Those Ludacrises are coming in great

Finally, after a boring summer of boring nothing but boring on t.v., the fall shows have started. Did I say "finally" already because, seriously, it felt like an eternity of nothing on but crap. Admittedly, I was not overly jazzed about Parks and Recreation but this latest episode had me in stitches. Hilarious, people. I kid ye not. I've now subscribed to the show on Hulu.com so I can catch everything and not clutter up the old TiVo. Check this clip out:

PDX Food Cart Review: Samurai

Recently Megan had the brilliant idea of getting the tots and us moms together to try out some of Portland's finest food cart vittles. So, last Monday we hit our first food cart - Samurai. It took me 30+ years to eat at my first Japanese food cart. It took Monsieur Henry only 23 months. He's far better at trying new foods than his mother.

As Darr had promised, pork yakisoba was on the menu even though it doesn't appear on the online menu, and so that is what I ordered.* In a word, tasty. Henry couldn't get enough. (He likes the salty goodness, just like his mama.) Huck didn't even flinch at the appearance of chopsticks, which is über cool. Though we hit the cart around the lunch rush, we were still able to get our food in a reasonable time. And, perhaps more important given that we were all traveling with toddlers, there was plenty of available parking. I cannot say for sure if this is the standard for that area during that time of day (we went at 11:30), but it was certainly appreciated by this mom. Upon receiving our orders, we headed off to the Park Blocks so we could sit and enjoy our food in an area that would allow the youngsters to romp about if/when they got bored with eating and listening to their moms gab, not that what we converse about isn't stunningly interesting and engaging. It occurred to me that a ratings system of some sort might be in order but really what I want to remember is what I ordered, if I liked it, if Henry liked it, and whether or not I'd go back (either to try something new or order the same again). For this food cart experience, a resounding yes to all those questions. Mmmm...fried noodles are yummy.

Of course there was video captured...

Samurai from Christie Glynn on Vimeo.

*There was fried egg on top as Darr had warned. This was promptly moved to the side and remained uneaten. Fried egg on noodles, vegetables, and meat? Whoever heard of such a thing?

Brunch, part five

This month's brunch theme was Farmer's Market, hosted by Rachele and Jay. Yummy doesn't begin to describe it. A fantastic taste sensation comes closer but still...it was good, people. Very, very good. Dishes consumed included crêpes (both savory (ham and cheese) and sweet (blueberries and apple) fillings), Caprese salad, a peach and eggs dish with peach salsa, turnovers (pear, leek, and Gruyère), a mushroom and asparagus frittata, bacon and bacon, apple pie, and french toast with ricotta (? - just a guess) and blueberries. Needless to say we ate. A lot. Did I mention it was good? Very, very good? The pleasant weather made it possible for the kids to entertain themselves outside on the patio with a cool sand table, although there were plenty of great toys inside for the kids to play with as well. It was another successful brunch. Many thanks to Rachele and Jay for hosting. Of course, there were pictures...

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Phoenix & Holly

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Beep. Beep. Beep.

Internet, it's 8:44 a.m. on Saturday morning. Henry has been fed and watered and had one diaper change. He's now on the floor in the living room playing with his trucks. And since he recently heard the cool beeping sound the garbage and recycling truck makes while backing up, I'm here listening to "Huhn...huhn....huhn....huhn....huhn...."

Babies are AWESOME. And also, I'm really glad I am not suffering from a hangover.

Back that truck up! from Christie Glynn on Vimeo.

Free!

from the always-excellent XKCD

---

The one that's always bugged me is red "licorice"
(don't get me started)

Twizzlers: A Low Fat Candy"
v.s.
Red Vines: Always Fat Free

Fat Free? Seriously? It's Candy!

Hat Tip: Candy Addict

Twelfth Wordless Wednesday requires rails

Public Service Announcement: Protect Insurance Companies

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

The personhood of corporations

There's a really great editorial over at The New York Times about what constitutional rights corporations should have. The Supreme Court is currently reviewing whether or not Citizens United (a corporation) had a right to air a damaging ad about Hillary Clinton. The fear is that allowing corporations to voice their opinions would damage our election system. "Since 1907, Congress has banned them [corporations] from contributing to federal political campaigns - a ban the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld." Good thing, too, given how much money corporations already use to influence our politicians. Just imagine what it would be like if they could use huge sums of money to influence the population at large. "The Constitution mentions the rights of the people frequently but does not cite corporations. Indeed, many of the founders were skeptical of corporate influence." Those behind the push to give corporations more rights? The conservative folks. Tsk tsk.

Monday

Progress means riding enough that your butt no longer feels like chopped liver* when it touches the seat. (Darr recently started riding his bike to work and Henry and I join him a couple times a week.)

Today, we're meeting some friends at a food cart - Samurai - downtown for lunch. I don't have too much experience with Japanese food so I enlisted Darr's help so I know what to order. I'll be having the pork yakisoba noodles, and he said it's totally okay for me to move the egg on top to the side if I don't want to eat it. (Eggs in carbonara recipes = yummy. Fried egg on top of noodles = weird.) More on this later as this will also be Henry Finn's first foray into Japanese cuisine.

Since it is predicted to hit 90 degrees (90 degrees!), we're heading out to Mo's house (her son, Jackson, was wearing the white polo in the zoo video posted Saturday) for some pool madness this afternoon.

Other things to do today include grocery shopping, picking up an extra whatchamacallit so Darr can hitch the trailer to his bike, hitting Hanna Andersson's to check out their Halloween pumpkin costume, and possibly baking a pie. As for dinner, I was listening to those darn folks at NPR this morning and we're on the brink of a beef catastrophe as far as prices are concerned so I'm going to buy some while I can still afford it.

*It's chopped and it's liver, how good can it feel?

Why I'm annoyed at and pleased with Zac Efron

Annoyed - because he thinks Footloose is a musical.

Pleased - because he believes this, he declined to be in the remake, which means I can go see it.

Jazzing up ordinary video of your kid's 700th day with a Star Wars intro

Henry's 700th Day from Christie Glynn on Vimeo.

Month Twenty-three

Dear Henry,

We are now just one month shy of you turning two. Two! Mon dieu, Monsieur. C'est trés magnifique! I'd ask you to slow down but your pops and I are already looking forward to when you're older so we can leave you for a night out without our departure being the most distressing thing to happen to a human being ever, which is how it is right now for you. This did not stop us, however, from hiring your first ever bona fide babysitter - Miss Hailey - so we could catch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in the theatres. Yes, you cried when we left, and we felt bad about that initially, but coming home to find you asleep and the condo building not burned to the ground was absolutely awesome.

You are a spitfire, bean. Your boldness knows no bounds. As evidence of this I point to your recent brazen act of thievery. It occurred during breakfast a week or so ago. In the kitchen. You and your pops seated at the island. Your little hand sneaked over and pulled a piece of cereal directly out of your dad's bowl. And then you popped it into your mouth and waxed triumphant. To curb what could be the beginnings of your life of crime we have implemented family hugs. Yeah, we're loving the potential criminal right out of you. Family hugs are much like they sound. You smooshed in the middle of your father and me. Usually there is a brief squeeze and you giggle and then we squeeze you again to get more giggles. Squeeze and repeat. Eventually we release you from this parental love grip and set you free. Often you don't go far.

You had been riding your borrowed bike to the elevator and downstairs to the car in the mornings so we could take your dad to work, but this past week we started biking downtown instead. It's been a blast, which surprised us because the last time we put you in the trailer and hitched you to my bike you made it very clear how terribly miserable you were. (Read: You cried. A lot.) Now, for much of the ride you are relaxing back there repeating "daddy" over and over again and laughing when he passes us by. When we aren't biking enough to satisfy your needs, you will go and sit in the trailer and say "bike ride," which comes out sounding like "butt ride". You like to spur us into action. And it works. It's very hard to resist a cute toddler sitting in a bike trailer signing outside while yelling "owshit" and "butt ride".

You are enthralled by the skateboarders we see at the park. We watched them perform their tricks for nearly an hour one day before breaking away for a rousing game of frisbee. You have quite the frisbee-throwing technique, Huck. Your frisbee-carrying arm goes back and then whips across the front of your chest in such a way that the frisbee is released and flies far away from the intended recipient (a.k.a. me) and lands somewhere behind you. This is followed by a game of 'who's going to reach the frisbee first' as we both bolt after it. You're a pretty good sport. Back to the skateboarding bit, later we were shopping and while at the store you came upon a dollhouse and in said house there was a teeny doll skateboard. You traipsed over to the aisle I was standing in, set the tiny skateboard on the ground, and proceeded to try and ride the skateboard, putting your rather large toddler foot on the teeny tiny board and hopping with the other leg. Danger's your second middle name. I predict knee pads and helmets are in your future.

You're making progress on your ABCs and 123s, although sometimes I'll ask you to count something and get letters, and you do have an odd habit of leaving out the number 4. That repeating phase you hear kids hit, well, you're there. You'd think this would cause me to be overly careful about the words that come out of my mouth but sometimes, particularly when I'm driving behind some jerk who is talking on his cell phone when he should be focusing his attention on the road, I say bad things. As all parents eventually find out, the problem with this phase is that you tots hear and repeat these bad things. So, I'll try to curb my potty mouth if you try to curb your repeater potty mouth, k?

This letter doesn't even begin to address all of the changes you have made and skills you have acquired over the past month. When leaving daycare, you'd say "bye bye, guys" and wave - sometimes to people in the room, sometimes to yourself. You seem a bit perplexed by the waving process but still recognize it as a convention of polite society so you do your best to participate. You are sleeping in the bed in your room without the baby gate in place. It's as if an invisible line has been drawn and you know we have every expectation that you will stay in your room once we have placed you in bed. You hate getting your hair rinsed. Milk is your preferred beverage. You shout "Woooo!" when you hear the Black Eyed Peas "I Gotta Feeling". You're learning to take off your own shoes and socks, and you think it's funny when I talk about your stinky toes. You're ready for yet another haircut. You retrieve our shoes, bring them to us, and encourage us to put them on when you want to go outside, which is pretty much all the time. You run hard. Play hard. Dance hard. Laugh hard. And fall hard.

On any given day at any given moment I can be completely overwhelmed by the love I feel for you. I wouldn't have thought it possible and it takes my breath away.

Love,

Mom

Henry 700

Henry - 700 days old

Top Seven Things You Don't Know About Henry

1. He prefers walking on train tracks to just about every other surface on the planet.
2. He says "mup!" for milk.
3. He spontaneously counts up to ten but usually skips number four. (No video yet because he resists repeat performances once the camera is in hand.)
4. He is learning Spanish.
5. He has a new-found appreciation for hanging out in the trailer when we go for bike rides.
6. He'll stand in front of his little potty and mime going to the bathroom, just like he's seen his pops do.
7. His most recent food favorite are teeny seedless green grapes we've been getting from the local farmer's market. (Last night he ate about a third of a pint during the walk home.)

Note: The blanket seen here is always the blanket we use for these photos. Unfortunately, said blanket had been left at daycare so I had to load one nearly naked boy - didn't relish the idea of dressing and then undressing the lad for the shot so this seemed the easiest remedy - into the car, drive to the daycare, retrieve the blanket, drive back home, prep the boy for his photo shoot, and get the shot. (Only six pics were taken and three would have worked. Apparently when you are 700 days old you are very photogenic.)

This message goes out to Miss E.B.

Message to one lady in California from Christie Glynn on Vimeo.

That's one way to put it

Everyone has the right to protest, at least here in America they do. We kind of pride ourselves on that whole freedom of speech deal. As we should. There are many countries that don't extend that right to their citizens. Voicing dissent can be met with severe punishment, even more harsh than the criticisms The Dixie Chicks received after lead singer Natalie Maines made her ill-timed statement about President Bush. But I digress... Over at the PrawfsBlawg, Mr. Paul Horwitz had the following to say after reading this piece at The Times...

I found today’s New York Times story about the thousands of protestors who made their way to the streets of the nation’s capital to protest big government compelling and a veritable profile in courage. As they made their way “by bus [on federally funded highways, carried in buses whose safety, licensing, and non-discrimination policies follow federal mandates], car [mostly those of the post-Pinto, NHTSA-approved, non-exploding variety], and airplane [under FAA supervision]” to the streets (road maintenance and sewer service permitting) of the District of Columbia (see, e.g., U.S. Const., Art. I, s.8, cl. 17), these valiant souls faced fire (happily, less of a worry, given the existence of . . . fire departments), famine (especially in those parts of America’s heartland, seedbed of independence, where the seeds come courtesy of federal agricultural subsidies), flood (OK – maybe we haven’t done a perfect job here, although, if I recall correctly, we’ve at least done a heckuva job), and foes (kept at bay, it is true, by a substantial police presence, in possible combination with a large number of concealed weapons) to deliver one powerful, sincere, totally consistent and coherent message: Get the government off our backs!

Breakfast, nap, party

Monsieur Henry was up at the crack of dawn this morning, which explains why we were at Lili Patisserie for breakfast by 8 a.m. Turns out this is the perfect time to take a youngster to breakfast on the weekend. We got to enjoy biscuits with mushroom gravy (serious yum factor here) and the chef cut a rather fanciful plate of fruit for the little man with fresh peaches, strawberries, and figs. Figs, I say! (Turns out Henry is not a fig fan.) The early arrival meant there were far fewer patrons than normal so Henry's occasional shout "BUS!" was less likely to annoy. Service was speedy and, best of all, Henry ate. A lot. Bacon, fruit, scrambled eggs, and the little lad even tried his first taste of biscuits with gravy. And then he tried another bite and another one and ... After nearly every bite he'd emit a little "mmmm" to show his appreciation for the cuisine, which is quite good. If you've never gone, I highly recommend it.

We walked home afterward, stopping at one of the school fields along the way for some serious play time. Henry loves being "ow-shit" (his pronunciation of outside). By the time we returned to the condo, it was nap time. And boy howdy did we nap. The Huckster and myself slept on the big parental bed for nearly two and a half hours. Those carb/fat consumption comas are sure awesome.

By the time we awoke we had just enough time to shower and change before heading out to a party celebrating Tevia's second birthday. Tevia is the daughter of a couple (Paco and Emily) we met in our birthing classes at OHSU. Most recently Tevia was at the condo for a playdate, along with Stephanie and her son, Mason, also known as a result of attending said classes). We all live in the same neighborhood so it was relatively easy to stay in touch and now that the kids are interacting more, I'm hopeful we'll hook up often. Henry is really lucky to have so many great friends. Of course, there were pictures...

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Making Jennifer Beals proud

I totally forgot I shot this until I was scanning the iPhoto library and ran across it. Yes, at one point in the video I am doing the trademark Flashdance warmup in order to prompt Huck to follow suit. It's what any good parent would do after throwing some orange legwarmers on their kid and turning up the music. I make no apologies.

He's a maniac! from Christie Glynn on Vimeo.

It rained

Rainy Sunday Park Happenings from Christie Glynn on Vimeo.

Here a puke, there a puke, everywhere a puke puke

Dang. Henry's first bona fide puke occurred at the condo at approximately 11:20pm on Friday night. And boy howdy was it a doozy. Probably helped that before commencing with his first bout of vomitosis, Monsieur Henry ate a bazillion blackberries and bite-sized pieces of broiled chicken. This made for a very interesting and colorful display of bile on all surfaces that were hit during the event. The lad was discovered standing in bed covered in puke. Puke in his hair, on his face, all over his pajamas, soaking through the sheets, all over the bedspread, even some on his pet pig. And it was a bright purplish color, only it took me a moment to assign the color purple to the vomit so for that millisecond I thought it was blood. Dear Zeus in the sky, that is never a good thing to experience. Several minor pukes followed, each one lessening in severity. The culprit? We think it is the same bug that I've been fighting for nearly two days now. Darr stayed home from work yesterday to take care of the wee one because I was out of commission. My throat hurts, my eyes are leaky faucets, either my right sinus or my left sinus is plugged (depending on how I'm lying on the bed), and up until dinner time, the thought of eating made me want to puke. (My actual vomiting occurred Thursday on the drive home from daycare after picking Henry up. Driving and puking, that's how I roll, Internet.) Henry has been washed off multiple times, trained in how to aim for the porcelain God in the event he has to blow again, and is currently sleeping in his bed. Darr is camped out on the floor beside him. I'm washing many loads of laundry in an attempt to salvage the following: one bedspread, two pairs of pajamas, one pillowcase, two sheets, one towel, and several wash cloths.

Gearing up for #2

That's the second birthday, folks, not the other kind of two (the kind that increases your family by one - we leave that to others). I just finished putting together the invites for Henry's family birthday party. Last year it was owls, this year it's DINOSAURS! ROAR! Because Huck's only turning two I'm still quite comfortable holding off from having a HUGE celebration although part of me thinks that just bringing all of his friends together would be great as a photo op and even better if it was Halloween themed so all the kids could come in their costumes. Hmmm... I might have to consider that. For now, feast your eyes on this magnificent creation - handmade, hand stamped, hand glued - for one very special little bean. Note: No two invites are alike. Each features a different dinosaur with varying colored backgrounds, including pink (the invite headed to Miss Amels).

From the vault: Piano Man

Piano concerto #9 from Christie Glynn on Vimeo.