Everybody knows that when you’re the mother of small children you lose touch, to a certain degree, with the outside world. This was really brought home to me while I was browsing buzzfeed.com the other day and came across an item listing “The Songs of Summer”. What I discovered is that there is a huge gap in my musical knowledge from 2002 to 2007. I didn’t recognize a single song! At first I was puzzled and then I realized that those were the years that I had a baby and/or toddler in the house.

I feel like a little bit of my youth was stolen.

Can I get some tunes?

I’ve always assumed I’d get Lucy’s ears pierced at some point. Although I think it’s a bad idea to get a baby’s ears done, I don’t see anything wrong with piercing, say, a 6-year-old’s ears. I learned this week that my husband and I severely disagree on the topic.

It's just a little hole.

Lucy asks about it sometimes and I always tell her that she can when she’s older. She always responds with “When I’m 18?” I don’t know where she came up with that age but it’s her response any time I tell her she has to be older for something. I kind of like it. Unfortunately, her daddy thinks 18 sounds like a good age for pierced ears. He finally conceded that maybe 12 would be okay. I told him I thought that was crazy. As more of her friends pierce their ears, the more interested she becomes. Just the other day she started crying because one of her ballpark friends had gotten her ears pierced earlier that day.

(For the record, I’m not a “jump on the bandwagon” type but I got my ears pierced when I was about 6. And one of my favorite things when I was a kid was wearing earrings. Even the ones that turned my ears green.)

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Well, the finite amount of free time in my week just got smaller. Lucy started T-ball practice this week. (Sam’s twice-a-week practice started a few weeks ago.) Her first practice was Monday and I have to say, it was kind of adorable. Most of the girls had no idea what was going on and one broke down in tears. I’m proud to say that Lucy ran the bases in the right order, even if she did carry her bat with her. Thankfully, nobody was hurt.

When we went to the big box sports store to buy her gear, she was pretty excited. That is, until we started looking at gloves. Lucy saw all the pink-accented gloves and she swooned. Unfortunately for her love of all things pink, Lucy is left-handed and the only lefty one in her size was a dark gray one. But she seems to have gotten over her disappointment, so that’s good. Her helmet is too big for her head but it’s the smallest they make. A chin strap keeps it on her head.

Lucy gets ready to hit it out of the park.

Trying to teach five 4-year-olds where to stand in the field, what to do with the ball if they catch it, and which base to run to when they hit the ball was the very definition of organized chaos. I’m so thankful that I’m not the coach! Even so, the team required lot of parental participation. Well, lots of mom participation. I was very disappointed to see that there were only two dads at practice. It made me wonder if it had something to do with the fact that it’s an all-girls team. Nearly all of the dads attend practices for Sam’s team.

Baseball is a big deal at our house and Lucy has been itching to play on a team since she was a toddler. I’m happy that she’s finally getting to play, even though it means that between her twice-a-week practices and her brother’s (not to mention when games start in a couple of weeks) watching kids play ball is about all I’m going to have time for. Adios clean house and home-cooked meals!

Every Friday, I’m going feature a few things I think would be worth spending my hard-earned cash on. If you can think of a better name for this weekly feature, leave it in the comments. I’m suffering from Friday afternoon brain-drain and this is the best I could do.

I’ve already asked David to get me these two items for Mother’s Day and my birthday. First up is the 10th book in Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse series, Dead in the Family. I haven’t been able to find an official synopsis of it yet, but according to a blurb on Harris’ Web site, the story revolves around Sookie, Eric and Bill dealing with family issues. At any rate, I’m excited about it and can’t believe I have to wait until May to read it. Harris has posted the first chapter on her site.

Dead in the Family is the newest book in the Sookie Stackhouse series.

The other thing I’m really looking forward to getting is season 2 of True Blood (based off the Sookie books) on Blu-ray. I refuse to get HBO just to watch one show, so I have to wait until late May to see it. You can find some clips on YouTube, but not the good bits. Alan Ball does an excellent job of taking the basis of the books and then spinning original ideas off that and making a compelling show.

Alexander Skarsgard plays vampire Eric on True Blood.

When all the weather people were predicting snow and ice for Little Rock last Friday, I didn’t believe them. Give those meteorologists some spring severe weather and they do pretty well. Their winter-weather predictions are pretty worthless. A while back when it was supposed to snow and didn’t, Sam wanted to know why the weatherman lied. I tried to explain that it was more complicated than that but it didn’t go very well. So when I woke up Friday morning and it actually was a little icy, I was a bit surprised.

Days like this, when school is suddenly closed, are hard for me as a working mom. I had to tell my editor that I couldn’t come to work because I had to take care of the kids. This is not a popular thing to do when you work at a newspaper. Other times like this, David could stay home but not this time. He had been in the office late the whole week because of several pressing projects and drop-dead deadlines and had something that had to be completed on Friday, no matter what.

Lucy with some snow.

We live south of Little Rock and because of a combination of already soggy ground and getting mostly ice instead of snow (it didn’t come until late in the day), Sam and Lucy didn’t have much white stuff to play in. Most of what they did play with came off the cars. I told them not to eat it. Hopefully they listened.

Lucy, Sam and our dusting of snow.

The kids are crossing their fingers that we’ll get a big snow before spring. It’s snowed in March here before, so maybe they’ll get their wish.

It’s actually been kind of gloomy around my house lately. My beloved Momma Mac (my great-grandmother!) died early Tuesday morning. This was the woman who taught me how to cook, fostered my love of gardening, and gave me a place to stay when things were rough at home. I’ll have more about this in another post.

Super Grover

So, to help shake myself out of my gloom I went googling on the Internet for fun stuff. And I found some! Did you know that Sesame Street uses Twitter?

I particularly like this one as I live with a mini-cookie monster. Tonight when I offered Lucy a chocolate chip cookie for dessert, she looked at me thoughtfully and said, “No thanks. I’m going to save that for breakfast.” This is, of course, all my husband’s fault. He’s the one who caved and gave her some for breakfast a few times.

Breakfast according to daddy.