Highlights:

• Day One: Noah “gardening” with Grandma and transforming himself into a mud Golem. Hopefully Grandma will email pictures next week.
• Patrick’s Birthday: It was great to see so many of my “longest knowing” friends for such a happy occasion.
• The Wedding: Sure, Noah only made it through maybe half the service, but everyone looked lovely. Plus, how can you not love the whole notion of a cousin marrying someone whose last name is already a family name? (But is no relation — as the Father of the Bride observed, “This isn’t Arkansas!”)
• The Wedding Reception: Best. Chocolate. Chip. Cookies. Ever.
• Brunch: With dear family friends and no toddler. And delicious banana blueberry pancakes.
• Toddler Playmates: Noah had a great time and did a really good job sharing with Caleb and Sam. Except for one regrettable incident in which Noah snagged an orange toy shovel and fled the scene at top speed, much to Caleb’s severe displeasure. Comically, we’re still not sure what Noah thought of his first experience with identical twins — after they left, he complained about “that guy” reading his dinosaur book.
• Getting Spoiled: Grandma had a cereal treat waiting in the car, an adorable soft triceratops waiting at home, and was persuaded to add 3 small “monster” cars, and a bag of plastic dinosaurs to the toy collection over the weekend.
• Getting Surprised: This is where I expose what a mean Mommy I am. On 2 occasions over the weekend, Noah scared the crap out of himself and I count one of those times as the funniest moment of the entire trip.
• The second scary surprise was the night Noah experimented with the ceiling fan control. It’s on one of those gradual switches, so if you push it up a little bit, the fan goes on slowly. If you push it up all the way, it sounds like a helicopter is landing. Guess what Noah tried — after locking himself in the room, of course! And then he screamed hysterically until a minute or two after I popped the lock and turned it off.
• The absolute funniest moment of the trip was on the first night. The guest room Noah stayed in had a stereo in it. A stereo filled with enticing knobs and buttons. All of a sudden, the house filled with classical music, playing at volume 11.

  At first, we thought it was part of the soundtrack of the indie movie Grandpa was watching. But then the screams didn’t make sense. When we opened the door, it was so loud that I had to yell “just unplug it!” at full volume to Grandma, while peeling a completely undone toddler off of my head.

  At least Noah didn’t figure out how to lock the door from the inside until the next day.

This wasn’t a highlight, so it doesn’t get to be on the bulleted list, but Esmerelda Freugenspeigel is definitely growing. I am officially ginormous, it has become hard to move quickly or bend over, and I have had hella round ligament pain the last few days. Mostly over the left hip, where we think she’s throwing punches.

Incidentally, we’re about 99% sure we’re going to go ahead with the scheduled c/s as planned, Tuesday 9/2. The financial incentive of two extra weeks of short term disability insurance is all the more important now.

Both of those come with a lot of variables, like watching the wiggling of my belly, and worrying about how this whole layoff thing is going to affect Jill and Noah. But there’s not really anything useful or productive to say about those things yet.

I did buy a notebook with 6 color coded sections, in which I’m planning to record to-do lists for all of these chaotic areas of life, and where I’m going to try to do some imagining about what’s next.

This morning, Noah and I went to our favorite playground early in the morning. He helpfully dried all of the slides with his butt.

By 9:15 am, we were starting to drip sweat, so we decided that at 10 we’d head over to the indoor bouncy castle playground where Jill bought a pass. Even better, Noah’s BFF Kaylee and her mom met us there! And better yet, when we arrived, one of my favorite preschool Moms from church, Amy, was also there with her kids.

Noah didn’t nap, but he did play pretty quietly in his room for 2 hours or so. When he got up, he insisted on putting on his “swimming shoes” — which gave me the idea to take him to a local pool that several toddler moms have given rave reviews. So we went.

The first person we saw there was Amy’s husband and their kids! Noah loved the pool, which is the best designed children’s pool I’ve ever visited: shady, a long shallow end that curves sharply before it reaches 3″ deep. The only bad part was that we had to leave when the pool closed at 6, provoking our usual temper tantrum at the conclusion of a fun activity.

Even dinner, bathtime, and bedtime went well. Noah read Punk Farm on Tour after we left the room, and we heard him talking about pig and sheep and chicken, and yelling “Rock and Roll!” for a few minutes before he crashed.

Some of you know that the company I work for has been downsizing — significantly — over the past year.

The latest round of layoffs came through today. I was on the list.

I’ll still be working through the end of the summer, and the severance package is such that we are not panicking. But it is still VERY stressful and not at all how I envisioned my maternity leave.

Nor are we singing some kind of strangely demented alphabet song where the next lines are Compassionate Dates, then Enraged Fennel.

Indeed, we are talking about my second favorite aspect of toddler parenting (after all those gooey and delicious expressions of love): the toddler malapropism.

For example, in Noah’s world, the lyrics to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” include the line, “Like a Dinah in the sky.”

From his perspective, it makes perfect sense. We have a book about a very shiny train named Dinah. Whereas he has very little exposure to diamonds.

But even more adorable than that are the names of two little girls in Noah’s day care class: Angry and Banana.

Their parents think their names are Avery and Savannah. But not their classmates. These two year olds are, for the most part, pretty articulate and smart. And they know a lot of words. Like Angry. And Banana.

Something to think about as we contemplate girls names.

If you want to take it, just for kicks, the name is “The Best Thing About You” — which I’m not sure is accurate. But it assesses your relative strengths. My strongest attribute was intelligence, followed by compassion.

The most interesting thing, to me, was looking at how everyone scored. Intelligence and passion had the most normal shaped bell curves.

And now I’m going to eat an English Muffin and go to sleep. I’m wiped out, and last night I woke up at 2 am hungry.

Today, just for example, Noah:

• Refused to have his diaper changed this morning when he woke up;
• Refused to brush his teeth;
• Refused to put on his shoes to leave;
• Clung to me with much fury and anguish when I tried to leave day care;
• Refused to take off the construction hat when I came to pick him up from day care;
• Threw the construction hat (luckily not at anyone);
• Lay down and refused to leave day care;
• Refused to eat a single bite of dinner, declaring “I no like noodles and broccoli” — two of his favorite foods;
• Demanded instead cherries and grapes, and repeated the demand approximately 40 times — to which we answered 40 times that he could have cherries and grapes after he had some noodles and broccoli;
• (Incidentally, the net result of this is that for dinner he had 2 cups of watery apple juice and some graham crackers in the car on the way home from day care.)
• Refused to go upstairs to get ready for bed;
• Refused to have his diaper changed;
• Refused to brush his teeth; and
• Hid from Jill when she went to go pick him up and brush his teeth for him, til she was sufficiently annoyed that she removed the glider rocker and ottoman from his room so he couldn’t hide behind them anymore.

Note that I didn’t count anything on this list that he merely declined to do on the first or second request, but ultimately agreed to do without screaming or throwing anything. Like pick out a new t-shirt for bed, or select a story to read. And unlike this weekend, there was no hitting or painful headbutting.

We already try to do things like 5, 2, and 1 minute warnings when we’re going to go do something else, but mostly those seem to occur to Noah like challenges to get warmed up with the defiance. Distraction works fabulously, when we’re able to get his attention. But at least half the time, as soon as we try, he starts yelling “No, Mommy, no!” and sometimes continues it to “Stop talking, Mommy!”

After consulting with some other moms, I ordered the book 1-2-3 Magic from Amazon. And also a timer that has both sound and light warnings so we can start giving him more information on how much time is left for things.

I’m open to other ideas too. I liked the Alfie Kohn books, but they just don’t seem pragmatic for toddlers with working parents. Noah has brought out depths of patience that I never previously imagined existed in me, but they don’t go far when he’s trying to run away in a parking lot, hitting me, or making me late for work.

And just so I don’t paint a complete picture of Noah as devil spawn, let me assure you that the deliciously sweet is actively present too. For example, tonight Noah:

• Sang the ABCs, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to his baby sister and gave her kisses;
• Kissed boo-boos on This Mommy’s elbow and my leg; and
• Cuddled close and charmingly while we read stories at bedtime.

Being 7 months pregnant, in Atlanta, and parenting a very routine-driven toddler, means that we don’t do a whole lot of Pride Celebration Activities. But our church had a booth, and it was indoors, so I volunteered to do a shift.

While I had lots of interesting conversations with other volunteers, both at our booth and at other booths, I only had one conversation with a random Pride-goer. (Well, a couple.)

It went like this:

Two guys pause in front of our booth. They aren’t really looking at the booth, but they’re there. One is wearing an American University t-shirt.

Liza: Hello! Did you go to AU?

Guy: Uh. Hi. Yes, yes I did.

Liza: Do you know Mindy? She used to run LGBT student services there?

Guy: Mindy. Mindy? Mindy…did she have a big annual Halloween party? What was that called…the Fetish Party?

After I quit laughing enough to agree, and to give AU t-shirt guy a short history of the origins of the Fetish Party — it actually began in Madison, when Melissa and I were housemates — we had a pleasant chat.

He, Jamie, was surprised to hear that the Fetish Party was no longer, but since the family is now both living abroad and parenting a toddler, agreed that it makes sense. (I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect it may be living on in Washington State, with yet another former Melissa housemate.)

Oddly enough, or perhaps not really, in my 3 hours at the festival, I ran into only one person I knew. This parenthood thing really has us not spending so much time out in the community. And most of the other LGBT people we know are also parents — who sanely did not take their toddlers and infants out in a thunderstorm to go to Pride.

Still, I had fun. I got a referral for a new adoption lawyer, and had a nice chat with another lawyer about getting a referral. And Jill and Noah had a nice, dry, quiet afternoon at home. They cooked peas and broccoli, and they made collages of car pictures.

I hope your weekend was equally nice and fun, and that if you have kids, they weren’t too scared of the fireworks.

And roughly 90% of the time, I order the same thing: a steak fajita quesadilla, with a side of guacamole and sour cream.

When I go with the guys who work in software security, we usually also split a queso dip. Not so much when I go with the other women in my department.

Every single time I’ve gone in the last month, within a minute of my finishing the actual quesadilla part of my lunch, someone has appeared while I had a chip and guac in my mouth and grabbed my still-full-of-guac-and-sour-cream plate. It’s already become a joke with my friends.

Today it happened so fast that I almost couldn’t get the plate back! Which also almost led to both of us spewing half-chewed food on the table, because we were laughing so hard.

But seriously! How do I get them to leave my food until I’m done?

I don’t know what I’m doing that signals the waitstaff to take away the plate. Should I leave 1 bite of quesadilla? They get all mushy if you don’t eat them while they’re hot. Should I try to train myself to sit at the table with my left arm protectively around the plate?