Either Madeline or I is a glutton for punishment.

We have a problem at our house. It's called discipline. It seems very simple on the surface. When Madeline does something wrong, particularly something we've asked heruage not to do many times, she gets put on her timeout chair for a few minutes. At the end of a few minutes, she must explain to mom (in as eloquent language as she is capable of) what she did wrong, after which we give each other kisses and she can be on her way.

That's the the theoretical. In reality, it's a little more complicated. For starters, Madeline likes to put herself on timeout. If I walk in to see she's done something bad, before I can say anything, she'll raise her hands in surrender and yell, "Tine-Out!". Then she runs giggling to her chair and clamors up. She'll sit there smiling as proudly as if she were the Queen of England, and laughs every once in a while to remind me she's having a really good time. When she's decided it's been long enough, she puckers up her lips for a kiss. Then, when I let her down, she runs around pointing at herself and saying smilingly and matter of factly, "Naughty."

So basically Madeline does the whole ritual perfectly and compliantly, while mocking me the entire time and having the time of her life.

Are you allowed to punish a child for a successful timeout?

Some stuff I wrote.

We watched the finale of So You Think You can dance last night. Some guy won and ripped off his shirt and danced around the stage. I have to say, it was a lot cuter when Madeline did it during Elmo's world today.

Anyway. That was about all I had to say coming into this blog post, but I don't believe in writing short blog posts. Short blog posts are just facebook status updates masquerading as their cooler older siblings. I figure that if you're going to write nothing but one line blog entries and call yourself a blogger, you might as well go join Twitter and pretend people care about your every move. I should probably just go delete my Twitter account, since I haven't looked at it in over a month. I just don't see what service Twitter does for humanity. If someone could explain it to me, I will go Twitter it so everyone will know.

Speaking of overly popular websites, I decided Facebook is getting sneaky. Apparently, this new privacy thing, depending on how you look at it, a) allows you to micromanage exactly how much content each and every person you've ever known is allowed to see or b) allows Facebook to sneakily share everything you've ever put on facebook unless you go click through a hundred links and tell them that yes, when you mean you want things to be private, that means not letting random Hungarians access to pictures of your freshman year of college. I thought I was covered when I just clicked "Friends Only" on all of the boxes when Mark whatshisface sent me a message telling me he wanted to help me keep my information safe. But to make sure random applications that your friends add to punch you in the face with a llama doesn't have access to your birthday and address, you have to go change it manually. Ditto on all your photos. Just a heads up from a disgruntled customer, who will nonetheless continue like millions of others to continue to use Facebook no matter how much I think they are screwing things up because they own my soul.

Well, that's a respectable blog post length. So I now bid you farewell. And beg you to please leave your shirt on and not act like an idiot if you win a quarter million dollars. Thanks you.

Boy Howdy, I feel like I'm back in sophmore english.

Jessie's been after me since we got married to read a book called Cold Sassy Tree. It's a book his english teacher made him read over the summer in high school. He complained about having to read over summer vacation, until I told him I had the pleasure of reading Charles Dicken's Bleak House the summer before my sophmore year. Which, for those of you who were not blessed to experience it with me, is a really, really long book. So that pretty much blew Jessie's woes out of the water. Anyway, the reason he wanted me to read this book was mostly because one of the characters likes to say "Boy Howdy!". Jessie likes to say it too, and that's where he got it from. He'd go on and on about how I was missing out, and I should read it. So I finally checked it out from the library a few weeks ago. Jessie saw me reading it. I started asking him questions about the plot and the characters. He couldn't even remember any of the names. Actually, he wasn't even one hundred percent sure he was remembering the right book. Luckily for him, the main character does, indeed, like to use that exclamation. So for the sake of a dozen Boy Howdies, I am now nearly through a random book about a hormonal teenage boy from the post civil war south whose grandfather is also overly hormonal. What a great wife I am. At least I don't have to write any essays on the matter.

Brought to you by the resident neighborhood hermits.

So today I went shopping with my mom. One of the first things she says to me: "So I guess you had a really exciting day yesterday, huh?" I stared at her blankly. The most exciting thing that happened to me yesterday was getting to sleep in until 8 am because Madeline did. I'm not sure how she knew about this grand accomplishment. She sees me looking confused, and says, "Didn't a plane crash right by your house?"

Huh. Turns out a small plane did crash right by our house. About a hundred, hundred fifty yard away actually.

In my defense, the only time I left the house all day was to get the mail. But still. I'm sitting there thinking, I might have heard some sirens. Did I hear sirens? Was that yesterday? Or was that the day Madeline hit her head on the window? Wait. Which day did Madeline hit her head on the window?

I was curious to see if Jessie realized we had nearly been involved in an aviation disaster. The only thing he said about his drive home yesterday was that traffic was a bit heavier than usual. We picked him up for lunch, and I asked him, "Hey, how about that traffic yesterday? Did you by chance see, you know, a small plane crashed next to our house?"

Turns out he didn't see it. Either on the way home last night or on the way to work this morning. A coworker told him about it today. According to him, it was dark. Last night at least. I don't know what his excuse was this morning. For missing a small plane crashed into a hill by our house.

Please, dear readers, do me a favor. If a small meteor should strike our neighbor's house, or an earthquake should shut down the city, or you know, the end of the world comes, would someone please send me an e-mail? Or a text?

Thanks. Jessie and I like to be informed.

I'm dreaming of a red Christmas. And concussions.

It looks like Christmas now. Partly because of the snow. And partly because you walk into church and every female of every age is wearing red. Our nursery, which is something like 80% female, was full of frilly red dresses and bows. Next week Madeline is totally wearing green to beat the peer pressure. Yesterday, I am sorry to say, she was in red and white. But she looked really, really cute. So maybe it was justified.

Speaking of the little red monster, she likes to destroy things. Including wrapping paper, gift tags, ornaments, bibles, walls, clothes, and carpets. But the most fun this week was when she was running away from Jessie and ran right into the ledge on our bay windows. There was an instant bruise about the size of a large, thick Christmas cookie. It pretty much caused me to freak out and google concussions for a half hour. Eventually, after consulting both the internet and my mother, I decided she had no obvious signs of major damage. But to be safe, I woke up about three times that night to get Madeline up. Just to make sure she would wake up. She didn't like that very much. I considered it payback for doing the same thing to me for the first six months of her life. She's all good now, and her bangs pretty much hid the bruising so no one at church accused us of child abuse. They were too busy trying to see the girl under the huge fluffy red and white dress. I think I need to find me a dress like that. So I can keep up with the nursery fashions.

Chains and where they lead to.

Madeline and I got bored while suffering our convalescence this past week. So we did what anybody would do who has finally given in to listening to Christmas music all day every day on the radio. We made a Christmas countdown chain. Not being crafty, I had no colored paper, so we improvised by alternating printing paper and wrapping paper. It looks kind of festive. Jessie hung it above our stairs, just at the edge of Madeline's range. For the first day or two, she could grab the end and threaten to bring the whole project crashing down if she decided to suddenly develop Tarzan like instincts. But now it's safely out of her reach, unless she has some sort of freakish Christmas growth spurt. She never wants to help tear a link off at night, but she watches with interest as we do it. And she'll randomly stop playing and go "Oooh! Chain!" and point like it's the most interesting thing we've ever had in our house. Maybe it is. It's not very long. Somehow I remember Christmas chains being longer when I was younger. I must have been shorter. Or we started in October.

I was listening to the radio last night. The song "All I want for Christmas is a hippopotamus" came on. Have you heard that one? Sadly, I think I never had before last night. Once upon a time I really truly wanted a real hippopotamus to live in our backyard. I thought maybe it would give me rides. Even then, I knew it wasn't realistic though. No one gets a hippopotamus for Christmas. So I never put a live hippopotamus on my lists. I put books and jewelry and tetherballs. I was thinking about that as I looked at our Christmas chain today. I made my mom and Jessie a list, but when Madeline/Jessie pulls off the last chain, I won't be getting a live hippo. Sometimes, you just can't put things on your Christmas list.

Swine flu.....okay. Not. Just good old-fashioned illnesses for me.

Hi. How are you? I'm good. I just feel like it's been years since I blogged, because the last four days have been really awesome and really long. I started getting sick on Sunday, and after three days of wondering whether I had the flu or strep throat, I started to suspect it was the latter. So I sucked it up and went to the doctor. Who was very, very impressed with the size of my tonsils. And, in better news, gave me a prescription to blessed, strep killing drugs. I love strep throat. No really, I don't. But as a teenager, I'd always get a bad sore throat and get dragged to the doctor's for those annoying painful throat swabs that seem like the nurse is trying probe to China by way of your adenoids. And then the test would be negative, and they'd conclude it was an untreatable virus and send me on my way. So I'm really, really glad that if I'm going to be miserably sick, I could be clever enough to get an illness with a nice simple cure.

Thus far, it seems that Madeline and Jessie have been spared the whole strep throat experience. Knock on wood. But they have been subject to my lack of being interesting/lack of cleaning their living space. The only reason I got away with not doing the dishes for three days was by not cooking for three days. But they survived eating a chocolate shake for dinner. Poor babies. And tomorrow, I should be interesting/productive again. Bless you, amoxicillin.