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Sunday, October 26, 2003

nothing is as gray as it was yesterday

This is so bizarre. LT and I have been giving ourselves severe cases of joystick-related carpal tunnel syndrome, attempting to master this Star Wars Starfighter game I bought at Wal-Mart on Friday. (note: he is already better at it than I am, even though I have played it for more total time. This means I am a grownup now, for real, right?). Anyway. The idea of this game is that you drive through these scenes and shoot at things and try not to get killed. The first mission is a training mission, and all of you video gamer types are going to laugh yourselves silly when I tell you that it is REALLY HARD on the easy level and I'm really proud of myself for making it through about four of maybe six stages in forty minutes when you're supposed to complete the whole mission in four minutes. This mission involves flying this little yellow starfighter thingie (like Anakin uses to destroy the control ship in Episode 1, my resident Star Wars aficiando is telling me) through this ravine and shooting these mines and stuff. It makes me seasick when I first start playing it. But the weirdest part is (remember up there I said this was bizarre) is that after I've been playing it, it makes me seasick to stop. Like getting sea legs. This screen is only just now starting to slow down on its pitching and yawing, and I have the strange sensation that really I'm looking at this upside down somehow, even though plainly I am not.


Remember when River Raid -- for the Atari 800, not the 2600 or whatever that one was with the huge cartridges -- had really cool graphics? And Miner 2049er, how I loved that game. (now the screen seems sideways. I have to stop myself from tilting my head to make it straight). And Zaxxon. These really hokey 2-d graphics that we thought were just Top Of The Line. We who had 800's looked down on those of our friends and cousins who had the bulkier cartridges and the funkier graphics. And now those are antique video games. You can download them with ROMs (which basically make your PC run like an Atari, or something) for your PC (not that I would break the law like that) and the whole darn thing -- ROMs, a zillion games, whatever else you need -- takes up like 60K on your hard drive. That's how fancy and top-of-the-line they are. Not that I would know this personally, of course. I wonder how long it will be before we will be laughing because we thought this two-week-old 2.7GHz-512M-RAM-120G-hard-drive machine was pretty snazzy. Probably not very long at all.


Today has been a better day than yesterday. I still have a lot on my mind but it doesn't weigh me down as much as it did. We came home from church and just kind of relaxed, although I did some housework first, to alleviate guilt. Except now, you can't tell I did any at all. Children see a blank space of hardwood floor and think, FANTASTIC! More space to play Legos/put together a huge floor puzzle/play with my dollies/get out my dollhouse! And lazy indulgent single-Mom-for-the-week that I am, I do not keep on them about having Only One Thing Out At A Time, so as a reward I get to put it all away after they go to bed. But oh well, it's a cheerful happy mess and it's not as hard to put away as it looks. See how much more myself I am feeling? already finding the happy side of a mess in my living room. By tomorrow I'll be waxing rhapsodic about how my little baby girl has grown into this 4-year-old with a horsie dress and a sweater and Mary Janes and a single ponytail in the back, carrying her little Bible out to the car for church. Or hey, maybe I'll do that now. What the heck.

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Friday, October 24, 2003

giving platelets... or not

Well, what a waste of an afternoon. For the most part. I zipped into Barnes and Noble on the way to the blood bank, and bought four nice matching Austen books (thereby finishing my collection of her novels in nice matching paperbacks), as well as a Maeve Binchy, and, on impulse, Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue, so that I would have a couple of options to get me through the two hours sitting still with needles in my arms. I negotiated the dreadful Fresno freeway traffic (uurrrggghg), got to the blood center, did my little "have you had sex with any prostitutes in the last two years" survey (I wonder, does anyone ever answer yes on that question? probably), got my finger poked... and got sent away because my iron is too low. Damn. I had forgotten about that -- not that they told me it would be checked -- they just said no alcohol, no caffeine, no this, no that, when I made the appointment on the phone. But I do have low iron. I'm not sure if it's because of my horrific periods or not. Anyway, I was so depressed for a few minutes -- I felt like I let Conor and Jared and Kayli down (all kids with this rare and vicious form of leukemia -- I'm friends with Conor's mom and it's through her that I learned about the importance of giving blood products, and found out about the other kids). I felt like I let the blood bank down, and I felt absurd for having stressed so much about getting there on time, pawned my kids off on my parents, etc., all so that I could go do this, and then I couldn't. I got over that -- after all, I tried, and after I work on getting my iron to normal levels I can try again. But I do feel kind of silly having scheduled this whole trip down there around that and then having the main event fall through.


I did get a lot of cool books though. So all was not lost.


I also went to Borders after the blood bank, returned a book T had given me (bless his heart, I love Jane Austen, and he got me a Jane Austen biography, but not one I'm interested in), and got three books: one with Jane Austen's and Charlotte Brontë's juvenalia, one with four of Shakespeare's comedies, and My Antonia. I did a little bit of necessary shopping (and got some surprises for the kids; they were gratifyingly pleased about that when I went to pick them up) and went to the Olive Garden, where I was treated rudely and the food was not as good as usual and I just generally wished I hadn't gone there. So. On the plus side, snazzy new books. On the minus side... almost everything else. sigh.


Good news though -- T just called and it looks like he'll probably be home by Tuesday. yippee!

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two old poems and some miscellaneous stuff

Well, T just called and said that he's been called out on another fire, and he'll be home to kiss us goodbye and grab his stuff any time. So we're in the midst of scurrying around getting his stuff ready to go, and writing him love notes, and drawing him pictures. I have a few minutes to spare while his clothes are in the dryer so here I am, trying not to think about how much I'm going to miss him.

I was going through the papers he keeps with him when he's away (sentimental stuff) and came across these two poems I'd written. They're the only two poems I've ever written that I still like. The first is about falling in love with my best friend; I wrote it just over ten years ago.

All these years
peeking around corners
waiting impatiently for him to appear
THE MAN OF MY DREAMS
He would have all the right pieces
yes, his puzzle would be well-put-together
He would be all I could ever want from a person.
A best friend, a partner in my walk, a fabulous person
all wrapped up in a body for which I'd have died
I waited
and watched
applicants came and were discarded
nobody seemed to fit and I would have lost hope

had I not turned

and seen you.
God pointed you out
(how could it have ever been any other?)
You'd been there all along, our love patiently waiting
to be found
(like misplaced glasses sitting on my face)
No earthly discovery ever pleased me more
than when I found us
sitting right beside me all the while.

--September 10, 1993

OK, so I was 18. "Would have lost hope?" But still, I like it. And I always had wanted to marry young. :)

The other is one that I wrote one night a couple of years ago, having just picked up my then-five-year-old sleeping son to put him to bed.

You used to live under my skin.
My every breath and motion rocked you.
My muscles wrapped around you in a protective embrace.
Your movements kept me company.
Your presence answered my prayers and filled my dreams.
You gave my body a reason for being.

Then you were a noisy bundle of Boy
hungry for my breasts, needful of my attentions.
I doted on you
(along with the rest of Western civilization).
I fed you, held you, stroked your head, changed your pants,
dressed you in fuzzy yellow sleepers.
You gazed at me like I was the only person you ever needed to see in the world.
I have never felt so important in my life.

I turned my head, and then looked back at you
and found in place of that bundle
this tall
capable
headstrong
loving
beautiful
intelligent
PERSON.
Who told you your legs could get that long?
When did you get permission to be four feet tall
and learn to read
and make up stories out of your own head
and have a best friend?
It is almost impossible to see that needy, helpless baby
in this joyful, wonderful boy before me.

That is, until I creep in when you are sleeping
and fold you into my lap with your head under my chin.
You almost wake up, but then
your breathing is even and your lashes are on your cheeks.
(who says you can have lashes like that?)
I rock you gently back and forth
and cuddle your head.
You are busy dreaming about dinosaurs or animal crackers
or motorcycles or big trucks or helicopters
or jigsaw puzzles.
You don't even know your Mommy is wetting your stubbly hair with her tears.
I have found my baby boy again.
You won't remember this moment in the morning
but I shall never forget it as long as I live.

August 3, 2001

That one, I still really do like, and it means more as time goes on. (for example, now I can't even put him on my lap and tuck his head under my chin; he's too big.

Today is the day I am going down to give platelets. I put off leaving until T could come home, so that we could kiss and hug him before his departure for what could be a two-week absence. I think I'll still have time to go by the bookstore on my way to the blood center, but I'll be putting off all the other shopping and dining until after I'm done there. I have printed out a long list of book ideas for myself -- some of them culled from the book list from ivillage, and some from Amazon's recommendations. I have discovered the joy of tinkering with my Amazon recommendations -- I spent an unmentionable amount of time doing that over a couple of days and now they actually recommend things I would be interested in, for the most part. It is almost creepy how they remember what I've bought in years past better than I do -- and heaven forbid you buy one Star Wars book from them; I had absolutely NO idea there were so many Star Wars books in existence. I think I'll have to make LT his own wish list for them; I had to delete them all from mine because my wish list was 80% Star Wars stuff. yikes.

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Friday, October 17, 2003

alone for the afternoon

My parents took my children with them to the city and T won't be home till 3:00. So I have two and a half hours to spend totally alone and what am I doing? Sitting here writing a diaryland entry. How totally pathetic.


OK, well, I am playing Alanis Morissette, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Barenaked Ladies, Meredith Brooks, Evanescence, and the Proclaimers at non-kid-friendly volume levels. Good thing the neighbors are all either a) deaf, b) away at work, or c) members of an aging-baby-boomer garage band which generally tunes up at midnight and gets really blasting by 1 AM, so I don't have the slightest inclination to accommodate them with my stereo volume. In fact I've often been inclined to pipe some really, ah, stereotypical Wagnerian opera at extremely high volume directly into their living room at 5:30 in the morning while my poor bleary-eyed husband's getting ready for work. But I digress.


I just don't have a lot of activities I enjoy that are substantially more pleasant without children in the vicinity. I don't smoke, don't drink, don't swear, don't even have a secret stash of Godiva chocolates (which actually, I don't like) hidden somewhere. Here's a list of possibilities that generally run through my head when my two munchkins are going to be gone:

• Sex. T isn't home yet so that's out.
  
• Blasting loud music. Check.
  
• Going to the grocery store. Well, it's not that I enjoy this, but it is a necessary activity which is simpler to do solo. And I did that already today.
  
• Going for a brisk walk. Did that.
  
• Going to a fancy restaurant. Doing that next week.
  
• Watching a nice romantic comedy without having to use my psychic Mom powers to mute or skip to the next scene at just the right moment. Hmm, has possibilities... but can't do that while "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" is playing....
  

It used to be that reading was at the top of that list. But now that the kids are older, if I'm going to neglect my housework to read, I can do it almost just as well while they're happily occupied playing with Legos or running around the yard as I can while they're gone or asleep. So when they're gone, I'm kind of at a loss -- what to do to maximize this time on my own? I guess I can just bask in my uninterruptedness... for the first twenty minutes until I really start missing them, and start having to remind myself every two minutes that I'm supposed to be enjoying this break....


I know that many of you are agreeing with my first paragraph right now: I'm totally pathetic. Which is as it may be, but I guess I kinda like it that way. I'm just gonna go lip-synch to "Bring Me To Life" while I fold some laundry and give up on being wild and reckless for today. ;-)

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Wednesday, October 15, 2003

the diary curse is coming upon me

Note: It is happening. It just took longer than I predicted it would in my first entry. I have gone from multiple entries a day, through one entry a day, and now I've begun skipping. I do hope that I'm still writing in this thing a month from now.

It's not so much that my life has been boring, either, it's just that I haven't felt much like writing about it. Our trip to the zoo on Monday was nice. We also did a bit of shopping (you can't possibly take a trip to the city without buying at least a few things that are unavailable up the hill). T went to Harbor Freight, which, for the uninitiated, is a kind of Oriental Trading Company of hardware stores. Everything's cheap, in more ways than one, but if you're looking for certain things (like tools for a kit that will be in the car for emergencies) it's a decent place to go. It's also a man magnet. C and I were the only females within two blocks of that store, I think. And, like paintball stores, auto body websites, and telescope accessories catalogs, it's the kind of place where I should just automatically double his pre-shopping spending estimate. I did have plenty of time to sit in the car and finally read the instruction manual for our new car stereo, though. (hey, it DOES have a clock!)

Here's a bit of advice: If you're trying to cut back the amount of time you spend at the computer, do NOT get a CD burner and a cd player for your car during the same week. Let's just say it's counterproductive. But now I have all kinds of cool stuff to listen to in the car.

I am trying to figure out what book I want to buy next week (oh, what a happy kind of decision to have to make! And I'm going to eat at Olive Garden too, all by myself!). I'm going to be spending two hours next Friday afternoon donating platelets, and I'll want a paperback book (I just see that being so much easier to handle with a needle in each arm), one I haven't read before that will really draw me in. I have a $18 book to return at Borders, and a $25 gift certificate for Barnes and NOble, and they're right across the street from each other in Fresno (whose bright idea WAS that?), so I should be able to get pretty much anything I want. I'm thinking I might get Jane Austen's juvenalia, if it's available in the store, but then I'm also thinking I might want something a little lighter and more modern since I'll want to be totally absorbed in it. If anyone has any recommendations, leave a comment. :) Thanks.

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Thursday, October 09, 2003

upgrading, or an exercise in frustration

The lack-of-sleep haze from Tuesday night has finally worn off, after a good eight hours last night. I'm still working on getting used to the new computer, though (hmm, sounds like a good excuse to sit around at the computer half the day....). We were the last people on the planet to upgrade to Windows 95, just before Windows 98 came out. Then we got Windows 98 late too, and now we have WIndows XP which, if the pattern holds true, will become seriously outdated within the next seven days, all because we've finally upgraded to it. Regardless, it is extremely nice to be able to start up my computer without a series of error messages about bad sectors, and to be able to run it for more than two hours without The Blue Screen Of Death, or without the keyboard stubbornly deciding to stop communicating with whatever it's supposed to communicate with -- generally in the middle of a really good scintillating IM conversation. It's worth the hassle of having to make this program fit my kinks -- for example, this font has got to go. Ick. Just as soon as I'm done with this entry.


In order to facilitate moving our documents, music, etc., from our old system to the new one, we bought a cheapo $100 external CD-RW drive when we bought the new computer. It was the process of getting this to actually function that took probably half the night on Tuesday. I swear the directions for this machine were stolen from engrish.com. Not only did they make no sense, but they also told almost nothing about how to actually use the thing. It was as if someone had made up a set of generic poorly-translated directions that would work for a new blow dryer, a compact imported car, a power drill, or a gas barbecue -- take your pick -- and then mistakenly put them in the package for this CD burner. Surely there are enough native-English-speaking people in China and other foreign countries who could be hired by manufacturers to make sure that packaging and instructions are both comprehensible and useful for English speakers? Or perhaps not.


Once I finally made that work, mostly by divine intervention I think, everything went pretty smoothly, and before I knew it, I was looking at that bizarrely-plastic-silver-boombox-looking Windows XP layout, having officially joined the rest of humanity in its susceptibility to modern viruses (our operating system was so old that your average pimply virus-writing hack was born after it was. Well, not quite, but close). I still would love to figure out how to make Outlook Express figure out how to import my old emails. I had backed them up ages ago, when we got a second 3.2G hard drive (ha! remember when that was a HUGE hard drive? I do) because our main 3.2G hard drive was too full. Now I have them on a CD, and I can't make Outlook Express see them. I am an obsessive-compulsive email-saver; it's extremely unsettling (and has been since I backed them up) to have no access to the history of my life for the last seven years. And I also REALLY miss my ergonomic keyboard, although it had its problems so I don't want to hook it up to this machine. I have a new one coming from eBay. I don't even have a wrist rest, and I can feel the CTS coming on as I type this.


Anyway. In other news of the day...


Those of you coming to this diary for the first time from a weight loss ring might be surprised to find no reference to my weight at all. Well, here. In the last two weeks I have lost one pound -- and I lost that two weeks ago, and it's periodically been lost and found since then. I started out at 194 pounds (which isn't as fat as it sounds, since I'm just a shade under 5'9" and very dense), and right now I'm sitting at 174. I'm on my way to 150 pounds, and now that my husband is home from the fire he was working on for a week and a half, and the kids and I aren't driving all over the countryside and eating half our meals in restaurants, as well as having junk-food parties, to distract ourselves from missing him, I'm back on track.


Also, homeschooling is going well. LT and I are studying Arthurian legends, and he is writing a puppet-show script of Star Wars Episode 7, since George Lucas isn't going to make it. So far the plot is a dread secret, but he has allowed it to leak out that Luke has 20 Death Stars and that he (Luke, not my 7-yo son) has made 100 double-ended light sabers. I'll keep you posted so that you can line up 200 people deep and camp on our street when the premiere (where lemonade and brownies will be available for sale, I am to understand) happens. ;-)

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Wednesday, October 08, 2003

The Day After

I have a whole bunch of funny stuff to talk about today. Just a ton. (setting up a new computer system will do that for you). Unfortunately, the problem is, all the funny things happened between 11 pm and 5 am, and then I only got to sleep for about 3 1/2 hours, so while the material is there, there's just no way I can do it justice in my semi-groggy state. Maybe later.

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Tuesday, October 07, 2003

a little birdie, just had to share

There is a bird (I don't know what kind, I'm not very good at that) just singing its little birdie heart out outside my house. Full-volume, very insistent warbling, for about the last four minutes -- just amazing. I feel like I should go outside and give the little guy some applause, or something, so he'll know his work is appreciated and doesn't stop. Barring that, however, since it would probably be counterproductive, I just hope he gets the attention of the prettiest girl bird ever hatched as his reward. :)






Another random item of note (2:12 p.m.): When you have an antiquated Pleistocene-era PC like mine, and you are listening to your bootleg downloaded copy of Barenaked Ladies' "Another Postcard" (I don't feel guilty because I'm buying the album as soon as it comes out ;-) and doing something else on said elderly machine which requires much RAM (like, say, selecting and deleting large quantities of emails), the stutter effect produced in the music creates an additional level of humor in this already-zany song. You should try it.

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Friday, October 03, 2003

book sale

ooh, joy, joy, the "members only" opening night of our library's semi-annual book sale was tonight. I only realized the book sale was going on when I read a post on one of my many email lists, wherein someone was offering a possible explanation for the quietness of the list -- "is everyone off at library book sales?" At first I thought, what an absolutely idiotic thing to say, does she think everyone's library has book sales the same weekend? And then I thought, Oh my goodness, my library's book sale IS this weekend!! So I turned around and asked the kids if they wanted to go to the library sale and buy books. C was enthusiastic; LT was not. Now here's the awful kind of mother I am: I said, "But you know, they might have some Star Wars books... it'd be a shame to miss it if they had Star Wars books..." and before the words have even finished leaving my mouth I'm mentally kicking myself -- what kind of mother ARE you??? First of all, you're the mom, he's the son, you say we're going to revel in cheap books and by golly, he just has to go! And secondly, exactly what are you going to do when you get there and there are no Star Wars books? You manipulative, lying excuse for a mother! So went my mental self-flagellations. I needn't have worried on one count, though, because we'd barely arrived at the children's section before LT found not one but two Star Wars books -- a storybook of Return of the Jedi, with photos from the movie, and a comic-novel version of Episode IV, most commonly just called "Star Wars", but actually, if we're going to go with the naming conventions used in the other movies, it would be called "A New Hope". Egads, let's not go with that, shall we?


Anyway, I spent $17 on books, and they're 50c apiece. This time I got stuff for the kids or for school, almost exclusively; I only got two books entirely for myself and they're children's books also. I found an almost-complete set of the Narnia books from the 80's (missing The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, which, before someone determined to re-order the series, was #1). This edition is especially significant to me because it's the same as the set my brother and I had when we were little. I think I may even have our old copy of LWW sitting around somewhere. If not, I can find it on eBay. And I got a Trixie Belden book (#5, The Mystery Off Glen Road). It is my goal to re-accumulate all of the first 20 of this series. I had them when I was younger, and somehow they got lost or disposed of. I got a few horse-y books for C (I am a sucker where those are concerned. I figure she'll read them eventually...), and the rest of the books were just odds and ends that I thought we should have, either for reading aloud or for school or for both.


Enough about the book sale. We had a really nice evening after that. We came home and I barbecued chicken burgers and hot dogs for supper; I sat outside and read a library book (The Time Traveler's Wife -- maybe I was just predisposed to enjoy whatever I read tonight, but so far I am really intrigued by this book) while the kids played happily. It was a really happy scene, without a doubt the best part of the day. Earlier we went to the valley with the neighbor ladies; it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd worked myself up to think it would be, but still, it was not an insupportable amount of fun either. I got the very bright idea to walk along the bike/walking path in smallish-shopping-city from the park to Toys R Us, so we could look at stuff and the kids could work on their Christmas lists while we waited for the ladies to be done with what they were doing and ready to go home. It proved to be too much of a walk for C, and she had a spectacular meltdown on the way back to our car. I never expected to be one of those mothers pulling a sobbing child along by the hand on the sidewalk. Next time you see one of those mothers, please have some mercy in your thoughts of her, on my account. It was far less fun for me than it looked. The rest of the trip was nice enough, though.


I am kind of bummed because I lost my really nice Mary Cassatt stamps. I have got into the habit of requesting something other than the ordinary standard stamps given out by default, when I buy stamps. A couple of months ago I requested Audrey Hepburn stamps; this last time I just asked for "something different", and the postal person handed me these really wonderful stamps with Mary Cassatt's artwork on them. I don't collect the stamps, I actually use them; it just feels all interesting and different to use a stamp that's something besides the traditional flag or whatever. I'd used about half the stamps on that sheet when I lost the sheet. I am far more upset about this than I should be. For one thing, I can just get more. It wasn't a limited edition thing or anything. But that's not what bothers me. I am just idiotic about stamps. One time the kids got hold of a partial sheet and stuck two or three them on their clothes like stickers, not knowing they were actually for mailing things. I went borderline ballistic, as if the stamps were worth, say $34 apiece instead of $.34 apiece. I know for a fact that I have spent more than $.34 per sticker for a sheet of stickers for them to play with, on more than one occasion. Don't ask me why the stamp thing bothers me so much, but it does. There are many strange things about myself which I will never understand.


random thought: I love how on amazon.co.uk it says that the item is "usually dispatched in 2-3 days" instead of "shipped".

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Wednesday, October 01, 2003

irritations and joys

In the "life's little irritations" category for today:

• Paying $43 for checks. Really, it's disgusting that it can cost that much for four boxes of freaking checks. You'd think they were printed on Van Gogh canvases or something. And I am a total sucker for every one of their shifty-eyed merchandising schemes also -- first I fall for the really cheap initial offering, and then I stay with that company rather than go for another cheap initial offering because it is SO much easier, since they have all my information already. And when I get all the way through checkout and on the last page they reveal that their handling cost is $9.00, I balk at first but then cave because I've come so far. And I spend 45 minutes dallying and trying to decide whether to go with the old comfortable patriotic-themed checks or to branch out into something new. sigh.
  
• Going to my favorite restaurant, with my parents and my two children, and waiting an hour and a half for our food. We were the first people in the restaurant when they opened for dinner, and yet half a dozen tables had paid and left by the time we finally got our food. We were so full from appetizers that I asked the waitress to go ahead and package our food to go, since an hour and a half is about the outside limit of a 4-year-old's (*sob*, that's the first time I've had to type that, no more 3-year-old) good-restaurant-behavior anyway.
  
• Being so totally uncomfortable from eating appetizers, salad, and soup that I could hardly sit down. Stepping on the scale and seeing that I had apparently gained seven pounds since getting up this morning. What the heck is up with that, I know I didn't eat that much. It makes me think I can't believe anything that scale says. And trust is a very important element in the relationship between a woman and her bathroom scale. I feel so - so betrayed.
  

To balance that, here are some parts of today that made life bliss.

• Singing "Happy Birthday" about a dozen times.
  
• Realizing that this girl's whole life for the past four days has basically been one long birthday celebration, and that it's not over yet.
  
• Speaking on the phone three times to my absent-but-adored husband, instead of the usual one stolen-time-at-11-pm fire overtime phone call.
  
• Feeling that teenagerish heart-leaping feeling when I hear the voice of the man I've been married to for almost ten years (can you tell I'm trying to make the best of a bad situation here?)
  
• Contemplating all day, and especially around 9:00 at night, what I was doing four years ago at that moment. My daughter's surgical birth was not a happy incident at its face value, but it was a momentous day even if it wasn't a lot of fun. And I never realized until my children began having birthdays, how much a birthday means to the person's mother. Now I always give my mom a special hug on my birthday as well.
  
• That startling moment of satisfaction when I step onto the porch or into the living room and see how clean it is (see, raving optimist that I am, I can even find something to be glad about in my FIL's panic-inducing visit)
  
• C's horse obsession. It is such fun watching my little mini-me enjoy the same things I did at her age.
  

And now it's time for me to carry my sleeping 4-year-old to her bed, and go read a chapter of The Silver Chair to LT (and my dad via audiocassette) before collapsing in sleep. :)

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