As you may have noticed, we’ve been absent from here for a few weeks. A good chunk of that was due to the holidays and our trip home to see our parents. During that time, Liza said her first semi-word: Pop. That would be my dad’s nickname among his grandchildren, and given that she only had eyes for him while we were there, I have gone ahead and written her out of my will.

Liza and Eli received their bounty of toys. Eli was particularly taken with a set of Tinkertoys two good friends of ours gave him. He would put a stick into one of the hubs, wave it around, and say, “This is a banger! Bang! Bang!” while smashing it into his other toys. He did build non-banger things, but the banger was his favorite by far.

We also secured a Wii, which has provided much entertainment. Eli likes bowling, though his release is so slow that the ball meanders towards the pins. Then again, he got more strikes than I did. He also likes “Super Mario of the Galaxy”.

Other random notes:

• Seeing a sign reading ONAN in front of a building marked “Cummins Mid-South” will cause a lot of giggling that you won’t be able to explain to your three-year-old.
• It is possible to make the trip in a Fit, though packing becomes more and more laborious after each visit.
• If there is a lolcat for every occasion — and there is — then this is the one for our trip:
  

  What gives, Little Rock drivers? Don’t they still teach you what that stick to the left of your steering wheel is for when you get a driver’s license? We hadn’t been in Little Rock for ten minutes before Eli asked, “Mommy, why is daddy blowing the horn a lot?”

• Yes, we took cute pictures. Expect them later.

It’s good to be back.

Eli’s room is filled with many great, very small toys. I devised this block so that Liza could see Eli and what he was doing but not get into the room to swallow many great very small toys. I don’t think it’ll last for long but it works for right now.

In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, there’s this stuff called Dust. It’s made of an elementary particle that is far more attracted to adults than to children.

It turns out we have the opposite in our world. It’s called Germs.

Yes, Liza is sick again. She’s managed to catch some illness from the maelstrom of them that swirl around her. We spent last night in the rocker with her, Vicks be damned, and this morning she has a cough and no sense of equilibrium. I shouldn’t laugh at how she can’t stay sitting and instead falls over, but that’s clearly going to be the highlight of my day.

Were you aware that people debate politics a lot on the Internet? I know! It was a surprise to me, too! It’s been driven by the eighty-two debates that the Republican and Democratic candidates for US President have had, a product of the ever-earlier campaign season. By 2015 we’ll see people running for the 2020 Presidency. It’s just like the Christmas shopping season in that regard, a Christmas season in which the only gifts we get are giant pitchers of phlegm.

Regardless, people on the Internet have debated what it would mean to the US if so-and-so is nominated. Everyone’s focused on taxes, the Iraq war, healthcare, and other such issues. But what about the less-obvious ramifications of each candidate’s nomination? That, my friends, is what we should be paying attention to.

Let’s get started, shall we? Here’s a taste of what might happen if each of the following candidates wins their party’s nomination.

Mike Huckabee: Steven Colbert begins work on a rival weight-loss book.
John Edwards: Haircut jokes permanently replace the “Al Gore invented the internet” jokes.
John McCain: The Air Force quietly asks Boeing to bid on a new plane, Straight Talk One.
Hillary Clinton: The Democrats have their first nominee who’s worn dresses in public. Mothers everywhere tear up their kids’ kindergarten essays about wanting to be President, just in case.
Mitt Romney: Republican opponents who had made “…and two wives in every kitchen” jokes shake Romney’s hand and pretend they never said such a thing.
Dennis Kucinich: The domain squatters who own ismyfirstladyhotornot.com get a lot of money.
Rudy Giuliani: The Republicans have their first nominee who’s worn dresses in public.
Ron Paul: William Jennings Bryan claws his way out of his grave to put his “Cross of Gold” speech on YouTube.
Barack Obama: Alan Keyes’s head explodes.

Clearly, I am to hard-hitting investigative journalism what the White Star Line is to travel accommodations.

Despite our best efforts, Liza has learned to crawl.

Oh, we did all the things concerned and lazy parents do to keep their kid in one place. We dressed her in long pants and full-length onesies that made her knees slip on the wood floor. We held her. We showed her the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration scare video “Blood Runs Red on the Carpetway”. Nothing worked.

This marks the change from “Liza’s playing in the kitchen” to “I swear, she was right here a second ago.” Her danger zone has gone mobile.

The danger zone, for you non-parents, is the invisible area around a kid marking their reach. You have to keep dangerous things, like knives, bare wires that spark, and more than three ounces of any given liquid; and things she might eat or destroy, like books, pens, or my toes, out of the zone or else. Babies explore the world by pushing, shoving, eating, and generally destroying everything they can reach with their T. rex-like arms.

Last night Misty and I sat on the floor with Liza. I whistled at her and patted the floor. She raised up on her hands, butt in the air, and stomped towards me like a tiny bulldog with ague. She may be shaky, but she’s mobile.

God help us all.

A few months ago Stephen started playing Lego Star Wars with Eli. Then I started playing too. So now in the evenings, after dinner, we have a round of Star Wars. We played through the second game and have now digressed back to the original.

Because of our evenings at Dexter’s Diner, Eli had developed a love for all things Star Wars. He wants to play “shooters” all the time which consists of him making a gun out of any available parts in his room and running around with a Jengo Fett “buuuuppppp-buup” sound. He talks about Darth Vader like he might turn up for dinner one night. And his latest obsession is the high-jumping General Grievous. Say, what is it with bad guys, anyway?

Not too long ago I found Star Wars Kids. I hadn’t shown it to Eli yet because I haven’t had time to go through the site and figure out if it is age appropriate or not and to see if he can play the games, if it is. But in the meantime LanaBob! send us the link to the R2D2 translator. When I opened the link this morning and typed in Eli’s name, he came bounding into the office as soon as he heard it. If his ears could have been standing straight up they would have been.

“What’s that?”

“It’s R2D2. He’s calling you!”

“Why is he calling me?”

“I typed your name here and then hit this button and he called your name.”

“Mom, make him say, ‘I really, really, really, really, really want Darth Vader for Christmas’.”

“How about ‘Darth Vader is cool.’ because the other is too long.”

“Ok. Now make him say…”

It went on like this for about 20 minutes. I have to admit hearing R2’s beeps and whees is pretty entertaining. I’m not sure what that says about me as a mom. I mean other than I’m just as hooked.

Neither photo conveys her disgust over the taste of food/drink that is not mom’s milk.

We put up our Christmas tree last weekend. I’ll admit I’m pretty bahumbug about the process. It seems ridiculous to drag all that stuff out for less than a month. The house is a wreck the day of. There’s boxes everywhere. Eli is in trouble constantly because he can’t remember that all this stuff is breakable and he wants to touch every single piece that emerges from the boxes. Everybody gets hungry because we put off lunch to try and get it all done. Stuff gets broken. The new tree sheds so we have to run the vacuum. It’s just generally not a fun day.

But then it’s all done. Every morning when I get up I see my small army of snowmen on top of the piano and am delighted by them. The Christmas dishes sit on the counter so we have a little seasonal cheer at every meal. Eli demands the Christmas tree be turned on as soon as he wakes up every morning so he can see Darth Vader in the Tie Fighter light up. He has finally twigged to the whole Christmas stocking thing and he’s fascinated by what might be in them. Eli is patient, like his dad. Instead of demanding constantly to see what’s in them, he only asks about twice a day. He’s also this year, for the first time, started listing the things that Santa might bring him (a trampoline and an air gun are the current items he’s listing, good thing they’re covered!).

So this week I’ve been trying to remember what made my childhood Christmases special. We didn’t have much religious celebration when I was little so my memories are all of traditions that my mom either brought from her childhood or created for me. She played Christmas songs on the very piano where my snowmen sit now. I remember the Christmas when I was eight or nine very specifically because I wanted a Bible of my own and a Barbie. It’s hard to recall which I was more excited about. I had a whole batch of Christmas stories that we only read after Thanksgiving and before New Year’s. One is a story cut from a magazine that my mom has preserved over the years. Eli and I are going to sit down and read it this year.

And I remember the cookies.

My mom cooked when I was little but at Thanksgiving and Christmas she really pulled out all the stops. I thought the store only sold cream cheese during the holidays because that’s the only time she made this really yummy pumpkin cake roll with cream cheese in the middle. And then there were the cookies. She didn’t just make boring old chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal raisin cookies. There were at least 12 kinds of multi-step cookies that she would spend an entire weekend working on. Our dining room table would be covered with cookies at the end. There were sugar cookies made with the cookie shooter, baked and then jam in the middle of them. Chocolate covered things that defy description. Cookies cut out with cookie cutters and then iced to look like art.

I know it couldn’t possibly have been as elaborate as I remember. Thinking back on it, it seems like excess to match a scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In my memory it is that fantastical.

So that’s the magic of Christmases past for me. And even though I am bahumbug the day we are getting Christmas out of the attic, I hope that we are creating some fantastical memories for Eli and Liza as well. Maybe I’ll see if my mom still has that cookie shooter.

I wrote this longish post on the various illnesses my children has suffered over the past three weeks and my worries and fears regarding them but now they are mostly well and I am feeling less out of control so I’ll just let you in on this bit of Eli wisdom instead:

“Grumpy is what moms do best!”

He proclaimed this to me while I was wrestling Liza on the changing table in the doctor’s office bathroom and after I had reminded him for the 47th time to not touch every available bathroom surface with his fingers, face and/or tongue and that his behavior was making me grumpy.