1. I have eaten more hot dogs in the past five days than I have eaten in the collective whole of the rest of my life. I’m not talking about three or four hot dogs; I’m talking multitudes of hot dogs, legions, mobs, swarms of hot dogs. Hot dogs for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, hot dogs on the way back from each of the four pee breaks in the middle of the night. I might even say that I’ve become obsessed with hot dogs, almost as obsessed as I once was with Britney Spears, but hot dogs are much better because they aren’t ever handed a microphone and required to say anything.
2. I fell down seven steep stairs on Saturday morning, a walloping, raucous ride on my butt bone into the basement. I fall down one or two of those stairs all the time, but on Saturday I had the phone in my hand and I was trying to maintain the conversation I was having with my mother even as my legs buckled underneath me and my elbow lodged between the wall and the handrail. When I reached the floor, halfway on my butt and halfway on my head, I must have rattled the part of my brain that controls language beacuse all I could do was moan incoherent consonants, lots of m’s and f’s and g’s. I’m pretty sure my mom thought her wayward daughter was having a sudden acid flashback — no telling what those hippies did to me California — but my husband was at my side in seconds, shaving cream dripping from his face, worry filling his eyes. He quickly calmed me down and got me to introduce vowels back into my vocabulary. After we checked out all my limbs and made sure The Armstrong Work in Progress hadn’t been harmed, I crawled over to the phone that had been flung across the room and told my mom I’d call her back when the rainbows in the walls stopped talking to me. Then I had a hot dog.
3. Yesterday we hosted a barbecue that was attended by lots of Mormons and lots of their Mormon kids. This meant that there wasn’t much alcohol for the non-Mormons, but this was remedied entirely by the number of hot dogs on hand. Among all the kids were two Sophies, a Simon, a Gus, an Otto, a Macy, an Eli, two Miles, an Owen, a Colin and a Kyle. This defintiely makes me wonder whether or not all my very stylish, hip friends will still associate with me when I name my child a very un-hip name like “Bob” or “Brian” or “Ted.” I’ve always wanted to give a son his father’s name, but who names a child “Jon” anymore? That’s just so ’72.
4. I’ve also made the executive decision that even though this baby won’t come out running around screaming, it will eventually grow into a thing that runs around and screams, and because I’m just not ready for that, when the time comes for this baby to exit the womb I’m just not going to let it. Plain and simple. It’s going to have to stay in the womb forever, or at least until it learns that it’s not allowed to run around and scream. While it’s in there it should also learn how to wipe it’s snotty nose, sleep through the night, and how to fix mama a hot dog.