Anthony is 23 months old!

On Friday, Anthony reached a big milestone: the last time I'll be able to refer to his age in months. From here on out, he'll be 2, then a little over 2, then almost 3, then 18. At least that's what it feels like!

To "celebrate," we took him to the beach. Because nothing says "celebration" like taking a child who is suddenly deathly-afraid of the water and is genetically disposed to dislike oceanfront activities (direct quote from Brandon: "I hate getting all sandy and wet") to Miami's famed "clothing optional" Haulover Beach.

Don't worry, we stuck to the non-nude portion of the beach, although Anthony did take off his shirt.

At first Anthony wanted nothing to do with any of it ("bye-bye, beesh; bye-bye, beesh") and tried to point the way to the exit.

He especially wanted NOTHING to do with the ocean, making a break for higher ground at his first opportunity.

We decided to give him a chance to get acclimated, and the introduction of a pail and shovel helped immensely.

Eventually, I dare say he cracked a smile.

Yep, definitely a smile.

Not sure what this is all about.

All said, Anthony seemed to enjoy his day at the beach, perhaps siding with dear old dad on the getting wet portion of the activity, but not appearing to mind the sandy aspect. But still, when we asked him if he was ready to go, he immediately popped up and starting tugging his stroller open...so we'll just go ahead and call the results mixed.

Or, maybe he was just anxious to get home to all his fancy toys....

Who needs to drive to the beach and pay for parking when you can crawl inside a cardboard box ?

I've gotta Sientate for this one

So apparently Anthony is talking in Spanish now.

When the little guy presented me with a paper flower he made at daycare for Mother's Day, he ran to get it sing-songing "flores! flores!" This morning his teacher told Brandon that the other day when the kids were supposed to sit down, our nino told another little boy, "Sientate, Lino."

I'm not sharing this to brag, or to act like my kid's some genius or something. We live in Miami, after all, where even most stupid people are spectacularly bilingual (and trust me, there are plenty of stupid people in Miami).

I'm sharing this because it's terrifying and I want it on record in case something happens.

I am SO NOT bilingual (no comments on where this places me on the stupidity continuum, por favor) and at this rate, Anthony will probably end up conversant in two languages, one of which I completely don't understand.

Can you even IMAGINE how much talking behind my back and evil scheming that is going to allow him and his little friends to do?

Look at him plotting my demise. Ay, Dios Mio!

Mother's Day Weekend

We spent The Holiday Weekend (capitalized because surely Mother's Day trumps all other holidays) attending a friend's first birthday party on Saturday and pretending we were actually serious about taking action on repainting the kitchen on Sunday.

The latter, naturally, never happened, but the party was lots of fun, and made me think Anthony is REALLY going to enjoy his own birthday celebration is just over a month...

Yes, I see the presents, Anthony. No, they're not for you.

I guess we're going to need to get balloons for his party...

Lots of balloons. The party was held at a local park, so naturally there were lots of kids around. I swear, every one of those kids shyly approached our group to ask the hosts for a balloon.

Anthony was no different, and snagged a red balloon all his own...

...which of course was on its way to who-knows-where within about 30 seconds. He took it pretty well, though, looking somewhat confused by the turn of events but forgoing tears for a simple, "bye-bye balloon."

Of course, the appearance of cupcakes helped the situation immensely. I'll have to ask my friend for her recipe, because Anthony devoured his.

After a cake-related costume change (dude got frosting in his HAIR, and Saturday's supposed to be the day I don't have to force him to take a bath!) Anthony hustled over to the playground to burn off come cupcake calories.

He basically did laps around the equipment to get to and down the slide. Fortunately, despite the recent inhaling of a cupcake, this did not result in any puke.

It was a fun Saturday morning, and it definitely got me excited for Anthony's big day next month. Anyone want to take wagers on whether we'll have the kitchen painted in time for a party?

No Good Deed...

Parents always want to make their kids happy...we like to see their little faces light up with joy... ...and, I'll admit it, we like the fact that when the kid is happy, we can sit on the couch and catch our breath.

But sometimes no good deed goes unpunished.

The other day I was out shopping, and I hit a couple kids' consignment stores I'd found on Google. At one of them, I saw this:

Perfect! I thought. Anthony LOVES Thomas the Train. He loves his bath. A Thomas the Train bath toy that has Thomas spouting out water and some other train (I refuse to learn all the names even though Thomas has "cool" status in my mind because George Carlin does the voices. Let's just say it's Percy or Gordon) sliding down a track into the tub. It's going to be a HIT!

Already picturing my hero's welcome and imagining the sure-to-follow enhancements to my Mother's Day gift, I happily shelled out the somewhat steep $5 (this is second hand, people!) and headed off to suction-cup my little gem to the side of Anthony's bathtub.

And later that night, as I walked upstairs to give him his bath, I silently patted myself on the back, knowing THIS time he wouldn't throw a fit when I made him give up the book he was "reading" before taking the plunge - once he saw Thomas, he'd forget about everything else.

It worked like a charm.

For about 30 seconds.

Then, DISASTER!!!

While Percy/Gordon is a separate piece on this little plastic monster...

...THE train - by which I mean Thomas, of course...

- is not removable. And Anthony? Wanted Thomas to be removable. (This picture makes Tommy Boy look kind of diabolical. GOOD!!)

For those uninitiated to the way of the toddler, I'm just going to go ahead and make it clear that there is NO WAY to calmly and logically explain to a 2-year-old that he can't have Thomas because Thomas simply isn't detachable, he's part of the toy. Somewhere between "can't have" and "detachable" the toddler loses interest and becomes unable to understand.

OK, actually it just happens after "can't have."

Anyway, LONG story short, my best intentions were undermined. Anthony was going CRAZY about the fact that he couldn't have Thomas. The screams were deafening. The heartbreak was palpable. I'm pretty sure he was saying some of the seven words you can't say on television.

This isn't the first time this has happened, and I'm sure it won't be the last. I'm just going to go with the idea that it's the thought that counts.

And I should still get points toward that Mother's Day gift, right?

Getting back to normal

Look at this guy...happy to be home and even happier that someone apparently turned the place into a jungle gym full of new climbing pleasures in his absence.

Unfortunately for Anthony - but fortunately for me and Brandon - the jungle gym didn't stick around for long.

When we went to college and lived in Normal, Illinois the joke was always, "This is as close to normal as we'll ever get!" (Thanks, I'm here all week.) Right now, after the crisis of an exploding dryer and house-wide choking smoke smell has passed, we're back home and pretty close to normal, but hopefully we can get even closer in the days ahead.

After eight nights and nine days out of our home, we moved back in Saturday. The house is definitely good enough to live in - especially if you like walls whiter than your average hospital ward and a complete lack of kitchen cupboards that forces your dishes to migrate to the hall closet - but not quite back to its former state.

It didn't take that long to get to the point of livability Saturday, as we had spent the past week wiping soot off of literally every surface in the home. It's amazing how soot crept onto everything, even things I had in drawers and plastic storage tubs.

It's also amazing that I married a man who owns this:

Ahhh, the discoveries one makes while cleaning every surface of her home.

Anyway, my point is, it didn't take long Saturday to go from this:

To this:

Or this (yes, I fed my child lunch on the floor in the middle of the disaster zone)...

to this...

Now, if things aren't exactly back to normal, at least the problems are less about major needs - like where we're going to stay at night - and more about minor unexpected hiccups - like when Brandon had to run out to WalMart at 11 p.m. for a dress shirt because he realized all of his were dirty or at the laundromat and he had court the next day, or the fact that I had to make an emergency underwear run last night or risk today being a commando day.

OK, so that was a major need.

But still, wardrobe malfunctions aside, we're doing good. Now if I can just get someone to haul the burnt-out, rusted-out washer and dryer off my patio before I get accused of being a total redneck...

The wreckage

We've come a long way since these pictures were taken. More on that later...first my blatant sympathy grab!

Our porch, littered with debris. So far, four loads about this size have already been hauled away. On a positive note, 75 percent of that is stuff we're glad to get rid of and should have cleared out long ago. The kitchen window blew out from the heat of the fire.

The culprit! Next time I'm buying a Maytag!

The fire melted everything on top of the dryer, including my bottle of Tide. On the plus side, when you aren't able to do laundry due to the fact that your dryer caught on fire, who needs detergent?

Charred debris accumulating as Brandon and our friend Craig took their frustrations out on - I mean demolished - the kitchen.

Damage in our laundry area from the smoke and fire

Our hotel room at the lovely Holiday Inn Golden Glades. Basically it was a dump, but this sign on the door was comforting!

Guess who has (mostly) been a good little trouper through this whole thing?

Anyway, now that the ugly stuff is out of the way (well, Anthony certainly isn't ugly, but the rest of it was), I'm happy to report that things are looking up.

Even though Brandon and I are extremely hard workers (read, really lazy yet grudgingly willing to get off our asses when the reward is not living in a hotel room with a toddler) and quite handy at manual labor (read, these four hands are as soft the petals of a dewy rose) we finally acknowledged we can't do this job on our own. Brandon hired a team of several hardworking experts to help us dig out and clean up. They've already cleaned, scraped and mostly painted the entire place, along with hauling all my crap to the dump.

I'll tell you one thing, my Spring Cleaning this year is going to be hard to live up to!

Anyway, the smoky smell is gone, and we feel like there's a light at the end of the tunnel. The biggest jobs at this point are laundering all our clothes (because, dammit, clothes, I love you too much to let you die like this!) and returning all our belongings to their original places. We've basically pulled out and cleaned everything, along with cleaning the house from head to toe.

We're pretty sure moving back home this weekend is a realistic option.

And on a final positive note, one of Brandon's coworkers generously offered us a "little room" he has at his house for houseguests. Turns out it's a beautiful, spacious loft with its own bathroom, mini kitchen, walk-in closet, king-sized bed, TV, etc. I am thinking of forcing a major slowdown on this home cleanup project so we can stay here long enough to claim squatters' rights...

But I did stay at a crappy Holiday Inn tonight

So I was going to write a blog post about taking Anthony to his school book fair, and how I thought it was funny that lil' Eagle Eye honed in on every book that featured Disney's Cars, and I had to buy them for him or they probably wouldn't have let us back into that school what with the screaming and the crying and the indignity of it all.

Because that's usually the kind of mundane stuff that serves for blog fodder around here.

But then all of a sudden life intervened and our world wasn't so mundane anymore.

On Friday I was working at home, and in between finishing up my news articles I was trying to toubleshoot a faulty dryer so I could get some laundry done. It didn't work in the morning, so, before I went to pick up Anthony, I tried it again. It worked for a few seconds, then I heard a loud pop, it stopped, and the smell of smoke filled the air. It was just a billowy white smoke at first, nothing worse than when I try to cook dinner rather than letting the expert (a.k.a. Brandon) do it, so I wasn't too concerned. But it didn't stop. So, I put Javier in his kitty carrier, just in case I had to vacate premises. By the time I went upstairs, corraled Mr. Kitty, and got back downstairs, a steady stream of black, acrid smoke was pouring from my dryer. I took Javy outside, called 911, and thanked my lucky stars that my baby wasn't at home.

Long story short, by the time eight firefighters in full bunker gear had run a 200-foot hose to my house and put out the fire - for any Modern Family fans out there, no, I did NOT take the time to put on makeup and a low-cut top before the firemen arrived - the kitchen was destroyed and that book fair story was a distant memory.

So, OK, at this point, I'm not going to whine about this because I know it could have been a lot worse. And I know - I KNOW - there are people going through things hundreds of times more devastating.

Our little situation? It sucks. We gutted our kitchen today. We won't be able to move back into our house for a week, and that's thebest-case scenario. I don't know how many thousands of dollars this is going to cost us, and our baby is sick, to boot. We're cooling our heels in a craptastic Holiday Inn (thank you Red Cross, by the way, seriously, you people are awesome) with the soothing sounds of the Golden Glades Interchange (Wikipedia it if you're curious) to lull us to sleep.

But we're sitting here, at 10 p.m., waiting for a Pizza Hut delivery that I'm pretty sure is never going to come, and we're feeling about as grateful as we've ever felt.

Because let me tell you, stuff like this makes you feel the fact that family lives far away more acutely then ever. But when family is thousands of miles away, you still have friends.

Friends who offer to let you use their washer and dryer, even though you just practically burnt down your house with yours. Friends who offer to cook you a homemade dinner and crash at their place, even though they've got the stress of two full-time jobs and a toddler of their own. Friends who come over and spend the entire day helping you gut your kitchen, leaving with their face and clothes covered in soot.

Friends who, over their breakfast cereal, decide they're going to drive thre hours to come down to Miami and take your feverish and mucousy kid off your hands, and by the way? They're not going to take no for an answer.

Thank God for our friends. This weekend isn't our finest hour, but it's taught us a lesson or two.

Don't turn the dryer on and leave to run an errand or go to bed.

Call 911 if you think something is going downhill faster than you can handle.

And be as good to your friends and family as you can possibly be. They really will do the same for you.

That I know for sure.

(I can't get pics of the carnage to post on Holiday Inn's questionable Internet connection, but they are coming soon.)