And, by the way, I know most of you don’t know her, but I still have to talk about my friend Sandra, who not only found a tick crawling across her 2 year old daugther’s face, but called me screaming to tell me all about how she is ready to move already. But since said 2 year old also got into the bucket of WHITE PAINT yesterday and left little while paint footprints all over the newly laid hard wood floor, and Sandra couldn’t clean them up because she was so busy cleaning up other paint spills, the little footprints are now permanent, which means that so is Sandra’s residence in that house.  Ah, 2 year olds.  Gotta love ‘em if you aren’t going to strangle them and throw them out the window to be devoured by dingos.

Speaking of small little girls, my little girl is sick–again.  I swear I don’t remember all of these trips to the doctor for minor little issues, but Dh assures me it happened with our older child and to just get over it already.  I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that our little cherub’s diet is regularly supplemented with dog food.  No, I don’t feed it to her deliberately, but despite my best efforts to hide the dog food from her, she somehow finds it. She’s like a dog food seeking missile.  I was concerned at first, until I realized it probably tastes a lot like one of those organic barley teething biscuits I’ve given her.  Have you ever tasted one of those organic barley teething biscuits?  Yeah, they’re gross.  After I sampled one, it all became clear as to why my daughter thinks dog food is a delicacy.  

So now I’m trying to break her of the dog food habit by giving her Oreos. 

(Kidding) 

(sort of) 

(Okay, okay, I only give her a tiny bit of the black part and let her slobber all over it to soften it enough for her to get it all over herself, her fingers, and my clothes.) 

(Do you like this parenthesis thing I’m doing?  I totally stole it from Sue .)  (Because she’s good writer and I want to be just like her when I grow up.) (Plus she gets more traffic than we do, and I’m hatefully jealous.) (’Cause I’m shallow like that.)  (Ok, I’ll stop now.)

J had a swim meet the other day, and he was paired next to his friend from Kindergarten, who, in J’s words, “Is my best friend, but is kind of a liar and a cheater”.  Nice.  But J’s not wrong–in a lot of ways, this kid is bad news, and I did my best to sort of discourage them from playing together so often.  It helped when Liar Cheater Boy got my son in trouble deliberately.  Nothing like a betrayal of trust on the monkey bars to cool a friendship.

Anyway, this kid was talkin’ trash to J, saying that he couldn’t buh-LIEVE that J was in the competition lane, swimming for points, just like he was.  J handled it pretty well, shrugging and saying, “Yeah, well,  I’m a good backstroker”, but I couldn’t help myself and I whispered to my son, “Beat him, kiddo.”   What I really wanted to do was shout, “KICK HIS A**, SON!”, but I figured that would be considered bad sportsmanship.  Or something.

Liar Cheater Boy took 1st place. J took 3rd. Oh well.

I congratulated my kid on a job well done, and he responded by falling on the ground and declaring that he would die if he did not get a hot dog.  So we narrowly avoided death by heading to the concession stand.  But the crises arose anew when I discovered that hotdogs cost $1.50, and I only had $1.00 on me. I tried to appease the beast by telling him we could get two bags of cheetos.  The woman behind the counter said, “Do you want a hot dog?”  I waved her off and said, “No, we’re fine.”  J responded by weeping pathetically and saying, “I really want a hot dog!”, so the woman took pity and saved my son’s life (in more way than one) by giving us a free processed meat product.

Frankfurters.  Food of champions.  Especially champions who know how to prey on older women’s sympathies.

I must go now, however.  Despite the fact that I have offered several variaties of food to my small girl, she is again headed for the dog food.

Which, if you think about it, probably has a lot of the same ingredients as a hot dog.

Lovely.