K has been into Little Einsteins lately. Despite my general antipathy for products of The Mouse, I like it quite a lot. I've come to realize that the children's programs that I really like (Little Einsteins, Backyardigans), are the ones that won't drive me crazy if the music gets stuck in my head. I like both series for introducing children to a variety of musical styles beyond Vapid Children's Pop. I love that Little Einsteins is teaching the rudiments of music theory.

But mostly, I'm vastly amused by the part of the program where we all cheer for Felix Mendelssohn.

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We had what I would call my first Grown Up Easter this year, where I made the effort to put some sort of special meal on the table. We've done Easter baskets for K for the past three years, but most years, we've been at someone else's house for Easter, and the years we haven't, we just never got organized enough. Easter isn't a holiday B cares about, so it's always been up to me to make the effort if I want it. And mostly life has wound up being too busy.

But this year, we invited a friend over for dinner and had a lot of fun. The children were charming, I managed to mostly not dessicate the ham (it was supposed to cook in the crockpot, but it wouldn't fit. So I had to stick it in the oven, but my recipe was for the crockpot, and the instructions on the label said two hours. After a while, it occurred to me that a ham that is already cooked and is just heating up shouldn't need two hours in the oven at 350 unless you're making jerky, so I pulled it out after an hour, thankfully before it got too dry. Next year, I'm rigging some way to do it in the crockpot anyway) and we got to enjoy strawberries and fine spring weather. We skipped church because most of the family was coming down with a cold, but everyone rallied by mid-morning, so K and I went outside and had fun hiding Easter eggs and helping each other find them. I love how she's getting old enough to start making this sort of thing really fun.

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But of course, the REALLY important event of the weekend was the new Doctor Who. We both enjoyed it quite a bit. Matt Smith has a nice zany energy that should be entertaining, but was able to bring the gravitas at the end when appropriate. He didn't have either of the two things that bugged me most about 10, which was the mopey emo and the preachiness. Tennant definitely grew on me, but after somewhere in his second season when I found myself wondering why I was so lukewarm on him in the beginning, I watched his first season again. Oh yeah. Because he was preachy and self-righteous. So far, none of that here. Okay, I wasn't incredibly fond of the bit at the very end which made it clear that the Doctor ex machina moments that feel a bit overused are going to continue, but I think that can be blamed on the writers, not this particular Doctor.

Tired snippets

* The combination of working both days this weekend, then having everyone home for MLK Day Monday has left me deeply confused about what day of the week it is. Not that I'm complaining - it was nice to be able to have a day off together after working all weekend, and the short week is an extra treat. But I'm drifting through the week never sure what today is - Tuesday? Wednesday? A week from next Friday? Who can tell at this point?

* After a dry December, a lot of our favorite shows are back - Chuck, Leverage, Burn Notice, White Collar and Psych. The alert will notice a certain similarity in all of those titles. I would say our appetite for hour-long spy/caper/mystery dramedies is completely sated for the moment.

* Speaking of caper/mysteries, we did manage to make it to a movie while we in Michigan, and saw Sherlock Holmes. We emjoyed it immensely, and not just because it was the first time we've been out together without a child since the night before Alec was born. It helped, of course, that Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law between them have 50 pounds of charisma in a five pound bag. It oozes out of their eyeballs, and they could make people enjoy watching them play Quaker Meeting. But the movie itself was pretty good. This is where I admit that I was never able to get into the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was younger. But I enjoyed watching a Holmes who was clearly flawed as well as brilliant, who showed the negative as well as positive sides of his genius.

* The other day, K brought a baby over to me and holding its hands behind its back, she asked me to tie them together. When I asked why, she said, "She's going to jail." Well. I tied the prisoner's hands good and tight. Far be it from me to stand in the way of the mighty hand of Justice.

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Last night was a poop in the bathtub kind of night, both literally and figuratively. It was the sort of night with two wailing children, two aggravated parents and a disgusting mess to clean up. It was a continuation K's ongoing poop issues, and I am sorry to report that we did not deal with it with the sort of patience and grace one would hope for. It wasn't really her fault, yet it was next to impossible not to take some of our frustration out on her. I wasn't terribly sympathetic to her tears, I said things that at the time were meant to point out the consequences of her actions but in hindsight were more like rubbing it in, and she didn't get a bedtime story, which wasn't consciously meant to be a punishment, but I'm sure it felt like it to her.

We all have evenings like that, and I'm sure there will be more. One of the things that I'm becoming more aware of as K gets older is that she's now old enough that she's going to be able to remember a lot of the things that are happening her. Six months later, she's still talking about the day the window shattered in the door, and I suspect it's going to be a lasting memory (a couple weeks ago, as we were going out the door, she patiently explained to me that I needed to be careful when I closed it). The window didn't shatter because I was angry and slammed the door. It was already cracked and I had my hand on the window as I closed the door, so I suspect it would have happened anyway. But I find myself wondering if K is going to remember it as the day Mommy got angry and smashed a window. It's a chastening thought.

But what can you do? Today, before I put K in the car after school, I asked her for a hug and apologized for having such a grumpy night last night, and that I know she doesn't have poop issues on purpose. I can hope that if she's going to remember the times I traumatize her, she'll remember these moments too.

End of the week review

*I worked all day at the library today, then came home, took a nap and started in on the second job. Only to discover after an hour that the server had been taken down for unplanned maintenance (although I only found out a couple minutes ago that's what it was - thanks for letting us know so expeditiously, guys). This wouldn't bother me so much except that we were told to have our hours into the payroll system by 3 this afternoon, so I had to put my Friday hours in before actually working them. Ack. Well, I'll figure out how to handle this next week, I guess.

*Tonight after dinner, K went into the cabinet, got out several cookies and came to give me one. Then she told me that two of the other cookies were for Daddy. It was very sweet and touching. Of course, it was sweet and touching in a way that meant that she got two cookies as well, but a year ago she would have been trying to hoard all five cookies for herself so I'll count it as significant progress in the "thinking of others" arena.

*In Friday night tv, Dollhouse was a definite step up in quality from previous episodes and Battlestar Galactica had about as good of an ending as I could hope. This week's episode of Dollhouse also had a fairly clear message from Joss Whedon of "In case you thought I was trying to say that human trafficking is in any way acceptable or that I'm trying to glamorize it, no, I'm really really not."

*B had the day off yesterday, so we were finally able to go see Watchmen. I admit that it's been quite a while since I've read the comic, but from what I remember, the movie was remarkably faithful to the comic. It was definitely incredibly graphic, but it helped create a tone that was very consistent with the story. Since the point of the comic was to provide a non-glamorized view of what real-life superheroes would really be like, the depictions of violence that didn't spare the viewer at all seemed pretty appropriate. Mind you, that meant I watched quite a bit of the movie through my fingers or with my eyes averted since I have very little stomach for graphic violence, but this is one of the very few movies I can think of where it didn't seem gratuitous.

*The same things has happened this week that happened last pregnancy: the day I started my third trimester, my pelvis started aching. It's more in the hips and lower back this time instead of the pubic bone, probably because Wulfrith is lying even farther back in my abdomen than K, which I didn't think was possible. I'm doubly glad now that I got travelling out of the way last week so I didn't have to traipse across the airport with my hips feeling like they're about to fall apart. Ah, the delights of the third trimester - aching joints, reflux, exhaustion, sciatica, ever-decreasing lung and bladder capacity... all sending the message that it's all downhill from here. Of course, at the bottom of the hill you get a baby, so it's worth it.

K informed me tonight that she wants two babies, a baby brother and baby sister. Sorry kid, there's just the one with no options of adding on. But it's good of her to remind me how much worse it could be. Yikes.

Dull

Life is pretty boring lately, just the normal rounds of toddler wrangling, work, work and more toddler wrangling. The house is largely arranged the way I want it and the only real unpacking is books, which, considering there are books we never unpacked from the last time we moved, could take a while.

We watched the season premiere of Torchwood last night. I think it might be the best episode I've seen of that series. James Marsters is so good at playing a flamboyant bad guy. And for once there was an episode with some real humor and joy to it. I was reading someone's comments about Torchwood recently and they put their finger on why I don't like it nearly as much as the new Dr. Who: they sucked all of the humor and charm out of Captain Jack and turned him into an angsty bore. But the fun Jack made a bit of an appearance in this episode, which I hope will continue.

Meanwhile, tonight's Mansfield Park was...eh. It's so hard for me to separate the fact that I don't like the book very much from any movie I watch based on it. I think tonight's version was certainly better than the version from 1983, which was so low-budget they couldn't afford to hire normal-looking actors.* And it was much more faithful to the book than the 1995 adaptation, although not nearly as entertaining. And I think part of it was the fault of the book and partly the fault of the movie.

The book itself is difficult because the heroine is so hard to like, dull, meek and prissy. I think it's particularly hard to take because it's entirely possible to have a very nice, shy heroine who Does the Right Thing according to her unfailing moral compass who still manages to be likeable (see: Anne Elliot). Fanny Price is not that character. The 1995 solved that problem by making Fanny vivacious and clever, and therefore completely unlike the character in the book. Unfortunately, in this version, Billie Piper attempted to portray Fanny in a manner so wooden she should have been starring in Pinocchio. More accurate to the book, but do we really want her to be?

As for the rest of the characters, Lady Bertram seemed far too alert, and for counterpoint, everyone else seemed slightly dull, without much chemistry between any of the potential lovers. I'll watch it again sometime this week to see if it grows on me, but my first impression is that my quest for the film version of Mansfield Park that manages to be simultaneously entertaining and accurate to the book will have to continue.


*The thing I took away from that very accurate, yet so extremely flat and dull adaptation was the one memorable scene where Lady Bertram roused from her laudanum-induced stupor to insert the non sequitur, "I think...I should like a shrubbery." It was the first time I realized that Monty Python has made any mention of shrubbery far more funny than it actually is.