Notes from my day.

• The person in charge of developing flavors at Ben & Jerry's needs to be knighted. Or given a Congressional Medal of Freedom. Or something. Because first there was Dublin Mudslide, Irish Cream-flavored ice cream with chocolate, crushed chocolate cookies, and coffee swirl, and now there's Apple-y Ever After, which is brown sugar ice cream with ginger-caramel swirl and chunks of apple, and which is also the pinnacle of ice creamy goodness.



• While it's nice that Loew's White Marsh has a Reel Moms movie on Tuesday mornings, the truth is that just about any movie theater's 11am weekday showings will be populated by stay-at-home mothers with their small children. Alex and I blend right in.



• Someone on my friends list - I'm pretty sure it was epi_lj - posted about seeing Madagascar, and mentioned that there was a moment when he laughed out loud, hard, and no one else in the theater did. Which led to a moment today when I laughed out loud, hard, all by myself, and then said to myself, "Hey! I bet that's what made If laugh." ("It's a cookbook! It's a cookbook!" Am I right?)



• True Confessions Time: I actually said the following words to Alex today. "Let's get down on the floor and have playmat time! And then, after I feel like we've had an adequate amount of high-quality interaction, we'll go to the mall." Further True Confessions: We both loved the mall trip. Alex was having such a good time staring at things that it was hard to get her to take her bottle, even though she was clearly hungry.



• As long as the heat index is over a hundred degrees, I refuse to feel guilty about taking our healthy afternoon walk in an air-conditioned mall, even if it does mean inculcating my innocent daughter with morally bankrupt materialistic values.



• Mmm, materialism. You can't have Apple-y Ever After ice cream without materialism.