In other news: The end of this vacation also means the end of my sabbatical. As much as I've enjoyed the time off, I really do miss the paycheck. On Tuesday, I go back to "work" - that is, I'll be at training for most of the next six months before we head to our new island home. Gigi will be at on-site daycare, so I can pop in on my lunch hour and get a snuggle fix.

Have I accomplished anything, or learned any valuable life lessons over the last fifteen months? Well, let's see:

I now have some idea of what people do from nine to five if they don't have offices to go to.
I now know that having all day to run the vacuum cleaner doesn't make me any more likely to do it.
I now know I'm better at this Mommy thing than I thought I would be.
I did acheive one goal: I submitted something for publication this afternoon (just under the wire!). Whoopie. It wasn't much, but I can say that I did it.

Happy New Year everyone!

Yeah, okay, I haven't posted in ages. Gigi went to day care the last time I posted. They called me at 1:30 and said, "She has a fever of 101, but we don't have a medical release from you to give her anything for it." (They never actually come out and say you're a negligent derelict.) When I picked her up, she was a little warm but otherwise seemed fine. The next morning, though, she had a full-blown case of preschool kennel cough. And the next day, naturally, I had it. And then her second tooth broke the surface. I was self-medicating (and not just the cough...) with some Polish honey herb liquor I bought on a dare at a conference in Warsaw many years ago. Damn if that stuff didn't work better than Robitussin.
But I didn't take it with me on the trip to the in-laws in New England, so I've spent most of the past week on cough syrup, bed rest, and the 900-page book about Henry VIII that my in-laws gave me. (Okay, last year it was Sylvia Plath; this year, they gave me a book about a guy who divorced, beheaded or outlived six spouses. Should I be nervous?)
The phlegm factory has finally shut down, Henry just married his fifth wife, and I'm not quite perfectly adhered to the sofa. It's been a lovely visit, but it's definitely winding down.

Hallelujah! A little white line has broken the surface. I believe we can honestly say there is a visible tooth.
Of course she's still caterwauling, off and on, 24/7. But I can at least be assured that she really does have teeth, and isn't just howling for no reason (or one that I can't guess).
This calls for a celebratory drink. Baileys and cocoa, that sounds good. Gentler than vodka, and suited to the snowy weather. It's all goooooood.

Pediatrician visit today. There is good news: she's now 18 lbs 14 oz, which puts her in the tenth percentile for weight. Doc is very pleased; I am jumping for joy. On the downside, no teeth yet, despite her best efforts and several sleepless early mornings over the past week. Ugh. I am looking more and more like a panda on quaaludes. The doc gave us the name of a pediatric dentist and told us to give them a call if those little nubs on her gums don't make any progress after a few weeks.
Then she got a TB test (my company requires it as part of the medical clearance before we transfer overseas again) and her booster flu shot. That was officially No Fun for either of us.
Tomorrow, while my husband and I get our pre-transfer physicals, Gigi gets to do a test run at her future day care center. They'll take her on a "drop-in" basis for fifty bucks a day in the weeks preceding her formal enrollment so she can get acclimated to the place. Nice of them, but dag, fifty bucks a day? It wouldn't hurt quite so much if I were not still on unpaid leave - and if our house payments didn't jump nearly a hundred bucks every time Alan Greenspan got a fart caught crooked.

Greetings from the house of pain. By the time this kid gets an actual tooth, she's going to be a vampire. Seriously, this is going to kill us both. Tonight she was crying so hard she puked. It took Orajel, Motrin, pacifier, and several verses of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" before she would even think about stopping the crying, and she would not fall asleep unless I held her. After she was finally out for about ten minutes, and I felt reasonably certain that all systems were functioning on the autonomic level, I set her in the crib. There was a brief twitch when I clicked the rail into place. I wish I could find a way to muffle that sound, because when it wakes her up, it's back to the beginning for the settling-down routine.
Thirteen months. Yesterday was her thirteen-month mark. We have a weight check at the pediatrician next Wednesday. If she doesn't have a tooth by then, it's going to be mildly embarassing. I'll tell the doc it's karma: she didn't want to come out either; we finally had to go in and get her when she was two weeks past her due date. But there's no such thing as a C-section for stubborn baby teeth. Poor kiddo. At least I'm allowed to soothe myself with vodka.
Serendipitously, I was at the dentist today. I went two weeks ago for the first time in, oh, too long. Drilling was necessary. So when I got home with novocaine-face, I guess I figured I'd be the one spending the evening dealing with twinges in the gums.
She's still asleep. And now for that vodka...

No, still no teeth. Not a one.

Happy Thanksgiving to our U.S. readers. Hope your holiday was enjoyable and peaceful. My family gathering was not entirely without incident, but to my chagrin, that's my fault. But let me set the record straight. For the last time: I did not stab my father with a fork.
It was just a poke, a mere prod. I did not break skin. I apologized, and my dad graciously accepted.
But you'd think he would know better, after more than a decade, than to call my alma mater "an all-girls school". I reflexively exclaimed, "Women's College!" and punctuated this correction with my fork, tines striking the back of his hand. Ooops. I am not proud of this incident. Mea maxima culpa, sorry Dad.
Now if he had been in between me and the mashed potatoes or the pumpkin pie, no doubt there would have been blood on the walls. "And I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers..."

Baby Gigi's vocabulary continues to expand. She absolutely melted my heart the first time she looked into my eyes as she made the babysigns gesture for "more" and said, "mah-MEE?" Before I had time to burst into tears, she started grabbing at my neckline. Okay, I get it, she's hungry. Now she uses "Mah-mee?" and the sign anytime she's peckish. I can live with having my title equated with "feed me," really.
In addition to variations on the theme of Mommy, she has "Daddy", "kee" for kitty, "kay" for her grandparents' dog Casey, and of course, "uh-oh" for "I dropped it, please pick it up so I can drop it again." As long as she holds off on "no" a little while longer, I'm happy.

I am pleased to report that we have heard from Queen Joolieoolie. Her lovely daughter was born healthy and happy and of course adorable. Baby girls rock. Welcome to the world, Princess K.

They really do absorb more than we give them credit for. We were driving out to the countryside last weekend for foliage-peeping and whatnot, and on the radio R.E.M. was performing "Man on the Moon". From the back seat, a tiny voice popped up, "Ya ya ya..."

Oh, and still no teeth.

Happy Thoughts and pixie dust and whatnot to the aforementioned Queen Joolieoolie, who is scheduled to have a C-section tomorrow. They did pretty good job with kid #1, who looks like somebody left his daddy in the dryer too long. Here's hoping that all goes well.

Great news! We finally know where we're going to live next year. The folks at HR decided, I guess, that if I couldn't get a promotion I could get a nice consolation prize.
So, remember that Tom Cruise movie where he's some kind of resort bartender? And that Beach Boys song from the soundtrack got stuck in everyone's head for the rest of the decade? You know, the one that sounds like a Caribbean travel agency's jingle?
Well, my next contract sends me to a place listed in that song. For three years.
SUPER SWEET!
The one downside to all of this is that I have six months to get myself ready for perpetual swimsuits...oh gaaaaaaaaawd. Considering my title as the reigning Lady Lardbottom of the Grand Duchy of Buttox, I have my work cut out for me.

"Gigi" and I have been sick all week. She got a cold for her birthday, so no trick-or-treating. I got the cold from her the following day. So after All Snots Day, we've been keeping a low profile and hoping not to spread it to her daddy - who is pounding orange juice like the Anti-Anita Bryant. Thursday she went for her twelve-month checkup at the pediatrician, and the flu shot made her miserable all day Friday. Saturday morning she woke up in the wee small hours of the morning. Ooooogh.
A few weeks ago, after I wrote about my limited tolerance for "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round," my homegirl Queen Joolioolie wrote me about her son, who at one point could only be soothed in the car with TWOTBGRAR. She and her husband would be driving around with the boy, inventing more and more verses for the song. Ah, yes. I feel your pain, sister. This week has taught me that a sure-fire method for wooing a reluctant Gigi to sleep is "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."
So there I was at 4:30 a.m. Saturday trying to invent new variations of "in the nursery, the baby's nursery, the baby goes to sleep" that didn't involve "the mommy goes insane..."
So my sleep schedule, such as it has been over the last year, is now pretty whacked. And the worst part about being sick? Coffee doesn't taste right. Maybe I can persuade my local Starbucks to whip me up a no-foam Robitussin soy latte.

Some folks really go nuts when celebrating their kids' milestones, but this is over the top. We just had the family over for dinner and cake. Sheesh!

Happy Halloween! I'm the scariest thing on the block right now. My little girl got a cold for her birthday, so she's up throughout the night. I look like a panda with a freebase problem. Now I'm starting to feel a bit of a tickle at the back of my throat. Excuse me, I have to wash down all that leftover candy with a gallon of vitamin C...

Still no teeth. Just in case you were wondering.

Outraged. Mind-blown, gobsmacked, rip$h!t, bug-eyed outraged am I.
Why? Because it's a week before Halloween, the detritus left in the stores is already on clearance - except for the candy, natch! - and it appears that there is no one left in a 25-mile radius with instant fake cobweb stuff. One store I went to last week didn't even have a Halloween display up anymore.
And what is out there? Christmas stuff. Slowly taking over the shelves in every store I've been to in the last two weeks, the "holiday" stuff is starting to rear its gaudy, fiber-optic fake-snow-encrusted head.
It's revolution time.
Honestly, people, Christmas Creep is officially out of control. It's no longer a random Santa lurking on the edges of the Back-to-School stuff (which barely tailgates on the 4th of July). It's garlands and pinecones and tacky little Dickensian villages (without the open sewers and industrial-revolutionary soot everywhere). And they're on the "seasonal" shelves in my local craft store, outgunning the jack-o-lanterns and witches by five shelves to one.
I mentioned this at one of the stores I was shopping in last week, and the guy said, "I am from Sicily. If you had a store that had one holiday decoration up before the previous holiday was over, nobody would ever shop there again."
Hear hear. Far be it from me to endorse a wholly Sicilian approach to the problem; retailers may keep their knees intact. But by God, people, if we all refused to buy anything with a holly branch or a candy cane on it until the fourth Friday in November, maybe, just maybe, the Powers That Be would show a little restraint.
Who's with me?

"Gigi" is 51 weeks old now. She's really getting the hang of this walking thing. Still no teeth, despite much wailing and gnashing of gums. Some garment-rending will no doubt be part of this process as well.
In the past few weeks, when I'm not chasing her down (or downing a chaser), I am looking at my options for returning to work. We're hoping to go back to Europe, just not quite so far east if we can swing it. My husband would like to continue telecommuting, and we need a compatible time zone for that.
But man oh man. Top three ways to pummel one's self-esteem into the mud: read too much Sylvia Plath while listening to early Tori Amos on a rainy day; stand in your undies before a three-way dressing room mirror; dust off and update your resume after two years in a $h!tty job and one year of extended diaper detail.
(Okay, in all fairness, the first year of that two-year Baltic stint was not so awful. Yes, it was the coldest winter on record since the second world war, but at least my boss had interpersonal skills and realistic, concrete goals I could fulfill.)
I have a strong sense of what I want out of this job hunt, but I just don't know how to get it. I mean, you can't really tell HR, at least not in writing, "I took one for the team, it got me nowhere and nearly destroyed my health; you [insert epithet of choice]s OWE ME BIGTIME. Anyone suggestions about how to phrase that diplomatically, kindly forward to purplescareblog@yahoo.com. In the meantime, I'm going to borrow some of my daughter's Baby Mozart for Big Brains CDs and try my hand at Word's Resume Wizard. Wish me luck!

Gigi's uncle has informed me that the song stuck in my head two posts ago is in fact by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I'd be even more appreciative if that knowledge would knock the damn song out. Argh.

Tequila Time! HR has informed me that I am not getting promoted. Naturally I am not happy about this at all. I will refrain from further blogging on the subject just now, since I don't want to get carpal tunnel flareup from typing the horrific stream of obscenities which would so richly describe my feelings. Try me again tomorrow.