This is one of Lily’s favorite outfits.
She picks it out herself, and she dresses herself.
At the tender age of two, she is already showing
an incredibly fun sense of style.
I hope it doesn’t disappear when the sensitive,
awkward, self-conscious female teenage years hit.
Or if it does disappear, I hope she rediscovers it
in her 20s and plays with color and self-expression again.
(Those are my socks, by the way.
I don’t look half as cute in them though.)
10 November 2006

I’m on steroids. My platelet count was 10 today (a normal person’s count is between 150 and 300), so my hematologist put me on a pulse pack of 40mg of steroids for four days.  That’s why I’m doing another journal update today and at 11pm at night.  That’s also why Matt took Lily for a drive.  She’s been crawling on me all night like I’m a jungle gym, and I couldn’t take it anymore.  He took her for a drive for two reasons: 1) to give me a break, and 2) to get her to fall asleep.  Apparently, she’s having insomnia too.

Sarah and her friend, Mika, brought me hot chocolate tonight.  They were grocery shopping at Walmart, and they phoned and asked if we needed anything.  I told them that Matt and I were faking winter (the high was 81 today….. 81… in November….. eighty-one…. global warming is a myth, my ass), so Matt was wearing his flannel pajamas and I wanted hot chocolate and Cool Whip.

They are such sweeties.  I need to post a picture of Mika so everyone can put a face to the name.  Anyways, on their way home, they detoured by our house and dropped off the hot chocolate and Cool Whip.

I was being silly while I was making my hot chocolate, reading the ingredients aloud to Matt because the amount of sugar was just so phenomenal it was funny.  The first ingredient on the hot chocolate packet was “sugar” and the sixth ingredient was “corn syrup solids.”  And I said to Matt, “And then you add sugar by topping it off with Cool Whip,” and I began reading the Cool Whip ingredients.

The Cool Whip ingredient list wasn’t as funny though; it was more disturbing.  Every ingredient, with the exception of “water,” was really bad for your body.  At least the hot chocolate used real sugar, not the scary “high fructose corn syrup.”

The ingredient list for Cool Whip: “water, corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup.”  I didn’t list the unpronouceable “contains less than 2% of the following” ingredients.

Geez, the garbage we feed ourselves and our children.  The “obesity problem” of Americans seems straight-forward to me: garbage in, garbage out.

I wonder when — or if — I’ll go to sleep tonight.  Steroids are a lot like amphetamines as far as being unable to sleep goes.  (I wonder if steroids are amphetamines.)  Maybe that’s why people get so irritated on them — they’re just so tired but can’t go to sleep.