It’s weird. I had a baby, and he was adorable. He rolled around and was generally awesome. Recently, however, I’ve had trouble finding him. Instead, there’s this dude who runs around my house all day and tries to climb in drawers. He subsists on nothing but fruit and soy milk, and if you take your eyes off of him, next thing you know, he’s climbed the stairs, climbed onto the headboard of your room, and has the cordless phone to his ear, saying, “he-lloooo,” in kind of an annoyed fashion– as if he has a lot of important business to attend to, and the person at the other end of the phone is wasting his precious time by not telling him what he needs to know.

You guys, I think this dude may have eaten my baby.

My baby, who learned to walk and took unsure steps around the house, has been replaced by a dude who doesn’t know how to walk at all– he just runs full-tilt to get to wherever it is he needs to go. He races around on giant hams for feet that slap on the ground like a fat guy doing a belly flop.

My baby wouldn’t stay still for two seconds, but this dude will cuddle with me on the couch and give me big hugs that go on forever. My baby would stare at me blankly if I asked for a kiss, but this dude will lean in and go, “mmmmmmm- muah!” and kind of launch his face in my general direction.

We had to baby-proof the old house, because my baby had a death wish. This dude likes to figure out how things work and helped his daddy put together a grill yesterday.

He calmly tried to figure out how everything worked, while daddy put things on backwards and lost parts. The dude also made sure that everything was working properly, and that Luke checked his work.

Each new word he says and each new skill he learns is replacing the baby I fell in love with with a boy who never ceases to fascinate and amaze me. It’s an interesting tradeoff. He won’t sit still in restaurants anymore, but he’s always waiting at the door for me when I come home, and squeals, “mommy!” like he hasn’t seen me in ages. My dude is pretty great.

So the “city” in this installment is strict Muslim state, Abu Dhabi. Sex and the City in Abu Dhabi. You guys, I don’t even need 10 seconds for this.

Americans: We really don’t give a fuck, do we?

The first photo is from the Mean Girls premiere in 2004, the second is from Cannes earlier this month. It really makes you want to eat your veggies and drink water, doesn’t it? Oh, and not inhale giant piles of blow all the time. Also, if you stare at the picture on the right long enough, you can almost see her septum deviating in real time.

When I got home this evening, I had forgotten about Lindsay Lohan, until I saw that she had posted a photo of herself on Twitter, and DAMN.

The first photo was taken at the 2004 MTV Movie Awards, and the second was posted on her Twitter feed today, with the caption, “She wanna-be carrie bradshaw!”

In related news, Sex and the City 2 should be banned from the earth.

Our household has been wracked by illness pretty much for a month straight. It got so bad that last week, Cooper was only able to go to school one day. He’s been losing weight, sleeping all the time, and producing some amazing colors of snot. Finally, I had enough and I said, “hey sickness. You’re a jerk, and you’re not going to beat us.”

We just moved into a place with a fenced in backyard, so I’ve been determined to take advantage of this as much as humanly possible. One of the first things I did, was buy my water-loving baby a pool, which he is obsessed with. The second is to garden. Luke is container-gardening some tomatos, we’ve topsy-turvied some peppers, and I’ve planted seeds for an herb garden. This works out for Cooper in many ways– the best of which is the use of the hose, aka his new best friend.

Sure, you can go spend 30 bucks on an inflatable blowfish pool at Target, but all a kid really needs is the hose.

Summertime!