Most Expensive Baby Toy EVER

Most Expensive Baby Toy EVER
Originally uploaded by lostonpurpose.

This is what I decided to do with the trashed laptop that would cost more (exponentially, nearly) to fix than it's worth.

She wants my new laptop, but she'll settle for the old one. I've pulled out the battery and anything she could hurt herself on. I will open it up and pull more guts out of it to make it lighter (hard job, it was really heavy to begin with) so it's more fun to play with. Also, I'm sure I can sell the memory on eBay or something, since it wasn't damaged in the diet coke incident.

Gosh, it was an expensive present, though.

This Just In: Forward Progress

I know her hair looks all goofy and her cheeks are still all rosy from her nap, but she struggled and pulled herself across the floor on her own to get to this book.

It was more of a tummy-down, army crawl than she's been trying for, but it was forward and it was all by herself. It seems to take a lot of energy because she tends to rest for a second or two before she tries again, but I think this is the start of chasing her around the house.

Even though my life probably just got a lot harder, I'm still happy she did it. Yay B!

She Wants to Crawl SOOOOO Much

My poor little baby has taken to pulling up on her hands and knees and rocking back and forth, then trying to push forward without moving her hands. This lands her on her tummy on the floor, looking confused about why she's two inches back from where she started instead of halfway across the room.

I have tried to suggest to her every way I can think to try moving her hand first, but she doesn't seem to believe me. She seems to have all her weight on her hands, so when I pat one or urge her to move it, she falls onto her tummy and looks at me as if to say, "That was mean, mommy."

She'll get it, but she's getting so frustrated in the meantime. Poor little girl.

Clerks II

Saw it two nights ago and dug it. It really could have been mindless references and jokes from the first Clerks, but ahoy! There was actually a plot and stuff there. Better than the first one, I think.

A few things:

The Silence of the Lambs dancing? Funny stuff.

I wanted to hate Elias but couldn't quite do it. I don't know why I wanted to hate him or why I wasn't capable of doing it, and I don't have the wherewithal to analyze it further.

The dancing on the roof scene? Now I know why you boys like this movie so much.

But really, I liked it a lot. What I don't get is all the pissin' contests going on about it (go to Kevin Smith's blog if you wanna read about it, but it's goofy stuff). For heaven's sake, it's just a movie. Like the man himself pointed out in his most recent post, don't people have more important stuff to argue about?

(Ooooh. Sick burn.)

Scary Movies From Your Youth

This is a great Fark thread.

What movies scared you as a kid? Would you still be afraid of any of them? Have you conquered some of them? Even come to like some of them?

Lots of stuff scared me as a kid that I saw in movies or on TV, but nothing more than the commercials for Magic. I would give you a link to IMDB for this movie, but then I'd have to look it up and I'd probably see a poster for it on that page, and I'd be up all night. It came out when I was about six or seven and it dominates my memory of that time period. I know movies stayed in theaters longer back then, but it seems as though those ads were on television for months.

The ads for that frackin' movie featured a ventriloquist dummy slowly being revealed out of the darkness. It may or may not have been sitting on a stool. I think there was a slow pan in on the dummy and it said scary, menacing things. I'm not sure I ever saw the ad all the way through. I do remember my mom telling me that this was before we had a remote for the television (man, am I old) and whenever it came on, someone would have to leap up and change the station before I completely freaked out. I apparently just clapped my hands over my ears and squeezed my eyes shut, screaming bloody murder until someone came to my rescue.

Damn, that was scary stuff. I will never be able to see that movie.

I'm thinking really hard and I'm not sure I can think of a movie that scared me as a child that I like or even can tolerate now. The original Poltergeist was another movie that scared me quite a bit, but I don't think I'm quite over that. I had to have my mother remove a doll from my room after seeing that movie, and now I can't even remember what in the movie had anything to do with a doll and I'm not willing to watch it and find out. (Update: I hadn't read the whole Fark thread yet when I posted this originally, but now that I'm further through it, it's clear there was something in Poltergeist about a clown doll. I choose not to think any further on the subject at this time.) I'm rather embarassed to tell you that I can't even watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because of an irrational fear of Oompa Loompas, not even now that I'm a real live adult with a baby of my own.

Again, perhaps this post would have been adorned with a picture of a doll, an Oompa Loompa or two, or (shudder) a ventriloquist dummy, but doing the Google image search for any of that would leave me whimpering in a corner.

Lady, I Feel Your Pain

At the Milwaukee County Zoo, which we visited during our desperate flight from the power outages and hundred-degree weather, we stopped in the monkey house and observed this poor lady spider monkey. You may have to go view the picture larger to see exactly how pregnant that monkey was.

In person, she looked so pregnant that I think we might have seen a brand-new baby monkey if we'd been willing to wait ten minutes or so. She was having a little more trouble getting around than the other monkeys flying from rope to rope around her. I held the B up so she could get an idea what her own mommy had gone through to get her here, but I'm not sure it sank in.

(Don't worry, I'm not planning to be one of those mothers who tells the 'I threw up for nine months for your ungrateful self' story every time the poor B misbehaves. Much.)

I also thought Miss Easily Distracted might enjoy this pic of a red panda. The poor little thing is supposed to have a big, bushy tail, but hers was amputated after a medical issue. She seemed really shy, hiding way in the corner of her pen, so I quickly snapped this picture and then moved along to give her some privacy. She was cute as a button, though, tail or not.

Oh, Yeah...

Ah, and we did get power back. We had already planned to evacuate to the MIL and FIL's house in Wisconsin, so we went ahead and made the trip anyway. I hear there was another storm while we were gone, but we reportedly kept our power and will be returning to a house with air conditioning and internet.

Hurrah. Thanks for the well-wishes.

Congrats, Floyd

I suck. I counted you out. I admit that I underestimated Phonak and Floyd's ability to rebound from a disaster to produce victory. Here is the crow I intend to eat:

And congratulations to Phonak's Floyd Landis, the next winner of the Tour de France!

No power

I am posting this from my cellphone. Twenty percent of the area has no power. There are supposed to be more storms and the temps are supposed to be in the 100s. But how is your day?

Oh, Floyd

I wonder what this Tour would be like if Floyd Landis had never left the Postal team (now Discovery) to lead Phonak. His boys just weren't enough to get him up the mountain in yellow today, and I don't think he'll be using those yellow tires or that yellow bike again this year. The team around him just isn't near strong enough to beat back all of the attacks coming from the other team leaders.

But if he'd stayed with Postal/Discovery, he'd surely be wearing the '1' for them and leading the team. And that team is strong enough that I think he'd be wearing that yellow down the Champs-Elysées.

New Laptop

For those of you following the 'diet Coke in the laptop' saga, I got yukky news today. The best price anyone could find on a motherboard to replace the one I fried was $800. Now, I don't know if any of you have been watching laptop prices, but you can buy a laptop nicer than the one I had for right around that price.

That meant a trip to the lovely computer store. Yes, I could have ordered one. Yes, I could have gotten a discount through Tom's job. But 1) I'm sick of not having a laptop after I've been so used to having one and 2) there are some screamin' sales. I found this lovely creature with $150 in rebates, to bring the price under $1000. It even has more than twice the RAM I had in the old laptop, and a faster processor and bigger hard drive.

And, since there's no love lost between me and the maker of my last laptop, this one is also about half as heavy, has better keyboard and trackpad action (and no, that's not judged on an old, broken-in keyboard--I recently replaced the busted-ass keyboard in the old laptop, and don't think I don't wish I had that money back) and it also has a bitchin' fingerprint reader.

After just a bit of twiddling, this laptop is not only on my LAN and sharing files with the desktop PC, but I can login to the machine and to most of the websites I visit where I have a username and password with only a swipe of my index finger on my fingerprint reader. Swanky!

I have almost all of my old applications reinstalled (everything I really use is open source anyway, so I just popped to a few websites and downloaded the installers) and the files that the repair shop could copy off my old hard drive (they did a good job, and gave me a great deal on an external hard drive that they copied the files onto, which I will now use for much more frequent backups--my last big backup was in March, boo me) are now in my brand-new documents folder. Those thankfully include an installer for the program I use to burn bitchin' DVDs of the B that I couldn't re-download, as well as project files and movies that were lovingly transferred from the video camera and then edited. There were also about a dozen pictures of the B that didn't exist anywhere else, and that has been taken care of as well.

So this is the end of the laptop/coke disaster of 2006. I feel guilty for burning the money, but everyone's human, right? Keep those cans away from the expensive electronics, all right? Take it from me.

Ha! Ha! A Post!!1!!

A lot of you reading this right now know your way around Fark and/or Something Awful and you are possibly aware that it was this week, last year, when every thread on Fark was threadjacked by the Ha! Ha! Guy. If you don't know who this gentleman is, or why he's so damn happy (!!!1!!!) then you can read about it on Wikipedia. If you still haven't had enough Ha! Ha!, then check out today's (as always, possibly not work safe stuff on Fark) thread on Fark, commemorating the Ha! Ha! Guy's birthday.

If you asked me, I'd probably answer that I don't think he's all that funny anymore. However, I did snicker at a couple of the Ha! Ha! Guys in the thread on Fark, so who the heck knows anymore?

The internet is not a truck. It is a series of tubes.

The internet is not a truck. It is a series of tubes.
Originally uploaded by lostonpurpose.

I laughed out loud for about a half minute when I saw this display in the cyber wing of the St. Louis Science Center. It's stuff like this that makes you glad you have to carry the camera wherever the baby goes so you can capture her doing all her cute little things. I get that stuff, but also the internet, as invisaged as a couple of tubes.

If you don't know what I'm talking about because you don't follow the net neutrality debate, don't read Boing Boing, and don't watch The Daily Show, then you really have a lot of entertaining reading ahead of you, if you want to find out what some ancient senator thinks about "downloading the internet".

You can try here for the tech version or see the techno version. You can read about it on Boing Boing or watch Jon Stewart skewer him.

So, I already thought this was funny, then I see this "Bandwidth" machine at the science center. Ah, old white Senators. How you'd make me laugh if only you didn't have an overwhelming amount of control over my life. (sigh)

I Have Questions

1. Is there anything more embarrassing than having your cell phone go off in the middle of the new mom's group at the hospital while a very severe pediatrician is speaking to the group...and your ringtone is Don't You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me? Wasn't me, but boy did that lady look embarrassed.
   
2. Is it possible for your head not to jerk toward the television when you hear the phrase, "reduction in semen"? It's during a commercial that plays about a hundred times an hour during the Tour de France coverage on OLN, but I'm still not used to it. Pulls my full attention every time.
   
3. Why do I want so much for the baby to crawl when a) it's not a true milestone and 2) it's bound to make my life much more lively, interesting, and fraught with danger the moment it happens?
   
4. If diet Coke is going to end up inside my laptop through stupidity on my part, is it entirely fair that the only place it goes and the only part it fries is the most expensive one? I need a new motherboard. Sigh. Is it karmic punishment for leaving a can of soda next to my laptop? I mean, it was dumb, but $500 worth of dumb? Really?
   
5. Where should I take the B today? I'm running out of antique malls and it's too hot to take her someplace where we have to stay outside. Ah, I guess I'll come up with something.

Antique Mall Finds

I've gone to two different antique malls around here in the past couple of days, and found a couple of things. One that we needed, and another thing that is really pretty and didn't cost very much. I'm pretty happy with the pull.

First up is the coffee table I've been looking for. I wanted something smaller that could get easily dragged out of the way, because the B still lies on the floor in the living room playing with toys and tricking us into thinking she's just about to start crawling.

It has a completely rounded edge, which is good for her noggin in the event that she bangs into it. It swivels, so she'll have fun with it there. And it's round, so she can walk around it once she can pull herself up and sidle along. In fact, she'll be able to do that pretty early, since she won't even have to move her hands at first due to the swivel. So, pleased with this lovely purchase for $55:



This lovely trio of small stained glass (real, not the gallery glass painted kind) was only $12! I need to run out to the hardware store and buy some small chain link to hang it, but so so pretty, right?



I also found four long-out-of-print Little Golden Books for $2, and a bag of antique buttons (good for crafting, you know, as soon as I get time to do that) for $3.

Maybe I'll go to another one today! Or, to the grocery store, where I really should go. I think I've done enough goofing off so far this week. But at least it was fruitful.

Lewis Black Demands CNN Remove Banner During Interview

Lewis Black, gotta love him. The banner removal is near the end.

The Perils of Thinking in Black and White

I keep hearing this guideline bandied around. To wit:

"According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)...children under age 2 should have no "screen time" (TV, DVDs or videotapes, computers, or video games) at all. During the first 2 years, a critical time for brain development, TV can get in the way of exploring, learning, and spending time interacting and playing with parents and others, which helps young children develop the skills they need to grow cognitively, physically, socially, and emotionally." ^[1]

Listen, I'm all for not parking the kid in front of the television and ignoring them. I think that's horrible. But isn't this going a little far? Let me explain.

See, I'm a typical American woman. I like a shower every single bleedin' day, and I like them after I've woken up but before I leave the house to do stuff. I am not a shower the night before kind of girl. If I tried that, I would honestly not leave the house and show the B the wide, wide world, because I would feel itchy and yukky whenever I did go out. Yes, this is a personal failing, I suppose, but there you go. I still want to shower in the same quadrant of the day that I did before we had the baby. There, I said it. I'm a monster.

There are days when the baby doesn't appear to agree with my need to do this, or when the timing of when I need to take the shower so that I'm not late to an appointment just doesn't happen to coincide with her being in a mood to play happily for 15 minutes in the exersaucer while I do what needs doin'. I have popped her in the exersaucer, her crib, or the playpen, only to have her literally scream, crying the entire time I was away. That can't be good, can it? If there was a safe, quick way to distract her for that period of time so she didn't spend it red-faced, gasping, and screaming, wouldn't that be better?

What I have found, however, is that if I take the portable DVD player and pop in one of the three HBO Kids DVDs I have (these, I think, are great, and the B appears to agree—she talks to them and points at the screen while they're on, and the high-quality music they use is the kind of stuff my classical music lovin' self would love for her to at least be comfortable with in later life) that will take that already-crying baby and make her calm and entertained while I shower, throw my hair back in a barette, get dressed, and pack her diaper bag.

She looks at me to check in while the DVD is playing (thanks to our glass shower enclosure in the master bath and her exersaucer in the master bedroom, she's completely in my line of sight the whole time) and laughs and smiles at me instead of screaming and crying because she's alone and sad.

Am I wrong here? Every day I try the exersaucer by itself and many days it works like a charm. She bats at the toys and interacts her little heart out, working on her gross and fine motor control like any well-brought up baby should. But those days, the ones when she just isn't interested and can't be distracted by play, is it so horrible that she spends fifteen minutes listening to music I think is great for her to be exposed to, watching animations of cute little babies and animals that she thinks are so amazing that she keeps looking for me so she can grin and babble her approval.

Is that really the worst thing that could be happening? I stopped working to stay home with her to make sure she got more one-on-one interaction as an infant than she would in a daycare. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, that's just what we decided to do.) I play with her, down on the blanket on the floor with her, handing her toys, playing peek-a-boo, or sit on the opposite side of her exersaucer while she bats at toys and encourage her. She literally gets hours of direct interaction with me and with a variety of toys every single day of her life since the moment we brought her home from the hospital. She gets time on her stomach, time encouraging her to try to crawl, time where I hold her steady as she stands and grins madly at me. We've played little games at every stage of her development so far, making them up as she became interested in new skills and was physically capable of doing them.

And yes, I won't deny it. When we play, there's usually music or the television on in the background. Sometimes she appears to notice it, but most of the time, she only notices it if the volume spikes suddenly, then she goes back to doing something much more interesting to her, like chewing on her foot. Interestingly, if a song comes on that I sing to her, she looks up and looks around, then looks and me expectantly until I start singing it. That floors me, that she can learn to associate specific music with me at such a young age. What having the 'background noise' does for me is engage the portion of my brain that would go to sleep handing her the same toy that she drops over the side of the exersaucer over and over again, letting me play that game and many others with her until she tires of it, instead of when I can't do it again without wanting to jump off the back deck.

The one thing I don't do is plunk her down in front of the thing, completely alone and for no real reason, and expect it to raise her for me. That's my job and my privilege and I don't intend to share it with an inanimate object.

So, is it evil? Will she have the horrible, miniscule attention span the AAP warns me against? Is she doomed to be sedentary and overweight because I do this? How long does she have to look at the screen before it alters her DNA and tears down all good things our hours upon hours of interaction has brought about? Is it instantaneous, like Peter Parker being bitten by the radioactive spider?

Is it just me, or is a blanket stricture like this going a little bit off the deep end? Is it so terrible to view it as another tool in the arsenal, to be used thoughtfully and responsibly when it does more good than harm? A tool, like every other, that can build if used responsively just as it can destroy good work if used recklessly?

Some days, I think the worst two words in the English language are "always" and "never".

[1] KidsHealth for Parents article, How TV Affects Your Child

"Heeeey! You Look Like a Real Jerk!"

"Well, I am a corporate executive."

Bah ha ha ha.

Worst Night Ever

So, yesterday.

It wasn't really all that bad until it got later in the day.

We went for a walk with the B. Came back, and I saw a can of diet coke on the table next to my laptop. I thought it was empty and I picked it up to throw it away, only to discover that it WASN'T EMPTY. You know when you pick up something and it's much heavier than you thought? How sometimes it just seems to slip out of your hands because you didn't pick it up the way you would have if it would have been even a little bit heavier?

Stupid thing slipped out of my hand and dumped fully half of its contents on the keyboard of my laptop. I had hopes that the aluminum panel at the bottom of the keyboard would protect the stuff that could short out, but this morning, after letting it spend the night next to the fan to dry out, it's a goddamn doorstop.

Sad. Very very sad. I hope we can find the parts that shorted and replace them, or at least salvage the hard drive and put it in an enclosure so I can get some data off of it.

Then I watched something that both did, and didn't, enhance my day. It was the Doctor Who S2 finale which I snagged on the QT online. I've seen the whole season, in some sort of legal gray area (or red area, but how else am I going to see it, as the Sci-Fi channel still hasn't inked a deal to bring it stateside) and this was the last episode I'd been waiting for. The next paragraph is written in white text in case you don't want spoilers. They are minor spoilers, more dealing with my reaction to what happened rather than a blow-by-blow account of the episode.

So so sad. Anyone who's read Mkae's blog knows Billie Piper was leaving the show, so they had to write her out. But did they have to wrench my heart out of its chest, then stomp on it repeatedly before slapping me in the face with it? I felt it was really, really well-scripted, well-acted as well.

But it finished downloading at 12:45 am and I couldn't stop myself from watching it. There I was, then, at about 1:30 am, unable to sleep with my mind buzzing about what I'd just watched and what might become of my laptop (whose fate was unknown at that moment).

I finally got off to sleep, but the baby awoke at 4:00 am, which she hasn't done in MONTHS. I changed her, fed her, and she seemed really sleepy. So was I, for the record, as I was on about an hour of sleep at that moment. Then the reason for her early awakening became clear. She was teething. Hard. I tried all sorts of stuff. Letting her bite on my finger and rubbing her gums seemed to help a little, but not enough. Biting on a washcloth, same thing. Cold, not so helpful. Teething toy, she seemed too upset to keep it in place.

Eventually, I decided that distraction has been the best thing to help with her teething so far. I put her in her exersaucer, where she played, surprisingly, happily, until she tuckered out. She went back to sleep around 7:00 and got three more hours of sleep, and so did I.

So, here I am, on four hours of sleep, which isn't terrible, but not great either. I have a dead laptop and a brain filled with Doctor Who that I can't talk to anyone about because I'll spoil the frack out of them. I have no idea how much fixing the laptop or salvaging my data from it will cost, because I think this is beyond my own personal kung-fu.

I'm just glad I put all my bookmarks in del.icio.us awhile ago. Now I just have to remember all my logins that were saved on that poor brick, and hope that I get something back out of it.

But enough about me, how was your night? (grumble)

Small Things That Make Me Happy

What makes me happy, other than the obvious larger things like the mister and the B, is what we have on the mantel in the living room.


I wish I had room for more pictures. There's a goofy little display cabinet in-between the two sides which I've cropped out, mostly because I'm thinking of moving it. I would let me put about four more pictures up on the mantel and one up on the wall, and I think I'd like that.

While these pictures are missing a lot of people that I'd love to have represented up there (there are more pictures in the built-in bookshelves to the left and right of the fireplace) I feel good every time I look up there. From the close-ups of the newborn B on the left to the posed and unposed shots of family and a few of our friends in the mismatched frames, I like to look at all of the pictures.

The teacup ride at WDW is represented...cycling, family, my first trip to the zoo with the B, my parents' 50th anniversary brunch cruise. I usually hate having my picture taken, but looking at these makes me quite content.

Happy Happy Fourth

Hey, here in central time, I still have forty-three minutes and counting to post this on the right day. We had a nice fourth, I think. The odd part of it is that I never saw any fireworks. I heard some through the walls of the house, but they happened to coincide with the period of time that the B wanted to go to bed, so I stayed in her room and told her stories until the sounds went away and she stopped flinching at them so she could sleep. We had a cute little outfit for the tiny B to wear today, as a part of my "celebrate all of her first holidays" plan. I think it was quite cute. I may put her in it again before she outgrows it, mostly because it doesn't actually say "July 4" or "Independence Day" on it.

We took a trip to the Missouri Botanical Garden today with her, which was great. She enjoyed it too, as you can see below.

There were lots and lots of pretty flowers and displays at the garden. I included the daylilies picture below, but click on it to see the whole set in my Flickr stream. It really was very beautiful out there today. The only downside was that it was hot as &$#()#_@#* out there, so we had to suffer just a wee bit to see it. It wasn't too crowded, though, and we found a drinks machine at an opportune moment, so we survived it.


So, nice day. Hope everyone out there is well and feeling good.

Happy Seven Monthday, B!

It is also the mister's father's birthday, and happy birthday to him, as well!

I hope everyone is having a great time at the various cons and cookouts and whatnot. There's not all that much going on here. The B is down in her crib for the night, sleeping like a little angel baby, and I am making use of a rhymes-with-porrent and starts-with-t downloader to see some of what David Tennant's working on now, ahem. So I'm off to indulge in that a little more. Whee!

Nightmare Pooh

This is really frickin' scary.

No, man, really.

There's no excuse for this. Seriously. Some of us have to read Pooh books to our kids, for cryin' in the sink. How can I do that now with this in my head? Where's that crochet hook, so I can use it to PUT OUT MY EYES!

So, Holiday

You know, a year ago, we were having people over at our house for some eats. Doesn't seem that long ago that I was giving the cats a walk on their leash.

I'm kind of casting around for an idea of something to do. All of the usual suspects (zoo, butterfly house, farm, science center) are probably going to be pretty crowded, and I really dislike the crowds.

I don't think we should go anywhere near downtown. Complete chaos, I'm sure.

But here I am, 8:30 am on Saturday with the weekend stretching ahead of me, and I'm not sure what to do with it. As the mister is downstairs with the B playing, maybe I'll begin it by stealing one more hour of sleep.

Wow. Party house! Whoo!