Posts from — November 2009

1. I GOT A NEW CAMERA.  Hallelujah praise BE.  Thanks to Mom, Dad, Harry, Ginny, and my grandparents, who bequeathed me with an early Christmas present along with many many protests that they had absolutely no ulterior motives WHATSOEVER for doing so.  Much of my evening has been spent taking picture after picture of L and my sister in various stages of the surprised, deer-in-the-headlights look as I play with the settings.  But fear not, my sister and L!  I deleted the offending photos! At least most of them! A good solid 85% to be sure!

2. I am excited about an upcoming New Development In My Life (do I even have to say it? I AM NOT PREGNANT HOLY MOSES) that I am not going to write about just yet, and I KNOW, that is the suckiest thing ever to read on a blog, but I have a tendency to be overly! enthusiastic! and! obnoxious! about new pursuits and so I am letting this one simmer down to Still Really Cool But I’m Not Going To Caps Lock You To Death status.  Just know that there is Something Afoot, and it is totally rad.

3.   Rosie is not taking naps in the afternoon, which sucks because of the lost break time for me, but I do have to give her props for taking the sting off a little by dialing up the cute notch to MAX instead.  She chills for a while in her crib with some books, but then once she’s done she flings them to the floor and spends about five minutes on the “uh-oh?  uh-oh.  uh-OH?  UH-OH?  UH-OH,” before switching over to “WOE-AH?  WOE-AH. DADA! DA!  DADA. WOE WOE WOE WOE. UH-OH? DA!”  Etc.  I enjoy the naptime filibuster, although admittedly things do turn a might hairy around dinner time.

4.  A few nights ago Noah was on a tear about what color you get when you mix other colors together, and as part of the discussion it was thrown out that if you were really serious about seeing some color changing, some sort of liquids would probably showcase that better than, say, a mouth full of chewed up Skittles. This quickly led to the realization that ketchup and mustard would be ideal for such an experiment, plus BONUS: then you could dip your hot dog in orange!  But Noah paused at that and asked, “What do you call ketchup and mustard mixed together?” And L saw the unfortunate place that this was headed, but was not quick enough to stop me before I shouted the most obvious answer out with the gleeful abandon of a preschool-age boy.

KETCHTURD!!!!

If I hadn’t permanently crossed my eyeballs in on themselves from editing this RosiestravaGANZA! ten minute, seriously-you-should-think-about-popping-yourself-some-popcorn video, I would have waxed all kinds of poetic as a prologue to it.  However, my technological learning curve is way steep, but not, unfortunately, as steep as my expectations.  So that is why I will just try to be as coherent as possible as I sit here in the wee hours to tell you: I LOVE ROSIE P.S. HERE IS HER VIDEO.

In all seriousness, I’m not even sure I could find the right words to describe the ways she has changed my life in just twelve months.  Noah changed my life by adding a layer to me that didn’t previously exist: Mother.  But Rosie has changed me in a different way. She helped me find things in me that were already there, long forgotten or never even known.  You can’t help but dive into a reflection pool when you are a woman birthing a female child.  In so many ways, good and bad, she is you.  You are her.  And all this is amplified for me as I see her grow and realize all the ways in which Noah is different from me.  He’s an apple not very far from his father’s tree, and already, at one year old, I can see Rosie’s plump and shiny fruit plain as day, right on the ground at my rooted feet.

She is her own person too, of course, and as I see this person emerge I marvel at her tenacity and her pluck.  Her joy and her strength.  Her beauty and her vivacity.  Her rock star hair.

I’m just ever so grateful to have had this fledgling time with her – this small sliver of her life where she is most fully mine and least the world’s – because I know that soon (unbelievably soon) I will have to let her go into that exhilarating expanse beyond my here and now and continue on the path that she so clearly has always known and claimed, right from the very beginning.

The First of Rosie from racher on Vimeo.

Working on her video and other important projects….will be coming atcha with full force next week.  Hope you have a beautiful, foliage-filled weekend.

When There’s Something Strange In The Neighborhood

While riding in the car the other day, Rosie did something totally uncharacteristic and began to fuss about having to sit in her car seat.  WOE. She seemed to say. LIFE IS CRUEL. Except it was more like EEEEYAAAAMAMAMAMABUHBUHBUHEEEEDADADADA repeat, repeat, ad hominem, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.  My solution for this situation of late has been to toss her my cell phone, because quieting that racket is totally worth the cost of a few texts to China.  So far the phone has a 100% hushing success rate, and when that rate starts to dip I am thinking of buying her a Blackberry.  Hey – whatever works.   In the past week or so, since she has become a wizened one year old woman of the world, she has started to hold the phone up to her ear (-ish vicinity) and pretend to talk, a particularly adorable trick.  On this particular day as she started in on her baby business deals, I said in the rearview mirror, “Rosie, who are you going to call?  Ghostbusters?” Noah, who was engrossed in his daily obsessive car watching, immediately perked up and said “Did you just say Ghostbusters? What is a buster?”  Which I then attempted to explain. Poorly.  I think I said something about a vacuum. And also slime. Noah pondered this explanation for a few minutes before deciding that “busting” was a completely unsatisfactory term and that to help out all others who might have the same affliction with the title he would now call it “GET GHOSTS.”

Maybe you were confused about this, and didn’t even know it.  Well now you know: who you’re gonna call is GHOST GETTERS.

He Asked For This

L: (as we exit Target) Hmm, I may have picked out the wrong toilet paper.

Rachel: What? How can toilet paper be wrong?

L: Well, it says “one-ply” so…

R: Dude, this is a TWENTY PACK.  You just bought us a SHIT-TON of ONE-PLY TP.

L: Oops.

R: Might as well use our hands. Geez.

L: You’re totally going to Twitter about this aren’t you.

R: Ugh. I should. But I’ll spare you the embarassment.

L:  You’re too scared, huh?

(pause)

R: Just giving you a minute to realize why you shouldn’t have said that.

Seriously I’m Hoping He Left Some of These Genes for My Other Kids

My original plan for today’s post was to have ready my One Year Of Rosie video for your viewing pleasure, but as it turns out, Apple has changed their computers since 2006. Did you guys know this?  So, iMovie is slightly different and newfangled and is taking some getting used to on my part, which is kind of gumming up the production. I have been learning some Life Lessons About Myself during this unintentional technology hiatus, and one of those lessons is that I may very well be headed toward crotchety old womanhood where I spend most of my days in the future saying things like “Back in my day we didn’t need our fusion to be cold! We got along fine with it hot! Just like the good Lord intended! Now get off my lawn!”  What can I say, I likes what I likes.

However, while I’m mucking around with all of that, you should watch this, because it has been over a month since I have posted any live action of Rosie, and this is a pretty good example of the fact that while a whole lot has changed in that month, the one thing that has remained steadfast and true is the formidable spunk that resides deep within the code of that girl’s DNA.  I can’t imagine that we will ever find ourselves any time in the near future wondering “Gee, I wonder how Rosie feels about that?” Because just like you’ll see at the :41 mark of this clip: she gon’ let you KNOW.

(Credits: Rosie as herself, Uncle Joe as The Bubble Blower, Me as Impertinent Voiceoverist)

Bubblegum SMACKDOWN from racher on Vimeo.