I Speak With the Tongue of a Thousand White-Hot Lies!

On Saturday we had my birthday lunch. And as much as I love my friends and family, the highlights of this day all came from Mr. Zweeble.

I had to take Erin to the airport at 6 am, so Z. and Scott were both asleep when I left. When I got back around 8, they were awake. I walked into the bedroom and Z. called out, "Mommy!" He then squirmed off the bed, bolted over to me, and bonked his head into my stomach before I could kneel down. "I missed you! I was worried!" Then, once I was at his level, he gave me a huge hug with back pats and said, "I love you, Mommy."

Later, he told me "Happy birfday, Mommy."

He then went rummaging in one of our toy chests and found the banner from his 2nd birthday party, and said he would put it up for my birthday. Grammie helped him.

While everyone else cleared the table after lunch, Z said he could sing the birthday song to me. "Happy birthday, Mommy ... Happy birthday, Mommy ..."

Then he offered to share my cupcakes: "I can share them wif you! I'm not takin' them, I'm sharing them!"

He sang the whole (actually-worded) birthday song with everyone, and helped me blow out my candles. Then he helped me open my cards, and "read" them to me.

Today, my child was not the cutest kid at music class. Because I think you get force-choked if you call Darth Vader "cute." So my child was the most fearsome Sith in music class today.

(Actually, he refused to wear the hat, so he kinda reminded me of that scene in Empire Strikes Back where Luke has the vision quest and decapitates Vader, and finds his own head in the helmet--except without the whole decapitation thing.)

The cutest kid was the little girl dressed as a ladybug. Or maybe the one dressed as a Tootsie Roll. Only two of the kids were actually dressed as what the parents were planning--apparently there was a lot of infant rebellion this morning. :)

There's something to be said for watching a little Darth Vader stalk around the room and then bounce with maracas. Oh, and spin with flowy scarves. He also liked to spin so his cape would whip out.

I think, next year, if I can talk Gus into it--he'll be two, so he'll have more opinions--I'd like to see if David could maybe help me make him a wolf suit, so he can be Max from Where the Wild Things Are. I have a friend who can sew and might take payment in baby pictures, so hey. :)

Oh, and due to the constant refrain of "llama!" around here (see dealio's recent post about the petting zoo), one of Scott's so-called "friends" sent us this horrible thing. You know something's trying to kill you when the baby watches it for a while and then says, "OFF!"

Saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. My capsule review: good Indy movie, solid movie in general, liked Iron Man better. Which is fine. My childhood is safe, secure, and unravaged.

( spoiler follows )

Hellboy trailer looked AWESOME. Giant mash-up of Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola, bay-bee.

And I think I'll probably put You Don't Mess With the Zohan on my list of rentals.

We're all kinda crabby today, so I am going to make a totally happy post.

1. doggiesushi will be here soon, which will probably cheer all of us up quite a bit.

2. I saw three odd birds yesterday on my way home, two together on 41, then another of the same sort about a mile or two down the road. Got home and looked them up in my bird books, and they were apparently sandhill cranes. Which was cool, but also strange because according to my book, they don't come to this coast. Which would explain why I'd never seen them before--I mean, they're huge; you'd think if they were local I'd have noticed them before now. Still, my aunt saw ... was it a wild canary? a bluebird? ... some bird in Tennessee that doesn't actually live in Tennessee at all, but it migrates over Tennessee, so we think it was making a pit stop. These could be the explorers of the sandhill cranes, the pioneers. Or the ones with no sense of direction.

3. I also got the print I ordered from visioluxus, an amazing photographer whose website is here. The one I got is three rows up from the bottom, third in from the right. It's gorgeous on the computer, but it's bloody amazing in person; it's metallic and the red is beautiful and it makes stories in my head, and I'd stare at it all day if I wasn't afraid the Zweeble would get ahold of it.

4. Okay, remind me to post about my father vs. the aquatic mammal, because it deserves its own post.

5. Thank god, the Zweeble has finally fallen asleep.

The Zweeble is pretty much over the pacifier. He was a total binky baby for the first 8 or so months of life. Now he'll occasionally find one and put it in his mouth, but it definitely seems more for old times' sake than anything else.

(side note: I knew that breastfeeding vs. formula was a huge parenting debate, I knew about vaccine controversy, but I had no idea that there were pro-binky and anti-binky factions. And there are! People would see the kid with a pacifier and immediately give us their opinions, whether or not we wanted them. I was amazed. My personal parenting mantra is "whatever works," so I just sort of shrugged at people and went on.)

I bring this us because we had (have, actually, I haven't tossed them yet) about a thousand pacifiers, and every couple of weeks we'd be down to two that we could readily find. So I would have to mount a Great Binky Hunt and track down the missing binkies.

Well, now we have Roll-A-Rounds, which are little plastic balls, slightly larger than golf balls, with things inside them. The Zweeble has the dinosaur set and two sets of just weird things like a disco balls or a jingle bell on a spring. So he has 18 of them, and we had five that we could find. So I mounted the Great Roll-A-Round Hunt. We're up to 15 of them (which I've put into his inflatable duck tub, as he's outgrown it and Scott can't bring himself to part with it, so it needs to be put to use somehow). The disco ball is still at large, and I don't know what's inside the other two. I've found these things in the car, under the changing table, in the couch, in the diaper bag ... and I'm running out of ideas as to where to look next. I keep glancing in corners, or suddenly realizing that, hey, the book shelf is high enough to have a Roll-A-Round underneath it. Then I drop and look, much to the Zweeble's delight, as he can then climb on me like the organic jungle gym that I am.

I've found two binkies, as well. :)

Last night he discovered the two containers of Mega Blocks I put in his closet--I figured eventually he'd look in them and find the things--so I'm sure I'm on my way to the Great Mega Block Hunt.