Sunday, November 30, 2008

I totally jinxed myself

A, realizing she desperately needed to pee, forgot to go in through the back door which was left unlatched for her and instead walked all the way around front to the door she has trouble opening by herself. While struggling with it, she wet her pants.

better than potty training

It's pretty fantastic to have kids who are old enough to independently decide to go play out in the snow, get themselves dressed for it, and amuse themselves unsupervised.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

tut tut

After years of eschewing weather reports, choosing instead to make my own best guess and bring in the laundry if it starts to rain, I have begun checking them the night before biking into work. So far it’s been more so I know whether long pants would be advisable rather than to convince myself to reconsider, though as ice becomes more of a possibility it will begin to serve that purpose. The forecasts are generally pretty accurate but not as detailed as I’d like- since they’re covering the whole region they can’t tell me just what time it will be snowing on Delaware Avenue, which is more relevant to me than knowing that snow will at some point occur. After four years of spending a good amount of time outside each day at Alfred, I could figure such things out myself pretty reliably. I haven’t managed to do so here yet but I’d like to make it more of a priority. There’s no excuse for not having a better grasp of typical weather patterns in a place I’ve lived for the past seven years.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

basilisks and rats

(in the car today)

A: Wombats live in Australia too.
C: I don't think wombats are real.
S: They are actually.
C: Basilisks aren't real. But anacondas can be like 30 feet long. A, that's as tall as our house.*
A: Wow!
S: Anacondas don't live around here. But black rats snakes do and they can be as long as daddy is tall. They don't bother people though; they eat rats.
A: Why?
S: Because their bodies evolved to digest them and they think they taste good. Do you think they're right?
A: Yes, but people don't eat rats.
C: Not usually, but I wouldn't be surprised if people living in the Warsaw ghetto did. A, a ghetto was a walled area of the city where people were forced to live. It wasn't very nice in ghettos but there aren't any anymore.
S: If people are really hungry they'll eat just about anything. A lot of people eat chickens, and eating rats isn't all that different from that. It just sounds grosser to most people.
C (deciding that A needed additional education): The Axis was made up of Germany, Hungary, Japan, (blah blah blah) and in 1939 they (blah blah blah) and Poland (blah blah blah for several minutes)
A: Wait! I need to say something!
S: Hang on, C. What is it, A?
A: Sometimes we see the moon in the daytime!

* Note the voluntary not-unkind engagement with his sister. I remain somewhat shocked every single time it happens, even when he is trying to show off.

(I won't regale you with yesterday's car ride, in which I taught C the differences between the mean, median, and mode in a discussion of "average" speed.)

Saturday, November 15, 2008

a big corporation sucks slightly less than before

Amazon.com is a serious overpackaging offender. More then once we've been sent a single book in a box that would fit a dozen, and plastic has been used to shrink-wrap the book AND fill the empty space. But maybe they're getting a little better. They are starting to work with manufacturers to produce items with minimal packaging (which is not only less environmentally egregious but also less frustrating to open) and have "developed software that determines the "right-sized" box for any given item based on dimension and weight." I hope not to personally experience these changes anytime soon (we can get just about everything we need from stores we can walk to) but I'm glad it's happening.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

A's birthday

It's hard to believe A is 4! She had a great 3 days of birthday celebrations (kid party on Tuesday with Nana and YeYe and Aunt Maureen also in attendance, birthday walk at her school and our immediate family party on her birthday, and this morning her play group kids celebrated with her).

I'm glad we have a 4 year-old who enjoys simple celebrations, like the duck themed kid party where we played games like Duck Duck Goose and had a cake with a duck on it...and doesn't require renting ponies or hiring clowns, etc. :)

Here are a couple photos from the last couple days. Don't forget to click for larger views.

enjoy,
Dan










Sunday, November 09, 2008

embarrassingly spot on

I've wanted to put this up for a while but BoingBoing crashed his server for a bit. Photoshopped sci fi/ fantasy book covers.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

We had nothing to do with it

C made signs and recruited his sister to campaign with him.

Sunday, November 02, 2008

halloween pics



C is cool...he's been campaigning in school a bunch and took it to the next step. he carved this himself.



A drew her jackolantern herself too, and helped with the carving (and scooping the massive amount of guts out of this giant pumpkin sarah grew in the garden).



she really loves the halloween songs at school--they sang to us after the parade...



C of course did the makeup and costume himself here--he is a "bloodstained black spy" and had neck wounds and blood on his shirt you may not be able to see... he really enjoyed going out for two rounds of trick or treating since A wanted to go before it got dark. Now we need the great pumpkin to take LOTS of candy away...



sarah is a superhero that needs a backstory... I am one of those arcade "crane" games (not yet attached to me in this photo). It was fun having people play...