Staying in the Moment

I just finished writing this rather depressing and sappy post about how I'm all stressed out right now. Then I got to the end of it, realized that writing it was enough, and decided that I couldn't possibly post it.

Instead, I thought I'd give you some random moments of joy in my daily life.
Before we went to DC, I showed Little Man some of the animals we'd be seeing at the zoo on the computer. The National Zoo has this fabulous website where you can watch live webcams of most of their animals. You can usually see an elephant and, almost always, the not-so-baby-anymore baby panda. Little Man loves it. Loves it so much that he wants to see the "eppugees" all of the time. "Eppugee," oddly enough is also his word for apple juice which is his word for any kind of drink. One night we were playing in the living room, and suddenly he took my hand, looked at me earnestly and said, "eppugee?" I asked, "Do you want a drink?" To which her replied solomnly, "ooo....eppugee, kiyyee kaa, oo-oo- ah-ah." Which translates, roughly, to "elephant, kitty cat, and monkey." How can you say no to a request like that??

To distract him from watching the eppugees all of the time--ok, really to entertain myself, because I can only look at the same #@^#^ elephant picture so many times in one week, I tried to find some animals on YouTube. Here's what my search came up with:
This is now Little Man's most favoritest thing to watch. And how can you not love it? Now, instead of eppugees, he wants the bock-bocks.

Oh- and he wants this too:



Can you blame him?