A Great Big Red Mad Mad Baby Head

I wrote this somewhere around September 10th.  Not sure why I didn't put it up, but here it is now.  Jeez - out of order posts.  How sloppy of me.


Having one's tonsils out comes with many privileges: eating lots of popsicles and ice cream, watching lots of movies, getting dibs on the computer to play games, having your grandmother travel 500 miles to help serve your every need, to name a few.  Playing on your parents' sympathies in the week following surgery is bound to work, so you might eek out many other little bonuses along the way.  Tonight Av cashed in a bunch of her bargaining chips and offered to forego bedtime stories in exchange for being allowed to stay up an extra half hour to watch Diego.  She knew I would cave, seeing as how Daddy was working late and I was on my own with her and a tired 7-month-old with pooping problems.  All she had to do was crank her voice up an octave and let it waver a bit.  She was fully prepared to squeeze out a couple of tears, if necessary, but since I immediately rolled over like a hound dog with heat stroke, she didn't have to go that far.  But something on Diego didn't sit right with her.  I don't know what it was, but she complained that it didn't make any sense and started making up alternate endings for this apparently inadequate episode, which she turned off about 15 minutes in.  I wish I'd done a better job of recording the things she said.  I was dealing with El and not paying close enough attention, but all of a sudden I realized that Av was rolling out all this wildly creative stuff.  She has a way of talking off the top of her head like a rapper on open mic night.  She looks around the room while she's doing it, taking whatever she sees and riffing on it - hence the great big red mad mad baby head that ended up in her story as a bizarre creature that Diego had to rescue from a pit of hot lava.  I think she gets this ability from GW - he's creative off the top of his head like that.  Pulls stuff from God-knows-where and works it into something hilarious.

Well, El sure is a great big red mad mad baby head today.  Poor little girl.  As much as she wants to eat solid food, it seems her digestive system isn't ready yet.  It makes weaning her off the nursing-five-times-a-night thing a hard sell.  Good thing she's so damn cute and cuddly.