Mmm...Full!

I love stuffing--especially leftovers the next day!

Why does Tillie look like a little prairie woman in this picture? It is so tough being a pioneer!

Flower Fingers

Do you ever feel like you have plastic flowers on all of your fingers? Yes, that is a metaphor for something very profound. Discuss.

Quitter

Ooops...I think I have to quit NaNoWriMo. Here I thought that could set aside crazy amounts of time to participate in a fun novel-writing challenge, but the month is almost up and I have only 1/25 of a novel. I've gotten permission from my writing coach (who is also my triathlon coach) to start transitioning my work into NaNoWriYo (National Novel Writing Year). I must have caught her at a soft moment, because usually she is quite a hardass about this kind of thing : ) Shew!

Tillie also has occasional frustrations...

...which her lovely cousin Wyley helps her overcome!

Cousins

Tillie loves her cousins and aunts and uncles...

Swinging

How did November happen so fast? It was supposed to be leisurely with lots of time for catching up on things and getting organized. Yet, I'm running late, exhausted, and 2 weeks behind on my novel writing--yikes! Plus, according to this blog, Tillie has been celebrating Halloween for a while now...

Tilli-BOT 3000

...says "1001111100101000110101" (which translates roughly as "Happy Halloween!")

Diseased

Is this the face of pestilence, the harbinger of disease, the bringer-home of pandemics? Since when does infection come in such a cute package? A toddler in daycare is the grossest petri dish out there. She is virulence unchecked. Tillie got a cold last week, which Scott was tortured by this weekend, and which I now feel creeping my way as a slow, tight ache in my throat. And to make matters worse, swine flu is going around her classroom. Four out of the 12 children in her classroom have come down with it. Tillie and her fellow booger-nosed friends greet each other with moist kisses and suck on the same toys, so it is just a matter of time before we are oinking up piles of vomit here on Dancy Street. I'm not looking forward to it. As if contagions weren't enough, now Typhoid Tillie also has puffy hives all over from who knows what. It started out as an embarrassing (for her mother) number of mosquito bites and has blossomed into a full-body reaction to something. She hasn't done anything out of the ordinary over the weekend, so I can't explain why she looks like a rash victim. Fortunately, she isn't bothered by it. I can't tell what her teachers think of my parenting skills. Hopefully CPS doesn't show up this week. Or if they do, I hope they bring some cough drops and calamine lotion. Yuck!