Frickin' frakkin' preschool

I put my husband in charge of signing us up for a preschool tour at the place where Bat Girl goes to faux preschool, since he's the one who takes her there every week. The wrinkle is that the tours are on Wednesday mornings and for parents only, so we have to find a babysitter, which we are very bad at. So we've been dragging our feet. This morning I reminded him to take care of it, since today is faux preschool day, and he moaned, "Can't we just do it after the holidays?" I had to explain to him that no, we can't do it after the holidays, since preschool tours are NOW and you can't get an application without taking the tour and applications are due in January (at the latest) for next September.

We're actually pretty late on this--luckily the few places we're looking at have pretty relaxed application processes. This morning I went web surfing for other 2-year-old programs and discovered that a lot of places "recommend" that applications be turned in the first week of SEPTEMBER. For NEXT YEAR.

Ugh. I'm seriously considering forgetting the whole thing and just sending her to preschool at 3 instead. If I start now, I might just have my shit together enough to make the application deadlines for fall 2010.

*****

I know "cute things my kid says" posts are only popular with the authors of those posts, so feel free to stop reading now. I just want to write down a few things so I don't forget them.

• This morning, as I do most mornings, I asked BG if she wanted to sit on her potty chair (fully clothed) while I peed. (It goes without saying that she always accompanys me into the bathroom.) Unlike most mornings, she did not run away yelling "Nooo!" and actually plopped down on the potty with enthusiasm. Maybe it helped that she had a book to "read." Anyway, she looked up at me as we sat there together and said brightly, "We're poopin'!"

• Newest phrase: "It's lovely!" Usually applied to my jewelry. I think she learned that word from Little Bear.

• Lately, when I come home from work, I'll hear her squeal, "Oh, hi!" in the next room, before she comes running to give me a bear hug. Another popular phrase of greeting: "Wass goin' on?"

• Last week, she was holding her doll crooning, "Oh, dolly, you're cryin', lemme wipe your eyes." And a few days ago, she was playing with one of her teddy bears and informed me, "Bear's cryin'. Needs a bottle." (Can you tell we've had a lot of tantrums ending in sobbing fits around here lately?)

Back to politics for a moment

I spend a long weekend at my in-laws', where we all ate too much processed carbs and high-fructose corn syrup and I think I managed to get one vegetable into Bat Girl in four days. But ah well, isn't that what Grandma's house is for?

Anyway, the ILs live in a state that is pretty much guaranteed to go for Obama next week, but they live in a pretty rural part of that state--we're talking deep in Wal-Mart country, deep enough that even though they live literally minutes away from the home state of the VP candidate, McCain/Palin signs seemed to outnumber Obama/Biden signs by at least 3 to 2. We had the rental car radio tuned to the local lame Gen X-ers station most of the weekend--you know, the one that plays the "best hits of the 80s, 90s, and today!" and has an all-80s weekend every other weekend so we can all enjoy a regular Dexy's Midnight Runners and Kool & the Gang fix. You've got a station like that near you, right?

I say all this as a preface so that you understand that this was just a regular mainstream radio station, with the stupid morning-show DJs that play farting sound effects--not conservative talk radio, not some crazy fringe opinion program. Anyway, we were on our way to Wal-Mart Sunday afternoon to buy all the usual crap you buy there, when that afternoon's DJ started ranting about Obama. The usual stuff, saying that Obama is a secret Muslim who is friends with terrorists, might as well be a Black Panther, etc. He basically said that Obama is part of a secret plot to bring down America, and that the reason why people are snowed by him is that the truth (secret Muslim, terrorist, etc.) is so outlandish that we refuse to believe it even when the proof is staring us in the face.

At first I was disgusted and wanted to change the station, but my husband insisted we listen ("It's good to hear what the other side is saying once in a while"). Then I laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. Then I got a little depressed as people started calling in to say things like "Thank God someone isn't afraid to tell the truth about this guy!" Again, this is a mainstream radio station, a DJ giving an off-the-cuff commentary in between songs, broadcasting to a wide audience in a generally liberal-leaning state.

It's not so much the fact that they were saying it that bothered me. I knew that people thought these things and said these things, and that I'm mostly shielded from it because of where I live. What really depressed me was finally realizing that there is a significant minority in this country who truly believes that Barack Obama is not only a bad person, but anti-American to the core--someone who will stop at nothing to destroy this country.

I've met my share of Bush-hating people in my life. Hell, I've been a Bush-hater. But I don't think I've ever met someone who believed that Bush (or even Cheney) truly wanted to bring the country down. Believing that he would bring the country down as a side effect of misguided policies and even selfish motives, perhaps. But believing that he had the destruction of America as his primary goal? No.

And I wonder...if Obama wins next week (please please please oh please let it be so), how can he truly be an effective, unifying President, if people think such terrible things about him?

(Please feel free to give examples of past Presidents who were believed to be the anti-Christ.)

Quiet

Haven't had much to blog lately--or rather, have had so much to blog, what with turmoil in the markets, turmoil in my own industry/company, turmoil at home and within, that I can't crack open the can of mess and pour it out. Sometime soon I will get my head a bit more sorted out and get blogging again properly, I promise.

But I had to share this: I just realized this morning that my parents are going to be out of the country on Election Day. They live in a very hotly contested battleground state--Sarah Palin spoke in the next town over from them last week--and so their votes will actually count, unlike mine. I wasn't totally sure if THEY realized they would be missing the election--my dad has been a US citizen for decades and usually manages to vote, but my mom has only been a citizen for about 15 years. Until she became a citizen, she had never voted for anything in her life, having grown up in Korea when it was under Japanese occupation and then a military dictatorship. The very first time she tried to vote, she got lost on the way to the polling place and gave up and went home.

So I looked up absentee ballot requirements for their state online, and emailed them detailed instructions on how to vote absentee. I begged them to take the time to fill out the forms, and sent a link to this video (featuring a Korean mom just like mine talking about why she's voting for Obama) for good measure.

My mom wrote back to me: "Hey, I would not give up my right of voting. We already send in for absentee ballots."

Go Mom!

Twenty months

If there's one thing the last month has taught me (well, reminded me), it's that with a baby/toddler/kid, nothing is constant and everything changes eventually.

Just a month ago, I despaired of ever getting Bat Girl to hold her own sippy cup, let alone learn to drink from an open cup. But in the last week or two, she has actually started holding the sippy and drinking from it all her ownself, instead of just pouring the water all over her highchair tray or the floor (we take the valves out of our sippys because they are annoying). And the other day I had her in her high chair with a sippy and a lidless Snack Catcher (yes, we like to remove the part of the feeding accessory that is the whole point of buying the thing in the first place) which had held a few bits of cereal. She proceeded to pour her water into the snack cup and...drink from it! (Now, if I could just get her to drink milk out of anything but a bottle...)

I also was certain that her top front teeth would rot out of her head because she steadfastly refused to ever let me brush the front of those teeth, actually curling her lip over them to prevent me from doing so. Months and months of this, people. But then, all of a sudden, last week she let me brush them. Briefly, but still! So take heart, anyone whose baby is driving you crazy with something--chances are they will change in a month or two anyway.

We are nowhere near starting to potty train, though we have a video and have had a potty since BG was a little over a year old. (She peed in it once, but now every time I say, "Would you like to sit on the potty?" she runs away yelling "NOOOO!" So yeah, not pushing the potty right now.) Instead, we are enjoying all the pee on the floor, without the benefits. She gets a little nakey-butt time after her bath while I'm draining the tub etc., and nearly every day last week, she celebrated by peeing on the floor. Fine when it's on the hardwood, not so fine when on the carpet. I now ask her if she wants to sit on the potty right after her bath, but see above re: running and yelling.

The language continues to explode in a most ridiculous way. And I mean ridiculous, as in friends of ours with kids actually laugh when they hear her talk because it is absurd to hear what comes out of this tiny child's mouth. Sample sentence uttered yesterday on the subway platform: "I hear another choo-choo train comin'!" She can even sometimes have a "conversation" with me on the phone, telling me what she and Daddy are doing and responding to simple questions. Communication does have a downside--used to be, when she woke up in the middle of the night, we'd let her fuss for a few minutes, figuring she was just sleep-crying and would settle down in a bit. Now, though, she'll say "Daddy, bottle!" or "Get up, get up!" Last night, the fussing became impossible to ignore when she started sobbing, "Mommy, Mommy, where are you?"

Apple of my eye, light of my life. But don't even think about asking me if I'm ready for another one.

A little more politics for you

This article by Rebecca Traister at Salon, about why we shouldn't feel sorry for poor fumbling Sarah Palin, is BRILLIANT.

And I just bought this. Looking forward to wearing it in front of my Fox News-watching father-in-law.