Twas Brillig

Oh, the crazy “mommy moments” just keep happening around here. While I don’t post about them too often, rest assured that they make up the majority of my life. And, after all, I WAS nominated as the hottest Mommy Blogger. (What’s that? You haven’t voted yet? Well, here. I’ll make it easy for you. Click here.) So I guess from time to time I need to prove my Momminess. Right now, I will highlight 3 moments from yesterday.

1. I put my happy cherubic little baby on the floor upstairs so that he could roll around and scoot to his little heart’s content. Then I ran downstairs to grab something, and in the meantime I heard, “*shuffle-shuffle*scoot-scoot*THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD*splat*WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH*” In zero seconds flat, he’d managed to make it to the other side of the room and fling himself down the stairs, causing me to feel like the world’s best mom. He wasn’t terribly hurt, besides a little bruise on the head, but it scared us both real good. “I only left him alone for a SECOND.” “Yeah, yeah, lady. We’ve heard that one before. You’re gonna have to come with us, now. And we’re giving your children to the nice lady down the street with all the cats.” You KNOW that’s what’s gonna happen one of these days.

2. Once the littlest boys were in bed for their naps, Bubba and Fluffy went upstairs to play while I, well, blogged. After a little while, I heard strange noises in the bathroom so I went to check it out. I found Fluffy, in the bottom half of her swimsuit, and Bubba, completely naked, in the bathtub, which they had filled and dumped all the shampoo into (besides the shampoo that was dumped all over the floor in the process, of course) obviously hoping for bubbles, but instead getting just icky water. And then… I heard extra giggling. Who else was giggling? Upon closer examination, I found the NEIGHBOR GIRL hiding behind the shower curtain, wearing a swimsuit, as though she’d been planning all along to come on over and jump in our bathtub. I DID NOT KNOW THAT THE NEIGHBOR GIRL HAD COME OVER AT ALL. Rather than throttling them all, which is what I was initially tempted to do, I handled it with great dignity, fetching Blake’s swimsuit and the rest of Madeleine’s and telling them DON’T SPLASH. Am I cool, or what?

3. Since my little princess is about to start Kindergarten, I’d really hoped to get Madeleine into a charter school rather than the regular nastiness that is the public school system, so I applied her to all of them that I could think of, but all of my attempts had been thwarted. Kindergarten is the hardest year to get a kid into a decent school–all the spots fill up SO quickly. I’d resigned myself to Public School. But LAST NIGHT! An email came from the charter school in the town we’re moving to in a couple of weeks–I don’t even remember applying to this school, because we never expected to move to this particular city! Anyway, they had ONE POSITION open up and her name was drawn! I had until 10:00 p.m. (less than four hours from when the email was sent–good thing I have no life and happened to be online!) to respond and accept the position or it would be given to someone else. I’m SO EXCITED! See, if this email had come just a week ago, I would have thrown it away, because there was NO WAY we were moving to that city, therefore the slot would have been wasted on us. So the announcement came at just the absolute perfect moment! It just feels like another concrete sign that we made the right decision. Yeay!

Okay, am I enough of a mommy-blogger for you now? Hey, did you vote yet?

I just bought the movie Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses for my Fluffy, and fortunately her brothers don’t yet know that it’s not cool for them to like Barbie movies, so they’re all happily watching it. We’ve all probably seen it about 57 times now.

And I have the most random thing to admit.

I think “Prince” Derek is HOT.

I would have included a picture with that last statement, but I couldn’t find any, even through lengthy google image searches–which leads me to believe that I’m the only “grown up” who thinks that Derek is hot. Or, perhaps, that any animated character is hot.

Alas, it’s not the first time. I always kinda had a thing for Eric from The Little Mermaid and Prince Philip from Sleeping Beauty.

And really, I can’t believe I’m writing any of this.

Still, I know I’m not entirely alone. I specifically remember a moment in college when I was hanging out with some guy friends who had just seen Disney’s “Hercules” (it had just come out) and they were talking about how Meg was by far the hottest Disney character ever! When I saw the movie myself, I thought that she was definitely the skankiest of all of Disney’s princesses (which is, of course, what these guys found so appealing). Still, the fact that ALL of them were saying this about an animated character makes me think that perhaps this is not totally unheard of.

So, fess up. Did you ever have a thing for an animated character?

(And is anyone gonna agree with me about Derek? Come on…)

Well, yeah. I thought I’d add a new feature to ‘Twas Brillig–because apparently my daily blogging routine was devastatingly uncomplicated. Or something.

So, here’s the deal. In my sidebar, there will be a box highlighting three blogs. These will change every day (every day that I blog, that is…). My purpose is to tell how I met all the bloggers in my blogroll! I thought it would be fun, and challenging in some cases, since I’m not sure I even remember how I met all my bloggy friends!

And to mix things up a bit, I’m going to do it in reverse alphabetical order. Cuz, well, why not?

This would be a lovely chance for you, my dear bloggy buddies, to go to my blogroll and make sure that your link works, that it’s going to the right place–and that it’s there at all!

By the way, there is absolutely no anticipation of reciprocity here. This is just something I wanted to do, free of charge! Everyone loves to hear about how their blog was found, right?

Of course, my blogroll isn’t set in stone (even though it does seem to take me an eternity to update it). I anticipate meeting more friends along the way. Do not weep for them, Gentle Readers, for as I go along meeting new friends, I will certainly add them to the fun, even if their letter of the alphabet has already been featured.

So, now, let the linky-love begin! Go check it out! You’re likely to meet some new friends in the process!
********ETA:
Oh! And don’t worry! I’ll be filing all the bloglights into my blogroll so you can go back and see what I said about you or someone else, and you can see if someone’s already been bloglighted or not, and also so that the linky-love is permanent, and not just for a day.

PLEASE don’t tell me you’re sitting around BLOGGING this weekend!

Oh, wait… what am I doing? Sitting around blogging? Hmmmm. I’m SO COOL.

Do you think I could buy a life on e-bay?

Hello, Gentle Readers! It’s been so long since we had a Soap Opera Sunday! So, seek out your inner drama queen, and let’s go!

(The only thing Soap Opera-y about this one is that it contains all the angst and emotions of the high school world. No torrid love affairs, I’m afraid.)

My Freshman year of high school, I had a great group of close friends–a boy named Mark was an integral part of that group. He was funny, talented, intelligent, and (to my little fourteen year old eyes) drop dead gorgeous. Which, I suppose, is where the problems started. I liked him. A lot. And it was no secret. And, apparently, it was not reciprocated.

My passionate devotion to Mark burned him out. Slowly but surely, he began distancing himself from our group of friends and became, well, rude. And that caused me to freak out at him, which caused further distance and rudeness, etc. By our Sophomore year, we were barely speaking to each other (but speaking PLENTY behind each other’s backs, natch).

The trick here is that both Mark and I were also passionately devoted to one other thing: Theater. And we’d both climbed the totum pole to the top, so we often had to work together, but we weren’t nice about it. Every time the spotlight shone on him (which was all the time) I gagged a little, got nasty and gossipy about him, or furiously jealous. Whenever Mark saw me, I was at my snippiest, snottiest worst–which is so funny, because I wasn’t really like that at all. Just around him. I just kept making it easier and easier for him to hate me.

It was so strange, to know each other so well and share happy memories and hilarious inside jokes, and yet feel so strongly negative towards each other.

By the time we were Seniors, Mark had his groupies, I had mine (Mark had, shall we say, a lot more adoring fans than I did….which, of course, bugged me too). Everyone knew that we weren’t very fond of each other, but almost no one knew that once upon a time we’d been best friends.

And then the inevitable happened. We were cast in the school play as romantic leads opposite each other. “Fine,” I thought. Sure, we’d be working even more closely with each other than we’d worked before, but we could get through it.

But this was different. Due to many factors (which are too long and boring to explain) this play was very emotionally charged and extremely stressful. Both Mark and I were feeling the pinch and, not feeling like we could lean on each other to get through it, we instead grew extremely antagonistic. Fortunately, we didn’t actually have that many scenes together, and when we did have scenes together, there was nothing too lovey-dovey. The words were lovey-dovey, but there were no *ahem* actions involved.

During our final dress rehearsal, our director said to us (after weeks of rehearsals, and nary a word prior) “you two are going to have to kiss at that part.”

The theater, which was full of people, went completely silent, before it erupted into psychotic giggling. Everyone in that room knew how we felt about each other.

I couldn’t breathe and I think Mark was about to throw up.

(Part of the ridiculousness was that never in my life had I been surrounded by so many boys–in the cast and the tech crew– who would have fallen all over themselves to be the one kissing me. For some reason, it was almost as if someone had hand-picked every boy who’d ever had a crush on me up to that time and put them in the cast and crew. And yet I was slated to kiss the one who found me utterly disgusting.)

I don’t remember what we said or if we said anything. But we never looked at each other or acknowledged to each other what we’d just heard. And we CERTAINLY never PRACTICED.

The next day at school, complete strangers were coming up to me saying, “Hey! I heard you and Mark are gonna have to kiss each other in the play tonight!” And they would heckle me and giggle and go on their way.

So, that night—Opening night, I wasn’t nervous about anything besides that kiss–that unpracticed kiss with a boy who loathed me–a kiss that all our friends, and even our non-friends, were sitting in the audience to witness.

I remember that right before that scene, I grabbed his arm backstage and shoved a breath mint into his hand. (Yes, I’m still snickering about that.)

We performed the play four times. I remember each night’s kiss distinctly, after all these years. Our first night’s kiss wasn’t remarkable. We were just in a hurry to get it over with. Our director’s notes after the second night were that it was “WAY TOO SHORT AND PASSIONLESS” which was SO true. You’d think we’d just given each other a hi-five with our lips or something. And so the third night we took it slower, as we’d been told to do, and it was… delicious. At least in my memory it was. I don’t actually know what Mark thought of that one, but I suspect that he was perhaps even more disgusted with me because he could sense that I was allowing myself to enjoy it a little bit. Haha. Anyway, the last night was the best. By far.

Because the whole school showed up to take a picture of it.

Clearly printed on the programs were the instructions not to take pictures. It didn’t matter. There we were, taking the “kissing position” and all we heard and saw were *clicks* and flashes. Hahahaha.

In the moment that all those pictures were audibly snapped, I could feel Mark starting to laugh, which made me want to start laughing. Both of us realized how absolutely RIDICULOUS this whole situation had become, that there was so much real-life drama between us that people were turning up just to take pictures of us STAGE-KISSING!!! The audience didn’t know that we were both on the brink of busting up laughing–we covered it well and moved on with the scene as normal. But we knew it about each other, and that was enough to undo a lot of the crazy years of anger and disgust. We now had something to laugh about together–ourselves. Stupid as it sounds, it was a really healing moment.

It was a turning point for us. For the rest of the school year, there wasn’t exactly comradery, but neither was there hatred, disgust, gossip, and jealousy. We were just co-existing. It was marvelous in it’s total unremarkableness.

Nowadays, I don’t know where he is or what he’s up to, though from time to time I hear things about him. Apparently, he pursued the professional acting thing–hey, if anyone can do it, Mark can. He really was that good–way, way better than I was. And, obviously, I made very different choices for my own life. But the point is (point? did someone accuse me of having a point?) that oddly enough, there’s nothing but kindness and respect between us now, on both sides. I hope that wherever he is, life is treating him well and that he’s happy. And I can say with 100% confidence that he hopes the same for me.

I’ve been tagged. Multiple times. I’m going to try to catch up here a little…

In the Spotlight.

Jenny and Jessabean both tagged me for this one, along with a myriad of others who say “if you’re reading this, consider yourself tagged” (not at ALL cliche…). I’ve seen it all over the web lately, and I’ve seen everyone answering DIFFERENT questions, so I wasn’t actually sure what the real questions are. So I went right to the Source, (and asked the horse, she gave me the answer that she endorsed, she’s always on a steady course, talk to Mr. Ed) and apparently there are several questions that I can CHOOSE from! So I guess I’ll answer the ones that I feel like answering!

1. What makes your blog unique? Well, let’s see. I’m a homebirthing, green-eyed, vegetarian, Mormon, world-travelled, “had-four-kids-in-four-years,” poliglottal, mommy-blogging Democrat who lives with her mother-in-law and writes under a Jabberwocky-inspired pen name. I like to think that makes me unique.

2. When did you start blogging? I started blogging two months and two days ago, to be precise. Before that, I had a different blog that I occasionally wrote stupid (and totally unnoticed) posts on from time to time, but I wouldn’t call it “blogging.” Then I became Brillig and I’ve been frantically blogging ever since!

3. What do you hope to accomplish with your blog? Make a million bucks? Take over the world? Hypnotize wild animals? Complete the tower of Babel? Punish all who are literate? You pick.

4. What are your feelings on the “blog popularity” issue? HAHAHAHA. I had to put this one in, because the WHOLE POINT OF THIS WOMAN CREATING THIS MEME WAS TO INCREASE HER BLOG’S POPULARITY. Well done, brilliant Christy. Well done indeed.

And now I will tag-a-roo. Hmmmm, who should my victims be today? I pick:

Whiskeymarie from Never what you think it should be
Jewels from Blonde Canary
Rebecca of Rebecca James
Believer of Believer in Balance
Jennifer from The Verge

Okay. Now to the second one. This one came from Butrfly today.

Where did you get your kids’ names from? (that’s not really the name, but it works…)

1. Fluffy is actually the nickname my little girl has had since she was in utero. I can’t for the life of me remember why her dad started calling her “Fluffy” and then when she was born bald (and remained mostly hairless until she was nearly 2!) it became just a silly name for her! Now her hair is actually quite Fluffy, so it works just fine. Her brothers all call her “Fluffy.” Her REAL name came from when I was working in a bookstore while I was pregnant with her and saw the name on a book and fell instantly in love with it, presented the idea to Hubby, he loved it too, and it was a done deal. What you should know is that she is named (her first and middle name) after who I consider to be the two most controversial women in the Bible. Beautiful names, beautiful together, and my way of saying, “back off–those two women were AMAZING.”

2. “Bubba” is just what we’ve always called him. His real name is his Dad’s middle name, which was Hubby’s grandfather’s first name, which was hubby’s grandfather’s mother’s maiden name. Got it? Basically a no brainer for me. But the name suits my little Bubba perfectly. Bubba’s middle name is my maiden name, which also suits him PERFECTLY.

3. “Scooby” is what Fluffy started calling him right after he was born. Hubby and I had decided not to find out Scooby’s gender before he was born, but for some reason we both firmly believed that he would be a girl. (If he’d been a girl, his name would have been Sophia Catherine. Isn’t that pretty?) Anyway, he was clearly NOT a girl when he was born and it took us TWO WEEKS to come up with a name for him! The name we settled on is so cute and we love it. It’s Biblical without sounding Amish… His middle name is Hubby’s grandma’s maiden name.

4. Lil’ Dude is an obvious nickname for my lil’ dude. I suspect it requires no explanation. As for his real name, he was my only baby born in the hospital and you have to name your kid before you can go home! We had NO idea what to name him. But I was desperate to get out of the hospital (hospitals in general make me feel that way…) so I kind pulled a name out of the air and Hubby liked it (after we’d been quarrelling about EVERY name up to that point), so we hurried and wrote it on the birth certificate app. and off we went! His middle name is yet another family name from Hubby’s side. (There are VERY FEW PEOPLE in my family that I would EVER EVER EVER name a child after, so I’m glad that Hubby had so many great people in his genealogy!)

And now, I tag
Thoroughly Mormon Millie
Braveheart-does-the-Maghreb
Mom O Matic
The Dead Letters
Families are like fudge…mostly sweet with a few nuts

Phew! Two meme’s down! Only about a thousand to go…

It’s another installment of Flashback Friday, Friends!

(I’m SO gonna end up in Guantanamo for this post. See why I use a nom de plume?)

I was digging through some of my old stuff the other night and came across my passport from when I was a teen. I was 12 when I got it, it expired when I was 17.

This wasn’t just any passport. I’ve had a million passports (okay, probably not QUITE that many…) but this one…

THIS ONE was….

Illegal.

There’s a raised stamp right over my face causing me to look “bumpy”… I just felt like
I needed to clear that up, lest there be any confusion.

Okay, okay. Illegal is perhaps too strong of a word. Technically, it’s against the law to have two active American passports (unless you’re Jason Bourne, apparently) and this was my second passport–I already had one that I was using, and continued to use the whole time I had this second one. My acquiring a second passport was necessary because in order to get into some of the Arab nations surrounding the country of Israel, you aren’t allowed to have ANY HEBREW IN YOUR PASSPORT. Which pretty much SUCKS if, say, you flew into Tel Aviv first and they happened to stamp your passport, as is the norm when you land in any country! Then let’s say you were planning to travel to, say, Amman, Jordan.

Which I did. And I was.

And so in a little American Consulate in East Jerusalem, my shady passport was concocted. I’ve been an unconvicted felon ever since.

*snicker*

Even with the new shiny passport, getting into Jordan was no easy feat. Tensions were so high in the region (imagine that!) that even though Amman is only about an hour’s drive away from Jerusalem, the border was closed. So, naturally, being the adventurous family that we were, we snuck in.

Okay, okay! Again, I’m being a bit over dramatic! We didn’t “sneak” in, in that we weren’t doing anything wrong. The four of us (my older brother, my parents, and I) woke up early in the morning and took a taxi to the southern end of Israel and from there we walked across the border into Egypt. Once in Egypt, we boarded a rickety old bus that took us across the Suez Canal and on to the Red Sea. From there, we took a commuter’s ferry to Aqaba, Jordan where, since we were coming from Egypt and there was no Hebrew in my passport, no one was suspicious that perhaps we’d been in Israel just hours before. And we were let into the country without a scene.

What could have been an hour’s drive was a 24 hour ordeal.

Anyway, the stamps in the passport include Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Germany, Austria, Italy, The U.K. (multiple times!), and, of course, the USA.

Not bad, considering the passport was technically illegal.

Nope. I didn’t see this one coming. Not at all.

To catch you up, quickly, Hubby and I are trying to sell our house. In efforts to sell it faster, we decided to move out of it. We’ve been living in his parents’ basement ever since (for the last two months). I’d had to pull my kids out of preschool and soccer and ballet and all that “important” stuff, and we’ve been really living a half-life here, in utter limbo, in a dark, crowded, small basement. We’re terribly grateful to my in-laws for being so gracious and generous with us, but we’ve also been extremely eager to move on with life. We’ve had no success whatsoever in either the home-selling arena, nor the home-buying arena.

Good. Now you’re up to speed.

My parents are moving to Spain for a couple of years. They need someone to take care of their house while they’re gone.

We had taken ourselves out of the running for house-sitting, because we were building a house. And, on top of that, we already owned a house. We really didn’t need to borrow anyone else’s house.

But, if you’ve been reading this blog at all, you’ll remember that we actually decided against the house we’d been building, for no reason other than that our gut unmistakably insisted that we walk away. And we’ve had a devil of a time selling our old house. We live in a collapsing market and our old neighborhood is full of beautiful homes for sale, not one of which is actually selling.

You can see where I’m going with this.

The matter of who would house-sit for my parents was resolved a while back, but my father reconsidered the situation and decided against the renter that he’d settled on. And today he called me. He’s in a pickle, needing someone to live in his house. I’m in a pickle, needing somewhere to live. After various frantic phone calls to Hubby at work and to my dad and to various realtors, the matter was decided.

We’re moving into my childhood home.

And we feel good about it.

And that’s all we’ve asked for all along–that when we finally make a decision, we can feel good about it.

This gives us time to sell our house the way we want to sell it, and not, out of desperation, entertain stupid offers from stupid people. When we do actually sell the house, we can then put our money in the bank somewhere and watch it grow as the market collapses, thus allowing us to buy an even more fabulous house than the ones we’d been shopping for. And we will be saving plenty of money, seeing as how we wouldn’t be paying any kind of rent or mortgage (my parents bought the house with cash. They’ve never owed anything on it and they certainly aren’t trying to make money off of us).

It also gives us a destination. I’ve been living in limbo, not knowing where to sign my son up for preschool or where to enroll my daughter for kindergarten.

Hubby is sold on every level. This is so exciting to him. So many things about this arrangement are so perfect, but I have a couple of concerns, large and small. The little concerns are about, for instance, my beautiful black grand piano. There’s no room in my parents’ house for my piano. I’m trying to find a sibling or someone else that I trust who might be interested in babysitting it. It’s quite possibly the only nice thing that I own and I treasure it.

Other concerns include Hubby’s commute. My parents’ house is half an hour away from where we are now, in the wrong direction. That tacks on significant time to his commute. He’s not the least bit concerned about this, so I guess I shouldn’t be either.

It’s also strange, the thought of going back to that neighborhood where I was a dumb kid. Back to that house, this time as Matron, not Child. My daughter will sleep in the bed where I slept as a girl, and my sons in my brothers’ rooms. It all feels a little weird, but no bad per say.

The bigger concerns, for me, are matters of pride. It’s silly, I know. My brain tells me not to worry about such things, but something inside still does. I’m a grown woman with a family of my own. My husband is very successful in his career. Outside of our mortgage we have absolutely no debt whatsoever. But we’re about to move into my parents’ house. It seems like such a maneuver is reserved for the kid who can’t quite get on his own feet—the kid who’s about to file for bankruptcy if Mommy and Daddy don’t jump in to the rescue.

But I’m NOT that kid! And my pride worries that someone might think that I AM that kid! Will the neighbors snicker? Will “friends” hear only snippets of the story and jump to conclusions about me or my Hubby? It’s one thing when people speak to you in person and you can rectify incorrect ideas. But you can’t correct the secret whisperings going on behind your back.

And no, I have no idea why I care. So don’t bother telling me how stupid that concern is, because I already know how stupid it is!

All in all, I’m pleased. I’m grateful for the way things worked out. My parents’ house is lovely and they have all the amenities we could ask for. It gives us plenty of time to decide what exactly it is that we want in the long run. It’s a form of limbo itself, but it also solves my current limbo. It allows me to move on with my life, while still giving me time to determine my future.

(For about three seconds, I tried this in Iambic Pentameter. It was a disaster. I gave up. Don’t judge me–you would have given up too.)

Forsooth, there were a couple of posts here earlier. Each of them, one at a time, has left this world of bloggingness.

Dear, dear Blogger, I salute you in your plight to confuse me.

I especially salute you in deleting posts that, really, weren’t my favorite. How did you know?

One of the deleted posts was about me wondering why no one is voting for me, the other was wishing myself a happy bloggy birthday. Both a bit narcissistic, I suppose.

Yea and verily, Blogger. I behold and hearken to thee, that Narcissus doth not bear fair blogposts. Oh thou foul Blogger fiend, oh foulest of bloggingness. Perhaps thou wouldst that I should blot out the whole blog… (I hate to point it out to you, but you left a few Meme’s and interviews and “look at me, I’m so cool” posts behind. I almost feel like narcissism has won a few small victories.)

However, I daren’t declare war, or even acknowledge that YOU may have already declared war. I refuse to see your glove at my feet, I refuse to see your drawn sword.

War with Blogger would be strategy at its worst. (I could make reference to that other war where strategy is, shall we say, lacking. But that would bring me off topic and have people jumping down my throat–and not in a good way–and this post isn’t really about that.)

I spent many, many hours creating my banner and my overall design. I can just see you, Dear Blogger, out of spite, turning it flourescent pink. With flowers. And a chijuajua.

(Could you really hate me so much???)

We can resolve this. Peacefully. If you continue to lose posts that I really didn’t like anyway, I see no reason why we can’t keep things amicable. Perhaps you’re just trying to do me a service.

Blogger: “Because I like Brillig so VERY much, I’m going to delete all of her crappy posts.”
Brillig: “Thanks, Sweety. But you missed a few…”
Blogger: “I’ll be back, darling.”
Brillig: *sighs contentedly*

And so I continue to appease you, make friends with you, stay true and loyal to you even when the prospect of my own domain beckons me. Perhaps I will ruthlessly use you, steal some of your coding, and move on someday, leaving a void in this wretched Blogspot. Perhaps I will be here forever. I cannot predict the future. Nay, I dare not! Because we’re really just getting to know each other still. And perhaps, just perhaps, you are the Romeo to my Juliet.

(Of course, they both ended up dead…)

On Saturday, my sweet little Fluffy went through a great big trauma.

Her earring fell out.

These are the stud earrings that her ears were pierced with a year ago and they have never ever been removed from her ear. As far as she’s concerned, they are just a permanent part of her body. Just how they fell out, none of us are sure. But it happened when her dad put his hands on the sides of her face, so she is certain that it was all Hubby’s fault.

And it wasn’t just that the earring fell out, it was that the ear starting bleeding like crazy and blood was running all over her hands and onto the floor.

And, like any 5 year old of the female persuasion would, she screamed.

Oh, how she screamed–as though it had been her arm that fell off, not an earring.

The bleeding was the result of a horrendous infection, which we hadn’t seen because it was only visible in the back of her lobe once the earring was gone. We’ve been treating the infection, which has been scary and painful for her, but it’s looking much better.

And boy, did she milk this for all it was worth. We went to Target to buy new earrings. She got three pairs: pink, blue, and white “diamond” studs. She also got a new Barbie notebook, and a promise from me that I would take a picture of her with her new earrings in and put it on my blog.

Alas, you can’t really see the earrings, but oh well. I have now fulfilled my promises.

The last of her demands was probably the funniest of all. She handed me her Barbie notebook and dictated to me what she wanted written down. It says:

“Daddy put his hands on my head and my earring fell out and it hurt really bad and I screamed really loud and then Mommy went to the store and bought me lots of new earrings and so I came home and I’m wearing my earrings now and I was really really sad when my earring fell out and Daddy made my earring fall out.”

The best part is that she hands it to Hubby every few hours and requires him to read it to her. It’s his penance, I suppose–even though we all agree that it wasn’t his fault.

Really, she’s had the whole household wrapped around her tiny little finger all weekend. I suspect that losing her earring was the best thing that ever happened to her.