The birds, the bees, and the giraffes

Sorry about the radio silence yesterday: I was busy tagging all my old entries and fixing the paragraph breaks so that my new tag cloud - look! over there! - would be more representative of the blog as a whole, and to perhaps entice people to read entries that have never before seen the light of day.

So now it turns out that an awful lot of my entries are about pregnancy -  but that's just because it was seemed like an interesting thing to talk about at the time. Unsurprisingly, quite a number of others are about sleep. I'm still trying to refine the tags to make it a more useful tool, so it's still a work in progress, but at least every entry has some sort of tag now. Anyway, let me know if you have any opinions on the tag cloud - if you think it's useful/interesting/a waste of space, whatever.

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When I brought Monkey to school this morning his classroom was sorely depleted - almost half the class were out with a rampaging stomach bug, and I can hear the ominous strings of the Jaws music creeping up behind me as I type, sure that he'll come down with it sooner or later. We've had a good run of luck not getting puking things recently, and it's bound to end eventually. It's not so much the illness I dread, as the cleanup.

Usually when we arrive at Monkey's school, Mabel doffs her coat, I wash her hands, and she dives straight into the playdough or heads off to the kitchen area to whisk up a nice little something for the babies, before it's time to leave the big kids to their activities unmolested by two-year-olds. Today Miss B (who is her new favourite person, having looked after her on Saturday evening while we went to a fundraiser) headed her off at the pass with the lure of plastic animals rampaging among wood blocks, and Mabel was soon holding forth on what exactly was going on between the lion, the panda, and the wild boar. Then she looked underneath the giraffe, and commented: "He has a penis, like a boy baby."

Miss B looked startled, as she gamely agreed. In the universal signal of pride, I breathed rapidly on the kuckles of my right hand - hah - and polished them on my chest. That's my girl, letting no penis go uncommented upon.

Incidentally, if anyone knows where this gesture originated, I'd love to hear it.