Less Than Perfect

Last night was a typical night in the LTP house: 7:30pm: The Nugget goes to bed first.  The Mister lays with her a few minutes until she nods off. 9:20pm: I go to bed a couple of hours later (on this night narrowly escaping the fate of falling asleep on the couch).  The small dog, Frolic, comes to bed with me, but is restless and heads back downstairs.  The cats are very excited and lots of meowing and purring and petting ensue before we can settle down to sleep. 11:20pm: The Nugget exits her room with a slam of the door and climbs into bed with mom. 11:40pm: The Mister comes to bed.  Frolic stands around on the floor whining until a veritable written invitation is given for her to join us on the bed because she is insane and neurotic and impossible.  The giant dog, Dandy, flops down on the floor with a thud. 12:20am: Dandy is panting loudly and pacing the room as a small storm is passing through because he is insane and neurotic and impossible.  I get up and head downstairs

In the early years of our marriage, when it was just he and I, The Mister and I would sometimes have hor's devours night.  This consisted of buying several frozen snacks and baking them in rounds in the oven while we enjoyed a favorite movie or program on television.  I would bake things in shifts so that we had warm treats throughout the evening. One fateful night, I handed The Mister my plate so that I could go answer the oven timer and pull out our next round of snacks.  After doing so, I returned to the living room to find The Mister holding my empty plate.  Thus was born one of our long-standing inside jokes in which I looked at him, stunned, and uttered: " You ATE my dinner?"  I will never forget his sheepish response:  "I thought you were giving it to me..." Since that time, The Mister has been cautious to double check any time he is handed a meal or partial meal of mine to ensure we don't have a repeat of that event.  And we never have.  Until...

One bite at a time.  Of course, anyone who actually knows me knows that I would never so much as harm a hair on the head of an elephant, let alone eat one, but it's a metaphor.  In this case, a metaphor for completing the mountain of paperwork and tasks associated with adoption. Yes, we have decided to proceed with adopting our next child.  After all of our pregnancy struggles, we just don't feel it is an option to try that route again.  Honestly, the only thing that has stopped us from adopting in the past has been the financial aspect; it is not a highly affordable undertaking.  But here we are in this phase of life where we are just taking all kinds of leaps of faith, and trusting that we can come up with the money is one of them. Having addressed that hurdle(ish), we are left to address taking the steps to activate ourselves with our adoption agency.  I was so excited waiting for the packet to come so I could get started that I obsessively checked the mail for days.  Wh

Might punch you in the proverbial eye for calling her by any other name. The Nugget has been very focused on pretend play lately.  At any given point, she can be found running around our house with her "hooves" pawing at the air while she tries to earn her cutie marks as a My Little Pony.  That is unless she is letting down her hair and descending a tower as Rapunzel.  Or maybe she'll be preparing to go ice skating with Frosty because she is his best friend, Karen.  Best of all, she recently decided to be "Olive" from the Rudolph movie.  I kept trying to figure out who she thought the character Olive was until a friend pointed out that she had no doubt been listening to the Rudolph song and deduced that the line "all of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names" was referring to one particular reindeer by name, "Allof".  Which explains why she kept correcting me about how I was pronouncing the name. Anyway, I think it's grea