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Rolly Rolly Merbaby
Pop some popcorn, it’s time for another Baby Bug home movie (4.75 mb quicktime)! Groan, hiss… I know, I know…. Home movies suck. Especially ones with me starring as the high pitched annoying mouse voice. This one is long too. I just couldn’t figure out where to edit it and then I just got lazy and figured I’d put a big disclaimer on the front end saying you don’t have to click on it. It’s your choice and really I mostly made this movie for the grandparents who appreciate these things. Or at least they lead me to believe they do. My mom recently had her phone disconnected. Maybe she got tired of me calling every day with the latest update on baby drool.
I was going to save this for Baby Bug’s three month movie (that’s my plan, make a movie every month) but I couldn’t wait. It’s just too big of news to wait. She’s rolling over! Sort of. With a little help from mom. Just a little push, it’s hardly cheating.
She’s so amazing these days. Between the buh-bbb-buh-buh blowing spit bubbles and the pterodactyl shrieks that clearly say “Mom! Rescue me from Dad who doesn’t have a clue!!” I am just overwhelmed with how brilliant she is. My little genius! And cute to boot! What am I going to do with myself? I’m completely and one hundred percent smitten with this little girl.
She was really good at the birthday party yesterday. Everyone LOVED her mermaid costume. I think I’m going to find someone to manufacture them for me and go into the mer-tail business… or something. I have so many ideas.
I wish I could be a professional idea popper. It would say that on my business card. Brenda Ponnay, professional idea popper. Then all I would have to do is sit around and think up ideas and maybe sketch them on paper so people could get them better. No worrying about capital or business plans or hiring and firing folks… just pure day dreaming up new stuff every day. That would be my dream job. Next to being a mom of course. Maybe I could do both.
Enough about me. Baby Bug was a perfect mer-angel-baby yesterday. Except the part where she starting screaming while I was videotaping the birthday girl and now I’m going to have to do some extreme editing or find a really good sound track to mask out the merbaby shrieks. Thankfully I was there as a guest first and a video-girl second so there isn’t as much pressure to create the perfect birthday dvd this time. In fact they said they’d be okay if I took four months to produce it since I have next to no free time to work any more.
It was really strange but good to be at the birthday party as a mom instead of my usual job as babysitter/photographer/videographer/girl-friday. I don’t think I mentioned it but this party was for Thing One, the little girl I used to babysit all the time. All these years I’ve been wishing I had a little girl like Thing One and now I do. Watching Thing One run around with all her little friends made me so excited for Baby Bug when she gets big enough to run around and play too. They are all going to be pals! There is only five years difference in their ages. That’s not too much. Maybe Thing One will babysit Baby Bug someday…it could happen.
Thing One loves Baby Bug. She’s so good with her. Even though she was surrounded by friends and relatives, and plenty of fun things to do (like a woman who was hired to make mermaids out of balloons), Thing One spent a lot of time at my side holding Baby Bug’s hand as it hung down limply from Baby Bug’s sleeping perch in the sling. Later I decided to let Thing One hold Baby Bug and it was the cutest thing. Thing One is so gentle. Even with her cast. (She recently fell off her bed and broke her elbow.) She kept asking me if we should get Baby Bug a pillow and if we could put Baby Bug to sleep in her bed. I don’t remember being that interested in babies when I was her age. I guess Baby Bug is like holding a living, breathing doll.
Kinda like how she is for me.
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Happy Birthday Toby
You know you’re a seasoned blogger when you’re bummed that everything turns out perfectly. It makes such a better story when life gets royally screwed up. Flat tire in the rain? Bring it on! Long lines at the DMV and an obnoxious clerk who gets your paperwork wrong and sends you to the wrong line where you waste your entire day? Yes! You can hear the chuckles from the cubicle walls already.
What’s the fun in a chocolate cake from a box mix that turns out perfect without any lumps or bumps? It isn’t lopsided, flat or burnt, the icing goes on smooth without ripping off the top layer of moist crumbs, and you even spell the birthday boy’s name right in soft light blue loopy letters!!! Snore. This is boring. At least bake a pacifier into the cake or slop some of that goopy pudding batter into Baby Bug’s ear or something. Sheesh!
Nope. Nothing hilarious happened. The cake was baked. The baby was securely fastened on like my personal little parasite. I didn’t bang her head on the oven door. I didn’t even make a mess with the eggs or chocolate powder mix. I had the whole day to plan out this little dinner shindig and everything went fine without a hitch.
It does, however, remind me of other shindigs that have gone down with lots of hitches. In fact, I’ve made many chocolate cakes (very much like this one), that turned into lopsided icing messes. I have no idea why the icing went on perfectly yesterday. I have never had such good luck before.
This all also reminds me of the first time Toby made me a cake. Way back when we were still dating (before the hills got dusty) and I had recently decided to turn away from my very tight knit family. I hadn’t spoken to my parents in months. It was a very very sad and lonely time for me. Especially on my birthday. Birthdays in my family were always grand events. Maybe because we didn’t celebrate Christmas we had to make up for it. (And no, my family isn’t Seventh Day Adventist…they’re just different.) There were always mountains of presents and any kind of dinner and cake your heart desired. The whole day was your day and I was pretty much the princess of the party every time my birthday rolled around. So you can imagine how pathetic I was feeling in my sterile white apartment in a new town with no family or friends or even a cat!
I decided to cheer myself up by making myself a cake. Chocolate of course. I’d never baked a cake by myself before. I was up to my ears in chocolate powder when Toby decided to drop by with some birthday flowers he’d picked from the city landscaping. He was so romantic back then… What I didn’t know about Toby then was that he was the master chemist. He took one look at me and my mess and quickly took over. All those years washing rat lungs in a lab taught him that me making a cake was a quick disaster. I know nothing about procedure, precision or orderlyness. I speed read, transpose numbers and skip steps. I talk a lot and get distracted and lose track of where I am. How many cups was that I just dumped into the bowl? I’m a wreck in the kitchen. Especially back then.
I think I fell in love with Toby when that cake came out of the oven. It smelled like cocoa heaven. I’d never seen a cake so beautiful outside of a magazine before. It was round without any sloping or bubbles that threaten to collapse into themselves. If food is the key to a man’s heart then chocolate cake is the key to a woman’s. Of course this is long before I discovered that Toby used to date a stripper, he smoked nearly a pack a day, he kept trash in his car a foot deep and he wears the same shirt for five days in a row*. But those were things I’d learn to love later.
*Not really. He’s just freaky with his clothes. If he finds a shirt he likes, he buys five of them. So it seems like he’s wearing the same shirt over and over. It drives me batty.
