I Am So Hot

And not in the good way. I have been out of the Cute Phase for at least a month, and am now into the Sweaty Beast Phase. Parts of my body touch other parts of my body that aren't meant to touch. Making me sweaty and uncomfortable and unpleasant. I pretty much look like the Venus of Willendorf now, except that she's made of limestone and in a climate-controlled museum somewhere and therefore is not sweaty.

R.I.P. M.J.


When I was 10 years old and already obsessed with Thriller, the top item on my Christmas list was any tape by Michael Jackson. A few days before Christmas at my dad and stepmom's house, a gift-wrapped cassette taunted me from under the tree. I broke down and decided to sneak a peek: it was "Off the Wall," with a handsome, sly Michael Jackson smiling at me (the peak of his unmarred beauty). I swooned. I was so thrilled and nervous that when I went to rewrap the present, I couldn't find the Scotch tape and had to rewrap it with masking tape. This did not go unnoticed. As punishment, my receipt of "Off the Wall" was delayed for a few agonizing weeks.

As I wrote a while back, I played both "Thriller" and "Off the Wall" until the tapes died back then, and the music moves me still. He was long gone to many of us, but the loss of Michael Jackson's genius is sad nonetheless.

Oh Yeah, I'm Pregnant

Pregnancy starts out as a pretty abstract construct. You spend several months worrying about it, concealing it, searching for reassurance of it. Soon enough, you have some nice, round proof, sweet reminders every once in while, but it's just an idea.

And suddenly, it's for real. For real, for real. That reality struck me when Lucy and I measured one of her babies — an infant-sized, healthy-looking thing — and determined that Lemon is a little bigger than that baby. Every so often, I hold that doll up to my abdomen to get a sense of where Lemon is and what's going on in there. Totally weird.

Little Orphan Lucy

Lucy must be having some anxiety about the upcoming Major Life Change. She keeps asking me if the movie "Annie" is real, and are there really kids who don't have parents. And she's been very affectionate toward the dogs, saying things like, "I will always love Clifford. I never want a new dog."

Also, she has been playing with a stuffed cat she's named Kitty Kitty. If you ask where Kitty Kitty came from, Lucy will tell you this sad story about how Kitty Kitty's mother and family were out walking, and they found a new baby cat they loved more than Kitty Kitty, and they picked up the new kitten and left Kitty Kitty on the street.

Poor kid. All this change is a lot to process.

Strange Customs Involving Teeth

Much to her delight, Lucy lost ANOTHER tooth right next to the other one she lost, which means she now has "a place to rest my thumb when I am sucking it."

Last night on my way home from work, I had to help the Tooth Fairy out and get some special money to leave under Lu's pillow. I went to the 7-11 and asked for either some silver dollars or some $2 bills. The clerk, whom I would guess was a recent immigrant from the Indian sub-continent, wanted to know why I wanted "special money." I found myself explaining the American tradition of the tooth fairy to this guy: an interesting cultural exchange that ended with him saying "Very nice."

When I got home, I read on Wikipedia that in India and some other Asian countries, "when a child loses a tooth the usual custom is that he or she should throw it onto the roof if it came from the lower jaw, or into the space beneath the floor if it came from the upper jaw. While doing this, the child shouts a request for the tooth to be replaced with the tooth of a mouse."

Maybe we will do that for the next tooth.

Little Miss Silver Lining

My day was bad. Not catastrophic, just the kind of stressful, exhausting day that puts a little cloud over your head. I worked late and got home just in time to give Lu a bath, during which we discussed our Two Best Things. I confessed I'd had such a bad day that I couldn't think of Two Best Things, only like, Seven Worst Things. I said my day was like Alexander's, and she seemed to understand.

As I was putting her to bed, I said, "You know, now I have a Best Thing, and that's getting to see you." She thought for a minute and said, "No, Mom, you have three Best Things — no four! Getting to see me, getting to see Dad, reading me one book, and then reading me another book. See, that's four!"

That's positivity. I should also add that, for all her Mary Sunshine attitude, she confessed that one of her Worst Things was "when I, um, told Melinda something not very nice, and that is...that I wished she was dead."

Uh, yeah. That's a Worst Thing.