Candy Land

When you imagine Saturday afternoons spent hangin' at home with the fam, you think plush carpet, you think barefooted kids sitting criss-cross applesauce, you think CANDYLAND. Hours and hours of drawing from that stack of cards rife with mystery: Will it be one square of blue, a single orange, maybe a double red!! or maybe even an express pass to Queen Frostine?!?!?

You don't think Guilt, Shame, Remorse, Haunted for Life, do you?

Erhem.

My mom gave us a wicked awesome Candyland game for Christmas. The set came in a big clear backpack and the gameboard is actually a rug, the gamepieces are big jolly gingerbread men, and the cards are perfect for my wee non-readers. So far, we've been making progress in piquing Baby Girl's interest in the game. And by that I mean she has successfully ripped the card box in half, scattered the color cards all across the board, and decided her gamepiece was going to live permanently on the purple square in the middle of the board. Gingerbread squatter.

But no matter.

I'm not going to feel all sore that our little lady is outright rejecting Candylandia. She'll learn the magic of advancing in the same direction as other players along the board soon enough.

I just hope she doesn't learn the crafty ways of an older sister who once upon a time would rig the cards, such that if the turns of a two player game were carefully calculated, a certain unsuspecting little sister would advance to a position of nearly tasting Hansel and Gretel-like the King Kandy nirvana and then, upon that last draw, produced a one-way ticket way on back to PLUMPY.

I can still see her lip start to quiver. I got P-p-p-p-plumpy.

Schadenfreude at its best.

I was such an evil, mean-spirited sister.

I am going to have to let my kids win every time to hedge this guilt.

In the meantime, I'll be hangin' on the Candy Land rug with these little plumpsters:

SoCal is a drug

Southern California is a drug, and this past weekend I got more than a contact high off of it. Now let's not be all dropping buzzwords, calling it The Gateway Drug. (Ever notice how peeps be saying that these days and don't even specify, like, into which gate the inferior drug is ushering us?) I don't know much about drugs and that sort of paraphernalia, but I do know that it took me thirty years to try SoCal, and now that I've gotten completely intoxicated by miles of palm trees and Yogurtland and the magnificent, freezing Pacific Ocean, I have to say that I'm glad a six hour plane ride separates us, because, Dear Los Angeles, I could get mightily addicted to you. ***

We spent Baby Girl's birthday weekend visiting Auntie ShaSha and Uncle JoJo, who are pretty much the best people ever, I'm not even sure if anyone is more generous or lovely, not even Ina Garten and she seems pretty fantastic. They totally let us build pillow forts on their couch and eat all their food and play lemon bowling with the lemons in their backyard. (Also: We're sorry to have traumatized their dogs, and by sorry I mean that I was sorry and by traumatize I meant Baby Girl should know better by now.)

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I have a lot of thoughts about Baby Girl turning three. I remember when my sister was three. She was mostly a ween. She could turn on the tears at the drop of a Mrs. Potatohead earring. But dang if she wasn't cute. Emerging from the twos with Baby Girl is tricky because I knew more or less what to expect with the twos. I always thought of them as the Training Twos. I was training Baby Girl to be a functional member of our family, she was training me to be a more longsuffering patient and communicative mother. The threes, however, now they're a whole other ball of wax. I'm a little daunted, to be honest, but yesterday my daughter made tremendous efforts not to chew her boogers by handing one to me, all dangling it precariously from her pointer finger, "Here, Mom, I don't want it." Which is to say I've got my tissues ready for the threes. They can be picky.

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Memorable travelogue things that we did in SoCal: - In-n-Out Burger: grilled cheese, animal-style, please and thank you - Stalking the In-n-Out Burgergirl Dianna: if you are reading this, your eye make-up really is amazing - Highway One! >Malibu!!> Palisades!!!>Sunset Strip!!!> Beverly Hills!!!!! OMG So Entourage! - Sweet tamales, shweet delish - Santa Monica Pier (Minnie Mouse has a Spanish accent, who knew?) - Meeting all the pups in the 'hood - Steel cut oats from...wait for it...Jamba Juice (amazing!) - Upper Room Fellowship in Temple City - Bandying about in Pasadena, dinner at Quadrupel, dessert at Creme de la Creme - Visiting the school where Uncle JoJo cracks the whip - Cartwheeling around the Rose Bowl. That sounds fun, doesn't it? Dizzzzehhhh! - Tofu Hot Pot Korean - Yogurtland - Yes, my vacations always revolve around food

Thanks, Pastry Chef Angie Park!! (This cake was truly bananas. I mean, it even TASTED like bananas!)

I know you were all waiting for the photo of me Mommin' it up with my fanny pack. Presto!

Honesty

"In motherhood a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings, and like sounds outside a certain range they can be very difficult for other people to identify." ***

"A day spent at home caring for a child could not be more different from a day spent working in an office.  Whatever their relative merits, they are days spent on opposite sides of the world."

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"Birth is not merely that which divides women from men: it also divides women from themselves, so that a woman's understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed.  Another person has existed in her, and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness.  When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your live has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle."

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"Looking after children is...isolating, frequently boring, relentlessly demanding and exhausting.  It erodes your self-esteem and your membership of the adult world...Even when you agree on a version of living that is acceptable to everybody, there are still longings that go unmet. It is my belief that in this enterprise generosity is more important than even than equality...."

- excerpted from the brilliant Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work

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