A few random things from a week that got way too busy, before the start of a week that will also get pretty hectic:

1. Kate insisted on wearing these glasses to church today. Paired with a hot-pink polka-dotted sun hat, purple plaid dress, three sets of plastic beads and two purses, the effect was quite stunning. We are in so much trouble.

2. Regina Spektor has a new album out. There are no words for how happy this makes me, but more importantly, it's going to make Kate's entire year. Anyone who visited us about four months ago know that for a long long time, every single time we got in the car, we had to listen to Regina Spektor's song "Fidelity," sometimes twice. She does this, gets hung up on songs, decides that they are her favorite driving song, and then insists that they be played first thing every time we get in the car. She's ruined quite a few great songs for me this way, including:

Allison Krauss and Robert Plant's "Rich Woman," which is basically a song about the joys of having a sugar mama.

Feist, 1,2,3.4 and "Mushaboom."

Lately she's all about "Jacksonville," by Sufjan Stevens, which is fine with me, because it gives me an excuse to put the full Austin City Limits version up on the blog. One of my remaining live music aspirations is to see Sufjan in concert. I say "remaining" because at this point in my life there are very few artists that I would stay up past 9 p.m. to see. I am totally uncool that way now.

We'll probably have to get Kate her own i-Pod for her fifth birthday so she can make her own super cool playlists. As it stands now, I have more Elmo videos on my formerly-pristine i-Tunes library than I care to admit.

3. Having returned to the land of books that don't have immortal heroes, I recently read Charles Dickens Great Expectations for the first time all the way through. For some reason, every other time I tried, I lost the thread of the story and gave up. But I enjoyed it this time, in spite of some re-entry troubles I had in remembering how to read British literature. They call everything by different names, or at least Dickens did, so in every third sentence, there's a noun I don't have any definition for. So when I get to those words, and pay attention here, because I'm about to unveil the secrets I learned in four years as an English major ... I just ignore them. It's a lot like how I got through reading an entire mystery novel in German during college in spite of the fact that I understood almost no German even after TWO YEARS of trying to learn it. And from that experience, I learned that it turns out you don't have to know what all the words mean to figure out the general gist of a story. Neat, huh? I realize that I could choose to learn the definitions for the words I don't recognize and thus become a more educated person, but I am lazy, and I don't want to.

4. Have I mentioned how I can't take a decent picture of myself and Kate? Here is proof. Our friend Bob took this the other night when we were enjoying the gracious hospitality of the Podgurski home. I understand there were actually some good photos that resulted from the photo session, but there was also this one, in which I look like an absolute crazy person. The reason for this is that Kate starts flopping around like a recently-caught trout when I try to get her to sit in my arms and smile for a photo, so I'm constantly going back and forth between trying to smile and trying not to let her crack her head open on the tile. The result is photos like this.

So now we're opening comments on this awful thing to see who can come up with the best caption? Post it in the comments section and I'll pick a winner. This means that Bob owes me $20, because he bet me that I wouldn't post it on the blog. He doesn't realize how little dignity I have left.

My suggested caption is "Crazy lady with frizzy hair kidnaps half-naked toddler," but I'm sure you can do better.

Well, I won't keep you in suspense for very long. The Birthday Boy is a much better shot than I am. My apologies to all y'all who voted for me for letting you down. Apparently, I underestimated Dan's skill with a handgun, which I suppose is comforting since he is the one who has been practicing. But would-be home invaders should still fear me, because based on my shot pattern on the person-shaped target we used, my strategy is to shoot bad guys in the, umm, guy region. Dan assures me that this will be very effective as a home defense strategy, but since that is not where I was aiming, it doesn't say a lot for my sharpshooting skills.

Here we are shooting. First Dan:

Then me. There was this girl next to me who was putting round after round into the exact middle of all the targets. It was impressive. I think she was laughing at me.

We did lots of other things to celebrate the Weekend of Dan, including the much-anticipated eating of the above-pictured ice cream cake, which unfortunately is still going on, since the smallest ice cream cake you can buy serves six to eight people. If just the two of you eat it, the cake probably helps you gain six to eight pounds, but who is counting?

We also went to the aquarium and botanical gardens to hang out and see the butterfly pavilion, which was fun. Turns out butterflies are really really fast and rarely stay still, so this is the only clear picture I got of one even though there were hundreds of them in that pavilion. Still, isn't it pretty?

We had a picnic after that.

That evening, after our shooting spree, Dan and I went and ate steak, which is a nice manly birthday kind of thing to do. Then we headed over to the home of Mr. and Mrs. J for a little gathering to see our friend Mike, who was back in town for a couple of days. Mrs. J, ever the awesome hostess, even had birthday candles and cake for Dan. Here's a picture of the group:

Sunday was Father's Day and therefore Part II of the Weekend of Dan. Kate gave him a Wii game he's been wanting, and then promptly demanded that they play it together before church. They play Wii like this a lot, with Kate holding a controller and totally convinced that she is playing too.

As you can see from this next picture, it was a very suspenseful game. Dan let Kate think she won.

Later in the day, there was more meat in the form of the grilled shish kabobs that Dan always always asks me to make for his birthday, and of course, some quality Daddy daughter time in the camp chairs that we have never taken camping. This is about as rugged as we get.

The photos posted here illustrate two points. The first point, in keeping with the title, is "It's Dan's birthday tomorrow!" The second point of the pictures is to let the grandmas see Kate's new hair cut. I took her to get her bangs trimmed the other day because she was starting to look like the guy from Flock of Seagulls. Now we have cute bangs instead.

In less than 12 hours, we here in the Wachdorf house are embarking on what Dan has dubbed "The Weekend of Dan." Tomorrow is his birthday, and Sunday is Father's Day, so he has taken the opportunity to just call a three-day holiday in his honor and plan an elaborate series of celebrations, some of which I think will be more amusing than others. Let's see if you can pick that part of the story out for yourselves. The plans for tomorrow are as follows:

1. Breakfast at Einstein's Bagels.
2. Ice cream cake. Dan loves him some ice cream cake. Seriously, seriously loves it.
3. Presents. I am probably looking forward to this more than Dan is, just because it will mean that he will know what I got him and will therefore be able to stop asking me about it every. ten. minutes.
4. Having secured a babysitter for the evening, Dan and I will go to restaurant of his choosing (he still hasn't made up his mind, so for all I know, we're going to Taco Bell.)
5. After dinner, we will go to an indoor shooting range for target practice.

Yes. That's right. My husband, when told that I was up for whatever he wanted to do for his birthday, chose a romantic evening at the firing range. The back story on this is that Dan recently purchased a hand gun. I am fine with this, since we have taken very extensive security precautions with it in light of Kate's presence in our home. Still, at no point have I expressed a desire to shoot the thing. In fact, I think I may have expressed the exact opposite sentiment, something along the lines of hoping that we never, ever have reason to use the gun. It's not that I have anything against guns. In a recent conversation, some friends from Alabama and I agreed that when you grow up in the South, guns are just kind of around, like scenery. People shoot guns recreationally, they hunt with them, they have them in their trucks. In fact, you can pretty much bet that several people around you at any given moment in Mississippi are packing. So it's not that I recoil at the sight of a gun. But my first thought upon seeing one is about the kind of extreme circumstances in which one might have need of a gun, and those thoughts do not make me go "Woohoo!" This, I am starting to understand after six years of marriage, is not how men think, or at least not how my husband thinks. My husband sees a gun and thinks "I need to shoot that gun. And so does my wife." So off to the shooting range we go.

The ostensible reason for this jaunt to the land of ammo and testosterone is that since we do own a gun now, I need to learn how to handle it reliably and safely, and that's probably true. But I know that once we're past all the safety stuff, it's going to turn into a competition. So I invite you, dear readers, to place your bets now: Can I outshoot Dan? Here is all the relevant information you need: I have fired a gun before, but not for a very long time. I am, however, not a terrible shot once I remember what I am doing. Dan on the other hand has been target shooting for a while now, and claims that he is pretty good. I, on the other hand, am very good at distracting Dan when he's trying to concentrate, and I am totally prepared to play dirty, so that may even the playing field a bit. Leave your birthday wishes, predictions and wagers in the comments section, and I'll let you know what happens. That is, after I finish grand marshalling the festivities Dan has planned for his Father's Day celebration, which include more gifts, more ice cream cake, and the grilled shish-kabobs he wants me to cook for him. If Kate knew how much ice cream there is going to be in this house this weekend, she would stay awake counting down the hours until tomorrow.

Our friends Mr. and Mrs. J got some great photos of a group of the little girls from our church at a recent picnic. Here's their daughter, Heidi, giving Kate a big hug. I understand that they promptly fell over in a heap and started crying after this photo was snapped, but don't let that detract from the sweetness of the moment.

Wagon rides! Here we have Ellie, Lily, Kate and Heidi. They couldn't get enough of the wagon, and suckered quite a few people into giving them rides. I mean, how could anyone resist all that cuteness?

And a photo of Kate and I, rare, since I'm usually behind the camera. I've given up trying to find photos in which we are both looking at the camera and she actually looks happy to be with me. Now I just settle for me looking happy to have caught her.

Dear Kate,

About six months ago, I bought this little insulated lunch sack, the kind designed to keep food cool. At the time, I bought it so I would have something to send snacks in when you went to our church's Mom's Morning Out program one day every other week. I'd fill it up with food on that one day, and then it would sit on a shelf in the pantry, empty for the next two weeks.

I bring this up because I realized the other day that in the last month, I have packed a lunch in that sack almost every week day, and that this marks a major transition for us. Suddenly, this month, you have realized that there are things in the world outside of our house, and you want to go and see them. So we go. We go to the zoo and the botanical gardens and the library and the park and sometimes to Target just so you can walk up and down the aisles and greet your public. "Hi! Hi! Hi!" you say to everyone who passes, and you wave like you're on a parade float.

This new phase of activity has been made possible by the disappearance of your morning nap, and I have to say that I'm happy to be on this side of that transition. For what seemed like forever, we were in this weird place where you didn't want to take a nap in the morning, but you still needed one. So some days you'd fall asleep in the morning and then refuse to take your afternoon nap, making you an absolute sleep-deprived mess by 5 p.m. Other days, you'd skip the morning nap and be in a state of delirium by the time your afternoon nap rolled around. Since anything that involves disruption of your sleep patterns is basically the shortest route between your regular fun personality and the crankiest version of you, I really didn't have time to think about what it would be like once you got down to the one nap. I was just trying to survive the getting there. And then suddenly, one day, I realized that you are a one-nap girl, so once you get up for the day around 7 a.m., you're ready to go. All morning. Until 1 p.m.

I have to tell you that when I first processed the fact that there were now seven straight hours of consciousness in your day, I kind of panicked. I mean, what was I going to do with you for that long? For a couple of weeks, I tried to just proceed as normal, keeping you occupied with toys and crayons and Elmo videos while I got dressed for the day and tried to get things done around the house. That did not work at all. You were bored, and it basically turned you into the Seven Hour Roving Force of Destruction. By the time I'd successfully showered, the living room looked like post-hurricane news footage. I'd follow you around all morning trying to clean up messes you had made mostly out of boredom.

I realized after a couple of weeks that I was going to have to get a new strategy and that it was probably going to have to involve getting you out of the house more. But I really didn't want to. I'm kind of a homebody, Kate. Your dad likes to use the word "antisocial," but I think that's overly harsh. What is true is that I could easily stay in my house for a week at a time and not be too bothered. So embracing my new role as Tour Director of Albuquerque has been exhausting. I think it's yet another way that parenting is challenging me to grow as a person in ways I wouldn't necessarily choose for myself. I'll know I've really arrived if I ever find myself on the sidelines of a Little League game. But we're not there yet, so these days, I'm just trying to get really good at packing sack lunches, sunscreen, and everything else we'll need to survive a morning out, sometimes exploring Albuquerque on our own, sometimes seeing friends. Speaking of which, here you are having tea with your friend Heidi.

And having a conversation with Clarence, hopefully a chat about your wedding plans, since his mom and I have agreed that you two will marry one another when you're older. We might let you have a vote about it too, but it is depends on if you are nice to us.

It hasn't taken you long to embrace your new social calendar. In fact, if 10 a.m. rolls around and we haven't left the house, you stand by the door to the garage and chant "Car! Car! Car!" Then you go get your shoes. Then you go get me my shoes. You are nothing if not persistent. This leads me to another area in which you are developing some new skills, for better or for worse. Right now, you remember everything. Seriously, everything. This is good because you are picking up new words every day. You also know how to count to two (hey, you have to start somewhere) and that B comes after A. But your real area of expertise is remembering every time you were ever fed some kind of food that you liked, and where we put it away when we were done. A few weeks ago, we bought some ice cream and you saw us put it away in the freezer. Big mistake. For the next week, every time you walked past the freezer, you would launch into this elaborate routine of signing "ice cream," jumping up and down and generally conveying the idea that you would like some ice cream, right now, pleasepleasepleaseplease. This happened about a dozen times a day until we made a big show of finishing the last of the ice cream and then making you watch us throw the empty container away.

Now on that evidence alone, I wouldn't expect anyone to believe me about your taste-photographic memory. I mean, I pretty much remember everywhere anyone ever gave me ice cream, too, and I try to go back to those places as often as possible in the hope that someone will give me some more. What happened when I started giving you half a Flintstone vitamin is another matter entirely. At your last checkup, your pediatrician and I were discussing you and your general attitude toward food, which can be summed up as "Eh. I could live without it." Except that Kate! You can't live without food! So if I had my way, you would eat a lot more food, but you have other plans, plans that involve eating like an Olympic swimmer for a day or so and then spending two weeks sustaining yourself by nibbling at the corners of crackers and eating half-mouthfuls of banana here and there. Our doctor assures me that you are healthy, but she said that if I wanted, I could give you a vitamin to make sure you're getting all your nutrients. So a couple of weeks later, I picked up some chewable vitamins and started giving them to you at night.

It's so funny to me how the smallest things, done with the best of intentions, can backfire on you in parenting. At first, you weren't really sure how you felt about the vitamins. You would put them in your mouth, take them back out, look at them for a while, and sometimes set one down on the coffee table and walk away, like "Well I'm done with that now." Since that's pretty much your reaction to everything you put in your mouth that isn't ice cream, I just kept giving you the vitamins, and sure enough, you eventually started eating them without complaint. Then you started asking for them at bed time. You call them "yummies" which you pronounce "ummies," and I thought that was so cute. Then you started asking for ummies in the morning, and at lunch, and in the afternoon, and every 20 minutes. Today I think we had the Vitamin Conversation at least 45 times and Kate, if I hear the work ummy one more time, I am going to lock myself in the laundry room and turn the dryer on to muffle the sound of my insane laughter as my mind finally leaves me. I may be the first parent in world history who has to ban Flintstone vitamins from my home like they were sugar-coated and soaked in trans fat. Your doctor is going to ask how the vitamins have been going, and I'm going to have to tell her that we couldn't handle it and had to quit and enter Vitamin Rehab.

Since you're a little Flinstone addict, it's good to be able to report that this month you are much more spontaneously affectionate than you have ever been before. You have always liked to snuggle, but lately, you will come running up to your daddy or me and give us a hug, or a kiss on the cheek when we're reading together at night. When I'm putting you down for a nap, you lay your head on my shoulder and pat me on the back, like I do to you when I'm comforting you after a bump on the head or the tragic news that you can't have ice cream at 9:30 a.m. I think of those bursts of affection from you as rewards for me, and also as an opportunity to remember that life is probably a little challenging for you too right now. I know that I have to tell you no a lot these days. I'm told by other parents that I'll be doing that in different ways at different times in your life for a long time to come. So I think it's important to say that I only tell you no because I love you and want what is best for you. And sometimes because I just can't handle another Elmo video.

I love you,
Mommy

P.S. The theme of this month's pictures is "Look! Kate's hair is long enough to stay in pigtails!" So this last photo is of what her hair looks like when we take the pigtails out at the end of the day.

About a month ago, I sheepishly admitted on Facebook and here on the blog that I had gone out and bought a copy of Stephenie Meyer's much-talked-about book Twilight, the first volume in a series of four about the love story between immortal vampire Edward Cullen and human Bella Swan. Having recently finished reading the last of the books, I've got some opinions to share now. I know that all three of you have been holding your breath. Oh, and spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't read the books and plans to do so.

I have done it. I have read four books about a vampire. A teenaged vampire at that, and golly did that ever make me look forward to the day when I have teenagers of my own. I haven't read that much whiny self-centered drivel since I read back over my own journals from high school. But I want those of you who love Twilight to hang in here with me, because I wouldn't have kept reading through all four books if I had totally hated the whole experience. I will have some nice things to say. Unfortunately, there's just no way to avoid saying one really harsh thing here at the start. Here goes.

Stephenie Meyer is, well, she's just not that good of a writer, at least not at the start of the Twilight series. Before you send me hate mail, let me clarify that I am not attacking the woman's creativity or storytelling chops. Clearly, she hit upon a relatively new plot idea, which is difficult to do, and is imaginative enough to give the vampires-walk-among-us world she's creating some truly interesting angles. The vampires don't have to drink human blood. They can survive on animal blood. That is great! I would never come up with that! That is why I have not written a best-selling fantasy series, and probably never will. My hat is off to her. I'm also willing to concede that maybe the writing in Twilight is actually really good, because Bella Swan is supposed to be a junior in high school, and the first book surely does read like something written by a high school girl. A really boy-crazy high school girl. That is a problem, because we're supposed to perceive Bella as some kind of strong silent loner of a gal who is way more mature than her age. But I'm telling you, if Twilight had a drinking game attached to it where you had to take a swig of your favorite adult beverage every time Bella Swan used the word "gorgeous" or "incredible" to describe Edward's physical appearance, you'd be passed out under your reading chair within 25 minutes. Instead, I just counted the number of times I put the book down and laughed until I almost cried over some particularly awful sentence.

With that out of the way, I'll admit that it may not be fair to criticize these books on literary grounds, since I don't think they even attempt to be "serious" literature. Once you make your hero a vampire you're probably done waiting for that phone call from the Pulitzer Prize people. It's all about plot, and while that's not what I want to read all the time, it has its place. Kind of like candy. Not good for every meal, but unbeatable when you have a real craving for it. Still, the thing that bothered me from the start and continued to nag at me through all four books was that I never figured out what exactly made these two characters, Edward and Bella, so special aside from the fact that he's a vampire, she's not, and they think each other are really really hot. I kept waiting for someone to make me care about this couple on an emotional level, and it just never happened in the first book.

The good news is that if you keep reading the books, at a certain point you just accept that Edward and Bella are the hero/heroine duo of this story because you've been beat over the head with it so artlessly, and then you can focus on other, more likeable characters. The bad news is that If you don't buy the love story, there just isn't a whole lot to that first book, and that leads to one thing I concluded about the series overall -- it is very inconsistent, but it does improve. Having read the whole series, I would say that Twilight itself is absolutely the weakest book of the four, and by Breaking Dawn, the last book, Meyer has actually grown or been edited into being a decent writer. That is a big relief because man, that first book has some serious problems. Sure, there's that whole danger and suspense plot at the end, but that felt completely disconnected from the rest of the story. It was like halfway through the book Meyer forgot she was writing a love story and decided to write an action movie instead. But I'm not going to pretend that she didn't hook me on some level. I closed the first book thinking two contradictory things: First, "That was absurd. I could write this garbage." and then, "Holy cow, I have to know what happens next."

So onward I plowed. And I am glad, because it was in Book 2, New Moon, that I really got to know my favorite character of the whole series, the first one I believed in, and the only one I really rooted for during the remaining books -- Jacob Black, werewolf by birth, a childhood friend of Bella's who becomes her best friend when vampire Edward up and leaves at the height of his ongoing "You shouldn't date me, Bella Swan, because I am a very dangerous vampire and am no good for you" routine. I will have a lot to say about that in a minute, but first, Jacob.

Jacob is so endearing as a character. He's funny. He's likeable. He has a pulse. Maybe if Meyer had chosen Jacob as the romantic lead, I'd be happier with the books overall. But she didn't, so we have Jacob as the stalwart friend who grows to love Bella romantically and must deal with the fact that for reasons beyond anyone's understanding (mine in particular) she consistently chooses Edward. Yet Jacob always makes decisions that are good for Bella, even when that requires him to do things to help his romantic rival. He is, in short, a really good guy. So I feel thankful that Meyer at least gave him some kind of happy resolution, albeit a pretty weird one. (I just can't get into all the mechanics of vampire and werewolfdom here, people. If you need to know, you'll have to read the books yourselves.) The triangle between Jacob and Bella and Edward was the most compelling part of the books for me, even though I knew I was rooting for the losing team. After all, no one tells you that these books are about "that girl who falls in love with a vampire, but then marries the werewolf instead." No, these are the vampire books, so Jacob is pretty much doomed, and that is a real shame.

That leads me back to Edward, and why I could never find him appealing as a romantic lead: At the end of New Moon, when Edward returns to the story because he just can't stay away from Bella, I realized that I can't like Edward very much because he is That Guy. I think a lot of us have That Guy in our lives at some point, ladies.He's the one who keeps you hanging because he just hasn't made up his mind. He's complicated and mysterious and deep and that's intriguing. But eventually, most of us grow past the adolescent girl and, therefore, past the immature guy. Then we want a real man, someone who can make up his mind. Someone with a job, preferably, and who wants a life with us that includes some security and a family. I concede that eventually, Edward does become Bella's protector and committed man. Maybe they settle down and own a farm somewhere after the books are over. But before that happens, we have to somehow root for Bella to turn away from Jacob, who is her friend, and loves her, and can provide for her, and won't require her to trade her humanity for a life with him. Instead, we're supposed to want her to choose forever-17 Edward, who seems to love her based largely on physical attraction. Personally I never recovered enough from my feeling that she was making the wrong choice to be happy about the entire rest of the story. On the upside, the conflict of all that playing out made Eclipse, the third in the series, a decent book, and one that held my attention much more than the previous two did.

Of course, when we're rolling our way into Breaking Dawn, the last book of the series, the choice is made and now the chips fall. Going in, I felt like that was going to be pretty anticlimactic, but wowee, I was wrong. If you've been waiting, this is the part where I eat a lot of my skeptical words: That is a great read. It really is. It took her three books to get me, but she got me in the end. I read that book like it was on fire. I held my breath. And I finally cared about Edward and Bella. I still think that if Meyer had done some things differently, I could have cared a lot sooner, but better late than never, right? In fact, my only objection in Breaking Dawn was pretty minor, but I still have to mention it: Who names a kid Renesmee? That is not a name! I laughed OUT LOUD every time I read it. It took away from the overall effect of some of the more intense scenes ever so slightly.

So to recap, the report card from me on these books is as follows:

Twilight: D- Badly written, terribly executed, saved from total failure only by interesting premise.
New Moon: C+ Kind of boring, too much whining from Bella, but we get Jacob, which is worth a lot.
Eclipse: B+ Actually a character-driven story, and one that I can care about, even though I don't think the better man wins. Pretty good stuff.
Breaking Dawn: A Much better writing, possibly because of breaking the story up to be told in part by my man Jacob Black. Actually has a connected plot throughout. Really fun to read.

On the whole, I'd read Twilight again, if only because it was a fun detour from the kind of thing I usually read. I'm probably going to watch the movies, too. It's very creative and enjoyable, and has given me my new dinner party question: "If you were a vampire, what would your superpower be?" (Mine would be the ability to clean the entire house using only my mind.) The only thing that troubles me about Twilight on a serious level is that the books are, undoubtedly, marketed at adolescent girls. I think that for anyone mature enough to see the flaws, the story is pretty harmless, but nonetheless, it sets forth a pretty distorted picture of what it is to love someone. The idea seems to be that being in love is all about the drama. If you're a guy, it's about finding someone you just can't resist in a physical sense. If you're a girl, it's all about sacrificing everything normal and traditional for someone who may or may not be good for you because you've decided based on pure emotion that this person is your soul mate. Oh, and he's really really hot. Basically, it's how teenagers already think, and it's not a great way to choose a spouse.

Having been married for a few years now, I can tell you that Dan has yet to need to defend me from lethal threat, much less armies of the undead. Not that he wouldn't if the need arose, but it just doesn't come up that much in real life. What he does do is get up and go to work every day to support our family. He takes the garbage out. He is a great dad. He loves me. There is very little drama, and most of it is caused by Kate. Obviously, we wouldn't make a very compelling lead couple for a fantasy series. But I'd take what we've got over Twilight's version of love any day.

I did tell Dan it would be OK if he bought me a Mercedes like Edward bought for Bella. A Porsche would also be fine.

We've had an interesting week here in the Wachdorf home. The kind of week your insurance company is not too happy to hear about. Health insurance. Car insurance. Take your pick. We are breaking everyone's statistical risk models this week. It started with Kate.

Saturday before last, Dan and I were in the kitchen talking while we were getting dinner ready. This sounds too active, so let me rephrase: We were standing around in the kitchen waiting for some Trader Joe's Mandarin Chicken to heat up in the oven. We were having some idle conversation,and appeared ready to cruise to a somewhat boring but not unpleasant evening at home. Then, the Great Variable that is having a small child took effect. Kate, in a moment that I have replayed in my mind 1,200 times since it happened, walked up to the oven and paused for a moment to look through the window at what was inside. The reason this moment keeps bothering me is because it is the moment I could have changed what happened next. I could have told Kate to move away from the oven. I could have made her move. She weighs all of 22 pounds. She pretty much has to do what I say. But it never occurred to me that she was going to do what she did next, which is that she stuck her fingers in between the bottom of the oven door and the broiler compartment of our gas oven. It's an external part of the oven, and I would not have thought it was very hot. Of course, being a rational adult, I would never stick my hand down there to check, either. And it turns out that it is hot, in case you wondered. Really freaking hot.

Over the course of the next hour, there was a lot of crying, some of it done by Kate, plenty of it done by me, and her poor little fingers developed some pretty rough looking blisters. Kate eventually fell asleep, and when she woke up in the morning, she actually didn't seem to be in any pain at all. But her hand looked just terrible, especially this one blister that I promise you was the size of a dime and thicker than the entire circumference of the finger it was on. So that afternoon, we took her to urgent care, where I told the whole story to at least four surprisingly understanding health care professionals, none of whom tried to make me feel worse about what had happened, and Kate's hand was examined by a doctor who pronounced it to be healing just fine. Ten days later, I can barely even tell where the burns were. Kids' skin heals so amazingly quickly, certainly by design since they are so very haphazard with it.

Skipping the part where I process all the massive guilt that I STILL feel about Kate's accident, let us move along to Incident No. 2. This Saturday morning, a week after the oven drama, Dan and Kate went on their usual trip to Einstein's Bagels to have some daddy daughter time and let me catch a few extra minutes of sleep. (Bless that wonderful husband of mine for starting this tradition.) This went fine until Dan attempted to drive home on a New Mexico Freeway, an absolute obstacle course of orange cones, uneven lanes and concrete barriers. I have been living in Albuquerque for six years now, and they have been doing some form of construction on some part of this particular Interstate for all six of those years. It. Never. Ends.

In traffic on this particular morning, Dan was being edged closer and closer to the barrier for one of these construction projects by a semi truck driver who was taking more than his fair share of the road. On Dan's left hand side was a long line of the never-ending New Mexico orange cones, and Dan managed to avoid hitting all of them. Except for the last one, which was conveniently located about two feet further into the line of traffic than the rest. That one caught the side mirror on our Saturn and blasted it into oblivion. The mirror was hanging on to the car by a mangled cable when Dan made it home. The car insurance representative Dan had on speaker phone a few minutes later actually asked if the orange cone was damaged. Because that is the main thing.

Now, as we move on to Incident No. 3, bear in mind that the preceding story was about our blue Saturn, the car that I usually drive. Dan drives a silver Nissan Sentra to work, a car that is extremely reliable and efficient, if comically small for Dan, since it used to be my car. Dan basically folds himself into it, and one day I expect his feet to pop out of the bottom of it, like a Flintstone car. This car is generally parked in our driveway. Yesterday morning, I woke up a little bit when Dan left the house at his usual crack-of-dawn hour, but quickly fell back asleep. So I was startled when about five minutes later, I opened by eyes and Dan was standing right there at my bedside again, asking if I left anything important in the Nissan the last time I drove it. No, I said, and I think I actually rolled over in bed before it occurred to me to ask why he needed to know this? Why? Oh, well, just because someone broke into the car last night.

Technically, it's a bit of a stretch to say they broke in. There wasn't any breaking in involved, since we hadn't locked the car. But it's not like that makes it totally cool that someone just opened up our car and rooted around to see what they could take. The take-home lesson for any would-be car plunderers might be that you should target higher-end vehicles if you want to find anything worth taking, because all they got out of our car was Dan's XM Radio equipment and an i-Pod tramsmitter. Since there is also a garage door opener in our car and anyone who was in the car could easily have gotten into the garage, we took a good look around there to make sure our highly valuable collection of half-empty paint cans, bags of outgrown baby clothes and dirty laundry was safe. Surprisingly, it was untouched.

I'm not sure I have come to any really deep conclusions about this week we've had. Out of everything that happened, the only thing I still feel upset about is Kate's hand getting burned, and even that could have been much worse. The rearview mirror thing was mildly inconvenient, since we have to wait for the part to come in and in the meantime I'm turning around completely backward in my seat every time I need to change lanes. But Kate and Dan weren't hurt. The door between our garage and our house was deadbolted, so I don't feel creeped out by the thought of anyone having a serious chance to be in our house. I'm thankful I don't have anything to be more concerned about from any of these incidents. I don't actually believe in luck, but all the same, I don't think this would be my best week to go to Vegas. I worry that maybe a slot machine would fall over and break my toe.

Before I had a child and would think about why I wanted to have one, I am pretty sure that this exact picture came to my mind: Dan with our child on his lap, reading a book after a nice family dinner on a lazy summer evening. On this side of the chasm between my pre-child life and post-child life, I now realize that these moments of idyllic family quiet are few and far between, but they are also sweeter than I ever imagined, even in my most air-brushed fantasies. Of course, I probably thought the book would be a great classic like The Velveteen Rabbit, and not an Elmo pop-up book, but again, that's reality for you.

One of the fun things about Kate right now is that she loves to pretend. One of her favorite games is to pretend that she is putting her monkey, her Elmo doll and her baby doll to bed. Her favorite version of this game happens in our bed, and she gets them all tucked in before she settles down beside them. It doesn't exactly leave much room for Dan, since she tends to pick his side of the bed for this little tableaux and squawks at him if he tries to reclaim his spot. He's not at all whipped by a toddler. Not at all.

Lately we've been trying to get Kate to learn the first few questions of the Children's Catechism. We're not too intense about it, since her attention span is pretty limited. Mostly we just ask the questions and then answer them ourselves. Frankly, I feel kind of stupid. But every once in a while, Kate will actually answer the very first catechism question, I think because it's the only answer she can really say. The question goes like this:

Q. Who made you?
A. God. (Which Kate pronounces "Dod." We take what we can get.)

Or at least, that's how the Q & A is supposed to go. The other night, Kate was in the bathtub, playing with her toys and splashing around. I had gone through the questions a couple of times, so this time I just asked the first question and then paused and prompted her to answer me. Here's how that went:

Me: Kate! Who made you?

Kate: (long pause ... thinking): Daddy!

I didn't really know what to say to that one. I mean, she's not completely wrong, but I was hoping we wouldn't have to have that conversation for another few years. Wow.

And speaking of all things baby, head on over to my lovely and talented sister-in-law's blog for some fabulous news. Looks like Kate only has a few more months to hog that grandbaby spotlight on the Rice side of the family. Woo-hoo!