You know what is a bad idea?

Watching Medium when you are, except for one sleeping toddler and 2 lazy cats, the only one home.

Am I a bad feminist for admitting that a. I am SO OVER the 5,000,000 performances of The V@gin@ Monologues that take place around here this time of year, and b. I didn’t think it was that good a play to begin with?

***

Getting on my ornery copy-editor soapbox, I need to rant ever-so-briefly about the incorrect usage of the v-word that proliferates in this country.

Bazillions of people out there are teaching their girls to refer to their front bottoms as v@gin@s. That term describes part of the INTERNAL structure of the ladyparts. It is NOT the term for the external elements to which they actually mean to refer.

***

Best search ever:
diaper rash gone horribly wrong

1. A partial listing of things Old McDonald has on his farm, with the noises each makes:

kangaroo — dart! dart!
birdie — tweet! tweet!
doggie — bark! bark!
hen — spit! spit!
llama — fff! fff!
car — vroom! vroom!
orange — orange! orange!
police car — wee-ooh! wee-oooh!
ambulance — wee-ooh! wee-ooh!
ferret — ee! ee!
rug — rug! rug!
bear — oo! oo!
list — list! list!

2. When she is not making me sing Old McDonald for upward of 45 minutes at a stretch (you think I kid. but I do not. sweet fancy moses in hot pants, I am not joking.), Eliza likes to play “Fly ’round the couch.”

This game involves her handing me a random object and declaring that I must “Fwy wound-a couch!” At this command, I am obligated to set off at a brisk trot, circling the couch while I hold the object out and make windy swooshing sounds.

Things I have flown in the past week include various plastic animals, her stuffed Pooh and Nemo, the mallet from her xylophone, several books, and assorted blocks, as well as various components of her Leappad reading toy.

3. Some photos which I like and which are not organized according to any particular system.

Barney likes when I wash the bedding because he makes himself a little hidey-cave and glares out at the world all menacing-like:

Eliza reading by booklight:

Eliza’s hair, which suddenly turned into not-baby-hair:

Foam in the tub that I played with in photoshop because I liked the swirliness of it:

This came in out of focus but I liked it so I monkeyed with it some more:

A giraffe we saw in Colorado:

Garden of the Gods in Colorado:

I’m as guilty as anyone else of celebrity schadenfreude. There’s an unpleasant impulse, I guess, to see them fall apart and say to yourself, “See, hahahahaha, money and fame can’t buy happiness after all.”

I had the merest sliver of post partum depression compared to some people. It didn’t last that long, and I was able to pull myself out of it, because I had certain skills I had learned in karate and meditation that I was able to put to use in service of my mental health.

It was enough, though, to understand how bad it could get.

Anna Nicole emulated her idol, Marilyn Monroe, in one final tragic way. I’m sure the seeds of her self-destruction predate her pregnancy, but adding a birth to the mix, not to mention the death of your first born? If she didn’t consciously set out to kill herself — who knows? — it’s no big mental leap to understand that she must have been deeply, deeply distressed in her final days. Her eyes in those “Anna Nicole’s Last Days!” photos you see everywhere look so vacant and sad.

I never saw Britney’s infamous interview with Matt Lauer, but I could tell from the photos that this woman had it. Bad. Adding another baby on top of that, not to mention a crumbling marriage? It doesn’t take a genius to see that’s a recipe for disaster.

So I say hurray, dooce, for her comments. And you go, Craig Ferguson, for explaining why you won’t make fun of her and for trying to understand what’s going on in her head right now and trying to get others to understand as well.

I’m not saying these women haven’t made dumb choices. I’m not saying they live(d) their lives by the book or that they don’t bear some responsibility for their fates. I guess I just feel like there, but for the grace of God, go I — and go a lot of us.

You would not know it unless you are with her at naptime or bedtime, but Eliza has a serious binkie addiction. Particularly at bedtime, she needs one to suck on, and then she likes to hold two as well. When she is very tired, she holds them against her cheeks. She falls asleep clutching a binkie by the nipple end in each hand. Tonight, I was getting her ready and we went over to the little cart on her dresser where we keep her stash. She had one in the mouth and another in her hand, so I knew she needed one more.
I held up two and asked her, “Do you want this one or this one?”
Her answer was, “Both of them!”

***

She has preferred one brand since we first offered her a binkie at 1 month old, but there’s another kind that she has lately come to like. She refers to those as “New binkie.” Thanks to Jim, she calls the old kind “Classic binkies.”

***

When I come get her in the morning, she is usually standing in the crib with all binkies deployed. I tell her it’s time to put away binkies, and she hands me the two she’s holding, and then, with a loud pop, pulls the third out of her mouth.

On those mornings that she decides to get up brutally early and I am trying to get her to sleep, or at least cuddle, some more, she usually ends up getting impatient with me and yelling, “Put away binkies!”

That’s when I know the jig is up and haul my carcass out of bed to make breakfast.