Okay, I’ll fully admit to turning 30 this year.  But not until September, mind you.  But this sticks me into this generational limbo-land.

Technically, I was born on the tail end of Generation X, but my early childhood was truthfully spent in the 1980’s.  As a result, I am not the expert on 80’s music that, say, the Webmaster is.  This is one area where he can soundly beat my butt in Trivial Pursuit.  I didn’t have an older sibling bringing “new” music into the house in that era, so I was still singing along with the Carpenters when the 80’s came to a close.  Although I did own two Debbie Gibson tapes.

By the time I was a teenager in the 90’s, I was pretty well only listening to musical theater or Christian pop music.  So, my musical trivia is still pretty limited - but that’s okay by me.  That’s why the Webmaster and I make such a good team when we play couples’ Trivial Pursuit.

Anyway, so I had no idea what a Rickroll was.  But now I know, thanks to the Webmaster.  I’m not sure this is anything anyone really needed to know in their lifetime, but there you go.

So, for your amusement, here is a Rickroll, courtesy of the Muppets.  (The original clip is here.)

And since we’re on a Muppet theme here, this is Ane’s current favorite clip.

Have a great weekend, everyone - keep the sunscreen handy!

“MOMMY!  HE’S TOUCHING THAT AGAIN!”

Usually, when Ane is about to tattle on Tad, it starts out with a gut-wrenching, ear-splittingly loud “MOMMY.”  Or, recently, “MOTHER.”  She has started calling me “Mother” and I’m not quite sure why, though I do find it amusing.

More often than not, her tattling is actually something I do need to know about, but the problem is that she doesn’t tell me what Tad is really doing.  For example, she once tattled, “He’s putting that on top of that again!”

“What?”

“He’s putting that on top of that!”

“What is ‘that,’ Ane?”

“THAT!”

I finally got in the room to discover that Tad had his large dump truck on the coffee table in the living room - a no-no, but hardly a dramatic emergency or screaming offense.  “Ane,” I began, exasperated, “when I ask you what Tad is doing, you have to tell me EXACTLY what is going on. ‘That’ doesn’t tell me anything.  You’ve got to be specific.”

As soon as that word left my mouth, I knew I’d lost her.  But then she nodded very seriously at me.  “Okay, Mommy.  I’ll try to be more pacific.”

At preschool on Monday, Ane’s teachers had several activities set up for both students and mothers to do during the Mother’s Day class.  One of them was to create a list of “10 Things To Do With Mom This Summer.”

Here is the list Ane came up with:

1) Go to the zoo
2) Ride on a roller coaster
3) Go to Disneyland (we are in the planning stages of this trip…)
4) Visit family (she originally said “Visit Uncle Captain”, but I amended it to include more people)
5) Play in the pool (both the wading pool and the community swimming pool)
6) Go to tea (again!)
7) Go shopping (she loves the mall more than any four-year-old really should)
Read Little House in the Big Woods (my suggestion, since we’ve been reading chapters out of it to match her My First Little House books)
9) Go to the beach (she wants to break out her sand-castle building stuff)
10) Go to a baseball game (either the Everett Aquasox or the Seattle Mariners)

She also wanted to put down “Go to the North Pole”, but I talked her out of that one.  However, I’ll keep it in mind as somewhere she wants to go if she REALLY gets on my nerves this summer.

So many things are grabbing my attention at the moment, I’m not sure if I can put together a cohesive blog post.

First off, the earthquake in China.  I happen to have friends who live in Chengdu, and after praying hard all day yesterday, I am extraordinarily relieved to hear that they are all well and accounted for.  So, that’s a great burden off my mind, though I’m sure that the stories they have will be nothing short of hair-raising.

Second, am very miffed with the Mariners bullpen.  And not real thrilled with Erik Bedard, either.  Tell me again why we traded Adam Jones for him??

Third, Tad can count to at least eleven.  THIS is the really big news.  Yesterday, my parents were watching him while Ane and I were at school (it was a special Mother’s Day event that was a lot of fun for both of us).  While we were gone, my mother created a game for Tad.  He had gotten a hold of some loose change, and he has a penchant for putting things into other things, so he was putting the coins through the windows of a Fisher Price play house.  Instead of letting him spread coins all over the place, Grandma got an empty sour cream container with a lid, cut a slot in the lid, and let him put the coins through the slot.  He had twenty coins, and when he finished putting them all in, he had to ask someone to open it up so he could do it again. 

When Ane and I returned, he was still going at it, and I could hear him counting: “One, too, free, foor, five, sicks, seben, ehhh, nine, ten, e-weben…” and then you could hear a lot of “teen”s - he would usually end with fifteen or sixteen (after skipping other numbers), and then clapping for himself.

“Have you been teaching him to count?”  my Dad asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Well, then, what good are you?”  he asked.  (He was kidding.)

Tad has obviously been doing more listening than we realized - to both Sesame Street and They Might Be Giants.  I now love the number “e-weben.”  It is so cute when he says it.  I wonder if I can get him to do it for Kay today…  And I’ve got to get it on video.

And finally, Libby, the little neighbor girl who my mother watches a few days a week, broke her arm last Friday.  She did this at her house (which is probably the ONLY good thing about it), and has a soft cast and a sling at the moment.  Both the ulna and the radius bones are broken on her left arm, but fortunately, no surgery was needed.  If Tad could really talk - or remember - he would be able to empathize with her.  We understand broken bones around here.