Requiescat in pace

Terri Schindler-Schiavo died this morning, after surviving almost 2 weeks without food or water. What does this say about our country, that we can legally starve an innocent woman to death? Throughout all this I couldn't help but think of St. Maximillian Kolbe who died the same way at the hands of the Nazis. I'm not normally given to pessimism, but this does not bode well for our country.

Terri's Fight
The Empire Journal
especially this page
Beautiful statement by the Schindlers

MYSTERY SOLVED!!

I FINALLY figured out Miriam's mystery quote from the Sound of Music.
Original version: "I want choo be like a diet."
More recent version: "My haw wannoo be like-a bode dat fie fum a lake a da twees."
Which of course when translated from Miriamese to English becomes: "My heart wants to beat like the wings of the bird that flies from the lake to the trees..." etc. which is from the movie's title song. I caught her singing the updated version, along with a couple other things about twips and falls and learning how to pway and that's when I figured it out. Mystery solved!

Some more quotable quotes from Miriam:

Okay, I'm sure you're all sick of Sound of Music quotes, but this one is just too cute. You all remember the part where Rolf and Liesl send telegrams to each other? Good. Well, Miriam has her own version of that scene:
[pointing her finger at one of us and looking VERY stern]: Liesel, stop! [now hugging us and saying happily]: Don't stop! Your Liesl.
[above repeated several times]

Once as I was changing Katie's diaper, I was explaining to Miriam that when she was a little baby, I changed HER diapers. Then Miriam said, "Yeah. And when you a li'l baby, I da Mommy, and I change YOU diapos!"

Once when I was nursing Katie, she got a drop down the wrong pipe, and flung her head back, coughing and spluttering. Miriam asked me, "Mommy, you got SPICEY moke?" I just about fell over. Where does she get this stuff??

Miriam has a couple all-purpose retorts that are designed to end effectively all attempt at further discussion, argument, or teasing. The first is:
"Boo!"
The second is:
"Poooooooooooooooke!" (while pretending to poke us from a distance)
An example:
Mrs, Pickles: Miriam, you need to keep your cup away from the edge of the table so it won't spill. Can you move it for me, please?
Miriam [whose eyes have been gradually looking more mischievous and her lips curling into a smile]: Boo, Mommy, Boo!
or:
[Miriam doing her usual dinner craziness thing]
Mr. Pickles: Miriam, you're nuts. Can you say "nuts"?
Miriam: Pooooooooooooooooooke!!
Mr. Pickles: Aaaaah, you poked me!
Miriam [laughing hysterically]: Ha ha ha! I poked you, Daddy! arrrrgle [trying to fit entire hand in mouth]

I'm sure she gets it all from her father's side of the family.


And a P.S. about Catherine:

Has anyone else noticed how gross and cute babies can be, at the same time? They really can be disgusting. Yesterday Katie got a bath in the middle of the day because she had a mother of all diaper explosions that must have emptied her entire intestinal tract. And the bodily noises she can make! Dave Barry spoke the truth when he stated that little tiny babies make noises that cannot be explained by the known laws of physics -- the kinds of bodily blasts that you would think could be produced only by a 350-pound man who had just won a burrito-eating contest. And I'm always embarrassed to burp her in church. I feel like it would be indecent.
The great mystery to me is that in all of this very earthy humanness, they're adorable -- and often because of it. It's just so innocent. Katie's beatific smile of satisfaction after she's performed a particularly resonating belch is priceless.

Miriamisms

Who needs TV when you have a preschooler in the house?

singing to CL's baby mobile: "You are sixteen, bear, going on eighteen... you are sixteen, ephant, going on eighteen... you are sixteen, horsie, going on eighteen..." etc. etc. (continuing with kittie, doggie, and the last animal I can't remember)

At dinner last night, patting Daddy's hand with her fork and singing: "Mary had a little lamb fork, little lamb fork, little lamb fork, Mary had a little lamb fork, it's fleece a-white a-snow fork." [at this point we BUSTED out laughing and Miriam continued]: "Mary had a little lamb Daddy, little lamb Daddy, little lamb Daddy..." etc., then patting her dinner with her fork and singing, "Mary had a little lamb rice, little lamb rice, little lamb rice, Mary had a little lamb rice it's fleece a-white a-snow rice."

Once when I was changing Katie's diaper, I noticed Miriam marching around and around on our bed (our down comforter is fun to march on because it makes that fun poof-crunch noise) singing her version of "Supercalifragilisticexpialadocious" over and over:
Supercalifwadge-i-o-a
Even though the sound-a someting atocious
If you say it loud nuf... aways a-pecocious
Supercalifwadge-i-o-a! Ba-la-bum ba-la-bum de-i...

Miriam's Sesame Street Clubhouse is the source of much problem solving and conflict resolution. The other day we were downstairs, and I was reading on the couch while Miriam was prattling away. Finally I pricked up my ears and heard:
"No! You being naughty! You need a time out!" [slams one of ther little people in the clubhouse. waits a few seconds.]
[peeks inside] "Are you going to be a good boy? Okay, you may come out."
[little fireman climbs up to the roof and approaches a girl sitting in the bird's nest] "May I have a turn?" "Yes you may have a turn!" [girl gets out, fireman gets in, & gets to enjoy a few spins]
Miriam, noticing me watching her: "The boys taking turns!"
me: "Very good!"

As I write this there are all kinds of antics going on behind me. Just now I heard, "May I come in please?" "Yes, you may." "Hello, man, are you naughty?" [kissing noises] "Oh, that's vey nice."
(This sounds hilarious taken out of the context of punishment & reconciliation.) :)

Once as we were cleaning up, I chucked a couple little people into their box, but Miriam cried out, "No! Dey have to go to sleep!" I looked in the clubhouse and saw the floor covered with "boys" lying everywhere.

And in the world of Catherine...
She has just discovered the wonderful, thrilling world of... blowing raspberries! She's started to do a little baby version of "motorboating" and is taking every opportunity to practice it, most notably when she's mildly upset, or excited about getting to eat (makes it a little difficult to get her latched on...). I wish I knew how to post sound files -- it's SOOOO cute. (of course, everything she does is cute, but this is new and therefore cuter)

Qoute(s) of the Week(s)

Mrs. Pickles had--what I would deem--to very good quotes during the past couple weeks. Here's her quote from last week.

"Adelbrained mothers should not be forced to pronounce the names of baby
products with common consonants."

"Adelbrained", indeed! What adelbrained individual speaks with such vocabulary? Answer: One who does a lot of crossword puzzles. That statement combined with those particular words struck me as very ironic.

Here's a much better quote for those of you who don't possess my appreciation for subtle irony. To understand it more fully, you'll have to first look at the following post regarding Mrs. Pickles snow kitty.

I just love this time of night after it snows! The snow is so
beauti--ohhhh, my kitty's head fell off!

Very humorous. Me and my alter ego were both laughing out loud.

Modern Day Monopoly

Mrs. Pickles and I recently picked up a copy of the boardgame Monopoly. We decided that it was important for our children to learn how to crush and dominate their foes, and boardgames are a necessary first step.

During a recent game (in which I was crished and humiliated by my wife), we couldn't help but notice the old-time feel of the game. All of the cards had pictures that illicited images of the 1930s and 1940s. We thought that the game could use a little updating, so we decided that to offer a few suggestions to the people at Milton-Bradley on some new Community Chest and Chance cards.

• Tenant left cigarette butt in trashcan. All houses and hotels burn down in one set of property.
• Rat infestation, slum lord pays exterminator fee of $200 (this one could be set aside for Baltic Avenue)
• Crack bust in hotel, pay lawyer fees.
• Bribe local elected offical to change zoning laws. Pay $500.
• Won clas action lawsuit. Collect $.03. If you were a lawyer on the case then collect $1,000,000.
• Trip over sidewalk. Sue all other players and collect $200 from each.
• Hillary Clinton elected president. Redistribute all wealth evenly.
• Clinton elected for a second term. All of your property is confiscated for the sake of the common good.

More modern cards may be added as our collective brains think up more of those crazed ideas that come to us in the wee hours of the night.

in other news...

Well, aside from sickness we've also had lots of snow this weekend. A teacher friend of mine called me yesterday to see if we could play, b/c she'd had 3 snow days and was starting to get a little stir crazy.

On Friday Miriam & I went to play in the snow, and we had fun making some snow sculptures. That is, I had fun making them while Miriam threw snow against the back fence and laughed when it stuck.

This is my snow girl.

snow girl

Sadly, when the sun reached her, she started melting and all her hair fell out.

I'm very proud of this one:

snow kitty

Those who know me well know that I couldn't just make a simple snowman. :)
The snow has really been gorgeous lately (well, not in our backyard anymore). On Friday it was like driving through an Ansel Adams picture. I'd post more snowy pictures, but that would require going upstairs to get the memory card and that is just WAY too much work for someone up past her bedtime.


Here is a candid shot of Miriam I got today -- completely unposed, I might add.

alumna

A future Steubie alumna in the making! :)

And finally, a cute shot of our girls. I hope they're this good friends when they're teenagers. (I'm not holding my breath.)

sisters

"I don't WANT a cookie!"

?!?
You KNOW your child is sick when she tells you that! Poor kid -- Miriam is recovering from a nasty ear infection. Thank God this is only the second she's had in her life. I don't know what Moms do whose kids have them regularly! She's been miserable all weekend b/c it hurt her to open her mouth. Eating was out of the question. She's basically been living on Pedialyte pops and banana smoothies. I just want to take a moment and get down on my knees and thank that blessed person who discovered penicillin. (my medical history's a little hazy Cassius... was that Pasteur? or Pascal? or some other French P dude? Jean-Claude, perhaps? or Philippe? -that was for you, Suebee) :) I think it's starting to kick in -- this afternoon she ate two bowls each of applesauce, raspberry yogurt, and refried beans & cheese, followed by a bowl of Godiva Chocolate Raspberry Truffle ice cream (to make up for not being able to share in the cookies and muffins Mommy and Daddy were eating in front of her all weekend. but WHAT was Daddy thinking when he bought it during Lent? b/c of course Mommy's going to "help" Miriam eat it). :) And she wasn't asking for "yummy medicine kabuzz my ear's still hurting" every 20 minutes. ("Yummy medicine" is cherry-corn-syrup-flavored Tylenol, as opposed to "pink medicine" which even though it's bubble-gum-corn-syrup-flavored Amoxicillin is apparently still yucky. I LOVED the stuff when I was a kid. But the faces she makes when she's taking it are hiLARious. We often have to sing "Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down" from Mary Poppins, just to get her to open her mouth.)

So, it's been a fun fun fun weekend in the Pickles household!

Whit maun A dae for tae tak lak yins in Norlin Airlan?

Well, for starters, check this out. (It'll learn ye how tae vote there tae.) :)
(Thanks to Andrew Stuttaford from The Corner.)

For an Ulster-Scots dictionary, and more information than you could possibly ever want to know about this fun dialect-made-language, visit Tha Boord o Ulster-Scotch.

If only my Alma Mater had a linguistics program! I love this kind of stuff. Mr. Pickles found it amusing how interested (one might say obsessed) I was in looking up the correct words for this post.

Dave Barry on Babies

When Miriam was a tiny tyke her G.A.M.E. sent to us some great Dave Barry quotes on parenting. We recently rediscovered them and found these to be so relevant now:

I just want to take a moment here to get down on my knees and thank whoever invented our current biological system, under which the woman's job is to have the baby somehow go from the inside of her body to the outside of her body, in clear violation of every known law of physics, and the man's job is to stand around looking supportive and periodically, no matter what is actually happening to the woman, say, in an upbeat and perky voice, "You're doing great!"

When a woman gets to approximately her fifteenth year of labor, she begins making noises that you rarely hear outside of nature documentaries, and her husband edges back a little bit in case she gets her hands on a scalpel. But then it happens, the Blessed Event, the timeless miracle that makes the whole thing worthwhile: The woman has a baby via a process that makes what happened in Alien look like an episode of Teletubbies.
[That reminds me: Katie's birth story coming soon... -Mrs. P]

Having a baby causes your IQ to drop, as we see from these quotes:
Albert Einstein shortly after the birth of his son: "To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms--this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness."
Albert Einstein shortly after the birth of his son: "Daddy's gonna EAT THESE WIDDLE TOES!"

Babies do not believe in sleeping at night. When my daughter, Sophie, was two months old, she felt that the nighttime hours were best used for making loud, inexplicable, Exorcist-style noises. At 3:30 AM, her bassinet would suddenly start shaking like an unbalanced washing machine and erupt with a wide range of squeaks, gurgles, chirps, snorts, snuffles, grunts, and so on. It did not sound like there was a lone baby in there. It sounded like the entire Barnyard of the Demons. (Which would be an excellent name for a band.)

When my daughter Sophie was a brand-new human being, she naturally explored the mystery and magic of the world around her, by which I mean she was always trying to get her hands completely into her mouth. This was her primary goal in life. Her arms and legs constantly waved around in a random manner, and every now and then, whan a hand happened to land on her mouth, she became excited and started sucking on it like crazy. But then, without warning, the arm would yank the hand away, which made Sophie VERY angry. Whoever was operating her arms was going to get a piece of her mind, as soon as she figured out how to talk.

Katie also loves to give high-fives to the baby-in-the-mirror while we're changing her diaper, but that mean uncomplying baby-in-the-mirror keeps taking her hand away and won't play. Katie has had several heated arguments with her reflection about this.

John Paul the Evangelizer

This is just too awesome. (note: you must be very familiar with Homestarrunner and Trogdor to appreciate this)

John Paul the Evangelizer