Eliza wants Jim to grow a beard because “then you will look like Santa Claus, Daddy!”

He was on the fence but noted that he has some white hair in his whiskers.

I told him he would look avuncular.

He brightened up.

“I’ve always wanted to be an avuncular man!”

Nonetheless, he is shaving as we speak.

***

Also, this morning I couldn’t find a shell Eliza picked up at the beach yesterday and she asked me to find it.

“It’s not important to YOU, but it’s VERY important to ME!” she explained.

***

Apropos of nothing, Major Bedhead told me some time ago that I needed to post a pic of my guest bathroom wallpaper.

Here it is:

Yes, it really does look like someone stuck tinfoil on the wall and painted trees on it. I will NEVER remodel this room.

We stopped at a pizza place tonight on our way home from Tanglewood for dinner, and turned on the small tableside TV to entertain Eliza, who was getting tired and prone to crankiness. 

After an episode of Scooby Doo, we found a sad reality show called Speedsters which followed a case in which some nutjob lost his mind over a traffic stop and led police on a several-hours-long carchase up one-way streets against oncoming traffic and through guard rails to u-turn on highways.

Eliza watches a while, then pipes up, “Hey, that’s a crazy person driving, just like Mommy!”

Thanks for selling me out, kid.

I wish you would all stop writing such good posts. (I am looking at you, Bon and Meredith! And Snooty! Oh, and Ms. Prufrock.) Dammit people, I am on vacation this week and your posts have me wanting to leave book-length comments, not to mention inspiring posts of my own in response. But Jim is downstairs with wine, snacks, an itchy clicker finger and episodes 7, 8, 9 and 10 of Season 5 of The Wire on tape, so I must be off for some couple time.

I still hope to get to you all, but in the meantime, here is a picture of Eliza who has wedged herself into the infant carseat one of our friends returned to us yesterday. I was amused, until she ordered me to carry her around.

Dude, you weigh 35 pounds. Not gonna happen.

Hey! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Want to play a game! OK! Let’s play Round and Round-around-Round! You take this pull toy, and I’ll take this pull toy and we will run around in the living room! OK! Now you should run in the dining room! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Now they will have a crash. Oh NO! We crashed! Thomas and the bug CRASHED! Hahaha! HEY! Mommy! Mommy! I need something special! Mommy! Mommymommy! HEY! I want a snack! Hey! I want a stringcheese! Thank you, Mommy! Here! Want some! Hey! Let’s read the cake book! I’m gonna be turning four! That’s THIS many fingers! And you are gonna be 11! Want a bug cake, mommy! Hey! I want a ocean cake! I want a castle cake! And a s’more cake! And a bee cake! Hey! That’s a millipede! Not a centipede! Hey! Let’s look at the clock! Where’s the little hand! What time is it! Mommy! What time is it now! What time is it now! HEY! the little hand is on the four! Oh no! The big hand is in the way! It should get out of the way! Hey! Mommy! You painted the living room! What color is the living room! No! It’s not purple! It’s YELLOW! Hey! Mommy! Mommy! Let’s go outside! I want to ride my tricycle! I want to look at the blue flowers! Hey! And then I want to look at the sunflower! Riding up the hill is hard work! Hey! Mommy!

Last night, Eliza got to bed a bit on the later side, and she was acting it. I started to brush my teeth while she was using the potty and then her face melted off from the bitter acid tears she cried over my betrayal. We must brush our teeth simultaneously and the more tired she is, the more synchronized she needs us to be. 

I told her she could brush her teeth but then she realized she had no pants on because she had jumped off the toilet. I told her she could brush her teeth without pants but apparently THAT sort of thing causes black holes to open up in our bathroom. So I asked if she was done using the potty and she wasn’t, so I said, well, do that before you put your pants back on. She refused to finish peeing before using the toothbrush but she wouldn’t brush her teeth without her pants on, but she wouldn’t put on her pants until she finished using the potty. Ad infinitum.

Finally, we made it to the bedroom and she wanted to hear Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs, which she likes to have me read using different voices for the opposite characteristics that describe the dinosaurs. I use a tiny voice when I say “Dinosaurs week” and a big growly voice for “and dinosaurs STRONG!” You get the picture.

Anyway, I made what I thought was a clever artistic choice this time around to fake-yawn for “Dinosaurs later,” what with them being all sleepy-looking and ready for bed. Well! I should know better than to innovate when my child is so tired her eyes are starting to look suspiciously like those of a rage zombie from 28 Days Later. Shrieking ensued, of the sort one might hear from a cat whose tail has been pinned in a door, and I was commanded to go back and read it again without yawning. 

OK, you might say, just read the damn line again and move on. But for some reason, I felt compelled to defend and explain my artistic choice to her. “See, he’s a sleepy dinosaur! That’s why I yawned!” This, as you can guess, is a dead-end argument in which the loudest shrieker wins. The loudest person was: Not me, so after a fairly ridiculous standoff that does not speak well to my mental health — I argued for 5 minutes with a 3-year-old about my interpretation of how to read a word in a picture book, people — I finally, and somewhat huffily, declared that we were going to read a different book.

Which we then did, and after a round of Crisscross Applesauce (we do a slightly different version but this is close) — thanks, K! for introducing her to that, because she loves it and it calms her down — she went to bed.

Somehow, the no pants thing must’ve stuck, though, because I was awakened at 3:20 a.m. by Eliza yelling, “I lost my pants!”

She got confused, I think, because she was wearing pajamas with shorts for pants, because she argued with me about the whereabout of her pants for several minutes, while I tried hard not to burst out laughing. Once we established that she did, in fact, have pants on, she rolled over and went back to sleep.

***

Unrelated quote of the day:

I got out the stepladder yesterday to unscrew some curtain hardware from the wall yesterday, which Eliza found extremely entertaining. (I sometimes feel guilty about how much random housework and errands I have do with her around, but it’s amazing what she will put up with because it amuses her on some level. It’s not my idea of a party, but going to the paint store? Quality time, as far as the kid is concerned.) Anyway, she thought the ladder was pretty cool and came over and climbed onto the lowest step behind me.

“I’m just chilling out over here on this step, Mommy!” she said.