So you’re at a minor league baseball game with your no-nap toddler, when she poops her diaper. Upon reaching the not-crazy-clean restrooms, you discover:

1. You’ve forgotten to pack wet wipes in the transfer from small diaper bag appropriate for church to large diaper bag appropriate for baseball.

2. The poop is not the solid, easily handled by a paper towel kind. It is the runny, seedy, already crusted-on-her-butt kind.

3. The changing table, on which you have already partially disrobed your child and opened her diaper, has no safety strap.

4. She’s already taken off her shoes and dropped them to the floor.

What do you do?

What I did was disgusting and involved saliva and two extra diapers. And a good cleansing when we got home. I won’t elaborate. It even makes me a little sick to my stomach.

So I’m in San Diego, and I’ve never been here before. And I’m about to expose you Big City Dwellers to my charming Midwestern naivete because MYGAWD this hotel is fancy/trendy/CRAYZEE. We are staying at the W San Diego, which is kind of like having a role as an extra in an episode of Private Practice or Nip/Tuck.

Everything is fancy and modern  and shiny and mostly black and white with pithy little names like “wet” (the pool) or “sweat” (the gym, closed for renovations) or “wired” (business center). Instead of a picture of flowers or some picturesque countryside in my room, there is a chalkboard. Should I leave a nice note for housekeeping? The elevators have actual real floormats that have to be physically changed according to the time of day. Right now, they say “Good evening.”

I have a down pillow shaped like a beachball in my room and am currently playing my ipod through the state-of-the-art system that is ipod compatible. Each room has a dvd player and small dvd library, with rentals available upon request. There is 24-hour room service (which provided me with a Kobe beef cheeseburger at midnight this morning), and I was a little self-conscious taking a shower because the door only goes halfway across the shower… and it’s clear glass. The girl who checked me in was wearing a half-shirt.

Everyone who works here is constantly saying things like “everyone at the W is a VIP” and “whatever/whenever!” Seriously. The customer service is phenomenal. PHENOMENAL, I SAY.

The hotel bar, from whence I just arrived, is called beach (lower case) and purports to have heated sand. I stepped in the sand and inquired Jeremy the bartender about its temperature. He exposed the hotel managers for the lying bastards they are, telling me that the sand was only heated for the first two weeks the hotel was open, and then they turned it off because it was crazy expensive and kept shorting out the power to the kitchen. HA!

So Jeremy supplied me with my second rather-large pomegranate martini (expense account! which also paid for my split of champagne at dinner!) to carry up to my lovely room with the view of the harbor, and here I am, missing R and Dave and wanting to go home. As always on these trips.

This was the first trip that R truly understood that I was going away. She begged me not to get on the airplane. She didn’t want me to go “play with Diego” (San Diego). She wanted me to stay there and eat hot dogs and play with her new Barbie horsie with her.

But she’s doing great with her dad. It’s great that they have this time together. And good that I have a chance to get away, too, I guess. But there’s only so much loneliness that champagne, a Padres game and two pomegranate martinis can take care of. Even if I do get to listen to my ipod in my hotel room.

Jennie often writes passionately about her love of her alma mater, Texas A&M, and how, as a child, she hadn’t imagined herself becoming an Aggie.

I graduated from the University of Illinois ten years, six weeks and four days ago. In some ways, it doesn’t seem like that long ago. In other ways, it seems like longer. I loved my time in Urbana-Champaign. I spent three years at the Daily Illini, the last year as campus editor. I made some wonderful friends there.

I spent two years entangled in a difficult and sometimes abusive romance with a man who I thought I might one day marry and who broke my heart a little bit every day we were together and for a good year after I got the strength to tell him we shouldn’t be together anymore.

I spent my senior year with my best friend, a woman I felt such a connection with I just knew we would be friends forever – until she became involved with the man who was still breaking my heart.

Senior year was joyful and complicated and bittersweet. I was on my own – no roommates, no boyfriend, no parents directing my every move. That was when I found myself, found who I really was; found the girl who could stay home on a Friday night to write papers for her English 300 20^th Century American Women Authors class and play Flip Cups with the hockey team and  flirt with the goalie on Saturday night. I found the girl who believed passionately in President Bill Clinton and the injustice of a mascot that parodies Native Americans. I found the girl who learned to love herself for who she was, not who she was with. I found the girl who was a loyal friend to a fault. And I discovered the girl who loved cold white wine on a hot summer night, the Chicago Cubs, Old Style beer and the Beastie Boys.

For some reason, I was thinking about all this last night when I was pushing R around the neighborhood in her stroller, her little blonde curls bouncing as she urged me forward, forward, further away from home – don’t go home Mommy! Don’t go home! Someday she will go to college (sob!), but I hope I can put her on a path to independence before that. I hope I can teach her to find herself – and love herself – before she turns 21.

She’s already on her way.

So, I finally saw the Sex and the City movie last weekend. I know, perhaps the last woman on the planet to have seen it (of those that want to see it). I found myself tearing up several times during the film, which really says very little about its quality because for God’s sake, I cried during “Runaway Bride” which I believe might be the worst movie ever made. At the very least, it’s the worst movie Julia Roberts ever made.

While I don’t have much to say about the actual film – other than I liked it pretty well but thought that it wasn’t as good as the series – I was really interested in the audience. When I walked in (alone), I saw another woman my age, perhaps younger, toward the front. Another solitary woman sat all the way in the back, she was a little older than me. Two girlfriends sat in the middle of the theater. A few minutes after I walked in, two additional older women came in, each by themselves. One of them sat behind me.

Now, I haven’t seen a movie alone in nearly ten years, though I used to do it a lot in the late 90s. And Sex and the City seems like a friend kind of movie, the kind of movie women go to see in packs. So why were so many of us alone?

I know I was drawn to the friendships in the series – the kind of friendships that are like a marriage without all the paperwork. I haven’t had a friendship like that in a long, long time, unless you count the one I have with my sister. Seeing it on screen, even though I know it wasn’t real, made me a little sad. Some people do have friends like that.

I have struggled with making friends since moving here. My problem is I don’t have the time to devote to a friendship like I used to. I can’t go out for drinks after work or out dancing on the weekends. I can’t spend an hour on the phone at night or Saturday afternoons at the mall. And what’s left? What do I have to give?

I sipped my Diet Coke in the darkened theater and listened to the other women laughing in the theater around me, and I wondered what their stories were.

I was tagged by Vixen at Vixen’s Den.

The Rules:

• Link the person who tagged you
• Mention the rules on your blog
• Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours
• Tag 6 fellow bloggers by linking them
• Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged

 My quirks:

1.    I like to drink milk out of these blue glasses we have. We drink milk (skim) every night with dinner, and if there is just one blue glass and then the rest clear glasses left, I always take the blue one. If Dave does the milk pouring and gives me the clear glass, I am slightly irritated. But I can’t say anything. Because it’s weird.

2.    I only wash my hair every other day, which means I only get on our elliptical machine every other day (then wash the sweat out immediately afterward). I am fairly upset if this routine is disturbed. My hair is color-treated (what? You thought I was really a blonde?) and gets really dried out if I wash it too much. Zoot finally gave me the courage to admit this publicly.

3.    I hate the texture of mushrooms, especially on pizza, but eat them because my daughter loves them. And I’m too lazy to pick them off.

4.    I hate shopping, except grocery shopping. I think this is a function of having no money to spend at the mall. I have a feeling that if I could buy whatever I wanted, I’d like shopping a lot more.

5.    I am nearly thirty-two years old and I still sleep with the same blanket I’ve had since I was in third grade. Whenever I go on business trips – or leave the house for an extended period – Dave washes the blanket. I hate that. It is falling apart. I sew it. Soon it will disintegrate and I’m very worried about what I will do. I sometimes wish I could have my blankie at work with me so when I get stressed I could rub its silk edges and calm myself.

6.    I can flip my tongue over completely, a hereditary trait from, I think, my father. I can also wiggle my ears (not the ear lobe, the entire ear), which I think I got from my mother. I hope I didn’t confuse which parent passed on which oddity. That would be embarrassing.

 I tag:

Mandy at Piaku

Erin at The State I Am In

Christina at Rockin’ the Suburbs

That’s only half the required number. I suck.

R will be 2 ½ next week. We’ve been potty-training her in a casual sort of way for a few months now. I’ve had a pretty laissez-faire attitude about the whole thing – all my friends say it will happen when she’s ready, it will be sudden and then it will be done.

We have a little bit of history here – she showed some interest early last fall, and we got a potty and started sitting her on it with some regularity. Within six weeks, she developed a bladder infection, kidney reflux and sustained some damage to her kidneys. She’s now on medication that supposedly makes her urine sterile. After that episode last October, we backed off on the potty training.

We’ve recently started again with some vigor – sticker charts and prizes for using the potty. Last Saturday (on the fateful trip to Target), I bought a second potty to keep on our ground floor and some Little Mermaid and Dora panties that she picked out. She went diaperless from late afternoon until bed time Saturday, with no accidents. Sunday morning, I took off her diaper and she continued to use her potty… until she pooped her pants. (When I showed her what happened when she pooped in her pants without a diaper on, she instructed me: “Mommy, you clean it.”)

Because it was Father’s Day and her grandparents were in town, I cleaned her up, dressed her in a pretty sundress – and a diaper.

Now, when I went to pick her up yesterday, she ran to me with joy and jumped into my arms. But she was followed by some of the kids in the four-year-old class who were chanting “Baby Poopypants” repetitiously and wagging their fingers at her. I was horrified.

I looked down at these children and told them, particularly their leader (a little blonde boy in an orange basketball jersey) that calling names wasn’t nice and they could hurt people’s feelings. He immediately justified himself by saying he wore underwear and she wore diapers and pooped in her pants. I told him he was a lot older than her and that he used to wear diapers too. He didn’t care, and the trio went back to chanting. I walked away, wondering a little bit where the teachers were.

R seemed okay, and we played and had a nice evening. Then, when her father was putting her to bed, she said, “Daddy, C called me a big baby and said I pooped my pants.” She remembered. It made an impression. Dave told her that if he did it again to tell him that wasn’t very nice and she wasn’t going to play with him anymore. I thought that was good advice.

I wanted to kick that kid. I wanted to call his parents and tell them what a bully he was being. I wanted to demand that the teachers step in and do something. But I didn’t do any of that. Dave’s advice – letting her handle it – was perfect. And I hope it works.

I lost my temper with R on Saturday. I mean, over-the-top, out-of-control crazy, scene-stealing anger. While it was going on, it was like I was watching myself, tossing back some popcorn and thinking how entertaining this would be if it weren’t actually me all screaming and red-faced.

I’ve found myself justifying my anger since then. But it’s not like R did anything so terrible to warrant the first Mommy Meltdown of her life. She was sassy and whiny and defiant, refusing to get into her carseat to go to Target. On the way to the car, she had spied the kiddie pool I had filled in the backyard while she napped. She decided she would much rather go swimming than shopping. And she told me so, physically and verbally.  After ten minutes of arguing with her, I pulled her out of the car and told her fine, we weren’t going shopping (even though I needed to go to buy things for breakfast for my in-laws). But she also wasn’t going swimming.

The tantrum continued, this time with tears and flailing about. That only revved my RPMs even higher. I picked her up, carried in her into the backyard and made her watch while I adopted superhuman strength and in mere moments emptied her pool into the lawn and shoved it back into the shed. Then I put her inside on the naughty step and flopped on the couch for a little timeout of my own.

The crazy thing? It worked. After a few minutes, she stopped the godawful tantrum. A few minutes more passed, and I went to sit next to her. She looked up at me with her big blue eyes and tear-stained face and said, “Mommy, let’s go shopping, then swimming. I’ll be good.”

I told her that sounded great. She watched as I filled the pool back up so the water could warm while we were at the store. And all was right with the world. I keep telling myself that even though sometimes it hurts or is difficult to discipline her or make her do things she doesn’t want to do, in the long run, it will be better for everybody. She’ll be better behaved (for me), and she’ll learn that life doesn’t always go her way (for her).

But I can’t say that I didn’t feel just a teensy-weensy bit of satisfaction dumping that pool water onto the grass. It felt good to be two years old again and expressing my anger in such dramatic fashion. Most of the time, I fight my anger or suppress it or feel like I have no right to it. But the glimpse of her face as I marched back from the shed, heartbroken and crushed, really took the wind out of my sails. I almost relented right there. But the timeout was necessary. And out of it, we both got what we wanted.

And she still loves me. And I still love her.

We went to Pittsburgh to see the baby.

This about sums up how R felt about her new cousin. It was love at first sight.

Sometimes, giving R her bath and putting her to bed can feel like such a chore. She hates having her hair washed, won’t get in the tub, won’t get out of the tub, wants to be read to but turns the pages faster than you can read them, won’t get in bed, won’t let you leave quietly… it can all be exhausting.

But I try to find little moments of pleasure in the hour+ the bedtime ritual takes: Singing silly songs in the bath, her clean smell, her enthusiastic application of lotion to her arms and legs, the snuggles, the bedtime kisses.

Last night, she was perusing the bookshelf in her room when she realized LO! There is an entire top shelf to this thing, full of big, thick books with no pictures (Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables and Mary Poppins series and other books from my youth). She reached for the tiniest book on the shelf – a kid-size directory to Catholic saints related in some way to children. I got the book as a gift for my first communion, and I know that because I wrote my name and the date inside the front cover.

As I read different “saint profiles,” she became more and more interested in what I was talking about. Even when I thought she was asleep, she’d perk up at a name (Ursula! Sea witch from the Little Mermaid! Or Joseph! Jesus’ Daddy!).

When I paused to turn a page, she looked up at me and asked, “Mommy, Where’s God?”

Wow. I was pretty quick on my feet and answered that a little bit of God was in each one of us – in R, in Mommy, in Daddy.

“Mommy, I’m God!”

Not exactly the response I was hoping for, but I worked with it, telling her again God was in everybody: her friends, her teachers at school, Uncle Kris and Aunt Lisa and Baby I, her grandparents.

“What God look like?”

I told her everyone had their own idea of what God looks like, we could all imagine him any way we wanted. R decided God looks like a butterfly. Sensing an opportunity, I asked her if she wanted to say her bedtime prayers. So we went through the classic bedtime prayer a couple of times, and by the third time, she was repeating some of it with me.

Raising this child may sometimes make me want to scream, yell and throw things. But sometimes, she shows me what grace really is.

Clapton is God. Good first concert for a toddler. I know some of you are probably shaking your head at me and whispering about GAWD how could she bring a TWO YEAR OLD to a ROCK CONCERT! THE NOISE! THE DRUGS! THE STORMS! But I don’t regret it in the slightest. Say what you will.

 The whole family, before the 50-something hippies took up residence behind us and the pot-smoking college kids moved in in front. The crowd was really great, overall - a little too excited about the proximity of lightening that could KILL THEM, but pretty great. Lots of families, older parents with their high school and college-age kids, 30 and 40-something parents with their elementary school kids.

Okay. So R was the youngest person there.

And she kept begging to go on stage to “sing and play ditar with Clapton!”

But we didn’t let her.

Peace out dudes. Christina is the one who noticed the little toddler peace sign on my flickr page. I just noticed that I look exhausted and my bra is showing in all the pictures.

The rain began about an hour into Clapton’s set. Prior to this picture, R and I were huddled under the poncho, listening to “Wonderful Tonight” and “Layla” as I wondered if we should hit the road. R refused - she wanted to stay. But when the storms began in earnest at the start of the encore, Mom and Dad had to insist on leaving.

And we came home to dead fish. And a flooded kitchen. But hopefully, she’ll remember this for a few months…