Bad mommy?

My toddler is sick. For two days now, she's been vomiting and having diarrhea. Not a whole lot, mind you, but make no mistake, the girl is sick. And yet, a very teeny, very tiny part of me is loving it. Not the vomit part. Not the diarrhea part either. Certainly not the part where I have to watch my formerly vivacious, outgoing, funny, energetic child turn into a tired zombie. But, the part where all she really wants to do is sit on my lap and cuddle? I'm all in!

Put a bird on it, or, belated merry Christmas to me

The Dutch start the holiday season early*. As it's not really the point of this post, I won't go into detail (but if you'd like to know more, you can follow up at Wikipedia), but suffice to say, it all begins in late November. The overeating, the festive spirit, small children constantly bordering on expectant hysteria....and....the gift giving. We celebrate with the Man's family, and this year we went traditional. We set a maximum price and then everyone drew names, made a list and went away for a year.

I drew the Man's aunt, who has excellent and exacting taste, which made me both a little bit nervous and, oddly, also set me at ease. I could figure out, more or less, what she would like; I just wasn't sure that I would be able to find it for the price range we had set ourselves. Before leaving the house, I narrowed down her list to the two things that I thought that I could probably manage to find; namely a nicely decorated wooden kitchen paper towel holder, and a wind chime. I'll admit - the wind chime I got. The paper towel holder, though, notsomuch. Still, I looked, and I looked, and I looked and everywhere I found expensive wind chimes. And I found plain wooden holders. And nice metal holders. But no attractive, wooden, paper towel holders. Lord knows, I looked and looked.

In all of this searching, though, I also found buried at the back of a quirky little store, the paper towel holder of my dreams. When I first spied it, I thought it was lovely, but not quite what the Aunt would have wanted. It wasn't wood, it wasn't painted. Still, I'd keep going back to look at it. And then, finally, I found a nice wind chime. Thank goodness. Sinterklaas was saved! I stopped thinking about paper towel holders and moved on to Christmas gifts for the Man and the Toddler. Apparently, it stuck in my head though, because when I opened my gifts on Christmas morning, I was secretly a little bit sad that it wasn't one of my presents; this despite the fact that I hadn't really even hinted at it.

Today, when I was riding past the store, I noticed that they were having a post-Christmas sale and, as if some other force was controlling me, I found myself walking in and buying it.

We've been watching the Portlandia series (which I highly recommend) and the moment the Man saw it in the kitchen, the very first thing out of his mouth was "Put a bird on it".