Entries from November 2006 ↓

Elizabeth seems to be at a "Love it" stage. And by that I don't mean that she's telling everybody she loves them. She loves stuff. She goes around the house looking at things and saying, "Izzat you coat, Daddy? I love your coat" or "Izzat Katherine's new toothbrush? Katherine, I love your new toothbrush." I have to remind myself that it only gets more fascinating from here. The other night I was reading her a book before bed, and the phone began to ring. Mind you, the phone is three rooms away, so I figured I'd let the machine get it. Elizabeth wiggles away from the book and starts climbing down from the bed. "I be right back, Daddy!" she says. "Where are you going?" I ask. "I be right back," she says. "I get the phone." Sure enough she walks down the hall into the bedroom, gets the phone, and brings it back to me. It has long since stopped ringing, but I go through the charade of answering it because it was just too cute.

Katherine, meanwhile, has begun spelling on her own, although don't tell her that or she'll freak out and stop doing it. As I cleaned the kitchen last night she sat at her doodlepad and would say "How do you spell Mommy, Daddy? What's the first letter." I'd say, "Well, sound it out, what's the first sound?" And she'd say "mmmmm….M!" And before you knew it, with no more coaching from me, she'd spelled the whole word, either from sound from memory, I'm not sure which. She hasn't quite mastered spacial planning, let, and often the first 2 letters of the word will take up the entire paper while the rest have to find space wherever they can. This is particularly charming when she spells her name, which is a very long name with lots of letters, none of which feels in the least obligated to line up next to its brothers. So while she does in fact get down a recognizable version of every letter, it looks like alphabet soup. I love it.

Rumor has it that Brendan is rolling over on his own now, though I haven't seen it yet. So we're playing that relatively cruel game where you shake a toy in his face and then place it deliberately out of his reach to see if he'll stretch for it and roll over. So far, nothing, just a frustrated 6month old wondering why Daddy got so mean. 🙂
He's also teething, which means he's gone schizophrenic on us. His only moods are big toothless grinning at everything and everyone, or screaming himself purple. The latter usually happens at about 3:30 in the morning. Why couldn't we get one of the kids that wakes himself up because he's got the giggles? Oh well.

Sysadmin: "Your code is throwing a null pointer exception."

Me: "Scheisse!"

QA Guy: "I didn't know you spoke German."

Me: "And I forgot that you did."

I'll take the Almond Joys, and ditto on combining the candy of the 2 year olds with that of her 8 eight year old sister. Afterall, two year olds still love peas…

Or the one that asks you if you can please just fix this one tool….

Quick and simple, Monique goes home this week. It was pretty obvious, really. Mayyybe there was a slim chance for Emmitt (but look at the following he obviously has!) or even Joey, who was in the bottom two a few weeks back. Shame, really, but at least she went out on a good note. The stuff she was doing was pretty hard. And she got her 10s.

But did she have to be so annoying in the confessional booth? I deserved a 10 for my stage dive! I deserved a 10 for my backward flippy thingie! I deserved a ten for squeezing myself into this dress! I got my 10 this week but I don't care no mo!

Right now Mario is well ahead of everybody else, if you go entirely on judges scoring and entertainment value. But it's at this point that fanbase is the most important. It's quite possible that Emmitt could knock one of the others out.

At 4 and 2, Katherine and Elizabeth might well be at perfect Halloween age. They are very excited to dress up, and look forward to the holiday for weeks on end. Any sort of parties or other opportunity to dress up and show off are very exciting.

When it comes time for actual trick or treating, Katherine starts out strong, walking from house to house and doing a very good job of ringing doorbells, saying "Trick or Treat", only taking the offered amount of candy, and then saying "Thank you." This lasts for maybe an hour before we start hearing, "My bag is getting too heavy to carry, I think it's time to go home now." I know that very soon we will reach the day when she pulls out a map of our entire block and all surrounding streets, checking off each house as we go to make sure we don't miss a single one. But at this age, we actually have to drag her (luckily we had a wagon!) to the last 3-4 houses that are between us and home. Seems like a waste to walk right past houses that are all decorated with people standing in the doors ready to give out the treats. Katherine's not whining or screaming or anything, I mean, god, we wouldn't literally drag the child from house to house just so Daddy can load up on mini Reese's cups. She just spends the last few saying "Ok, is this the last one? Ok, just one more, and then we can go home."

Elizabeth was doing equally well, walking up steps and saying "Trick or Treat" and "Thank you." Her idea of "offered amount of candy", however, seemed to be "As long as you're holding the bowl in my reach I'm going to keep taking pieces out of it." Keep in mind that, barring M&Ms, Elizabeth does not actually have any candy at all, so this whole adventure is more like "Pick a color and shape that looks interesting." She does very well until…..the dog.
Just the other day Elizabeth had a "doggy scare me" moment, so we're not doing dogs right now. For the rest of the night I had a tiny 2yr old Dora latched onto me like a howler monkey, saying over and over, "No like doggy, daddy. Doggy scare me. No doggies." Which is cute for a little while, but when she doesn't think you're listening she'll pull your face around so she makes eye contact just so you're clear on the whole "no doggies" thing.

And can you believe that there was one lady who not only let her dog run free, but let it jump up and lick the kids? I mean, is this lady completely stupid? Why not just offer them spoonfuls of peanut butter right out of the jar and see which kids are allergic? Surely it's a smarter move to keep the animals away from the kids if you don't know how kids are going to react. Since every other house with dogs did exactly that, I'm going to say this lady was in the minority. Luckily it didn't seem to freak out Elizabeth too much, who actually wanted to touch the dog. But when the next house rolled around we were back to "Doggie scare me Daddy, no doggies."

Brendan just sort of hung out in his Bjorn thingie. I was amazed at the amount of people who offered him candy. The child is 5 months old. He's got exactly 1 tooth. No, he can't have an Almond Joy.

Speaking of which, who are the people still giving out Almond Joy and Mounds? Do any little kids like those? When I was little, I gave them to my dad. Last night, as we went through Katherine's candy pile, I gave them to… my dad. I still don't like the things. I will, however, snag the Snickers when I spot them.

Candy counting was interesting. It was very important to Katherine to count all of her pieces. When I emptied the bag for her she was upset with me, she wanted to do that. Turns out she had something like 36 pieces of candy, which is fairly moot because we just dump hers and her sisters into a big pile anyway.

But then came the "Which ones do I like" pile. There will come an age, I am sure, when the default answer to that question is "If I've never seen it I will assume that I like it unless it turns out to be gross." Katherine right now is in ultra conservative "I only eat what I've eaten before" mode. So she picks out the M&Ms, and the Smarties (good score on whoever was giving out Smarties. Love those.) and the Hershey bars. Anything with peanut butter she shrugs off. All the fruity sugary stuff (like skittles) goes to one edge of the table to ultimately end up in the trash. Then comes the explaining of each piece that Katherine does not recognize. Somehow I translated Kit Kat as "Like a Hershey bar, with a cracker in the middle. Kinda like a Pop Tart." I have no idea how or why I made that leap, but she's into poptarts recently, so that's a score. She seeks out all the KitKats. I try to argue that Reese's Pieces are just peanut butter M&Ms, but the peanut butter embargo is still in force, so none of that. Then I spot a S'more bar and explain that it's a marshmallow candy bar. Another big hit, since she's into marshmallows.

All total Katherine (Elizabeth was long asleep at this point) identified well less than half of her candy as stuff she would like. After that little separating exercise it all got dumped back into a big pile anyway. I'm curious to watch over the coming days to see which pieces actually do get eaten. I expect the enthusiasm to try new things has already dwindled and she'll stick with the M&Ms.

This weekend I was making omelets for breakfast. Elizabeth was first, and her egg had a double yolk. It was a very exciting day indeed. Katherine, who had requested cereal instead of omelet, immediately changed her order to omelet as well in the hopes of repeating the trick, but no such luck. We compromised, I made one omelet and split it between them.

I'm not sure what it means, exactly, but I think Elizabeth might be the next Dalai Lama.