Losing my marbles

My mind has overshot the mark and gone from never thinking of posting topics to having altogether too much to say. Either way, it results in a jumble, so the distinction may not be clear from the outside. Let's leave it that way, and just pretend this little conversation never happened, okay?

Roaming about in my head like the marbles I'm losing:

Oracle is a cool word, sadly overtaken by a software company. Another cool word compromised in the same fashion is Tivoli. Tivoli is an island in Washington, gardens in Copenhagen, and one of my best friends. Sadly, now Tivoli is also an IBM brand. Damn the man, stripping the romance from pretty words. And making this the linkiest paragraph in the history of the internet.

I really need to cut my nails, it's getting hard to type and I kind of skewered one of the babies with one the other day. I think we've passed some critical fingernail point in this household, where there are too many nails among us to keep them all adequately groomed, even with constant attention. I cut the nails of two children just yesterday, but was then skewered myself by a (different) child's nails this morning (that plus a deep and abiding love of My Name Is Earl confirms the existence of karma for me).

One perk of having so many children is that you let yourself off the hook for more of their personality quirks. When I only had one child, I blamed myself for his shyness, his tentativeness (I so want that word to be tentativity), and his incessant mindless chatter. Okay, maybe I am kind of responsible for the latter. But now that I have several children, and they are all wacky in completely different ways, I realize that they really are their own people and that no amount of perfection or failure by me is going to alter their fundamental personalities, short of real abuse or neglect. Very liberating, this realization.

I've read several new books recently. This is a sign to me that I'm coming out of my pregnancy/post-partum coma, as I'd been in a reading rut, sticking with old favorites that didn't require much in the way of thought or memory from me. I'm glad I'm venturing forth now, as I've just added a new book to my all-time favorites list.

That's it, I've reached the end of the marbles for now. Whew, that feels better.