Can it be that it was all so simple then?

I'm having a nostalgic moment. I ordered some stuff for Viva online from Old Navy a few days ago, and via the e-mail confirmation, looked up the current status to see where my stuff is. Well, not only can I see my current orders, but I can see orders that previously shipped. The last online order I made through O.N. was in March of 2003, when I was on bedrest due to preterm labor and panicking because it seemed likely Viva would arrive, very inconveniently for me, at any second. (Of course, she breezed on through and was born on her due date.) My baby shower had been cancelled, I didn't know what I might need, and in my anxiety mixed with cabin fever, shaken and stirred with hormonal overload, I powered up my laptop and ordered a slew of newborn items like socks and onesies and tiny, tiny little slacks.*

And today, Viva is wearing "my first Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt" and Hello Kitty underpants. Underpants! What, are you kidding me? Where the hell did my baby go?

* I love the word slacks. It's so...old-timey to me. Do you not just love it? All right, already.

(Viva Says) Hell, No, I Won't Go

"...unless I am (a) standing on my step stool washing my hands, having just gotten up from the potty without peeing in it; (b) standing on the bath mat in the other bathroom (the one without the potty in it) or (c) standing in the laundry room, helping Mama put clothes in the dryer. And by the way, I want a smoothie."

Damn, this toilet training is frickin' exhausting. You do not realize the myriad mundane steps in your day that you never think about until you have to train someone how to do them for the first time. And you have to tell them over, and over, and over. How much toilet paper to use, how to rip off the toilet paper without pulling all the paper off the roll, how you can't flush the toilet over and over but have to wait until it stops making noise and then flush. Oy vey.

We are making progress, but I want to flush my potty training book down the toilet, because one of the things it says is, "In most parents' minds, potty training is a monumental task to undertake." Well, it is. There's no way around it. And that's all I'm saying.

Follow Your Bliss

So I'm actually going to a yoga class now in a real yoga studio, with a yoga teacher and everything. Prior to this, I had been practicing yoga sporadically with some tapes at home, and had seen improvement, but man alive, going to an actual class is the kicker. The kicker-in-the-ass.

Last night, prior to class, we (Sweet Willie, our friend Kareena, and other classmates) were hanging out in the little garden area outside the studio, drinking tea and waiting for class to start, when a Really Bad Driver tried to back her car around a corner of the building. She scraped the side of the car against a pole, and then just stopped. She got out of the car, looked at the pole, looked at the car, got back in the car and got on her cell phone. She basically refused to move for fear of damaging the car more. Meanwhile, there was someone in a car behind her, waiting for her to get out of the way. Sweet William went over to see what he could do, and it was then that we determined that the car wasn't even hers. Ouch.

There was also no way for her to move the car without scraping it more, whether she went backwards or forwards, and Sweet W told her so. She refused to accept this, screamed something in Armenian, and returned to the phone. We all kept wondering what she was waiting for: a helicopter? A band of weightlifters-for-hire? A time machine, so she could go back 10 minutes and not scrape the hell out someone else's car? The person in the car behind her was patient for several minutes, but finally told her she would have to suck it up and move. At that point, Really Bad Driver exclaimed, "It's your fault this happened, so you're just going to have to wait!"

Eeeee! Cat fight! We all started laughing, I'm sorry to say. Not loudly, but we were not a sympathetic audience anymore. I love when people blame their own incompetence on other people, don't you?

The Driver Behind would not be baited, so the two of them stood there, glowering at each other on and off, until some guy arrived, got in the car, and backed it up s l o o o o w l y around the corner. Entertainment over, time for serenity and all that crap.

Namaste, my peeps.