Poppinz and the Boyz

Don't you think that's a great band title?

Anyway. This post is brought to you courtesy of Mary Poppins. Because Madeline is in watching it. Again. But I've kind of reached my Dyke Van Dyke saturation point. Who knew such a thing existed?

I suppose we'll never know why Madeline gets these quirks in her head. Besides Mary Poppins, she's fallen in love with Candy Land. Or, more accurately, the little gingerbread playing pieces from Candy Land. Because she doesn't really like to play the game. She just scatters the cards everywhere and then stands on the board holding the gingerbread men and spinning in circles. She calls them her boys, which makes me laugh. Yesterday morning, I heard her yelling for me from her crib, so I went in to get her. Our conversation went exactly like this.

Me: Good morning!
Madeline: My Boys! Where they go?
Me: They're downstairs.
Madeline: Poppins?

So if that's not proof that she eat sleeps and breathes Mary Poppins, I don't know what is.

Madeline's new obsession. Hint: It's not Taylor Lautner.

Madeline has never liked sitting and watching television for hours. If she sits through a whole episode of her favorites, I'm pretty impressed. We've tried to watch some Disney movies, but usually she only lasts about twenty minutes, max, before she gets tired and goes off to play something else. I don't know whether to be proud that she's not a television addict, or disappointed that I don't have an effective emergency babysitter. Mostly though, when I hear stories from mothers who have to watch Cars or Tinkerbell twenty times daily, and I feel like may be better off this way. At least, I felt like I was better off. Because we found a movie Madeline really, really likes to watch.


Go figure. My daughter is addicted to Mary Poppins. We discovered this by accident one night when Madeline was screaming bloody murder but didn't want to go to bed. So we flipped through the channels trying to find something she might like, and there she was. And somehow, a singing Jane Andrews made a lasting impression. Now she asks for her everyday. "Poppins?" she'll ask hopefully. And then she'll sit and watch it with rapt attention for an hour and a half. An hour and a half. I was convinced her attention span was a third of that. And she only gets agitated once in a while, if it's been more than a couple of minutes since Poppins was on the screen. And when it's all over, she waves and says, "Bye Poppins! Poppins! Bye! Bye Poppins!" Repeat for about ten minutes. I was hoping she'd get addicted to say, The West Wing, but you take what you can get. At least I have an emergency babysitter. And I get to watch Dick Van Dyke dance and sing. I won't complain.

The mechanic is the best place to pick up guys.

This morning Madeline and I went to get new tires for our car, so that we don't die. Because we almost died about ten times this morning in the snowstorm, because our tires are very bald. Anyway, we did some shopping while they were working on the car, and then came back and sat in their lobby while thy finished up. Madeline was having a lot of fun running around touching all the tire displays and trying to pour herself a cup of coffee. Until a man came in with his son- the Boy. Madeline was immediately smitten with the Boy. She ran up to him and said "Hi!", and proceeded to blush and bat her eyelashes and wring her hands and look at the floor. Seriously, the girl is a natural born flirt, which I assume she got from her father. Because I still think flirting means carving man-eating pumkins and putting them outside your door as a warning. But, I digress. Madeline would not leave the Boy's side, even though I had brought many toys and cookies and books to entertain her. She jabbered at him, showing him around the Firestone lobby. When he went into the restroom, she waited just outside the door until he emerged, saying "Where go?" the whole time. She showed him her cute boots (Shoes!) and took great interest in his race car shoes. Now the Boy, being a male, was a bit overwhelmed under the power of Madeline's wily charms. In other words, he was incredibly nervous and didn't utter a word, but just stared at her. Madeline didn't mind making all the moves though. She tried to climb right up onto his chair with him, but I felt that was a bit forward, so I intervened.

Things were going swimmingly for our little Juliet-until they finished our car. Then I turned to her and told her to put on her coat, and her face became striken. "No coat! No!" She cried. And she proceeded to try to climb into the Boy's chair again, and latched onto his arm. All my pleas that it was time to go home had no effect. Finally, I dragged her kicking and screaming from the store, while she was yelling "Bye! Boots! Bye!" and crying all the way. And she sobbed halfway home. I felt like Lady Capulet, separating two star-crossed lovers. Well, except the Boy just mostly seemed relieved to get Madeline off his chair. But I'm sure he was hurting on the inside. I guess the first love is always a heartbreaker. But there's nothing a cup of yogurt and a cookie can't cure.

Sometimes I amaze even myself with my brilliance.

Sometimes I think January is too long. Twenty days would have been sufficient. I'm all for symmetry and dividing the months up evenly, but February pretty much screwed up that plan. No one likes January. For months we've had holiday after holiday, and we've become accustomed to the rush. Then January hits, and we have an entire month of nothing. Nada. Well, Martin Luther King Day, but giving all respect to the man, it isn't a holiday if most people are still working. And winter has gone from festive and magical to muddy and dreary. And if that isn't enough to sap your joy right off your bones, right about now is when everybody has blown their New Year's resolutions. So now we're all cold, cheerless, bored failures. Welcome to January.

But never fear! In my infinite wisdom, I have come up with a really great plan to reorganize the calender in the interest of beating the mid-January blahs. Want to hear it? I knew you would. I've been working on it for at least ten minutes now, so you know it's genius. We're going to reallocate our resources, date-wise. Just take some extra days off the end of January. Give one each to April, June, September, and November, respectively, and three to February, which deserves more face time. Now all the other months have thirty-one days, so you don't need any rhymes to remember which ones are shorter. And January is now only 24 days long-completely tolerable, and over before you know it. And when Leap Year rolls around, we'll toss the extra day onto the end of December, during Christmas break, where we can enjoy it. I'm confident adopting this system will significantly improve the quality of life for everyone. No need to thank me. Just send a "Happy February" greeting my way this Monday. I'll be celebrating, even if no one else is.

Monkeys are not positive role models

(You like my picture kick? I'm feeling visual, I guess. Enjoy it while you can.)

So right now, Jessie and I have kind of a beef with Curious George. This is mostly because on my last trip to the library, I checked out the original Curious George, reasoning that since Madeline liked the show, she would like the book as well. This logic proved to be too accurate. Madeline LOVES the book. Madeline must read the book at least twenty times a day. And because George is eating a banana, every third time we read it, Madeline must eat a banana too. We are quickly running out of bananas. This would be bad enough, but it turns out the original Curious George book espouses questionable morals. For one thing, everyone smokes pipes. Including George. With no mention of how little old monkeys who smoke end up with lung cancer. And it encourages the removal of cute little monkeys from Africa, where they can eat bananas and swing on vines, to zoos. Where they play with balloons that could potentially pop, be consumed by the monkey, and asphyxiate the animal. Not to mention the fact that it teaches that little monkeys who accidentally call the fire department go to prison, with no notifying of the monkey's responsible guardian and no lawyers or due process. So Curious George is officially on our hit list. And I would not be surprised if a certain monkey book accidentally got buried in the bottom of a closet until our next library trip.

In which the Warners are cultural and domestic.

So the other night was date night. And in our infinite coolness, instead of dinner and a movie, we had the first annual Warner International Food and Drink Fest. Which basically means this: we drove to a store called Many Lands, bought a bunch of random food from different countries that we'd never tried before, and then came home and cooked some dishes from different countries. In the interest of sparing your tastebuds some of the excitement ours underwent, let me tell you these things we learned. And there are pictures, because you have not blogged if there are not pictures. Or something like that.

You should always create an ambience when trying new food, so that even if it's disgusting, it looks pretty. We accomplished this with a cheap tablecloth, cheap candlesticks, and DI goblets.

Beef tataki, from Japan, is good. It also looks pretty on a plate. And we got to use daikon, which we did not know how to pronounce, so that made us feel very cultural.

African sweet potatoes and yams sounded good in theory. But the cinnamon threw us both off. To quote Jessie, "It's like eating apple cider". Whatever that means. So we tried to feed them to Madeline for lunch the next day. She also didn't like them and wouldn't eat them. You lose, Africa.

Moving on to our lovely collection of foreign drinks. We had some sort of strawberry/passionfruit drik from Hawaii, which was pretty good, even though Hawaii isn't a foreign country. There is no picture because we drank it in the car to keep from dying of thirst. We also had Guarana, of which there is no picture, because everyone has had Guarana. Then, we tried White Gourd juice from Singapore. I think it was the single most disgusting drink I have ever had in my life. (Except when Jessie made me try matte at a mission reunion, which you can also have the joy of tasting if you grab a hunk of grass out of your yard and boil it.) Anyway, back to the white gourd Juice. To our great surprise, it was like drinking graham crackers. Really disgusting graham cracker juice. We tried to foist the leftovers on Madeline, again, but no dice. Even Madeline knows that graham crackers should not be consumed in liquid form.

We also got a drink that had some weird characters on it we didn't recognize. When we got home, we turned the can around and discovered there was English on it, and it said "Grass Jelly Drink". Needless to say, after the graham cracker juice, we were feeling a little apprehensive. So we left this one for another day. Do you blame us?

We were going to make some May Day Fritters from Finland for dessert, but it turns out that all the other food was too much, so we left those for another day. Instead, we've been snacking on a variety of foreign junk food, of which there are no pictures, because I'm sick of uploading pictures. Also because I didn't take any. We had these Bongo chips from Fiji that taste like Cheetos, some Chocolate cake from Germany that had an interesting taste, and Tim Tams, which taste like creamy Kit Kats. We haven't yet tried the Beng-Beng bar, so I can't report on its edibility.

And thus concludes our report on all the random foreign foods you never knew you wanted to try. It was an exciting adventure, to say the least. But I think we'll be sticking to normal food this week. In the interest of patriotism, of course.

Cami Warner's Day Off

So the other day, Jessie and I caught the end of Ferris Beuller's Day Off on some obscure cable channel we never watch. Jessie was shocked and appalled that I had never seen this show. Apparently, it is a classic. I really hadn't heard of it until a few years ago. I am woefully ignorant. Please send me hate mail. Anyway, it was a cultural awakening, and I spent the next hour trying to figure out a) why it is a classic and b) why I don't get a day off, even for holidays. I was pretty sure I needed one, because Madeline has recently hit the terrible twos with full force. She likes to be willfully disobedient and make messes faster than I can clean them up. Here is a sampling of awesome things she has done over the last few days:

-Pulled keys off of Jessie's laptop
-Dumped a box of spaghetti all over the floor
-Wrecked a puzzle we were in the middle of
-Colored all over her bedroom mirror and dresser with a marker
-Squeezed baby lotion all over the toilet and floor and then tried to eat it
-Drew with toothpaste on my closet shelves
-Threw a half hour fit after I wouldn't let her bring a laundry basket up the stairs
-Refused to eat meals unless her baby doll is on her lap (getting covered in sauces and such)
-Drawn all over herself with pens and markers. Multiple times.
-Drawn all over our television and television stand with a crayon
-Stolen cookies off the second shelf of the pantry, using toy buckets as stepping stools

Voila. And there you have my resume for why I deserve a day off. Fortunately, I have a mother who loves Madeline almost as much as I do, and likes to babysit. So I gave myself a day off. And it is fabulous. Don't get me wrong, I miss Madeline. It's a little quiet here. But it's kind of nice to be able to clean my house and watch it stay clean. (I know. I'm cleaning the house on my day off, which doesn't seem right. But it's my day off. Don't judge me.) And I got to sleep in. And stay in my pajamas until noon. So it's a pretty good day. I may even be crazy and go to the library. All by myself. And browse the books for as long as I want without chasing a toddler through the aisles. Or maybe go to a fast food place and sit and eat French fries all by myself, just because I can. Somebody stop me.

How the Warners party.

Jessie and I started a puzzle the other day, as a sort of anti-television device. It's one of those really difficult puzzles, where half the puzzle is red leaves that all look alike, and the other half is completely black. The last time we did a puzzle was when we were young and innocent and, most importantly, childless. We are quickly discovering that puzzles are not family friendly activities- at least when one member of the family thinks the point of a puzzle is crumbling it into little tiny pieces and seeing how quickly one can disperse those pieces in an average size room. Suffice it to say, we have to keep the puzzle locked up in the spare bedroom to make any sort of progress. And work on it at night, in secret, after the puzzle Nazi has retired for the evening. And remember to keep it locked while you're in the shower so said Nazi doesn't undo half the puzzle on you. Not that anything like that happened to me.

We have this problem with a lot of our time filling activities. We used to whip out Sorry or Sequence or Settlers of Catan when we were bored on a Saturday night, being the awesome exciting party people we are (who are also obsessed with the letter 'S' apparently). But now, unless we can finish the game in less than two minutes, it's bound to get interrupted and scattered across the floor. We've tried to include Madeline in our game playing, but all attempts to play Memory or Sorry with her have resulted in copious amounts of cheating and rule-flouting on her part. No respect for authority. So we watch Pixar movies and play princess dress up and let Madeline run our life. As is the natural order of things.

The things I know about toddlers and sleeping. And the things I don't.

Once upon a time, I believed that once your child reached the magical weight, age, and self-soothing ability that enables them to sleep peacefully through the night, you don't have to worry about sleep problems ever again. Then I grew up and realized this was a ridiculous lie. You may not be endlessly exhausted all the time anymore, but you are never done fighting sleep issues. It was a good thing to learn. Because now, when Madeline has relapses and goes from quietly and sweetly hopping into bed for every nap and bedtime to fighting any mention of the word sleep and staying up hours past her bedtime, I'm prepared. I can breathe deeply and repeat to myself, at least she's not waking every two hours or waking up at 5 AM. The little punk is getting tame in her old age.

Madeline's latest sleeping exploits are probably my fault, because I coddle her when she's sick. Which means she got a lot more attention and leeway on the whole sleeping thing. I sang her to sleep and let her cuddle til she was asleep, and let her sleep schedule get entirely wrecked. And of course, Jessie did all of this too. Let's not leave him blameless in the whole mess, for he is just as softhearted as I am when Madeline pulls out her little cough and looks sad and adorable. So the upshot of the whole thing is that she forgot how to go to bed at night. And I was singing to her for a half hour every time she needed to sleep, and my voice was getting a bit hoarse. But then I was brilliant (or rather, I had this suggested to me by ten different people and went, oh, duh, why didn't I think of that?), and put the Children's Songbook on CD playing in her room. Now she gets music, I get to not have laryngitis, and everyone's happy. Unless our CD player breaks. In which case anyone with a decent voice is cordially invited to come perform to a captive audience at the Warner household. (And I do mean captive, since she hasn't figured out how to climb out of the crib yet.)

A summary of Camiville.

Apparently, one of my unwritten resolutions this year was to go as long as I could without blogging. And believe you me, it was difficult. So much to blog about. For instance, why no one texted me about the earthquake when I specifically requested that all natural disasters be reported to me, on the off chance I don't notice them. I'm disappointed in all of you. Or we could blog about how Madeline has been sick this week, which really has no effect on her level of energy or daily activities, except that it makes her more demanding and it's not so fun to clean up her crib when she pukes in the middle of the night. Or we could talk about how I finally pulled out exercise video featuring peppy exercise lady for the first time in months (in some twisted New Year's kick), and discovered that it's a small bit harder holding a 25 pound baby than a 16 pound baby while you're trying to walk a mile in two square feet of your living room. Also that peppy exercise lady is still annoying on a 52 inch television. Some things can't be improved by watching them on a big screen.

So I know you all are highly disappointed we didn't take the time this week to blog in detail all these exciting events. Please try to contain your disappointment, and I promise to blog a little more dilligently. Maybe.