You know how you feel all good about yourself when you figure something new out on the computer? Or is that just me? I’ll be all “Look! I made a webpage!” and I’ll get all cocky like I’m a big computer geek like all the cool kids. Then? My BFF’s eleven-year-old daughter goes and teaches herself to make animated .gifs like the one above (teaches HERSELF) and makes me one for my goofy little website. She’s the cool one, not me. She’s ELEVEN for chrissakes. And she MADE this for ME.

Thanks LaLa! I love you!

Guess what I got in the mail yesterday? A nursing necklace! Leah sent it to me to help with my problem I’ve been having with NikkiZ getting distracted while she nurses. This necklace gives her something to play with while she nurses so that it encourages her to stay focused on the nursing and the necklace because they all pull her attention in the same direction. She really likes it and so do I.

If you want one too? You should email Leah at whatnotandwhimsyATgmailDOTcom (you know the deal, replace the “at” and the “dot” with the actual symbols, this is to keep some bot from browsing this page and grabbing her email) and she’ll sell you one too! It really is a neat thing and I’m very grateful she sent it to me. It’s made of incredibly strong and waterproof cord while it also has a release clasp in case of emergency, like, getting it stuck in gears when I’m working with heavy machinery. Better safe than sorry.

It’s awesome and I love it. Thanks, Leah.

NikkiZ’s Spring Fling was tons of fun last night. I was able to hang out with some of the other parents in our class. Also, one of her teachers made all of the babies these flower collars to wear and they were SO adorable. Our little flower garden.

My Target Bakery cookies along with my Target Bakery brownies were the fastest selling items - second only to the rice krispy treats which, damn, I could have made some of those. I ended up going home with part of the Sand Castle Cake just because it was so damn awesome. And a TEENAGER made it. Whatever. I still don’t know how to bake and here this girl is, 15 years younger than me, and baking damn sand castle cakes.

I bet she won’t ever have to resort to buying cookies from the store for her children’s bake sales.

NikkiZ’s class is having a Bake Sale tonight. The parents are supposed to bring items to sell in the Bake Sale. Someone is baking a Sand Castle cake, others are making brownies, and muffins, and cookies. There is going to be a bounty of sugary goodness made with the loving hands of parent’s in NikkiZ’s class.

I’m going after work to buy whatever Target is selling in their bakery.

Bonus points will be given if something in the bakery is already packaged in a way that it can be sold in individual servings. This will keep me from needing to buy something like sandwich bags to put the baked goods in. I figure, I’m definitely going to have to put price stickers on the baked goods (I’m assuming Target won’t have already done that part for me), I shouldn’t have to actually bag the items up too. What do they expect from me? I’m a busy woman. There are blogs to read and naps to take, how am I supposed to find the time to put cookies (or brownies, or cupcakes, I’m not picky) in bags for a bake sale, much less even BAKE anything from SCRATCH. Who the hell has time to do that?

Don’t they know it’s time for May Sweeps and my TiVo is already FULL? Jeez.

When I walked into NikkiZ’s doctor’s office yesterday, the waiting room was FULL. This was only our second visit to the new doctor, but I know it’s a small practice so a full waiting room was very odd. The more I sat there, I realized this was all one family. One woman in her 40s, her sister, her mother, and her three kids. The three kids were all girls and ranged from about 8 to about 16. It didn’t take me long to realize the oldest child was the one there to see the doctor. This was one of the conversations that clued me in:

Mother: Why can’t they give us the prescription here to take to get filled for you?
16-year-old: Because my P.O. has to approve it first.

It took me a few minutes to decide what P.O. meant. I knew I had heard it before but I couldn’t remember where. Then it clicked: The nine million procedural dramas I watch. P.O. means Parole Officer.

Surely that nice looking teenager doesn’t have a Parole Officer I thought to myself. What else could P.O. mean in that situation?

It was then that I noticed, Oh. Handcuffs.

This nice looking teenager had handcuffs and ankle shackles on to go with her VERY baggy khaki pants and orange sweatshirt I hadn’t paid any attention to before. You could tell she was doing her best not to draw attention to her retraints. It was a very surreal moment when I realized there was this young girl handcuffed and shackled waiting to see the same doctor I was waiting to take my daughter to see. Especially when I heard the nurse explain to the doctor later, “Poor thing, she’s incarcerated so you have to examine her with her restraints on.”

(I promise I’m not nosey, the office is TINY.)

I have no idea what the girl did, but my curiosity was killing me. I also have no idea why whatever detention center she obviously came from didn’t send a guard of some sort with the restraints. It seems if she was enough of a flight-risk to be cuffed and shackled, she would need a guardian of some sort too. It was all very odd. Do juvenile detention centers release kids to medical facilities, but only if they’re restrained? But they don’t bother sending any sort of chaperone besides the family? It was all VERY weird.

Either way, the girl seemed very nice and it wasn’t like I was worried for our safety or anything. It was just NOT something I expected. To run into a teenage prisoner of some type in the lobby of my daughter’s pediatrian’s office.

Now, at my P.O.’s office? I see them all the time…