"Mommy, I could help you," says MJ, climbing up on a bar stool and inspecting what I'm up to. She says this, most of the time, before she even knows what it is I'm up to. I feel like I could use this to my advantage somehow, but that's for another day. On this particular day, I'm chopping onions, which she, as always, pronounces to be "beautiful."

"That's OK, baby, I've got this one," I tell her. But she stays and watches and critiques, until she gets bored with watching and critiquing, and then she gets creative. With the chopped onions.

The husband likes his ice tea maker almost as much as he likes his clothes hamper empty and his dresser drawers full. Unfortunately, he likes to leave it sitting around, too. So, I mean, I can't really help it if a few of the tiny little chopped onions might have ended up in the filter basket. It wasn't my idea, after all, and I did say, "Oh, MJ, onions don't belong in the ice tea maker. Do you want to make Daddy's tea taste icky?" I may have been laughing at the time, or smirking conspiratorially, but I tried, people. I tried.

And she may or may not have been bowling earlier today with the apple he's currently chomping on. It's hard to say.

So, this is my new writing pad (hee, get it?). I hope you like it as much as I do. Now, I'm still kicking the tires and figuring out things, so bear with me if I get a few things wrong here and there ... graphically, textually, and any other word ending in -ally that might apply. I would tell you what kind of wrong to look for, but I'm not even sure of that yet. Challenges are good for the soul, yes? And speaking of, if you happen to be my sister, my neighbor or one of the two other people who stop by this blog occasionally, and you have a few spare seconds ... please take a tiny bit o' time to update any blogrolls or feed readers with http://motherbunkerblog.com. I'd really appreciate it.

Last but not least, a round of Internet applause for the people who moved me here from Blogger, and polished up the place all nice and purty: Heather at Desperately Seeking Wordpress, and Karen from Simply A Musing Designs. (And while we're at it, a shout-out for Heidi at Frantically Simple, where I originally found Heather's button.) Heather set up my new domain, handled the layout, plugged in all the nifty features, transferred all my old posts and answered a thousand dumb questions from yours truly with great cheer and patience. She rocks (and inexpensively, I might add). Heather brought Karen in to spiff up the decor, and I LOVE the header she designed. If I may quote my 3-year-old: "Is it beautiful, Mommy? I think it may be beautiful."

I do. I really do want to be a geek. Remember, back in the days of leg warmers and Aqua Net, when being in the know about computers meant you were kind of a nerd (and not the good kind, either -- think dudes from Weird Science)? Those were the days when the coolest possessions you could have were the oversized sweater with neon-colored block patterns and the latest Poison CD. Now, being a geek is all the rage. Hundreds of geeks line up outside Apple stores to get the latest iPhone -- normal people, like you and me, who don't study quantum physics. (Wait -- I'm not the only one not studying quantum physics, am I?) And speaking of that, CBS has "The Big Bang Theory," which proves that not knowing what the hell a genius is talking about can be really, really funny.

Be a nerd ... all the cool kids are doing it.

Sadly, it has come to my attention that I have a long way to go before reaching geekdom. Yes, it's true: I was once the only chick in the theater for Star Trek: Nemesis, but I was on a date with the nerd that I married, so I'm not sure that counts. Every day, I learn something new that makes me feel like I'm the only kid at school without a Swatch watch. (And believe you me, you don't want to be the only mid-1980s kid at school without a Swatch watch ... or shoulder pads, for that matter.) I was watching "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" this week -- which, particularly whenever the blond cheerleader and her family is on, is absolutely awful (but yes, I watch it anyway) -- and they threw out this little tidbit of info from a high school freshman on the show: "Nobody e-mails amymore." Apparently, e-mail is, like, so yesterday. So my main mode of electronic communication is now as current as the bag phone.

I also read in Wired that Twittering is the new blogging. I just started this site in December, and I'm already outmoded? It's taken me this long just to figure out what an RSS reader is. I am amazed by the people who find the time and patience to Twitter, and I can almost guarantee you I'll never be one of them. Why? Because I waste my free time watching crap shows like "The Secret Life of the American Teenager." (Although, in fairness, I am reading Unaccustomed Earth right now, by Jhumpa Lahiri, whose writing I love ... so I don't actually waste all of my free time.)

I do think I should get geek bonus points for reading Wired, but then again, that, too, is because the husband subscribes. And he is, as previously mentioned, something of a nerd. I literally just took his new laptop from the FedEx guy ... a new laptop that was delivered directly from Shanghai, I kid you not. And he called me five minutes after it hit the doorstep to ask me if, as his sources had told him, his package had been delivered to "reception/front desk." (How great is that? I'm the front desk now.) He even ordered my engagement ring online -- which, to the untrained eye, might seem impersonal, but in this case is actually the highest compliment.

But I digress ...

I never thought I'd wind up so beyond of the realm of tech trends that my 13-year-old niece would have a better cell phone than me. I've been reading Randy's copy of Geekipedia to find out just how much I don't know. I'm only on the A's, and I'm already out of my league. Take your J.J. Abrams, for example. Creator of "Lost"? Yeah, that guy. Remember the "sat phone" that the Losties kept calling each other and the bad guys and the boat on? The Geekipedia article on Abrams says: "viewers may have thought that the sight of a KRZR — a Motorola phone marketed two years after the story was supposed to have taken place — constituted a continuity error. Nope. It was a tip-off to season three's time-bending finale." OK, um ... you have to be a special sort of viewer to 1) know the model number of that phone and 2) know the year that it was manufactured, vis a vis the year in which "Lost" takes place. If this is the kind of stuff you have to know to be a cool geek, I've got a really long way to go.

But, you have to start somewhere. There have always been a few bugs with this blog's layout, a lot of things I have to work around, a lot of tweaking that's beyond my understanding. So beginning Monday, MotherBunker is moving to self-hosted Wordpress, where I'll have a bunch more stuff to learn ... but, I think, more resources to learn it. I think the new site is slightly more geekified (that CommentLuv thing? Genius!) ... and therefore cool. You know, until I move in, anyway. That's a preview of my new place above; and on Monday, I'll post a forwarding address here, so that all three of my readers will know where to find me :)

Well it's official: Cars has reached irrational levels of adoration in our home. MJ has the bug. I have the bug. Randy ... well, he still likes real cars better. And LL Cool Baby is much more into dollies. So I guess it's just MJ and me. She likes this movie so much that she even watches the deleted scenes (the ones that are just drawings, not all Pixared-out yet ... the "brown" ones, as she calls them) over and over again. I find myself telling Randy things like: "You know what line I love from this movie? The one where Sheriff asks Mater what he had told him about talking to the prisoner, and Mater says: 'To not to.'" How bad is it, people? Let's borrow a line from one of Mater's cousins to explain:

You might be obsessed with Cars if:

... at 10 p.m., when your toddler has been in bed for an hour and a half, you don't turn off the movie that has been playing all day. You, in fact, stop what you're doing twice: to watch the scene where Lightning McQueen fixes up Radiator Springs and then the one when he goes to the big race at the end.

... and you think to yourself: Man, I would have loved to have been at that race.

... while picking up a Cars book for your daughter, you buy the soundtrack for yourself.

... your kid and your husband get a boo boo in the same place, and each of them gets a Cars band aid ... Sally for her, Mater for him.

As he was leaving for work yesterday, Randy asked MJ and me what we had planned for the day.

"Oh," I said, with genuine enthusiasm, "we're going to have lots of fun ..."

He laughed. Not an "Oh, good, wish I could be there" kind of laugh, but rather a cheerful snort. A chortle, if you will. A disbelieving snicker, you might say. Now, give him his due: He had been up since 3:30 a.m. with MJ, when a fake need to use the potty turned into a need for toy cars and who knows what else. So the idea of having any sort of fun when watching this particular toddler for the next eight hours was, admittedly, not a viable notion to him. But I really did have plans for the day. Good ones.

Which is, of course, where I went wrong. Randy had plans to sleep all night, after all, and look where that got him.

So the new read-along book I wanted to do with her ended after two pages, when she figured out this was the same story she could watch in movie form on the DVD player. I used to love read-along books when I was little, so surely she would, too? Nope. Not so much. But then again, what good is a read-along when you can't read yet?

Then there were the muffins that I thought we could make together. Like any kid who hasn't yet realized how much work is involved in cooking, MJ always wants to help in the kitchen. We have a toddler cookbook by Annabel Karmel that makes this task seem like a glorious mother-child bonding moment. Witness the shiny happiness on this page:

But what MJ did instead of pouring and stirring was to make "apple boats":

... which is altogether cuter than stirring and pouring, but was not in the recipe, aka, "the plan."

The day went on like this. I had a vision of how our day might go; she had an altogether different idea -- not worse than mine, just a different interpretation. A different plan. No plan, in fact.

A lactation consultant once told me that women who demanded (or demand) excellence from themselves in the workplace are often surprised or frustrated by the ways in which they can't control the daily tasks of motherhood. It starts when you devise a birth plan that gets shot to h-e-double-hockey-sticks as your labor doesn't behave right, and continues each time you make a plan, big or small. In my workplace, there were rules and etiquette and meetings and benchmarks. In parenting, there are questions, journeys, unknowns. Being prepared doesn't mean crossing off a checklist of to-dos; it means understanding that you might just have a better time at Chick-fil-A's customer appreciation day than your kid, who actually turns out to be afraid of the main attraction: The guy dressed up in the cow costume.

In fact, if motherhood were a job you interviewed for, it would be the only occasion where "I'm a perfectionist" would be a proper response to the question "What would you say is your greatest weakness?"

As a freelance writer, I knew the steps to putting together an article. I could envision the research, the reporting, the transcribing, the brainstorming, the writing, the editing. As a mother, the best days I have are usually the ones where one random activity takes us to another one, when I don't concern myself with entertaining her so much as I let her be entertained.

Most of the time, I know this; I've learned it through months of practice. But there are days still when I have to relearn it, relinquish control, rewrite the plan, and make apple boats instead of apple muffins.

When I went out to get the paper yesterday morning, someone had left us a surprise on our mailbox post: a Target bag filled with an unopened package of Pull-Ups. That someone clearly reads this blog, including my last post about the "broken" Pull-Ups. I'm pretty sure that someone also has a 3-year-old girl (the pull-ups were pink), and I thank her. This is one of the things I love about living in a neighborhood where so many people have kids the same age: We're all kind of in it together. Even when it comes to potty training.

And let's talk potty for a minute, shall we? It's a great subject, after all, especially when you're talking about Naked Friday. Yep, we went old school to start the weekend, potty boot camp, a full day (well, minus mealtimes, naptime and bedtime ... that's where the Pull-Ups come in) of a t-shirt and no diapers -- a dangerous but, it turns out, highly effective, method of potty training. It seems kids really don't like even the idea of peeing down their legs. Go figure. Not one accident, people. Not one. The Royal Potty Chair was a-singin' all weekend. I wouldn't say we're there just yet, but things did go well enough that we broke out the toddler underwear that we've been hoarding for months now and gave it a spin. I haven't been this excited since she learned how to walk.

MJ walked into the bathroom yesterday without pants, holding a suspicious soggy something between her thumb and forefinger -- which she then gave to me inside out, even though I had just washed my hands.

Nice.

"Here Mommy," she said when she handed me the most ridiculously soaked Pull-Up ever, "it's broken."

And with that, she breezed past me and plopped herself down on her potty.

So there's a little insight into this potty-training toddler's mind: She seems to believe one uses the potty only as a last resort, when you've run out of room in your pants. Awesome.

Still, it's progress. I'll take it.

We now interrupt your workday to bring you this important, vitally important, piece of news.

To the Bat Phone!

Ring!

Him: Hellooo?

Me: Guess what?

Him: What?

Me: Guess who's going to be on "Rescue Me"?

Him: Who?

Me: No, guess!

Him: Who?

Me: Guess! You'll never guess!

Him: Probably not. Just tell me.

Me: Michael J. Fox!

Him: Wow. That is exciting.

Me: [squeal] I know!

Him: When?

Me: Dunno. Next season, I guess.

Him: Cool. Thanks for letting me know.

Me: Yeah. No problem. I'm on the case.

Him: Yes. I can't imagine going through the whole day without that information.

Me: Exactly.

Him: What else is going on?

Me: Um ... yeah. That's pretty much it.

Him: OK. Working now.

Me: Yeah, OK. Bye.

My baby is 11 months old today, which is so hard to believe. With MJ, I recall time passing sort of slowly through her first year. With so much to learn and, every day, something new happening in the world of this little person -- first cereal, first smile ... even her belly button stump took four weeks to disappear (and, disconcertingly, we never actually found it ... yikes) -- the first 12 months of her life floated deliciously by, and I can honestly say I savored each one.

It's been harder to do with Little L, though I've tried, and though I've been all-too-conscious of trying. That's because MJ continues to have firsts herself, the subtle kind that show up in a grown-up remark, a comprehension she didn't have the week before, even a new kind of beaming smile that grabs up the world around it in a knowing way -- different from that baby smile, the one of joy over simple motions happening in the space around her, of a person she trusts making an entrance into the room, for example.

And so my mind is always split. But in short, quiet moments, I do savor the things that make a baby a baby for such a short time; the ones I still conjure in my mind, I suppose, when I end a request or an answer to one of the many "Whys?" I hear every day from MJ with the term of endearment, "baby."

And here's one of them, one that doesn't last long: The snaggletooth smile, via Little L today. Yes, I know you get a version of these later, when they start to lose their teeth ... but are they ever quite like this again?

I am clearly not cut out for the "have baby, will travel" set. I always seem to be just a step behind everyone else when it comes to meeting the current standards of mother-child excursion preparedness.

For the past few weeks, we've been new gym members. (Technically, new members of an old gym we used to belong to, back in the halcyon days of semi-ripped ab muscles and good posture.) In those four weeks or so, I've been in three-and-a-half times, which is about the number of instances per week I had planned to go. The half, by the way, constitutes the trip when I worked out for 10 minutes before the child care folks came and got me to retrieve my absolutely-out-of-her-mind-with-stranger-anxiety 11-month-old, which is not to be confused with the trip when I never made it out of the child care room because she was in full meltdown mode 15 seconds after we entered. I sat in the room for an hour, playing with toys I could have been playing with at home, while Randy finished his workout. But that? The frustration over actually wanting to workout and actually wanting to leave the baby behind for a while to do so, and being thwarted every time? That's a different story for a different time.

This story is about how I went back in to retrieve my children yesterday morning. Bawling, splotchy, shaking, heaving, squealing, angry and frightened baby? Check. Waiting for me at the door. Well-adjusted, happy, couldn't-care-less-whether-Mommy's-around-or-not toddler? Hmmm. Being held. Looking pouty. Nice Gym Nanny looking at me with mingled pity and concern -- not for MJ, I guessed, but for her mother, her wholly inadequate and unprepared parent who apparently missed the memo that said her kid -- and all other kids -- is incapable of going ONE HOUR without having something to eat and drink. One hour, people.

Me: What happened?

Nice Gym Nanny: Well, she wanted a snack, and we couldn't find hers (waves a hand in direction of a counter that is literally packed with little Take-and-Toss bowls with goldfish crackers, each lovingly labeled with child's name before the mother/father left home to exercise.)

Me: Oh.

Nice Gym Nanny: Yeah. So she was really disappointed.

And so, I guessed, was Nice Gym Nanny ... in me. This is one of the reasons that I never bothered much with Gymboree classes and the like when MJ was even smaller than she is now; the idea of having to pack up her and half of her belongings to go somewhere else to play for 30 minutes seemed like unnecessary work for an 18-month-old with very simple needs. And now, packing a small lunch at 9:30 a.m., complete with masking tape monogramming (do you know how long it would take me to find masking tape around here?) seems like a lot of unnecessary work for a mother with a very simple need to sweat out all the spent patience clogged in her SAHM-y pores.

Am I being whiny and petulant? Yes. Most of the time Sometimes, that's what a blog is for.

I'll be honest. Some days I can't remember to brush MJ's hair before we go to Target. What I'm saying is: I'm soft. I need training. Boot camp. I'm a Type-L (for "lollygagging") parent personality living in a Type-A world. I'm pretty sure preschool in the fall will be as much about preparing Mommy to play nice as it will preparing MJ to do the same. They should charge me double. (But don't tell them I said that.)