Zeùre in Belgiu, qnd dude; the keyboqrd on this co,puter is totqlly different:

 

Which is to say that I will not be regaling you Trans-Atlantically with the Tales of Our Trip because OMG I have to hit the shift key for numbers and periods? Gahhhhhh! Also, it just took waaaay too long to find that exclamation mark.

 

However, I will share with you that we have already hit 3 countries: Germany, during which we were so jet-lagged that none of us remembers very much (good thing we’re going back there in a few days), Holland, which was awesome in a totally drug-free way for those of you getting the wrong idea, and now Belgium, where we saw the Sonic >>Death

+0.

 

ack; Eliza wantto type! and now she is saying, hey stopit!!!! to herself.

 

More another day….

1. Go visit Bon and send her some good vibes to help her stay strong during her little girl’s harrowing medical adventures. They’ll be fine, I know they will, but they can use all the healing energy they can get.

2. Hate Ritz Camera with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Called today to see if the camera might possibly be back yet. Snotty manager type: “Well, I TOLD you that it wasn’t going to be back this quickly when you brought it in.” Me: “Well, I told you that I had hoped to get the camera back by now since I bought it so I could take pictures on the trip I’m about to leave on.” Let’s leave it at Never Will Get My Business Again.

3. Eliza endorses a political candidate. This, people, is what happens if you listen to nothing but news radio in the car. Also, she wanders around saying, “Ganistan!” all the time. And sometimes, “Cawifornia!” NPR, I CURSE YOU!
Eliza’s presidential pick ETA: Shoot, can’t get it to load — it’s a cell video. Anyway, she says, “Rack Oh-BA-ma for presunint.”

4. I have decided to initiate a new project: Run My Town’s 10K Without Dying. Since said race does not happen until St. Patrick’s Day, I am giving myself plenty of time to get in shape, I hope. I am warned that it is brutal, with the uphill and the downhill and etc., so I think my goal will be to come in under 90 minutes. This project is under review pending how much pain I am in after I try running with Grandma Texas when we hang out together in Germany.

5. Phillip Pullman. Has anyone else read anything beyond the “His Dark Materials” series? Because I Bookmooched a bunch of his stuff from England and I am simultaneously creeped out and awed by him, and wondering who the crazies are that are calling this children’s literature. I just read The Shadow in the North and first of all the man puts M. Night Shyamalan to shame as regards plot twists, and the way he smacks you upside the head from out of NOWHERE with the political point he wants to make? Wooooo.

6. I’m off in 24 hours and anticipate a frenzied morning, so this’ll be it for now. I’ll try to post from Belgium or Germany, as much for the novelty of it as anything else. The cats will be thrilled, no doubt, to have us gone and to have the undivided attentions of our friend K., and none of the usual poking and screeching from the Lumbering Toddler of Doom. I hope they act at least a little glad to see us when we return.

Last night Eliza woke up wanted to cuddle.

Usually, this request is made in the wee smalls of the night. I come into her room, and I see her fuzzy head peering over the top of her crib. She stands there, clutching her 8 million binkies, one in her mouth, and says, “Want to cuddow a widdow bit!” If you can resist that at 3 in the morning and stand fast to your no-co-sleeping principles, you are a stronger and more well-rested person than I.

However, at 10:45 on a day she mostly spent whinging and whining, especially from 5 p.m. on when she woke up from her nap, I admit to being totally eye-roll-y about the whole thing. She falls asleep more easily in the big girl bed, so I got in the bed to comfort her and once she fell asleep, I left. I put a pillow where I had lain and took the mattress out of her crib and put it on the floor next to the bed so she would have a soft landing if she fell out. Remember this. We’ll come back to it in a minute.

At 4 a.m., she woke up again and I caved on the whole cuddling business, so I went into her room. Barney, who is all about excitement and emergencies where he can get underfoot, ran alongside going, “Hey, are we going somewhere? Yeah? Yeah! We’re gonna go play in that small shouty person’s room? With the excellent carpet for sharpening my claws at 5 in the morning? I LOVE that place!”

About 10 minutes later, everyone was all settled in and Barney was doing his impression of a masseur, i.e. walking up and down on us. Then he remembered, “Hey, there’s no one in the crib! I can go explore without getting yelled at!” In one of those slow-motion, “Nooooooooooo!” movie moments, I heard and felt him take a running start to leap into the mattress-less crib, which is against the foot of the bed. He landed on the link springs with a loud “Kerrang!!!” that somehow managed to set off one of Eliza’s alphabet singing toys.

So there we are in the pitch black, with a startled, wailing child, Lulu the spider regaling us, “A B C D….” and me fishing around in the crib feeling for the cat, who is trying to escape from this bizarre contraption on which he most assuredly did NOT expect to land and not getting his footing at all.

I of course was concerned about internal bleeding, but after a minute or two of hunching in the traditional cat “WTF?!” posture, Barney shook it off and went exploring. He seems perfectly normal this morning but kept insisting that I pick him up and put him on really high places, i.e. shelves in my closet or the linen closet that he cannot reach on his own. I guess he wants to see his enemies coming at him this time.

***

As friends can attest, one of the funny thing about living with the Parrot Queen is that she will answer for you when necessary, thus obviating the need for actual dialogue.

When she is whining for a snack while I am busy with other things, she will interrupt herself to say, “Inna minute, sweetie!”

Chattering on about a toy she can’t find, she’ll say, “Want me to geddit foh you?”

Whenever Eliza does something I don’t want her doing, I explain to her that it could hurt her/could hurt someone else/could break something and ask her not to do that again. Being nearly 2, however, she doesn’t usually get it the first (or second, or 300th) time, so I remind her, “Now, Eliza, what did I say?” and discuss again what she shouldn’t be doing and why.

The other day, she was smashing something, and I did the usual explanation on why that was no good. She stopped, then started doing it again. Then she stopped herself and looked up at me.

“Now what did I say?!” she said.

It turns out that Eliza is not a picky eater — we’ve just been feeding her from the wrong part of the world all this time.

My girl loves Asian noodle dishes: pad Thai, Korean jabchae bap, and Vietnamese pho have all disappeared down her gullet in recent weeks. I think perhaps she refuses Italian pasta dishes because she doesn’t like tomato sauce on pasta, preferring instead the sweet-sour-salty concoctions favored in the Asian cuisines we have sampled.

I decided last night that the time was right to introduce my girlie to Japanese food and took her to a local sushi place, where she proceeded to have a high old time, thoroughly charming the pants off the waitstaff, who came over in pairs at one point to pay obeisance to the ponytailed queen.

Our waitress made that little contraption with a pair of chopsticks, a little wad of paper and a rubber band that little kids use and tried to teach Eliza how to use it to get her own food, but Eliza gave her the fisheye and promptly dismantled it. She did deign to let the waitress hold her waiter glass for her so she could sip from her straw.

We started with shumai dumplings, which Eliza loved, especially when a. it became clear there was dipping involved and b. I fed them to her with my chopsticks. She was considerably more skeptical about the sushi I set in front of her — an avocado roll and a California maki — and even though I tried the chopstick thing and explained that here, too, there was the dipping, she resisted.

The waitress suggested a sliver of ginger, which Eliza picked off her tongue with a disgusted look akin to the one I am getting from the cats about their new health food (the love affair with wet food wanes).

Eventually, I dismantled one of each maki so she could see what was inside, at which point she proceeded to eat the components separately, carefully avoiding touching the California maki’s crab lest it give her cooties. The fish roe on the outside was subjected to much prodding and poking and discussion — “widdow pink BAWS!!”, tasted and deemed acceptable.

She dipped her one chopstick that hadn’t landed on the floor in her little soy sauce dish and licked it off repeatedly, which may account for the whole waitress-straw-water thing on account of the soy-saltiness. Then she polished off the canned pineapple that comes for dessert with the check, and, once she discovered the mind-blowing fact the fortune cookies have pieces of paper with words on them inside, made me read our fortunes to her over and over: Mommy reada PAPER inna COOKIE!!

Leaving the restaurant, she waved her Princess Diana wave to the waitstaff and demanded an audience with the huge maneki neko at the front — “Wookita KITTY!”

Walking outside in the evening light, I could see that her shirt bore a record of her meal, with avocado up under her armpits and rice glued to her front with soy. I told her she had food on her shirt, and she looked down, picked a rice kernel off her belly, and ate it without breaking her stride.

*UPDATED 5/12*
Right, so as I said in comments, we took her to eat Indian food last night. She had no use for the spicier stuff, but I’m calling it a success anyway. She was very intrigued by the papadam and used it to dip into the raita and that sweet-and-sour stuff they usually give you with samosas. Then the naan showed up and she said, “Want PIZZA!” Pizza is the one Italian food she WILL reliably eat, and she does so with enthusiasm, even when, in this case, the “pizza” had no topping on it. The restaurant owner kindly brought us some mildly spiced yellow lentils, which she tried with rice — “Eata speciah corn!” — which Jim and I devoured the other stuff. Then we ordered dessert: a gulab juman (sp?) which is like a donut hole dunked in syrup, and a ras malai, which is a ricotta-type cheesy substance in a sweet milky sauce. “Wanta BROWN dessert!” was the verdict, as she ate most of the gulab juman, then proceeded to spoon up the leftover syrup. Not surprisingly given her sugar intake, she stayed awake for the car ride home. I de-sticky-fied her in the tub and read to her while she came down from her sugar high.

The delightful Sarah has tagged me, and, as has been amply established by now, I CANNOT resist a meme. I think it’s always interesting how many different directions the same set of questions and instructions — but a different brain and life interpreting them — can take you.

OK, here goes:

INSTRUCTIONS: Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot, like so.

1) CuriosityKiller
2) Doggy Mama
3) Eve
4) Sarah
5)Elizasmom

Next select five people to tag: (if you haven’t done it already)
1)Claudia’s Spaceship
2)Mama D
3)Daily Kvetch
4)A Lifetime
5)Tangled Me

What were you doing 10 years ago?

Probably covering a meeting of some sort for the newspaper I worked for. Going to karate. Hanging out with Jim.

What were you doing 1 year ago?

Playing with Eliza. She was just starting to talk, and her vocabulary reflected the things she was most interested in: Kitty (hih-DIH!), going outside and looking at flowers (ATSA!), and eating dairy products (CHEE!). In retrospect I can see that hih-DIH was her very first word and that she’d been saying it for a while before we actually caught on. Eliza was an early talker and while of course I am ALWAYS convinced she’s a genius, mostly I love the talking because of the inverse relationship between words learned and meltdowns had.

Five snacks you enjoy:

Lindt chocolate balls, especially the stracciatella flavor
Nutella on freshly baked bread. I have a rule that I can only eat it when I have made the bread, which keeps me from ballooning liike a manatee.
BBQ flavored anything
Artichoke dip in any incarnation
Hummus, especially the 40-spice variety

Five songs that you know all the lyrics:

What pop song released between here and 1980 DON’T I know the lyrics to? They have seeped into my brain and taken over the space where calculus is supposed to live; it’s the only possible explanation for my ability to remember Backstreet Boys lyrics and not having a clue what all those xes and ys stand for after taking calc TWICE. After not having heard it for 10 or 15 years, I bought Duran Duran’s Arena. I could sing along to every single word. If you stopped me on the street and told me to sing Depeche Mode’s Somebody, I am reasonably sure I could comply even though I haven’t owned the album it was on in 10 years. I have not yet tried this experiment with a-ha’s Hunting High and Low, but I’m sure it would work. Less amusing is that this happens regardless of whether I like the song at the time that it is popular (because, embarrassingly, I did like a-ha at the time. Oh, how I liked a-ha. Which, now that I’ve written it a bunch of times, has got to be the dumbest name for a band EVER). I know Boston’s Amanda, although it makes my skin crawl.

And, bonus, Eliza is showing signs of a similar inclination, being wont to spout off pages of The Lorax without provocation.

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:

Pay off our house
Remodel it in a green-friendly way
Fund a lobby to explain to politicians that the best way to cut abortion rates would be a multi-pronged initiative including adequate sex education, free or low-cost birth control, pre- and post-natal care, and low-cost/high-quality childcare (yeah, I know, we’d probably need BILLIONS to accomplish that, but it’s MY fantasy)
Put money aside for Eliza’s college fund
Plan a huge trip where we visit places that have always intrigued me: Samarkand, Angkor Wat, Kilimanjaro, and, assuming I have enough money for excellent security, the Middle East

Five bad habits:

I pick at nailpolish. I cannot make it out of a nail place without destroying a manicure
Gossiping — I sometimes have a hard time drawing the line between imparting useful information and rumor-mongering
In the same vein: celebrity gossip magazines, and it doesn’t help that our Premiere subscription was just switched over to an US weekly subscription
Snacking randomly
I am kind of OCD about cleaning my ears.

Five things you like doing:

“Gardening,” which I put in sarcastiquotes because I haven’t a clue what I’m doing
Baking
Exercising, when I can hit the zone and really go all out
Knitting, although so far I have only made 2 scarves
Reading

Five things you would never wear again:

High waisted pants. I don’t care that they’re coming back, they’re just heinous.
Ditto leggings. Thus far, I have not caved
Babydoll dresses — and for that matter, anything else that makes me look preggers when I’m not
Fuchsia lipstick
Purple eyeshadow

Five favorite toys:
The Musical Chipclip
My blog
Make-up
Our hammock, now that it’s summer, FINALLY
My mixer

____
* And if you have not visited I Can Has Cheezburger, you must.