>A few weeks ago, Jack was freaking out before his nap, because he desperately needed “Other Batman”. I managed to find at least five different batman action figures to no avail. I think I finally just sort of backed out of his room as his pleas for “other batman, otheeeeer baaaatmaaaaaan” got quieter and he fell asleep.

And then today as Jack and I were playing in his room, guess who we found! Other Batman! Too bad I made the Dash costume out of construction paper and safety pins. I bet Jack would love to dress up as Other Batman if the costume hadn’t disintegrated.

>Possible answers: Maybe with a puppy, I didn’t feel like I had enough pee-soaked laundry to fill a whole load? What am I talking about? Oh, I bought some cute underwear for Jack, and after I changed the world’s nastiest diaper, I thought, “Hey! Why not put him in underwear?”

Jack was on a great streak with going to the potty a lot. I’m not sure what happened, but at some point between when we ran out of incentives (chocolate chips) and when we got a puppy, Jack lost interest. But there is nothing like dinner at a nice restaurant to get that boy to want to sit on a potty. And there is nothing like dog patterned, day’s of the week underwear to make me loose my sanity and put Jack into the St. Bernard/Wednesday pattern.

Spoiler alert: This doesn’t “end” well.

But it’s not as bad as it could have been. I had the asparagus in the microwave, and the salmon in the oven, and the boys were playing at the breakfast bar out of nipping puppy range, and Lucy was nipping, and Dave was walking through the room and he said, “What did you say Jack?”

Jack was saying, “I poopin’! I poopin! I poopin!” Fortunately, it was just pee, and now I have laundry to do, and you can thank me for not making a pun involving “load”.

>I thought I had the boys’ Superbowl outfits planned perfectly:
But then I realized we needed a costume change for the halftime show:

Jack was mesmerized.

>I cannot rely on Gramma, a.k.a. technospaz to upload the video of my darling children learning the following behavior from their beloved Grandfather. Fortunately, I have been able to record it myself. And by “Fortunately” I mean, it was really easy because this sort of thing has been happening every night after dinner since my birthday.

In related news, the capes arrived from Aunt Beth the other day. I’ll have her do a guest blog post about that saga. But this picture made her respond with the following text: “My hatred now burns less brightly.”

But Jack wouldn’t wear the cape like a normal little boy. He put it around his neck with the cape in the front. “No. Like dis. Like a bib. Cake. Cake. Cake.”

>New Years Resolutions…
1.) Blog more often… (stop laughing)
2.) Backup blog and change format
3.) Fill in Jack’s baby book so I can delete that section on old milestones, and uh, for posterity
4.) A bunch of other stuff no one cares about like eating right and exercising and writing a book.

>True Confessions: One of the reasons I have been sort of lame about blogging is that I have over 1000 pictures on my camera, and it takes picassa 2000 years to see them all, and then the ones I want are sort of tiny and down really low behind a wall and I can’t see them. Wow, in the time it took to type that, I probably could have gone down to the mac, downloaded all the pics and then deleted them off the camera. And I really need to do that before Christmas anyway. Just this evening, Jack was being really cute at the dinner table, and I thought, a video of this would be so cute, and I would treasure it forever. Without a video, how will I remember his sweet 2 year old voice? How will I remember the tilt to his head, and the way he raises his eyebrows when he asks a question to which he already knows the answer? How will I capture the true joy in Luke’s laugh when Jack is cracking him up? But the camera, is alllll the way over therrrrrrre. And I’ll never get a chance to download the video…

Then I had the same thought right before bedtime when Jack was crawling around, pretending to be a dog. He was a very frisky, barking dog. His bark sounded exactly like this, “Bark! Bark!”

To Do:
Deal with camera
Fix Christmas music playlist (delete all songs from Disney classic.)
Catch up on a bazillion things I need to post

Also – I am toying with the idea of changing the layout here. So don’t be surprised if that happens. AND! I updated the list of books read for 2009. I am sort of in the middle of two, so maybe the list will grow by the end of the year. And I didn’t put comments on the books this year but I feel the need to give Her Fearful Symmetry 2 thumbs down.

>The school bake sale includes boxes of cookies… 4 types of boxes times 4 types of cookies per box times 6 of each cookie type times 85 boxes = 16 different types of cookies, 2040 cookies total. Behold what we hope is at least 240 of them:

Yesterday was baking day, today: decorating. Tomorrow everything gets boxed up, and Thursday is the sale. I am acting like I have a lot to do with this, but I am only doing a tiny part. My awesome neighbor is in charge and we decorated at her house this evening.

Saturday is my annual cooking baking extravaganza, I hope I am not burned out by then.

>We didn’t get a very good yield out of our garden this year, and I usually blame skunks and squirrels. I assume that it would be annoying if there was an animal eating our produce, but I wouldn’t know, because the animals in our yard eat all the leaves and flowers and we end up with nothing. Sometimes they even eat the plastic tag that says what variety of zucchini we planted.

So I have to admit, I wondered what was going to happen with our new bird feeder. I was pretty excited about our early Christmas present, because I thought it would be nice to watch the birds while I eat breakfast. But I just had this weird feeling that the squirrels would somehow get involved. The bird feeder actually looks pretty squirrel proof, but the suet is another matter. Well. I should say the suet was another matter. It lasted about an hour after a certain squirrel discovered it. This squirrel should have absolutely no problem making it through the winter.

Note that the squirrel looks like that before it even made a dent in the suet.

>Well – I made it – I posted once a day for 30 days straight! I’m sure it’s not a coincidence, but I have tendinitis or something in my wrist now, so I may be taking some time off! Maybe not, we’ll see. But I’ll try to go for quality over quantity and just throw some pictures on if I ever remember to put my memory card back into my camera.

Coming soon:
Pumpkin cake near disaster details
Stuffing Redux

>I was really excited to do my last post of November and say, “Woo hoo! I posted every day in November!” But then I realized it’s only the 29th.

See you tomorrow!