In My Next Post, I Will Discuss My Life as a Shopaholic

At the risk of turning my fledgling, neglected blog into Cathy, I will announce that my fat pants have officially become my pants pants. The pants are thrilled, as this marks a promotion of sorts for them. We don't need to talk about how I feel.

I'm going to be a better blogger. I will start on Monday, which is also the day I will stop eating bonbons and referencing my "buns of cinnamon."

Oh!

I forgot something. Sometimes, randomly Googling people from your past--come on, you know you do it--pays off. Although I don't have any editorial comment to offer, I can report that, if you cue this up to 1:20, you will see an ex-boyfriend of mine making a cameo appearance on As the World Turns.

Fever Dreams

So, I wanted to be better than this, and I think I still will be in the future, but our household has been--what?--in disarray? That would be charitable. As I type this, I'm watching one of our cats pick at dried toast on the dining room floor that the bean threw there, like, five days ago. Gross. It's like we had a giant house party where everyone got into an egg fight, threw glasses of orange juice against the wall, knocked over some well-placed knickknacks just to make things look even worse than they actually were, filled up all the garbage cans with used tissues, and passed out mid-bottle. And didn't do my laundry.

But there have been some noteworthy and, for the most part, more positive events, as well. (I have the flu, so I refuse to take responsibility for anything that I type or for anything that happens in my life from here on out, ever, by the way.)

1. Bean made his own emoticon on my computer! I'm not kidding. Here is what it looks like:

}-=[

I think the uni-brow is very creative, but I'm unsure about the single eye. The mustache is a little too evil (I've never been a fan of joking references to Hitler), and anyway, it only really serves to elongate the emoticon's face a little too much. The frown, of course, works.

2. Lost is back! Lost is back! Now, T and I can reasonably expect to have conversations like the following again:

"Where is the smoke monster? I haven't heard it eat any trees lately."

"I don't know, but I bet that in the next flash-forward we'll see why Locke is able to see Jacob, the island ghost who may or may not be Jack's dead alcoholic father. And I bet we find out why that polar bear skeleton was discovered in Tunisia wearing a Dharma Initiative collar."

Love it!

3. My mom unwittingly wished me a "Happy VD" last Thursday.

4. Mitt Romney bowed out of the presidential race, leaving Leon and Bean to bemoan the death of the Republican party. They'd hoped for so much and for so long; it was a sad day for them.

Well, there is more, but I can't remember it right now. Did I mention I have the flu? (Of course, the people who know me best could wisely point out that I'm writing this post primarily to tell anyone who will listen that I have the flu. People! I have the flu. But I also have more time for leisure than I've had in the past three weeks, so it's defensible.)

The Bean Stands Alone

So, Bean can now add "proficient in standing" to his ever-growing resume. Naturally, T and I are thrilled!

One of my favorite things about these milestones is how much you're forced to acknowledge even the--let's face it--most basic achievement. Bean will stand, but he insists on screaming in jubilation every time he does it, and he grins at you in that way that demands you clap and shout and jump up and down and generally share in his triumph the way babies do, by being way, way over the top about it.

And so we oblige, and this makes me think of one of my favorite "What if?" games. What if you treated everyone the way you treat your kid? At work, that might look something like this (and you've probably seen it before, in bad movies if not in real life):

COWORKER: I went ahead and booked that meeting room for us.
YOU: (in squealy voice, applauding and jumping up and down) Oh my god! You did it! You go! You amaze me! You are such a big, big boy! I have to get the camera! T, where is it? Where's the camera? I have to take pictures of this moment!

Is this how sarcasm was born? Did a bunch of parents start thinking it would be funny to treat everyone in the world this way?

Anyway, congratulations, Bean, on graduating from being 30 inches long to 2'6" tall. And, of course, on pushing the cats one step closer toward a collective mental collapse and on making sure your parents remember to celebrate the things worth celebrating.

I'll Tell You Right Now That the Butler Didn't Do It

Last weekend, T and I hosted a murder-mystery dinner party, the kind where each person plays the role of a suspect. I know, I know. You're thinking, "Dorky! I would never do that," but at the same time, you're thinking, "I would kind of want to do that."

Anyway, we had stellar guests: They dressed up, they played their parts with gusto, and they were careful not to get so wrapped up in the game that we began to wonder if they were (dramatic stage whisper) theatre people.

So, it was fun. Bean played the role of Victoria Lester, the murdered woman, perfectly in that he ran around for a while, screamed, and collapsed for the night. T was somehow able to channel "big shot in oil" Big Bill Bradford, our friends rock, and there was alcohol, so all was good.

The one thing, though, was that this game was produced for, I don't know, maybe four cents, as I believe the cover art demonstrates. Max Haines, murder-mystery dinner-party creator extraordinaire, lends his services as a consultant based on his "knowledge and research of murder mystery," and the writing leaves one...confused. (For the record, each guest gets a generalized script to read from that outlines what his/her character should reveal in a given scene.) Many times over the course of the evening, someone would declare, "I was jealous because she couldn't have him! I mean, I couldn't have him. I mean, wait. Who couldn't have him? I think it was me, but the wording here is a little confusing."

Really, though, the badness was part of the fun. Can you imagine what a well-done murder-mystery dinner party would look like? It would look dorky, that's what.

Anne, Anne, Are You Okay?

Ever since Bean was born, I've done what any good mother would do: I've become increasingly paranoid that my child will choke on anything larger than 1/16 of a sunflower seed, and I've become increasingly convinced that he should probably just eat rice cereal for the rest of his life so we can avoid living the horror stories parents seem to love to tell about the time their kid almost died eating a Gummi bear.

The other thing I did was brush up on my CPR skills. The infant dummy is strange and slightly scary--you have to blow up its body!--but most of us have distinct memories of Anne, the gold standard of resuscitation dummies.

For the curious, Anne was a real person and a probable suicide. I'm not sure what you could do with this information--be nice the next time you give her mouth-to-mouth, I guess? But still, it's interesting, the faces we use and for what. Now to track down that ever-elusive Gerber baby . . .

Photo: Anne

Update: The Gerber baby has been found! (Actually, she wasn't very hard to track down. And she is not Humphrey Bogart.)

So Over Being Zero

A year ago today, many things happened.

1. Our cats died a little inside.

2. I discovered that chastely pronouncing yourself "not of the body" does not exclude you from being completely and 100% of the body during labor, which is really, really gross.

3. I learned that you can have two men of your dreams at once. (Such men can even cohabitate if you play your cards right, ladies!)

Over the past year, we've seen Bean do so many things for the first time: squirm, roll over, hold his head up, crawl, smile, laugh, recognize his family and friends, say a few simple words, stand up, grow hair, lose hair, grow hair again, discover emotions, give the best hugs, smear cake all over his face like a drunken maniac (above), and turn into a little boy. It's almost impossible to think that we met him just one year ago. He's been here forever, really.