Well, coming back to a blog you've neglected for eight months is a lot like reaching into the back of the fridge and finally confronting the cottage cheese container you've been ignoring back there for ... eight months. You open it up and it's teeming with garbage that makes you want to throw the whole fridge out. I guess the comments section of our blog doesn't have that "verification" thing where you have to type in what word you see to confirm that you are not a spam generator, hence, 8 million tons of spam are festering in our comments section. ARRRRGH. 

Sooooo Elaine is now two. And she is quite a lot smarter than both of her parents. And she is insanely funny and cute. And temperamental. And also very opinionated. And either independent or antisocial, I'm not entirely sure which at this point.

I am becoming INCREDIBLY good at counting to three. Here is something that happened this evening: Elaine was in the midst of disrobing in preparation for her bath, a process she was peppering with a lot of whining and dawdling and stalling and so forth, and when her diaper was the only remaining barrier to bath entry, I reached out with both hands and slipped the rubber bands off her pigtails. Holy shit. MELTDOWN. The screaming! The blue face! The stomping feet! It was epic. I sat there cross-legged on the floor in front of her, feeling helpless and therefore patient since it looked like my only possible salvation had to be time and exhaustion. A few minutes passed, and Brandon finally decided to try the route of distraction. Over Elaine's wailing I heard a loud noise coming from the bathroom -- a rumbling, bubbling, vibratingly wet noise, a noise arresting enough that it did in fact get her to stop mid-yell and listen. We looked toward the bathroom and there, just as you'd expect, was Brandon's butt in the air, his face plunged into her bath while he blew air as hard as he could through his mouth. Elaine, tears still drizzling down her cheeks, trotted in and stood next to him, silently observing, then turned and trotted around to the other side of him and observed for another few seconds, and then backed up and trotted back into the bedroom and stood in front of me and resumed screaming. Dumbfounded, I said (loudly enough so I could be heard over the racket), "ELAINE. I am going to put your pigtails back in. Then I am going to count to three and take them back out again, ok?" and she goes "YYYEEEAAAAHHH." And that is exactly what happened. While she stood perfectly still with her big, round, wet-lashed eyes on my face, I put her hair back in pigtails. Then I said, "Now we're going to take them out. One, two, three" and I slipped them out again (this whole process took probably 9 seconds) and she went off to the bathroom, happy as a clam.

The thing I have mastered about parenting so far: don't even try to bring logic into it.