Saturday night puttering

from the "This is your alphabet on drugs" department:

You all know the alphabet, I trust.

Miss M can recognize all the letters, but has her own spin on the recitation of the alphabet that goes something like this:

A-B-C-E-F-G-H-(I or J, never both)-K-L-M-T (theory: in ASL N and T look very similar)-O-P-R-R (she signs Q, can't seem to say it, but knows that there are two letters between P and S)-S-U-(sometimes)V-W-X-Y....

It's very funny. And we're going to treasure it while we've got it, because as Anita ruefully pointed out, we're sure it's only a matter of time before she gets it right.

from the "Decisions, decisions!" department:

A brief food shopping excursion to gather the ingredients for a meal in progress right now (Sunday dinner for friends who had a baby), yielded the following find: kosher ready-to-bake cookie dough in a tube. Why had I assumed that it wasn't kosher? No idea. But now the question is: eat it raw or actually put it on a cookie sheet and wait 10 minutes?

from the "It all depends on your perspective" department:

Shabbat was nice overall. The sleeping was average (I definitely appreciate the concern, though!) because to cut down on the screaming I shared a twin with the bed hog, which, despite the same dimensions, is not the same as sharing half of a king. We had to do the "touch at three points" routine, but there was no crying--to my foggy recollection--between 12:30 and 6:30, and I even managed to slip out of bed for the 3:30 bathroom run without waking the beast.

The stress of Shabbat came from the fact that every house has its own babyproofing pitfalls. What your kid needs to be steered away from is not the same as another kid. So our hosts have a sweet little munchkin, 17 months old, walking but really very docile. Apparently from time to time she throws valuable stuff into the trash, like her daddy's cell phone, but it's not a regular enough occurrence to prompt putting the trash out of her reach or into a cabinet. Miss M, of course, was interested in the trash (shorter and much easier to open than the one at home), the recycling box (on the floor, open, and full of bottles, cans, and old newspapers), the kidney-shaped (not kidding) glass coffee table, low-lying bookshelves, plugged-in televisions, and the flight of stairs. Oh, the stairs. Miss M is great at going up the stairs, but she doesn't have a great deal of practice when it comes to descending stairs. And there were no gates of any kind. So I was a bit of a nervous wreck. Other than the stairs, though, it was more of an issue of the mess potential than the danger potential, but don't all the toys and books strewn about qualify as enough of a mess?

So the perspective department came in at Shabbat lunch. Other guests included a family with a set of 9-month-old twins, who are crawling and doing a little cruising. Remark from the mom of the twins to our hosts: "Your house is so babyproof!" (Taxman and I looked at each other and nearly fell over in hysterics.) We took that to mean that she was impressed that all the outlets on the first floor were covered. I have got to wonder what she would say in a year, when she has two 21-month-old toddlers.

from the "You must be kidding department":

We are experiencing a multi-day cable/internet outage. Again. So we have to borrow someone's connection. Again. We are really paying too much for this to happen twice in two months.