the Count from Sesame Street:

ONE!

ONE load of laundry done.

Ahhh-HA-HA-Haaaaaaaa!

TWO!

TWO servings of coffee ice cream.

AHhh-HA-HA-Haaaaaaa!

More daily excitement not coming your way later today, perhaps.

1. “Oh my GOODNESS, that really is quite scary, isn’t it?”

Said by the veddy handsome young posh Brit boy (so, please take a moment to re-read the line in the voice of a veddy handsome young posh Brit boy, willya?) who carried our things to our room at The Inn at Harbour Town in Sea Pines. The inn is staffed almost entirely by young gorgeous foreigners who are in internship programs from colleges and unis around the world. They’re getting experience on the job while pursuing degrees in hotel management.

What he was talking about: why, Polly, of course! We walked into our handsome posh hotel room and McPantses promptly plunked Polly (who is a bit large for McP to haul comfortably just yet) into a desk chair. Handsome Brit boy noticed Polly and jumped and said, “Oh, that scared me, I thought you had another one with you that I hadn’t noticed.” (Can you imagine sharing a hotel room with two infants? I cannot.) Then he laughed and said the above as he picked Polly up and studied her.

She is a little scarily lifelike.

2. “I am so thirsty I could drink my own urine.”

Said by me on the incredibly long ride home yesterday. Well, I was really thirsty.

3. “My daddy wears diapers.”

Said by McPantses to her new friend, Miss K, on Friday night, as Miss K’s mother, the lovely woman who food blogged for me when Third was born, and I struggled our way into a restaurant in the rain at Hilton Head (rained Fri p.m. and lightly on Tuesday morning as we were leaving–perfect weather).

Why she said it: because The Husband is a total nincompoop who joked with McP on the drive there that he wears diapers. What ensued was a conversation involving screams of laughter and much smack talk from McPantses, who gleefully taunted her father about his diaper wearing and insisted that she would change his diaper (and at this point, the convo got a little too weird for even me, so I tried to put a stop to it). I think the diaper joke was probably one of the stupidest things The Husband has ever said. Ever. He will never live it down. Miss K answered, “Well, my daddy wears underwear.” Smart girl.*

4. “There has to be a dead body in that trailer.”

Also said by me on our long drive home yesterday. We passed a dilapidated old single-wide with the windows blown out. All you could see from the road was the trailer’s creepy dark recesses and if I was in the habit of stashing dead bodies,** I’d think that a prime spot for the deed.

* Miss K was a delightful companion for McPantses and we really missed all of our friends who came to play with us in Hilton Head after they were gone. Miss K’s mother was a morsel of hilarious fun and we had much to talk about, what with our love of food and general snarkiness…

** I prefer to eat my kills.

Oh, let me publicly thank Mother K (heh heh) for introducing OCD Junior (aka McPantses) to the art of twisting straw wrappers. Thanks a LOT, woman. McP has a new obsession that reduces her to tears when she is forced to throw the straw wrapper away, etc. McP and Miss K have a bit of the OCD Junior in common and I love that in a kid.

Next entry, I will tell all about the pagan woman I picked up at dinner Monday night. I think The Husband is expecting the woman to come spirit McPantses away into the Hilton Head world of neverending Shack Attack fried dinners, playground time and lighthouse exploring. (We visited the lighthouse every. single. day. The women manning the desk eventually stopped charging us after we went twice in one day.)

Nothing says brave (or “braze,” as McPantses would say) like a seven hour road trip!

If you need me in the next several days, you can find me lounging about in South Carolina at a faboo resort, where I plan on being wined and dined and rested for days on end. I plan to shop and have manicures and spend the majority of the days in a state of semi-drunken relaxation.

Oh, wait a minute.

I’m taking the kidlets.

(I want to take the kidlets.)

So, I will be the one who looks a little sleepy. I’ll have the milk stains on my shirt and you’ll know me by the odd mix of white hair hilighting sorta dishwater blonde hair in serious need of new hilites. I have scrotty orange toenail polish (need to fix that tomorrow, so it might be Milano Tomato by the time I hit Hilton Head).

I can’t wait.

We are packing a wee bit much, but Third’s only getting the bouncy seat for play. As my mother said earlier tonight, I am physically incapable of leaving the boychild’s favorite playthings behind. Oh, the joy of being a human pacifier (or, as McP says, “Passie-fier.”).

The Husband has golf booked Sat, Sun and Mon.

I have friends booked Fri and Sat. I cannot wait!

See you next week!

you know you’re in for a treat.

Tonight’s bedtime prayers:

Dear God, thank you for the heavens in general, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, AMEN.

(Guess she’s learning the pledge of allegiance at school, hunh?)

I’m pretty sure, anyway, that’s what’ll happen next.

Please explain this to me: I ventured outside to grab the mail a little while ago (mail lady Karen brings our mail at around 9:30 a.m., which is good for getting and bad for sending) and a huge bumblebee buzzed all around me and eventually lit on our front door.

The bee went to work on a wedge of wood between the widow panes of the door and I sort of shooed him away when I could see that he’d managed to gnaw (?) at the wood to get below the black paint. There is a bumblebee-sized gnawed place of BARE WOOD that is about 1/2 an inch deep.

WHAT IN THE BLOODY SAMHILL?

It looks awful and I have loved our front door since we had it painted shiny black. It has one of those useless bright brass kickplates at the bottom, too.

But the bee went and fucked it all up.

I sprayed the bee wedge in the door with an old can of wasp/hornet killah that I found and left a fat foamy poof there. Surely that’ll do it for a little while, but I am bound and determined that this fat bastard vandal bee MUST DIE.

THE BEE MUST DIE.

And then someone must come fix my front door. I should be able to get the handydude here by 2007.

***

On another note, the Husband reminded me to add to my list of things at which I am bad:

19. Until a year or so ago, I was particularly bad at admitting I am bad at some things.

So.

There you go.

Damn bee.

What if he is building a nest and I walk out of my front door one day to find a teeming mess of bees and some fat scary nest hanging off my front door? What if he chainsaws right THROUGH the front door and comes after us?

If I think about it enough, this will freak me right the heck out, so I am going to go make some hot tea and snuggle the boy on the couch while supervising McPantses’ alphabet practice (her choice).

Dear Lord.

Now I am terrified.

Thank you, Lisa, for telling me about carpenter bees. UCK.

p.s., I cannot believe the damn thing came back.

THIS MEANS WAR, DAMN PUNKASS BEE!

Why did it burrow into the beehole on the door after I sprayed both bee and door with wasp/hornet foamy stuff? WHY? The hair on my arms is standing up and not because it’s only 67 degrees in my house, either.

Dover makes the coolest coloring books ever.

They’re stained glass coloring books, which means that the images are printed on what looks like vellum or just plain ole clear/transparent paper.

(pardon me, but how the heck do people who have long fingernails all the time stand to type? My nails sound like my parents’ dog’s toenails click-click-clickety-clacking all over their floors and it’s making me crazy)

There are small Dover books at any Cracker Barrel (shutupSHUTUP) for $1 or $1.50 and they’re full of stickers more often than not, which delights any road-tripping little kid, right?

Their regular coloring books are swell, too. Buy some.

at so very many things.

Really.

Another blogger, the veddy funny Julia, discussed things at which she is bad today in her post about an unfortunate driving incident and it’s making me think about the myriad of things at which I am absolutely terrible.

Let’s count, shall we? I’m thinking there are at least 101 things that’ll spring instantly to mind.

1. Admitting I was napping. I always lie about it–no, no, I wasn’t asleep. You didn’t wake me up.

2. Housekeeping. Good at ironing and polishing silver; terrible housekeeper.

3. Letting things go. Grudge-holder extraordinaire. Please say “extraordinaire” to yourself right now in Maria Shriver’s voice. She said it on Larry King the other night and I have been repeating it in her voice over and over.**

4. Letting unfunny things go that seem funny to me and no one else. See above.

5. Remembering to do certain things. I cannot forget an appointment. I cannot remember to put the drops in Maggie T’s very itchy ears. Cannot. Ever. I even leave the damn drops out on the counter and I still have trouble remembering.

6. Being the bigger person. Never gonna happen. Neener neener neener. This is made extremely easy by the fact that I am married to the bigger person. One of us has to be, right?

7. Braising. Terrible at it. Could use some lessons.

8. While we’re in the kitchen: knife work. Ditto on the lessons. I still have a scar on my finger where I lopped off a chunk of skin two Thanksgivings ago cutting up taters with the massive serrated bread knife. There was blood on the ceiling. It was chock fulla carnage, that night.

9. Car care. I hate routine automotive maintenance. I need a daddy for that stuff. I even hate looking at the little oil change sticker on the windshield. And rotate and balance? Let’s not even go there, baby.

10. Balancing the checkbook. Thank you, online banking.

11. Enjoying playgrounds. I cannot help it. I hate them.

12. Breastfeeding deep in the night. It’s so hard to stay awake enough to get a good feed into the boychild. When he sleeps for longer stretches, it’ll be easier to accomplish this, but for now, we’re both still dozing off drunkenly, which isn’t good for either of us in the long run.*

13. Dusting. It’s a branch of housekeeping that I particularly loathe.

14. Folding clothes and emptying the dishwasher. These aren’t so much housekeeping as they are ingredients necessary for daily life. They’re childhood chores that grate on my nerves. The Husband handles one with aplomb (can one empty the dishwasher with aplomb? he does it more like a poltergeist–he opens all cabinets and drawers until the job’s done and I have to avoid the kitchen to keep from shutting everything in some desperate OCD-induced panic).

15. Suffering real-life fools. It’s not that I’m so incredibly bright (duh), but that it’s really hard for me to sit back and let people say extremely stupid things in polite situations (talking politics at social gatherings, for example) and keep my mouth shut, even tho I know I should. The Husband gets nervous when these things happen, so I try to stay quiet, or to at least not curse. Much.

Okay, I’m now sure that the list numbers in the thousands, but I’m worn out and my self-esteem can only take so much.

Ooh, one more:

16. Typing with long fingernails. The year or more of prenatal vitamins has given me freaky strong nails and right now they’re oddly long (for me, anyway) and it’s hard to type. Third has a clogged tear duct (right eye, for those of you keeping score at home) and it’s hard to squish out the goop with the Cruella DeVille nails, so they’re going to have to go pretty soon, but I’m torn between grossing myself out with the nails and loving them because they’re so odd and new to me. I prefer short nails with clear or light pink polish.

*I’m reading The Dante Club, but it’s hard to pick it up in the middle of the night. I try to keep myself awake with good books during nursing spells–I read Glamorama while nursing McPantses (nothing like a little surprise RU486-induced abortion sprung on a pregnant gal by someone else to keep you awake after you’ve just had a baby). Let’s hope, for my sake and Third’s, that I can get somewhere tonight.

**17. Remembering, apparently. She said “extraordinary.” Dammit.

Meet Miss Libby and Maggie T (nee Margaret Thatcher), the two gawgeous golden retrievers who share our house with one mean cat (Zelda).

Note to future visitors to my house: as the bed in the guest bedroom is the one piece of furniture the dogs haven’t been trained to leave alone, be sure to give me advance notice so that I can bleach and boil the room from floor to ceiling.

The dogs are sisters from two different litters and they are currently 6 and 5 years old (and McPantses is 4). They’re eager to please and patient with children.

Actually, Miss Libby is patient with children and mothers everyone from Maggie T to McPantses. Maggie T, on the other hand, halfway ignores children and hasn’t paid much attention to Third. Libby gives us the crook eye anytime the boychild so much as squeaks. When McP was a baby, Libby would come and glare at us anytime baby McP cried. I am pretty sure the Husband and I could leave town for a few days and have a smoothly run household if we left Libby in charge, but for that minor opposable thumbs problem.

The bottom line: golden retrievers are the best, hairiest dogs ever. Buy a good vacuum. The Dyson Animal is near the top of my big purchase list.