Rudy loves babies. Marley loves glitter.

First of all, this is what Marley looks like when she's ready to head off to preschool. I wish I had half her sense of style. The pink cowboy boots alone! (I also enjoy Obama's watchful eyes in the background. As in, "Let me be clear. Marley, your hair looks great.")

Marley is officially moseying along through her mornings like a professional preschooler, and Toot and I have had some sweet alone time. Since my mother's in assisted living now, I don't have to worry about her daycare pick-ups and drop-offs, which allows me time to complete errands of my own with moments to spare at the playground before we head back to pick up Beanie. Rudy loves swinging, hoo boy. She giggles uncontrollably and cannot stop herself from announcing, "I wheeee!" at least twice a minute. Anyhow, I am still responsible for my mom's medical care, and after her cataract surgery last week, and all the pre-op and post-op appointments associated with it, including the commute time to pick her up before we even begin the trip to the doctors' offices, I've logged well over thirty hours of my spare time TCing that B in the past couple weeks.

And I'm busy with field hockey, too, and still waking up early for boot camp a few days a week, which means that I'm tired, and therefore way more cranky than I'd like more often than I'd like to be. But. Good things still happen. And I notice. And I'm happy.

To begin, Rudy finally took me up on my offer to get a new Baby Dolly if she would just toss her nuh-nuh in the trash. Last Saturday, after she woke up from her nap, she was shouting, "NO NUH-NUH!" and waving her pacifier in the air. So I asked her if she wanted to throw it away and go buy a baby for being such a big girl, and she was all, "Yeep."

She waddled over to the trash, and we took off for Target, and she chose a tiny baby similar to three others we've already got at home. Which made the whole thing anticlimactic for Marley and me, but Rudy was pleased. We got home late that night after visiting pals, and as we walked into the dark house, I kept murmuring to Rudy that she was such a big girl who would get to snuggle with her Baby Dolly in the crib. And she yelled, "No NUH-NUH!" very proudly, and I thought, "Alright, then. We can do this." And then once we got upstairs, she whimpered, "Nuh-nuh?" And then the crying started. But a few days later, it's just no big deal. And that's how it was with Marley, too. So, thank you, Little Ladies, for letting your pacifiers go, in the grand scheme of things, so easily.

And yesterday, my Bean-Beanie turned five. FIVE! We celebrated in style all day, starting with a happy family breakfast and ending with a sweet cake that provided little more than pyrotechnics. No one ate a slice. Marley and Rudy only wanted ice cream, and Todd and I had just inhaled too many slices of the Bertucci's pizza that Bean had requested for her birthday dinner.

For Marley's fifth birthday, I sort of got her her first Barbie. With a small amount of trepidation. But she's already got these Disney Princess Barbie-ish dolls, and when Heather took Bean to the Dollar Store recently, Marley picked out a "Barbie" there that she loved and that made me feel like the real thing would not be such a bad thing. The Dollar Store doll was a sickly sort of pasty-white, her poorly-made clothes were ripped and falling off, her legs were gross-skinny, and she had very little hair. She was like Crystal Meth Barbie with a bad weave after a bender, and even though Barbie's no role model for real women's bodies, at least she's got a healthy glow and some definition in her legs.

Rudy and I went Barbie shopping a few times while Marley was at school, and the first couple of times I left empty-handed, partly laughing at and partly depressed by my choices. Basically, even when Barbie's a nurse, she's a nurse wearing a Sexy Nurse Halloween Costume. And heels. As you know, I have a lot of experience with the medical establishment. The doctors and nurses I see on a fairly regular basis never wear heels.

But on our last visit to the Barbie aisle, I chose Gymnastics Coach Barbie. Which actually did not turn out to be Marley's first Barbie, because her babysitter brought her, I don't know, Princess-Pink-Sparkle-Glitter-Ridiculous-Barbie for a present , and she opened it just before I left to coach a field hockey game which my team won! (Go Hawks!) Which reminds me that the other night, Marley was running around in her underwear declaring that "Magic Dazzle Dust" is such a beautiful name for a song, and that she was going to do a show with that song and also, "Nudie Booty," perhaps in reference to her cute little bum, as well as pirate's treasure. What I'm saying is, this girl's mom (me) is running around with a whistle, completing push-ups and foot fires with the field hockey team she coaches, and sadly got rid of her most recent pair of Birkenstocks when the soles separated far enough from the treads to make tripping a constant threat. And then there's Bean, literally rolling body glitter on her arms with delight and prancing around the house singing about how someday her prince will come. There are times when I see myself in Marley, and there are times when the apple shoots way off the tree and travels so far that it leaves a trail of pink glitter in its wake.