You can tell everybody this is your song

You know how smarty pants kids and obnoxious adults like to read fortune cookie fortunes with the oh-so clever addendum "in bed?" In the last week, Lil E has come up with his own addendum, randomly placed on the ends of sentences about lunch, the park, Dragon Tales, his friends, anything he considers of substance or simply needing a bit of boy-flavored spice. His versions of "in bed," however, are all about monsters and poop (which are arguably one and the same if you are a Freudian or a parent somewhere in the potty training timeline). They go something like this:

"I saw Sammy at the park and we played on the slide and ran in the field...and then a monster came and scared us away."

and alternately

"I saw Sammy at the park and we played on the slide and ran in the field...and then I pooped on his head."

Lovely.

The incessant potty talk both amazes and exhausts me. Who knew there were so many ways and so many opportunities to bring waste into the equation? I sometimes delude myself into believing this is just another exercise of his creativity and advanced verbal skills. But who am I kidding? He's almost three and this is what wee people do (wee people! ha! see it's catching).

Perhaps even more startling is how the potty talk has invaded his love of golf ("Does Tiger poop? Does Tiger poop on the green? What if there's poop in the hole?"), music and dancing ("Let's do a poop dance!" What kind of music does my penis make? Can I drum on my penis, mommy?"), and yes, even American Idol ("In the new American Idol, will Gina sing? Does Gina poop on the stage? When I'm a musician and I play all the instruments on stage, I will poop on your head!"). For the love of reality television, child, stop!

Alas, it is hard for Lil E to separate his obsession from his art, which led us to our living room one afternoon last week, the keyboard turned up to 11 and the boy singing in full voice into the microphone. Soulfully, seriously, lyrically, this his song:

The digger is digging in the dirt.
The digger is digging on the sidewalk.
Somebody pooped on the digger!
I think it was the construuuuuuction workerrrrr.


There's nothing more to say, really. Just the moan of the electric guitar, the slowing beat of the bongo, the notes of the piano outro and a final flush and fade to black.

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LInkety Dinkety Doo: Monday morning crinkly eyes

I stayed up way too late finishing up an incredible book, All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki.  It is a dense and intense book with heartbreaking, funny, smart characters that come together randomly yet naturally. The writing is superb with metaphors that are not blindingly obviously, but rather gave me pause after reading a paragraph, thinking, "Wow, that came together beautifully."  Be warned, my husband is quite ready for me to return to our family and I am relatively sleep-deprived but it was so worth it.  On to the link love...

• Give mama some love.

Sk*rt is a site where you can recommend posts, a head-shakeable blog phenomenon that I don't quite understand but will shamelessly play along with just to see my byline on the screen. One of my posts from Strollerderby is up there today and it needs a snuggle, friends. Look for "Mama Needs a Hot Italian Manny (Everything You *Really* Need For Your Newborn)"  and then click where it says "Love it." This is purely informational, I swear.

• Oh hell naw.

There's really nothing more to say. Well, unless you read the comments, which made me let out one of those embarrassing one syllable "HA!" laughs that gets you a strange, quizzical glare from the child.

• I so get this.

In fact, I am so there. Are you?

• And this.

Give Sarah some love for her beloved poop-wary peanuts.

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Back to our regularly scheduled programming

Is it possible to have major let-down and intense freak-out stress all at once? Oh yeaaaah, it's called motherhood, right? Or maybe, it's called being a mother-writer-blogger-wife-sassy layday trying to squeeze a vacation in once in a while. Just when I felt I was catching up on sleep/blogspiration/laundry/email after BlogHer, we shipped the kid off to Camp Grandma & Grandpa and headed to Vegas with two of our BFF couples.

I am sure you are all fidgety with curiosity: How was Las Vegas?

My answer: Ehhh.

I realized about an hour into our vacation that I don't love casinos, which is not the best revelation to have when you are about to spend four days in Las Vegas. But to me, casinos are loud and depressing (again with the dichotomies) and put me into an overstim that is very similar to the first time I showed Lil E a Baby Einstein DVD (which quickly - thank the goddesses -- was replaced by American Idol).

Perhaps it is because we are on a pretty tight budget around here since the total disappearance of Miss Noncommittal Lazy Pants, Bruce's thrice weekly cash-wielding, crying out for therapy more than crunches client has disappeared into the northern 'burbs, most likely in a puddle of underdeveloped biceps and Egg Beaters (not that I'm bitter about clients who never call their personal trainers back, JACKIE!*). We shouldn't have counted on the income but we did, and so that led us straight to the casinos with very little to gamble.

But not gambling was not really the issue. Gambling bores me. I'm good for twenty minutes and then I'm ready for a detox, preferably in a non-smoking bar where they make excellent lemon drops.

I should qualify my boredom by telling you I grew up in a gambling family. When we played Hearts with my Grandma Alice, we were all expected to pitch in our pennies. If we won, we celebrated. If we lost, we lost. And if we cried or complained, according to Grandma Alice's father's rules, the cards went into the fire in the woodstove (or the junk drawer, in our case).

I grew up betting on the Kentucky Derby and if necessary, by round-robin phone calls minutes before the horses hit the gate. We heard many stories of my grandfather's ability to count cards effortlessly and how my mother spent much of her childhood at the track. Even though my parents have scaled back the gambling habits of their parents' generation, we still place wagers on the Oscars and pull out jars of change for card championships at the holidays.

The slots and craps and blackjack and roulette, though, just don't trick my trigger. To make matters more uninteresting, I just did not get why it was entertaining to walk the long, scorching strip to see hotel after hotel.  After the initial ooh and ahh over rain from the ceiling or a leg of the faux Eiffel Tower sticking out in one corner, everything seemed swallowed up by the familiar bad cocktail uniforms, whirls and dings, tables and overstim.

Here's the good part: We were with our friends and they are amazing. We laughed and had drinks and told stories and used short-hand that only the six of us understand.

We lazed by the pool and hit the steam and sauna spa in the hotel. We ate one of those crazy Brazilian meatgasm dinners and saw a mediocre  comedy show that was saved by Jimmy Schubert (who's he again?) and April Macie (if you saw April Macie on Last Comic Standing a couple of seasons ago, know that she's much funnier and much raunchier live).

We also had a blast at a little pub in New York New York where the dueling piano act is hilarious and rockin' and goes great with one or five Coronas (the beer here's only $5.50 a bottle...bargain!). Here's how much fun we had dancing and singing at the tops of our lungs for 3-1/2 hours until my blisters throbbed and my voice was nearly gone (oh effin' yes, more blisters, even in the cute flats unpadded flats from the depths of Miss Thang hell I bought just for the occasion):

So it's not the most attractive of poses, but dude, we were singing Journey. What else was there to do? It was like a requirement to get all Rockstar: Supernova-ed like that.

Check out my Bizarro Mother-In-Law. I don't mean that as an insult, I mean it as the strange coincidence of my MIL look-alike  (in the floral shirt) planted right next to our friend (in the red shirt) at the bar all night long. Crazy, right?

We did not make a burlesque show after all, but Bruce and I made a deal when we hobbled home one night while our friends cruised on to more casinos that we'd be sure to get to Lipschtick and soon. I'm a little disappointed that I missed all those feathers and sheer-rhinestoned costumes that gives my inner seven-year old a little thrill, but I will be just fine. After all, I may just become that dancing grrrl myself, and wouldn't that be a kick?

* Of course, that's not her name, people. And either is Miss Noncommittal Lazy Pants. Stop looking for clues. If you think I am talking about you, stop reading immediately and CALL YOUR TRAINER!

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