Doodle mania!
As a six-month old, Doodle is really starting to develop a personality. He is a good sleeper most nights, and a very good eater, as he demonstrates here.



Last night, I was holding him on my lap, and I picked up a little jar of Burt's Bees lip balm and put some on my chapped lips. He held out his hand toward the jar. When I told him that it was mommy's jar, he started to cry. He had been a pain in the ass all evening, if I'm being honest. So I let him have the jar. Instantly, his mood improved, and he was so proud of himself with that damn jar of lip gloss. He held it up and looked at it, then transferred it from his right hand to his left. He banged it against his side. He dropped it and fumbled around for it until he found it again. Concept learned: crying will get you everywhere.

He's starting to go places, too. He hasn't discovered that rolling over = means of travel, but once he does, I'm sure he will be off to the races. In the meantime, we have purchased a baby walker for him. I've heard that they are dangerous, but we usually use it on the carpeted living room where his mobility is limited. He mostly stands still because I also put on his Baby Einstein video while he's in there, which causes a catatonic trance-like state with occasional giggles. (Who thought that bubbles had such comic value?)



According to the doctor, he is in the 75-90% for height and at the 25% for weight. Tall and skinny. Like his dad. I'm so glad he got those genes, rather than mine, which are the kind where I look at a donut and gain weight.

It's going so fast. Everyone who told me that? You were right.

Signs of growing old
I currently have two tubes of ointment that I am carrying around in my purse. One is a mouth sore ointment because I have a sore at the side of my mouth. The other is an eye ointment because I have some sort of lower eyelid infection thing going on. Walking train wreck, that's me.

I swear, since I've turned 30, I've had more ailments than my entire 20's put together. Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but seriously. TWO kinds of ointment? Next stop: Restful Acres.

Dom-o-rama

He used to be top banana in our household, and now he's just a bitter old sea salt with an ever-growing kitty gut. The Dom has taken his new role in the family with a dash of bitterness, but he's still my special guy.

And so now I present a sort of Year in Pictures 2005 for my black and white pal (with some special guest stars):

He's the epitome of laziness ...


Through the window screen.


The cat's out of the bag:




Sometimes, they exist side-by-side in peace. (Check out Doodle's socks in the third shot. Did I really dress him in those?)




A wild animal on the loose:


Road kill.

Comic gold
Doodle is quite the talkative chap. He has a few sounds in his repertoire, but the one he favors the most is what I call his Monster Noise. It's a growl and a scream at the same time, but he does it when he's excited.

The other night he was doing the Monster Noise on his changing table, and I looked down at him and gasped, "It's a monster!"

This hit pay dirt on the laughter scale. I had a zinger on my hands. He squealed with giggles. Naturally, this encouraged me to repeat this phrase about 55 more times. Eventually the laughter died down, until at the 54th repetition, it just garnered a half-smile from the Doodster.

"I'll never be this funny again in my life," I told my husband. So I'm relishing it.

In other news, Doodle ate baby food last night for the first time. Green beans. It looked and smelled like ass. But he ate half the jar, only cringing after the first spoonful, and then smooth sailing from there. He's such a good little guy.

24
Was anyone else upset that they killed off David Palmer in last night's 24 premiere? I couldn't believe it. I still can't.

That being said, it looks like another great season. Can't wait to see what happens next. Although, Derek could very well be this year's Kim.

Doodle's movie debut
Doodle just loves to play peek-a-boo. Here he is in his film debut, which you can view here.

Venting
I'm in charge of two large presentations at work. A lot of information is flowing in to me, and when I get it, I told Incompetent but Likeable that I would forward the relevant info along to him so that he can do P.R. stuff that is related to the presentation. The info was due to come in to me on January 9.

January 3: IBL comes to me. "Do you have anything yet?" he asks.
Me: Nope, it isn't due til the 9th. I'll let you know when it comes in.

January 4: "Kath, did you get anything today?"
Nope.

5th: "Anything on the presentation come in, Kath?"
Zilch.

6th: "Hey Kath!"
NO.

Then I was out on the 9th. Yesterday I checked my e-mail and had -- lo and behold -- SOME of the info had been sent to me, but not all. I forwarded it on to IBL, just like I said I would. But I was curious to see if maybe my boss had gotten some of the info, and he wasn't in. So I went over to IBL.

Me: [IBL], did anything come in yesterday while I was out?
IBL: [in irritated tone] I don't know, because I was too busy doing other stuff and didn't have time to look.

Later on in the day...
"Hey Kath! Did you get anything new?"
GAH!!!!!

Survivors, Ready!
The new Survivor cast is out. Yay!

Which reminds me of kind of an amusing little anecdote... so the other day, I was feeding Doodle and I turned on one of the episodes of Survivor that I had DVR'ed. I believe it was the premiere of Survivor:Amazon. Anyhoo, Jeff Probst begins to narrate, and Doodle whipped his head around to look at the TV. Poor little guy. He probably thinks Jiffy is his second daddy or at least an uncle or something, for as much as he's seen him in his six short months of life. I'm just sayin'.

A moment of silence...
For my 20's.
And here's to the next 20 years of being a thirtysomething. At least whenever anyone asks.

Kids these days
Maybe it's because I'm getting old. But I honestly don't know how I'm going to handle it when my son starts listening to songs with lyrics like:

My hump
My hump my hump my hump
My hump my hump my hump

And we ain't talkin' camels here.

I guess it will be no different than when my mom forbade me from listening to "The Humpty Dance" when I was in 8th grade. What she didn't know won't hurt her.

*sigh*

Eyes and ears
I just came to the realization that the biggest gossip monger in my office is not a woman. It's Incompetent but Likeable.

He knew that I knew something about my boss meeting with the big boss, and he pestered me and pestered me about it until I told him a little nugget of what I knew. (I didn't tell him everything... I know better than that.)

I'll ponder this while I eat my butter braid pretzels.

And I checked this morning to make sure my strip cheese was mold-free before I threw it in my bag o' food that I lug to the office each day.

Close encounter of the mold kind
My strip cheese had mold on it AND. I. ALMOST. ATE. IT.

Seriously, had it not been for the fact that the cheese didn't come off in one neat strip, I would have eaten that mold.

*hurls*

This goes along with the way my day has gone so far. I am wearing my new cute skirt that I got at Old Navy, my boots, and a black top, and I took my coat off this morning only to find that my new scarf had fuzzed all over my top. Luckily a co-worker has a lint roller so I was hooked up with the de-fuzzification.

I am really bummed now. I have strip cheese every day at 4 and now I have NOTHING. Nothing!!!!

When I get home, don't nobody better get between me and a bag o' chips.

See previous entry re: losing weight.

He had me at Super Mario
And now, I present to you,

the Video Game Pianist.

If you are a fan of video games, particularly the original Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo, you have to hear this guy. Outstanding.

P.S. He also does a pretty cool version of Maroon 5's "This Love". I am upset that a) I did not come up with this myself, and b) I quit taking piano lessons in sixth grade.

First post of '06
Happy New Year to everyone! I actually made it up until midnight this year (but at 12:01, the TV went off, and not a creature was stirring, not even a Doodle). We watched some of the Dick Clark's Rockin' Eve, but I gotta tell ya, seeing Dick Clark in his decrepit state was pretty hard to watch. I think it's great that he wanted to be there, since he's such an icon and New Year's Eve is his thing, but just stand there and wave, Dick. We all want to remember you when you were in your glory.

Over the weekend, I feel like Doodle changed so much. He's learning to grab objects and hold them, which is good news for his toys, bad news for my hair and glasses. He has gotten really good at eating cereal off a spoon, and he can roll over. When I played Peek-a-boo with him, he giggled and giggled. Of course, that led to him being wound up for the next hour or so, and it was at night, so I made a quick memo to self to only play Peek-a-boo in the morning.

I'm heading into my busiest month at work, so the posting may be sparse. Or it may be my only outlet of stress. We'll see.

Of course, we have a new TV season starting, so I'll have plenty to keep my mind occupied during prime time. I'm looking forward to American Idol, 24, Survivor, and whatever other mundane reality show comes along (Celebrity Fit Club 3? Not so much. Pathetic cast.)

I feel like I should mention some kind of goal for 2006, and it is this: not to gain back my weight that I lost when I was diabetic during my pregnancy. I'm starting to put it back on. I lost about 25 pounds total, and I have gained 10 of that back. I want to lose that 10 and another 10 after that. But somehow I don't think that making chocolate chip cookies every week is the way to do it. Unless there's some kind of new diet that I don't know about? No? OK then.

And here I thought I was all that and a bag of Fritos
I'm suffering a bit of a cold. It arrived Christmas Eve amidst the toilet catastrophe. But it's been almost a week now, and I think it's going away.

Apparently not.

Two people today have come to talk to me, stopped mid-sentence, and said, "Aw, you don't look too good!"

Nothing like a little blow to the self-confidence to start off the day. I have a cute outfit on and everything.

Separated at birth?
So, I was just trying out this cool face recognition software that I found on planetdan. It compares your face (or the face of any photo that you upload) to their celebrity database. It shows you whose faces are similar.

I uploaded this picture of myself:



And up came my closest celebrity match:



OK? Could be a lot worse.

Then I looked at who the other close matches were. Scarlett Johansson. Not bad! Julia Roberts. I don't see it, but allright.

But then it goes from bad:


To worse:


To... hunh?

Christmas Crisis 2005
It's becoming a bit of a tradition around my household for a major utility to wonk out and/or for someone to drink too much and make a spectacle, so this year, I was on the lookout for trouble early on.

While I'm happy to report that there were no drunken spectacles, we DID have the utility wonkage -- nice and early so we could enjoy it the whole weekend.

Friday afternoon, my mom came over and we were finished opening the presents, when suddenly, Dom got a wild look in his eyes and went running toward the bathroom. I heard the sound of running water and ran after him to see what the heck was going on.

The toilet was running and had completely overflowed. The bathroom floor was completely drenched. My mom and I went to work mopping up the water with every towel available in my linen closet and managed to stop the toilet from spilling more vile water. When I went down to the basement to put the towels in the washer, I found that the water was leaking down there, too. I set up some buckets and called my husband to warn him that he'd have some investigating to do when he got home.

He checked things out and figured that the toilet had just gotten blocked, but later that evening, it happened again. Once again we had to use a boatload of towels to mop up the flood, and threw it all in the washing machine. However, this time, as the washer was running, MORE water came through the toilet and it flooded for a third time!

Every plumber in town wanted double pay for the holiday weekend, and so we decided to tough it out the entire weekend. That meant we followed the "if it's yellow, let it mellow" philsophy in the bathroom, and if it was brown, one had better pinch one's buttcheeks together and high-tail it to my in-law's house. We couldn't do laundry, take a shower, run the dishwasher... the house has gone to hell. Luckily, Dave the plumber is at our house right now, hopefully snaking out the drain.

We're getting a bit superstitious about Christmas these days. When next year rolls around, I'm going to be bracing myself for the plague of the locusts. Or maybe, on even numbered years, Christmas will mean one too many PBR's or G & T's. Hell. I'll make it a self-fulfilling prophecy and make sure it's me.

My keyboard is covered in orange powder as I type this
Dear Vendor (or anyone really):

Want to know the way to my heart around the Christmas season? Bring me a tin of popcorn. Sure, the obligatory cookie tray is nice, but even I tire of sugar at some point. Popcorn, however, is always appealing to me. Especially when it has a cheese-ish substance on it. Caramel works, too. I am a fan of the three-way tin, myself. The menage-a-trois of popcorn: butter, cheeze, and caramel.

Mamacita.

Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
I don't know if I've mentioned it or not, but my son? Is a genius.

He just turned five months old over the weekend. And during the past few days, he:

• Attended a wedding. He was perfectly behaved through the church ceremony (although he burped and farted in the church, so I'm sure someone is going to hell as a result, be it him or me for allowing him to be in a house of God -- unbaptized and all). He was also an angel at the reception and was a great excuse to not join the conga line. Sorry! Holding a sleeping baby! Can't dance!
• Rolled onto his stomach all by himself. Once onto his stomach, however, he flailed around like a carp on a beach.
• Ate cereal like a big boy. He opened his mouth like a baby bird for the spoon and then cried hysterically when it was "all gone."
• Maneuvered himself across the classroom at his daycare in one of those baby walker/activity station things.

I'm telling you, it's a baby Einstein we have on our hands.

/end brag