This teething thing, man. It is really throwing me for a loop. Or taking the wind out of my sails. Or something. I am too tired to summon the correct metaphor. She got two teeth back at Thanksgiving, and I thought to myself, “Self, this teething thing is a piece of cake! I don’t know what everyone else complains about. A little drool, a few slightly crabby days — Ellie is a champion teether and we have this teething thing licked!” However, now she seems to be working on SIX TEETH all at once and I feel like it has been going on for the past seventeen years. She won’t let me look in her mouth (I invented a game called Upside Down / Rightside Up specifically for that purpose, but she seems to have caught on to me and now closes her mouth pretty tight even when flipped upside down) so I don’t really know for sure what’s going on in there, but I think three of the six have broken through, so we’re halfway there! Woooo! (Not wooo.) She was up one (1) zillion times last night, and for the first time in months I decided to have a nap while she was napping, but was woken up after five minutes by Norton wandering around the house, meowing pitifully about how tragic his life is. Then the phone rang, and it was a telemarketer calling all the way from India to see if we wanted to subscribe to our local newspaper, which makes very little sense on several levels, but I politely declined rather than saying what I wanted to say, namely that their paper is lousy with typos and I wouldn’t read it if THEY paid ME to. Now I’m sitting huddled at the computer, drinking tea resentfully from a mug that says “love the moment” on its side and googling recipes for Cat a l’Orange. I think these are the days that make you panic a little bit when the nostalgic elderly in line at the grocery stores tell you they’re the best ones of your life.