I am a Bad Mother.

Do you want to know how Bad I am?

Exhibit A: When the baby pulls herself to standing on my leg, and then loses her balance, I usually just let her fall over. Thinking, in some sort of horrible, misguided Bad Mother way that it will help her eventually learn to keep her balance.

But instead, she sometimes loses her balance again when her butt hits the floor and falls over sideways, bonking her head on the chair and causing her to cry hysterically for many, many hours (subjective time) until Dad distracts her by making the world's funniest pbpbpbpbt! raspberry noises.

She has a little bruise on her forehead this morning. I am a Bad Mother.

Exhibit B: Despite all warnings about keeping young children on a low, sugar, healthy diet. Despite all warnings about weird chemicals (like aspartame and sucralose).

I let the baby drink soda.

I know you are thinking, "NO! Not even the most horrible of Bad Mothers would do that!" But I have proof!

(Okay, no, really, it was an empty can that I let her play with, and when she started lifting it like that, I dove for the camera as fast as I could. But I did, one time, let her take a sip of my soda. She made the most horrified face ever.)

(And I'm sure letting her play with an empty soda can counts as Bad Motherhood, anyway, because she could have cut herself pretty badly on the opening.)

Exhibit C: Despite the certain knowledge that every virus, bacterium, and germ known to mankind is personally on a crusade to infect my daughter, I let her crawl around the house with these dirty feet:

And the last - for now - but certainly not least:

Exhibit D: I let her bang on my computer, and don't even notice that she's popped a key off the keyboard until she stops banging on the computer to pick the rogue key up off the floor.

This is actually two pieces - the key cap, and a smaller piece of plastic with snaps and grooves and things that goes under it. They came apart, and at first I thought the smaller piece of plastic was gone forever, until Penny let go of it.

My only consolation is that these pieces are so small, I doubt she could have choked on them if she'd taken it into her head to eat them.

Also, I learned my Thing For The Day yesterday, in figuring out how to reassemble my keyboard.

(Matt expressed sympathy rather than congratulations when I got it put back together good-as-new, on the grounds that if the key had been permanently broken, I obviously would have had no choice but to buy myself a new iBook.)

So there you have it. All that in just one evening. I am now, officially, a Bad Mother.

Which, I might point out, officially makes Matt a Bad Mother Fucker.

(No, actually, I didn't plan that Extremely Bad Joke at the beginning of the entry. It just kind of slipped out. If it makes you feel better, you can add it to my list of failings.)

--Liz