My baby does the hanky panky...

My son has recently discovered that, despite the fact that he has not yet mastered crawling, he can manuever by rolling and spinning on our hardwood floor. This, while a great source of motherly pride at his obvious level of genius, is also a great source of worry and annoyance. It used to be that I could put him down on his blanket on the floor while he kicked and bubbled, and I made breakfast, or emptied the dishwasher. Now, however, if I were to do that, I would find him on the verge of manuevering himself under the couch. Even though I watch him like a hawk, the speed at which he can get into things and wriggle his way around is truly terrifying. I took a bite of my sandwich at lunch the other day, and in the time that it took me to finish it, he had managed to grab one of my books off the coffee table shelf, and rip off a piece of the cover, which he then tried to shove in his mouth as I reached over to take it from him. For someone who is not quite six months old, he definitely has a very strong sense of what he should not be doing. I love my son, strongly, desperately, in the constant knowledge that I do not deserve something so beautiful and good; in the constant fear that I will not be able to keep him safe forever. And his adventuresome disposition from such an early age seems to confirm my every fear - he will find the highest branches, the steepest hills, the deepest waters, and I will watch, praying and biting my nails, ready to be his safety net if he needs me, and knowing that he probably won't.

Cleaning Is Time for Reflection...or So I've Heard

The only type of reflection I do when cleaning/organizing my house is, "How in the HECK did that get there? Is that a clothing tag???" Seriously, It is the #1 thing that I find on my floor, clothing tags. I believe that they hop out of the trash can in which they were deposited so that they can scamper around the floor, sticking to feet, causing slips, following me into bed, onto the couch, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. The other thing that I find everywhere is dryer sheets. I think that they insinuate themselves into the clothes so that they can escape from the dryer, and then its just one big party to them. I'll be walking around in public, and my husband will lean over, lovingly, and pluck one from my back, where it has been sticking since I left the house two hours before. I almost feel as though I should have him give me a pat-down before we leave the house, "Ok, no dryer sheets. Wait...is that a clothes tag?"

Is nothing sacred???

I finally came back to my blog, after months and months of abandonment, to find that one of my posts had a comment. I was so excited to think that someone had thought enough of my ramblings to post a comment, so imagine my disappointment to find that some IDIOT had actually spammed my blog!!! Disappointment quickly gave way to a serious case of pissed-offedness when I looked over the spam: a page and a half of fake-stock related crap. I don't know about everyone else, but some things should be above such blatant abuse...although, I suppose I should be thankful that it wasn't an advertisement offering to make my *ahem* "man part" bigger. And, on the subject of spam, WHY IN THE HELL WON'T THEY LEAVE ME ALONE???? I am not a man. I am not interested in making ANYTHING bigger. I don't want to see barely legals in various contorted/improbable positions. I don't want a free Ipod. I don't want inside stock trading tips. And, I especially don't want to be told that I should lose weight. What I want is to get and read e-mails from people I actually care about, without having to deal with all of the junk. I know that there are spam-blockers, and bulk mailboxes available, and I use them both, but they don't catch everything, and the spammers are getting more clever about getting their junk through. My question is this: do these people actually make enough money off the replies to justify the thousands of people they annoy/harass with spam? My second question is: who is stupid enough to reply to spam? Do they believe the too-good-to-be-true promises of the spammers? And, really, do people honestly believe that these siren songs come without a price? Even if we don't pay the price in cash, we pay with our privacy. We pay in that moment of cringing when we open our inbox, and we pay with our insecurities as we wonder even as we delete the offer, "Can I really lose 20 pounds in a week?"