You guys are SO LUCKY, because this is one of those times when my exuberance overcomes my common sense and I tell you about a contest I am myself entering, thus dramatically decreasing my own chances of winning. And I don’t know if you know this, but I can’t accept either payment or gifties for saying nice things (it’s the rules with that BlogHer ad over to the right), so you can be sure my motives are pure, if a little dim.

Our own Bird has a contest up for her shop Redbean Dream, and ska-WEE it is cute stuff. (All these photos are hers; I asked permission before I yoinked them, because I am SO POLITE and also because I am so in awe of artistic talent.)

One prize she’s giving away is your choice of an illustrated letter. This is “F is for fleur de lis,” but you can choose your own letter, your own color, and your own picture. Doesn’t that kind of thing get your mind clicking? I’m all, “S is for Swistle”! I could get the S is for Swistle done on a Swistle-colored background! With, like, a picture of that little skirt (“S is for skirt”!) that’s my avatar for no good reason except that I liked the skirt and couldn’t find it in Elizabeth’s size and so got a little obsessed with it.

She’s ALSO giving a second prize, your choice of a fine art print. Don’t let me influence you, but Fleur de Pea in pink (it also comes in blue or yellow) is my definite favorite.

And then she’s going to pick a THIRD winner to get a SURPRISE prize. Which, OMG fun.

You only have until Friday to enter, so GO GO GO. And if you win, I will try to be genuinely happy for you.

Never Crabby Shirt update! Cindy used a random number generator to choose two winners:

1. El-e-e of hello, self
2. Dawn of the May 15th, 11:26 a.m. comment

El-e-e and Dawn, email me (swistle at gmail dot com) with your mailing info and I’ll send it on to Cindy.

I’m finally getting caught up with photos.

OMG—MOM?!?

Mr. Pickles thinks airplanes are so CLIQUEY

Mr. Pickles is already tired of looking out the window and wants to know when food will be served. Got some bad news for you, Mr. Pickles.

(More photos at The Chicken Game Flickr Group, which everyone is welcome to join.)

SaLy at Incubation Nation wrote a post about the new “never crabby” shirt from The Children’s Place, and that reminded me that YOOPS I forgot to post something I meant to post a long time ago, which is that reader Cindy emailed me to say that has two of the old never-crabby shirts in size 4T and she’d be happy to send them to someone who wants them.

Remember those shirts? We pretty much ALL bought them. I think I bought it in 2T, 3T, and 4T.

Anyway, if you have a use for one (or two) in 4T, leave a comment and Cindy will pick someone to send the shirt(s) to!

So, doll collecting: more controversial than potty training. Good to know!

I am reading American Psycho, so I’m having trouble doing anything else. I get so grossed out I have to put it down, but then I’m so mesmerized I have to go back to it.

I had a happy Postcrossing thing happen: at the airport I bought a postcard OF the airport—and then today I drew the name of someone who collects airport postcards. I’ve never seen someone request one before, so it was pretty exciting.

I’m still settling in from my trip. I haven’t gotten through my email yet, or through the posts in my Google reader, but I’m getting there. And then I need to go through five kersnillion photos of THIS:

Niestle

Perhaps the first thing you will notice about this picture is, “Hey! That’s the old couch! Paul must have fixed it!” And you would be right: he did fix it, so now we still have it, but in the playroom rather than as the main piece of furniture in our living room.

Or perhaps the first thing you will notice about this picture is the SEVENTEEN DOLLS sitting ON the couch.

This is a little embarrassing. After William was born, we’d planned to have a third baby about 2 or 2.5 years later. Then Paul lost his job and couldn’t find another for almost two years and so I went to work full-time. There’s never a “perfect time” for a pregnancy, but there are definitely times that are better than others, and this was not one of them. So we delayed our plans.

Evidently I went a little crazy? That’s all I can think of. Because I had NEVER been interested in dolls before, not even as a child, and yet I started collecting them, and collecting clothes for them, and CHANGING their clothes, and COMBING THEIR HAIR and so forth. Then Paul got a job and I quit mine and got pregnant and totally lost interest in the dolls and packed them all away, so draw your own conclusions.

We’re going to be putting in a second bathroom, and it’s going to mean a loss of storage space in the basement. My doll collection, totally ignored for more than four years now, takes up five huge Rubbermaid bins. I’ve been reluctant to cull, though, because what if I get interested in dolls again? Some of these dolls were acquired only after expensive, time-consuming quests. What if I get rid of them and then WANT THEM BACK?

Well, but this is getting silly. I can’t just hang onto them forever, and Elizabeth is, so far, uninterested in dolls, and we need the space. So my goal is to pare it down to what fits in ONE large bin. That way I can keep my top favorites and my favorite outfits, just in case either Elizabeth or I suddenly get interested, but can also free up space.

The problem, of course, is deciding on favorites. I’m very influenced by how hard the dolls were to find and how much they cost, or by how badly I wanted to buy them originally. I’m TRYING to judge only by how much I LIKE the doll, but it’s tough. Doll #1 was a $20 Walmart doll that eventually went down to $8 on clearance. I bought her new from a large stock of the same doll. Doll #11 was a hard-to-find doll from a line of dolls that sold for $80-100 each before the line was discontinued; I bought her used on eBay after many failed attempts, in a very exciting auction that I WON and went around feeling thrilled about for WEEKS. I prefer Doll #1. But it’s hard to ditch Doll #11.

All right, yes, this is all just a stall while I’m supposed to be culling. Fine, I’ll get back to it now.

Oh, hello! I am home! In the first hour, I:

1) Removed a tick from Henry’s scalp
2) Removed clumps of peanut butter from the underside and leg of the coffee table
3) Cleaned up the results of a child over-using air freshener without permission (and then threw away the air freshener because what are we, an anarchy now?)

Note that it was not until the second hour that I:

4) Peed

And I have not yet:

5) Unpacked
6) Read my email
7) Deleted any of the “over 1000” (!) posts in my Google Reader

Paul proudly reported that he brushed everyone’s teeth TWICE while I was gone. So THAT went well. And my parents, who took over the shift I usually work alone, did not run screaming into the sea, so THAT went well too.

Seat choice report, for those of you who didn’t read my laboriously-thumbed Twitter updates: my favorite seat on a Southwest plane is the window seat in row 20. It’s right over where they load the luggage, so you can count pink suitcases and be glad yours is a carry-on because GEEZ do they have to SLING them around like that? That’s rough enough to break a SOCK. And oooh, nice muscles! It’s close enough to the wing that you can make sure the wing is still attached and so you really feel like you’re On An Airplane, but not so close that the wing blocks your view. The seats toward the front fill up first, so that I had a whole row to myself for one flight, even though the front half of the plane had people sitting even in some of the MIDDLE seats. But it’s not so far back that the bathroom line is standing next to you. I hesitate to recommend the seat, since the next time I fly I might find YOU sitting in MY favorite seat, but I guess there are lots of flights I WON’T be on.

The view from window seat row 20

What else? Oh, yes, here’s my recommended Carry-On Snack List:

1) apple
2) baggie of pecans
3) empty water bottle filled at a water fountain after security
4) candy bars
5) chocolate-covered dried cherries
6) baggie of roasted salted sunflower seeds

I found this covered all my snacking needs satisfactorily. Raisinets make an acceptable substitute for the chocolate-covered dried cherries. Milk chocolate Dove with almonds was my favorite candy bar.

Can it get better than this? I put it to you than it cannot.

Oh, hello! Do you know what? It’s possible to use “computers” in “other people’s houses” to “post blog posts”! Isn’t that WILD?

I’ve been using my cell phone to use Twitter occasionally to send little updates (the Twitter box is somewhere in the righthand margin), but GEEZ that’s time consuming and my thumbs aren’t yet good at it, so it’s all, “I……a…..m…..FORGET IT.”

The quick update is that I am having a WONDERFUL TIME, and Niestle is THE CUTEST EVER and The Place Where They Live (I never know how careful to be with info, do you?) is TERRIFIC and I want to MOVE HERE and play with Niestle all day and hang out with my brother and sister-in-law so much they start to wonder when I will go HOME! This is just the best vacation ever and I love it, and my flight here couldn’t have gone better (unless they had FED US, but luckily I’d packed lots of yum snacks), and I’ve been sleeping luxuriously, and they have been buying me treats left and right (ice cream cone from a cool ice cream place that had flavors like “Honey Lavender”! fun meal with all the dishes named after the cities they came from! a truffle cake for after dinner tonight!), and we have been watching 30 Rock which is hilarious, and I have been snuggling and snorfling and squeezing babies like crazy, and it was a totally good decision to come here, and let me see if I can find a picture. I’m using my brother’s computer so I have to snoop around a little and hope I don’t come upon anything Embarrassing. …Okay, here we go, here’s a picture he took of me and Niestle:

I have of course bitten off all those delicious little toes by now, so it’s good he documented them before they were gone.

I am in such a pre-travel fret! Last night I took sleeping pill from 2002 because I was sitting (read: standing) there in our bedroom saying, “Oh! Wait! I should have done a load of laundry this evening! I forgot to try on my pedal pushers! Are my new pink sandals going to arrive in time and why does UPS say they don’t recognize the number when Lands’ End says they shipped? Which of the ten paperbacks I bought at the library book sale should I bring with me? Oh, dang, I meant to paint my fingernails! I should bake another batch of muffins just to be sure there are enough.”

Then I was reassuring myself in a way that wasn’t particularly reassuring, thinking, “Even if I totally forgot to pack, and then woke up late and couldn’t shower, and had to rush to the airport with nothing but my purse which let’s say for the sake of my peace of mind had my boarding pass and ID in it, I could still SURVIVE a 4-day trip. I would just go to a store there and buy a package of underwear and a thing of deodorant and maybe a t-shirt, and everything would be FINE JUST FINE ABSOLUTELY FINE.”

*pant pant*

I kind of love this kind of Anticipation Fret. It sure gives chores a little boost in the butt when I can think, “I should wash these clothes so I can TAKE THEM ON MY TRIP!!” and “I should bake muffins for the kids to eat WHILE I’M GONE ON MY TRIP!!!”

I do have one thing I’m genuinely fretting about, and that is the carry-on situation. Southwest says I can have one carry-on and one smaller personal item such as a purse or a laptop. When I was more distant from Flying Time, I casually interpreted this to mean I could have two carry-ons: my “as big as possible carry-on so I don’t have to check any bags” carry-on, and my regular “magazines and snacks” carry-on.

Now that I am flying TOMORROW OMG IT’S TOMORROW, I’m worrying that no, they really mean one carry-on and one purse, and my regular carry-on will be my carry-on and so they will make me check my big carry-on.

Surely SOME of you have flown Southwest and can tell me The Scoop. Meanwhile, I will be running around going “OMG OMG OMG OMG” and cycling laundry and sorting paperbacks and digging out another 7-year-old sleeping pill for tonight.

Oh and p.s.: I checked in at the very MINUTE it would let me do it, and I was still number 25! But I’m in A group! Woo!