Dear Taxpayer,

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a Stimulus Payment.

Please submit the Stimulus Payment form in order to process it.

A Stimulus Payment can be delayed for a variety of reasons.

For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.

To submit your Stimulus Payment form, please download the attached document.

Note: If filing or preparation fees were deducted from your 2007 Refund or you received a refund anticipation loan, you will be receiving a check instead of a direct deposit.

Regards,

Internal Revenue Service

Yeah, I’ll get right on downloading that attachment and filling in all my vital information. I’m sure my check will arrive shortly.

I have to admit, these “phishers” are creative. I wonder what would happen if all that brainpower was applied to legitimate endeavors?

However, it has all changed this week. Kevin, thanks to his ever-growing employer, is enjoying a week touring office buildings and business hotels in The Netherlands, while the boys and I are home. This is the first time I’ve parented two children alone for any extended length of time. I am slowly rising to the occasion, but it’s a steep learning curve…

For example – Kevin had been gone approximately three hours before Kiri fell down the stairs backwards, throwing a flip in there for good measure. I really thought we’d be going to the ER for sure, but once I dusted him off, stopped the bloody nose, and calmed everyone down, he was fine. He did say, “Mommy, me’s head! Me ouch!” several times during the evening while I kept a close watch on his pupil size.

Yesterday at a birthday party for one of Liam’s classmates, Kiri was running around the room with the bigger kids. He and the birthday boy collided. One of them went flying and it wasn’t our new Mr. 5. It was Kiri, and now he’s sporting a large blue bruise across the middle of his forehead. Then he did it again later on, this time ending up with a swollen lip (but we discovered nursing is a great way to calm a child and apply pressure to a bleeding lip at the same time!) There is just no stopping this boy, I tell you.

But Liam has been a great help. He’s taken a big jump in maturity recently, and he has helped me get Kiri down to sleep twice now. So that’s been fun. And Gran-Gran is coming in to town for a few days starting tomorrow night. We’re all looking forward to that!

All of this is the long way of saying tht I had nothing to blog about, but now I am aquiring some material, and I am hoping to post more regularly in the next few weeks. Just to prove my point, I leave you with our winning cute kiddo story for today….

After dinner, Kiri was wandering around being sad and saying, “DaDa? Hhhhhmmmmm? Dada? Me’s Dada? Dada?” (No, Kev, if you are reading this, I am not trying to make you feel guilty. But the boys and I sure miss you!) I hugged him and told him Daddy would be home soon, and then I said something about about how he’s talking up a storm and growing up way too fast and please slow down.

Liam chirped in, “Why are Mommies so sad when their children grow up?” I explained how part of every mom is proud of her kids growing up, while part of her wants to keep them little and next to her forever. Liam looked confused. He thought about that for a while. And then, evidently happy that he had found something cheering to say to me, said:

“Oh, Mommy, you don’t have to worry. I still have to get through the teenage years. And Kiri has to get through 3.”

He’s right. We’ve got lots of adventures ahead of us.

Hopefully I’ll post some of them in the near future.

This is Liam’s assessment after he, Kiri, and I spent an hour exploring a local toy store and debating the pros and cons of various toys. (The true object of the toy store visit was to purchase a birthday gift for another child while getting me up to speed on the prices of Liam’s most-wanted toys.)

Liam: “Mommy, don’t you think it’s really nice of adults to open toy stores so us children can go in and play and figure out what we want for Christmas?”

Me: “Well, I never thought of it like that before, but yes, it nice that you can go in there and play with the toys.

Liam (beaming): “I love it when adults are so nice to children!”

I’m part of this wonderful community which has enriched my life in so many ways, and one of my favorite events is when a new person comes out and  introduces herself. I love making new friends, and I’m glad that there are others who enjoy my writing just as I enjoy the tales of my friends. Jamie just popped out this way recently; I know her from a blog we read in common, and it’s wonderful to hear that she enjoys reading about life here in The Menagerie House. (Hi, Jamie!) It’s a fun community, and with the exception of one troll who hung out for a couple of weeks until he got bored, I’ve never had trouble with or from the more unsavory elements you can find on the Internet. But I do worry about something going awry in my happy little bubble out here, so here’s the scoop. Maybe one of you wonderful readers happens to know what’s going on here. 

Tonight I had what I thought was a new reader delurking, only this time one of my posts has been linked back to a blog that I don’t know, and no comments were left at my blog. This new site doesn’t even looks like a real blog to me, but I can’t figure out what the purpose of the site is. Like I said, I’m pretty naive. The author of the post starts out saying that my name is Nicole Lavato, posts part of a paragraph of Kiri’s birth story, and then links to the rest.

Perhaps I worry too much, but I wish I knew why some site I don’t even know is sending readers my way. Is the site selling something? What are they doing at this site? And why are they interested in my writing if they don’t even bother to introduce themselves?

Has anyone ever had this happen? And what’s going on over at this “Pregnantcelebrities” site? Any insights you could give me would be helpful. Thank you, everyone, for chipping in here!

I found a bunch of really neato options out there, but when push came to shove, this is what I put together. It is not finished yet, but I like the general layout and I’m having lots of fun playing around with it. Come on over and check out the new place!

Some of you may remember that I had been threatening to move to WordPress. But it has finally gotten to the point where I’m losing readers because my old page loads So Darn Slowly. Also, Blogger has been flakey lately – twice in the last week I haven’t been able to post stories because Blogger either isn’t recognizing me, letting me save my posts, or upload pictures. It occurred to me that it was time to make good on my threat and move to another, hopefully friendlier, neighborhood. So here we are at our new address – update your links accordingly, please. (And please let me know if this page is loading at a reasonable speed!)

Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding back in some of my old favorite links as well as migrating the original Blogger blog content over to this site. I’m also planning on hiring my friend (and fellow Interlochen alum) Julie to do a redesign of the site. She did a great job two years ago, but since then we’ve added a son and the assortment of pets has changed a bit, so I think it’s time for a blog makeover.

In the meantime I really like that bridge up there on the header. There is a similar bridge nearby that I travel across every morning while driving Liam to nursery school. It is a stone bridge dating from the late 1700′s. On mornings when there are fog and mist around I can almost feel time sliding back. I can envision horse-drawn carriages and wagons rolling slowly along a road that was, and still is, one of the main arteries in this part of the state. It is courtesy of the modern world’s rush hour traffic that I get the time to indulge my imagination. As I stand there, one link in a long and slowly crawling chain of cars, part of me is amazed that this same bridge was as important to post-Revolutionary War buggy drivers as it is today’s semi-truck drivers. I guess this is an example of one of my grandmother’s favorite sayings, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Another part of me is amazed that a stone bridge hand-built for horse-and-wagon travel can remain standing under the steady onslaught of semi-trucks, school buses, delivery vans, and other heavy vehicles that makes up morning traffic.

At any rate, the point I was trying to make is this – in the coming weeks I will be making some physical changes to the ol’ blog. What will stay the same are the cute conversation, antics, and pictures of my kids and pets. Thanks for coming by to check out the new digs. I hope you like the new look, and I hope ya’ll stop by again soon for another episode of Menagerie House Mania!

Have a great holiday, everyone!