toddlerspit: this week

[If you are a stalker/serial killer, please ignore this post. E. is here, and he's very burly and has a fiercely sized maglite that will bash your skull in.]

E. has been in Berkeley all week, installing a laser.

Or so he says.

No, really, he's installing a laser. I just thought that might sound mysterious. But given recent posts, perhaps I shouldn't joke. Misleading and in bad taste.

Perhaps. And perhaps some of us are not at Berkeley after all!

Kidding. He really is installing a laser. At Berkeley.

Anyway, that has meant single mom-ness this week, which for the first time ever has been not just not-miserable, not just tolerable, but actually fun. I mean, the girls are still in school, so I can't toot my own horn too much, but we've had a really nice week. The weather has been beautiful and it's so easy to stick the girls in the car and go do things now.

There was a beautiful morning run on Green Mountain:

Hello, brown cloud!

I'm trying to incorporate some hill work into my training, because the Wild West Relay is all mountain running. At, like, 10,000 feet. I don't want to die, so now I force myself, wheezing and crying, up some local hills.

I must be insane.

Here is Addie, at one of the last soccer practices of the season:

Her big thing is to wear mismatched socks right now. She wears them to school with flip-flops. This makes it sound like she has something wrong with her, but she just rocks that look. She especially likes to wear her santa socks with her flip-flops. Other than that, I think she looks very grown-up in this picture.

The after-practice picture, at the grocery store, not so much:

She wants to play soccer again with her team next year. I'm glad for this. It's fun to watch her run around on the field. Though I screwed up at practice the other night and yelled at her to pay attention and the coach told me he could handle things.

: {

There are things at which I am not needed, and things at which I am needed, and sometimes, it's hard to know the difference. Like with Addie's 2nd grade "passion project" on Mt. Rushmore. Should I have stepped in to help more, so that it didn't look quite so much like a chimpanzee made it?

All the other kids' projects looked prettty nice. Like maybe they had some help. After getting a reality check from my neighbor ladies (what to call them? They're some of my best friends. Neighbor ladies doesn't quite to it. I'll call them the "Nadies" for now), I decided not to worry about it. I've decided that Addie's project is, in fact, one of my favorites. And Addie knows a whole lot about Mt. Rushmore. So there.

Here's Milo:

Every morning and every night he looks at me with total forlorn-ness, asking where E. is. I don't scratch his head just the right way, apparently. Poor boy. Also, he is losing so much effing fur that I threatened to vacuum his very body today. It's Armasheddon 2012, I tell you what.

[I mean it, creep! E. is going to go all ghetto on your ass! And my dog will bite your kneecaps off and shove them in your ears!]

Finally, here are some pictures I took of Nolie the other morning. She can be very grumpy in the mornings (don't know where she gets it) but this week has been mostly quite pleasant. The only flare up happened when I took these: