I skipped band tonight. I didn’t actually really want to go all that badly in the first place, but I was going to – honest! But Carrie was incredibly cranky, over-tired from getting up early and missing her nap, teething…the works, and it seemed only Mommy could make it better.
I would have felt guilty going because I was leaving my unhappy toddler, and I feel guilty for not going. There’s no escaping feeling guilty, is there?
I bet I have the only toddler in the whole wide world who, every morning, asks “nail, feet?” while pointing to where I keep the nail clippers and sticking her toes in front my face so I can clip her nails. Now if only she’d do that with her hands…
When Carrie said Murphy’s name correctly today I briefly contemplated officially changing his name to “Mercy” just so I could hear her call him that for a little while longer.
As adorable as it is to hear Carrie sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” to herself, it’s way more adorable to hear her sing it while helping a teddy bear touch his head, shoulders, knees and toes.
(A.K.A. The Longest Blog Post Ever!)
I can’t believe it’s Monday night already. The past few days have been packed with so much craziness I’ve barely had time to think, let alone blog!
So, to sum up…
The new toy:
I bought myself a refurbished Kodak V550 camera to upgrade my Canon SD400. This is my carry-it-everywhere camera. It will definitely not replace my digital SLR, but I think after a weekend of playing with it I’m comfortable with it being at least a few steps up from the other camera. The video is incredibly better, the outdoor shots are also better. The inside shots…not so much. They’re probably better, but not so much of an improvement that it would be worth the upgrade. However, the shot-to-shot time and the initial shot time are incredible in comparison. It would literally take my other camera 30 seconds to start up, and then 10 seconds to recycle the flash in between shots – I timed it. Not to mention shutter lag. The new camera – if I didn’t have the D-SLR to compare it to I’d say there was no shutter lag, and the flash recycle time is just a couple of seconds.
Here’s a picture of Carrie I took with it indoors, using the camera’s built-in red-eye removal. There would have been major red-eye in this picture with the old camera, but if I zoom in a bit (to the original, this one’s been resized for the web) I can see a lot of noise in the background. For a snapshot camera, though, this will work just fine!
The back-breaking labor:
We started staining the deck this weekend. We’re completely changing the color, from weathered gray to cedar. You can see a corner of the weathered gray in this picture. All we have to show, after approximately 18 person-hours of work (12 of which were all Denis), is the railing going around the deck – inside and out.
The crafts:
Dear Carolyn,
What a month! We’ve officially entered the “no” phase. I ask you a question, and your automatic response is “no!” The thing is, you say it in this really cute, matter-of-fact, tiny little voice, and it’s so hard not to laugh.
You’ve actually made quite a huge improvement in your language skills over this past month, not even counting your very clear “no”. You’ve picked up so many animal signs from the new set of Signing Time DVDs we got you last month I can’t even keep track of them. You know more of them than I do! You sing your ABCs – and can recognize most of the written capital letters – and count to 10. You love the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” and will start singing it randomly when you want to hear it. You’ve also started doing what I call litanies. You might be nursing before bed, and you’ll say “mama milk, daddy milk, molly milk, mercy (murphy) milk…” and keep on going with all the names you can think of at the moment. (It’s really funny when you throw Uncle Michael into one of those litanies, because most of the time you call him “mucka-my”.) You do this with all sorts of phrases, like “mama sleep” or “molly eat” too, not just milk. I suppose those count as two word sentences.
Sometime in the past month you also started full-out running. You run with sound effects – I can’t describe the sound you make while you run, but you do it every time. Someday I need to catch it on video. If you could spend every waking minute outdoors on swings and slides, and running around, you would. Your biggest tantrums are the result of me having to drag you indoors because it’s started pouring or we need to go run errands.
Somehow, despite your love of the outdoors, you’ve also become quite the TV addict. Your favorite shows are Blue’s Clues, Signing Time, and Go Baby. I suppose they’re all pretty harmless, and I try to limit you to a half-hour of TV a day, though there are days when you get your way and get to watch twice that much TV. You also love to watch baseball, and will bring Daddy the remote after dinner and ask “bay-bah? bay-bah?” The other day you pointed to one of the players on the screen and said “Daddy hat?” because he was wearing the same baseball cap that Daddy always wears. You’re a pretty smart kid.
When you’re not outdoors or in front of the TV (which is thankfully in a different room than all your toys) you occupy yourself with blocks, dolls and puzzles. And books! We’re even starting to read some longer picture books lately, although you do love your lift-the-flap and touchy-feely books still.
I have to admit, between the “no, no, no”s and the fact that I spend so much time chasing you down to try to get anywhere or do anything with you, this month has been pretty challenging. But at the same time it’s been a blast since you’re starting to communicate so much better and we can actually have little conversations that aren’t totally one-sided anymore. I suspect that the challenging part of things is going to get worse before it gets better, but that everything you’re learning how to do is going to far outweigh that. I’m already seeing glimpses of the little girl you’re becoming, and although I know you’ve still got a long time as a toddler I also know how fast time has gone so far, and I’m not going to wish away one second – even the challenging ones.
Love, Mommy
To celebrate finishing a project, I picked up another project that’s been in the “current” list for almost two years: the woven tumbling blocks table runner. I sewed the borders on tonight, tomorrow night I’ll start sewing the binding on. It’s almost embarrassing how little work was left on this when I abandoned it…
I also finished upgrading the crafts section of the site. I think all the links will work and/or redirect automagically. If you notice something broken, leave me a comment and I’ll fix it. It’s definitely a lot slicker, and updating things will be so much easier now!
Today is our 7th anniversary! We know each other so well at this point that we each nearly bought the other the same card. Next year we probably will!
Over the past few weeks I played the Da Vinci Code quest game on google, and I ended up being one of the 10,000 finalists who moved on to the final puzzle challenge. There’s a 48 hour window to play the final puzzles which started this afternoon. So after I was sure Carrie was asleep for the night, and after restarting Safari and making sure nothing would distract me, I loaded it up. It’s 5 consecutive puzzles, and the person who takes the shortest amount of time to complete them all wins the grand prize.
Wow. I thought I was pretty good at puzzles, but this was…well, I know for sure I didn’t win the grand prize. I think it took me somewhere close to an hour to complete it – I forgot to look at the time when I started. Four of the five puzzles were things I’m generally pretty good at, but they were sadistically difficult. The fifth…well, if being able to play this particular game is a requirement to enter Heaven I am totally destined for Hell.
But based on all the snippets of movie previews and such we had to watch during the first phase to get clues to answer those puzzles, I really want to see the movie! (I also want to see X-Men 3. I don’t imagine that we’ll actually get to the movies twice in one month, so now I have to decide which one I want to see more…)
In my former life, when I was a software engineer, I had grand plans for my site. And for various reasons, most of which I don’t even remember anymore, I had decided to convert the whole craft section of my site to be database (MySQL) and PHP based. Mainly I think I was planning to make it easier to keep updated. I started the process two years ago, lost interest, had a baby, stopped working, lost touch with any and all web and programming knowledge I might have ever had, and, well, now it’s two years later. I have no idea what made me decide to start working on this again two nights ago, but now it’s become an obsession. (As in a “stay-up-late, who-needs-sleep, just-one-more-line-of-code” kind of obsession.)
So far I have a few test pages working, including a page to update the vital information about each project. The lines of code are slowly appearing out of the teeny-tiny little corner of my brain that survived the sleep deprivation and the invasion of nursery rhymes and lullabies. Actually, that’s somewhat impressive considering I’d never actually worked with PHP except for the few days I started trying to do this two years ago. I thought then – and apparently I still think this way – that if I just wanted it badly enough I could write PHP code. It seems to be working so far.
If I don’t get sidetracked by something else (no guarantees on that obviously) I might even have this running by the end of the weekend. Of course, the goal is for it to look exactly the same as it did before – just the way the information is stored and updated would be different – so nobody will ever notice if I don’t finish it!
We stopped in Stride Rite today because I wanted to get Carrie a pair of sandals for summer. I didn’t think she’d outgrown her shoes yet, because I just had them checked a few weeks ago and her feet still measured 5 1/2 – and her shoes are size 6.
Apparently, her feet grew quite a bit in those few weeks, and now measure 6 1/2. So we bought her some size 7 pink sneakers. They’re cute, but not the adorable fisherman sandals I wanted, because the store was sold out of her size. I’m very tempted to buy the other pair online and let her have two good pair of shoes for the summer. Especially since she’s now getting into all kinds of dirt and mud – it might be good to have a backup pair when the other pair is desperately in need of cleaning. Plus I’m feeling really guilty about letting her walk around for weeks in shoes that were a half size too small! (Like how I justify these things?)
I could hardly believe it when Carrie started filling words in for me while we read our bedtime stories earlier. I’m sure it’s just that she’s memorized the books we read frequently, not that she’s reading them. But I do think she can recognize the word “Dog”. I suppose this shouldn’t be so surprising to me, since about 90% of her books have the word “Dog” in them at least once. In fact, her current favorite book at bedtime is Sleepy Dog: “Turn on the moon. Turn off the light. Sleepy, sleepy, sweet dreams tonight.”
It’s not like I’m pressuring her to do anything with letters or reading. She just starts randomly reciting the alphabet (when she’s not counting her toes) and points to letters and says their names. I’m assuming that someday she’ll acknowledge the existence of “M” and “N”. She recognizes the written letters and will say their names, but when we say the alphabet her version goes something like “J”, “K”, “L”, “O”, “O”, “O”, “P”. I guess it’s similar to the “ella-mennow” thing, maybe she thinks it’s “L and O, O”. And as far as I can tell, she recognizes finger-spelled letters at least as accurately as written letters. Which is much better than I can do!