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Tags: diet

So miniBot and I were talking about Therapods today, and he wanted to mention something he'd learned on Dinosaur Train.

miniBot: "Well, on Dinosaur Train, they said... Well, on Dinosaur Train, they said... Well, on Dinosaur Train, they said... Well, on Dinosaur Train, they said... they said Therapods only have two fingers on their hands, and how scary can you be with just two fingers?"

Yep, pretty much an exact quote, with about three seconds for each ellipsis. I kind of wonder what is going on there- I think he's trying to form his words and match them to his idea, but he doesn't have a meaningful pause sound, and let's face it- most kinds of verbal communication are still things that require efforts on his part. The most heartbreaking thing I've heard out of the guy in weeks was when I was trying to ask him what was wrong with his bed, and he finally gave up and said "I don't know how to say it," and started to cry.

Leaving aside the rightness or wrongness of his remark about Therapods (they'd been talking about Tyrannosaurs in particular, not Therapods in general), I've learned to just wait it out with most of this. He's really pretty bright, and usually has something weird and interesting to add to a conversation, it is just a matter of giving him time to find a way to add something, rather than interrupting him and trying to either lead him on or coax some words out, which has to be sort of frustrating.

Checking up on him a moment ago, while he was sitting on the potty chair doing his business, he showed me a book of animal pictures that has an elephant on the front.

miniBot: "Do you know what THIS animal is?"
me: "I do believe that's an elephant."
miniBot: "You're totally right!"

I love my kids. :)

Friday: I don't remember much of the first part of the day, but I do remember going to Cloud City for some coffee and studying, which was way overdue. That evening, I came back and vacuumed the ground floor, and helped the boys through dinner (including implementing the new "you don't leave the table until your area is cleaned up" rule).

Saturday: wKnitter got up and did breakfast with the boys, and then drove herself and her partner to the Etsy show, while I pretty much entertained the kids and got them ready for the day. When she got back here (9:30 or so), we loaded up the boys and drove her back. This allowed me to have the car for the day and her to be there for (almost) the opening bell.

After the boys and I did the show (I was happy to discover that they were selling beer at the concession stand), we went to the Children's Museum, where the boys ran around in more-or-less self-directed play and I tried to keep from pushing the etsy show to every parent with a toddler. miniBot was a big boy about using the restroom there, and after a little lunch, we decided that it was time to go home. Gnat fell asleep on the way, and when we got back, miniBot took some quiet time while I ate my lunch (I hadn't had much at the center).

When the boys woke up, we loaded up and went over to Kids Cuts on Roosevelt to trim the shaggy head of miniBot. miniBot wasn't very excited about the idea, but he more-or-less let the haircut happen, and I took the after-haircut lull to do the following: 1) Get batteries for wKnitter's Fuze necklace, 2) Taste the flavor of the day at Peak's (raspberry Theo chocolate OM NOM NOM), 3) Pick up stuff for dinner- some sodas, a bag of salad, and a mini-tub of cheap chocolate ice cream.

I ended up having to pick up wKnitter from the show (which I'd forgotten was my job), so me and the boys loaded up in the car and did so. miniBot helped me make a pizza (I rolled out the dough, spread the sauce, and spread the cheese, he did the pepperoni), I prepared the salad (rinse, dump), and put some pumpkin cookies in the oven halfway through dinner, so we really had a pretty great meal. Why don't people do home-baked pizza more often?

Sunday: Again, wKnitter did breakfast with the boys. I drove the whole party (both boys, both women) to the show, and at my suggestion we decided to do drive through coffee on the way. Bummer was that Tin Cup coffee (home of the "Ride the S.L.U.Trolley" shirts) isn't open on Sundays, so coffee was at McCafe. miniBot wanted to stay and see the science museum, but I was a little worn out and they didn't open for an hour, so we came home and called oldmangrumpus.

Brunch was at Whole Foods, where miniBot got his first lesson in "If the thing you buy doesn't work, you can take it back." In this case, the thing we bought was a set of three pancakes, one of which couldn't be cut, sliced, or even penetrated by the cornware (might have been potatoware) utensils that were available. I was very polite about the whole thing, and the staff was quite responsive to my suggestions, calling up the chef after giving us a full refund.

The four of us then made a trip to Silver Platters, where my quest for Toshinori Kondo CDs was a failure, but we picked up They Might Be Giant's Here Comes Science album and the new Mike Doughty CD for dinner listening. There was also a brief trip to the library at Northgate, where we returned some stuff, and I picked up some comic books (hey look, "Ultimate Crisis!") before heading home.

Gnat napped while miniBot and I played Lego Star Wars, picking up the last minikits for the Battle of Endor (guess what? I seem to like these Ewoks and I'm not sure why), and getting about half of them from Episode IV's "Rescue the Princess," which may require using a minikit guide to figure those out.

That afternoon, I left the boys across the street while I drove back to pick up the ladies, and dinner was a refreshing bowl of Mac n' Cheese accompanied with beer. After the boys went to sleep, I read the entire Infinite Crisis thing, and I'll probably read it again- they were overreaching a little bit, but the story isn't bad, and it probably has my all-time favorite Joker moment (note to fictional self: If building a coalition of supervillans, don't piss off the Joker by inviting everyone else).

Today: So far, I've written up my BUS119 and BUS236 papers for the week (the cross-cultural analysis of Thailand and Australia was fun), and pointed someone to the totally awesome story of two crazy brothers building a supercomputer to analyze a tapestry of a unicorn in response to a picture of a painting of two unicorns playing poker. Yeah, I'm cool.

This afternoon: Taking the boys to U Village to return some crappy LED flashlights (using the on/off buttons seems to break the battery housing) and find a couple of better ones somewhere.

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Both kregexpeditor (removed since the KDE 4 upgrade) and grip (unmaintained since 2005, relies on old libraries) are missing from Ubuntu karmic. I expect to find alternatives to grip, but for now I’d like to keep using it. And I’ll give up kregexpeditor when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

The hardy version of kregexpeditor still works on karmic, and I’ve used pbuilder to port the jaunty package of grip to karmic. Both are now in the repo.

I have 28 Wave invites sitting around, if anybody wants one. Drop your email in the (screened) comments.

http://blog.ulf-wendel.de/?p=277

Unglaublich, lest selbst: http://www.intphpunconf.org/introducing-phpuceu/ .

http://xkcd.com/666/

Well, Tom brought up the pig flu from his travels around teh US and Canada. Yes, Canada. He can get back in the country which means he got to see his kids. I heard it was a fun trip which included hockey, haircuts, family guy jokes and swine flu vaccines for the boys. I am hoping my swine flu vaccine has taken effect but it’s close. I had it on a Thursday and he got home on Tuesday swearing he had the pig flu. This is teh second time I have ignored him and his fevers. I never hear the end of it… anyway.

I was a nice wife today and made him Sprinkles dark chocolate cupcakes with mint chocolate frosting. There has been a lot of baking going on around here. Pumpkin chocolate muffins which were realllly good. I can’t say I am a pumpkin fan but I really liked these. I have made brownies and cookies also. Given Toms flu, we are going to stay out of the general public and have thanksgiving with just us. I have quite the menu planned… 14 pound turkey, rolls, green beans, cornbread if I am nice, mashed potatoes… well the usual. I am going to buy some pies from Seattle Pie Company for dessert. It should be good.

We are going to have the kids for Christmas. We have planned a surprise trip to Disneyland which I can’t wait for. We are going to spend 4 days at Disneyland and then a couple days in San Diego. I hope the weather is lovely….

I finally bought a new computer since my Macbook pro is getting old. I went for the 27″ imac quad core. It’ll be on Wednesday. Yay for four day weekends and new computers…

Originally published at Nina's Exhilarating Life. You can comment here or there.

Tags: family, travel

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I had a bit of an epiphany while studying at Cloud City Coffee on Friday. Specifically, I no longer think that "If I knew then what I know now," that I would've had a significantly happier high school or college life.

The lesson I was studying friday was on resource allocation, and I think that is what made me think about this. If I were to rank my priorities now, they'd go a little something like this:
1. Family
2. Home
3. Career
4. Education
5. Friends

If I were to rank my priorities in college, they would've looked more like this:
1. Friends
2. Politics
3. Education
4. Family
5. Religion

In high school, it was more like this:
1. Friends
2. Debate / Forensics
3. Religion
4. Politics

So I don't think that the decisions I made in college were really all that bad, given the priorities I had at the time. And if I were to go back, some of them would change- I'd surely bump religion off of the list, and add "romance," but I really don't know how they'd reprioritize. I used to think that if I was doing all that over again, I'd have had a lot of girlfriends in college and would have taken a much more career-focused courseload, but now I'm not so sure. In a lot of ways, some of those years were the happiest of my life, because the things that meant a lot to me (1, 2, and 3), got a ton of attention, and those parts of my life thrived. Now, I've come to realize that some things matter to me that didn't before (Home? Seriously?) and that I haven't been giving those things attention. So I went home and started doing it. The front two rooms of the house are now vaccuumed and the toys are put away or constrained (not just strewn all over), and I'm keeping that stuff up. The dining room table is still a mess, but when it gets cleaned, I'm going to be careful to try to keep it that way.

I can't realistically expect myself to spend every waking hour making forward progress on some goal that means a lot to me, but recognizing the things that are important is already making a difference, at least internally. Next on the agenda- invest more in my friendships again, I've let those wither way too long.