hurray for leaving the house
Today actually went well. I'm shocked.
We got out of the house and went to an indoor playground, and Pippa got out all the pent-up energy that's been accumulating in her with this terrible weather we've been having. She was wearing a grey sweater and jeans with white Keds (the kind of outfit that would be more or less gender neutral on an adult, maybe slightly feminine) and everyone thought she was a boy. I was totally unbothered by it, but I actually thought it was funny how people would just fall all over themselves apologizing if they said "how old is he?" and I answered "she's two and a half." As if they thought I was going to knife them for thinking she was a boy. Dudes, can we agree that they basically all look the same at this age? If this were 1713 instead of 2013, they'd all be wearing dresses (all the kids there were five or younger). It's funny that a society with strict gender roles was fine with this, but modern people who claim to believe gender is unimportant, the majority of them absolutely lose their minds at not being able to identify whether a three year old is a boy or a girl. Really people.
Anyway, then we came home and she ate an enormous lunch, and now she's napping.
The more amazing thing is that Mary-Alice is ALSO napping.
...well that was too good to be true. *sighs* Pippa has gotten up three times. The first time to tell me she had an accident, which is fair enough and I wasn't mad. But the other two times, no reason.
Well. I do want to jot down a few things about what's going on.
Mary-Alice has sandy lashes and eyebrows, so I'm wondering if she's going to be a blonde (or even stay blonde). I was very blonde as a baby and my hair got slowly darker and darker.
Pippa's final baby teeth (the last two molars) are coming in, which means a last hoorah of putting things in her mouth. We had a minor resurgence of biting people too, but thankfully not too much. The molars are just erupting now so hopefully it'll all be over soon. And by the time her adult teeth are coming in, she'll be beyond trying to bite the safety handle on the trampoline at the playground. (Yuck.)
I'll have to run it by The Husband when he gets off work but I'm thinking about celebrating with pizza. Gordon's store has their in-store deli pizzas on BOGO this week, so it's a cheap treat.
I'm rewatching the Joss Whedon Much Ado About Nothing. It really is great, especially the physical comedy in the eavesdropping scenes. The big weak point is understandable; the supposed alpha couple, Claudio/Hero, suffers especially with modern audiences because Claudio is apt to come off as a jerk and Hero as a wet rag. The 90s Kenneth Branagh version actually did really, really well, mostly because Robert Sean Leonard totally sold both his initial love for Hero and his suffering at her supposed betrayal and her supposed death. Kate Beckinsale also did an excellent, subtle job of seeming like there was more beneath the surface than her upbringing and shyness would allow her to show. Whedon didn't even try, though; he actually plays up the jerkishness and stupidity of Claudio for laughs, and it IS funny, but it means that the romance there is completely unsatisfying. It's not the actress's fault that her Hero ends up so dishwater; the audience can only conclude that any woman who would not only fall in love with such a schmuck initially but also take him back after his complete lack of faith in her must be completely paralyzed above the eyes.
Currently I'm reading Descent Into Hell by Charles Williams. His work is all public domain in Canada so I downloaded a bunch of epubs from Project Gutenberg Canada. I've finished The Place of the Lion already. It's kind of... 1/2 H. P. Lovecraft and 1/2 C. S. Lewis. If that combination intrigues you, give it a shot. He's really good--better actually than Lovecraft, in this limited Lovecraft that I've read--at somehow giving the impression that some creepy eldritch bonanza is going on just around the corner, without actually having anything in the text that you can put your finger on and say "this right here is weird and wrong", up until the doppelganger shows up or a monster bursts out of someone's chest or whatever. The "terror" side generally, really. But it's more like "weird fiction" or "thriller" than straight-up horror, at least using the totally subjective measurement that it's not something that gives me nightmares.
Descent into Hell is proving a little more difficult because it's not as easy as the other book to read just a few pages at a time without getting lost when you come back to it. I may need to put i t to the side until I can actually read it properly, instead of a few pages here and there when nursing.
We got out of the house and went to an indoor playground, and Pippa got out all the pent-up energy that's been accumulating in her with this terrible weather we've been having. She was wearing a grey sweater and jeans with white Keds (the kind of outfit that would be more or less gender neutral on an adult, maybe slightly feminine) and everyone thought she was a boy. I was totally unbothered by it, but I actually thought it was funny how people would just fall all over themselves apologizing if they said "how old is he?" and I answered "she's two and a half." As if they thought I was going to knife them for thinking she was a boy. Dudes, can we agree that they basically all look the same at this age? If this were 1713 instead of 2013, they'd all be wearing dresses (all the kids there were five or younger). It's funny that a society with strict gender roles was fine with this, but modern people who claim to believe gender is unimportant, the majority of them absolutely lose their minds at not being able to identify whether a three year old is a boy or a girl. Really people.
Anyway, then we came home and she ate an enormous lunch, and now she's napping.
The more amazing thing is that Mary-Alice is ALSO napping.
...well that was too good to be true. *sighs* Pippa has gotten up three times. The first time to tell me she had an accident, which is fair enough and I wasn't mad. But the other two times, no reason.
Well. I do want to jot down a few things about what's going on.
Mary-Alice has sandy lashes and eyebrows, so I'm wondering if she's going to be a blonde (or even stay blonde). I was very blonde as a baby and my hair got slowly darker and darker.
Pippa's final baby teeth (the last two molars) are coming in, which means a last hoorah of putting things in her mouth. We had a minor resurgence of biting people too, but thankfully not too much. The molars are just erupting now so hopefully it'll all be over soon. And by the time her adult teeth are coming in, she'll be beyond trying to bite the safety handle on the trampoline at the playground. (Yuck.)
I'll have to run it by The Husband when he gets off work but I'm thinking about celebrating with pizza. Gordon's store has their in-store deli pizzas on BOGO this week, so it's a cheap treat.
I'm rewatching the Joss Whedon Much Ado About Nothing. It really is great, especially the physical comedy in the eavesdropping scenes. The big weak point is understandable; the supposed alpha couple, Claudio/Hero, suffers especially with modern audiences because Claudio is apt to come off as a jerk and Hero as a wet rag. The 90s Kenneth Branagh version actually did really, really well, mostly because Robert Sean Leonard totally sold both his initial love for Hero and his suffering at her supposed betrayal and her supposed death. Kate Beckinsale also did an excellent, subtle job of seeming like there was more beneath the surface than her upbringing and shyness would allow her to show. Whedon didn't even try, though; he actually plays up the jerkishness and stupidity of Claudio for laughs, and it IS funny, but it means that the romance there is completely unsatisfying. It's not the actress's fault that her Hero ends up so dishwater; the audience can only conclude that any woman who would not only fall in love with such a schmuck initially but also take him back after his complete lack of faith in her must be completely paralyzed above the eyes.
Currently I'm reading Descent Into Hell by Charles Williams. His work is all public domain in Canada so I downloaded a bunch of epubs from Project Gutenberg Canada. I've finished The Place of the Lion already. It's kind of... 1/2 H. P. Lovecraft and 1/2 C. S. Lewis. If that combination intrigues you, give it a shot. He's really good--better actually than Lovecraft, in this limited Lovecraft that I've read--at somehow giving the impression that some creepy eldritch bonanza is going on just around the corner, without actually having anything in the text that you can put your finger on and say "this right here is weird and wrong", up until the doppelganger shows up or a monster bursts out of someone's chest or whatever. The "terror" side generally, really. But it's more like "weird fiction" or "thriller" than straight-up horror, at least using the totally subjective measurement that it's not something that gives me nightmares.
Descent into Hell is proving a little more difficult because it's not as easy as the other book to read just a few pages at a time without getting lost when you come back to it. I may need to put i t to the side until I can actually read it properly, instead of a few pages here and there when nursing.