And found...

So the Palm Pilot was at the Squirrel Hill library, where Beth and I had gone for toddler storytime on Tuesday. Beth, Eleanor and Daniel crowded around me after storytime demanding snacks from my endless supply of Craisins...I guess one of the three of them pulled the PDA out of my bag and left it there. So glad that someone turned it in to the librarians!

I'm very relieved. And very embarrassed, after turning the house upside down last night and keeping Scott up until 3 a.m. worrying about it!

Lost!

So, years ago my sister was dating a guy who worked for 3Com and had one of the first-generation Palm Pilots. She'd tease him: "Bryan, what would you do if you lost your Palm Pilot?" And his response would always be exactly the same: "I wouldn't lose it."

"But what if?"

"I just wouldn't."

"Okay, but what if something really bad happened and you couldn't find it?"

He'd get annoyed. "I wouldn't lose it!"

Scott got me addicted to a Palm Pilot about five years ago. He was sneaky about it: he found a really good shopping list program to replace my usual nineteen different scraps of paper. Got me hooked. Took me away from my beloved analog planners with gorgeous photographs. And this week I (gasp!) lost my Palm Pilot. It's a Tungsten E. Not the most fabbity-fab-fab PDA out there – it doesn't double as a cell phone, the MP3 player is a bit limited, and something on it crashes the Palm Desktop interface with my computer so I can't load it up with new photos of Beth – but I've been really happy with it. It works for me. And it's gone. We've torn the house apart looking for it. I'm retracing my steps this week hoping I can find someone who might have seen it. The pregnancy hormones aren't helping – my memory isn't what it should be, and I'm starting to go a little bit nuts.

Scott's brother is fond of saying that we're digital people in an analog world. He has no idea....

Pumpkin, anyone?

Urrrgh. We're back from the first Thanksgiving dinner hosted by the next generation. My sister did Thanksgiving this year – the first year my mom hasn't cooked in, like, ever. The fact that her kitchen has about the same square footage as a special-edition postage stamp didn't seem to faze her much. I'd have been systematically chewing my fingernails down to the third knuckle.

I'm always amazed at the sheer quantities of food that we prepare for this one meal – and the amount of canned pumpkin involved. (Hint: it's a LOT.) The new family tradition: pumpkin cheesecake. Not as difficult as you'd expect, with the following caveats:

1. Be prepared, if you have small children around, for the inevitable clamoring to see what you're doing, and demands for "Taste! Taste!" Beth probably ate a whole graham cracker while my mom was crushing enough of them to make the oh-my-gosh-this-is-good graham cracker crust.


2. Read the directions...and whip the cream cheese before adding the rest of the ingredients. Otherwise your long-suffering husband (the one who reads directions before replacing a light bulb) ends up running the whole mess of goopy pumpkiny cheesecake batter through a strainer to get the cream cheese lumps out.

Happy turkey day, everyone. I have a lot to be grateful for...and I'll bet you do too.

Beff happy. Beff poop.

Beth is starting to put together little two-word sentences. Her first, a few weeks ago, came while I was changing her diaper. "Did you poop?" I asked her, already knowing the answer.

"Beff poop," she said. She was right.

I was so proud.

Last week as we were on our way en masse to a pre-natal appointment, she sat in the back seat proclaiming, "Beff happy. Da'ee happy. Mama happy." (This may have had something to do with the fact that Scott was about to accept a job offer. Yeeha!)

Last night she watched her dad sit on the potty and told him, quite seriously, "Da'ee poop." Then, with a look of intense concentration on her little round face, she added, "Beff poop." Then she grunted.

Hey, it's a step toward potty training. I'll take it.