The Wee One is nine months old now, and it’s such a charming age. Nine months is the age at which babies become the archetypical baby — gurgling with goo-goos and ma-mas, crawling around with chubby thighs and a wiggling bottom, clapping their hands and giving a big smile when you enter the room. The best part is the way she’s just discovering what a great place the world is, and as such, has so much enthusiasm for every little thing that happens during the day.

“Sweet potatoes for dinner! I love these! So delicious! Mmmmm!”

“My bear! I love him! So cuddly! I want to give him a big hug!”

“There are ducks! In my bath! They kissed my belly! Hee hee!”

“Look at me swinging! So high! So! Much! Fun!”

By the end of the day we’re both exhausted from all that joy.

I’m trying to enjoy these days as much as possible because I know it’s the last time we’ll have a delightful 9-month-old baby of our own around the house. The great weather combined with the sunshine of the Wee One’s ever-present smile is really helping to make this spring a happy time, indeed. I guess I’m kind of wistful about the Wee One growing up, but truthfully I’m looking foward to it a little bit, too. I’m tired of nursing — I’ve had a couple of infections lately that are making it rather uncomfortable — and really looking forward to her sleeping through the night, which for my other two, came hand-in-hand with weaning. Later this summer she’ll be toddling around a little more and better able to play in the sand at the park (without eating too much) and to ride in the wagon with Gal Smiley (which will widen our circle of travels).

Still…nine months is awfully delightful. I’ll try to focus a little more on the now.

Something my mom said when we were down visiting at Easter: “There’s nothing worse than an unmade bed or a sink full of dirty dishes.”

Then she proceeded to tell me a story about when I was a little kid, and a friend of hers had twins, and we all trekked over to meet the twins, and the lady and her husband, parents of newborn twins, had a sink full of dirty dishes, and it was so gross, and my mom has never stopped thinking about it to this day.

And now, I can’t stop thinking about that story, either. Only my thinking goes more along the lines of, “Mom, we are BOTH quite, quite fortunate that you only manage to make it up to Ottawa twice a year. TRUST ME.”

Last summer we decided to get a stamped concrete patio in the backyard, because we hate grass and we wanted to remove as much of it as possible, and we hate maintaining stuff, so we wanted something with absolutely no work required. Because we are lazy, and hate the outdoors, except when it looks like the indoors. No wonder I’m pasty-faced and need to lose weight!

(If you’re not sure what stamped concrete is, here’s a nice sample picture.)

Anyway, we got a bunch of quotes from firms that other people warned us against, and some more firms that refused to give us any references, and more firms that said they knew what stamped concrete was on the phone, but when they got here, not so much. Then we got exactly one quote from an awesome guy who does awesome work who we loved, but of course, charged twice as much as everyone else, so we had to heave a big sigh and resign ourselves to another year of icky grass beneath our feet.

But! We saved all year! And now it’s next year! And we can afford the good guy!

He was here last night to re-do our quote, and it’s the same price as last year, so we are a go! I’m so incredibly excited. By total fluke they are booked to do another similar patio for the house right across the street from us starting next week, so he is going to try to do both jobs at once. So this time next month, I could be out back working the barby, sipping a Tom Collins, and all without actually having to have my feet touch nature!

It’s going to be sooooooo awesome. Once the patio is in, we’re going to start talking fence. And once the fence is in, we’re going to talk landscaping, and maybe shed. And once the trees and shed are in…we’re talking tiny paradise!

So this morning I woke up to find that my shiny new little laptop, the one I have been so lovingly configuring for a week and a half now…is totally and completely dead. It won’t even start up.

I’m pretty upset about it. Thank goodness I hadn’t really done too much writing on there, so not too much data is lost. The worst loss is my DietPower data, not to mention the program itself which was a real bugger to install on Vista.

On the plus side, I have my very own in-house IT guy and I’m sure he will help me take care of it on the weekend, when we return to the Future Shop to do mucho yelling. They better not give us any crap over this.

The Captain and the Gal were playing in the backyard while I was getting lunch ready.

They came to the sliding door to ask for a bag. They needed it to put all the garbage in, garbage that had blown into our yard over the course of the winter, that they were now gathering up and throwing away.

Now that’s why we had children.

It’s laundry day today. My basic laundry day is four loads — white, grey/tan, kids’ darks, parents’ darks (split because it’s too much for one load).

How would you sort the following items?

• Ottawa Senator’s white hockey jersey, with logo on front and black/red stripes on sleeves
• light grey sweatshirt with navy blue sleeves
• white underpants with little red flowers
• chocolate brown sweater with cream-coloured patches on shoulders
• white flannel jammies with a red/blue Strawberry Shortcake pattern
• polo shirt with deep red, chocolate brown, and white stripes, with a white collar

Hm.

Back when Gal Smiley was about a year old, I was still carrying around about 30 pounds of extra baby weight, so I decided to crack down and lose it all. It took about six months and all my Mommy friends asked me how I managed to do it. I would have loved to have told them about some magic secret of weight loss — “Just eat 3 pounds of doughnuts per day! It’s easy!” — but sadly, I used the boring old standby of limiting my calories while adding more exercise to my weekly routine. Snooooooze. Worked, though.

Food-wise, I tried to limit crap that is obviously bad for you, like cookies and Kraft Dinner, but other than that, I pretty much ate whatever I felt like. I just limited my daily calories overall to a level that I felt I could maintain for life — not a crash diet level, but a level that I felt like gave me enough food to feel comfortable on an ongoing basis. I kept track of my daily calories using a program called DietPower, software that you can use to enter every single thing you eat. Not only will it track calories for you, it will also tell you how much of each major nutrient you are getting — how much calcium did I get today? How much vitamin C was in that orange juice? How much more fibre do I have to get today to meet my Daily Recommended Intake?

This kind of detailed, self-involved record keeping probably seems like a lot of work but it so, so appeals to someone like me, who can’t get enough of detailed, self-involved record keeping. Want to know how much money I spent on coffee at Tim Horton’s in February 2007? I can tell you. That’s the kind of logging I do around here. So entering my daily food is not only not a chore, it’s a delight. I can’t get enough of it — the pie charts that show my fat/protein/carb ratios! The line graph that tracks my overall weight loss! The endless lists of what food is good for getting what nutrient! I’m swooning.

By far the most addictive thing about DietPower, however, is the fact that it gives you a letter grade each day, telling you how you ate. I thrive on feedback. I need the marking. I have to know I can get an A+ in eating, dammit!

Back when I lost the weight between Gal Smiley’s birth and my pregnancy with the Wee One, I managed to get an A or A+ almost every day, and I must admit, I felt pretty damn smug about it. See me eating with quality! Watch me get an A even though I had chocolate chip cookies for lunch! Feel the approval of a cold heartless computer program wash over me!

Now, it’s time to lose the weight from my Wee One pregnancy, so a couple of days ago, I started up DietPower again. I had to download the latest version to install on my laptop. And know what? Something about the program is different. All of a sudden, it’s way, way harder to get an A in eating. It seems that no longer can you just eat whatever crap you want, and get an A just for hitting your calorie target. No, instead, it takes away points if you eat stuff that is high in bad fats or sodium, and awards points for stuff that is cheerfully high in vitamins and other crap. I apparently suck at that sort of thing. In fact, the first couple of days I was working an F — an F! I have never, ever, in my whole life, gotten an F in anything. EVER. It`s like a huge mark of failure branded onto my forehead. I SUCK AT EATING. How will I go on living?

Over the weekend I managed to pull myself up to a B level, but it was a lot of work and I have no idea how I`ll ever get an A. What the hell does this program want from me? To give up chips? To stop having coffee with triple cream? It’s just so unreasonable!!

What really peeves me is that Sir Monkeypants decided he’d give DietPower a try, so on the weekend he casually strolled over to my laptop, created a new DietPower user, and entered his food, only to achieve an A. AFTER HAVING EATEN A KIT KAT. Life is so unfair! I’m totally going to take this to the principal’s office!

In the meantime, the weight loss has begun. Prepare yourselves for a few month’s worth of bitchtastic posting.

The other day I took Gal Smiley to the dentist for a cleaning and checkup. They gave her a bright pink toothbrush and she was really excited to rush home and use it right away.

When we got home she ran upstairs to put it in the toothbrush holder in the bathroom. She pulled out her old brush and asked me if we needed to keep it, or if she could throw it away.

I told her to go ahead and put it in the garbage. So of course, Captain Jelly Belly burst into tears and begged me, BEGGED me to not to let it go to the big, dark, smelly, scary hole in the ground where it would feel lonely and unloved.

Gal Smiley is a really sweet and giving child, especially when it comes to the Captain, so she rushed right over with a tissue in hand to try to comfort him.

She patted him on the back and said, “Don’t worry Captain! It’s just a dream! It’s just a dream!”

Yes, Captain, just a dream. A horrible, horrible nightmare where we actually put garbage in the garbage, instead of hoarding it in small piles throughout the house until we’re forced to get official city clearance to have our lot declared it’s very own above-ground landfill site. Shudder.

(Gal Smiley’s old toothbrush now lives on the shelf in her room. I’m a softie.)

So my new laptop has Vista on it — it’s pretty hard these days to buy a new computer that comes with anything else, so although we really wanted NT, we resigned ourselves to working with the Vista. It couldn’t really be all that bad, could it?

TOTALLY THAT BAD.

I’ve been working on and off this week to install new software and configure my machine the way I want it, and it’s SO annoying. First of all, it came with about 15 pieces of software pre-installed, on all two-month “trial” licenses. Then at the end of 60 days I’m sure your computer explodes because all of this expected software is no longer running, and you have to go spend a couple of hundred dollars on licenses. I HATE that kind of negative billing, like, “Here you go! You get it by default, and we’ll charge you for it too, unless you say no!” Grrrr. So needless to say, we’ve been busy uninstalling all that AOL and Norton crap, and uninstalling stuff is brutally slow and annoying and requires plenty of watching and inputting and clicking and it’s SO BOTHERSOME.

And then, after we’d uninstalled a bunch of stuff, I installed some software that I actually wanted. It created icons on the desktop as part of the install. And know what happens when you double click that icon, to start your new software?

A dialog box pops up asking you if you really wanted to start that software. Really? REALLY REALLY? ARE YOU SURE?

And I wouldn’t mind much if this happened the first time, if I could say, “Sure, I really REALLY wanted to start it, and I installed it, and I am the administrator and sole user on this PC, so trust me when I say, this software is good, and I really wanted to start it.”

But no…this REALLY REALLY dialog box pops up EVERY TIME I START THE SOFTWARE. EVERY. TIME.

To make this dialog go away, I have to turn off my security warnings. When I do that, a big friendly RED X appears at the bottom of my screen at all times to warn me that I am doing something so potential fatal, so incredibly dangerous, that I’ve been Scarlet Lettered. DANGER, TURTLEHEAD! YOU ARE RUNNING SOFTWARE!

You can turn off the friendly red X if you really want to. But my point here is that I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO. I should be able to install some software and approve it somewhere for now and forevermore and then all is well.

Oh, and did I mention that I installed Word — THEIR OWN SOFTWARE — and now every time it starts up, I get a million warnings about stuff that could not be initialised and add-ons that are missing? And EVERY TIME I do something in Word — save a document, load help, insert a table, leave it idle for a minute or two — these warnings about the add-ons and whatnot are REPEATED. Requiring me to click “OK” many, many times, until I no longer have any fingerprints.

I’m off to try installing some more crap. Luckily the kids and are at swimming lessons, so I can use all the blue language I want. Fucking Vista!

Okay, I expected that most of you would not know about the old Calgon ad, but having it confirmed makes me feel really, really old.

So go watch it on YouTube so I can seem hip while making pop culture references again, okay?

God I love the internet.