Let sleeping toddlers lie

Especially when they're this cute:

Or this weird:

For those keeping score at home, Will is using his stuffed beagle as a pillow, his pillow as a blanket, and his blanket as extra mattress padding.

Parenthood

You know you're a parent when having your toddler stuff a handful of raisins down your buttcrack is an unremarkable event.

That is all.

Read this

As a literary genre, fantasy seems to have the most problems - derivative plots, dull pacing, shockingly bad sentence structure, and my biggest pet peeve: unpronounceable character names. [Side note to all Fantasy Authors: if your protagonist's name is so full of unlikely consonant combinations that I have to mentally sound it out every.single.time I read it, IT'S A BAD NAME.]

Obviously there are notable exceptions to my little rant (Tolkien, Martin and LeGuin are easy to hold up as immediate examples), but in general it's an incredibly unreliable genre if you enjoy even a moderate level of good writing. As you may have guessed by this point, it takes a fairly exceptional fantasy book to capture and hold my attention. So with all of this said - go read The Name of the Wind.

Right now. Buy it, borrow it, do whatever you have to do to get your little hands on a copy. It's an incredibly engaging story told by an startlingly talented writer, and if you end up even half as absorbed as I was, you'll spend every spare moment you have - including the ones where you should be making dinner or doing laundry so your family doesn't starve or go nekkid - reading it.

And when you've finished, go get the next book:

Repeat all the neglect of your family, then scream in frustration at the Literary Gods for allowing you to discover this series before it's complete, especially since if the spacing between the first two books is any indication, it will be another two years before the third book is published.

Now go away. Read the books. Trust me.

Sushi

This is what I did last night (and have been doing for most of the week) -- turning this:

Apologies for crappy cell phone photo. 

...into this:

In case you were wondering, the okonomiyaki (Japanese pizza) on the right was for Ben, since he doesn't eat fish. 

It's been a good week - and we still have 2.5 days left!

No kids + raw fish = happy Lisa

Today is the single most exciting day in the history of the world. Or at least the history of Lisa. Today is the start of a week long vacation - and not just any vacation! A vacation where the majority of the time, Ben and I will be......wait for it......totally child-free.

I'll give you parents of toddlers a moment to recover from your overwhelming envy.

My amazing in-laws somehow agreed to watch our hellions adorable children for FIVE WHOLE NIGHTS while Ben and I chill in Sydney. We're traveling to their house today, where I'll spend two nights getting the boys settled in before escaping to the coast for the rest of the week

I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am! Sleeping in as long as I want! Dawdling over meals instead of shoveling in a piece of cold toast as fast as I can before the Pirates start flinging food around the room like little cavemen! Strolling through a store without sprouting seventeen extra arms to stop children from grabbing every.single.thing within reach! Sitting by a pool with a book and a drink involving fruit and copious amounts of rum! I know I'll miss the boys more than I can say, but at the same time - WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Oh, and perhaps the most important thing of all about this trip: there will be sushi. If I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life, that would be it - and yet for the past five years, I have lived in sushi-free towns. (Arguably, there was a restaurant that served sushi at the last place we lived. I tried it once. It involved canned tuna, corn kernels, slices of carrot and globs of mayonnaise. 'Nuff said.) So for the six days I'm in Sydney, I intend to eat so much sushi every day that Ben will have to roll me into the hotel elevator.

I'm not taking my laptop, but I'll steal Ben's smartphone (yes, I live in the Dark Ages and don't have one - they don't give 'em away for free here and I'm a tightass) so I can still post occasionally. You know, pictures of sushi and whatnot. 

No-Sleep Week

Apologies for my absence - this past week was my bi-annual No-Sleep Week.

Once or twice a year I get a nasty bout of insomnia, and there's no real solution except to ride it out - I hate taking sleeping meds because they leave me feeling unrested and dopey, and things like chamomile tea don't do much except make me pee. Add to this that the Pirates are cutting molars right now so the tiny amount of sleep I did get was invariably interrupted, and I spent the entire week in a foggy haze of exhaustion. Good times.

Things should be back on schedule now, but to make up for my lack of posting, I'll give you Ben's new favorite joke (courtesy of The Oatmeal's DJTAF):

Q: What do you call a psychic midget who has escaped from prison?

A: A small medium at large.