Sales meeting work comes in three flavors: denial, avoidance, and raspberry panic.

Right now I'm in denial of all the projects piling up into a giant bottleneck, have you noticed? It's kind of like the toilet you don't want to flush because you know it's going to back up and overflow.

I'd rather blog than plunge a clog. I think that's my new motto.

Onward to avoidance! In which our hero nonchalantly exits the proverbial bathroom and hopes to be long gone before any "issues" are discovered.

I'm going to invent a fad diet called The Monochromatic Revolution. And because you're all my special friends, here is an exclusive sneak preview of what is soon to be known as the diet that revolutionized the way people approach healthy eating and weight loss. It will also make me rich, but that's beside the point.

This groundbreaking regimen is based on ancient principles of light infusion, color psychology, nutrient density, and inner harmony. Of course, all supporting scientific studies and case-based evidence has been reviewed by scholars from around the world. I won't tell you what they said when they reviewed it, but at least one review contained the word "remarkable."

So here it is, an excerpt from my yet-to-be-written new book, Take Control: Lose Weight and Feel Great with the Monochromatic Revolution!

I guarantee you will lose weight if you follow this plan to the letter in combination with the recommended 90 minutes of physical activity per day.*

How it works: Each day you will eat only foods of a certain color. On "red" days you will eat only red foods. As much as possible, the foods you choose should naturally contain the color of the day, so you can't just add red food coloring to your mayonnaise or binge on cherry Lifesavers.

For example…

Day 1: Orange
Breakfast: 1 tangerine, 1/2 cup sliced mango, 1 slice pumpkin bread with 1 tsp orange marmalade
Snack: 10 baby carrots
Lunch: 1 baked yam, 3 oz. cheddar cheese, 1 ripe peach
Snack: 1 cup sliced cantaloupe
Dinner: 1 cup macaroni and cheese, 1 cup baked acorn squash, 1/2 cup mandarin orange sections
Dessert: 1/2 cup orange sherbet

You may also choose to purchase our convenient, color-coded meal packages that contain an entire day's ready-to-eat meal plan. These packages will be available for a limited time at the low, introductory price of just $29.95 each – that's a savings of nearly 30% off the suggested retail price!

When you've reached your goal weight, then you'll be ready to embark on the next step of Multichromatic weight maintenance. You'll begin combining foods of different colors in the same meal. Proceed with caution here, because the wrong color combinations can sabotage your weight loss and reduce your sense of well being. My book will explain precisely how to avoid this pitfall and learn from common mistakes.

Are you intrigued? Do you happen to be sitting on a $30,000 advance and a publisher's contract? Then go ahead and float it this way, sister. I'm more than willing to start turning out chapters.

*Consult your physician before beginning this or any other diet and/or exercise program.

Oh, how I love ordering yarn online. I've only ordered from elann.com and I can't see any reason to ever not order from them because they're so wonderful. Well okay, maybe if I needed a specific type of yarn and they didn't have it… well. That would be a reason. But I digress. Go order something from elann.com right now, you'll see what I mean.

I love coming home and finding a box of yarn in the mail. And then opening it. And feeling it. And making swatches, and unraveling them, and swatching some more. I won't lie. I don't really make proper swatches. I don't do the whole 4x4 washed and dried and properly gauged swatch route. I knit until I get bored, check the gauge, figure that looks about right, and then start a new project.

The problem is actually that I love starting new projects but then I get bored and shove it behind something heavy, like a bookcase.

So yesterday I came home to a fresh box of yarn that I'd ordered for a new baby project. Someone at work is always pregnant. And I love making baby things. So I stashed my current project (that brings the tally to, um, seven half-knitted things stuffed out of sight) and spent the evening playing with the new yarn.

I have no excuse for ordering new yarn, actually. I have an entire room devoted to holding yarn. Don't get too excited, the room is also holding sewing materials, scrapbooking and card making supplies, paint, canvases, etc. This room basically holds a bunch of stuff that keeps the right side of my brain from becoming bored, restless, and destructive. Inner children need art supplies, that's just the way it is. Luckily I have a husband who understands this and doesn't begrudge the extra room being used in such a way. Now that I think about it, the room also houses his "electronics graveyard," which, in a way, also nurtures his own geeky inner child.

Anyway, I ditched knitting group last week due to a school project emergency, but I hope the ditching wasn't contagious to the rest of the group. I'm feeling knitty. And no, I didn't actually mean that as a pun. But these I did:

• holy knit
  
• knit happens
  
• knit hits the fan
  
• I have to take a knit
  
• looks like knit
  
• smells like knit
  
• they knit all over it
  
• are you knitting me?
  
• take knit
  
• give a knit
  
• what is all this knit?

I now open the floor to all you lurking punsters. You know who you are.

Over the weekend, Gertrude picked up the adorable but frustrating habit of awakening at the crack of dawn and plodding into her parent's room for a squirmy, restless, early morning cuddle. The sweet cheek stroking and hugging would last for about five minutes before it degenerated into whiny demands for television, snack foods, beverages, and all of my pillows (not one, but all of them).

I've been trying to be patient with it, because I know it won't last. I was just thinking back to Matilda's days as a cuddly 3-year-old. She used to do the same thing, wake me up wanting snuggles, and more often than not I sent her back to her own bed. I wish I would have cuddled her more when she was small and cuddly, because now getting her out of bed in the morning requires bracing yourself for growling, flailing, and sometimes the baring of teeth.

It's very hard to be patient when you're robbed of the last good hour of sleep before the alarm on a Monday morning.

It's less hard when you open your eyes and see a smiling, bright-eyed little one resting her chin on the edge of your mattress.

It's not fair that they have such power over us. Blame the cuteness.

Leading off with the TMI news of the day, it's that time of the month and not only do I feel compelled to eat everything within arm's reach, coincidentally none of my pants seem to fit.

So I'm crabby. Because the pants I wanted to wear this morning looked like sausage casings. And I dreamed incessantly about a gay couple down the street throwing out perfectly good bar stools because they'd gone out of style, and I really wanted them to give me their old bar stools, but they told me I wasn't cool enough to pull them off. Instead, they gave me a chair shaped like a high-heeled hooker shoe. So here I am, in fat pants, feeling bloated, dissed, and unworthy of nice bar furniture.

But thankfully today is not about me! It's happy-birthday-day to my sweet husband, the one who makes being married new and fun every day, who laughs at the same twisted humor I do, and talks to me about important stuff like feelings and ideas. He's the kind of dad other kids wish they had. His girls always come first, and you can see it in his eyes how much they mean to him, and how he'd do anything to make sure they grow into beautiful, smart, happy human beings.

He also has this annoying knack of guessing what his presents are with spooky accuracy, or wheedling the secrets out of me. This year is no exception. But I think I've kept him in the dark on at least one thing. I hope he at least acts surprised.

Tonight is dinner at Bandana's ("We hand rub all our meats!") followed by Angel cake, as Gert calls it, and cool whip. Draw your own conclusions.

In the meantime, birthday boy has tagged this blog for its first ever Meme:

Immediately following there is a list of different occupations. You must select at least 5 of them (feel free to select more). You may add more if you like to your list before you pass it on (after you select 5 of the items as it was passed to you). Each one begins with "If I could be..." Of the 5 you selected, you are to finish each phrase with what you would do as a member of that profession. For example, if the selected occupation was "pirate" you might take the phrase "If I could be a pirate..." and add to it "I would sail the 7 Seas, dating lasses from around the worlde." See how easy that is? Here's the list:

If I could be a scientist...
If I could be a farmer...
If I could be a musician...
If I could be a doctor...
If I could be a painter...
If I could be a gardener...
If I could be a missionary...
If I could be a chef...
If I could be an architect...
If I could be a linguist...
If I could be a psychologist...
If I could be a librarian...
If I could be an athlete...
If I could be a lawyer...
If I could be an innkeeper...
If I could be a professor...
If I could be a writer...
If I could be a llama-rider...
If I could be a bonnie pirate...
If I could be an astronaut...

My answers:

If I could be a linguist... I would have done the college professor who taught the classes, because lordy was he hot. In a patched-jacket, unkempt, intellectual, language-wrangling sort of way. See, you think I'm kidding but I'm not.

If I could be a gardener... I'd be able to figure out a better method for starting seeds than setting them out in trays of dirt on the windowsill of my bedroom where my cat might easily mistake it for a place to take a crap. Because, you know, there ain't nothing like crapping in front of a window when the opportunity presents itself.

If I could be an athlete... I'd want to be the sort of creepy, circus-performer type of person who can bend over backwards and stick his or her out head between his or her knees.

If I could be a librarian… I would wander around all day opening books at random and smelling them. Mmm, bookish, inky, musty, papery, nostalgic smell. Let someone else reshelve them, my eyes are too crossed from lack of proper oxygen.

If I could be a scientist... I'd find a way to bottle that bookish smell and market it to English majors and linguists as an aphrodisiac.

In return, I shall tag one of my favorite people whom I selfishly declare don't post nearly often enough: Momma-YaYa.

And I would also tag Carol if she had a blog, but as far as I know she does not, and she should, because she has interesting things to say. If Carol were to start a blog, the above material would make an excellent first post… Just sayin.

I am going to refrain from selfishly tagging a certain very pregnant person because you don't want to do anything to irritate a person who would rather be having a baby than doing just about anything at the moment.

Thank you, and good night.

It's okay, I'm still alive!

But I'm sure you knew that, because if you read Gary's site you surely know that he wouldn't be talking about a zebra penis if his wife had just checked out. Not right away, at least.

I'm not going to say anything about the new pope, because no matter how unCatholic a person may be, it's just not right to mention any religious leader, including Benedict XVI, in the same post as a zebra penis. The fact that I have just done so is merely my own little "score one" for the altar boys. End of nondiscussion.

I was brought up Catholic, and I attended 12 years of Catholic school. When I think about how much money my parents spent on tuition they couldn't afford, it makes me sad. They really couldn't afford it. We were always in debt, and I went to school with a bunch of stupid rich kids who made me feel like crap for wearing K-Mart tennis shoes with my plaid uniform. And they dragged us to church every morning where the other kids would laugh at anyone who even half-assed participated in the service. I went to 3 different Catholic grade schools and Catholic high school, and the climate was the same. It was cold, oppressive, cliquish, and uncaring. Anyone who had a problem fitting in or doing well academically was made to feel like they were the problem.

I'm sure my parents are still paying off that education, and I'm still trying to feel okay about myself.

Every time I hear anyone with a conservative political agenda talk enthusiastically about the "Catholic youth" I feel a little bit like throwing up. But I guess that's just me.

We met with our friends at Alternative Mortgage Solutions (highly recommended) yesterday to see about refinancing our house. Gathering up all the pay stubs, tax returns, and such brought back all the horrible, heart-palpitating anxiety of two years ago when we were buying our first house and trying to keep the deal from falling through two days before closing due to sudden, complicated financial circumstances.

The preliminary stuff went smoothly, and we brought up the idea of paying off a few bills with the equity in our house, depending on what it might reappraise for. The loan we were investigating would let us borrow up to something like 85% of the equity in the house.

(Just so you know, when I say things like "reappraise" and "equity," I'm totally talking out of my ass.)

I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cool if our house had shot up in value so much that the equity would entirely wipe out our credit card debt? So I started adding up in my head how much the house would need to appraise for.

Turns out, we would need to live in the only eight-story, fourteen-bedroom Victorian mansion on our modest block of suburban split-levels.

Coming back down to reality, I pointed out a few of the nastiest creditors of whom we would definitely like to be rid, and that seemed feasible.

("Feasible" is a word I use only when speaking of financial matters, and I'm not sure why.)

But I'm not even convinced any of this is really going on right now because two days ago I cracked my head on the corner of an open cabinet door. For all I know, I'm lying on the kitchen floor bleeding out of my skull, and all recent events have been a very vivid, mildly unsettling coma dream. And you were there! And you. And you. And Uncle Fred. And little Toto…

I made several life-and-death decisions this past weekend.

Specifically, I spent a lot of time on my knees in the strip of dirt I call a garden, hearing arguments from both sides of the perennial ground cover debate.

I have this weird yet somewhat attractive (if you're into that sort of thing) perennial plant that refuses to give up its territorial hold on a certain spot of land. I've pulled it out, tilled the soil, mulched over it, and no matter what it just keeps coming back. If only the rest of our lawn were so resilient.

Not surprisingly really, with the warm weather we've been having, the damn ground cover has sprouted right up, invited friends, and chilled a few six-packs.

I went in Saturday morning with the mindset that I was going to pull everything (yet again) and really stay on top of it this year. I have a lot of plans for that strip of dirt – tomatoes, peppers, pole beans, cucumbers, and a variety of herbs. We're not set up to accommodate decorative foliage.

As I started mercilessly digging out hunks of earth and roots, I noticed something. Mixed in among the annoyingly persistent greenery were happy little strawberry plants sporting bright yellow blossoms.

So here we had a dilemma. I have an "arrangement" with plants in my garden: I will offer protection in the form of watering and weeding you if you make it worth my while and repay me with some form of produce. The strawberry plants seemed quite amenable to that sort of agreement.

And yet, they were so inextricably interwoven with the other stuff. It would take hours of meticulous work to try to separate them, and knowing that ground cover I'd be out there doing the same thing week after week.

Reason spoke up, reminding me that if I did have to have strawberries I could simply purchase a new flat of them for several bucks, thereby sparing myself the pain and frustration of salvaging these plants.

But I have a soft spot for growing, thriving things (unless you're the ground cover that I've tried unsuccessfully to kill, and then you can just get the F out). I also am irresistibly compelled to root for the underdog. The strawberries gazed up at me hopefully and brandished their fuzzy yellow flowers.

"Oh, all right!" I said. The strawberries erupted in celebration, and I proceeded to spend the next 14 hours squinting at root clusters and cursing.

And now the damn birds will have a nice crop of well-groomed berries to dine on. Trust me, I harbor no false illusions.

I'd like to propose that days of the week be given a different numbering system than weekends. If something is due on April 1 and I get it to you on April 4, for example, it's only one day late. But that's not how it looks on the status report.

This weekend I learned why I am not allowed to bake cakes.

Because I eat them.

I made the cake Friday because Matilda was starting to emerge from marathon puking, and as we were sitting there watching TV, she saw someone pulling a cake out of the oven. And Matilda said, "Cake sounds good!"

When your child has refused to eat or drink anything for three days, as a mother you start to get a little crazy. I pounced on it. "What kind of cake?" I asked. "Do you want icing? What kind of icing? And ice cream? With strawberries? And chocolate milk? And cookies?"

Matilda shrugged and settled back into her ketone-laced food indifference. I, however, now wanted cake almost as much as I wanted her to eat something.

There's something about having a big, fat, fluffy cake in a 9x12 pan sitting in your kitchen all weekend. No matter what you're doing, you're acutely aware of it. It beckons you in from working in the yard just to hack off a chunk of it and shove it in your mouth. It draws attention to itself when you're stacking dishes in the cabinet. You can even hear it calling over the roar of the vaccuum cleaner.

And it seems like no matter how much of the cake you eat, there's still about half the cake left in the pan.

"I had cake for breakfast," Gary confessed yesterday.

"So did I," I said. "And I'm also planning to have cake for lunch."

If it keeps up like this, we might be able to feed several impoverished nations with one cake.

There's a loaves and fishes parallel in here somewhere, but I'm not drawing any grand conclusions.

Hi there, today because Matilda is still sick I've decided to clean out her closet. And can I just say. Sweet. Holy. Christ. The child keeps every scrap of paper she has ever scribbled on. Every McDonald's toy. Every sticker, gum wrapper, and plastic pencil topper that has ever crossed her path.

It's my fault, I think. No, actually it's my mother's fault. My mom can't throw things away. She assigns sentimentality to everything her kids have ever touched or even thought about touching. My room was always full of crap because I thought it was all valuable and worth keeping because it had memories attached to it. Come to think of it, it's her mother's fault. This is a totally learned behavior.

I'm breaking this cycle. Stuff is not going to run my life.

If Matilda could get off the couch without vomiting right now, she'd be horrified at what she saw in the trash. Yes, I'm kicking her when she's down. I'm horrible. But she'll thank me for it when she's not cleaning out a basement full of her kids' first-grade papers someday. She'll just have to find something else to blame me for. Like the fact that I threw out a plastic cricket in a soda bottle that she's been hoarding in her closet for six years.

Does this happen to anyone else? One of the kids stays home sick, and instead of being attentive and doting on the sick kid you decide to start fifteen different projects.

I seem to forget that a sick day is still only about five or six hours. One cannot remodel a living room in six hours.

But that doesn't stop me, and by the end of the day I have half-peeled wallpaper hanging off the walls, half-sorted boxes of junk spread out all over, and piles of dust sitting in the middle of the floor that I hadn't quite gotten around to sweeping up.

On the last sick day I baked cookies, scrubbed out the fish tanks, and folded all the laundry while Matilda napped off a fever on the couch.

"You can never just stay home," Gary observed.

Today I took Matilda to the doctor for some antibiotics and then parked her on the couch so I could clean out her dresser drawers.

Part of me feels guilty. On the other hand, it's the only time I'm ever actually motivated to accomplish things.

They're threatening to take away my iMac at work, which has me a little rattled.

Granted they've been talking about putting all the writers on PCs for years now, but this time they're bringing in a PC to put in our common area for us all to "try." This sounds like IT's way of saying, "Here, you stupid, whiny Creative crybabies. Acclimate yourselves to the inevitable so we don't have to listen to your Mac bullshit anymore."

I love my iMac . Not just because it makes me different and special in a wide sea of uniform PC users. But because the iMac is beautiful and elegant, sophisticated and loyal. It's kind to small animals and homeless people. It often donates to the March of Dimes. How could they take such a loving, affectionate machine and replace it with a cold, soul-less PC?

Besides, if they get rid of my Mac before I get an iPod, the Mac would be heartbroken.

Oh, you were wondering about the iPod link over on the left? Funny story, that.

It all started several years ago when the iPod was born and I began to lust after it.

The iMac and I have grown to develop a deep, shared appreciation for all that is sleek, elegant, and efficient. We love birch trees. We love spheres. We love the Dodge Viper. We love evocative, austere color palates. We love Scott Patterson.

One day, a coworker of mine came into the office and set something small and white on her desk. My iMac gasped.

“I love her!” he whispered.

“You love Mandy?” I asked, thinking it might take a lot of convincing to get me to see that point of view.

“No! Her.”

I looked closer.

There, upon her desk, was a small, white, elegant iPod with its striking circular control and long, spindly earpieces. And I loved it. I loved it so much that when Mandy told me she'd paid $500 for 5 gigs it actually didn't sound that bad. Not that I had $500 lying around. And then three months later, Mandy was cursing because the 10GB iPod came out for the same price. Then the 20. Still… not like I was any closer to having $500.

All the time I watched Mandy playing with her iPod, the "free iPod" spam taunted me. The banner ads mocked me. They almost wore me down, but I held out.

I work in advertising. I know the lingo. Promises are relative. Nothing is free. I tried to put the iPod out of my mind.

Then, a few weeks ago, I got to talking with my brother J. Somehow, the subject of iPods came up. I joked, "Hey, we should just get 'free iPods' by clicking on those ads!"

"Yeah, my roommate actually did that," said J. "It does work. He got one."

Huh???? It's not a scam? Why, then, do I not have my iPod?

I felt a little dirty, but when I got home I went ahead and clicked through one of the banner ads. It turns out there is a hoop to jump through, but there's an iPod at the end of it. Sign up for an offer and refer five people who also sign up for an offer. Okay, that sounded painless.

So I signed up. And it was remarkably painless. But because I do have shame, I'm not going to go around asking people to sign up for stuff on my behalf.

My blog has no shame, however. Especially that sidebar. I've seen it take off its shirt for a longneck and dance on the table. It also sings karaoke. So it has graciously volunteered to hold the link for me.

And if you're like me and you'd do just about anything for an iPod, go ahead and click over there because it beats dancing on a table.

Two things. Three, actually. Number one, I'm incredibly high on Tylenol Cold Daytime right now, and it seems to be causing short-term memory loss. Number two is. Um.

Moving on, then.

We had Easter at my grandma's house, in a manner of speaking. We don't actually go inside my grandma's house. My dad pulls an RV up along the side of the house, relatives mill around in the yard waiting for Grandma to make an appearance, and at some point Grandma will emerge from her house for several minutes, offer observations and a bit of unsolicited wisdom, and then go back in to feed the cats.

It's all very oracle-like.

And then when we got home, Gertrude became so wrapped up in watching a bizarre stop-motion animation Little People video over and over that she apparently lost track of her bladder function and urinated on the couch.

Meanwhile, the dog learned that if a jelly bean falls on the floor, all he has to do it lick it once and the kids will throw it in the trash. From there, it can be dug out and consumed at his leisure when no one is looking.

This may explain why I later found the dog lying in the middle of the floor moaning, while his sugar-spiked eyeballs jittered around in their sockets.

Matilda's idea of a good time on spring break is coming to work with me and filing stacks of papers. The only thing more fun is three-hole-punching them and placing them in binders.

This immediately makes her everyone's favorite. She takes big, ugly stacks of paper and makes them go away, and she always manages to do it right. I don't know why she finds this fun. Maybe she's keen on having finally discovered a practical use for the alphabet. Or maybe, judging from the state of her bedroom, she's suffering an organizational deficit that only filing can fill. Perhaps she's a case of OCD just waiting for the chance to bloom.

Yesterday I think she was a little bummed because she barely had any chance to dig in on the filing before Mommy dragged her along to a photoshoot. She got to do some amateur modeling. She got to hand out freebies and collect photo release forms. She had several middle-aged women fall in love with her and ask if they could take her home. I would have considered that a good day. But it wasn't until we returned to the office to find a looming stack of filing waiting for us that she really got excited.

I can only hope she still holds this task in such high regard when her college friends invite her to Florida. I want to believe my daughter will say to them, "Are you freaking kidding me? What are you going to do down there, lay by a pool and flirt with boys? Drink, vomit, and flash your titties? Whatever. I'm going to file some shit, baby. Yeah!"

Guess what I'm doing right now.

Did you just say, "Sitting on the couch between a laptop and a pinkeye-infected nine-year-old, trying to ignore the cartoons on TV long enough to write back cover copy for fundamentals book on maternal-newborn nursing"?

Wow. You'd be right.

Yesterday I tricked my fever-stricken daughter into eating a banana. I came into the living room with a banana in hand. "Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring. Bananaphone," I said, and handed her the banana. She actually answered it.

And now she's irritated with me because it's been stuck in her head ever since. I'm just irritated because typing on the laptop makes me cranky. The dog is irritated because I'm sitting here not playing ball with him.

The only one seemingly not irritated is the cat, who really doesn't give a shit.

Peanut butter. And banana. On white bread. I am five years old again, only this time I’m not picking off the banana slices.

The only member of this family more addicted to peanut butter than me is the dog. If he so much as hears me touch the plastic lid on the Jiffy jar, he attaches himself to my leg and rolls his eyes up at me in his most pathetic, mommy-don’t-you-love-me plea.

Today I scraped the last bit of peanut butter out of the jar for my own sandwich and looked down at his pitiful little face. “Sorry, bud.” I said, and his peanut-lovin’ heart broke right in two.

Caught (as I often am) in the middle of a struggle between Right Mom and Righteous Mom, I contemplated the empty container. Behold, here in the palm of my hand the two things Finnegan adores: peanut butter and plastic.

Now he’s curled up in his crate with his front paws wrapped lovingly around the jar, his tongue snaking around after the last smears of creamy goodness. The expression in his eyes reminds me of an Atkins dieter on a carbohydrate binge.

Most of the time I'm just one bad day away from lying in the middle of the floor with my own nose embedded in the recesses of a peanut butter jar. Don't act like we all haven't been there.

Belated birthday greetings to my little brother D who turned 27 on Wednesday. D has just taken a job as assistant manager at a very large chain drugstore location, and so I'm very proud of him and I hope he doesn't have to take too much crap from bitter old ladies who would rather argue for three hours before paying eight cents more than the sale price of Metamucil as stated in the weekly ad.

I used to be a register girl at said chain drugstore, and very nearly had to bite my own hand a few times to keep from gouging out their bitter, old eyeballs. Good times.

The thing I've recently learned about D is he's allergic to aluminum, which means he avoids all products containing any amount of it. As I understand it, this means he can eat mainly garlic and broccoli, bathe in distilled water, and wear clothing hand-woven from natural fibers he's cultivated himself in a small, sterile brick pot of toxin-free soil. Deodorant? Um, no.

Talking to my mom, he's not minding the lifestyle change a bit because it's such a relief to be free of all the allergy symptoms. I guess if I were losing my hair and scratching my skin off too, I might gladly say farewell to processed cheese. Well, not gladly.

But the problem I'm having is we're celebrating his birthday at my folks' tomorrow, and I always bring desserts to birthdays. Fabulous, creative desserts. This whole allergy thing sounded to me like a challenge.

"What kind of flour can I use?" I asked my mom. "What about whole wheat flour?"

"He doesn't really eat anything that's processed at all," she said.

"Dairy?" No.

"Soy?" No.

"Raw sugar?" Probably not.

"Christ. Is he outside right now gnawing the bark off a tree for sustenance?" Well, he has lost about 30 pounds...

"Fruit???"

Yes! D can eat fruit. It's not terribly creative, but a simple fruit salad is topping my list right now. I wonder if walnuts contain aluminum.

I wonder how well tree bark would work as a binding agent.

The subject of leprechauns came up at my house this morning. "If you catch one," I informed wide-eyed Gert, "you'll get three wishes. You can wish for any three things you want!"

Gert didn't miss a beat. She clearly not only grasped the concept of wishing for things, but the idea of a leprechaun granting them was no further fetched than any other genetic aberration we foist on kids during the holidays. She was game.

Gert told me, "I would wish for," and she held up her fingers to count them off, "a baby. And money. And a lamb chop."

A baby, okay. Gert's been on a crusade for a younger sibling for many months, so this one comes up a lot. She frequently asks me if I have a baby in my tummy, which is most awkward when we're in the presence of other people who are expecting us to have another one, and they always seem a bit let down when I tell Gert no.

Money. That seemed a bit sophisticated. I wondered if her sister had been coaching her.

But what the hell. A lamb chop! I asked her why she would wish for a lamb chop, and her reply was just as cryptic. "Because my old lamb chop I would give back to the baby and I would wish for a new one for me."

I told her those were very nice wishes and I hoped she got to see a leprechaun today.

Several minutes later, it occurred to me what she was talking about. Not lamb chop. Not Lambchop. Lamb Chop! Like the stuffed version her grandma had recently given her, which presumably would be handed down to the new baby when the leprechaun came through. So she'd need a spare. Duh.

Holidays make so much more sense when you think like a three-year-old.

About the hair transformation? A short Q & A session is in order.

Q: Has short hair made you more carefree and spontaneous?
A: Why, this morning after tweaking and shaping it, I spontaneously rooted through Matilda's drawer of hair junk and dug out the cutest little carefree butterfly barrette to stick in my hair.

Q: Has short hair made you a better parent?
A: Aside from barrette theft, yes. Matilda commented that I now look like "the nice kind of mom she'd like to be around." Apparently long hair made me a crabby, haggy, vindictive mom. Vast improvement.

Q: Has short hair made your nose smaller and cuter?
A: Shut up. That's what glasses are for.

Q: Has short hair made you more creative?
A: It did inspire me to change the default font on my outgoing email. That should at least rattle a few people.

Here's one definite plus… no one who was at the presentation yesterday knows I'm the same person who tripped over two rows of chairs and got her heel stuck in someone else's shoelace on her way to the front of the room.

T minus twelve hours to PowerPoint time. Ladies and gentlemen, the freak out has begun.