For a while now I’ve been working on an article called, “Things I Swore I’d Never Do Before I Had Kids, That I Now Do On A Regular Basis.” It’s amazing how judgmental you can be of parents before you have kids. It was so easy to sniff and say, “Oh, I’d never let my kids watch so much TV” — that was before I tried to get dinner prepared with two starving, screaming kids holding on to each leg, and all I wanted was to be able to boil some spaghetti in peace for 15 minutes. Or, “I’d never let my kids eat junk food” — that was before they managed to go 30 hours without eating anything, so we were thrilled to have them finally agree to put some Kraft Dinner and Smarties in their mouth. Now it’s all about doing whatever the hell it takes just to stay alive.

Oh, I can hear you childless people out there giving me the “Tsk, tsk,” but just you wait until you’ve been stuck at home for five days straight with a sick kid, and you’ve watched The Heffalump Movie so many times you can chant it in your sleep, and you’re so desperate to get out of the house that you risk the grocery store, where fun-loving swingin’ singles give you dirty looks as your child screams in the cookie aisle and you frantically grab for the Teddy Grams to shut him up. You’ll see!

One of the smaller things I swore I’d never do is peel grapes. You can’t give grapes with skin to a toddler, because if a piece of the skin comes off, it’s a choking hazard. I figured, there’s lots of fruit in the world, there is no way I am getting in there with a knife and removing grape skins, what am I, a peon in classical Greece? But when your kid continuously refuses all fruits and vegetables, and you’ve tried everything else in the produce aisle, those grapes start to look pretty good. Anything to be able to tell your doctor at the kid’s next checkup that he eats something other than french fries and Froot Loops.

So now, I not only peel the grapes, I just spent a half hour removing the pits from seedless red grapes. Because “seedless” grapes are not really seed-free, they just have really small, soft seeds that a normal person would not notice, but which a toddler feels are huge, threatening boulders in the middle of their so-called food.

And I guess that’s love. 🙂

The Amazing Race is on tonight. There’s an older couple on this season, Fran and Barry. Usually when there is a couple-of-a-certain-age, they’re super nice and grandparenty and endear themselves to the viewership, but Fran and Barry really bug. They’ve survived longer than they should have through flukes and random luck, and even though they’ve made really stupid mistakes (like walking right by the big red-and-yellow clue box, multiple times, on more than one occasion), and every time, they are big with the “woe is us, we are so so eliminated,” and then when they are miraculously saved, they are all, “oh, we are totally a force to be reckoned with.” Whatever!

Every time they show Fran and Barry doing a task, it looks as though they are never ever ever going to finish it, and they are all depressed and sad and bewildered, and then they cut to commercial. And just before the commercial cut, they show one of them, usually Barry, making the Amazing Race Stupid Old People Face, a gap-mouthed face of total confusion. I used to think The Face was pretty funny, but that was before Sir Monkeypants imitated it one morning. Then it moved from amusing to TOTALLY HILARIOUS. I seriously couldn’t stop laughing. I possibly have never laughed harder. And now, he can pull out The Face at will and it gets me every time. I had to stop asking him to make The Face because I have stuff to do, and I can’t be spending 15 minutes of every hour totally incapacitated with laughter.

The other night I was playing with the camera’s continuous shot feature, and I was taking continuous shots of and he slowly turned to me and made The Face. I can’t even look at this series of shots without dying.

Here’s the final frame of the series.

A few months ago a new fast-food place opened in our mall, called The Soup Man, a franchise started by the Soup Nazi of Seinfeld fame. I’ve been wanting to try it for a while but usually we are in too much of a rush, but today while lunching at the mall I finally got a chance. The only good vegetarian option was Tomato Basil, and I’m pleased to report that it was friggin’ fabulous. For a simple tomato soup, it was surprisingly hearty, full of yummy chunks of rich tomato and onions, and surprisingly spicy, with real basil leaves included. It came with bread, a banana, and a yummy Swiss milk chocolate for dessert. It was pretty expensive for a food court — $7.50 total for the vegetarian soups — but definitely a full meal. I’m stuffed now and very satisfied with the whole experience, so I’d say the price was worth it, although the woman in front of me in line complained about the price (no soup for you!). It’s definitely one of the less busy stops in our food court so I hope it hangs around, and that I get to eat there again soon — can’t wait to try the lentil soup or the minnestrone!

Last night I had a dream that and I were at some sort of summer camp. The campers went on a field trip, but instead of travelling on one big bus, there was a whole fleet of buses so that the campers could be divided according to their religion. Sir Monkeypants and I were the only two who boarded the bus labelled, “Heathens.” Then we went on the trip (to a damp wine cellar somewhere) and headed home. On the way home, it got really dark and there was a terrible snowstorm. Our bus driver took sick and since we were the only two on board, I had to take over the driving, while Sir Monkeypants tried to navigate.

I was really scared and I complained to Sir Monkeypants about how we had to pilot this huge bus through the storm all by ourselves, and he said, “Damn those Catholics and their full busload!”