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.