle will not be the end of the world.

Sigh. It makes me very tired. I think I spent half of today holding her wiggling body as tight as I could so that she didn’t expel herself off of me and land headfirst on the concrete. Kicking, wiggling, pushing herself away… you name it. It is amazing what a little twenty-pound body and a will of steel can do. I don’t think I could get a better work out if I took three spinning classes back to back.

I want to say the duck pond was fun. It was really pretty (green algae and all) but it was so much work. I don’t think I’ll be going back anytime soon. It didn’t help that I misplaced my phone and we spent an hour looking for it with Baby Bug struggling against me. I tried carrying her in my arms, I carried her upside down, I put her on my shoulders. It was just impossible.

I would have strapped her into the stroller but Toby and I had the bright idea that I should leave the stroller at home so Baby Bug could “be free to roam and explore”. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking about the great big body of green water that she could fall into. Nor was I thinking about her will power of steel. A “walk in the park” was anything but a “walk in the park.”

It’s not like she would drown. The pond is only a few feet deep. But still, I just didn’t really want to go sloshing in to save her. With the mud and wet clothes and the probability that she would go head first… it all seemed like a bad idea to me.

In the end, I won’t say it was a complete bust. She didn’t fall in the water and I got a bunch of pictures. As a reward, I think we both will sleep really good tonight. All’s well that end’s well, right? Just don’t ask me to go to the duck pond until Baby Bug learns to swim.

We’re covered with smoke here. You probably saw something about it on television. Everybody I know is fine, so don’t worry. We’re all rubbing our eyes and coughing but we are in no danger of having our houses burn down. The fire near us is a whole city away and there are lots of streets and concrete between us. I guess that’s one good thing about living in an urban area. We don’t have that much wild brush to burn up here.

It probably wasn’t very smart of me but I was so in awe of the rose colored light, I packed up Baby Bug and took her down to the tide pools for an impromptu photo-shoot. I hope she doesn’t blame me when she develops asthma later in life. I don’t know how bad it was to be breathing this air. It didn’t hurt to breath and I saw a few other families out enjoying the strangeness of it all.

Maybe I can sell my photos and pay for her doctor bills. Ack. I shouldn’t joke like that. But it was pretty amazing to be out in this strange other-worldly light, taking pictures. I would have stayed longer if the battery in my mom-minivan camera didn’t go dead. Along with everything else that is dumb with this camera it also has a battery that goes dead with very little warning. It lasts the normal amount of time but when it starts blinking that means your photo shoot is pretty much over immediately. Even turning it off and then back on again doesn’t work.

But guess what!!!! I don’t hate my doltish camera anymore! You know why? Because it’s waterproof. WATERPROOF is sooooooooooo cool! It was the weirdest feeling to deliberately dunk a piece of electrical equipment in a tide pool today. I was all ready for it to shock me or at least start changing funny colors on the lcd screen. But nope. It just kept on working and working. I LOVE IT!!! My camera is an amphibian! How cool is that?

You should have seen the look on the girl’s face who was standing near me when I dunked my camera in a tide pool. Her eyeballs popped right out of her head. Priceless, that’s what her shock was. I think I’m going to go around dunking the camera in water just to repeat that over again.

Being amphibious makes all the other stuff that I hate about the silly camera not so bad. I can put up with the slow shutter button response. I can put up with pukey color it adds to all my photos. I can even put up with the stupid lcd screen that goes dim one second after I start to frame my shot. I’m sorry I said all those mean things about it because when it comes to taking a beating and still keeping on ticking, my camera can kick your camera’s butt. (I say that affectionately, of course. As a rule, I’m against cameras fighting.)

But enough about the silly camera. It was really fun showing Baby Bug the tide pools. I can’t believe I haven’t taken her down there more. I used to walk there all the time when she was small enough to fit in the baby carrier but I never let her actually get down and look at the little crabs walking around.

It was like walking around on the moon. Poor Baby Bug, I was so distracted by my picture taking that she got herself in quite a pickle. The ground is very uneven and rough and her little feet just couldn’t find an easy way to go where she wanted to go. Eventually, she fell into a pool and got very upset because she had her shoes on. “Shoes ON!” she cried.

I love her little orange shoes but she has nearly outgrown them so I told her it was okay that she got her feet wet. I couldn’t very well take her shoes off because the rocks are sharp with barnacles and crustaceous skeletons (is that redundant?). So I decided her little orange shoes could take one for the Gipper. Or Gromit or whatever. It was worth it for the experience.

Okay, yes, I admit it. I was selfish and I wanted to play with my amphibious camera. Take one for me, cute little orange shoes. (Actually the shoes are fine. Much like my camera!)

We had some excitement this morning watching a house being torn down. It’s not every day houses get munched with giant tractor jaw monsters… unless you live in our neighborhood and then it’s every other day. It was kinda fun being up close and personal. I apologize for the bad filming technique, I was holding the baby in the other arm and well… I’m just not that great at filming.

If you liked this movie, you might like this one too (8.4mb quicktime)

So maybe you’re wondering how Baby Bug and I spent Memorial Day? Maybe you read something somewhere or saw some pictures… And maybe you want to hear my side of the story. Ha! Of course you do.

Here’s how holidays usually go down at the secret agent house: Wake up. Do the same thing you did they day before. The end. Weekends work the same way. Every day is Monday and every day is Saturday too. That’s how it works when your home is an office and there are no boundaries between work and state. (Of course we’re not counting the weekends I go to out to the sticks but I can’t be going out there every weekend. Toby would starve.)

Because I’m brave and lack social skills, I emailed Whoorl and told her that I had nothing planned for Memorial Day and I was day dreaming about sitting on her patio and sipping something. I also told her that I day dreamed about Baby Bug eating her plants and wrecking havoc on her very swank and very carefully decorated patio.

Let me just take a sidebar and explain how everything at Whoorl’s is soooo perfect. They have patio chairs with pillows and there is this wooden bench with a basket thing hung on the wall behind it. We’re not talking country clutter either. This basket thing is ART. ART OUTSIDE! They have art everywhere. Cool art. Art that makes me want to make my own art. I love their house. Their plants are even stylish. I like to visit and pretend I’m living in a magazine. End sidebar.

I didn’t really expect Whoorl to invite me over. She lets me come over all the time on my way to the park but that’s just on week days. She usually has plans on the weekends and holidays. She’s social and well connected and has friends in LA who are hip and cool. I figured she’d laugh at my funny joke about Baby Bug wrecking her patio decorations and then tell me how she’d love to hang out but she has to go to this super-fun-smashing-get-together (or a football game or something.., What? Is football season over?).

Imagine my surprise when she invited me over on Saturday AND Monday for margaritas aka whoorlgaritas that are famous in this state. And THEN she said that if I didnt’ come over on both days, she might cry. What?!! She really did! She did! I should post the email. I was so happy! Wowie Zowie, I have real holiday weekend plans! Even Toby was kinda proud of me. He thinks I should drink more often. I’m sort of a prude when it comes to drinking. I just started late so I always feel like I must be a lush if I have a glass of wine or something.

Saturday came around and I packed up Baby Bug (and her tea set) in the stroller and headed over for a tea party with Wito and Whoorlgaritas with Whoorl. Let me just say, the whoorlgaritas: they are yummy! Not too sweet. Not too tequila-ish… but juuuuuuust right. So just right that you could easily have another one and think nothing of it. Until all of a sudden you’re just sitting there, chatting away and ka-thunk you feel very very whoozy and glowy and maybe you better keep sitting down and let Whoorl rescue the baby from eating that aloe vera plant instead of getting up yourself and tripping over your own feet. Don’t worry. I didn’t drink that much. But I did feel very glowy and happy and was perfectly content to just sit and be still and not worry about taxes or bills or babies that don’t nap.

But it doesn’t stop there. We continued the fun in two parts. Part two was on Memorial day when we moved the party to the front yard. I am SO jealous of Whoorl’s front yard. She has real grass. A lot of it. Not like you folks in Canada or Utah where you can’t see from one side of your property to the other but relative to my complete lack of dirt or grass, Whoorl is living la vida verde. She could even play croquet on her lawn if she wanted to.

The afternoon was divine. The sun came out so D (Mr. Whoorl) set up an umbrella for us and Whoorl spread out her pretty flowered bedspread. She says, “What? This old thing? I use it to cover up furniture and pick up dog poop.” (What! Just kidding on the dog poop part.) The kids played and Wito ate all Baby Bugs snacks (which Baby Bug didn’t mind at all because she was too busy hugging him). Then some neighbors came over and it was more chatting and sipping and kids playing till the cows came home. I love our neighborhood because it is like this. Everyone hangs out in their front yard.

Of course these sorts of things come to an end eventually because there are nap schedules to keep to and husbands to feed and such. Baby Bug and I wheeled ourselves home and then both conked out and took a nice whoorlywoozy nap until 6:30 pm! An hour past her dinner time! Oh no! Everything went down hill from there. I didn’t realize that I’ve inadvertently put Baby Bug on a pretty strict schedule. If we waver off of it more than an hour, all hell breaks lose. When bedtime came around she just wouldn’t fall asleep. She was content to sit in my arms and listen to me sing to her for TWO WHOLE HOURS but every time I would put her down in her crib, she woke right up and cried and cried and cried and cried. It was awful.

What have I learned from this? Whoorlgaritas are tasty and fun but you better get home before the nap clock strikes or else you will turn into a pumpkin who stays up all night long singing to a fussy baby.