Hi! I have limited laptop battery life, so I’m just going to get right to it.

After my Weight Watchers meeting on Saturday morning, I stopped by Toys R Us to do some christmas shopping for Ethan and Jocelyn.

I thought I was doing pretty well.

Until I looked into my cart and realized that EVERYTHING was for Ethan. A little garage thingee with matchbox cars (the cars will go zooming down the ramps from the top level all the way down to the bottom. Wheeeee!), a Bob the Builder lego set (it got vetoed later), a Geotrax set. To my credit, Jocelyn is going to get a big ticket item in the form of a play kitchen, and I had the ticket for that one in the cart. But still! I just naturally gravitated toward all the boy car train truck toys and had NOTHING in there for Jocelyn. So I made another round of the store, this time keeping my eye out specifically for Jocelyn. After picking up a cute JoJo doll, I seriously was still coming up empty. The baby toys were really too young for her, and the little girl toys were too old. The amount of pink in the little girl section is just frightening. It nearly makes one need a pepto bismol, except that THOSE ARE ALSO PINK. You just can’t escape it. I really dislike pink. I’m good with purple, but pink should go crawl under a rock and die. Especially that Barbie doll package pink. Shudder.

Now, I know that Jocelyn also loves trains and trucks etc. Just an hour ago, she threw a FIT when Ethan wouldn’t let her play with HIS dump truck. She was very sad. Ethan does this thing where he gets a flashlight and goes “choo-choo”ing around the main level, sometimes with Jocelyn, Mommy or Daddy tailing along behind him as freight cars. Jocelyn LOVES this game, loves pretending to be a train. So I know that if I were to buy her the more boy-type toys, she would be totally in heaven with that. But that isn’t even the point. I used to be a girl! I totally had girlie toys! I was a Barbie queen, I loved my cabbage patch dolls, and anything that had “unicorn” or “pegasus” in the title I was totally enamored with. So WHEN DID I LOSE THE ABILITY TO SHOP FOR GIRL TOYS FOR MY DAUGHTER?

The answer is sad. I’ve never HAD the ability!! This is the first year that she’s a little girl, rather than a baby girl. Baby girls and baby boys can totally get the same sort of toys. Rattles, toy phones, activity tables, you name it, it’s unisex. So now I am facing my own ineptitude for the first time. I called James and ran down the current present tally, and lamented my lack of toy girliness. He reminded me that she had shown some interest in a My Little Pony once, and I rushed to the display and picked some of those out. Shew. Saved… At least until NEXT TIME! I guess it will be easier once she can really tell us what she wants, as well. Ethan makes no bones about what he wants. In fact, I made the mistake of leaving him in the same car WITH THE TOYS R US TOY EXTRAVAGANZA BROCHURE in it. He latched onto it Saturday and lost himself in it’s pages. We forgot to throw it away after getting home from the movies last night, so today we had to watch consumerism latch onto our boy and suck out his life essence.

I know I’m making a bigger deal out of this than I should, because (well, it’s kind of fun to make a big deal, but also,) I DO remember in MY childhood spending many a happy hour gazing over the Sears Christmas Catalog, folding back the corner of the pages that had the toys I HAD TO HAVE OR DIE AND THEREFORE PESTERED MY PARENTS TO NO END. Ahhh… childhood. *happy sigh*

So I think we’re pretty set for Christmas now, which is good because there’s no way I am going to venture into a mall or a store, let along a toy store after Thanksgiving. Anything else we need, well, that’s what the internet is for.

Saturday morning weigh-in:

So. Up like, 2/10s of a pound on my Saturday morning weigh-in.

scream.

Serves me right for dying and going to heaven at Perfect Pita.

I am really heading into a bad time of year. Thanksgiving is this week, for which we’re just staying at home and doing our own thing. Christmas holidays are coming as well, and good food always goes hand in hand during the holidays. This is when, last year, I really just tossed in the towel and lost all the success I had gained during the summer, and I really don’t want to do that again. Honestly, it’s clear to me that I have not really “committed” to this process yet. I want to kind of sail through it, fudge a lot, and still lose weight. when I called James (during the TRU phone call) and told him about my weigh-in, I said something like, “It’s really just time to buckle down, and” blah blah blah. To which he said, “You say that every week.” I SO wanted to bite his head off, but IT IS TRUE. I say that EVERY WEEK. I have NOT buckled down, and it is showing up on the scale.

In fact, I have to say, if it weren’t for this blog, I think I probalby would have been doing even worse than I am. Something about writing down all these things in my head, that normally would stay in my head, makes it so much clearer to me. Now, I really don’t want this space to just be all about this aspect of my life, but at the same time, I think I need to divulge more details in order to keep myself honest. I personally, don’t find that sort of a blog all that interesting, so I think I’ll just mull it over for a while before I start informing the Internet what I had for breakfast. I mean, how boring is that. I guess we’ll see.

I have 6 weeks until New Years, so I need to lose a little over 3 lbs a week in order to make my new years goal. Just a little perspective for me.

Enough of this. Blech.

So last night we went to dinner and Harry Potter with some friends. It was kind of amusing how at dinner, we kind of fell into boy conversation and girl conversation. I can’t remember what the girl conversation was, but the boys were going on about work. I’m not complaining or anything, I think they got bored with what we were discussing, but I just thought it was funny (amusing funny, not weird funny).

Harry Potter was good, but I must say and James emphatically agrees, that the new (yes I realize he’s not that new now, but to me, he’ll always be the new) Dumbledore just isn’t right. Oh how my heart longs for the REAL DUMBLEDORE. There were several scenes that just didn’t seem right, didn’t seem to be the way that Dumbledore really would act / react. I don’t blame the actor, if anything, that would be a director’s choice, and it just wasn’t right.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie, but it seemed to be lacking. I was trying to explain this to James on the way home, and this was the best analogy I could come up with.

I haven’t had one of these dreams in a long time, but have you ever had a dream about flying? I have, and they always started the same way. I would always trip, and in a very Douglas Adams sort of way, miss the ground, and start flying. The most vivid one I remember, I had in grade school, and had it several times. I am in a huge stadium, and am walking down the very steep stairs. No hand railings and it is very crowded. Well, someone bumps me from behind, and in order to not trip and fall down this huge flight of stadium stairs, I start running down the stairs. I go faster, and faster and I can’t stop, even when I get to the bottom, and suddenly I’m falling over the edge to the field below, when instead of hitting the ground, I just zoom by it and am flying. I usually am aware of the fact I’m dreaming now, and unlike some people, I usually never “stay” in a dream or affect how it goes (only very rarely, and they’re usually sex dreams. Ahem.) So it’s usually only a few minutes of ecstatic flying around, effortlessly and powered by my own mind, before I wake up. And I always just want to cry, because the experience of flying is so amazing, so thrilling, so ________, because new words need to be invented just to express how incredible it is, and it’s over. I’m back in real life, and there’s no flying. No flying! NO FLYING IN BASEBALL!

Well, that is how the world of Harry Potter feels to me. When I’m reading the books, there IS magic. There ARE wizards and witches, flying and quidditch, house elves and cleaning up spells (yeah like HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE), and then when I stop, I want to cry, because the magical fiction is just that: Fiction. Well, in my Harry Potter movie-going, that is how my grading criteria works. If it makes me thrill to my toes, and want to BE in this magical place, then it get’s my big thumbs up. It’s getting harder and harder to acheive this, because let’s face it, there’s a lot of stuff to cram into these movies.

So yes, I enjoyed it. And they had me for parts of the movie. But not for all of it. As always, the books are better (a universal truth? probably).

So you are all getting lucky in the fact that my laptop battery is about to run out. And so I must end this post! Adieu! And I hope there aren’t too many typos!