How do we survive motherhood with our sense of humor intact? It would be more to the point to ask how anyone survives motherhood without a sense of humor. You need one. We will cry or we will laugh it off, and laughing it off is so much easier on your sanity. Tiffany spends a great deal of her day right now exploring her world. That’s how I think of it. I choose not to see it as getting into everything, doing the most annoying little motions over and over and FREAKING OVER ALREADY. She can stand up and giggle at herself in the mirror for two hours. I’ve seen her do it. She can open and close the linen cupboard- not much, just enough to make the hinge squeak. For five minutes straight. She will pull every book off the shelves within reach until she’s in serious danger of toppling the whole thing on her head. Every night after she’s gone to bed I spend an hour putting the house back to rights. Every morning I wake up, and five minutes after we start the day together everything gets pulled out and strewn back over the floor.

It’s good for me. It’s good for me to clean and good for her to mess it up. This morning she knocked over a floor lamp, shattering the bulb into a million tiny ouchy pieces. Fortunately the glass shade did not break. Even more fortunately for my Darling Girl who likes to put everything she sees into her mouth immediately, she knocked it over by crawling underneath and trying to stand up, and thus it’s fall was angled all the way across the room from her. I then spent the first half hour of her naptime kneeling on the floor and using a tweezers to pick glass out of the carpet. Then I vacuumed. Then I picked more glass. Then I vacuumed again.

Currently on the reading list: Interesting Times. I’m curling up with Terry Pratchett this weekend because he’s damn funny and I don’t have to think when I read his books. Of course, I’ve read them all twenty times each so there’s not much mystery left in the plot. It’s like sitting back on the couch and watching a 26 hour marathon of Gilligan’s Island for the third time. You know the end, you still have a good time getting there, and it’s very relaxing. Keep that sense of humor, Mamas. Keep laughing and we’ll stockpile the tissues for a rainy day.