Like Todd, I've been having trouble sleeping lately. Musical trouble. You're all very fortunate I don't have more time to blog, because this last week you would have endured not just a post about the song Mamacita, ¿Dondé está Santa Claus? (six nights ago), but also one on Calling Occupants of Interplantary Craft (two nights ago) and Super Trouper (earlier this week). I wish I were joking.
(Baby would like you to reflect at this point on what she has to endure living with someone who can't keep these musical gems to himself, lacking the part of his brain that would keep him from singing every song that gets stuck in his head.)
You're lucky I have work, planning our trip to Austin, watching Zapp videos, doing homework, and going to class to occupy my time.
Did you know that the word "antichrist" doesn't appear in the book of Revelation? In fact, it only shows up in 1 and 2 John, and neither passage refers to "the" antichrist as a single or specific person. 2 John 7 says "Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist!" (NRSV). It appears to refer to people who were in the church, but who had started spreading the heretical view that Jesus was purely a spirit, and didn't have a physical body -- he only seemed to. 1 John 2 has the other three instances of the word, including one plural (1 Jn 2:18: "As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come.") There are many references in the gospels and Revelation (and the one on 2 Thess. that Andy is so fond of) to possible end-times figures who are either false messiahs or political rulers who set themselves up for worship, but the term antichrist is never used for such a person.
I finally got around to uploading about a gazillion pictures of Wren that David and Meredith have taken over the last few months. They're up now so you can click on this picture to see them. Some of them are definitely among my all-time favorites.
It's nice to have so many great pictures of Wren to remind me why I'm not crate training her. She is in boundary-pushing mode right now. She's been hitting, biting, and right now she's standing on the coffee table- which is usually a time-out offense but so far today she's just been laughing at time-out. Time out?! HA! Is that the best you can do? Give me a break. And by that I mean a kit kat bar. I'm hungry, bitch.
This is the vibe I've been getting. And I've been feeling a little sick and gross for a while, so I haven't been responding with perfect patience. This morning we built a fort in the bedroom, with extra blankets and pillows. That worked for a little while. But Lazlo's bike is broken, so he took the car to work. We're stuck at home. I'm not up to chasing games, and Wren is only interested in "hibernating" games for so long. If I'm feeling better later, we can bake some bread. That always puts me in better mood.
I hope my blog audience is enjoying this gorgeous weather- Wren, Ramona and I did end up going to the Arroyo yesterday, and it was lovely, except for Ramona eating horse poop, and running away when I put Wren in the car. So next time I'll take treats for my very food-motivated lab. And maybe I'll ask Lazlo to bring me some cheetos for lunch, because I'm food-motivated as well.
"Can you find the animal that makes this sound?"
Poor Wren has had a rough afternoon and so I'm more patient than usual with the talky-spinny-animal noises thing. Her "soothing sounds" white noise machine went insane in the middle of her much needed nap and scared the crap out of her with escalating terrifying alarm noises. I specifically steered clear of "terrifying alarm noises" when I was on that aisle in Target. When I put her in her crib, the machine was set on either "babbling brook" or "rainstorm." As far as we can tell, a little treble is the only difference. But an hour into nap time we got police raid+weird bird noises, in a sort of wave pattern, getting louder and louder. Wren was so upset and scared, and it's taken almost an hour to get her calmed down enough to venture outside my arm radius. She's comforted herself by (once again) pulling every damn thing out of my purse and scattering it on the floor. I take a stand at makeup, but I don't mind so much if she crumples stamps and bills and knitting patterns.
There really is nothing like the rage one feels at anything that wakes a sleeping baby. I remember this well from Wren's infancy, when a car alarm would go off, the neighbor's kids would bounce a ball off our window, Ramona would bark... I'm trying to think of ways to describe it but they all sound overwrought and hyperbolic, words like 'incandescent' come to mind. So it's just silly to talk about it. Suffice it to say, it makes me angry.
Partly, I guess, because naps are so important for both of us. For me, not to state the obvious, it's a nice break in the middle of the day. I get to fill it with a limited variety of activities at my discretion. Showers are possible, as is going to the bathroom by myself. I can read without having a book knocked out of my hand, or type without constantly defending the computer. I can walk into and out of rooms without a big ordeal and a lot of discussion about where I'm going and whether she'd like to walk with me and hold my hand or lie of the floor in a sobbing puddle. I can make something to eat without coming up with a way to entertain Wren in the kitchen and I can eat it without having to share or clean up a big mess or worry about not feeding Wren the right foods. (Speaking of, right now she's sitting next to me methodically eating the chocoalte chips out of a bag of trail mix. When she's finished with those, she'll start in on the dried cherries. She seperates them into piles as she works her way through the bag.) I can also watch Battlestar Gallactica without feeling guilty for exposing my child to the Cylon menace and all that violence and creepy ambient music.
And naps are important to Wren because, even though she sometimes doesn't think so "NO! MAMA NO!" she's very sleepy by naptime, and even if she doesn't spend the whole time sleeping (a lot of suspicious rustling indicates that she's repeatedly wrapping her various "babies" in their blankets to help them go to sleep) she wakes up all refreshed and ready to be her own sweet talkative, dancing, bizarrely kissy self.
The kissing of anything and everything is relatively new. She tried it out on her friend Finn yesterday with less than stellar results, but that won't stop her from going for seconds. In addition to the usual rotation of oft-kissed stuffed animals, she has also taken to kissing my feet and hands. Weird, but what are you gonna do?
Anyway, interrupted naptimes suck. And it takes us a while to rebound. So while I had plans to go to the arroyo this gorgeous afternoon, I'm not sure if we'll make it afterall. Today is one of Lazlo's long days, so it's me and Wren until an early bedtime. And hopefully tomorrow we can both take a nap.
