Yarn and baby poop

For when you are trying to nonchalantly put distance between yourself and the Holiday of Shame.

12 hats in 24 days: a knitting challenge

This did not work.

Onward to baby poop. Sorry.

The poo fairy takes a day off, is replaced by spoon

The infink was finally displaying charm and humor in front of my mother. He had a habit of greeting her by getting miserably sick with whatever seasonal grossness his brother brought home from school, and my mother had taken to grunting skeptically whenever we insisted that he was not normally a complete jerkface. It went well for two days, and I got to bask in smug-parent-smugness after his adorable bathtime antics and perfect bedtime routines. Then it all went very wrong, and he spent most of Saturday screaming on the toilet over a log of concentrated Thanksgiving that was refusing to vacate his tiny body. His doctor offered him a spoon (a SPOON), and then - when that was gently declined - a spoon filled with laxative instead. That evening, there was much fanfare over the resulting brick in the potty, and the man was set off on a nostalgic diatribe about the Biggest Poops I Have Ever Seen (which it turns out boys in locker rooms have a lot of experience with), until we kindly told him to shut the fuck up.

On Sunday, cheer needed to be re-asserted, and that cheer needed to involve a lot of chocolate and brandied eggnog, so the tree was set up two weeks early.



The gargoyle cat menaced our feet from her foot-blind.



(Bonus glimpse at last year's grocery store clippings - we maintain our waistlines because we cannot afford to eat)

My mother flew back to Oahu the next day, and I realized I had been laying down her presence like a comfortable padding of fat over my seasonal unease. As I drove back toward the mountain, the insulation tore away and I cried into the steering wheel. I'm a sucker for tradition, you know.