AM: Eliza what’re you doing?

Eliza: I’m just wandering around muttering to myself.

***

I’m struggling with the ethics of my duties as a parent. I should probably correct her when she says stuff wrong, but on the other hand, some of her malapropisms and mispronunciations are so dang cute and funny that I hate to do it. Do I support my child’s language acquisition or her adorability? ‘t Is a question to ponder.

Recent examples:

“invalid” instead of envelope (this one’s my favorite; I can kind of see how she got there but it’s still kind of nutty)

“bront-e-oh-saurus” instead of brontosaurus

climbing “instructure” instead of structure

I can’t transcribe exactly what she does to “herbivore,” but it seems like she always throws in a couple of extra o’s.

Thermometer, on the other hand, seems to consist mostly of m’s.

We still have combursations instead of conversations, we put flowers in a base, and we ride the verrist wheel.

***

We live in New England. And yet, about a dozen times a day, we hear an excited shriek. “Mommy! Look! A squirrel!”

***

I am thankful, every day, for my little girl.

I hope you all have many things to cherish this holiday — and I hope you have a wonderful one!

This morning, Eliza wrote a note to Jim’s mom. She had him spell out “Dear Granny, I love you, Eliza.”

Evidently emboldened by her success, she went solo this evening to write a card for Grandma Texas. She came up with the message and how to spell everything on her own:

Annoted version, for those of you who get all uptight about all the letters that belong to one word being on the same line and stuff::

That’s “Dear Grandma, I hope that you will get some hugs from Eliza.”

It was this or a tattoo on my bicep.

At least when this gets old, I know it’ll wash out. Right now, I love it. Tomorrow at 8:55 as I walk into work? Probably not so much.

But since the economy is continuing to send the finances of my employer down the crapper, I should get probably this out of my system before I have to look for a new job.

Also, you should know that I had to take about 6 pictures of myself from all angles because I don’t have the requisite two-mirror set-up to allow me to see the back. Which looks, as usual when I conduct these home hair experiments, like it was attacked by weasels. Angry, bloodthirsty weasels.

Jim and I have been cleaning the house since 9 a.m. and I think we’ve just hit on the perfect Christmas gift:

All we want is for people to stop giving our kid stuff.

Is NOT a joke OMG my back from the bending and putting away.

***

Child has inherited her Grandma Texas’s OCD r.e. teeth. She has brushed her teeth 3 times so far today. And after a similar display yesterday she said, “I brushed my teeth again. Because I’m wacky like that.”

***

Jim is going to go see Sonic Youth tonight with a friend. The band lives in Hipsterville and he once stood at the urinal next to Thurston Moore at the fancy arthouse cinema there. He has run into him at less awkward times, as well, but has never introduced himself. I think he should, because Thurston Moore is a significant personage in our relationship. Our first date was a Thurston Moore solo show, which should tell you how much I liked Jim, because damn, that music is impenetrable, but at the time, everything Jim did was fascinating, so I went to the show and gamely attempted to sound knowledgeable about the band. I am that awful kind of woman who totally changes once she has her dude hooked because after we were married, I refused to attend any more Sonic Youth shows. Also, Who shows.

The New York thing is getting out of hand. I went 4 weeks ago, we all went last weekend, and if all goes as planned we will be in the crowd for the Thanksgiving Day parade thanks to Jim’s hardcore parade-going aunt, who all but levitated last summer when I floated the idea of such an outing with her grandniece. Side note: Jim, that delicate flower of the south (he high-schooled in Florida), was all, Uhhh, I dunno if I want to stand outside that long in November, and we were all, DUDE, this is a CHICK thing.

Another side note, this one of a nonsequiturial nature: His mom lives in Tennessee in the winter and he/we’ve been admittedly kind of foot-draggy so far about planning our trip to visit her because she lives around here during the summer after all and it’s not like we have a lot of loose change for airfare/car rental/hotels lying around what with the fact that nobody will fucking hire my eminently qualified, handsome and very nice husband WTF is wrong with people. But the other day I had a moment of blinding insight that went roughly like this: “Oh! Wait! Omigod! Tennessee! Nashville! Kings of Leon! Jack White! Bzzzt! Twitch!” and now I am thinking about being an unsupportive wife and telling his mom we’ll come visit TOMORROW, on the condition that we can borrow her car and go rockstar-stalking. Does Meg White live there too? That might sweeten the deal for Jim….

Jim and I have been sucked into Modern Family. It’s hysterical. I am still laughing over the dad who’s trying to be all cool and spouting off text acronyms and their meanings, including “WTF: Why the face?” That is second only to 30 Rock’s Bitenuker/Bijtneuker joke when it comes to alluding to the F-word in imaginative ways in network TV. (Bijtneuker, which is pronounced like bitenuker, is pidgin-Dutch, and translates roughly to “bite-fucker,” and when I heard it, I developed a giant, enormous fangirl crush on Tina Fey, because that someone would go to that kind of trouble to set up a bilingual joke that only maybe 10 people would get makes me happy beyond reason.)

Speaking of hysterical, Jim and I are also cracking up over the bootlegs of Bruce Springsteen’s Detroit show. He actually FORGOT where he was and went of on this minutes-long riff about being in Ohio and how Ohio was totally awesome, until Steve Van Zandt pulled him aside and broke it to him that he was talking about the wrong state. Bruce Springsteen is VERY hard to embarrass, but his reaction actually puts me in mind of the “pinch his tits” preacher for sheer horrified realization. Oh, you haven’t seen “pinch his tits”? Go here. I’ll wait.

Tap tap tap…

Are you back? Are you done laughing?

Isn’t Youtube awesome? Every stupid thing you done did, EVER, preserved for posterity. Good times.

I lost a bunch of weight because of the combination of running the half-marathon and then being in too much pain from the flu to eat. You know how usually when you get on the scale, you pee beforehand and wear as little as possible and maybe shave because that leg-hair is surely adding 3 pounds? I am having these giddy moments where, before I get on the scale, I’m going, “Put on a cardigan? Have a glass of water? Don’t mind if I do!”

Next semester, I will be teaching a class called, “Tempting Fate: How to piss off the God of Hubris.” I fully expect to be eating my words shortly. They will add ten pounds.

Which, omigod, finally brings me back around to the original subject of this post. So. Grandma Texas came to visit and all of us went to New York so Eliza could count the water towers. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: My one piece of advice when you travel with kids is not to expect them to want to do the same stuff as you. If you can detach from the whole adult concept of what is worth seeing you can have an incredible time traveling. So, Eliza’s highlights of the trip are all the taxis, and the water towers on top of the buildings, and the fact that she got to hand the conductor her ticket on the Metro North train into the city and he punched it just like the conductor on Dinosaur Train. We went so last-minute-ish because of the weather that I couldn’t email Saw Lady to ask her if she’d be playing, but we saw one of her saw-playing compatriots in one of the subway stations. I’ve become something of a fan of the instrument ever since the Saw Festival. It just sounds like nothing else in the world.

We meant to hit a Japanese restaurant Marie had recommended to me in an email but we didn’t think we had time to go all the way there and back to Grand Central in time for our train so we went to another restaurant. Ironically, we got so caught up in the food experience we had instead that we missed our train anyway and caught the one an hour later and then our brains were all frizzled the next day but it was OK because I am so very grateful to have that place within daytrip (ie affordable) distance.

We went for a Japanese place without sushi, and got handed menus that completely confused the hell out of us, with mystical categories of food like “tasty,” which included pictures of random animal parts on a stick. I decided to embrace my cluelessness and asked the waiter WTH one was supposed to do, exactly, and he explained that one ordered an appetizer, then a thing on a stick, and then a bowl of soba (buckwheat) noodles.

I thought I was being pretty daring with my unspecified “pickles of the day” appetizer, but Jim totally one-upped me with his choice of wasabi-marinated raw octopus. Even the waiter was taken aback. “It’s very…. Japanese,” he said doubtfully. Jim, who has admitted to reading one too many extreme-eating articles in the New Yorker lately, refused to back down.

I adored my pickled smoked radishes, as did Eliza, which, WTF is the deal with the kid who will eat ANYTHING so long as it’s Asian cuisine? And then we all tried Jim’s octopus, which had the unfortunate texture of snot-covered rubber bands but tasted quite fantastic. Even Eliza liked her tiny taste of it (see above sentence WTF… etc.) My mom had these weird little sandwiches made of slices of some sort of white vegetable with some sort of pink goo between them. She was skeptical of the appeal, so we ate them for her.

Then Eliza ate some exceedingly random tempura, and I had no idea the Japanese, as a culinary culture, were so obsessed with root vegetables. We negotiated intensely over a piece of white turnip-y stuff and a crescent of orange squash. It’s probably just as well that we were seated in a semi-private area because I suspect wrestling your kid for her tempura makes a bad impression. And Jim had these little funguses wrapped in bacon on a stick and the texture was seriously OMG snot wrapped in bacon (Jim: “WHAT exactly did I order again?!” in a such a tone of horror-wonderment that of course I had to try it) and I had sticky yams on a stick which are more like surprisingly-delicious snot-covered radishes. Especially when I rolled them in the mysterious spicy red powder offered as a condiment. Setting your mouth on fire = GOOD.

Then we had the noodles which were so good and in a surprising departure, not snot-textured at ALL, and then we all had ice cream and by that point EVERYTHING was a dare and I ordered the buckwheat ice cream that had a warning: “BITTER” next to it, also because I will eat anything that’s bitter. It was not slimy.

Eliza had red bean ice cream which she did not share very well at all. Must work on that.

I like almost any flavor but I have huge texture hang-ups r.e. things that are slimy, so perhaps this whole experience was a testament to the quality of the sake the waiter sold us, or perhaps it was the WTH-we’re-in-New-York-ness of it, but I had a blast and a cannot WAIT to go back.