Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I went to the Austin Blog Meetup tonight, for the second time. I keep meaning to go but life always seems to get in the way. I enjoyed the people and hated the space – our choices were: 1) get rained on, 2) listen to really loud music, or 3) listen to horrible poetry accompanied by spastic guitar playing. 4) was leave the coffeehouse entirely and hang out in the covered breezeway in front of Clear Channel Communications. No chairs, just cement. In any event, it was fun to go, although the group is considering dumping Meetup entirely and doing its own thing. The venues they suggest are just miserable. For heaven’s sake, the coffeehouse starting charging cover and nobody could even go in to use the bathroom. Not cool. I’d offer up my house if my living room could comfortably seat more than 4 people. Well, and there’s the rugrat factor too.

My daughter Jo has taken a real shine to Attack of the Clones. She calls it “The Flying Car Movie” and asks every day if it’s on. The baby calls it “A-Nah-Nah”, and here’s why. Jo gets the love theme stuck in her head and sings it constantly – na NA na, nanana NA na, nanana NA na… and so on. She sings it all day long until everyone in the house is humming it.

Last night we couldn’t get the kids to sleep until after 1:00. Then I stayed up for a couple of hours more because I was working on getting the linux box set up to host 2 domain names, and what I don’t know about linux can fill about 84,000 books. So I fall into bed exhausted in the wee small hours before dawn. 30 minutes later Jo wanders in, saying she wanted to go downstairs and play with her puzzles. We tried for hours to get her to sleep to no avail. Finally hub took her downstairs around 7:00. 3 hours later Caroline woke up. I brought her into bed with me and tried to sleep for a couple more hours while she groomed me like a gorilla, interspersing her grooming with occasional bops on the nose. Needless to say I didn’t sleep well.

So now I just got Caroline to sleep, and Jo is still awake. She’s a maniac. Neither one of the kids will go to sleep in bed alone. Caroline requires that Mommy holds her until she is sound asleep, then tries to slip her into the crib. Jo requires that Daddy sit at the foot of her bed and read, like a good Daddy should.

Speaking of a good Daddy, while Caroline falls asleep she likes to talk to me about her day. Since she’s not even 2 yet, the conversations are usually a bit garbled. Last night she was talking about how Daddy said he was going to spank her hiney for writing on the walls with a crayon. (The orange blends in with the tan walls so well.) I agreed, and said I would spank her hiney too because it was very naughty. She said “No! No naughty. Daddy naughty. Mommy naughty. Spank my hiney. Humph.” I expected to see a headbob and a fingersnap.

She also had encountered a cat dingleberry in the hall, which I missed, and she ran into her room to babble excitedly and unintelligably at me, and I nodded and uh-huh’ed at her until she grew frustrated that I wasn’t paying attention and put her hands on her little hips and said, “Well, did you see it??”

Of course I had to go look then.

Sorry this is KidBlog lately. Not much else going on. Lack of sleep really kinda consumes lives; anything else that happens is just remotely relevant. Like the hurricane. We had nice windy weather and ominous looking skies all day, but no storms. The ranch got hammered, though.