Fashion and babies and Bleu

World, meet Bleu. I'm pretty sure he's going to be Baboo II.

This was one of those 'kill two birds with one stone' moments. The baby did not want clothes on. He wanted to hold his blanket and run at the same time. He wanted to smell his Bleu but did not have time to sit down with it. He wanted to chew on the blanket corners. He also wanted the fuzzy side facing him and not the silky. He wanted to be running AND playing hide-n-seek AND being silly.

In fact, this was like killing a whole herd of birds with that stone!



I didn't say he'd be easy to catch.
Only that he'd be happy.

The science of a birthday

You too can have a fabulous Mad Science birthday party by following these simple instructions.

1. The birthday girl. Find a daughter who turns up her nose at boring store-bought princess-themed parties (read: parties that are easy to pull off) and instead turns her crazy brain to thoughts of secret lairs and crazy potions and things that explode.

2. The invitation.We went with old-fashioned cartooney fun.

3. The decorations. I'll admit that it really really really helped that Joe spends half his day in a chemical lab (testing drinking water) and that the lab director is the nicest of human beings and let us borrow most of this stuff. Monica is the best!! But we found some educational science stores and websites where you can get most of this inexpensively.

The decorations were all safe and edible - candies and colored water and a Poison Your Neighbor's Drink station where you could put test tubes of punch into beakers of soda. Except that then the girls started putting the candies in their drinks and it really was poison.

4. The cake. Mad scientists love bright colors. It's a known fact.


5. The entertainment. We found the craziest of scientists to entertain a herd of sugared-up 2nd graders.

They explored the science of the digestive system and made ooey gooey slime blobs.

6. The explosions. We went with Diet Coke/Mento cannons.

In which we share a donut

It is one of those mornings. We bailed on our run for a previous engagement only to have the engagement cancel on us at the last minute. So instead of running in the chilly, sprinkly April outdoors, we shared a donut. And a tater tot.


Maybe it was two tater tots. You don't count those sorts of things. Either way, everything was crunchy and warm and tasty and not April outdoors.