A Belated Happy Mother's Day

My Mother's Day photos were good in theory but not so great in practice. I thought I'd get some cute photos of LB & me posing next to this sign with big, cheesy grins on our faces, but of course LB would not oblige us. I especially like the photo below. The waitress, who was trying to help us out with this photo-op, told LB to smile, and LB cut her the meanest look ever given by a not-quite-two-year-old kid. The looks says, "I am not a performing monkey. I do not pose and smile on demand."

Overall, though, I had a great Mother's Day. I spent most of it working in the English Department's library because my MacBook was out for repairs (see more on this below), and in the evening, Tom, LB, and I went out for dinner, where LB consumed her weight in ketchup.

One ketchup-covered finger in the mouth while another finger goes for more ketchup.
I need to send out some belated thank yous for my awesome Mother's Day gifts. Thank you for my stuffed bear, LB (which I think was actually purchased by G)! And my daycare-made craft, LB! And to Tom, thanks for my iPod Shuffle. I wonder if the Shuffle was not also a gift for Tom since he may be tired of me always borrowing and messing up his iPod. No longer will he have to worry about me putting more Lady Gaga and Usher on his iPod! All joking aside though, thanks for the awesome gift, Forhdam!
Here's a closer look at the card LB made at daycare. So cute!
Thanks for my gorgeous red flowers, Mom! I feel like I should really know the name of these flowers.
At daycare, LB made this little pine cone, whose top is painted to look like a flower. I have a feeling Pam and Chrissy actually made it, but I still love it and I'm looking forward to keeping it on my office desk when I start at Peninsula.
The best Mother's Day gift of all, however, is that Miss LB has recently started to do something so unbelievably adorable, I don't even know if she can top its cuteness level: she will come up to me, give me a kiss, and then say "I love you." Aaaaah . . . heart melting.

The other adorable thing she's started to do lately is refer to herself as "You." It's clear that she thinks her name is actually "You." When she sees herself in the mirror or sees a picture of herself, she happily announces, "Oh, it's You!" And when she's helping to sort and fold the laundry, she'll identify the things as "Papa shirt," "Mama shirt," or "You shirt." I'm sure she'll figure out her name and/or the correct, first-person pronoun soon enough, so for now, I"ll just smile happily when I hear her talking about "You."

So this blog post is so belated because my poor MacBook was seriously messed up, so messed up in fact that it had to have a new hard drive installed, which means that I got a new computer but with the body of my old computer. Actually, when they replaced the hard drive at the Genius Bar, they also gave me a new bottom cover for the laptop, so the body is also partially new (thanks for the freebie, Apple!) I don't know how the hard drive got damaged, but last week the computer was very, very painfully slow, so I decided to turn it off and reboot it. However, when I tried to turn it back on, it wouldn't start up again. After a week of diagnostics and minor repairs, it was determined that the needle inside the hard drive was broken and so the files could no longer be read.

Because I'm not the best about backing things up, when the hard drive was replaced, I did lose some files. The most painful losses included the thousands and thousands of pictures I've taken over the past year or so for this blog, some lectures, and some of my iTunes music. Fortunately, all of the best pictures are here on this blog, I can access and retrieve some of the lectures that I've uploaded into UCR's online system, and the iTunes music I lost was mostly recent albums that I purchased through my MacBook and that I had yet to put onto Tom's iPod (Florence and the Machine you will be sorely, sorely missed).

I'm just glad that I still have my dissertation. When I realized that I had a back-up of my diss, I probably made a face very similar to this one. It's the I'm-so-happy-my-eyes-are-going-to-pop-out look.