A little down.

Munchkin had another visit with the Developmental Nazis today. And the speech-language pathologist said that he presented just like a kid with significant hearing loss. So we're going to have his hearing checked with an audiologist next week.

I'm both relieved and annoyed. Relieved because it's probably not something neurological, not something that we can't pinpoint and help.

But, dear readers, I have wondered about his hearing since he was about 6 months old. I have stated my concerns to friends, family, pediatricians and specialists. They all told me I was crazy and would not schedule a hearing test. During the first visit from the developmental nazis at our last duty station, they didn't even bother to send a speech-language pathologist to evaluate him. They sent a physical therapist and developmental psychologist intead. They also kept suggesting it could be autism. Don't get me started.

Only once he turned two did someone finally listen and send us to an ENT. Hence the adenoid removal.

But now the adenoids are gone and he's still having some trouble hearing.

I feel guilty. I feel like I should have pushed harder. I know hindsight is always 20/20 but maybe if I had stamped my feet a little louder, intervention could have happened earlier. Maybe we wouldn't be at this point. I don't know.

But I'll tell you one thing, next week can't happen fast enough.

Soldiers' Angels Challenge.

The call has gone out for Military and Military Spouse bloggers to try and get 5 readers out there to register for Soldiers' Angels. If you do register, but "Non-Essential Equipment made me do it!" in the comments section.

It's a worthy cause. Go ahead and do it!

Shiny, happy people.

Everybody says that you take millions of photos of your first kid. And they were right. Poor kid probably thought I had a camera for a face for the first 12 months of his life.

But then Munchkin went mobile.

And since then, between him reaching for the camera to press the buttons or racing towards mortal peril as I try to frame the perfect shot, the photo ops have been few and far between.

And people, there have been serious complaints. I never knew grandmothers could be so damn cranky when they are forced to go a few days without new grandbaby photos. Think about the old days people! You might have had to go months! Years, even! Give the mother of a toddler a break, please!

So to quell the screaming hordes, I've been trying harder to pick up the camera, even when I know that doing so is just going to result in my having to leave it in an unsecure place as I go chasing after my kid.

But today, for whatever reason, it was the perfect opportunity to take Munchkin's picture. Despite outdoor antics and eating lunch with a spoon, his shirt remained (mostly) clean, his face didn't have any discernible scratches or food bits and he was sitting still on the couch giving me the cutest, sweetest little boy smile EVAH.

And so I picked up the camera and told him to say, "Cheese!" A few flashes of light, the tell-tale clicks of the shutter and I had not one but several photos of my two-year-old in this near perfect, totally unheard of state.

But then I looked at the photos.

Somehow, someway, every time I said cheese, he made this weird, totally wacked out grimace face. Not the smile I had seen on his face before I got the shot. The little monster had done funny faces ON PURPOSE. It's at moments like these that even though he is the spitting image of his father, I so know he is mostly mine.

The Grandmas are not only getting these photos emailed but embossed and framed.

Zapped by the good idea fairy.

You know when you are in a meeting to plan some activity or event and instead of focusing on the task at hand, the people in the room start suggesting good ideas? You know, echelons-above-reality type ideas that would be really great but such a pain in the ass to implement? And those ideas -- though, great, really! -- totally take away from the whole point of the meeting which is to simplify that original activity or event by delegating pieces to make actually possible to go away and implement?

You know what I'm talking about? It's what my husband calls "attack of the good idea fairy." And I sat through 3 hours of it today as we attempted to plan what should have been a totally mundane bake sale.

Somehow, the simple act of discussing what kind of baked goods to assign to each group became a discussion of the potential of helium balloon sales, cookie decoration contests, funnel cake machines and a doggie and/or child dress-up parade (you know, because we don't want to put off those without kids). I know there was more inanity but honestly, I started zoning out when someone had to talk about the Darth Vader costume they had for their Westie. Otherwise, I think I might have gone postal and beaten someone to death with their fundraising idea book.

I tried to rein folks in. I did. I pointed out that with limited time, it would probably be better to focus our efforts on excelling in one task than stretching ourselves and doing a shoddy job of several. But it was too late. The good idea fairy had tapped my compatriots with her magic wand, leaving them with visions of balloon animals and face painting dancing in their heads. And frankly, any argument made up of reason stood no chance.

There are days when I really, really wonder what I'm doing in the FRG.

Another study to make Mommies feel bad.

Baby Einstein not so smart after all.

And, of course, my kid loves those damn videos. He will talk back to them where he won't to me. *sigh* It's not that I thought they were the brain boosters that some people have claimed but they weren't violent cartoons, they don't have questionable advertising and they at least introduce classical music and art.

Is there anything I'm doing that won't totally fuck my kid up? Sometimes I seriously wonder.

Doing my bit for the procrastination effort.

While I wait on a source to get back to me with some more background information for a story I'm doing, I could have organized my notes, put together quotes from my other sources or gotten to work on my next story. I could have.

I also could have snaked my drains.

Instead, I was the happy recipient of a cardboard box from Barnes and Noble today. A box of books from a gift card that I found in one of the move boxes. Sure, the card probably belonged to my husband. But he didn't use it and if someone isn't willing to help unpack those pesky office boxes, finders keepers, lazy-men-who-leave-all-unpacking-to-their-wives weepers.

So since it was a rainy day, I figured I'd just pick up one of the books and skim the first few pages -- Laura Lippman's "What the Dead Know." It's the story of a decades old abduction of two sisters, Sunny and Heather Bethany, and a woman, caught leaving the scene of a car accident, saying that she is Heather, the younger of the two sisters. But something is not quite right and the story, told both in the year of the abduction and in the present, tries to unravel is she who she says she is?

I was not able to put it down until I turned the last page.

I should probably hide the rest of the book shipment until I finish this story. But if any of the others are as good as this one, I'm going to have a hard time doing so.

What does ready really mean?

This is a bit of a shameless trawl, but I'm writing an article for a national parenting magazine about being "ready" to have kids. For it, I'm looking for some sage tips from all the Mamas (Daddies, too!) out there on how to best get ready.

Anyone interested in sharing their own advice?

Deadlines are our friends.

With this sage piece of advice running as my new mantra (thanks, Lee Anne!), I'm trying to get everything done.

• Go through Tri-Care nightmare bureaucracy to set up an appointment to have Munchkin's hearing tested AGAIN. Check.
• Schedule follow-on developmental nazi visit. Check.
• Get the car serviced. Check.
• Clean the kitchen. Check.
• Cook some meals for the rest of the week. Check.
• Go out and buy a few bottles of wine for the house. A house devoid of wine might be a total catastrophe (thanks again, Lee Anne!). Check.
• Find something, anything else do do besides the work I'm actually getting paid for. (And now that I'm thinking about it, the lawn could really use a mow). Check.
• Finish three articles by Friday. Ummm, well, getting there. Sort of.

I jinxed myself.

CPT Dick is one of God's most pathetic creatures -- a Red Sox fan. And though I joked that I would be decorating Munchkin's room in Yankees gear, when I found this Red Sox comforter set on sale, I clicked order before you could say, "The Green Monstah." We have an old twin bed just waiting for Munchkin for when he's older enough and I figured it would be cute to continue the team tradition.

Apparently, on some unconscious level, Munchkin understood this. Today, he decided it would be funny to start climbing out of his crib.

It was nap time -- not even two hours after I ordered the comforter set -- and we did our normal nap routine. Juice, story, kisses, the works. Five minutes after I sit down to work, who do I see peering over the side of the couch with a shit-eating grin on his face? Oh yes. My son.

We repeated this silliness about 8 more times before I realized that the thrill of the game would make it pretty much impossible for him to go down for a nap today. And this was hard for me to admit, because my son is a serious crank when he is overtired.

I knew this day was coming. He's climbed out of his crib before but only to retrieve his cup. We knew he was capable but, until today, he was perfectly happy to stay in it. And it is at this moment -- and of course when CPT Dick is away -- he's decided that he's done before confined.

Oh well. Onward and upward, as they say. Tomorrow I will drag the twin bed out of the storage room. For tonight, I just took the mattress out of the crib and set him up a little comfy spot on the floor. After gating him in the room (which he can also climb) and laying him down back three times after escapes, he seems to have figured out that he will not get another reprieve today. At least I hope not.

Thank goodness I have wine in the house.

Another rant.

What happened to the sense of personal accountability and responsibility? Seriously?

My start as FRG leader has not been a great one. Outside of the leader hand-off drama and the accompanying smackdown, my short tenure has been marked by ladies who believe my job is to pick up their slack when they make mistakes or decide not to bother to take care of their own business. A few examples:

(1) We have a wife who is in the states. Her husband was in another unit OCONUS and thought he'd be headed stateside. So he sent her back early on the Army's dime. And he did so against the advice of his command.

So what's now happened? She wants to come back and be with her husband. But she can't afford to move back here or live here on her own dime. So she wants to reneg on the agreement that her family made with the Army and make the Army pay for her to come back and provide her housing, all the while complaining about how the Army has let her down and doesn't care about families. And she's spouting this line to any and everyone who will listen.

But the best part? She's already managed to do this once. He was stationed overseas before and she choose to return early and then found a way to get back courtesy of Uncle Sam. It just pisses me off. We have so many wives who are doing the right thing, who are going through the long process of command sponsorship now made even longer by the Army's transformation. And now they probably have to wait even a few days more since the powers-that-be have to listen to this chick whine. Again.

(2) Our unit has a ton of pregnant ladies right now. And I know they've been briefed on family care plans. I know this because I could probably do the family care planning spiel in my sleep and I'm not pregnant. But still, we have a bunch of ladies who are about to pop who are only now coming forward and saying, "I want my husband to come home. I don't have anyone here to watch my kids when I go into labor."

Now, my civilian friends who are pregnant have two or three back-up plans and they only have to worry about their husbands maybe losing mobile phone reception for 10 minutes a day on the freeway. My one friend, L., has a list of no less than 6 numbers to call both in her wallet and taped on her refrigerator at home in the case that she goes into labor and is unable to make the calls herself. She jokes that she would tattoo all of those numbers on to her body, you know, if they weren't so wacky about pregnant chicks getting inked.

She's that serious about making sure that there is someone that she trusts there to watch her older daughters when it comes time to push. I wouldn't expect anything less.

This is your pregnancy. These are your children. Why would you not make sure that you had a family care plan in place so you could concentrate on popping that baby out in peace? And you are a military spouse, why would you ever assume that your husband would definitely be home? These are the most important points.

But then, if you are going to ask me for help, why on earth would you curse me out when I try to explain that I cannot guarantee that your husband can come home -- that is a chain of command issue -- and that you need a back-up plan at the very least for labor because I'm assuming that if your husband can come home, you won't be having all four of your other kids in the delivery room, too?

(3) And finally, we had to set up an AER loan for a family of 5 that had no money in their bank account. Not a dime. But when I stopped by today to make sure that the AER was taken care of? Mrs. Spendy couldn't help but tell me all about the two Persian kittens that they *had* to get for their girls for $700 a pop. $1400 for kittens! I just about had kittens when she told me.

I don't know. I know that my heartstrings should be pulled when I read a story like the one that GBear posted on SpouseBuzz, but after doing the FRG thing for so many years, all I see are the inconsistencies in the story and the ways that this family probably did not follow advice or regulations. I see it every day. Now, that's not to say that the military doesn't make mistakes. It does. And when the Man messes up, believe you me, I will be the first one up there making a stink.

But people need to remember that God (and the Army) helps those that help themselves.