My brother and my sister-in-law are here for a short visit, and I got to see my sister-in-law’s tum. My NIECE is in there! I was in the same room as my niece! Oh, and I suppose it’s “their daughter,” too, whatevs.

It was so exciting. I was sort of struck with awe about it. There is a BABY in there, and it is a new member of our family! My sister-in-law said, “She’s been kicking,” and I was, like, SHE! She she she! Because she is a PERSON! A person who is a SHE! She’ll be a REAL PERSON, and I’ll probably know her my WHOLE LIFE! And yet right now we don’t even know her NAME or what she’ll LOOK like!

Babies are so neat.

P.S. Work It, Mom!, the site where Linda and I do our column Milk and Cookies, has a new section called Problem Solved: various writers answering common reader questions. I have one posted today about cheap skincare, but there are also posts up about homeschooling, low-carb lunches, reducing morning chaos, weight loss tips, etc. It’s not a niece, but it’s a pretty neat new baby anyway.

Today at Target I bought a “Christmas Tree Grow Kit” in the dollar section. It is the wee-est, cutest thing ever: a teensy little green pot about 2 inches tall, and a chunk of soil, and six little spruce tree seeds. For one dollar!

It is almost worth the whole dollar just to see the soil expand. It’s a lightweight chunk about the size of a stack of four quarters, and you look at it and think, “Uhhhhh….this is a wee little pot, but it’s not THAT wee.” Then you add a little water (1/6th cup, which took me awhile to figure out but is 2 and 2/3rds tablespoons), and the soil just GROWS. It’s a little gross to watch, even.

And then there IS enough soil to fill the wee little pot, and you scoop it in there and press in the six seeds, and you put the pot on a sunny windowsill and you wait. Good thing I bought it with lots of time before Christmas!

So! Here we all are again! What will we talk about? I want to CHAT but I have nothing in particular to talk about except the last couple of weeks of mother-in-law visit, and let’s not talk about that.

Oh! I know! Do you want to hear about the tick I removed from my cat? Okay! Well, Elizabeth said there was something on the cat, and I went to look and it was this weird shiny grey smooth dangling POD-LIKE thing, about the size of a popcorn kernel. I couldn’t imagine what it could be. It was too big to be a skin tag, and so I thought maybe tick—but it was totally smooth. No LEGS. I’d thought there’d be visible bug parts if it were a tick.

Well, so I went online, because that is what I do. And it did seem like it was probably a tick. I looked on several sites, and the instructions seemed pretty consistent. I took a little of this and a little of that to come up with My Plan:

1. Don’t try to burn the tick off or smother it with vaseline. Those are apparently really bad ideas.
2. Get a disposable cup and put half an inch of rubbing alcohol in it. Put a Q-tip and a tweezers in the cup. (You’re sterilizing the tweezers and getting the Q-tip’s tip wet for use later in the process.)
3. Locate the cat. Open a can of tuna if necessary.
4. Kneel around the cat so the cat is as immobilized as possible, with the tick centered in your cat-view.
5. Take a breath to stabilize yourself, because this is going to be icky but you can’t let yourself get icked: working quickly and decisively is in everyone’s best interests here. You need to get that tick before either the tick or the cat realizes what’s going on.
6. Take the tweezers, grip the tick as close to the cat’s skin as you can get, and YANK. Pull straight out, don’t twist. Just POP that thing off, and then drop it into the cup of rubbing alcohol.
7. Take the Q-tip out of the rubbing alcohol and rub it around on the cat’s skin where the tick was.
8. Release the poor cat. Maybe bring out that tuna.
9. WASH YOUR HANDS. Ticks are diseased and gross.
10. Wait ten or fifteen minutes, then flush the tick down the toilet and throw out the cup, and wash your hands again.
11. The next time you see the cat, check the owie. It’ll look kind of icky. It’s normal for it to be red, bleeding, or welty. Apparently it’s okay if (WARNING, WARNING, IMMINANT GROSSNESS ALERT!) the tick’s head remained under the cat’s skin; that will work itself out. (BARF.)
12. You can put a little dab of ointment on the owie if you want to. I mixed some antibiotic ointment with some hydrocortisone ointment.
13. Keep checking the owie regularly for several weeks. Call the vet if the owie gets worse or if it fails to get better, or if the cat seems sick.

There! Now you know!

Today’s theme is “The Easier Way.” Anything where I have to decide which way to go, I’m going with the easier way. Elizabeth could stand to have a bath this morning, but it’s not at a crisis point yet so I’m going with the easier way and not bathing her. When I packed the boys’ lunches, I went with whatever items were easiest to grab and toss into the lunch boxes—and if today’s hot lunch option hadn’t been something I knew they wouldn’t eat (“Warm Egg-and-Cheese Bagel”), I would have had them get hot lunch. The kids are going to watch a LOT of television today, and I’m not doing any laundry or any cleaning. I don’t think I’m even going to unload the dishes from the drying rack.

Let’s see. I know I had some Positive Spin things to say. Now what were they? Oh yes!

One: My Mother-In-Law Good Dishes are one of the best purchase decisions of my entire life. I feel happy to get them out, happy to use them, happy to set the table with them, happy to WASH them even. When my mother-in-law announces a visit, I have the happy thought that I will get to get out the Good Dishes. They’re dressy without seeming unreasonably dressy. I like to look at them. They’re to my tastes. I don’t mind if, later, the children fight over who gets to inherit them. And yet, I don’t mind putting them away between visits. Here they are, so we can all admire them for a moment:

Except my set has mugs, not cups-and-saucers. I’m not sure why, except that I bought mine open-stock-style at TJ Maxx.

I had more positive-spin stuff, I’m sure I did. Oh! My mother-in-law visited some other relatives first, and she brought me two nearly-new, good-quality coats another relative was getting rid of. And, unbelievably, I really like both of them. One is a light, clear, vintagey aqua color, and a vintagey cut, too. It’s old-ladyish, but in what I THINK is a cute, sassy way. The other has a red suadey outside and an orange fleecey inside, and it’s cute and warm and cozy. So even though my mother-in-law announced with a merry laugh that she’d told her cousin, “Swistle is bigger than me—I’ll see if she can use them,” I’m happy to have both coats. I wore them on outings and felt like a cuter person than when I wear my usual coat (one of Paul’s). And for the record, I am NOT bigger than her. Taller, yes, and I could totally take her in a fight.

Now I’m going to brew a pot of coffee and get caught up with everything you’ve been writing while I’ve been gone!

OMG HI!!! I kiss you on both cheeks! I feel like I have been away from the clubhouse for YEARS, perhaps because of a long prison sentence!

And oh my dear, I am so behind. I have over 500 new posts in Google Reader, so I will be doing a lot of Skimming. My email inbox, which shows me the most recent 50 unanswered emails, has overflowed. I haven’t looked at Twitter for a week and a half. I have nearly 100 Facebook requests to accept or ignore. MY COMPUTER CALLS TO ME.

And unfortunately, so do my children. Even now I hear the first peeps. And by “peeps,” I mean I hear a 3-year-old yelling “ONE TWO THREE FOUR!!”

I feel too paranoid to post a lot of stuff about the mother-in-law visit here, but you can imagine me doing Lamaze breathing and thinking that, as with childbirth, at least there is a definite end to this. And then please picture how I felt last night, when I realized her departure date was FRIDAY, and not Thursday as I’d thought.

Well.

Anyway, today I am stealing a minute before the children wake up, and already I hear Henry crying. And so I am back into the fray, and we’ll talk more later.

I just read a “go green”-type article that said it was very important to choose good, safe lipsticks, because the average woman eats 4-5 POUNDS of lipstick PER YEAR by licking her lipsticked lips or eating with lipstick on.

I looked, and my lipstick is .13 ounces. That means there are 123 lipsticks per pound. You’d have to be eating more than an entire tube EVERY DAY to get to 4-5 pounds a year. SO GET CRACKING. You are WAY behind on this year’s quota if you’re going to be average.

Bad Hiding Places

• Sock/underwear drawer
• Under the bed
• Bedside table drawer
• Medicine cabinet

Good Hiding Places

• Shoebox in a stack of shoe-filled shoeboxes
• Box in the basement marked “Christmas”