Last fall, Rosie’s school had a very nice professional photographer come and take portraits of the kids as they played on the playground. She was great about capturing them in their natural habitat, so to speak, and got some great shots of Rosie that we purchased and distributed and so on and so forth. Her 2-year old class pictures! Hooray! Done and done.

Except not.

I kept seeing signs up on the doors from one of those bigger, lamer, generic photo studio places saying “School pictures next Tuesday!” and I thought surely they must mean class pictures, because we just had school pictures, right? Did I dream that? But nope—turns out it’s a twice a year dealio, with the first set of shots being actually good and the second set being set up against a faux-woodland backdrop with a log and a toad in the picture. Not even kidding. So when the sign up sheet went up for parents to designate which background they wanted for their kid, princess castle or beside a log with a baseball glove (???) I dutifully checked the baseball glove option (because WHY does everything for girls have to have a princess castle involved? WHYYYYYYY) and went on my merry way, totally planning to save my nickels and dimes when the proofs came back in and not purchase a one.

But here’s the other really dumb thing about this system. Big Box Studios has now decided to make all the prints of the photos from your child’s session in advance so you can just keep the ones you want and send the rest back. So every single kid got an envelope jam-packed with wallets and 8 x 10s and 5 x 7s before parents had even laid eyes on the shots. Waaaaaste of resources, yo.

Am I going off? I think I am. There is a point, hold on.

It occurred to me after I checked “All-Star” or whatever they called the baseball glove on the ground backdrop, that Rosie might not be very happy about it, or at the very least, that they would think I had misread the form. Because why would you check the obviously-meant-for-boys choice? Dummy. And sure enough, when the pictures came back, there was Rosie, pleased as punch, in front of a pastel pink princess castle, frog-friend at her side. And her face said it all:

How do you like them apples, Mom?

I have never laughed so hard.

P.S. We bought exactly zero of the prints, like the terrible tightwad parents that we are. But I did take a photo of each one before slipping it back into the envelope. I expect the authorities any minute. Write to me in jail.

P.P.S. Since I’m going to jail anyway, I’ll also show you this one:

I don’t know about you, but I want to be that girl’s friend. She looks like quite the kick in the pants.

P.P.P.S. OK, ONE MORE. I really am going to jail, aren’t I. At least I’ll get to wear stripes. I do have a thing for stripes.

Shew dog. I didn’t even drive into work on Monday and Tuesday and I am whooped. Wednesday, after two no-commute days, I felt full of vim and vigor (and also a baby). Or at least as full of vim and vigor as one can be who is toting around another human being 100 percent of the time on her person. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I was vimmish and vigorish. But the next morning when I woke up I felt like I had climbed Mt. Kilamanjaro (slash a short flight of stairs) the day before. Oof. Miss Physical Fitness I am not these days. But when I’m not pregnant, watch out! I will be all over that flight of stairs like a person who can climb a flight of stairs! Probably. Maybe. After I finish a nice bowl of ice cream.

Speaking of bowls of ice cream, tonight I totally whipped out the phrase “If you get me a bowl of ice cream, I will have your baby” to convince L to go into the kitchen and scoop me up a serving of triple brownie. I realize I probably have the short end of the stick on that deal, but dude, that ice cream was worth it.

In conclusion, here are Noah and Rosie holding baby chickens:

Yeah, that’s all I got. These puffy fingers are out. Have nice weekends, all of you. Next week we’re going to keep this blog party going like it’s 1999 2009.

Would you like to see a picture of my belly? No? Well, I’ma show you anyway. BOOM:

I am not much of a self-portrait poster, but dude, when you’ve got all that and a bag of Doritos (literally) going on in your front section, it just needs to be documented somewhere. So I chose … all over the internet. Like you do! As you can see, I am a master face-cropper-outer. The nose has not appeared yet, though I don’t think it’s far off. The wedding rings have officially been removed. It’s just too Southern winter damn hot, y’all. I remember the same weird warm weather thing happening the October I was pregnant with Rosie—it was time for fall, but just kept on being summer forever. This is my superpower: effecting climate change with my very girth. Sorry for debunking your movie, Al Gore.

Unlike my other two pregnancies, where I wanted to take a blowtorch to every single thread of my meager maternity wardrobe by the third trimester, this time I have tubs and tubs of overflowing outfits. I haven’t even worn them all. This is in part due to the generosity of five (5!) friends who all passed down their pregnancy wear and also the fact that I work for a pregnancy magazine and that kind of stuff just tends to be around, you know? So what I’m saying is: if you happen to get knocked up, and you are my general size (and I know you in real life and you live relatively near me), I got you covered. (Mostly I’m talking to one specific person who still technically owns 1/3 of these clothes.)(Who is not pregnant—that I know of—but I’m just making sure she knows I still have her back and am not offering her stuff to random people.)(Unless they offer me bags of cash.)(Haha just kidding.)(Mostly.)(Help, I am trapped in parentheses and I can’t get out.)

Anyway, what is my point? I don’t know. Mostly I’m just trying like beans to blog every day this week. Put some words into this URL. Show my face while cropping out my face and all that. In the meantime, I wonder: how are you? How is your dog? Isn’t this weather weird slash way too hot for people who are 34 weeks pregnant? How about that sports team? I love what you’re wearing. That color really brings out your eyes.

Tragic and unexpected news always makes me wonder, “When is it going to be OK to be funny again?” Because to me, funny=normal and that’s what I really want, is normalcy. (Which is really to say, I wish for the sad thing not to have happened at all.) I remember reading several interviews of various comics about how they wondered that very thing after 9/11.

I don’t know the answer. But I need some funny today after sad news about a friend’s family, and so I’m sharing with you a few of the tweets I’ve favorited on Twitter over the years. (You can see the whole list here.) Some of them may appeal only to my weird sense of humor, but I do think a couple of them are pretty universally hilarious.

What’s made you laugh recently? I would be most glad to hear. I’m feeling a need for a good dose of that best medicine.

HAHAHAHAHA there are no non-pregnancy related things.

Just kidding. (Sort of.)

Here are a couple of topics not having to do with my uterus:

The kids still take a bath together most of the time, and I’ve kind of decided that as long as no one’s feeling weird about it, we’ll keep on keepin’ on. Until someone is, and then we’ll just not. No big. Although we have nudged Noah towards showers, because 1.) It’s time, yo. and 2.) Less work for us. Rosie will occasionally take showers with me, although we did that just tonight and boy howdy was it a circus with my ginormous girth. I bonked her in the head approximately 1 frizillion times. Also, the amount of questioning about why I have certain parts has increased as said parts have … increased. She asked if she would have a baby in her belly one day and I said, “Yes, when you are old like mama and in a loving committed relationship and also financially stable.” All she heard was the yes part. After which she squealed and hugged herself with glee. We’ll be having this talk again, young lady. With charts.

Noah continues to require food that he can gum, as he is losing teeth by the fistful. I did not post the before picture here (Although I DID on Instagram. Gross out. Sorry Instagrammers.) He isn’t as cautious about loose teeth as I feared, although he does seem to be more of a tooth whisperer than a strong armed yanker. They come out, though, so that’s all that matters I suppose. This fourth tooth, though, marks the first Tooth Fairy Fail moment. Noah came in to our room early in the morning and said, “Mom and Dad, it’s the weirdest thing, the Tooth Fairy didn’t come!” GAH. URGH. BUH. and so forth went we. But lo how we played it! For it also happened to be St. Patrick’s Day (well played, teeth!) and his other disappointment was that the leprechaun had not visited and mucked things up (sidenote: Dear teachers everywhere–We are struggling with the few mythical creatures we have to lie while not lying about. Please do not introduce another being into the mix. Apparently some leprechaun came into Noah’s classroom the day before St. Patrick’s Day and wreaked havoc with glitter and overturned chairs (wha?) and such. No. And I thank you.) so we just put the gold dollar coin that L serendipitously happened to have in his possession in Noah’s tooth pillow as he went to get some cereal and VOILA: two birds, one stone. Noah couldn’t decide whether it was the tooth fairy or the leprechaun who had been so stealthy while he breakfasted. We, of course, just put on our best poker faces and shrugged our shoulders.

Here is a girl who loves books. I don’t mean to act surprised by this, because Noah also loved books at this age, but Rosie has always been so much louder and more boisterous than Noah ever was that it always makes me stop and watch when she is absorbed in her page turning. We will be encouraging this, oh yes we will.

Also, Rosie is showing increased interest in my stuff. Makeup, lotions, clothes, earrings, nail polish, what have you. I kind of dig it right much. (Pretty sure shoes shown above have not been worn since the second Bush administration. But still!)

Every year when the Georgia Marathon takes place, our church is blocked on all sides from motor access, and so we all have to find alternate ways of getting there. A few weeks ago we got up early and set out on foot, proud of ourselves for our industrious (and earth-friendly!) ways. Halfway there, as I was waddling slowly behind the rest of the family, it occurred to me that we were not seeing any runners. That’s when we realized the marathon was the next week.

I was far less enthusiastic about the walk we embarked on seven days later. That church is far, yo. (Probably not even a mile.)(Which is like 17 pregnant lady miles.)

There are a couple of places you can sit in our house and look out and it seems like we are totally in the trees, nowhere near civilization or stores or cars. I’m a city girl through and through, but even I can appreciate a view like this every now and again.

Rosie brings at least two of these drawings home a day. Most of the time both sides of the paper are covered. I haven’t thrown away even one. How could I? I want to wallpaper the walls with them.

My kids really like to walk on ledges. I really like to take pictures of my kids walking on ledges.

Pregnancy talk alert: When I left to take myself to triage last Friday, the kids were still asleep, and never saw me leave. Luke didn’t tell them anything about it before they left, but when he picked them up that afternoon, he must have explained that they needed to be gentle when they came in to say hello, or something similar, explaining in kid-friendly terms what was going on, because Noah came in the house with a very concerned face and the first thing he asked said was “Hi mom. How’s the baby?” He then proceeded to get me anything I wanted (and somethings I didn’t necessarily need)—water, books, food, etc. Then he made me this heart note.

In conclusion, he is just about the best thing ever ever. The end.