It's nearly midnight...and I'm watching trendy vampire trash

It's remarkably enjoyable, for being so brainless. So...predictable.

I don't think it's the movie that so good...it's the company. This tall, reed like woman-child, sitting, captivated next to me, alternating between chattering constantly and dead silence, mouth open at the screen, still in awe of her early Christmas gift.

Somehow, she manages to be so old and so young at the same time. Still here with me, but so far away...pushing every day just to be a little bit farther, and then, without warning, she lands in my lap like a child of three.

I'm slightly ambivalent about the Twilight series, but I will watch every movie, read every book, learn every make up trick in an effort to extend her childhood just one more hour, to  have one more thing to discuss with her...or should I say listen to her discuss. Remarkably, she has more to say than I do.

It's even more remarkable that she's eleven. Eleven. I have an eleven year old child.

Funny, I don't feel much older than that most days. Life is very strange.

Why children aren't born full sized...or able to speak.

God knew.

If our children came out of us semi-full sized, with fully functional hands, feet and mouth, Eve would have killed off the human race right after she produced Cain.

If she didn't actually resort to murder...there would have been but one child. One child capable of destroying the Garden of Eden in one fell swoop, all while mouthing off and knowing better than the first mom.

Certainly NO ONE would consciously reproduce again and again, having met the stage that comes between toddler and teen angst. I'm also fairly certain that it requires a certain degree of naivete to reproduce a third time having already seen what preschool looks like.

 And yet, here I sit. Several children crawling all over me...looking forward to the year when ALL THREE of them know better than I do, and can give me the basic plot of a forty minute movie in no less than an hour and a half. That can bring up both constipation and diarrhea in the same sentence, and at the dinner table, all while topping it off with a general discussion of eating disorders. Nothing like the talk of bulimia to stimulate your appetite...
 
Or maybe I should be thanking my child for thoughtfully ruining my appetite after spending no less than ten minutes arguing about what I was cooking for dinner.

 I think I know what's in the saute pan. Evidently she knows better. This conversation has a predictable end...I get irritated and she gets upset.

*BIG DEEP SIGH.

She's on her way out the door. Tall, well dressed, fashionable....completely and totally outspoken...so far from the baby who used to sit and stare me down. I will miss her the moment she walks out the door, but this minute...and the fiftieth diarrhea joke...I'm ready to pull my hair out.
 

Idiot parenting lesson number 1-never leave the chocolate unattended.

I made chocolate chip muffins this morning.

Really good whole grain muffins, with dark chocolate chips dotted all the way through.  This is really the easiest recipe in the history of the world, and I simply sub out whole grain flour for white and toss in some flax seed, so it's not entirely guilt ridden.


There was a HUGE plate leftover for tomorrow's breakfast, right according to plan, sitting on the kitchen table.

Did you see the past tense there? Because right now, my middle child is doing laps around the living room, having bootlegged several muffins at a time into the downstairs bathroom and crouched behind the closed door, eating her bounty while using the step stool/training potty as a table. She's on a sugar coated caffeine high that may not end till three or four in the morning.

She must have eaten four whole muffins, and the rest have been clearly claimed with a series of well placed toddler-sized bite marks.

 *deep sigh*

 I'm not sure who's more scared right now, me, or the dog she's riding like a pony.