Don't look now, but…

The old theme I was using was antiquated and didn’t do some of what I wanted, so I changed my theme to Violinesth Forever by Patrick Chia. It looked nice and all, but it’s full of a lot of nonsense which I fixed up quickly (I don’t really have time to deal with it right now, so it’ll sit this way for a couple of months before I can do something better…).
So that’s that… no more blog for a while, I’m afraid…

Fixing some stuff.

…here are a few recent pictures of SuperGuy to hold folks over until I get around to more.

You just try telling me he doesn’t look like a two- or three-year-old in most of these… and then I will tell you he is 18 months old and three feet tall. (Ok, actually, only the toothbrushing one makes him look older, but still…)

Click to embiggen, and enjoy

Seriously, Mama... no pictures please... I'm busy making a mess.

Baby behind, watching Rachel Maddow (seriously. T is in LOVE with Rachel.)

Dr. Teeth grins for the camera

The last ride with Papa in the front bike seat (we sold it, as T is outgrowing it)

That will have to hold everyone over for a while. We’re busy busy here at Haus Grothoff…

For the next few months, all comments will end up hitting the moderation filter (and thus won’t be shown until I approve them), so if you comment on something, don’t freak out if it doesn’t show up right away.

Nothing sinister going on, just us being away a lot of the summer and some other stuff.

5:30 am, these days, and little guy is awake because the sun is out. Now, we still share a room with him until our lease is up, which is not ideal for many, many reasons, but the worst thing is that if he’s up, we’re up (well, I’m up), and there’s no quiet playing in his room until I can stand up without falling down.

The thing is… we have a talker.

I may have given the impression yesterday that he can only talk about squirrels, but… um…. no. The reason that was so cool was that we’d never talked about squirrels or making something go away or anything, and he was really persistent.

But little guy does like to yak it up. Especially at 5:30.

Ma ma maaaaaaa! (Some stuff about going on a walk) (Some stuff about a bottle) (Some other stuff only Torsten can understand) (Some stuff about bears)

Ma MAAAAAAA! (Some stuff about going byebye… and cars… and something else only Torsten understands… and going on the swings, only in German… and more stuff about cars… and dogs… and the bus… and Thomas… and and and…)

This goes on for a while, and finally, I crawl out of bed and our day starts with me wishing I were dead. Well, until he smiles and gives me a kiss.

Then I just want coffee.

I’ve managed to secure an extra somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes by putting foil on the windows (this was done both for him and for us, because he wasn’t sleeping long enough at night and was overtired by naptime), but I suspect it’ll be several years before the Torstenalarm outsleeps me…

It’d be easy to be grumpy and resent it (in the sense of being angry at the world, not Torsten!), but he’s so cute and funny it really is hard not to wake up and smile. I am the worst morning person in the world, and I still manage to wake up and giggle with him before my brain is on.

Here at Haus Grothoff, we have a little red squirrel friend who likes to climb up the wall of the apartment building that’s about two meters from our house and sit on a window ledge watching us eat breakfast.

Usually I point him out to Torsten, who watches him quietly as he eats, and then the squirrel disappears and we’re done with it.

This morning, however, Torsten decided to make his feelings about the squirrel known. I had no idea…

Me: Torsten! Look, it’s the squirrel!
Torsten (to squirrel, emphatically): Bye bye. Down. Go down.

(Squirrel eventually goes down the wall. Torsten returns to playing with a piece of banana, possibly calculating angles of trajectory.)

A bit later, as Torsten moved on to his toast:

Me: Hey Torsten, look, the squirrel is back…
Torsten: Squirrel? (Or, more correctly, “sco?”)
Me: Yeah, the squirrel is back.
Torsten: Bye BYE. Go go go go go. Squirrel go.

(Squirrel climbs up the wall out of sight, and Torsten watches carefully, keeping an eye out to see if it comes back down. Clearly, he knows the rodent cannot be trusted and he means most emphatically to protect us all from Squirrel Doom ™).

A few minutes later, Torsten is done, out of the high chair, facing the squirrel window, and I am holding him on my shoulder while putting his pants on (because, quite frankly, this kid isn’t going to lie down for anything these days…):

Torsten: SQUIRREL! Bye bye. Go squirrel. Squirrel go. Go go go go go. Squirrel go down. BYE BYE!

Yes, I know, not interesting for any of you, but this is the longest sustained and comprehensible utterance on a theme I’ve ever heard out of my almost-18-month-old, and it was really, really funny, especially since I’ve never heard him tell anyone or anything to go away, though he does do an emphatic “bye BYE!” when he’s decided it’s time for him to leave and go somewhere.

He really doesn’t like being watched by that squirrel, I guess Damned voyeuristic foragers.

Can’t really blame the squirrel though. Torsten is cute…

Dearest Torsten,

Ok, you are now 17-and-a-half months old, and it is only now, more than six months later, that I get to posting.

It’s a bit unfair if I try to pretend I wrote this when you were actually 11 months old, so I won’t – I’ll let the pictures tell most of the story, and I’ll interject just a bit about what I remember of you then.

(If you can see the cut below, there’s more after it. If not, please visit the original post to see the rest… And as usual, click on the pictures to see them full-size)

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m usually the one who puts Torsten to bed. Almost every night for his 17 months on this planet, I’ve put Torsten’s Boppy pillow on my lap, and picked up the little guy and a bottle and rocked him to sleep in the squeaky rocking chair. Even now that he has to be at least a meter tall (he’s huge), I rock him down and carry him in to bed. Someday he’ll be too big for this, and sometimes I’m too tired to do it (I do it anyway), but I admit that there’s something delicious about snuggling with your child as he falls asleep at night on your lap. They’re in constant motion so much of the day that it’s nice, for a few moments anyway, to be still and cuddle.

Up until the last month, he was always asleep by the time I took him in, but these days, he’s usually still awake when he finishes his bottle and he smiles and lets me take him in to bed, laying him down on the Boppy with one of his bears and tucking him in.

Sometimes he cries, but usually he just smiles or talks to his bears and is in any event almost always completely out within a few minutes.

Last night, though, was very sweet. For a couple of evenings now, he’s been turning his head when he finishes the bottle, eyes closed, to give me a kiss before I take him in to sleep. He’s a lovey baby – lots of hugs and kisses – but there’s something almost unbearably sweet about your child deciding, half-asleep, that the last thing he needs to do at night before he passes out is to give his Mama a kiss.

Last night was really cute, though. He usually crashes about 8:30, and I was exhausted by 7 and went in to take a nap while he played with his papa. Apparently, while I was sleeping, he had already downed his bottle and was still quite awake, so when Christian very rudely woke me up at the requested hour (really – he scared the crap out of me!), I was not looking forward to taking care of a not-ready-to-sleep baby for a couple of hours.

Instead, though, he climbed into bed with Christian (who had decided to come lie down on the other side to snuggle) and me, snuggled up to me while putting his arm around my shoulder, and smiled, his head turning back and forth between his papa and me as his eyes started to close with his head on my pillow. After a while, what became clear was that he’d climbed in with Mama to go to sleep, so Christian left, and Torsten just snuggled there, smiling with his eyes closed every time I gave him a kiss on the cheek, totally content.

Ten minutes later, when he’d really passed out, I carried him over to his bed and he smiled again, asleep, as I put him into it with his bear.

We have such a nice little boy.

Dear Mr. President,

Holy freaking crap. No, really. I come home from a beautiful sunny walk this morning to this headline: Memo: Two al Qaeda leaders waterboarded 266 times.

I don’t care what your excuse is, President Obama – I don’t care what your reasoning is in terms of looking forward instead of looking back. As much as I have disagreed with your policy to not go looking for prosecutions of those committing war crimes during the Bush administration (and as bloody angry as it has made me), that disagreement and disapproval is nothing to the sickness and rage I felt when I read that headline.

Pardon my French, but two-hundred-and-sixty-six fucking times?????

Once is unforgivable. Once is torture. Two-hundred-and-sixty-six fucking times???????

Abomination is not a strong enough word.

I don’t care how evil these guys are. There must be consequences. MUST. And you must pursue them right now – yesterday, if possible.

I applaud you for releasing the information, because the truth needs the light of day and facts are better than dark speculation. Maybe you released the information so that you could do something about it, I’m not sure. I am not surprised that the Cheney-Bush administration did this, but then, neither were you. Neither is anybody with a brain.

But if you do not prosecute those involved, if you do not tell the world (which we are frankly lucky to have be willing to speak with us at all after the last eight years) that we recognize these egregious sins as a nation and we are willing to pay the consequences in the world community, I guarantee that we will pay the consequences in other ways.

I know you feel you need the support of the intelligence community – and you do – but having the intelligence community call your shots is not better than having the defense industry call the prior administration’s.

If you do not do something about this, you make us all less safe. You make your citizens abroad less safe (I’ve never pulled the “I’m a Canadian” trick when travelling, but I may have to next time) and you make your citizens at home less safe. Torturing people by waterboarding them more than 100 times (?!?##@$????) does not act as a deterrent – it acts as an invitation for revenge and a spark for an inferno of anger by people who already see us as unjust, greedy, self-centered, wicked. And we are. But we also have better angels – we can be just, fair, giving, ethical, appropriately introspective. We can admit that terrible things were done in our name, and we can accept the blame for that. And we can stop history from repeating itself.

This door to torture, Mr. Obama, cannot be left open. Cannot.

Do something about this, Mr. President. I’ve seen you speak, and it inspired me to spend precious hours away from my new baby to do what I could to ensure you were elected. I know you can make a strong statement, I know you can fight this fight. I know you can say that this is what was done in our name and it was terrible and it was horrid and it was abominable and it was wrong and it is not what the world should expect from us.

I know you can make a loud and clear nostra maxima culpa for all of us. You may have been reluctant to do it, to open that Pandora’s Box before. Now that you have opened it, do the right thing,

It is time for those who did this in our name to pay the consequences, and for us to accept the discomfort of dealing with our recent past.

It is not a choice. We must.

I’ll probably break the blog several times over the next few weeks because I’m finally getting around to fixing some little things.

Today’s mess-up: converting categories to tags. That should be easy enough, but I suspect it’ll break other things I have that depend on categories, so be warned…

Whew.

No, I haven’t been diving. Aside from being too buoyant, who has time to go diving?

But anyway…

It shouldn’t be that difficult to understand that everyone I know who’s had a baby seems to descend into an abyss of sorts for a while. Some people stay down for much longer than others, and for me, it’s taken about 16 months to return to some sort of equilibrium.

There are a lot of reasons for this, many of which are None of the Internet’s Business ™, but the biggest one is being a new mama away from family and friends and having only one other person to help out – his Papa. Now, we have had a weekly babysitter for the past six months, once we realized date night was no longer optional, but still… the life of a tenure-track professor is very busy, and (not coincidentally) so is the life of the mother of his child. Christian spends a lot of time with our little Mr. T, don’t get me wrong, but last quarter things really came to a head – being with the baby all day almost every day, not seldom from the moment he woke up until the moment he went to bed (and of course during the night), was just wearing through me.

And it’s easy to feel guilty about that. Of course no one else is ever in your shoes, and a therapist I know made the comment at some point that she sees countless mothers who are simply completely overwhelmed, but still – being a toddler’s sole source of comfort, food, entertainment, encouragement, guidance, security, safety, etc. all day long is really hard, especially when you sit back at the end of the days and say, “what exactly did I get done today?” I remember when my husband’s aunt asked me at some point last summer, “what exactly is it that you do all day?”, and while I found myself a bit… sensitive to the implication in that statement, I found it hard to answer until I read an article which pointed out exactly how many roles you’re playing during a day, and all of a sudden spending an hour in the bathtub with a bad book when I got free time didn’t seem like such a strange thing to be doing after all.

But you do say to yourself, “I love this child more than anything in all the world – how can I be so frazzled? How can I want so badly to go hide somewhere for a few hours? Am I a bad person?

(The answer to that is “most definitely”, but not for the reasons above )

Anyhow. So last month, for a number of reasons, we realized that because we now have a lot more to get done than even in the early days, we have a lot more on our collective plate than we can handle, and besides that, Torsten needs more social time with other kids. So we started looking for daycare options.

Hahahahaha. Daycare. For a toddler. In Denver.

Hahahahahahaha. I couldn’t even get anyone to return my calls at the places with good ratings nearby, and the one I did get a hold of and end up visiting which sounded promising left me feeling a little weird (and when the Colorado government website which lists daycare center evaluations, infractions, and accusations seemed to support my feelings, even without the fact that both their exhorbitant prices and their hours kept changing when talking to them and reading their literature, we decided that no matter how badly we needed a spot for him, there had to be other options).

It appears that if you want your younger-than-two-year-old child to get into daycare on relatively short notice in Denver and you don’t intend to drive to the suburbs, you have really poor options. Really.

So we tried other avenues. And I’m happy to report that we finally did find a fantastic and flexible daycare option for him, and so far, so good. He really likes it, he has a great time, and we get a few hours a week to get stuff done, feeling surprisingly confident that he’s ok and happy and active. He’s only being cared for part time right now, and only a few days a week, because we quite frankly want the time with our son and we are blessed with the flexibility to be able to take it, but those hours of not having to have in the forefront of one’s mind how many hours since he last ate, when the last diaper change was, how cranky he might be right now (and thus exactly when one should try to put him down for a nap), whether or not he might have managed to get into something he shouldn’t have, whether or not he’s had enough outside time before naptime, etc etc etc, are really productive.

I find I can get a lot more done in a short period of time than before we had him, so I guess that’s a good thing, but I can also take the time to, for example, wash my insanely large and unwieldy mane o’ hair properly without it out because I’m trying to hurry up and am busy listening to see if Torsten’s awakened from his nap, or have a cup of coffee and enjoy the sunshine outside, or, you know, write.

And all of a sudden, my outlook on life is a lot sunnier, because I finally am at the point where I have enough time and brain power to start thinking about professional subjects again, to be intellectual, to ponder.

I took to motherhood just fine after we had Torsten, but the change in lifestyle was abrupt and shocking and when it happens to you, you think that everyone else handles it better because no one tells you before you have kids. People will tell you that you need to stock up on sleep and that everything changes, but no one tells you how you really think you won’t survive after not getting sleep for months, how it can sometimes be hard to remember your partner as a person rather than a competitor (no matter how wonderful he or she may be) when you’re both fighting to have just enough time to be sane, how the rather brutal identity shift can be really traumatic even as you are revelling in the fact that you find you love being a new father or mother, and how you some days think you might not make it. No one tells you that this is for a whole lot of people par for the course. People tell you it’s hard, but no one tries to impress that upon you. And they don’t do that because they know it sounds a lot like they’d be trying to convince you not to become parents, even though they are, in fact, not. It’s just the reality of the situation. It’s also completely worth it, but it is very easy to temporarily lose your sense of humor about it and everything else for a while, and that’s tough.

It took a whole lot of time and some really great friends who were already parents to wake me up to the fact that they’d all had this same experience and that it was ok, truly. It helps, of course, that Torsten is a really easy kid with a really great personality, a sweet disposition (lately he loves giving kisses and snuggling), and a silly sense of humor – you couldn’t not adore this kid if you tried, and even when I’m having a day where disasters have occurred, he can make me laugh in delight, and the older he gets, the more fun he is, but realizing that it’s all ok, and that even if I’m a stay-at-home mom right now, asking for help does not make me a bad mother, is making life a whole lot better.

I’ve even started keeping up with correspondence and following the occasional blog feed again.

Yippee

(N.B. Although this is being written nearly 6 months after-the-fact, this post is made up from snippets of drafts I tried to write at the time he was actually 10 months. Also, as usual, click on the pictures to see bigger versions. This is a very picture-intensive post, so for those of you who look below the cut, beware…)

Whew. This has quite seriously been a month for the record books.

It started with us coming back from Europe – we left with a baby who couldn’t crawl yet,  we returned with a baby who could easily take over the house the moment we had our backs turned and rewire the nearest electronics into sentient toasters. I know everyone says to childproof your house before the baby comes, but really, who listens to that? (Hint: not us.) We’ve kind of fenced in the living room for the time being and put foam down on the floor, because we were having a really hard time listening to your poor little noggin hit the hardwood floors every time your attempts to stand failed. You still hit your head on things, but it’s much less awful this way.

Crawling Torsten on the loose!

Beware the wild Torstens at the Grothoff zoo...

(Note: much more below the cut for those who can see it. If you don’t see anything at all after this text, please visit the original post to see the rest.)

Read the rest of this entry »

N.B. Edited as a favor, just this once-and-only-once. Nothing to be read into that.

So I recently found that I could block someone I didn’t really want reading my stuff on Facebook, and even though my privacy settings are pretty high, I thought I’d just be vigilant and block them there for my own peace of mind.

I am a dumbass, however.

More to the point, the Facebook programmers are dumbasses.

Now, I don’t really post anything there I’m too afraid of people reading, and more to the point, I wasn’t even intending to block anyone when I found the functionality to do it. It was just an opportunistic thing.

So.

I enter this person’s name in the “block” field of the privacy settings. It searches and finds me a huge list of people with this person’s name, so I go down to the search function and type in an email address, which I get wrong.

So I type it in again.

And then I get a message that reads like this:

“jane_and_john_doe@example.com” is already a Facebook user, so we’ve sent them a friend request for you.

I couldn’t breathe for a good 10 seconds. My hands went numb.

Three frakking years of no contact and stupid-assed Facebook decides to fix it for me. Auto-freaking-matically.

I found that the request can be revoked if one is able to successfully block the user, which I was.

Unfortunately, that does not prevent them from being sent an e-mail saying you want to be their friend, even if they will not be allowed to once they click the link.

This is probably a sign that I should have avoided Facebook to begin with as I intended, but I just decided to Hell with it. I’m still not going to have contact with this person.

Makes me want to cry, sort of, but I’ll get over it.

Here I was thinking the possibility of going to see Elmo Live was exciting (see what parenting does to you), when all of a sudden, I notice this on last.fm:

Will this be an open casket concert?

Um… yeah. That would be all kinds of awesome, but…

Ok, so I’m going to try something, just for fun (for me – it probably will not amuse anyone else and I don’t care).

I’ve said several times before that the search terms that provide me with hits cause me near-endless amusement, and it occurred to me that I might as well provide these poor lost souls with what they’re looking for (or, more likely, smartassed responses to it) since they bothered to come visit my humble little blog. I forewarn you, though – very little of this will be useful.

And so I bring you the first installment of:

Ask GoogledKrista – for when The Google ™ just doesn’t cut it

(More fun than Dear Abby on a stick!)

Query #1: “what does it mean when a guy is ‘almost caught up’”

Response: Probably that he’ll be fired or dead by morning.

Query #2: “sarah palin foot fetish”

Response: Um, ok, wow. You have no idea how many hits I get from this one. Seriously. I suspect there’s some Internet site somewhere that… ewww. Never mind.

I realize it’s my fault for the title I used in a post about Sarah Palin putting her foot in her mouth all the time, but, um, really?

Sarah Palin?

And do you have a foot fetish and just have a thing for her feet, or are you hoping she has a foot fetish? In any event, could you guys please go look somewhere else? (Yes, I realize I’ve just ensured more hits by responding to this, but it’s just so darned funny to me…)

I should add that this is a bipartisan issue – I get just as many hits for “Hillary Clinton foot fetish”, and I know I’ve never mentioned that one… If I start getting hits for “John McCain foot fetish” or “Barack Obama foot fetish”, you can refer to me as officially creeped out.

Query #3: “why won’t my baby let me sleep?”

Response: I’ll give you the answer my buddy LaQuisha gave me when I asked a similar question: because he is a baby and he can do anything he wants.

Query #4: “geek girls Finland”

Response: Apparently, some Italian person is looking for the Geek Girls of Finland. (Apparently, they do not have their own calendar yet.) While I have no help for you, I applaud you in your efforts to appreciate Geek Girls as they most certainly deserve to be appreciated. And if any of my Finnish friends give me any latebreaking info on this topic, I’ll be sure to follow up.

Query #5: “barry manilow looks like papa smurf”

Response: Hmmm.

Nope.

Not seeing it.

Query #6: “my husband is evil”

Response: So is mine. Professionally so.

Actually, to be serious, he isn’t. I get this query a lot, and it makes me sad.

All joking aside, if your husband is actually evil – as in hits you or emotionally abuses you, you need to get out. Seriously. Right now.

My husband is a nice man who I call “evil” because he’s got a particularly wicked sense of humor. He’s not the other sort of evil at all. I’m sorry, but you won’t find any tales of bad men (as relate to my husband, anyway) here.

But if yours is actually evil, seriously… get out while you can.

Query #7: “week 5 pregnancy period hacks”

Response: I hope this did not come from one of the Geek Girls of Finland.

Here’s the thing… being a geek girl is a good thing, but you need to understand that getting pregnant doesn’t exactly count as an anti-menstruation “hack”, and if you really see it that way, you need to put the K & R down and go outside.

(As hacks go, this one has some fairly irreversible side effects… )

Query #8: “baby smiles at not moving ceiling fan”

Response: Totally normal. Torsten only recently became less obsessed with the ceiling fan, but he’s been staring at it since he came home, which totally freaked me out because I’d read some stupid article on autism where a mother said she knew there was something wrong with her baby when he came home from the hospital and was obsessed with staring at the ceiling fan. Took me a good while to find out that no, lots of kids from very little like ceiling fans. When they’re still, it’s the pattern of the blades. Moving, it’s, well, the movement.

So enjoy the smiles.

Query #9: “celta lesson planning cheat”

Response: Oooo, now this one makes me mad. Almost as mad as undergrads who try to send me computer security homework as “interested questions” after reading my web page.

Ok… for those who don’t know, the CELTA is the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults issued by Cambridge, and getting one is intense and quite tough. Working on getting one is about the only thing you’ll do for a month if you do it full time. I got one last year, and it just about did me in. It’s a lot of work, and lesson planning is a huge part of how you’re evaluated.

So, um, to Mr./Ms. Future Cheater… You have barked up the wrong tree.

You have some nerve. You should be ashamed. Also, you do know I have your IP address, don’t you?

Query #10: “when you see it you get no sleep”

Response: Try querying Rush Limbaugh spandex.

I’ll try to collect some better ones next time I try this – I just sort of poked at some of the random queries in my logs for fun this afternoon.

Tune in next time, when hopefully I won’t have another instance of “krista fetish” to respond to.

And now… to do real work!

(Manilow photo by Matt Becker – used under CC Attribution 3.0 license. The Papa Smurf image is from Wikipedia and is used under U.S. copyright fair use provisions.)

N.B. Because I am so far behind with these – 6 whole months! – and I’m having to rely on pictures to refresh my memory as to what happened, I’m going to be posting pictures a bit out of order. Grandparents, godparents, uncles, aunts and friends probably want to know what’s going on with Mr. T now rather than what happened six months ago, so I’m doing the 15 month post first.

Dear Torsten Monster,

Ugh, Mama has been horrible about writing these things, and she’s very, very sorry. I’ve got a bunch of drafts piled up, but none of them make any sense, and I didn’t get all that far with them anyway.

Not coincidentally, this lack of posting coincided with you learning to crawl and walk (all of which happened in the course of about six weeks, thank you very much), leading to an even sleepier Mama and Papa.

That’s ok, though, because you, Torsten, rock.

I know what you're up to!

I won’t go back and detail the last six months here, because that’s for other posts, but I will talk about who you are now.

(More after the cut – if you see no more text and no cut here, visit the actual blog entry…)

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Ok, so here’s the first set of many pictures and Torsten-related things I intend to get up soon – one thing at a time.

Anyhow…

Part 1: The dress

Once upon a time there was a dress. The wearer wasn’t particularly fashion conscious, but it was a nice dress, and it did quite well when she decided to marry an Evil German Guy:

Wedding, 2005 - in steaming hot Indiana

(More below the cut, for those of you who can actually *see* the cut…)
Read the rest of this entry »

N.B . I make no claims of grammatical correctness in this post – I’m too tired to care!

So I still haven’t gotten my slew of Mr. T pictures posted (I have posts nearly ready to go, but things keep getting in the way of me finishing…), and I haven’t written anything of substance here in months either.

Life has just kind of been like that of late. I just wrote the nth email unintentionally containing less-than-complete sentences (where n is greater than 2 and I am too tired to mourn that there’s no way to get those emails back), I lost my wallet on the bus the other day and had to cancel all of my credit and debit cards (though I’d like to shout a big thank you to the kind, anonymous person who dropped it into our mailbox yesterday completely intact), and I went to the doctor today forgetting I had neither debit nor credit cards and was  thus forced to have them bill my copay because I am one sleep-deprived dingbat. On top of that, some days I walk out of the house with my shirt on backwards (which is an improvement over my first three months of motherhood in which I more than once nearly answered the front door without pants), my clothes are usually coated in various Torsten-related substances anyway, and I’ve totally turned into the kind of person who says things like, “Damn you kids, get off my lawn!”^[1]. Well, ok, I say things like, “Guys, it’s 2 am, come on,” in my grumpy old mother voice, shouting out the window to the noisy new neighbors. Same diff. The point is that I’ve been out of it. Yeah, I win.

There are a lot of reasons for the lack of writing and the scattered brain – Torsten is huge and capable and implementing his world takeover scheme already, exhausting both Mama and Papa (And thank you, JoAnna, for warning us ahead of time about tall babies and doorknobs! Taking care of that early has been a lifesaver… we’ve been calling him Houdini since about birth, and he shows no sign of stopping with his evil mechanical escape tricks), I just got back from four days away taking a big-assed German exam in Chicago, the evil husband has been working his butt off and teaching a lot of hours, and there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for two people to get all of the work done (though Torsten, who’s almost 15 months old now, actually helped his Papa sweep the kitchen today, so that’s something .

It’s not all bad news, of course – we’re finally able to handle the above, even if we’re positively loopy some days. Having an older child means it’s becoming easier to start doing some things for grownup Krista as well as being Mama, and that’s a very happy thing indeed. There are some big things in the works, actually, but that’ll have to stay cryptic until I have some more information. In any event, in spite of me having Mommy Brain something awful, things have finally started to come back together on this end.

Of course, that’s no guarantee I’ll actually get pictures up soon, but it does mean I’ll try

Anyway, for those who just can’t live without their dose of Torstenosity, here are a few tidbits:

• T has grasped the concept of binarity and can say (and understand) up and down, off and on, open and shut (which, amusingly, does not sound like “shut”), in and out (where “in” is usually the occupied bathroom, and “out” is where he’s supposed to be), etc. This means lots of flipped lightswitches and slammed cupboard doors, but it’s neat to see that he gets it.
• He has become Mr. Climbing Monkey, and he is totally silent when doing things he probably shouldn’t be. This led to Boudreaux’s Butt Paste being smeared all over our very high dining room table and the things on it, and us not noticing when he did it. He’s good.
• Torsten is still the most awesome kid ever, and has learned how to give big smacking lovey kisses to Mama of his own accord
• He now plays lots of clapping games, and he hasn’t tried to beat Mama for singing “If you’re happy and you know it” yet. Yet. This is a major feat for a baby who loves music.
• He’s not a real fan of eating. Unless it’s something we are eating. As I tell Christian when I steal his chocolate, “stolen tastes twice as good,” and apparently T agrees.
• While I was away, he actually bitched me out on the phone before bursting into tears because I was gone. You haven’t lived until you’ve been told off at length on the phone by a 15-month-old.
• It’s official – he now repeats the worst things Mama says, especially when driving. Mama will have to finally clean up her act. Boo.
• He’s still the biggest flirt ever. Ladies everywhere are no match for the Toothy Grin of Torsten ™
• He’s very tricky when playing games, sometimes legitimately tricking us. We’re in so much trouble when he can talk…
• He has a bunch of teeth, all the better to eat you with!
• He is still the nicest baby in the world. Really. He loves to snuggle and kiss and giggle.
• Mr. T loves books. This makes me incredibly happy.
• He has finally sold Mama on Elmo, because he loves Elmo so very much. This is as far as I am willing to go – there will be no trading up to Barney, the Abominable Purple Dinosaur.
• He can climb up and go down the big kids’ slide at the park by himself. Of course, we’re always standing nearby to catch him, but it’s cool.
• He’s about the size of a two-year-old, which makes squirming at diaper-changing-time not fun.

These random tidbits of Torstenmation have been brought to you by the letter T and the number 0.  I make no claim that anything in this post has made any sense whatsoever.

Anyhow, Saturday is tentatively looking like a good day for me to work on Torsten-stuff, so I may get more posted then. But don’t hold your breath – Mommy Brain is insidious and might cause me to spend the day snoozing instead

^{[1] Does anyone know where that phrase is from anyway? I see it everywhere and have no conclusive answer. (And if you say “Gran Torino”, you are too young to answer this question.)}

On the eve of the final day of the Bush administration, I just wanted to send a final message to George W. Bush – something that I remember my father saying to me many, many times as a teenager.

And that, Mr. President, is this:

Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Classy, I know, but what can I say – it’s from the heart.

I know I keep promising to get pictures of the kiddo up, but it’s been crazy. I spent the last half of December trying to get some reaaaaaaally important administrative stuff together and trying to meet a code deadline, and then Christian’s quarter started, leaving me with long, long (long) baby days.

And then… it happened.

Christian and I both got the Evil Death Cold of Doom ™. And when I say “evil” and “death”, I’m so not kidding.

It sucked.

It continues to suck for Christian, anyway – I’m much better now. I can only hope the baby doesn’t get it, because that would be horrid.

In any event, the point of all of that whining is that I’ve had no time at all to get pictures up, and I’m not promising anything right now, either. I have a huuuuge German test to study for that takes place next month, and until that’s over, I’m totally slacking on everything else except for the care and feeding of a baby Torsten.

I have so much cuteness to post – low-quality video of snuggly toddler waddling around in snowsuit, birthday pictures, etc, but it’ll just have to wait. Sorry grandparents and stalkers… them’s the breaks.