Lists Which Have Nothing To Do With Babies or Pregnancy

Ten Things Max Has Said Without Prompting In The Last Week

1. "Yay! Meat!"
2. "Hello, Max! You silly." (To his own reflection in the mirror)
3. "Go potty? No thank you very much." (Potty training has hit a bit of a bump.)
4. "Yah-yah-yah-yah-yah." (In a high falsetto voice, in imitation of me, while waving both hands in sort of a duck's bill fashion, while I attempted to lecture him about something which, clearly, he failed to see the importance of.)
5. "Need hug!"
6. "Eat eat onion. Eat eat apple. Eat eat Daddy." (What does this even mean?)
7. "AWESOME!" (In response to the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?")
9. "Hi Kitty! You go be bad."
10. "Max baby? Baby, of course."


Six Things We Consumed As A Family This Afternoon At Baltimore's Lexington Market, And One More Thing Consumed Several Hours Later
1. Battered and deep-fried onion rings and mushrooms. (Wrong. Just...wrong.)
2. Hot-and-spicy Polish Sausage with this crazy tomato-onion-green chili sauce on it, sort of a really good ranchero sauce.
3. Smoked turkey dog, plain (a la Max)
4. Authentic lamb gyro on pita, with tzatziki and goat feta (Dan declared it as good as the ones he got in the Army in Germany from street vendors, announcing that the only thing that would have made it better was "about fourteen German beers first.")
5. Maryland crab soup from Faidley's Seafood Market with half a crab literally sticking out of the soup (fair--a little too much cartilege left in with the crab.)
6. Calamari, fried when I ordered it, also from Faidley's.
7. Tums.

Ten Reasons Why The America's Test Kitchen "Best Recipe" Cookbook Is So Worth It.
1. Beef tacos
2. Chicken Provencal in the slow cooker
3. Carbonnade Flamande (Belgian beef stew with beer and onions)
4. Garlic Mashed Potatoes (excellent with numbers 2 and 3)
5. Black olive vinaigrette with fresh thyme
6. Buttermilk cole slaw
7. Asian dry rubbed barbecued beef brisket for the charcoal grill
8. Fresh Whole Red snapper a la Vera Cruz
9. Smoked cheddar-horseradish cheeseburgers for the charcoal grill
10 Grilled vegetable pasta salad with red wine vinaigrette (I could write a whole post about my abiding love for vinaigrette, but that would be self-indulgent and boring)

Four Reasons I Took The Day Off
1. Last day before Dan goes back to work and Max goes back to daycare
2. Our house is a disaster area
3. My lovely but occasionally incomprehensable boss is in town after a month traveling, and she is just too effing much to deal with on a Friday
4. Family-friendly comp-time policy

One Thing I Didn't Know Before I Checked My Email Tonight
1. Jamie Lee Curtis is a pseudohermaphordite, and that's why all of her kids are adopted.