Yeah, yeah, yeah...

Okay, well, the tantrums are still occurring at random intervals, along with the moodiness, but I hope it's beginning to even out. The transition is difficult, going to full-day school, and G's freelance gig has been heating up a lot lately, so that good ol' Mommy doesn't have as much free time as she once did. And believe me, Daddy is no substitute whatsoever.

However, that told, Gaz is still doing funny things. We occasionally play all sorts of odd musical bits, here and there, and she latched on to the opening bit of Devo's "Uncontrollable Urge" (check it out in your online music source of choice).

The opening has Mr. Mothersbaugh going "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah, yeahyeahyeahyeah!" And Gaz adapts that rhythm to whatever she wants.

"Salty peanut, salty-peanut, saltypeanut!"

"Macaroni, macaroni, macaroni!"

"Hello Kitty, hello-kitty, hellokitty!"

So that's hilarious.

We also have this elementary school program called "ROBERTO" which stands for Read Or BE Read TO. And we read to her nightly. The requirement is 20 minutes a day, but it's not uncommon for us to run 30 minutes, and last week we had two nights that stretched to 60 minutes. So that's good, right? Problem is, I'm hoping her teacher doesn't actually check what it is they're being read, because she'll see a lot of issues of "Batman: The Brave And The Bold" (which is a pretty fun kids Batman comic) and "Tiny Titans" (which is like Muppet Babies only with the Teen Titans, so more like PreTeen Titans) along with the usual Seuss and Disney and Kipling (Gaz loves Kipling's "Just So Stories" for some reason).

Tonight I read her an issue of the Scooby-Doo comic she had me buy over the weekend, and finished up with the wonderful "Bats on the Beach." That's a good mix, I think. But then after I turn out the light, Gaz wants me to tell a made-up story, and while I can do that, I'm pretty tired myself, so I do what I've been doing the past week or so: I tell her about comic book characters. She's heard the origin stories of Superman, Wonder Woman (a favorite), Batman and Robin, Green Arrow, Green Lantern... what little I remembered of The Flash, and Martian Manhunter. On the other side of the fence, I've told her about Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, and tonight I explained The X-Men.

Oh, the X-Men. She'd caught a glimpse of a little sketch of Wolverine over my shoulder when I was looking at a comics blog, and she asked who that guy was, so I had to explain mutants and Professor X and as many of the X-Men as I could recall offhand before I started to describe Wolvie. She was really impressed with his healing factor, and she loved the idea of an unbreakable metal skeleton, but she got really tickled when I explained the claws. However, despite thinking they were really cool, what she wanted to do if she had Wolverine's powers was to jump around really high! And she'd want Nightcrawler's teleportation, and Jean Grey's telekinesis power (I didn't explain to her about the whole Dark Phoenix thing becuase... you gotta leave room to grow, right?), and so on. This girl is gleefully investigating the whole nerd culture thing, and she's not even into her second hand worth of years. I love it.

I suppose I should investigate Wikipedia to refresh my memory on some of the superhero origins for tomorrow night... we'll see how that goes!