lawmummy

In case you’re a little hazy as to where I hail from, let me help you out…  See the big red dot?  Where the hurricane (Ernesto) is hitting?  There.

Here’s another picture, same red dot:

I expect that my parents are freaking out.  They have had it with the hurricanes.  Not only are they bigger and more ferocious than in years past, but the overdevelopment of the NC coastline has resulted in more erosion, more damage, more trees down, more flooding.  Sigh.  You don’t even want to get me started.

In honor of "Blog Day 2006", here is my list of five blogs that I haven’t blogged about/mentioned in passing before that I think deserve a look:

1.  Tailgating.  Since football season is starting this week, I thought this was pretty appropriate.  I never knew how obsessive college football fans could be - you see, I come from the land of college basketball.  And yes, while it’s true that my college chums and I used to stalk Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley (though stalking is such an ugly word), that pales in comparison to the year-long, painstaking preparations for Penn State college football tailgating.

2.  This Garden is Illegal.  I love this blog because it talks about things I like:  gardening and family.  I’d swear, from all the tomato talk, that Hanna is secretly Southern.  But apparently, she’s from Ohio.  Go figure.  Those are some damn nice Ohioan (is that a word?) tomatoes.

3.  Lowering the Bar.  Serious legal humor.  I mean, not serious, but seriously funny though sometimes painful, like The Office.  That’s a compliment.  And there’s a tax law category.  How great is that?

4.  Binkytown.  We’re both Libras, we’re both moms and we share a fondness for Becks (the player, not the beer).  But not a beer drinker?  What’s up with that?

5.  Daughter of Opinion.  Alternately hysterically funny and a little sad, I appreciate that Jessica shares her life with us on her blog.

And my cheating bonus blog:  phillymoms dish.  My phillymoms friends and I are just getting this one going.  Check it out if you live in the tri-state area (or even if you don’t but you secretly want to move to Philly because it’s so cool.)
For more information about Blog Day, see this post.

Weird things are afoot at the Erb household.

Last night, just before bedtime, Amy’s duck went missing. 

Chris found it outside in the ice cream truck playhouse.  It had been raining and Duck was quite muddy.  Chris picked him up and brought him inside to the mudroom.  I found Duck on top of the washing machine.

It was too late to salvage Duck for Amy’s bedtime but I thought it made sense to try and clean him up in time for Amy’s nap the next day.  I figured Super Nanny would thank me for it later…

So, into the washer went Duck.  And surprisingly, into bed went Amy with very little fuss (after some explanation about Duck taking a bath).

Ostensibly, Chris and I went to bed.

The next morning, Chris went downstairs to feed the dog (or so his story goes).  When he came back up, he asked why I stopped the washer.  Confused, I asked him what he meant.  He explained that (insert dramatic music here) when he came downstairs and wandered into the mudroom, the lid to the washer was open and Duck was floating at the top, alone.

Only I didn’t stop the washer.  Chris thinks I’m making the whole thing up, but I’m not.  I asked him what motive I would possibly have behind putting Duck into the washer and then stopping it midway.  None!  I suggested that Katie might have done it, a theory which Chris dismisses because she would have had to get the footstool, open the washer and put the footstool back all before we noticed that she was awake.  Possible, but not plausible.

So, who had it in for Duck?

As I figure it, here are the alternatives:
1.  Chris stopped the washer and doesn’t remember.
2.  One of us sleepwalked downstairs and stopped the washer.
3.  Katie did it.
4.  The butler did it.  Sure, we don’t have a butler, but none of the other choices make sense either.

Of course, the sleepwalking thing, while never a problem before, isn’t totally impossible.  One would think that one of us would notice in a three story house - we’re on the top floor and the mudroom is on the ground floor.  But then, we’re pretty damn tired these days… 

Sleep has been at a premium at our house.  The girls have been little chatterboxes at night.  Tonight they wouldn’t go to sleep until nearly 10pm.  And Charlie?  He has been out of sorts for the last couple of days.  This evening, I finally called the pediatrician - he had no fever but just wasn’t himself.  The crying had lasted far too long.  Sure enough, the little guy had an ear infection.  And he’s teething.  And apparently recovering from a viral infection.  Poor little man!

That explains my sleepless nights.  It explains the prevailing grumpiness at the house.  It does not explain the big mystery of the floating duck.  Figure that one out, Sherlock!

I am so tired of stories about Suri Cruise and John Mark Karr.  Yes, Tom and his brood are creepy, as is John Mark Karr.  Neither of them warrant another mention.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy the next Kate Hudson/Owen Wilson gossip as much as the next girl.  And yes, I perused the Emmy Photo Galleries (Wasn’t Helen Mirren beautiful?  A pregnant Heidi Klum rocked.  Sandra Oh was too skinny but perfectly put together.) But c’mon…  Whatever happened to real news? 

So, today’s top ten are the ten stories that I wish the media spent more time:

1.  The crisis in Darfur.  I’ll admit that I knew very little of this until I saw a small segment on CNN.  I was immediately horrified.  How we, as a nation, can send troops into Iraq and ignore the tragedies in the Sudan is inexcusable.  You want to talk dictators?  Corruption?  It’s all here.  The result?   More than 200,000 people are estimated to have died since 2003.  More than 3,000,000 have been displaced from their homes or need food.  The UN has reported that the situation has worsened.  Why isn’t this on the front page of the newspaper every single day?

2.  Hurricane Katrina.  I consider this to be the single largest humanitarian failure by our government in our history.  How dare our government officials go to bed at night in comfortable beds while people are still waiting for aid and homes?   We can’t blame it all on FEMA.  But we need to figure out what went wrong (besides an administration that a year later, still refuses to make Katrina survivors a priority) so that this never happens again.

3.  The Little League World Championship.  Cause the kids are so darn cute, they try so hard and they’re not all Barry Bonds steroid pumping, fan hating, anything for a dollar baseball players.  They just love the game.  And, oh yeah, the finals are in Pennsylvania.

4.  Literacy in America.  One in seven adults in the US cannot read on a basic level.  That’s 14%.  That’s huge.

5.  The AIDS epidemic.  It hasn’t gone away.

6.  Child abuse.  We don’t talk about this in the media much unless something truly sensational happens.  How’s this for sensational?  In 2004, almost 1,500 children were killed due to child abuse; more than 80% of those children were under the age of 4.  More than 872,000 children were victims of abuse in the US.  The Catholic Church sexual abuse scandals were plastered all over the papers, perhaps because they were so salacious.  But what about the hundreds of thousands of children who are abused each year and don’t make the papers?  Let’s not forget about them; I posted about one in Philadelphia last year.

7.  Breast Cancer.  This is near and dear to me as my grandmother died of breast cancer in almost 20 years ago.  This year, more than 200,000 cases of invasive breast cancer will occur in the US alone with almost 41,000 deaths.  The bad news is that those are staggering statistics.  The good news is, we’re making progress.

8.  Genocide in Rwanda.  In 1994, an estimated 800,000 Tutsis were killed by the rival Hutu tribe in the space of 100 days.  Millions of Tutsis and Hutus fled the country.  The rebuilding process is slow.  There is mistrust and great poverty.  The numbers of people affected are huge.  The UN failed to stop the genocide in Rwanda; about that failure, a high ranking UN official said:  “>"I still believe that if an organisation decided to wipe
out the 320 mountain gorillas there would be still more of a reaction
by the international community to curtail or to stop that than there
would be still today in attempting to protect thousands of human beings
being slaughtered in the same country."

9.  Deaths in Iraq.  The Philadelphia Inquirer has been publishing the death toll in the City every day to call attention the violence.  How about we do the same thing for our soldiers?  More than 2,600 have died in Iraq.  They shouldn’t be forgotten.

10.  Oprah.  Obama.  Hines Ward.  Bill Gates.  How about spending less time talking about what folks are wearing and spend more time reporting what they’re doing?  Some of our celebs, politicians, sports heros and yes, geeks, try and do some good, too.  Let’s talk about them a little more.  That’s a nice note to end on, no?
 

As if Jeb Bush as Governor with his duty-tax skipping wife and drug-taking, probate-busting daughter Noelle isn’t enough…

The state that elected Katherine Harris to office (and yes, she’s running for Senate now) has now declared that if you don’t elect Christians to office, you’re "legislating sin."

If, as Harris claims, separation of church and state is "a lie we have been told" and that separating religion
and politics is "wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers", God has some serious explaining to do.

A friend sent me some info about Blog Day (31 August - not far away) that I thought I’d pass along.

This is, more or less, how it works:

BlogDay posting instructions:

1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting

2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending on them on BlogDay 2006

3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a a link to the recommended Blogs

4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and

5. Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2006 and a link to BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

For more info or for a button, click here.

Ames is having a hard time sleeping these days.  She is suffering from some pretty intense separation anxiety, so nap time and bed time have become hours-long cry fests.

She has become acutely aware of her surroundings and is convinced that there are monsters everywhere. 

When I was at home alone with the girls (Chris was in Germany) and some idiot guy was calling my house, convinced that he knew me, my mom offered these words of wisdom:  "Nobody is coming in that house with Lyle there."  Lyle is my dog.

So, I decided to use these pearls of wisdom with Amy and her monster-phobia.  I told her that Lyle would never allow monsters in the house, that he would scare them away.  Success!  For a week, Amy was content to believe that Lyle was protecting her.  And then something clicked in that little head of hers.  Now she is convinced, every single time that Lyle barks - for the mailman, because another dog is walking by, or because he feels like it - that there are monsters.  One afternoon, she literally screamed and burst into tears yelling, "MONSTERS!"

Sigh.

So now, she refuses to go to sleep.  "I not sleepy," she tells me over and over.  And then the worst, "Mommy, pease don’t leave me" while grabbing at my hand.  Chris gets, "Daddy, you come back?"  I have to say, it really gets to me.

I know that this is a combination between her little toddler imagination kicking in (it happens around this age) and separation anxiety.  Katie had a short separation anxiety phase, but it was mostly directed at me when I left her at the daycare that she didn’t care for.  She would cry and scream when I left the center, sometimes lying on the floor.  We resolved it by having Chris drop her off when possible (eventually, we pulled her out of the center altogether). 

But Ames?  It’s wildly inconsistent - sometimes in the morning when I leave for work, sometimes during the day when I leave the room, but always, always at night.

Last week, it was so bad on Saturday night that I ended up dragging her mattress upstairs into our room, at 2am, just to get some sleep.  I had stayed with her for over an hour, to no avail, and I was concerned that Katie would not get any sleep if we stayed much longer.

Since then, we have tried a mix of things.  She has finally fallen asleep each night, but man oh man, are we tired.  In between that and feeding the baby, I feel like the walking dead.  I can’t imagine how little Ames feels.  She has "baby bags" under her eyes from staying up so late.  Boy, I hope this phase passes a little more quickly…

Rain already!

It’s so humid out that, and I swear I am not making this up, the raisins that the girls left out on the table actually plumped overnight.  Really.

I hate summer.

So, I’m starting a list.  Feel free to chime in.

1.  Kids’ tastes change more frequently than Lindsay Lohan’s boyfriends.
2.  Order bookbags early.  Yes, this one is sold out.
3.  You can’t get rid of Barbie, no matter how hard you try.  She’s baaack!
4.  For some inexplicable reason, toddler girls can play in the pool or bath for hours, but shriek if their hair gets wet at other times.

5.  There’s no end to the number of ways the question "Why?" can be asked.

6.  Potty training may not be high on the list from day to day but poop is.  Poop is fascinating.

7.  Ketchup goes with everything.

8.  Toddlers are never tired.  Ever.

9.  It is not possible to sing the song "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" too many times.

10.  Cuteness never gets old.

Fan of The Roots? Philly’s own. Their new video features some cool shots of the grittier parts of the City. You can watch it here (LOVE the song, BTW):