long time no nailpolish

musa is asleep and i have put away the laundry and i have painted all 20 of my nails for the first time since my wedding in august 2003! well, first coat. i forgot about the necessity of second coats. i mean, this is the first time since then i have even cracked open a bottle of nailpolish! i figured that deserved a blog entry. hope nobody needs a diaper change in the next 20 minutes or so. hope nobody new comes to my blog, reads this top post, and decides i'm a worthless ditz for dedicating an entire blog entry to nailpolish. i don't even like it that much; i just figured, what the heck...

musa's growing vocabulary

if i don't make this list here, i never will, so here goes. not a complete list, i'll add to it as i remember...:

cereal (shuh) (since he's saying it right now)
mee (milk)
dudhu (urdu for milk, means my milk)
juice (joo)
orange (reej)
kiwi (kee)
apple (appuh)
pear (peah)
anda (urdu for egg)
bread (beh)
fish
peas
please (peas)
banana (aba)
grapes (pess)
waffle (aafoh)
shoes
pants(paa)
shirt (shrrr)
socks (saah)
hat (ha ha)
knee
toes (toe)
teeth
wee wee (yes, it's what you think)
car
elmo
spider man (ah-man)
tigger (ahkaa) (sounds just like when he says "our car", must use context clues to distinguish)
read (ree)
ammi (what i call my mom)
abbu (what i call my dad)
ma (waht we call my MIL)
dada (paternal grandfather)
kaka (paternal uncle)
mamoo (amoo or moomoo) (maternal uncle)
baji (beej) (his older girl cousin)
umbrella (aba)
flower (faa)
water (wa wa)
upstairs (uhtuz) (this generally refers to either up- or down-stairs, and means he wants to go that way)
nurse (nuh)
bath
pee pee



and last week he starting copying my mom in saying my name - either "ayesha" - pretty clearly! - or "aashoo" - and he says something similar (asha) for his cousin, issa.
and he says this thing, that sounds like "aau pa tuh", randomly, over and over again, like he's trying to tell you something serious. no clue what it is.
at times he actually does pretty well communicating - a couple of weeks ago, he was in the living room, walking around without his pants (i had taken them off for some reason, i think he had spilled something on them) and i was just outside the gates, and he says, "mama! mama!," and i said "yes musa?" and he said "upstairs!" and then "pants!"... translation, "mama, i want to go upstairs because i need to put on some pants!"
and it's sooo funny even while it frustrates me to no end, when i am trying to chastise him about something, he looks guilty, looks away, then he changes his whole expression and tries to change the subject, usually by mentioning a grandparent's name...

ijtehad on the Constitution, and TDay prep

so i was listening to NPR quite a lot today, because i was in the car quite a lot today, and i heard a couple of news broadcasts regarding that fact that the supreme court has decided to revisit the DC law banning handguns to see whether or not it is actually constitutional.
and one of the broadcasts talked about how any conclusion would hinge on deciding exactly what is meant by "the right to bear arms" - here, i'll post the second amendment -

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

... or more specifically, does this sentence mean that the People have individual rights to bear arms, or that state militias have the right to assemble and arm themselves?
and it just struck me how familiar this conundrum felt: interpreting words set down as, well, gospel, for lack of a better word at 1:27 a.m. when i ought to be sleeping; interpreting such words decades or centuries after their writing, with no recourse to their original authors or interpreters, but only a body of previous interpretations to refer to... it's not such an alien idea for americans, then, is it?
okay, i know, totally different from interpreting qur'an and hadith and perhaps inappropriate as a comparison. but, i'm just saying, it struck me.

that said, i will add that i baked a pumpkin cheesecake today, but i can't taste it till thursday, although i did taste the cranberry conserve i made today and it rocks the house! tomorrow (or rather, later today), i'm making the butternut squash soup, parts of the stuffing, an apple pie, and the roasted garlic-herb butter i'm using to rub the turkey with. and my parents are coming up too inshallah! yay!

okay off to bathroom, pray, sleep...

nerdy pleasures

i did not know that "garde-robe" is french for closet, but it makes sense considering we also have the word "wardrobe" which is related of course. i just saw "garde-robe" on the side of the closet shelf organizer box i bought today and thought about medieval toilets...

a long-expected party

well not really, but it's more memorable than a blog post entitled "a long-awaited day". today trader joe's opened in columbia, about 10 minutes from my house!!!! no more loooong treks to silver spring or asking DH to stop by rockville on his way home from work... okay so silver spring isn't that far but since my MIL lives there i usually ended up taking her along and then staying at her house for as long as she wanted to play with musa, so it ended up being a long trek anyway...