Blog Archives
Friday Misc
Yeah, daily posts are way out of my league right now and I find that to be sooo pathetic. But hey, constraints are constraints, self imposed or not.
Anyhoo, the house thing is moving along but we still don’t know the exact timing on when the deal will be sealed up and the keys to the kingdom get handed over. Probably sometime towards the end of next week. Guess we better REALLY try to motivate and push through the heat-induced lethargy and try to get the rest of our junk packed. I so wish that I would just, like, wake up tomorrow and it would be December, and a lovely 50°, partly cloudy day. Sigh, I can dream.
Took the day off today to do a hundred and fify errands, and the bright spot was GETTING OUR NEW FRIDGE ORDERED! I don’t know why this is like the most exciting part about the new house, but I am really stoked. Silly, ridiculous, I know but somehow it makes me feel like…wow, we really OWN something. A huge, HUGE thanks goes out to Aunt D for all her help. You have no idea how happy you made me today.
So long, you lying, scoundrel Sprint wireless b*stards! My contract was up last week and today I went and got my new iPhone and ported my # over. Not that I have any illusions about the corporate practices of AT&T wireless. But hey, I figure after 9 years with Sprint, it’s time to let some other company piss me off for awhile. Plus, iPhone, HELLO! Family share plan with work-affiliation discount is way cheaper too, even with the data plan. All in all, a win-win, I think, and K now has TWO iPhones to kill batteries on while playing games.
K is pretty much over her little cold, but still coughing a wee bit, and has been more restless than usual while sleeping. (FF would say VERY restless, as evidenced by the thrashing knees and feet invading his side of the bed.)
I have discovered that quite possibly one of the cutest things in the world is K singing and dancing to Laurie Berkner music videos. Recently, Noggin ran a 1 hour special of her music videos and so we DVR’d it. K and I have been rocking out all week! Her favorite song…”I’m not perfect”. She sings it perfectly! Ironic, isn’t it?
Parenting Odds and Ends
K slept in WAY too late today. In fact, in a rare show of persistence, she stayed asleep even after I crawled out of bed (quite the rarity). It gave the parental units a little time to watch some TV and generally lounge around in the daylight hours sans preschooler…weird!
When she woke up, she came into the living room wide-eyed and crazy-haired. We did our “good morning” routine complete with hugs, tickles, and snuggles and then K looks at me and says, “I was having a great dream Mom!”
CM: yeah? what kind of dream?
K: a dream about a big huge bird!
CM and FF: cool!
K: yeah, I was washing it and making it all clean!
CM: (strangled giggles)
K: what did YOU dream about mommy?
At that point, I dissolved into laughter for 2 reasons. #1: [true confession time] as a kid, a SMALL kid, at the family ranch one time, I was playing with a friend in the chicken coop. For some reason, we thought it would be a great (and humane) idea to give a chicken a bath. So after terrorizing them by chasing them around for about 20 minutes, we finally caught a hen and took it to the water bowl to “bathe” it. Unfortunately, the poor chicken little expired from the stress. Yes kids, that right, I started my sociopathic career at the tender age of 6 or 7, by bathing a chicken. I have unfortunately, never lost the reputation of chicken killer, and my dear family reminds me of this episode frequently.
Funny reason #2: right before K woke up, I had just mentioned to FF that I had been having some really weird dreams, mostly concerning Christopher Meloni, in the nude. I didn’t think it wise to try and explain that to K, so I claimed dream amnesia.
This afternoon, she was playing with the iPhone again, and torturing the poor little Hula people. In fact, a new feature in the game is that you can name the natives, and she had FF name three of them after us. I find that…disturbing. Anyway, after awhile, she came to me in the other room (doing homework as usual) and climbed into my lap. She decided to play the fishing game for awhile and proceeded to work on her casting skills. After awhile, she says excitedly “look Mom, I caught a burrito!”. That got my attention so I looked at the screen, to find that she had actually caught a bonito, but I didn’t have the heart to correct her. It was waaaay funnier to hear her running around talking about catching burritos.
Also at one point while cooking dinner, she was around the corner, playing with the iPhone still, and says “Mom, I’m making the hula people dance!”. And then quietly she starts chanting to the screen “shake your body, shake your body, shake your booooooody, YEAH!” I almost peed myself.
Lastly, while running around the house half naked, (still working on that potty-habit thing), she ran into the bathroom to pee. Now, generally she is pretty good at this pottying gig but occasionally if she is distracted or eager to get back to some activity, she’ll get the “steps” out of order. In this case, after she peed, she jumped down (without wiping, flushing, etc) and was about to run off and play. We talked about the proper steps for pottying and she gave me an exasperated sigh, said “ok I’ll get a wipe” and proceeded to reach around and clean her hind end. Seeing that she was totally missing the target area, I reminded her to wipe “the front part of her bottom too”.
Oh yeah baby, parenting rocks–don’t let anyone tell you different.
She spun in circles a few times, and then loudly says “BUT I CAN’T FIND IT!”.
Whereupon FF overhearing this exchange, cracks up hysterically. It’s so, so hard to keep a straight, patient face at times like these. Your amusement, annoyance, and absurdity meter all fight relentlessly.
Some days, this sounds very attractive:
Three-year-old Iphone Expert
Last October, we finally got an Iphone, after many months of torturous longing. The moment we got it, and took it out of the cute little box, K was instantly attracted and bidding for her own slice of time on the sexy touch screen. So I figured hey, she can type in the phone numbers as I call them out, when working on updating contacts. Not only was it a great opportunity to practice her number recognition skills, but also satisfied her need to play with Mommy and Daddy’s shiny new toy.
Little did we know that we had created an unrepentent monster.
Every single day, she would negotiate for time to play with the Iphone. Within a couple days, she had learned how to change the wallpaper photo, turn WiFi on/off, open the calculator and shift it from simple to scientific, rearrange the app icons (look Mom, I made the buttons wiggle!), type letters/numbers in the notepad, review calendar entries, and play songs from the iPod interface. When I say learned, I do not in any way mean random button pushing–once she figured out how to make something happen, she did not forget and could reliably repeat the behavior on request.
Silly us–we thought that was pretty amazing and cute. We started joking about videotaping her expertise and sending it to Apple.
Within a couple weeks, she had learned how to “play” a solitaire game I downloaded, ie how to advance the cards and shift them around. She figured out how to call people, but it was always random luck on who she dialed, so I eventually had to start discouraging her from roulette phone calls. She learned how to open the picture catalog and skim through them. She learned how to delete apps, change a variety of settings, and play Tiltsnake. SHE taught ME how to quick delete emails, and also showed me the “sleep” button on top that I had somehow overlooked up to that point.
It was around that time that she started preschool and upon the enrollment visit, she was interacting with one of the graduate students in the ‘house’ role-play area of the classroom. The student handed her a plastic toy phone and encouraged her to “make a call”. K looked at her like she was the stupidest person ever to waste oxygen, and silently handed the plastic phone right back to her.
A couple weeks after that, she noticed the camera app and asked me to show it to her. I demonstrated how to take a picture ONE time, and she ran off in the other room. Upon retrieving the phone later in the day, we discovered she had taken over 100 pictures. Mostly of her feet but there were a few candid shots of the carpet, wall, toys, and table. By Christmas, she had become an expert fisherman, using the Flick Fishing game (she taught several other adult family members how to play this game). She learned about 10 different fish species names and would call out to us each time she caught one, and what type it was. If I would ask her to give me a turn, she would nonchalantly close out her game, open my solitaire app and hand it to me without saying a word.
She is THREE.
This weekend, Uncle M (my youngest brother) came to visit and he also has an Iphone. He showed me a couple games he recently downloaded, and one was called Pocket God. The point is basically to torture poor helpless islanders–see picture at top. K got one glimpse of the screen and instantly WANTED TO SEE THE HULA PEOPLE, and 3 days later is still pretty much willing to sell off body parts to get time playing the game. She was relatively nonplussed by my other new game (good old Tetris–one of the few games I am actually good at!) but she played a few times and said “Mom, I’m just stacking some blocks with my fingers”. She vastly prefers torturing the hula people.
At this point, I figure I should just pimp her out as a full-time app reviewer.
