more than this

Dropping Eleanor off at the YMCA. The kids in her group did a "flag activity" and there's little 8.5x11 crayon flags from Canada and Jamaica and the USA around the wall and door area of the room.

"Which one is yours honey?"

"It's over here."

drastically different "flag" from the others: small heads (which I recognize as robot heads in her drawing style) scattered around and stars, and some smiling faces, and a big kind of oval in the center.

"What's that a flag for sweetheart?"

(in an 'of course' tone)
"That's Connie's Space Lounge!"


I'm proud of course. Should I also be terrified? I didn't notice at first but it was generally in a green and purple palette
Perhaps not *I*, but certainly all of you.

Thanks to rubel I've been reading The Last Psychiatrist lately and I love it. Today's entry is so horrifyingly amazing I can't see straight. And the guy is totally dead on. Wow. You know me, I'm not one to judge, but if anyone makes me feel okay judging, it's the Last Psychiatrist. I suspect that's part of his program, actually--sort of like an inoculation against this degraded, mush headed era of... judgmentlessness (??).

Anyway, mrs_lovett and I used to talk about a "yoink" game--and in a way it was a little bit fascist--coming up with the most dramatically over the top way to force idiot jerkoffs to stop fucking up their kids. Think of The Simpsons when a character appears onscreen to swipe something--a tasty danish, or Jasper Johns taking Marge's painting off the roof--the "yoink" sound. Actually here's a list, for your edification. You know how it goes.

Well, imagine that sound in those uncomfortable moments when you see a woman grab her kid's arm in the grocery store, swat his butt and say "stop that you little shit." You just kind of want to yoink the "little shit" and run off. Mind you, I'm probably guilty of a yoinkable offense here and there--start the car, drive a block, kid starts wailing in the back seat "Daddy you forgot to buckle me!"; or last week when I (oh lord I didn't mention this did I?) started out of the bakery with Eleanor, make a u turn in the doorway and say "oh yeah, we probably need to grab your brother in the car seat over there before we go." Yoink--especially since I was in the tony Linden Hills neighborhood and no doubt some nanny state soccer mom would gladly subject me to a lousy lecture about the traumatizing effects of my absentmindedness.

Not to mention, if i did yoink the kid in my other example, I'd have to feed the little shit, which I'm categorically unprepared to do. We like to joke ha-ha "joke" about those times when we're about to go into the store or someplace and Eleanor says "can Henry come too?" and, both of us just laugh. "No sweetie, Henry's going to sit in the car and wait... for child services..." Actually that joke (a loose term at best) has broad applications in our private jokebook. "Sweetheart daddy's going to go fix a drink. You just wait here until child services comes." After we put both kids to bed, I've asked Leann, "You wanna go get ice cream? The kids'll probably stay asleep, at least long enough until child protective services come." Leann's probably got a lot better set of examples which I'm hoping she'll contribute in the comments.

Seriously though, read that Last Psychiatrist article. My anxiety about the "in their twenties, both obese" depiction notwithstanding, that is a serious yoink.

My older kid, you may remember her as Eleanor, swears. We got her to stop saying "what the hell?" (amending it to just "what the...?"). And she doesn't use any of the choice words I like--no f-word yet thank goodness. But I think she's invented a swear word or two. When she's embarrassed/annoyed with herself, like she's make a mistake, dropped something, or started to say/do something then thought better of it or edited herself, she uses a word "sart". She explained to me in her typically lucid fashion, "you say 'sart' when you say it you do something if you do something and it's just like you did it, it's 'sart'." Uh, yeah. I tried to use it once in the exact apologetic/embarrassed tone she uses, and she said "no, daddy! don't say that you can't say sart." A word that appeared around the same time as sart, is "pliffet" or "pliffend" or "pliffid" or something.

Well, the more I think about it, the more I like these invented words. In particular sart. It's short, it's punchy enough, and it's a great stand in for shit/crap/darn/dang/hell especially in the self-effacing tone. "shit I dropped that" or "oh crap I forgot the milk" and the like. It reminds me, incidentally, of satori (by way of mispronunciation I suppose) in that it's like a slap against the forehead in a moment of personal insight. Sart, I missed my bus. Oh sart that meeting starts in five minutes.

I don't understand the meaning she's attached to pliffid yet, though.

Parental leave: it's time off from work. But it's no vacation.

Oh yeah, while you were out, I also was workin on a website. Using hypersites I built lolbabies.com about two weeks ago.

We had a couple people post things already, and obviously there's the test pix up there too. It's you know, just kinda something for fun. No big deal. If you like Disapproving Rabbits or I can has cheezburger (to name some of the 800# gorillas of captioning sites, imho) it's like that, except for people in the...uh... baby... culture.

shigella posted a cap of her baby on there (10 neeples. The word neeples iz funny lol!) and there's a couple I made as examples. We took a couple things further in terms of being very explicit asking users to think about licensing and made it relatively easy to contribute (and made it easy to apply cc licenses to postings).

Feel free to stop by, check it out, post some of your own (the posting system is pretty much self-contained, so new stuff will appear much more quickly than it did at first). Soon I hope to make it possible to contribute pix to "blank slate" galleries up there--pix to be used for making new caps and stuff, since not everyone with good ideas has access to pictures of kids or ultrasounds. Also I linked to kscakes.com's capping tool which was originally designed for the lolcats crowd. It's pretty useful too.

We'll be growing over time, you know how these internet things work. Check it out: lolbabies.com.

hello world! Fresh from the ultrasound shed, we present the latest baby pictures out of the Olsen household. From her womb to your eyes... I helped make that... etc. etc.