I just needed a short bio for something, and I wanted to keep track of it for future looking-back, so here it is:

Sprinter, nurse, cook, fellow princess, police officer, teacher, driver, mermaid, human roller coaster, carpet vacuum operator, hairdresser, heartache healer, half-of-a-parade, tricycle lugger, monkey-kitty-butterfly, protector, photographer, singer/dancer, and also I change a lot of Huggies.

And here’s a bio I wrote for Violet a bit ago:

Violet was born at St. John’s. We call her “Vibble” as a nickname, because her initials are VBL (Violet Bella LaVietes). Since her St. John’s days, Vibble has taken the usual routes to arrive at the Twos. She currently spends most of her time running in circles and removing objects from cabinets, containers, and shelves. She is a much-too-adept climber who is still getting the hang of talking. She enjoys electronics and is not fooled by “decoy” remote controls or phones. She loves edamame and gummy bear vitamins. She dislikes diaper changes and the two-gummy-bear-vitamin limit.

Hm, some of that is outdated now, of course. The running-in-circles has given way to running-miles-and-miles-before-I-can-catch-her, for example. But isn’t it the truth with a kid this age that you could write a bio for them one day, and by the next day, you’d have to write a different one!

Friday we went to Tanaka Farms—rode in a wagon all over the farm; tasted green beans, carrots, tomatoes, corn, and more right from the fields; and “picked” a watermelon. What fun! Photos here.

This has been a trying week and a half. A lot of events that, taken one by one, alone, I could absorb with not a lot of impact, are adding up to make me feel pretty stressed: Getting rear-ended on the freeway and all of the errand-running that has followed for car repairs, added to Vibble’s trip to the ER. We’re trying not to feel constant stress about taking her back in next Tuesday to have the staple removed, but that’s hard. I don’t want her to have to walk back in that scary place, let alone get held down by orderlies again for another, albeit quick, procedure. It’s just not something I look forward to in life, for either of us.

Then there were cat problems; Mia has always been a “pee cat,” but it’s gotten increasingly worse, and this past week she peed on the living room carpet, on some stuffed animals, and in a giant box of Legos. LEGOS! Just stop a moment and imagine the clean-up involved. It’s about a hundred bucks’ worth of Legos, so I don’t want to pitch it, but EW. SO GROSS. So I took her to the vet, and long story short, she had her teeth cleaned, and we had to rearrange our upstairs to basically create her own country up there and give our master bathroom completely to her, and now she is on some kind of antidepressant that apparently causes her to have the squirts all over the house. You’re right, Vets, this is way better than the peeing. I’m just at the end of my rope with that one, and I’m not the only one; the tension here in the house over her this week has been trying. And so every night now it’s medicate Linus, medicate Mia, clean up after Mia, clean up after Mia some more, and try not to hate this kitty. It’s not her fault, but oh man, she’s hard to love right now. Our house smells embarrassing.

OK, so the list continues: Yesterday I took my car into the shop and picked up a rental car. The wait for the rental car was a real drag, and poor Vibble was really doing her toddler-best to be patient. So we headed from there to the mall to meet up with friends so Violet could play, and this kid—this kid who NEVER PUKES—let go a gallon of gushing vomitousness in the back seat of the rental car. A rental car in which I had NONE of my usual supplies with which to clean her up, reclothe her, etc. Flash forward to naked Vibble, escaping from the store where I am buying her an outfit and streaking into the mall. Yes, she felt fine. But the car seat was ruined. It was that much puke—chunks of it down in the mechanisms, and the padding soaked. Having once before tried to clean the exact same model of car seat (in one of only four other times in her little life she has puked), I know this: I can get the stench out of the fabric, but no amount of cleaning, with any amount of products, gets it out of the plastic. And anyway, I can’t sit her in this car seat, no way, it’s soaked, and I can’t snap the clasp shut. Our other car seat is now in the repair garage. This is going on way too long, this venting, so let me just say thank you to Brooke and to David for watching Vibble at the mall while I ran to Target to get the only car seat they had that fit the bill, so I could get her home and beyond.

Add to all of this that we’re in some kind of long home stretch with Stevel’s app he’s been working on, so he’s spread thin enough to be transparent, working too hard all day and coming home to work too hard all evening on the app a lot of nights. Add to it the unexpected expenses of the ER bill, the vet bills, the new car seat—again, all things we could absorb individually without saying “ouch” too loud, but all at once, well, it’s just been an expensive and draining couple of weeks. A few too many of those moments where I’m standing there going, “OK, I need a plan to deal with this mini-crisis.” I know I shouldn’t even be complaining about ANY of these things. They ALL turned out just fine in the end, none were serious, just minor bumps in the sidewalk, but I just feel so … remember that commercial where the lady goes, “Calgon, take me away!” I wonder if you can still get Calgon.

Thank you for listening. I do feel better now. And we just had a 5.9 earthquake. Shake it up, Cali!

My morning routine for myself used to be what I always considered, ‘Low Maintenance.’ A little makeup, clothes selection, some hair attention.

Now that old routine seems prima donna in comparison to what I get to do. Here’s what it looks like:

[1]

Sometimes I try to do some yoga. HA! Violet thinks this is HILARIOUS! Time to use every muscle in her body to knock Mom over! Wheee!

[2]

OK, get myself dressed. Can I even enter the closet? Most days this involves traversing a blockade of laundry baskets. If so, it’s bottoms, a top, and hope they match.

[3]

Around this time I have to turn on some Madeline, because the Little Boss does not like for me to spend too much time in the closet, heaven forbid. Demands! If I have time to be in the closet, then apparently I have time on my hands—why am I not holding her!

[4]

‘Makeup’ these days has been pared down to one thing: Chap Stick. Chap Stick is the entirety of my beauty regimen. (Naturally, I don’t balk at buying expensive LUXURY Chap Stick, because it’s got to work hard to draw attention away from my blemishes and dark circles.) Of course, today, my Chap Stick was unavailable. As I was sighfully debating whether to dig in the laundry baskets to try and find it, Vibble showed up at the closet door. She brushed her hair back from her face to show off to me her handiwork: Her face was completely buttered in Chap Stick. “Lovely! Mom’s turn to use MOM’s Chap Stick!” (At least she has stopped using it to completely fill in her navel—she’s just maturing every day, and we are so proud.)

[5]

So the Chap Stick has been recovered. Without offending any sensibilities out there, let me just say this: Step 5 is where one hopes one does not need any feminine hygiene products. Because in Vibble’s room there is a dolly napping on a mattress of panty liners … and tampons, forget it. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to wrap tampons in colorful plastic wrappers—you know, like CANDY! or HAPPY MEAL TOYS!—I curse you. They are a holy grail of toddlers.

[6]

Breakfast: Diet Pepsi and whatever has the most sugar/choco power.

[7]

Shoes: Flip flops. No matter how cold it is out, they are fast and, most importantly, in the living room. Once I’ve come downstairs, there is no going back. There’s just no time. We’ve got to be somewhere, and Vibble is purposely dribbling milk on her clean shirt and refusing to wear pants.

[8]

Pack the day’s needs. This step is so important, it requires I stop. Breathe. Focus. The last thing I want today is to be on some playground and smell poo on my kid and realize I don’t have a diaper. Hand sanitizer, yes. Crayons, of course. A diaper? Um.

[9]

Step 9 is where I turn off Madeline. You have probably heard this step, wherever you live. It is deafening.

[10]

Step 10 is where we head out of the garage, and I realize I forgot to put on deodorant, brush my teeth, and so much as look at my hair in a mirror. Good thing it’s not me people are looking at when we’re out in public, but this cute little pantsless kid with the milk on her shirt, right?

Well, staples, really. OK, one staple. But it suuuuuucked. Not the staple part so much, that part was actually very quick. But the part where Vibble’s head was bleeding all over the place, and the pediatrician couldn’t get all of the blood washed out of her hair to find the wound, and Vibble was so sad, and then when the ped told me I had to take her to the ER anyway … ug. Poor little one. She was so brave. She’s really a toughie. They had to hold her down to do the stapling. She seemed most upset by having her blood pressure checked, though, and when anyone got between her and the TV. So brave. Periodically as we were waiting to go into the ped’s office, she was asking ME if I was OK. (Um. No.) Steve came over from work, and like I said, Violet was such a champ.

The cause was a typical toddler altercation at a birthday party (hope it’s still a good memory for the birthday boy—we really did have a lot of fun up until the toy-tractor part). It’s true what they say about head wounds. They bleed A LOT.

We go back in two weeks to get the staple taken out. Meanwhile, Steve and I are facing the reality that this is likely the first of many such staple-trips to the ER with VBL, aka, Thrill-Junkie. May need to budget that copay into monthly expenses by the time she’s six.

Yesterday I was headed downtown to drool over exhibitions at Dwell on Design at the Convention Center. On the ramp that connects I-10 East with I-110 North, traffic was stop-and-go around the big curve, as usual. The car in front of me hit the brakes. I hit the brakes and stopped. Guess who didn’t? Yep, the woman behind me with the dog in her lap. WHAM. She hits me. I look into my rear-view, see her look up from said lap dog, and WHAM, she hits me again, as the car behind her impacts us.

These are the things I’m grateful for:
- Violet wasn’t in the car
- No one was hurt
- My car seems OK, just minor bumper damage, I think
- The police report was smooth
- The doggie wasn’t hurt; since it was the only passenger without a seatbelt, that really could have sucked

The other two drivers’ cars were pretty smashed up. Windshield glass, fronts accordion-style, fluids dripping from under the hoods. A far worse day for each of the other drivers than for me. Still, it sucked the wind out my sails, and I went right home afterwards, skipping Dwell. Because I just wanted a hug, and I had a headache, and I was worried I might have a lot of phone calls to make about my car. (Turns out this process is a million times easier than it used to be, thankfully.)

It was only 10:30 in the morning, but if you subscribe to the superstition that morbid things happen in threes, I was covered: I stepped in gum while giving the police report statement, and I passed a dead kitten in the third lane on the freeway drive home. Hm. Covered, but possibly jaded? Did I just equate a dead kitten with gum on my shoe? I guess I hope it was quick for the kitten; the gum can suffer.

So drive extra carefully this week, please! Pay attention. Come to a full stop. Slow for that yellow light. Put your phone away. I’m talking to myself as much as to you. Want more convincing? Read this.

We took the TRAIN today! Met up with a couple of playgroup pals at Union Station and rode about an hour and a half down to San Juan Capistrano, where there’s a petting zoo and restaurants and other fun stuff right by the station. I will be understating it to say this, but I’ll say it anyway: IT WAS SO FUN! And Violet was incredibly good all day. Aside from a brief wah-wah on the train ride home, she was just the best little kid.

My favorite part of the day was when we first got to the petting zoo. Along with your entry fee, you can choose a purchase from an assortment of veggies and animal food. I picked the bowl o’ pellets, knowing if I went with the cut veggies, a certain little animal I know might feed herSELF. Anyway, once in the pen of bunnies and guinea pigs (aka The Rodent Infested Pen—[shiver]), Vibble made her rounds. She took her bowl of kibble and set it in front of an enclave of bunnies and then sat back on her haunches. A few seconds later, she took it away from them, moved along to another enclave of bunnies and guinea pigs across the pen, and let them munch from the bowl for a few seconds. This went on and on and on and on. It was just adorable. I got some video; I’ll try to upload it sometime soon.

After the petting zoo, we had lunch and then killed a little time at a playground that had a sand pit with a water-pump in it. It was like every two-year-old’s fantasy sandbox, and we let the girls get soaked and dirty, then cleaned them up for the train ride home. Our hope was that they would nap, but while Emme was down with that plan, Vibble and Brienna were too wired. Because TRAINS! And ANIMALS! ANIMALS YOU CAN TOUCH! And ICE CREAM! What an exciting day they’d had. (Me, too.)

Enjoy some photos of our day!

Today has been a rare day without TV. Not that Violet watches a TON of TV, but ideally, for us, she would watch none. It’s just that, sometimes I need to use the stove or something, and I need her distracted and to stay put. And then sometimes, she is just blue, and nothing seems to work, and then I say, “Do you want to watch Madeline?” and she grins and gets all happy. Madeline is a very effective mood-lifter here.

Anyway, no TV today, but let me tell you why sometimes if I need to do something besides watch her every move I have little choice but to put her in front of the TV for a bit. So just now I was trying to get some laundry done. First she played in her room. Then I had to take a break from laundry to clean up the broken light bulb in her room. Then she played downstairs. Then I had to take a break from laundry to vacuum flour off of Violet’s arms and legs and the entire—yes, the ENTIRE—first level floor. It smelled like a bakery in here for the second time this week (earlier in the week, she got into the spices and decided our living room needed a dash of cinnamon—in every square inch).

When I found her with the flour, she knew she had been caught. Immediately, she said, “I sorry!” She said it about four times, shrugging her shoulders, and the tone she used was one you might use if, say, you accidentally stepped on someone’s toe in line at the grocery store. Like, “Oops! Clumsy me! I got into the flour!”

“Don’t put candy down your pants.”

It’s time I shared my secrets. As someone who lives in Southern California, I have to keep up with THE latest trends in interior design, and I do, of course. But I have some DIY tips you can take advantage of no matter what your budget, and whether or not you have kids. Read on to see what I mean …

[1]

Hand-print Feng Shui is all the rage. For this one, if you don’t have kids of your own, you may need to entice someone else’s kids to help you; adult-sized handprints are a dead giveaway that you’re into knockoffs, and you want your guests to think you spare no expense or effort to be stylish. That said, you can spare every expense and effort if you Google “Make your own finger paint.” But if, like me, you’re much too lazy, you can pick up some at any arts and crafts store. Now, the key here is to make a few handprints on some paper before embellishing the wall; that way, it looks as if a creative child has been painting, painting, painting away until that split-second adult supervision lagged, when BAM, the wall got a high-five.

[2]

Play Doh in the carpet is so hot right now, and you don’t have to have kids to make it happen. Authenticity is easy to fake in this case. Just pick up some Play Doh at your local toy store, or better yet, order it online for ease and convenience. Remove it from the containers and mix it up—yes, it’s crucial the colors mingle, preferably to the point of being a single brown wad. Next, break the wad into tiny pieces, sprinkle them on the carpet, and grind, grind, grind them in with your hands and the soles of your shoes. It’s that easy!

[3]

Furniture crumbs and a light dusting of playground sand on all surfaces: Here in L.A., no one steps foot into a house without these. Three-week-old raisins, dried pieces of string cheese, and cracker bits make your couch worthy of any celebrity bottom. Similarly, a few apple juice stains on a light carpet will elevate your social status in a moment, and sprinkling a little playground sand around is so 2010.

[4]

Fancy up: Furnish with broken fixtures. If you don’t have at least one lamp that looks like a drunken hobo monkey swung from it while waving a jug of moonshine around, you need a total home makeover, because what are you thinking? This is so easy to do! Begin with a nice, department store lamp. Next, whack the lamp-shade with a hammer. Remember: Dents in the lampshade are nice, but a huge tear makes a great focal point in any room. You can scrape a little sandpaper along any exposed surfaces, and do your best to bend anything bendable. Finally, don’t forget to snap off the switch so there’s no way to turn the lamp on or off with pliers. It’s THE thing to do to have a broken lamp with pliers next to it; everyone knows what this means (that you’re HIGH CLASS).

[5]

So you’ve got the carpet, the furniture, the lighting … Now as designers and stagers alike will tell you, no decor is complete without considering the five senses. You’ve just GOT to get that diaper-pail scent. But how, you ask? Well, first, it’s amazing how much most people associate the smell of baby powder, baby lotion, and baby wipes with dirty diapers. So pick up travel sizes of all of these items and leave them open in the living room. Now get your hands on a dirty diaper. If you don’t have a personal supply, I can sell you one cheap. You need to wad up the diaper and enclose it in a tight-lidded plastic container in the bathroom for a few days. Then when you open the container, the scent will pervade your home in no time.

I know it takes some effort to be as stylish as we are out here in L.A. I wish you all the best in your ambitions, and I hope you’ll share your own tips. As they say on HGTV, Make the world a better place—start at home.

My mom flew out for a visit the other week, and we had the bestest time. We visited Leo Carillo and Malibu Lagoon, shopped, and just basked in the fearlessness and fun of Vibble. Stevel and I took an overnight to Big Bear, just the two of us, which was a nice, lazy, relaxing getaway. Check out photos here!

If your answer is no, learn vicariously. Stevel spent some 25-plus hours over the last two weeks retrieving data from my fouled-up hard drive, and then delicately performing a hard-drive transplant on my iMac, and then getting everything restored for me. If you’re not married to Steve, you should find some other way to make sure your photos and documents and videos are safe. (Even if you ARE married to Steve, you have now found some other way, because he didn’t deserve to spend all that time making sure, as he put it, “Yes, you deserve to learn that lesson. But losing the photos of the first two years of your kid’s life is just too hard a way to learn it.”) I’m now using Mozy. Stevel uses Time Capsule.

This weekend saw a visit from Cindy and Bridget. What fun—hooray! We shopped, poppied, beach-hopped, and ate-stickers-all-the-time-dude. We enjoyed a visit from Cindy’s fun cousin, this rad guy. It was wonderful to hang out with these girls. I posted some photos—poppy day shots by Jeremedia: Here’s your link to the PHOTO AWESOMENESS.

And now I need to go do my glute exercises. My glutes are bozos.

Two important things happened this week in the way of “getting back on the horse.” Horses.

[1]

We rode our bike again.

I have a great kid-seat on our bike, and I started taking Vibble for rides in bicycle-friendly Santa Monica at about 6 mos. old. When she was a year-ish, we had an accident. It was actually pretty hard to talk about, and I hadn’t been on the bike since, but here’s what happened that day:

I put Vibble in her seat in the garage and mounted the bike. It was very dark in the garage. I rode out into the extremely bright sunlight and was momentarily blinded, and in that moment, I misjudged the location of a pretty high curb in front of our building. We toppled over the curb into the busy street. The first thing to hit the road was my knee (after months of physical therapy, it’s kind of ok now, heh). Second thing was my arm. Third, my precious kid’s helmet. As in, her head, on 26th Street. Cars whooshing by within centimeters.

She was fine within, I would say, 45 seconds. The helmet did its job, and I limped over to the front steps and held her, and she was smiling and laughing in no time.

I was not fine. Aside from my physical injuries, I had just come a little too close to Bad Things. I shook and sobbed, and while the sobbing eventually abated (after hours), the shaking lasted almost three days. And we didn’t ride the bike again, I couldn’t.

The other person who was not fine—perhaps the person least fine—was Stevel. This was a family bike ride, so he was on our other bike behind me, and witnessed the whole thing. I think for him, watching Violet’s tiny helmetted head hit the street was the very thing his anxiety is constantly assuming might happen: Complete horror. He still doesn’t understand how I drove that bike so that it went over sideways into the street.

I don’t need to tell you how awful this all was. We sort of agreed I wouldn’t blog about it, and that wasn’t going to be a problem, since I could barely choke out a one-sentence version of what had happened to tell the doctor when I went in about my knee. But I’ve since told the story to friends and family, and I wanted to record it here and report that we got back on that bike this week. I knew I needed to do it. It was a trembly ride for me, but by the end, I’d hit my stride again, and OH MAN, does this kid love to ride. Holy crap. She chattered the entire way to the library. Twice, drivers got honked at from behind, because a light turned green and they were still talking to Violet: “Look at you! Goin’ for a BIKE RIDE? You like your bike?”

It was all very smooth from her perspective, I think. She was enthusiastic about getting in the seat—she clearly remembered and was eager to ride. She had a new helmet (I was told after any accident you should replace the helmet), which she has since put on in the house a few times and worn around, as if to say, ‘When are we going on that bike again, Mom?’

Soon, Vibble, and often.

[2]

The other horse I will abbreviate, as it is still kind of fresh in my mind (and the bruises are still green).

I had some things mounted in the kitchen, a tiny cabinet up high with our liquor in it being the highest, screwed in as instructed to the thick wood (actually, it’s double-cabinet thickness) side of the cupboard bank over the sink. It was on there good and sound, trust me. BUT then I mounted a Can Crusher on the side of it and proceeded to release all of my frustrations on Diet Pepsi cans, with the force of all of this going into the side of the cabinet and rocking it slightly on its screws. I knew this was a bad idea. KNEW. And yet …

So one day I’m crushin’ some cans, and BA-BOOM!!!!!!!! The cabinet comes OFF the wall, on its way down taking out a nearby wine rack, the medicine cabinet that serves as Vibble’s play kitchen fridge, a piece of the cupboard, some chunks of the floor, and oh, a little bit of my leg.

Fortunate thing of fortunate things: Vibble is not playing in her kitchen, although she is pretty eager to get into the middle of the mess, and Dad has to keep her from trudging through glass and wine and booze and fractured wood and Diet Pepsi cans and laughing-weeping Mom (I felt momentarily insane).

OK, so back on the horse: This week, I had a professional handyman come in to do some things in the house, and I had HIM re-hang all of these things—liquor cabinet, wine rack, kid-fridge, Can Crusher (in a new spot, of course). He put billions of heavy duty screws into everything. I don’t know if you could get these things down with a sledgehammer. He also mounted some other things onto walls where I had been considering hanging them myself. His instructions were: “On there good enough so if she hangs off of it, it’s not coming down.”

The lesson here is, Kristan and her cordless drill: Too ambitious. I wouldn’t say this was a “close call,” since it was clearly the can crushing that caused the disaster, and I never crushed cans while Violet was in the kitchen. It made me RIGHTLY nervous to have her anywhere near that action. But what if … ?

OK, put the helmet back on, Vibb, if you’re going into the rooms where Mom has screwed random cabinetry into the walls herself.

That wasn’t as abbreviated as promised, sorry. And yes, both of these fallen-off-horses were my fault. I blew it. I’m learning from it, still.

[C]

And now I need to try and get myself back to sleep. I’ve got some awesome friends coming into town today, and I want to be ready to PLAY! Bridgey comes in around 3, and Cindy around 10, and with Cindy coming I’m thinking we will likely grocery shop right away, since I don’t know the first thing about buying bacon. Or foie gras.

It’s 4 a.m. I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately (last couple of months). The reasons are these:

1. I drink too much Diet Pepsi.
2. I drink too much Diet Pepsi.
3. I drink too much Diet Pepsi.

I know I need to kick the caffeine. Here’s how I know:

1. I have sleep issues.
2. My use of it has escalated dramatically over time.
3. When I run low on cans, I start to panic. “I need to go to the grocery store,” I find myself saying out loud over and over, to no one and everyone.
4. I bought a Can Crusher. I was convinced I needed this.
5. I used the Can Crusher so hard it fell off the wall, taking casualties with it and hurting my leg.

I’ve had much advice for how to best kick this habit—go cold turkey, hydrate, switch to green tea or some other substance. Not to defend it too much, but I’ll say this habit is at least legal and fairly inexpensive. Also, it’s delicious. I WILL kick it, but possibly not for another year or two. My problems are these:

1. Vibble is two.
2. Vibble is two.
3. Vibble is—”Oh my God, Kid, slow [yawn] DOWN!”—twooooo.

I can’t keep up with her with my own allotted human energy power. I try from time to time and barely make it through the morning without crashing.

Among the awful effects on my life and body of a steady intake of Diet Pepsi are frequent awakenings at 3 and 4 in the morning. Although this one—today—I can blame on another cause of sleeplessness, too: The sky is a weird color. It’s sort of smoothie-coral and foggily lit. When you grow up in places where the telephone poles are mounted with tornado sirens, a weird-colored sky makes your hackles stand on edge. You get to be like a cow before rain: You can sense things no matter what’s going on, like if you’re sleeping, and the sky is a big smoothie, you wake up feeling like, ‘Something’s not right.’ I wrote a poem once about living in a tornado-place. It’s not a great poem, I never revised it, but let me see if I can find it … OK, here it is:

WE DIDN’T LIVE IN MICHIGAN VERY LONG

I.
From the year I was five, I remember these things:

The day I cut my own hair with my art-scissors
and hid under the bed until I was found out

The tree-fort into which Robert Pirrahni and Johnny Ham
did not allow girls

Hot air balloons—too many to count—
landing in the park up the street

The terrible howl of the tornado-warning alarm in our subdivision

II.
A storm with tornadoes makes the colors all wrong. The sky goes green and then orange. It is very quiet.

During a tornado, you are supposed to move to the center of the house.

The center of our house was the coat closet. Whenever the alarm sounded, I ran to it and did not come out for a long time. Hours. I squeezed between my father’s snow-boots and a box of mittens. My mother’s dark wool coat hung around my face. If the tornado should come, I

would not have to know.

Stevel [to Violet]: “What’s this book you’re bringing me?”

Me: “She’s bringing it to you because I didn’t want to read it.”

Stevel: “I don’t want to read it, either. I don’t know much about this Strawberry Shortcut.”

Me: “Cake. Strawberry Shortcake.”

Stevel: “I said I didn’t know much about her … OK, here we go … Strawberry Shortcake Plays Soccer … ‘Strawberry! You’re late! You promised you would practice soccer drills with me today,’ Huck said. ‘I’m sorry, Huck,’ said Strawberry Shortcake, ‘But as I was walking through Cookie Corners I met Ginger Snap. And then Angel Cake joined us at Cakewalk. And in Orange Blossom Acres we picked up Orange Blossom—’”

Stevel: “These sound like porn star names.”

Me: “You’re right, they do.”

[From here, Stevel continued on with the story, until page 12, when ...]

Stevel [reading]: “‘Okay, enough jogging,’ Huck decided, coming to a sudden stop. Strawberry Shortcake ran right into him. Huck fell, and Strawberry landed on top of him. Angel Cake landed on Strawberry. Ginger Snap topped off the group. ‘Let’s practice some passes,’ came Huck’s muffled voice—”

Stevel: “Oh my.”

Me: “It is a porno!”

Stevel: “Shh. [continuing to read] “Strawberry practiced a throw-in from the sidelines …”

[And this dedicated dad carried on with the story. But even Stevel had to admit when Honey Pie Pony showed up on page 18 with Custard and Pupcake that this soccer match had gotten TOO WEIRD. So we decided to put the Strawberry Shortcake Storybook Collection away until Violet is a little "older."]

I keep thinking as this kid gets older, it’s going to get easier to understand what she needs from me. Already we’ve gone from random screaming, to more specific screaming, to tantrums aimed at clearly defined goals, to where we are now—she actually tells me what she wants a lot of the time (this may involve saying over and over, “Eggs,” or it might entail her bringing me the box of eggs from the fridge, message clear either way). So I keep imagining a future where she simply states her needs. Ah, the mysteries solved! The confusion dispelled!

But I realized that’s not reality at all. Sure, she’ll be able to place her specific order/request with me—”Nonfat Decaf-Capp with Splenda, please, Mom”—but the truth is, it only gets harder to know what a kid needs. Harder and harder. I think about my niece, Erica, who just turned 11. Some of what she needs, she tells her parents. Some of it is obvious—an 11-year-old certainly needs love, attention, and plenty of Hannah Montana T-shirts. Duh! But increasingly, Erica’s emotional needs from her family are mysterious and extremely unique. What does this 11-year-old need from her mom and dad? I’m sure they’re trying to figure that out all the time, and it’s a moving target. And it’s not going to get easier …

Someday she’ll be 34. What does a 34-year-old need from her parents? If you’re lucky, she’s had some therapy and can try and articulate it, but that doesn’t mean it will make sense all the time. How much space does she need, versus how close at hand does she need to feel her parents are, emotionally, physically? Where does she need her parents to be in terms of the dynamic with her husband and with her own kids? I can’t even answer that really. But I know there’s no box of eggs I can present to explain it.

Yep, that part of this job is only going to get harder. I think I’m up to the task. Thanks to all of my own parents for taking it on for so long.

We two went to the L.A. Zoo today, and what fun. Not that we saw very many animals. We spent a lot of time at each exhibit, though—and by exhibit, I mean bench, sewer grate, or crack in the sidewalk. That’s not to say we didn’t spend some time in the company of the animals. Almost half an hour in front of some kind of grassland antelope, more than half an hour in the chimp area—but in all of these cases, the draw was much less the animals themselves than the infrastructure and exhibit surroundings. Vibble just totally loved this place. I let her explore at her pace, following behind her with the stroller and leaving the decisions about where we would go next almost entirely to her. She was in heaven.

When she did notice an animal, Vibble would exclaim, “Doggie!” I’d say something like, “Look, Vibb, a chimp. That’s a chimp.” And she would reply, “Doggie!”

I think her favorite part of the day, judging by the width of her smiles, was when she found a little girl in a sitting area who had time on her hands because her mother was nursing her baby brother. Violet and this little girl had a squealy leaf battle that went on and on and on.

We bought a membership on our way out. Now, here are some photos

“I’m sorry, but you can’t go to the grocery store in nothing but your tutu.”

Vibble had her first “real” haircut today. Sat on my lap in the hairdresser’s chair and watched Elmo contentedly. Hairdresser made it all one length not too far under the chin. ‘Cause that mullet wasn’t going to go away on its own.

Some photos post-haircut