Some sketches for my newest Nerdy Baby series. These are going to be little 5×7″ prints as soon as they are cleaned up and I’m sure they make sense.

1. My favorite so far:

2. Needs to be re-drawn, and I’m sure the joke has been done before but I refuse to check because I don’t want to know. Oops, and the scanner didn’t pick up the cute little resistor symbols in the background:

3. This one doesn’t quite work, I don’t think. Do you get it?

4. And this is one of good old Maxwell’s equations, all decorated super cute. If I had a jigsaw and the accompanying where-with-all I would make this into those cute painted wood letters that are in all the cute baby rooms these days.

My plan is to also do something like this for all of the favorite constants. Ooh and! One showing the difference between big G gravity and little g gravity.

I was also going to post about today, but it’s almost 2 in the morning and oh my god we need to get our family on a more normal schedule. Nicolaus is in our bed chatting with Kevin. I know that the answer is to set an alarm and wake everyone up early and then prevent napping for a few days in a row and there! it’ll be done. But there’s never a day where dealing with angry/tired zombie children for 12 hours sounds like the best way to go. So every day I wimp out and let them sleep until whenever and– what? it’s not good, right? Needs to stop. Because they are growing children and sunlight is important and everything. Yeah. Alright, you convinced me. I’m going to set an alarm right now.

Um. Yes, please! You may send gluten-free cookies (or anything else that isn’t explosive or harmful) to:

Tiffany Ard
2451 Cumberland Parkway #3264
Atlanta, GA 30339

Please note that this is a PO Box and not my actual address and that stalkers, as always, are asked to arrive with cheesecake.

My stomach feels — and I really am not happy to report this — better. Shit. Kevin’s orders for the weekend are to figure out how to make gluten-free pizza that doesn’t suck. I found the Amy’s frozen brand but it costs roughly $37 for a 6″ pizza, and anyone who has ever seen me eat pizza knows that “personal” sized pizzas are not going to work. Must learn to cook.

Yesterday I invented a delicious dessert: A spoonful of peanut butter and those koala bear brown rice crispies, with a little brown sugar. Mix all together then put the entire blob into your mouth.

I’m sure there’s some fancy way to add a little butter and bake it into some sort of cookie but I’m not really what you would call a “person who cooks” unless you count steam-in-the-bag vegetables.

Here is what else I eat:
Corn tortillas
ground beef
embarrassing amounts of organic salsa. Must learn to make my own salsa or we are going to end up even more broke.
avocados
brown rice
potatoes
celery, cucumbers, bell peppers, carrots, brocolli, water chestnuts
fancy bacon

I’m not proud to say that the thing that tempted me more than anything else this week was the dinosaur-shaped chicken that I served the boys for lunch. It’s just… they smelled so good and the package said FUN NUGGETS in giant red all caps. Actual nuggets of fun, right there in front of me. But I was good. I skipped them and had a can of corn instead.

You don’t really have to send me cookies. But I really appreciate all of the awesome advice and encouragement. Thinking about food all the time is exhausting, and if this is the answer for me I can’t wait to get to the point where avoiding gluten or wheat is just a normal part of regular life. It sucks, but as my sister in law very pragmatically says: Yeah but you know what sucks more? Feeling sick.

That Loved Dog book says that while routine is important, every day your dog should get some kind of a surprise. Like surprise! A walk to somewhere new. Or surprise! We hid your food under the couch and you have to find it. Surprise! A trip to Home Depot or oooh the pet store. Or surprise! A trip to a place where they put you under anesthetic so they can do unspeakable things to your privates.

When I went to pick Roux up yesterday the nurse told me two things: 1. He needs an cone collar thing because he’s trying to take out his stitches and 2. He hates the collar thing.

They brought him out and oh my god, he looked absolutely devastated. So very heartbroken because we don’t love him anymore and we did this to him because of the not-loving and oh SAD. Not just sad-looking because of the giant pathetic cone around his head — which everyone knows is the #2 saddest thing on earth — no, he honestly looked like he wanted to cry.

He wasn’t even cheered up by the boys who were dressed in their finest sequins and fanciest hats just for him. Nicolaus had also brought rawhide bones, but Roux sniffed them and sighed. Too destroyed to eat or chew. Graham brought him a poke in the eye, which he didn’t appreciate either.

He won’t pee while wearing the collar thing. We take him out and he stares at the ground and whispers, “Just let me die here.”

I tried taking the collar off just long enough for him to pee, but he immediately was like oh thank GOD. I have these stitches back here and I have got to get them the fuck out.

The pathetic creature is on my bed right now, sleeping after many hours of refusing to lay his head down with the collar on. He would drift off and then jerk his head up because oh no! It almost touched the ground!

I wanted to take a picture of him yesterday with Nicolaus’ camera but he refused on the grounds that he doesn’t want anything sad to tarnish his memorycard. So you will just have to imagine: sad. Oh wait! Here: SAD.

So when I said that a gluten-free diet was going to be easy, did you laugh at me quietly to yourself? Or did you call friends over, point at the screen, and chuckle out loud?

On the weekends we like to eat out. The weather here is amazing, and there’s all these places where you can eat outside and — you know, on weekends we eat out. Should be easy enough to not eat bread, right? Hahaha!

The first place we went was a hippie cafe. The lady at the counter had beautiful purple hair, the kind I used to have before it was too much work to maintain, and she was super nice. Good: Everything at a hippie cafe is clearly labeled. It’s also fresh, yummy, and reasonably priced. Bad: 45 minutes later I was hungry again.

The second place was a little bakery where the kids and Kevin ate grilled sandwiches and I had a salad with shredded turkey on top. It was good. But then I remembered that deli meat often has gluten in it. And an hour later I was hungry again. They did have soda options, which was nice. The hippie place didn’t have anything with caffeine except for a funky-colored energy drink.

Last night I researched “Atlanta gluten free” and found a bunch of restaurants. We picked Pappasitos because yay, Mexican food should be easy!

Oh good lord. First of all, I’d read on the internet that they have a gluten free menu. So I asked to see it, and oh my goodness sort of wish I hadn’t. They don’t have a printed menu, what they have is a head chef who came out and discussed all of the options and gracious me he wanted to talk about this way more than I did. And for whatever reason they add gluten to their refried beans and to their rice. And to their red sauce and their sour cream sauce and their water and everything.

By the end of the night I felt like an idiot. They were so, so so very nice about it but the attention was embarrassing — and after all of that, I had a terrible stomach ache.

The stomach ache tells me that:
A) this diet isn’t helping or
B) the diet takes time to work or
C) I fucked up by trying to eat out

So yes, please laugh at me for being so ridiculous. I’m officially humbled. And! The plan for today is to drag my kids to the grocery store so I can buy rice and beans and ground beef and never eat anything else ever again.

I went to my doctor early this week and said doctor, my stomach hurts all the time and it’s been thirty years of my stomach hurting and I’m getting tired of it so I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to try eliminating everything out of my diet except for cashews and clementine oranges and maybe bell peppers.

He looked at my history which includes seeing specialists and a recurring diagnosis of IBS and asked me a bunch of rude questions about my bathroom business. He’s nosy. Why is he so nosy? That stuff is private. He’s worse than the lady who answers the phone when I call to make an appointment. “And what did you need to see the doctor about?”

I always hesitate while the part of my brain who is a smartass has a quick discussion with the part of me that hopes to someday cause a localized stroke that will disable the smartass so that I can function normally in our society. So many things I could say. And what did you need to see the doctor about today?
“Poop and farts.”

Or: “Well I remembered that there used to be tiny people living inside my vagina, I want to make sure he has that in my chart. I heard about a woman in California who recently turned out to have a bunch, and it’s happened to me twice now so — anyway, seems important to not be caught off guard if that ever happens again.”

Or “Can you just put down that I don’t feel good? My bathroom scale broke and we have that lower copay now so I want to come in mainly for the part where they weigh me.”

Or “That son of a bitch owes me money.”

And so on. But usually I just mutter something about girl problems, which is neither in nor out on the smartass thing. It’s what usually happens when the two sides of my brain compromise: I end up making a joke, but it doesn’t make sense and it isn’t funny.

I laid my plan out for him and he listened and asked questions and the whole time my kids were in the room chatting to each other and to me and to themselves because now that Graham talks my life is a non-stop picture-in-picture infomercial for whatever random shit just came into my kids’ weird little brains, in a good way I mean, except that it makes it hard to concentrate on doctors who are saying things about my diet idea. Things like no, Tiffany. Don’t do that diet, Tiffany. That’s not the scientific method, Tiffany.

Oh. As much as I like the idea of trying my new “safe food” diet plan, I do love the scientific method.

So for the next few weeks he wants me to cut gluten out of my diet. Just gluten. I am specifically supposed to NOT cut out other things. Then we’ll go from there. Fine. So what the hell is gluten? I’ve been researching this on the web and have discovered that most people who end up on this diet are far more upset about gluten-free diets than I am. This is for three reasons:

1. Most people eat things besides Mexican food. The entire country of Mexico could develop a sudden wheat intolerance and they might not even notice. Corn, beans, rice, vegetables — all fine. My default meal is a bowl of lean taco meat mixed with organic salsa, beans, rice, cheese and chopped vegetables, eaten with salt-free corn tortilla chips.

2. Most people haven’t had stomach aches that rival labor pains for most of their lives. I’m not whining, just saying. It’s tiresome enough that trading bread for stomach aches is sounding maybe alright.

3. Most people hadn’t already resigned themselves to a diet consisting of three foods. When I started reading about the gluten-free diet I was dazzled by its variety and richness.

Ooh and! 4. Most people hadn’t already found themselves avoiding these foods out of the kind of superstition that only an IBS patient can understand. I made it through the day in high school by eating no breakfast, followed by a lunch of lemonade, butterfinger candy bars and cheetos which are all not only very yummy and nutritious but are all gluten free. Coincidence? Almost definitely! But then I’d come home and eat regular food and have a stomach ache and blame the junk I ate at school. Hmmmm?

We’ll see what happens. I’m honestly not sure what to hope for. If this diet works then that’s sad because it means no more pizza and I do dearly, dearly love walking to our favorite pizza place and eating horrifying amounts of pizza. But if it doesn’t work then that’s sad because of all the other stuff I just said. Either way my standard of living is excellent by global standards and my kids are funny and my dog is cute. So you know. Gluten.