The crazy lizard stick lady

There are two tiny wood piles in my backyard. Little piles of sticks I've picked up from the ground. I made them myself! For the lizards, of course.

Yeah, I'm a little crazy.

When my husband and I moved into our house, we wanted it to be a natural place full of native Florida plants and homey enough for wildlife to move in if they wanted to. Surrounded by neighbors whose yards are "done" (come to think of it, the way some of my friends get their nails or hair done) and look like a slice of tropical heaven, our yard kind of stands out like a tamed bit of the wilderness. Drive down my street, and you might ooh and aah over the trimmed orderliness that is our development ... until you come to our house. Purposeful asymmetry. Oaks left to flourish and stretch out their branches they way they were meant and not pruned to point to the sky in surrender like our neighbors'. Dead palm fronds left hanging down on purpose in order to provide a home for eastern screech owls or various bats. (What? A bat can eat 600 insects in one hour. How can you not appreciate that?.) Our yard is landscaped, but it's natural, and what we lack in tidiness and tropical perfection, we make up for in colorful flowers, birds, butterflies and other animals.

And NO pesticides. (Umm ... do you see why I need those bats?)

So it is that I created lizard shelters by piling up sticks -- a tip I'm sure I picked up somewhere. Sometimes my son likes to pick up sticks from one pile and carry them to the other. If he sees me picking up new sticks from the ground, he might help. I think this is not only good exercise for him, but it gives him something to do when playing during his Green Hour. (It was great to see the Green Hour mentioned at MomsMiami.com today.) That's when I take my son outside and just let him play however he wants. Sometimes it's our backyard, and sometimes it's a neighborhood park.

I haven't seen a lizard in the little stick piles. I assume they go there at night. Who knows... Maybe someone was playing a trick on me, and there really is no such thing as a lizard shelter.

But those sticks came in extremely handy today when I saw a dead rat under the bird feeder! I took the fattest, longest two sticks I could find from one of the piles to pick up the rat and throw it in my neighbor's yard dispose of it properly before my son found it.

Those crazy lizard piles are staying.

A mouthful of sleepless nights

Picture something that has a lot of teeth.

Maybe



or



You might imagine



or



How about a baby with a mouth full of teeth? Ever heard of that?

My son started teething at three months old and got his first two teeth before four months. By the time he was a year old, he had 10 teeth, including at least one molar. My mother insists it's a sign of intelligence. (But she also said that about my brother, who took his sweet time getting his bachelor's degree to graduate at age 31 and still doesn't have a job a year later.)

Because my boy's teeth came in so fast, there was no way I could relate any of his regular fussiness or growing-baby symptoms to cutting a new tooth. Because there was always a new tooth. Teething was the norm.

When I tell people my child won't sleep or eat or is pooping a lot -- the bold excitement that has ruled my life this week -- they suggest he's teething. And I have to consider that, because as strange as it sounds, I'm kind of clueless about teething. My son knows all about it, of course, but as the mom I've just chalked it all up to general obstinate toddler crankiness.

The past couple of nights when the Man-cub has woken up wailing, I helped him go back to sleep only to have him wake up a half-hour later. Too tired myself to put up with a sleepless child the first night, I lay down with him on the floor of his room -- and he was almost instantly asleep.

Last night, I skipped the floor (you're welcome, hips) and took him straight to my bed after giving him a dose of Infant Morphine Motrin. He did end up with his feet on my husband's head, but I say little toe imprints on your face for your morning meeting are a small price to pay for a night's rest.

Who knows how tonight will go, but I have to remind myself to try to count my son's teeth. I stopped checking after 14.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming

Almost three years ago, I lived through Hurricane Wilma. Most people outside of Florida don't remember Hurricane Wilma because Hurricane Katrina's devastation overshadowed Wilma's. (Most people also don't realize Katrina hit us first in a one-two punch that affected South Florida severely.) After Wilma, we didn't have power for 10 days and my husband lost a week of work. Gas was scarce, lines for generators were long, and only a few people were allowed inside the supermarket at a time (when they finally opened). Trees blocked roads, and there were no working streetlights for a week. I cooked on our grill or propane camp stove, or not at all. The showers were cold, which was miserable even though the days were hot.

I also lived through Hurricane Andrew in 1992. And that was just horrible devastation. Not so much for me, but for many people to the south and many people I knew at school.

Everyone here has interesting hurricane stories, but that really isn't the point of this post -- it's to highlight how to help recent victims of another disaster, the tornadoes in Iowa and Minnesota, as suggested by Iowan Surrender Dorothy.

Seeing images like this


Parkersburg, Iowa

Reminds me a lot of this


Miami-Dade, Florida

And it's just chilling.

Hurricane season starts on Sunday.

Just palms

Just palmetto fronds

Tarnished ... ruined ... spammed!

Once your blog is a month old (yay me!), you can list it on BlogHer, so I did. I also signed up for BlogHer newsletters, including one that is all about freebies, giveaways and that kind of thing.

The freebie newsletter included information about a promotion to receive a free makeup kit. I assumed it was something special through BlogHer. After clicking the link and filling in my e-mail address, though, all I got was page after page of lists of "do you want to receive more information about x company," and you had to check yes or no before preceding to the next page. I gave up after page four of this nonsense (I must be a slow learner) and never got to the page about the stupid makeup kit.

So as I said, I started this blog a little over a month ago (yay!), and that called for a new e-mail account to match the name of the blog. A nice, as-yet-unknown-to-spammers e-mail account. My beautiful, spam-free e-mail inbox is no more, however, thanks to the mistake I made with the BlogHer freebie. Even though I canceled my request for the makeup kit and told the marketing company to take me off the list, I am getting loads of spam now, suddenly. I've gotten 53 spam e-mails so far today.

A Dooney & Burke handbag is pending if I will just fill out a survey. A $500 Costco gift card. Free Southwest Airline tickets. Free Exxon gas card. One spam message says I can rid my colon of weight and toxins. (Hey, no one calls my colon fat.) Another says I can become a radiologic technologist. (How did they know I was looking to make a career change into that field?) I can also "relax on a cruise today at no cost." (Today?) I can even get a Medicare-covered power chair. (Even if I'm not on Medicare?)

All of this junk just because I wanted to score some free makeup -- a link from a respected source.

I've learned my lesson. There is no free lunch -- and no free makeup!

Honorary Latina

Many people in South Florida have a Latin heritage. I don't.

My only claim to Latina fame is my sister, whose father is Mexican. She has other sisters on that side of the family who are Latinas. One of them is called Chiquita. You can't get much more Latin than that.

My sister lives several states away, and when she visited recently, I introduced her to Pollo Tropical. She had black beans and rice. I also forced her to try the fried plantains and yucca.

Me, the gringa -- not the Latina sister named Chiquita -- introduced my sister to plantains and yucca!

That's what living in South Florida will do for you.

Oh, and I also know more Spanish than my sister, just by living here.

I think I deserve honorary Latina status.

All there is to know about me

I am now officially a real blogger. Because I have just been tagged for a meme by Catnip and Coffee.

Not just a meme, but that ubiquitous meme that's all over the blogosphere, and your friends send it to you through e-mail, too -- the Four Things Meme. I'm pretty sure if you took all the Four Things Memes that have been done and laid them end to end, they would win a presidential election in a small country. (What? Aren't you soooo tired of hearing "Reach the moon and back," "Circle the globe seven times," and "Span the length of 19 football fields"?)

Four jobs I have held

Fabric cutter
Failed-magazine publisher
Waitress/server/servatron
Marketing department lackey

(I like to try new things)

Four movies I could watch over and over

Princess Bride
What About Bob?
Raising Arizona
Nacho Libre

(I told you I was a goofball)

Four places I have lived

Florida
Indiana
x
x

(Yep, I don't get around much)

Four TV shows I like

Ugly Betty
Grey's Anatomy
How I Met Your Mother
Scrubs

(Even though I don't usually have time to watch any TV)

Four favorite foods

Fruit
Bread
Cheese
Pasta

(You'd think I'm Italian, but sadly I'm not)

Four places I would rather be

Exumas, Bahamas
St. John, USVI
Key West, Florida
St. Lucia

(See, there's a good reason I live at the Tropic of Mom)

Four people I'm tagging

My blog is new, and if I tagged the few people I "know," they'd probably say they already did this meme. But if you want to play along, please do!

So now you know pretty much everything about me....

Fast-food summer?

Yesterday, I took my son to a park where he could run down the boardwalk among the cypress trees and play on the playground. When your child's face is covered in sweat, though, that's a good sign it's too hot outside to play. When the temperature soars above 90 and the U/V index is 11, what's a mama to do with an antsy child?

So we moved our operations indoors and went to a library we hadn't been to before. The library didn't really have anything for little people, though. My son did pick up a book by Pearl S. Buck, so I know he enjoys classics. And he tried to read it, he really did. But when he discovered the women's restroom -- which had an open type of entry, not a door -- had excellent acoustic properties perfect for squealing, I knew it was time to leave.

Up the street, I found -- ta da! -- an indoor playground. It was connected to a McDonald's, though.

Let me mention right here that I made my own homemade baby food from organic fruits and vegetables. Three times a day, I try to make sure my son gets a meal with all of the four food groups. I give him new foods to try all the time. We don't eat a lot of fast food.

So it was inexplicable why my car pulled into the McDonald's parking lot. Amazing that I picked up my child, opened the door and went inside. Strangely curious that I ordered -- gasp! -- a Happy Meal.

But you know what? My son was indeed happy. He ate all four pieces of chicken and all of the apple slices. (You can get these instead of french fries.) He only played with the cookies. He got to watch every car ("Car! Car!") leave the drive-through. Afterward, he was happy to play in air-conditioned comfort with a boy close to his age.

The boy's mother told me about another McDonald's with an even better indoor playground. And you know what? We went there today. This time, we shared a yogurt parfait. And my son had a grand time. Until I caught him stealing french fries from other kids while they were playing.

So am I turning into one of those mothers who takes her kid for fast food every day? Those terrible mothers who supposedly don't care about nutrition -- who don't have time to make their children a healthy meal? Am I going to end up on page five of the local section and get booed by my neighbors for exposing my child to a fried sandwich?

Well, it sure beats sweating or getting skin cancer.

Mom's Law

Everyone knows Murphy's Law.

Mom's Law is similar, but worse. Not only will things go wrong whenever they can, but they will go wrong at the worst possible time.

Like when you are having a large family gathering at a relative's house covered in wall-to-wall white carpeting, and your child has a diaper blowout. Yeah.

Or when you are on your way to visit friends you've been looking forward to seeing all week, and not only does your child spit up all over your carefully selected shirt, but you notice you've sat in something gross. (Or even better, you don't notice you've sat in something gross until you get there and your friend's friend tells you.) And now you don't have another matching outfit.

Most recently, I realized I threw away a Visa reward card (found money! woo-hoo!) that came in the mail. But I realized this at 1:28 am. I got out of bed and started going through the trash can. With the light kept dim so I wouldn't wake up my husband or son, I admitted I really couldn't see what I was doing. I was going to have to wait. So then I had to wash my hands, turn off the light and do the requisite tripping around in the dark.

This morning after breakfast, I got some gloves and started going through the garbage piece by piece. Because, after all, $20 is $20. All I found, though, were leftover scraps, empty containers and junk mail. No reward card.

I'm a victim, I tell you! A victim of Mom's Law. Not only did something go wrong (I tossed my reward card), but I had to go digging through the garbage twice, only to find it wasn't in there.

I threw it out the day before.

Garbage day.

Everglades above and below

Mural at Everglades National Park visitor center, Homestead

A lawnmower-eat-tree world

My grandmother had 12 children.

My mother had three children. (I was the middle child. Gah!)

I have one child, and if I'm lucky, I'll have at least one more.

But nearby I noticed a mother with hundreds of children.

Behold the baby forest in my backyard:


A cricket's eye-view

My husband hasn't felt the need to mow in, oh, about a month. But now that it's been warm and sunny and things are growing at a faster rate -- and acorns have had a chance to sprout -- the massive oak tree in our yard is surrounded by her little ones. Some of these little suckers are a foot and a half tall! They have roots like superglue. And the mass of them are crowding one another so bad that they would never make it in a real forest. I guess they don't haven't learned yet that it's a tree-eat-tree world ... or in our case, it will be a lawnmower-eat-tree world.


The proud mother live oak

Time to fire up the engine....

- - - - -

Oh, and the water park reviews are on hiatus for a while. I know, I can hear the whole blogosphere moaning in disappointment. My husband and I took the wee one to Calypso Cove in Margate over the weekend (it's open only during the weekend until school lets out) -- which I loved -- but again, my son wasn't interested. I'm giving it a rest for a little while.

More water park fun: A review

In my quest to tour local water parks, today I took my son to Coconut Cove in the South County Regional Park in Boca Raton. I'd heard from another mom that it is really good, and with a glowing testimonial like that, how could I not go? Coconut Cove is close enough to go to casually, but not exactly nearby, but I had to try it out.

After I paid to get in, the cashier gave me two bracelets to put on us. My son -- being a boy and all -- has never worn a bracelet of any kind. I have never put anything like that on him. And apparently I suck at putting these bracelets on, because both of them ended up too big for him and shaken off onto the floor. I returned to the cashier and asked if she could give me two more bracelets, and she told me she wasn't allowed to -- I should just show the bracelets I had if someone asked me about them. By this time, though, I had crumpled the bracelets into a wad, which wasn't very impressive.

The disheartening part about our trip to Coconut Cove, though, is that my son -- the same child who played for almost two hours at Splash Adventure just last week -- refused to so much as stand in one inch of water here. I guess he's just having an off day. With my son clinging to me, I tried walking him around the water playground, up the stairs, showing him the cute foam sea turtle just under the surface of the water, pointing out the other children who were happily playing.... He wouldn't take the hint. So I gave up and went home. (Notice the lack of photographs in this post.)

To compare it to Splash Adventure last week, though, I would rather have gone there than Coconut Cove today. The water playgrounds at both parks are almost the same, and Splash Adventure is closer to my home and about half the price. True, Coconut Cove has two tall water slides and a river float, but they were closed today -- and my boy wouldn't have been interested or able to use those features anyway.

Next week, I hope to try out yet another water park.

My work is so hard.

Oh, and I just found out about the City of Miami's first water park, Grapeland (what is up with that name?!), which just opened. Yay!

Pushy

If anyone is reading me, welcome to my wildlife blog -- I mean my mom blog.

Just to prove I can write about my child, I'll tell you about one of his hobbies. He loves to push things around. I think it started when I got him a hippo push toy to help him steady himself when he was learning to walk.



(Not actual picture of my son.)

Then my mother gave him a ride-on-top/push behind Winnie the Pooh train for his first birthday. Because the train has lights and lots of buttons to push and plays repetitive songs that are as loud as the runways at Miami International Airport, my son thought this was way more fun and quickly abandoned his hippo.



(Also not a picture of my son.)

Now my child has moved on to strollers.



We got a free, lightweight umbrella stroller with the last car seat we bought. I bet if I put a pedometer on my son, it would prove he gets those 10,000 steps in, plus, just pushing this thing around the house. And it doesn't even have a single light or button, and doesn't play music. Weird.

The problem is that he doesn't want to ride in strollers anymore. He'd rather push them. (Sorry, Paula! My son didn't know your beautiful baby girl was in that stroller. Honest.) I try to take him for a walk to the park around the corner, and he throws a fit because he wants to push the stroller down the street. Believe me, I'd rather let him do that than be the victim of another one of his tantrums, but I can't let him loose around all those cars on the road. When we get to the park, he wants to push the stroller around -- the slides and swings, he can take them or leave them, but don't get between him and his stroller.

It's not just strollers. If we're at Target and I try to put him in the seat of a shopping cart, he reaches out to the bar with both hands so he can push it. While he's in my arms. Once he's in the seat of the shopping cart, and we pass by someone's unattended cart, he strains to reach out and push it. While he's sitting in his own cart.

Today when I asked my son if he'd like to play outside, he smiled and immediately situated himself in that little umbrella stroller. OK. Well, this was different. He let me push him out onto our patio ... past the pool fence ... onto our dry, crunchy weed patch beautiful backyard lawn. Then he heaved himself out of the stroller, knocked me out of the way and started pushing it around. The little sneak!

As I watched my son navigate the yard with his wheels, I started thinking, you know, our society really needs people who can push things. This is a very valuable technical skill. Where would we be, for example, without the fancy restaurant waiter who pushes the dessert tray to the table? The guys who haul hand trucks stacked with beverages to stock the shelves? The intense medical professionals wheeling a hospital gurney? People in management? Oh, wait -- managers push people around, not things.... Anyway, I'm sure I could come up with more jobs that require pushing as a skill if I thought about it some more.

I think the kid is going to be OK.

Sailing on Biscayne Bay

Sailing on Biscayne Bay

The great possum rescue of 2008

I am having the worst luck lately. Yesterday, my Internet service was down again. And my Mother's Day.... Well, this is what I planned to post yesterday.

- - - - -

Ah, Mother's Day. A time to celebrate mothers and take time to reflect on ... wait ... reflecting? Something reflecting in the pool. No, there's actually something in the pool. Let's take a closer look....

It's a baby possum, clinging to the pool-vacuum hose floating on the surface!

My husband takes the pool net to scoop the rat lookalike into a bucket. Poor thing could have been there all night.

So my husband decides to put the possum in a cat carrier with a little food and water so it can dry out and regain its strength before releasing it.



Then he begins a long afternoon of -- what? doing things to celebrate the mother of his child? -- no! Fixing the busted lawn sprinklers, of course.

Later that night, we let the possum/opossum/Pogo go into the wilds of our yard. It hung around at first, then took off like a shot into my wildflower garden. Since we went through all of this trouble to help the possum, I sincerely hope it doesn't just become roadkill.

As my husband would say, "It was a dark and possumous night."

I guess if I'm a quote-unquote mom blogger, then I'm going to have to step up the mom posts and stop blogging about wildlife so much!

Wherein an electrocuted iguana ruins my lunch

The scene: yesterday, in the kitchen. I have just returned home with my son from a fun outing. It's lunch time. No sooner do I set down the diaper bag than the power goes out.

No power means no cooking.

No cooking means a cold lunch.

And you don't want to open the refrigerator too much, because you don't want the warm air to move in. You don't know how long the power will be out.

So I scrounge around and come up with slices of deli turkey and ... um ... I think that was it.

By the time my son declared he was done eating by threatening to fling the remains of his turkey (at least he only threatened this time), the power came back on.

I didn't think anything more about it until I saw this headline today:

Iguana causes power outage for 20,000

So 19,998 other people had a cold lunch too? I'm thinking.

Seems an iguana wandered into a substation and got jolted to death, causing the power outage.

This is one of those times when you shake your head and say, "Only in South Florida."

It's a man ... it's a dad ... it's SAHD!

I met an interesting creature today. I've heard of them before but never met one in person. They have been glamorized and yet also sometimes been the subject of suspicion. I'm talking about:

The stay-at-home dad!

Able to get up with the baby in the middle of the night, do the laundry and fix the dishwasher (or so I've been told). Happy to heft a 40-pound child up his shoulders, run to the store for those three things that annoyingly got left off the shopping list and open every stubborn jar in the kitchen. Willing to lift the couch to find a lost binky, give the dog a bath and rub the wife's feet when she comes home from work! A Renaissance man of many talents!

And you know what, he seemed like a perfect normal, average, nice guy.

A regular dad.

SAHD dude, slow down -- you're making us SAHMs look bad....

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami

I am soooo lucky to be broke

I am cracking right the heck up over an article I found in the New York Times about parents and their high-design decor clashing with babyproofing and children in general.

The article highlights several parents who have either given up on their fancy decor or made a compromise. One parent was "distraught" over putting tape around a high-end table, saying, "It transformed this beautiful modernist piece of furniture into a piece you'd find in a '70s rec room." Can't you just hear the tears in his voice? Another parent said she thought she would die when her child carved her name in a cherry dining table just arrived from France. Cha-ching! Still another parent said, "Looking at what the room used to be was the visual equivalent of listening to Bach or Mozart. Now it's the visual equivalent of listening to Barney." Uh, wait -- maybe you are listening to Barney, wafting in from the next room?

Lucky me, I have no idea what it's like to "have a room finally done" or to have a table shipped from France or to put an 18th-century "piece" in storage until the children are older. In my house, there's nothing made with handmade silk or teak. I have no idea what Noguchi is. So I will never experience the distress these parents have.

Heck, when my husband and I bought a sofa from Carl's, we thought we were hot stuff. We thought buying a $300 Pottery Barn chandelier made our room so important. When we had real stone delivered for a patio redo, boy, we were really living it up then.

After reading this article, though, I am just humbled.

But at least you'll never hear me say, as one of the parents in the article did of child-safety gear, "That stuff is just gross. . . . We couldn't bear it. It was too ugly."

Welcome to my world, friend!

Living my water-park dreams

About zbdlkjt years ago, there was a huge water theme park called Atlantis in Hollywood right by I-95. Anyone been there? I totally loved that place. One summer in high school, I spent the whole day there and got burned so bad that I had sun poisoning for a week. My forehead swelled up so bad I looked like a beluga whale.



Fun times.

Even though I am a goofball responsible adult now, I dream at night about water slides. (That is, when I'm not dreaming about Jason Taylor.) I just love water slides.

So I was excited yesterday to read in the paper that today would be the first day county water parks would be open every day for the summer.

Guess where I went today?



I took my son to Splash Adventure, which is in Quiet Waters Park in Deerfield Beach.

I have to say, the water park was much better than I could have dreamed. Splash Adventure is like going to a playground that's been flooded. I think I read that it's 18 inches deep at its deepest, which is perfect for the boy. There was a gentle water slide, a corkscrew slide, a tunnel slide and a short double slide. The whole thing is set up where there are levers and wheels to turn to make water come out of holes in the floor, or fall from above, or spurt out of a tube. There were plenty of lounge chairs and big umbrellas around the water play area, too. Plus, there were always two or three lifeguards standing by.



If my son had the language skills, I'm sure he would have asked me if we can come back every day. I am thinking about taking him to a different water park every week. Even though my beloved Atlantis is gone, it's amazing how many county and city parks have added smaller water parks.

That's definitely one good reason to live in South Florida.

The cult of Thomas

Fearing that your child will someday join a cult is a real fear. And, I'm learning, it can happen as early as around two years old. I learned this today.

Let me back up a bit. Way before our son was born (childless days for my husband and me), our Adorable Nephew celebrated a birthday where Thomas and Friends was the theme. His parents and grandparents hinted overtly that a Thomas gift would be de rigeur. My husband and I had to educate ourselves in order to attend this party. Who was Thomas? And those friends? Where did they hang out, so we could buy them?

It turns out they were everywhere. Those trains -- and their tracks, figures, accessories -- had infiltrated not only the toy stores, but craft stores like Rag Shop (RIP). Thomas and his disciples/friends had taken over a whole corner of Barnes and Noble.

It was that corner of the B&N that caught my son's attention today. After he tossed some books around read quietly on the reading platform in the children's section, we wandered over to the Thomas corner. An elaborate shrine had been set up for Thomas. My son approached the altar, made suspiciously to his height and appearing to look like a play table with train tracks all over it. Not just train tracks, but bridges, a water tower, a roundhouse and other things whose use I'm still unsure of.

And do you know my son played with those trains at that table for 20 minutes? That's like an hour in toddler years.

And he's not even two years old.

Oh, it starts young. Very young.

Those Thomas people are goooood.

I'm sure this isn't the last we'll see of Thomas....