Oik. It's been over a year since I posted. Obviously my faithful following of exactly zero people continue to be, well, zero people. Nothing like building on success.

So much has happened in the last year. First, my daughter Elizabeth has been working on overcoming symptoms of Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder. Thank God she doesn't fit all of the diagnostic criteria, the psychologist said it was only a "tendency", but that "tendency" was so incredibly disruptive that she spent a good portion of the last year meeting with him to get a handle on it. If you go back and look at the entry "When Gingerbread Men Attack" you will see it shows all kinds of exciting OCD stuff that I was too dumb to notice at the time. Her kindergarten teacher sat me down and had a hard talk with me, after which I acknowledged that spending the day putting markers up to your hair and freaking out because you might have gotten marker on yourself instead of doing your worksheets and hanging out with the other kids is Not. Normal. Go figure. Fortunately she is doing much, much better and I think her improvement has made a big difference in everyone else's lives, too. We're all happier and more relaxed, for the most part.

Alex, now 2, has become my comic relief. He is currently in L-O-V-E with The Wiggles! Truly, I limit my children's TV viewing like a nice, responsible mother being given a loving pat on the back by a smiling American Academy of Pediatrics. (Who must smoke funny cigarettes at lunch and then come back and recommend children no longer take cold medication. But I digress.) To hear little Alex talk he does nothing but watch TV 24/7! Wiggles this, Wiggles that. I want my Murray shirt! Let's see Little Wiggles! I cut his viewing down to one episode per day (I didn't have the heart to make him go cold turkey) after Elizabeth had a nightmare about a Wiggles picture that came alive and started dancing in her room. My poor husband had the "Music Bug" theme stuck in his head so badly he couldn't sleep one night, and I have had my own sudden, inexplicable urges to grab the MP3 player and let my old friend Prince chase out the occasional lingering refrain of "Toot, Toot, Chugga, Chugga, Big Red Car". (I've found that keeps it from turning into "Toot, toot, Chugga, Chugga, Hit the Bar".)

Of course, I'm all talk! Am I taking Alex to The Wiggles concert next month? You betcha!!! And with a smile on my face! Truthfully, I have nothing but respect for The Wiggles, who do a fantastic job of entertaining the preschool mosh pit facing them wherever they go. (In their Big Red Car. Toot, toot.) I took Elizabeth to their concerts in her day and they put on a great show, they are enormously generous with their time and make a sincere effort to personally meet as many of the kids as possible. Who can argue with that? I simply think they need an antidote for the parents who have heard a few too many "Chugga, Chuggas". I'm just sayin', is all. Plus, once Alex learns to actually pedal his tricycle and gets a little more mobile I think he'll probably try to stalk them. They need alternatives.

I've started working in the last year, mostly from home. I was a music major in college and this year started giving piano lessons to local kids. I'll be honest, at first I did it for the money. I loved music up until my college music experience, when reality hit home and I realized I was not the next Beverly Sills, after which I crashed, burned, did a 180 and went into Social Services. I lost my joy for music and didn't do much of anything with it for almost fifteen years. But then one day I was sitting there watching the world of music open up for the first time for one of my students, and I realized I was having an absolute blast! I just love watching these guys soak things up, watching the "ah-ha" light go on when they do something and understand it for the first time. I had forgotten that music didn't need to be perfect to be beautiful, and these kids helped me remember. How lucky am I?

Oh - and I learned to knit. I have so many knitting questions, I hope real knitters maybe actually read this and I hope I actually write some of the questions down and get answers some day. It's good to have goals, no?

All right, I'm going for the semi-annual blog entry this year! Wish me luck!