So I was making out my annual grid of fall television shows -- new ones worth watching, days they're on, times they air, returning shows, conflicts in recording, etc. You know, like everybody does this time of year. (What? You don't? Hmmm.) It's sort of my equivalent of fantasy football or baseball, except my opponents are the networks and my DVR. Oh, and time, which, as always, is a worthy and formidable foe in my quest to conquer all my favorite shows in a single week while making sure my children are well-fed and clean. They generally are.

Anyway, I finished my grid, looked up from my work -- a timeline of teenage romps, medical dramas, sci-fi nutjobs and sitcoms about friends who don't have children and spend way too much time in each other's apartments to be platonic -- and gave Randy the news.

"It's looking pretty bad," I told him.
Him: "Yeah?"
Me: "Yep."
Him: "What's the diagnosis?"
Me: "That Monday night at 8 p.m. is where our television dreams go to die. We have Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dancing with the Stars ..."
Him: "Ugh."
Me: "Anyway ... Dancing with the Stars, Big Bang Theory, Chuck ...
Him: "Uh-oh."
Me: "... and Gossip Girl."
Him: [sarcastic gasp of tragedy] "Oh no! Not Gossip Girl! Anything but Gossip Girl! What are we going to do?"
Me: [ignoring lack of appreciation for my pretty, pretty show] "Well, I think it's clear what we have to do. I can dump Dancing with the Stars, I guess ..."
Him: "Please?"
Me: "... but unless two of the other four are available online -- and here I have to exclude Gossip Girl, because you know I love it, xoxo, and I like my teen dramas in full screen, in all their backstabbing glory, as they were meant to be seen -- we're going to need another DVR. What do you say?"
Him: [with a promising note in his voice] "Well, I think we could manage that."
Me: "Yeah?"
Him: "Sure. Just take MJ out of preschool and we'll use part of her tuition to pay for another DVR so we can keep watching all of our shows."
Me: "Awesome. I love it. I'm calling Time Warner Cable tomorrow!"

It's time once again to check in with the antics of the MotherBunker nephew, and this time it's not necessarily because my own offspring have no fodder to provide the blog today. It's because if I don't keep my laptop on my lap, he might sell it right out from under my nose.

So, to recap: He's 7. Going on 42. A few weeks ago, he checked his piggy bank and decided it was getting a little too low on funds. I don't know why a 7-year-old needs a nest egg, but I'm sure I will one day. When I have a 7-year-old. Who's going on 42.

Anyway ... to quote the nephew, "When I get down to $2, I've got to start selling stuff."

Not his stuff, mind you. Other people's. He sold a pair of gloves with fur trim, belonging to his older sister but hoping to be used again one day by his mother, for $2.The taker? His grandmother. He sold a box of blueberry muffin mix, which my sister purchased for 75 cents, for the profit-making price of $1. He sold a chunk of brownie for a penny. (A penny?)

And then one day, my sister came home from work hungry, and headed for the bread drawer, where all good members of our family go for empty calories.

Except it was empty.

"Hold on there," my nephew, who had spirited the loaves to his "desk" ... aka, his shop, said. "Slices of wheat are $1 and white is 50 cents."

"Why is wheat more expensive?" my sister asked.

"Because it's harder to make. Obviously."

Obviously.

... not that it's a competition or anything, but I think it's safe to say that on her first day, MJ's preschool got the better of this mommy. No big deal, or anything, it's just that when I pulled her out of the car to take her inside, I looked down and saw a long dribble of something wet all the way down her orange sherbet-colored shirt. Great. Maybe it's just water.

"MJ, what is that?" I asked her.

She looked down. "Oh," she said, in her best don't-worry-about-it-Mommy voice (which she inherited from her father, who likes to tell me that he'll let me know when it's time to worry), "that's just toothpaste."

Toothpaste dribble. She missed her mouth while brushing. By the time we got inside, it was that lovely chalky shade that makes any first day of school truly special. Oh well. Obviously, there are worse things.

Like going out to your car after dropping off your newly minted preschooler and hearing this sound when you turn the key in the ignition: "Cluuunk. Cluuunk. Cluuuuuuunk." Then checking your purse (wait ... do I have my purse? ... yes, good) for your cell phone, which, like your car, is also dead. Awe.some. Grab baby from back seat, head back inside to find an old-fashioned land line, call husband at work and interrupt his day so he can drive over and jumpstart your piece of crap Camry ... which the Toyota service people swear has nothing wrong with it, even though this is roughly the sixth time it has died on you in the past two years.

But on a brighter note, MJ conquered preschool just fine. We thought she might be a little apprehensive, but that was before we let her pick out her own pair of tennis shoes last night -- Dora shoes, which are slightly better than Cinderella shoes -- and she couldn't wait to wear them. I was surprised she didn't ask to sleep in them ... that is, when she was sleeping last night, which wasn't for long. (Yes, we're back on that kick again. The mood of our house currently? Tired. What? That's not an actual mood? Yeah, well, we're too tired to have an actual mood.)

She spent several minutes showing off her new shoes before we left the house, and once she entered her new classroom, she plunked herself down at a Play-doh table and never looked back. She honestly did not even look up when I told her goodbye and headed out to my dead Camry. "Later, mom. See you in a few. I'll be hangin' here with my new homies."

Plus, she is CLEARLY already a genius after only one day of school. CLEARLY. At bedtime, she decided she needed to "change the sheets" on her dolly's bed. And because, perhaps I mentioned, I'M TIRED, I tried to persuade her that dolly was already asleep and it would be rude to wake her up in the middle of her dreams. Not that MJ would understand that concept, since she DOESN'T SLEEP.

"Mommy, Dolly not asleep yet," MJ told me.

"Oh yeah, sure she is," I said. "You tucked her in. She's gone to sleep."

"No Mommy," she told me, with a look of concern for my lack of intelligence, "she's not. Look -- her eyes are still open."

Back when I was a diligent blogger, i.e., when I rarely took time to clean house and my car was always late for an oil change/inspection/etc., things would happen that I knew I'd want to write about, and I would scramble for a notepad to write it down before I forgot. (I still have to write EVERYTHING down, mind you, and here's a sampling of what appears on my kitchen calendar right now: "clean oven," "rose bush trellis," "philosophy." Yes, I have to remind myself to clean my oven, as if the crumpled pizza carcinogens smoking from its bottom aren't reminder enough. And don't get too excited about that "philosophy" bit; I have not taken up higher studies just as my beloved fall television schedule gets underway. That refers to the skin care company philosophy.)

ANYWAY, as I was clearing out some junk today, I came across a little mini- notation I made several months ago, little bits of dialogue MJ and I had shared. Without further ado, and so I can cross something off my to-do list (which feels so great to-do, ahem), I present "The Tale of the Boon" and "Perfect," two slices of life with MJ:

MJ has a ridiculously good memory. A month or two ago, she got a green dolphin balloon at a birthday party, and toted the thing around the rest of the day. She also toted it out onto our deck, where, predictably, inevitably, she lost it to the clouds. Today, we were sitting on the deck, and she looked up at the sky and said, "Mommy, where's the green 'boon?" It took me a very long time to figure out what she was talking about, and when I did, I reminded her that we'd lost it when she'd let go of it.

"Oh," she said, "Maybe the air took the 'boon to the boys to play with."

I have no idea who the boys are.

And on that same day, she had been sprawled out on the kitchen floor coloring with markers -- a little bit on paper, mostly on herself. She hopped up, ran past where I was standing at the stove and into the bathroom. A few minutes later she came out -- inexplicably wearing her backpack -- and said, "There Mommy. I washed my knees. All the marker's off. I'm all perfect."

"You're perfect?" I asked.
"Yeah, I'm all perfect," she said. "I'm all clean and fluffy."

The cutest. Just the cutest.

Did I mention? My littlest girl turned one while we were away, and because she is just that special, she was feted in two countries. Here's a shot from her USA party, in which she got groovy with her cake. Yum!

















And here she is rockin' it Canadian style:

When you spend a week essentially driving around North America (OK, the eastern part), stopping to visit loved ones in between diaper changes, roadside/truck stop potty trips and backseat Goldfish consumption, there is nothing, nothing you want more than to just. get. home. already. Nineteen hours of driving each way, even when spread out over two days, just isn't ideal.

So, of all the images I will remember from our trip to Canadaland, with stopovers in West Virginia, it's not this one from the Toronto Zoo (which sums up how MJ felt most afternoons around 4 p.m.) that I will recall the most:

Nor is it this one (which sums up how LL Cool Baby got back at MJ for waking her up every time she fell asleep in the car: with a swift kick in the head) ...

 

It's the one I don't have a photograph of. It's MJ, at a Subway in Morgantown, W.Va., miles from home but on the back end of the trip and feeling giddy with freedom from the car, running laps around the middle of the restaurant like a Jamaican track athlete and chanting some happy-happy-joy-joy song over and over again. I thought briefly of making her stop, the way most responsible parents might for fear it would interrupt someone else's meal. But what I really thought was, "Sing it, sister."

Home? Is freakin' awesome.

Now, ymou may have heard that I'm not always the most discerning television viewer. I watch some of the really great shows, but I also watch some pretty crappy, 7th-Heaven-y stuff about pregnant teenagers who are members of their high school bands. (Seriously. "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" has to be the worst show on TV, and I swore I would erase it from my DVR recordings as soon as she told her parents that she was pregnant ... and yet ... I have not. I kind of hate myself for it.)

I will seriously watch almost anything.

But I've never really given in to "American Idol," not the way so many others have. We watched the year of Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard and, afterward, the husband told me I could never watch it again. And do you want to know why?* Here's why: I watched the last 10 minutes of "Canadian Idol" at the in-laws (that's right, I said CanadianIdol) and found myself upset that a 17-year-old with floppy black hair named Mookie got kicked off the show. "How," I kept repeating, over and over again, "do you kick a guy named Mookie off?" Then I became concerned, briefly -- but enough to spend a few minutes thinking about it -- that he had smashed his guitar on stage after his farewell song, and what a silly thing that was to do when you weren't even the runner-up on Idol. I mean, are you really guaranteed enough post-Idol money to buy yourself a new one if you finish below four or five other people? Television is like crack for my free time; I swear I can get obsessed with any show if you give me a chance.

It's quite sad, really. So I guess it's good we don't get CTV down in the south.

(*OK, his reason for why I couldn't watch it again WAS, in fact, Clay Aiken.)

How much do I love Neil Patrick Harris? I was -- I mean, MJ was -- watching "Sesame Street" yesterday morning, and NPH appears as a ... wait for it ... Fairy Shoeperson. He's the only celebrity guest you'll ever see on "Sesame Street" who can turn in a performance worthy of Broadway. He sings. He dances. He wears a glittery suit with wings. I can't embed the video, but if you haven't seen it, it's worth checking out here. This clip is not as good as the whole sketch on the show, in which he shows off some of the funny that makes him so great on "How I Met Your Mother," but you get the idea.

... and after you check that out, watch this video from him on Conan, in which he talks about some of the choice lines the writers gave him.

AND because you know how much I love "HIMYM," watch the video below of NPH and Jason Segal performing "The Confrontation" from Les Miserables, which I stumbled across while searching for the Sesame one. So funny. I laugh louder each time I see it.

When I came home from Target last night, MJ was watching "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." I don't know why. Some questions just aren't worth asking. But she was on a Seuss kick, because when we trotted off for bedtime stories, she asked for "the one with the big turtle. The big green turtle. That one."

Yertle the Turtle is so underrated in the Seussicon. It's so much fun to read, and it has such a great message, with the king building a high tower for himself on the backs of all his subjects, only to be knocked off by a burp.

And Yertle the Turtle, the king of the trees,
The king of the air and the birds and the bees,
The king of a house and a cow and a mule ...
Well, that was the end of the Turtle King's rule!
For Yertle, the King of all Sala-ma-Sond,
Fell off his high throne and fell Plunk! in the pond!

And today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he,
Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see.
And the turtles, of course ... all the turtles are free
As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.

In fact, as I was reading it to MJ, I couldn't help but think that someone, anyone, should have read it to a certain former one-term senator/third-wheel presidential candidate from my state of residence around late 2005/early 2006 or so ... In fact, don't you think everyone who decides to run for office should have to read it? There should be a required candidate book club, and Yertle the Turtle should be first on the list.

... or, "What Happens When a Little Girl Mixes Her Toys," aka, "Why I Love My Toddler: Reason #3,675," a photo essay in four parts:

Despite his rusty exterior, Mater likes to sleep in a fluffy canopy bed in a pink room. He keeps his potty chair nearby, though, for emergencies.  













Even cars get tired sometimes, as these minis show. Or, as MJ calls them, "baby cars." And where do baby cars belong? In cribs, of course.

 

Grilling in the living room is not advised, but at least Ramone is keeping a safe distance from the BBQ here.

After a nice long nap, it's good to get outside to the playground. Maybe take a trip down the slides.