Random Domesticity

I don't have any real theme for today's post; I just have a series of random thoughts.

Is it totally pathetic that I am ridiculously excited to play hookey from mommy-hood today? I am going with a couple of my mommy friends to lunch and a matinee movie SANS kids! Woo-hoo! Obviously, I love my daughter, but she's in a particularly clingy phase these days. Even now as I type, she's here yelling, "Up-oo, Mamma. Up-oo!". In other words, "Mom, I want to sit in your lap". So, I am typing with a 30lb 20-month old in my lap. Sooo, it will be kinda nice to have a couple of hours in which I have my lap to myself.

Warning: I am about to enter the gushing Mamma zone for a minute here. If you're sickened by mothers' tales of their offsprings' incredibly cute antics, this is not the paragraph for you. Please feel free to skip ahead. Okay, anyway I have to say that at each stage of S's development, I think that she's at the cutest one yet. Right now her communication skills are really starting to blossom -- she's been putting together rudimentary sentences and even using pronouns (apparently a concept that is fairly sophisticated for children first learning language skills). At the playground, she'll stand at the top of the slide and yell at the top of her lungs, "Mamma, I big girl!". Too cute. However, she doesn't quite get all of the rules of pronoun usage. For instance, she loves it when I hide and then jump out yelling, "Boo!". Her response every time is, "I scared me!". Every day brings a new language gaffe that is so adorable -- I have to remember to write them down so that I don't forget them when she's older and her language skills are full of different kinds of interesting nuances (such as, "Mom, why can't I take the car?! That's bull@$*&!").

I pride myself on being a pretty good cook -- I love to eat which is generally half the battle, I believe. Well, my best friend T hails from New Orleans and cooks a mean red beans and rice. Last night I used her recipe and attempted my own red beans and rice. Let's just say that it wasn't my finest showing in the kitchen. Where hers was creamy, mine was pasty. Where hers had a beautiful rich dark red color, mine was more of a sickening brown. Mine looked like refried beans -- which are tasty, but there is a reason that you generally hide them in a tortilla. They just don't look that appetizing. R insisted that it was very tasty (smart man), but I just wasn't very happy about it. I think that next time I will use some slightly different ingredients and make sure to add more water while it simmers. I think that tonight I'll try to redeem myself with one of my old stand-by recipes.

Oh and my final thought for now: is Britney Spears really pregnant again?!? Does anyone else think that's a bad idea on so many levels?