Been a long time

Whew. I had to take a break from blogging. Daddy needed to use the computer.

He finally finished his "work." When I checked his history on Internet Explorer, I saw the URLs for Engadget.com, Woot.Shirt.com, CNet.com and something called hotnakedgrannies.com.

I celebrated Christmas for the first time, and I must say, I quite enjoy the accoutrements of the holiday. The sticky bows top my list of favorite things.

Christmas was loads of fun, even though I had croup. Cough. Cough. It was kind of a downer, though, because Mommy was real sad. My great grandmother died just before Christmas. I didn't get a chance to know her very well, but I know she loved me. I was super cozy when she held me. She smelled like Vaseline Intensive Care hand lotion.

Mommy said that when she was a little girl, Santa Claus somehow always knew to come down Grandmother's chimney on Christmas Eve. He even left presents for Mommy under Grandmother's Christmas tree, even though Mommy wasn't always a good girl. I hope Santa knows to come down Mommy and Daddy's chimney next year!

When I grow up.

Mommy and Daddy sometimes wonder what I’ll be when I grow up. I don’t know what they have in mind for me, but here are some paths I’m considering:

Gravity tester: Have you ever sat in a high chair when your mommy or daddy puts lots of bang-y toys on your tray? After you bang and swing them around on your chair, you can let go and they fall on the tile floor! You should try it. This is one of my favorite activities. I hope Vassar offers this as a bachelor’s degree.

Paper tear-er: Best place to practice this is in Dr. Phillip’s office. She has this big long vinyl table that is covered with a long strip of tissue paper. Oh boy. When you sit on it, it crinkles. All you gotta do is scrape your fingers over the edge and it tears. Then you wad it up and put it in your mouth so Daddy can then scoop out slobbery balls of paper from under your tongue and out of the sides of your cheeks. Georgia Tech, maybe?

Washcloth sucker: Three words: bath time rocks. Why? Because you get a soppy wet soapy washcloth, stick it in your mouth and suck on it. Calgon, take me away. University of Hawaii for sure.

Hair puller: I’m a big fan of hair that can be pulled. If people hair is not around, Spanky Mae’s fur will do in a pinch. Beauty school, here I come.

Necklace/earring inspector: Every girl likes a little bling, right? All the better if you can pull it off your mommy’s neck or try ripping it from her ears. I’m thinking of checking out some schools in upstate New York for this.

Spoon chewer: Now that I got two teeth, this is even more fun than ever. Mommy fills the spoon with cereal or sweet potatoes, then puts it in my mouth. I bite the spoon so she can’t get it all the way in, and then food smears all over my “Night Shift” bib. I’ll probably have to look into culinary school if I go this route.

Wrestler: I enjoy sitting on the floor, facing Curious Jorge, and face planting straight into him. I also enjoy doing this with my great big Taggies ball. It’s great fun smushing your face into soft toys. I’ve also started doing this to other babies at daycare. Miguel gets a big laugh out of it. Maybe WWF will have some openings when I get a little older.

Alarm clock: My morning songs are much more pleasant to wake up to than a stupid buzzing alarm clock. Every time Mommy comes into my room in the morning—oh, usually about 6:15 a.m., Saturdays and Sundays included—I am practicing all my syllables. My vowel noises. My consonants, etc. Mommy says she can hear me in the baby monitor that sits on her nightstand. Vanderbilt? I hear their voice program is tops.

Allie On Holidays

For those of you keeping up, I just celebrated my sixth-month birthday on October 3. Yes-siree, Bob, I’m 6 whole months. As opposed to six skim months.

I’m discovering that the best part of life, so far, are the holidays. Any holidays. As far as I can tell, holidays are for dressing up.

First, I observed Independence Day. This is the holiday to celebrate the day the English came to America to spread religion and small pox to the Native Americans. I wore my special red-white-and-blue, these-colors-don’t-run, All-American striped dress.

Next, I celebrated Labor Day, which honors the esprit de corps of the American worker by giving everyone but Mommy the day off from work. I wore a red, white and blue dress, for this occasion, too. I can’t say for sure, but the dress was probably made by workers in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or some factory run by children in China.

October is extra special because I’ve been celebrating two holidays! First, one of my teachers at the school house gave me some bangle bracelets for Eid. I wasn’t too sure what this meant, so Mommy looked it up on Google. Evidently, Eid is a festival marking the end of Ramadan. Even though we’re not Muslim, Mommy thought I should wear the bracelets to show my respect for my teacher’s holiday.

But the best holiday, at least so far, has been this whole Halloween thing. Here’s what I can tell about Halloween:

First, your mommy and daddy take you to the store to look for costumes. They set you in the middle of the floor in the crowded store and stuff you into five or six different get-ups.

Daddy says you can’t be the peas in the pod because that’s been done too many times. And you can’t be a red chili pepper because, although the costume is cool, it’s kinda boring.

You can’t be a giraffe because the giraffe hat doesn’t fit you. And you can’t be a lady bug because that’s just no fun.

But if you look really exceptionally cute in the frog and duck costumes, and Mommy and Daddy say I do, then you get to take home both costumes. I don’t know what I’m going to do with these things, but right now, they’re hanging in my closet and I like to try and grab them because they are fuzzier than my other clothes.

Also, you get to go to the pumpkin patch.

Other holidays I’m looking forward to this year:

• Sweeps Week
• Dia de los Muertos
• Christmas
• My 1-year birthday
• Easter
• Mario Day (Mar.10)
  

This post brought to you by the letter “S”

I am a big fan of story time. And Sesame Street. Tonight, I got the best of both worlds when Mommy read me a Sesame Street tome called “Bubbles, Bubbles.” For all you other mommies and daddies out there, you can find this volume in the “Sesame Beginnings” set of four board books, which also includes classics such as “At the Zoo,” “Eyes, Nose, Fingers & Toes” and “Nighty Night.”

But back to “Bubbles, Bubbles.” Mommy didn’t know that the seemingly innocuous Muppets were so, how do you say… “friendly” with one another.

The book begins innocently enough, with Ernie, Bert, Cookie Monster and Elmo taking baths, individually, and commenting on all the soap bubbles. But by the end, it’s pure debauchery with the four men all in the tub together.

Mommy said the only person missing from the scene was Roger*, the realtor who sold Mommy and Daddy our lovely estate in FloMo. Roger and his wife, Betty*, had what one might call an “open relationship.” They were both realtors, and Roger was the one in the pair who drove potential buyers to homes for sale.

Roger judged the value of each house by the number of people that could fit in the shower stall or bathtub. If more than two people could not fit in a particular shower or bath, it was crossed off the list… unless, of course, there was a hot tub in the pool, in which case the home’s value could potentially go up, as long as there was plenty of privacy surrounding said hot tub.

I guess Roger liked lots of things in his tub. All I need for a good bath is a rubber ducky.

* “Roger” and “Betty” are not their real names. The realtors’ identities have been changed for their protection.

Roughin' It

This weekend I went camping for the very first time. Camping is fun! If you haven’t ever been before, here’s how camping works:

1. First your mommy has to pack for you. Here’s what you pack: 2 full gallons of Nursery Water for your bottles; 6 breakable glass bottles (not plastic ones because plastic will mess with my endocrine system and turn me into a boy); 1 Costco-size can of Enfamil; 4 footsie jammies; 4 to 5 suits (or onesies, as some call them), in case I spit up on one; 4 pairs of white bobby socks; one 86-count package of Pampers; two containers of 92-count baby wipes (in case Mommy loses one); and 3 blankets (different weights and sizes, depending on how hot or cold it gets in the camper, or in case I spit up on one). Then your mommy has to pack for herself and daddy for himself.
2. Next, your daddy tells your mommy that Spanky Mae can’t stay in the camper because Grandma Ida would not want pug fur all over the camper and your mommy tells your daddy that Spanky Mae can’t stay outside the camper all night because she’s an inside dog. Then your mommy says “Why didn’t you talk to Grandma Ida about Spanky Mae like I asked you to?” And your Daddy says it doesn’t help matters to remind him that he forgot to ask his mother about Spanky Mae staying in the camper. Then mommy gets teary-eyed when Daddy says Spanky Mae can stay by herself in the house for eight hours while the rest of the family goes camping 10 minutes from the house. Then your mommy starts thinking about all the pug tee-tee and all the pug poo-poo that daddy is going to have to clean up when you get home.
3. After that, your mommy pouts and your daddy doesn’t talk all the way to the campsite, 10 minutes from your house.
4. Meanwhile, your Grandma Ida and Grandpa Gary drive their camper from Wichita, Kansas, to Lake Grapevine and park it near the water. After Grandma Ida and Grandpa Gary hold me and kiss my cheeks and pinch my baby thighs, we pile into the truck and drive to Little Pete’s restaurant on the marina and eat dinner while one band plays ’80s cover music outside and a group of drunk people sing trashy Dixie Chicks music on the karaoke machine inside.
5. After dinner, you go back to the camper and watch Hurricane Ike news coverage on the flat screen TV. If you want, you can even watch Hurricane Ike news coverage on the flat screen TV that’s in the camper’s master bedroom. It’s just like watching Hurricane Ike news coverage at home!
6. Then everyone takes turns going to the bathroom in the camper. Everyone changes into their jammies and brushes their teeth while trying not to elbow other family members.
7. Next, Mommy and Daddy put you in bed between them. Grandpa Gary starts snoring from the camper’s front room. Then you start howling, because it’s three hours past your normal bedtime, and you don’t know where the heck you are, and why are your mommy and daddy in bed with you?!
8. Finally, it’s time to wake up. Everyone goes potty in the tiny camper bathroom. But if the boys have to poo-poo, they are not allowed to use the camper potty. They have to put on their pants and shoes and walk to the main campsite bathroom so they don’t stink up the camper. Girls can poo-poo in the camper because their poo-poo smells like roses.
9. Mommy tells Daddy to hurry so you can drive back home and let Spanky Mae go tee-tee and poo-poo and feed her her pug breakfast.
10. After you take care of Spanky Mae, you drive back to the campsite just in time for the rain to start. Then you sit in the camper and watch the windows fog up because Tropical Storm Ike is hitting the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
11. Then, your mommy gets worried that you might be sick, so you all go home and watch Tropical Storm Ike coverage from your flat-screen TV in the living room. Or the one in the bedroom if you want.

What I've learned at 5 months

I am now five months old. A wise and worldly girl. Here are some things I’ve learned in my lifetime:

1. Pugs don’t need two eyes. Pug eyes are like kidneys. God gives ‘em two, but they can get by with one just fine.



2. Mommy is much nicer after a glass of wine. Before the wine, Mommy holds me on her hip and clomps around the house at about 60 miles per hour, using one hand to grab dirty laundry and throw it into the washing machine (she can also measure & pour liquid Purex with one hand into the wash); feed Spanky Mae her pug dinner; whip up dinner for herself and Daddy; and make me a bottle and/or oatmeal (not Quaker Oats). After the wine, Mommy sits on the couch and holds me in her lap. She doesn’t even mind when I tip the wine over if I reach for it while I’m on her lap. It’s like I have two mommies in one!
   
3. Crib soothers that play heartbeat noises work on daddies, too. When I was little and I cried a lot, Daddy would play heartbeat noises and set me in my crib. Then he’d lay on the floor in my room in case I cried and he had to get up again. Then Mommy would wake up at 2 in the morning and notice that Daddy wasn’t in their bed. She’d come to check on me and find Daddy balled up in the fetal position on the floor. Fast asleep with the heartbeat noises.


4. Fisher-Price makes great tunes. I figured out that when I yank on this one toy that dangles from my bouncey seat, it goes do-do-do do-dee-do-do do dee-do-do-do-do. I like to hear it over and over and over again. I never tire of it. Daddy said he wants to throw my bouncey seat through the window. I guess the music is so good that he wants to share it with our neighbors. That is so nice of Daddy!



5. After Spanky Mae licks your face, your mommy has to rub Purell antibacterial hand cleaner all over you and you smell like rubbing alcohol for a few minutes.


6. When you make spit bubbles while you have cereal (not Frosted Flakes) in your mouth, the cereal flies out all over the kitchen. And into Mommy’s lap and hair.


7. Pug toys look an awful lot like Allie toys.


8. Bath time is the best time because you get to inhale a bunch of air into your tummy and make it look bloated and then stare at it. If your Mommy puts your bathtub on the counter in the bathroom, then you also get to stare at yourself in the mirror and smile at yourself. You also get to kick and splash so that the water sloshes out of the bathtub and onto the carpeted bathroom floor. (Really. Who ever heard of putting carpet in a bathroom anyway. Yuck.)




9. People and pugs have lots of names. Here are all the names for me: Allie Pie, Allie Bear, Tooter Bug, Tooter Bear, Tootie Pie, Pieface, Pie Pie, The Face, Allie Bom Bom (this is what Miss Lucy, my teacher at school, calls me). Here are all the names for Spanky Mae: Spankles McFinklestein, Spankers, Spankers Crackers, Spankers Biscuit, Thpanky, Spankus, Spankus McClanahan.
   
10. Aunt Sandi doesn’t like crying. She gets scared that I’m going to break or something if I have to let out a little wail. Then she hands me back to Mommy or Daddy.

Why I love Granny Toni

Today Granny Toni took me shopping. Here's why I love Granny Toni:

1. Granny Toni doesn't have a Mexican bone in her body, but she wants to be called "Abuela." For you non-Spanish-speaking folks, that's "Grandmother" in Espanol. Like I said in an earlier blog, she doesn't want to be called anything that makes her sound old. Unfortunately, this would include all the English words for what she is in relation to me. The problem is that Fletcher, Lola, Momo & Spanky Mae--all of her granddogs--have been calling her "Granny Toni" for years. So it seems as though that name has stuck.


2. She is too silly for words. She put me on her leg while we were shoe shopping for Mommy and said, "Ride little horsey go to town. Ride little horsey don't fall down." When she said the "Don't fall down part," she kinda acted like she was off balance as if to mimic one falling off a horsey. Her timing was perfect.


3. She thinks Mommy and I can't tell when she wants to go have a smoke. After 31 years, though, Mommy is on to her. She said she was going to quit smoking the day I was born. But that was more than 120 days ago...


4. She wants me to be as cute as possible at all times. Even when I'm asleep. One night, when M & D wanted to go see a movie, Granny Toni babysat me. The next morning, when M walked into my room, she noticed a pile of my nightgowns on my swing. M called Granny Toni and asked why all the gowns were piled up. Granny Toni told her she was trying to find the gown that looked cutest on me. I told you she was silly.


5. She likes to put toys on my head. My head is so big that many toys can stay put if you put 'em up there. She put my jingle frog up there today. I knew it was there, but I didn't care. I sat there with Jingle Frog on my head for quite some time.

This is Granny Toni in M's hospital room the day I was born.

Crisis Communication

An exchange between two commentators on my blog occured today. The exchange threatens the reputation and integrity of the Pieface brand. To minimize the damage, let me offer this explanation:

Daddy said he was going to stab Tate's Mommy in the ovary. This was in response to a comment Tate's Mommy left on my blog about "Tate playing the field." Daddy, who was raised in a staunch Roman Catholic home, took offense to a member of the opposite sex "playing the field" with me, his one and only daughter--or child for that matter.

Tate's Daddy thought the whole "ovary" thing was a little over-the-top. He said so to my Mommy while they were at work today. (Not that they read/comment on/create blogs during work time, because they don't, for the record. During their lunch hour, maybe. If you consider lunch time anywhere between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., taking into account all the time zones.) So, Mommy apologized on Daddy's behalf for the ovary-stabbing comment.

Meanwhile, Mommy fired off an e-mail to Daddy saying that he's not allowed to make threats to the ovaries of her coworker's spouse. Daddy explained that he was simply quoting Ron Burgundy's line to Veronica Corningstone that he was going to "punch her in the ovary."

Given that the line, misquoted as it was, was from the 2004 blockbuster smash Anchorman, the phrase is rendered harmless.

NOW, here's a random photo of me in want of context. (Actually Mommy's coworkers will find the context quite hilarious. And yes, that is spit-up dripping from my bottom lip down the front of my suit.) Where do I get my clothes, anyway? The toilet store?

Garage-sale shopping and Benihana

It all started with a crappy dresser M&D bought me before I was born. The drawers are rickety and the face of the bottom one falls off every time M opens it to get me suit to wear after I’ve spit up or pooped on the one I’m wearing at the time.

So when M spied a dresser at a neighbor’s garage sale on Saturday morning, she swooped me up and made D come along, too. I guess she needed his expert drawer opinion.

As if garage-sale shopping isn’t white trash enough, Mommy made us look even more ghetto by leaving me in my Maggie Simpson nightgown. Plus, Daddy walked over there barefoot. He didn’t even bother with his flip flops. He doesn’t like wearing them because the part that goes over his toe pulls the black hairs on his Fred Flintsone toes.

When we got there, we found that the dresser was a dud. It was a little too ornate for my taste. So, I’m stuck with the crappy one.

On Sunday, I went to church with M & D. M wants me to be baptized, so she’s been looking for a good church in the area. M&D had two and a half years to find a place of worship in FloMo before I was born. Why the heck are they just now starting to look? Sometimes I don’t get those two.

After church, I cried all day. I’m not saying the two events are connected, I’m just sayin’.

On Sunday night, we went to Benihana to celebrate Granny T/Abuelita/Noni’s (she still hasn’t decided what I should call her. Anything with “Granny” in it makes her sound old, she says) birthday par-tay. (I have to say par-tay b/c I’m cool like that.) See how amused I was at Benihana. I can’t help it if I had to cry. They were passing me around like hookah pipe, and I didn’t like it one bit.

Why is a 4-month-old blogging?

Because I can, Silly. At 4 months, I can do lots of things:

• Make clicking noises with my tongue and gums
• Toot
• Squeeze Spanky Mae's nose with my hand
• Make spit bubbles
• Watch "Kill Generation" with my daddy
• Do differential and integral calculus
• Make bulleted lists in blogging software
• Roll over, one way, from by back to my tummy over my left shoulder
• Laugh
• Poop
• Smile
• Drink 6 ounces of formula in a single feeding
• Mix a mean Jack and Coke

What can you do? Feel free to post your comments.