So this is what 33 feels like...

A brief recap of my birthday yesterday:

Began gloriously at midnight on the phone with rafaela, which took me to some uncharted hour of the morning in contented bliss...
woke up entirely too early and hauled the yard apes off to their respective destinations...
hobbled back home, did the LJ thing and the e-mail thing, and IMed semi-subliminally with knotwork; crawled back into bed fully intending to nap, but regrettably without notifying the rest of the civilized world, which meant two telephone interruptions and an ex-Dad-in-Law hollering for information...
had a lovely late-morning chat with magnifelyn...
whipped up some yanking-cranking-handing-out-spankings Thai green chicken curry (y'know, the kind that you'd need warning labels for if you were planning on bottling it)...
headed for Saratoga with Colleen, who sprung for dinner at the Parting Glass and drinks (yes! plural!) at Professor Moriarty's, and even shockingly volunteered to drive designatedly...
and ended gloriously at midnight on the phone with rafaela, which took me to some uncharted hour of the morning in contented bliss.

*looks back, counting on his fingers* Yep, it was officially a Birthday.

Athlete's teeth and bearded ladies

Abbey: [pointing to the photo on the back of The Giving Tree] Who's that?
Me: That's the author, Shel Silverstein.
Abbey: It looks like a girl.
Me: [puzzled] A girl. A bald girl, with a beard.
Abbey: [ponders] She must have taken the hair off her head, and stuck it to her face.

Abbey's silly.

In spite of our best efforts, Abbey's definitely a child of consumer's culture (not too surprising, since she watches about 3,906 hours of broadcast televesion in any given week). So it's common in our household to hear her rev up her patented TurboWhine_tm and cry, "Daaaaaad! Can I have that?" with "that" in this case meaning "the Übertoy du jour that the Nickelodeon station break is currently shrieking about. (For the record, our response is always "Put it on your list." This response luckily does not require us to even enter the room the TV is in.)

But yesterday she threw me. I picked her up from the after-school program yesterday, only to have her beg to go to the dollar store this weekend. She wanted something very specific, but it took me a moment to figure out what on earth she was talking about. It turned out that her heart's desire was for an athletic mouth guard.

I'll repeat that for those who have just turned in: she wants an athletic mouth guard.

I asked her why, and she didn't get much beyond "it's cool" in her bid to convince me that she must have this. The one argument she did attempt was that, if she ever started playing soccer, she'd need one. I tried explaining to her that she did not need one now, thank you very much, that we'd get her one when she did start playing sports and not a moment sooner, that the things are downright uncomfortable, and the old standby "Because I said so," but she'd have none of it. You see, the man named Common Sense and the man named a Child's Hankering for Stuff will never share a house, even under Oscar and Felix conditions.

Ah, parenthood: the gift that keeps on baffling.