I do my business with a wink and a handshake!

This picture kills me. She looks so nefarious!

Big day for a little girl

Mabel had a pretty full day yesterday! By the time we got home in the evening (after 11) she was zonked in her car seat--and it seemed a shame to take her out! Here she is, sleeping peacefully. I don't have a picture of the screamfest that occured after this when I took her out and changed her diaper (it really needed to be done, or I would have just let her sleep).

Here she is this morning, all happy again!

Whoa, she's a pretty saucy girl! Look at her sit up almost by herself (I cut my hand out of the shot). She looks so wide awake. Really, this is just a brief feed/change intermission before she goes down for a few more hours. Even as I write this, about 15 minutes later, she's sound asleep in her crib again.

Well, yesterday Mabel and I got up bright and early (ha ha, 9am. Well, it's all relative anyhow) so we could be to our play group at 10:30 (we got there at 11. Don't get so hung up in details, okay? Just let me tell the story!) I joined a moms club this week, aptly named "Moms club of Renton." They have activities for moms and young kiddies; playgroups, book groups, mall walks, lunches, free musuem admittance, etc. All that good stuff to get moms out of their houses. So this was our first play group, and it was a lot of fun. Mabel met a bunch of people her age and I met a bunch of people my age. Mabel was pretty wired from all the excitement (or maybe it was from hearing Jimmy Carter on the Michael Medved show) and when she finally did calm down and go to sleep, she took a record long nap, and I was able to clean the house a bit. When she woke up, I took her running, and she fell asleep again. It was a good thing too, because in the evening we went over to some friends of mine and Bobby's, and we watched Wall-E, and Mabel was buzzing, Buddy! She would not go to sleep, she wanted to stay up with the grown ups (who, in this case, were obviously just larger-sized children playing with their blu-ray toys) and watch the whole movie. I knew we'd all pay for it; she got overtired and then went from huge smiles to crying the whole way home. She fell asleep just in time for me to have to disturb her by waking her up when we got home, but I changed her and fed her and got her into her crib in fairly short order, and this morning she was all smiles again. Amazing how quickly kids are able to get back to sleep. I wish I could get back to sleep so quickly. The only reason I'm up writing this now is because I can't get back to sleep. I'm going to give it the old college try, though. I've got the Successories Rock that Dad gave me; it has "Never Give Up" etched into it, and reading that always inspires me. I may try banging myself over the head with it a couple times too; after all, it's NOT FRAGILE!

Lists of 10's

10 things that drive me crazy (in no particular order):
1. People who jog/walk/bike on the wrong side of the jogging/walking/biking trail
2. Tailgaters
3. Having to listen politely when people talk about Global Warming
4. The Freedom From Religion Foundation
5. Most (so-called) poetry
6. Waking up early
7. Listening to my upstairs neighbor "pray" at the top of her lungs
8. Pork
9. Malls
10. Reality TV shows

10 people that drive me crazy:
1. John Kerry
2. Michael Moore
3. Christine Gregoire
4. Al Gore
5. Jim Carrey
6. The lady who does Penguin Window commercials
7. Nancy Pelosi (changed from Matt Damon)
8. Franklin Roosevelt
9. Oprah
10. Carrot Top

For good measure...

10 things I love:
1. Kelloggs Fiber bars (mmm...fiberlicious)
2. My family
3. Monk
4. The David Boze Show
5. Mabel's smile
6. Old radio shows, old movies, old TV shows
7. Sundays
8. They Might Be Giants
9. Yogurt Covered Anything
10. Wishbone

10 people I love:
1. Jack Benny
2. P.G. Wodehouse
3. Garrison Keillor
4. Robert D. Hales
5. Abraham Lincoln
6. Audrey Hepburn
7. Joan Blondell
8.Ronald Reagan
9. Franz Kafka
10. Charles Bronson

More news from Lake Wobeg--I mean Washington

Baby with the Bathwater

Here's a snap of Mabel after her traumatic bath, day before yesterday. It's really Bobby's job to bathe her, but she had a monsterous blow out (maybe I should have taken a picture of that!), and really needed a bath. She doesn't like her baths--so she cried and cried, then I dried her off and put her in her robe, and she chewed merrily on her teething ring. This was just the eye of the storm, though, because as soon as I dressed her she cried bloody murder again.

It's been over a week now since I posted anything else on this blog. I was trying to get a couple postings up, then I was going to let you all know I had it--but kudos to Carrie for discoving it first! I ought to give a prize. Sigh, I have nothing.
Mabel's asleep, so I have a little time to blog, but nothing much to blog about. I'm stuck on my Mabel book; the plot gets me hung up--plus, Bobby and I just watched some Jeeves and Wooster, and whenever I am approached with Wodehouse, well, it can be very discouraging to hold his Forth of July style talent against my tiny candle. Does that work, or is that mixing metaphors? Should I have said "against my tiny Pop It of talent"? Y'know, those little things you throw on the ground that go snap. Anyway, we'll let it go. The point is, Wodehouse makes me feel pressured.

I've restarted my diaper sewing again. Mabel outgrew all of the newborn-sized diapers in less than 2 weeks, so I'm doing some that hopefully will fit her a little longer. Right now, they're still too big, but by the time I've got enough of them ready they should fit. For 2 weeks. Maybe. This child, she's like an Amazon.

Things have been going pretty well with my running this week. Not great, but better than last week. Right before Christmas I had built up to an 8 mile run, and then I got sick, and then the holidays happened, and the weather was so foul, and next thing I knew it had been 3 weeks and I had exercised twice (neither time was running). So when I next went on a run, I was struggling to do 3 miles, and two days later I did maybe one, then turned around, walked back to my car, and went home. I have no idea why I was doing so lousy, but this week I did 2 three mile runs and one that was close to 4 (I lie, it was maybe 3 and a half. I'm just trying to impress you.) I think maybe after I got sick the whole Epstien-Barr virus kicked in, and it just took a little longer for me to shake that.

For Christmas, Bobby gave me a Garmin Forerunner (for those of you who don't know what that is, i.e. Dad; it's like a watch that tracks my running; distance, time, heartrate, etc.) and I've spent hours trying to get that thing programmed. It's got all this computer software that needs downloading, and a footpod that needs calibrating (isn't that what businesses do? uhhh, never mind). I think I've got it mostly figured out. Mabel woke up, so I'll see if I can get a picture of her in her homemade diaper...

Here she is! I still can't get her to smile for the camera. She's so distracted by the flash.

Some pictures

She looks like Kincaid to me here. Look at that expression.. She's like Johnny One Act: either in complete shock, or asleep.

She fell asleep with the pacifier in her mouth, and then the next time I looked at her she was pulling this balancing act. Note the Tele-Tubby style outfit.

They're so sweet...when they're asleep

Mabel is mastering taking the pacifier out of her mouth and then crying to have it put back in. So Bobby thought if her hands were full, she wouldn't be able to take it out. It didn't really work.

Well, here's Mabel with the sort of placid look to her face that is typical of her. I caught her reading The Portrait of Dorian Grey.

We're on the air!

Okay, I've finally got started. It took me so long to think of a title, now Mabel has woken up from her nap, so I don't know how long I'll be able to write.
I think the new year has been working on me; I finally got this blog set up, I've started on my Mabel book again, and I've signed up for a marathon on June 6th which I've just started training for. We'll see how that goes.

Maybe I'll post some of the Mabel book when I'm a little further along (note to new viewers: my Mabel book predates my daughter Mabel by several years.) I started writing a book about a girl named Mabel from the perspective of her neighbor Benjamin (Benny) from the apartment next door. Mabel is modeled after the screwball blonde types from the 1930's movies. I specifically had Joan Blondell in mind. She was in a bunch of those-- "Hey, let's put on a show! We'll reherse lots of dance numbers and then find out we have no funding, but then the leading lady (played by Ruby Keelor) will meet up with a guy who is young, handsome and rich (played by Dick Powell), and he'll fund the show, which will be chock full of dance numbers that weren't shown in the rehersals!"--movies. Joan Blondell was always the wisecracking second fiddle to Ruby Keelor's character. I can't stand Ruby Keelor, or the crazy dance numbers, or even most of the songs--so, say 3/4 of the movie drove me crazy, but I loved Joan Blondell. They had a ton of these movies back in the thirties, and I've seen at least a dozen of them at least a dozen times. So, I lifted the Blondell character (who is often named Mabel), and I mixed her with a P.G. Wodehouse character named Ukridge. Ukridge's primary characteristic is that he is always running a get-rich-quick sheme, but his second most striking personality trait is that he has no bounderies, and no sense of what is yours and what is his, except that what's yours is his. Sort of like Sam.

So that's Mabel.

Just one more thing that drove me crazy about those movies from the 1930's; they were always choreographed by Busby Berkeley--and even though they were suppose to be stage shows, they would have been impossible on any stage. They have streams of water in a forest glade, and women frolicking and swimming around, and I don't care how big the stage is, it's simply not possible for a stage show. And yet, Busby Berkeley won one oscar after the next for these reality-defying "stage shows."

Look, I'm glad we could talk about this. It's been on my mind. I'll just go ahead and post some pictures now.