1. How to get Eliza to at least try foodstuffs of which she is suspicious:

Put a toothpick in it

Bake it in a cupcake liner

Put honey on it

Put maple syrup on it

ETA: PEER PRESSURE! She just ate gobs of mac and cheese because her friend M, who is a BIG GIRL (she’s 4) was over for dinner and ate a bunch.

2. How to get her to remain at the table when she is finished:

Give her the salt shaker, let her make a pile of salt and play with it

Ditto for jimmies and Old Bay Seasoning

3. Foods she will eat almost anytime (almost, because she is a toddler and it is Her right to be capricious):

Corn

Watermelon

Cupcakes (extends to include anything baked in cupcake liners)

Chocolate

Teddy Graham crackers

Lollipops

Hot dogs

Banana

Gummi bears

Cheese pizza

Refried beans and cheese

Cheese on toothpicks

4. Things you’d think she would like but turns down:

Ice cream

Mac and cheese

Items covered with melted cheese

Chicken

Ice cream

5. Things she has said taste like chicken:

Her hair

Me

The cats

Various reptiles

Many, many food items that contain no chicken whatsoever

Erica tagged me for this one, and since it’s new to me, too, I’m in, sort of (you’ll see):

Tha Rulz
1. You have to post these rules before you give the facts.
2. Players, you must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of their middle name. If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had.
3. When you are tagged you need to write your own blog-post containing your own middle name game facts.
4. At the end of your blog-post, you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

So, here’s the sort of part, I have 3 middle names, and they are all very long. The first one is my mom’s name, the next one is the feminine version of my paternal gransfather’s name, and the last one, I’m not sure, but I think it’s a great aunt or some such (care to shed any light on this, mom?). I actually mispelled the last one for years; my dad was looking over my college applications and said, uh, that’s not how you spell that. Oops.

Anyway, to prevent this meme from getting out of hand, I’m going to use the first letter from each name.

R is for reading. I have always loved to read, although I got derailed for a while by school and work, and the expectation that I should read grown-up people books, many of which I find offputtingly self-consciously literary. I am grateful my book-club for reviving that love. I’ve also stopped stressing about the alleged demographic of the books I read, because I seem to be finding all the best stuff in the young adult aisle these days.

A is for assertive. I am not especially assertive, but I find that I do better asserting myself on behalf of my daughter. I think it works on the role model principle — my karate school used to have students of all levels in the same class on the principle that the newbies would benefit from looking up to someone, and the experts would be better versions of themselves because they had people looking up to them. I find the same happens with my kid — I feel compelled to try to be a better advocate for her and a good role model.

K is for kindness. In college, I let myself be influenced far too much by some friends who valued irony and quick wit at the expense of kindness. Greeting the world with a snort and a flip dismissal is a hard habit to break, but at the risk of sounding like a hippie, I just can’t be a part of contributing to all that negative energy anymore.

I meant to post from Texas, I most truly did; it’s just that I had matters of vital importance to attend to — things like watching Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe flirt with the mosquito breeder who had a giant mosquito tattoo on her back, figuring out how to play Solitaire on my iPod, and eating my weight in porkchops and Goldfish crackers.

The trip began inauspiciously. We were dropped off at the airport at 2:30 and at about 8:15 during our layover, I called Jim to tell him about a new business venture I’d come up with: babysitters posted throughout the airport that you could hand you kid to so you could go walk it off for 15 minutes.

Eliza screamed for 20 minutes in the security line because it was too slow and they made her take her shoes off. About an hour into the first flight she announed, “you are DONE wiffa airpwane!” and became positively irate when I told her she could not get out. I don’t think she bought the whole, “30,000 feet is not a good place to get out” line I was selling. I distracted her for a while by pointing out interesting landscapes out the window until she realized what I was doing, which made her even angrier. She was winding down tantrum three when the flight attendant and I did not understand that, “You want some MIWK in your YEWWOW sippy cup,” actually meant that she wanted water in her big girl glass. I know, I am an idiot. I called Jim after tantrum 4.5, when she rejected a smoothie in favor of soft-serve, and then decided 10 minutes later that I had conned her out of a smoothie.

Fortunately, except for one vehement disagreement over the timing of dessert, she was much more charming around The Grandparents Texas.

Let’s see.

Ah yes. I forgot to take pictures at the aquarium, but here is The Crazypants in her aquarium-appropriate seahorsie dress, after consuming a hotdog and a lollipop, the latter of which she loves so passionately that she will choose it over ice cream:

She discovered a Santa figurine in one of the closets. We found her like this, and she explained that she was taking Santa for a ride in her car (the pillows):

Hey, guess which one lives in Texas and which one is from Massachusetts!

Also, if you want to blend, apparently it helps not to be wearing clogs. My mom told me they were hippie shoes, like Birkenstocks. As a committed anti-Birkenstock-ist, I took offense, but I ceded the larger point r.e. sticking out like a sore thumb:

We went to the beach and saw a flight of pelicans (a gaggle? a brace? eh, I dunno):

The Small Person has been excited about beaches since I can remember, but she is getting really bold about water. As soon as we set her down on the sand she took off:

I love this shot:

After an hour of gamboling in the waves she announced it was time for a picnic. Luckily, I had anticipated this with a peanut butter sandwich and juicebox. This is good, because the Small Person is very excited about picnics. One day, she carted a banana along to the playground near my mom’s house because she wanted to have a picnic at the playground. This beach picnic was especially awesome because “You hadda speciaw CHAIR!”

All this running around builds up an appetite. Missy slayed two corncobs for dinner one night:

And another night Grandpa Texas took us all to eat fried fish. Here are The Grandparents Texas, eating:

We also went to the mall. Grandma Texas was pleased when I lifted the clothing-buying embargo a while back (I called a halt because we were getting so much that she wasn’t getting to wear half of them before she outgrew them). We visited the GAP, which is also a good hide and seek location, except when you give yourself away by shouting that you are HIDING and giggling madly:

The best thing about the mall, though, was the doubledecker Merry-Go-Round. The Small Person insisted on riding on the top level and further surprised us by telling us she wanted to ride on a horse - that went up and down, no less. Though she loves Merry-Go-Rounds (she goes into a blissed-out, trance-like state I’ve taken to calling the Carousel Coma everytime she rides one), she usually prefer the carriages over the horses. Not so this time. In fact, we rode it twice, and while during the first ride, I stood next to her, on the second go-round, she pointed to the bench and ordered me to sit there so she could ride her hosie by herself. Here is the Queen on her might steed:

Eventually, it was time to leave, and apparently she worked out all the screaming on the trip out, because during the trip back today, she couldn’t have been more awesome. She even decided at one point that she needed to take a nap, scrunched herself into a ball, and nodded off. I got no reading done, choosing instead to gawk incredulously at my sleeping Dervish.

As off-putting as I find that French woman who is telling people not to have kids because hers are hard work (see previous post), that is how inspiring I find this post on Feminist Mormon Housewives. I’ve been enjoying the whole series they’re running on “How I Became a Mother,” finding myself nodding at some in recognition and intrigued and baffled (but in a good way) by others. This one I linked to, though, though, is just plain, tears-in-my-eyes beautiful; beautifully written, beautiful in its ideas and full of the love this woman has for her child. I think Frenchie could learn a lot from a trawl through this series.

Some French woman wrote a book about 40 Reasons Not to Have Kids. Which is fine as far as it goes — people who don’t want kids, or who aren’t sure, are welcome to their opinions because yes, it is a hard and sometimes thankless job, and if you don’t want to do it, you shouldn’t have to.

The thing that makes me shake my head is that she is a mother of two. I wonder how those two kids feel, knowing that the raising of them was so onerous and soul-deadening for their mother that she is now publishing manifestos against parenthood.

I hope the royalties cover the therapy.

***

Meanwhile, I continue to find any potential soul-sapping more than offset by The Toddler’s take on the world.

As I mentioned, this past weekend, Eliza was intestinally afflicted. I was trying to assess exactly how poorly she felt, and asked if her tummy hurt.

“Does your TUM-my hurt!” she responded.

Not helpful.

I asked again.

“Does your TUM-my hurt!” she repeated.

Well, where does it hurt, I asked her.

“Does your tummy hurt RIGHT here!” she said, jabbing at her knee cap. Ohhhh-kay then.