If you’re prone to vomit when exposed to extreme cuteness, please do not watch this video of Laylee singing in the Elementary School Musical. It’s like High School Musical but Laylee’s way cuter and more talented than Mr. Zachory Efron and she has more facial hair.
Archives for May 2010
Speedily Down to Hell
Today in the car, Magoo noticed that several cars were speeding past us.
Magoo: They are going off the speed limit mom! Totally!
Me: Yep. They’re going pretty fast.
Magoo: They’re going too fast. We don’t drive like that.
Me: Hrm.
Magoo: We don’t drive off the speed limit because we don’t want to get a ticket.
Me: That, and we want to choose the right and obey the law.
Magoo: Yeah. Maybe they just don’t know about speed limits.
Me: Hmmm.
Magoo: Or maybe they just don’t know about Jesus.
In his mind, Jesus equals good. If you are doing what’s good, you’re following Jesus and if you’re doing what’s bad, you are not. He gives you the benefit of the doubt though. If you’re doing something wrong, you may just not know that Jesus exists so you don’t have the option of following him. This can be broadened to include speeding, favorite color choices, not eating your vegetables.
It makes me want to watch my speedometer a little more closely. After all, I’m a good Christian woman. I might as well drive like it.
Rambo Gardening Techniques and Punk Firefighters
My approach to gardening this year is to kill kill kill everything in sight.
I wanted to plant some things but there is no room in my yard for useful vegetation because it’s all been taken over by crazy soul-sucking weeds. Blackberry vines that I thought were cute and semi-useful have multiplied by such an alarming rate that I fear they may be organizing to overthrow our family and crush our home. Some of the vines are as thick as small tree trunks.
Then there are the dandelions, the morning glory vines, the moss, the crab grass, the terrifyingly invasive Japanese Knot Weed and all of their friends. Any time I clear an area to plant something, the weeds come in thicker and stronger because they have so much freshly churned earth to grow in.
So this year I’ve got chemicals for the areas around the yard where I won’t be planting other things. And for areas where poison would compromise the soil and surrounding plants, I bought a flame thrower.
For reals.
It’s also known as a garden torch but when I ignite that thing and walk up and down the rows of my vegetative nemeses, an area I like to call “The Kill Zone,” I feel mighty powerful indeed. All of my childhood pyro tendencies and all of my current pent-up frustrations come out as I pull my little red wagon full of propane around the yard, laying waste to every living thing that I don’t choose to let live. It’s kind of magical.
Dan stands by as fire marshal and every once in a while I let him have a turn with the big flaming gun, which he assembled for me.
At one point on Saturday I hit a patch of dried leaves that got a little bit out of control and Dan doused it, worried that someone might call the fire department if they saw the smoke.
I think of fire fighters differently lately.
Laylee’s been playing my Style Savvy game on the DSi. I was hooked for a couple of weeks but got over it pretty fast. It’s a little repetitive and there’s only one body type in the game. But Laylee likes it and I had a fun couple of weeks with it. She was recently telling me all about the shop she’s set up and what her favorite clothing suppliers are.
“I don’t really like Mad Jack,” she said of the goth punk clothing supplier. “It’s my least favorite of all the clothes. I don’t even know who would wear it except like punk rock people and firefighters and stuff.”
Apparently firefighters wear spiked dog collars on their necks, dress nearly all in black, carry their wallets on chains and enjoy wearing their hair in purple striped Mohawks. I hadn’t noticed that before but if they have to come out next time I’m Rambo-ing the weed bed, I’ll keep a closer eye on thier fashion choices.
Food for Wanda
Wanda doesn’t so much like to nurse any more. If the room is dark and silent and she is extremely tired but not deliriously tired, she will maybe possibly nurse. She is more likely to nurse if we are lying on a semi-firm mattress facing each other. She prefers Manfood.
This makes outings harder. Today when we went shopping for several hours, she did not get food for several hours because there is no part of my body that squirts out applesauce or mechanically separated organic turkey and she would have none of the milk. She is also too small to throw pretzels at. Correction. You can throw pretzels at her but it is about as effective as putting her to the breast at satisfying her hunger.
The slightest variance in food temperature causes outrage or fits of hilarity. Slightly-hotter-than-Luke-warm baby food is horrendously awful for the first .0009 milliseconds it’s in her mouth. And what exactly is “slightly-hotter-than-Luke” warm? I’d say “Han-Solo” warm is a little too hot but what else is there, “Uncle Owen”?
If the food is cold it makes her laugh. Rice cereal with cold breast milk? Hilarious. Cold water straight from the fridge in a sippy cup? Forget about it.
Breakup Weight Gain
Wanda’s winding down on nursing, trying to break up with me gently. I’m a bit sad, a bit excited about getting my body back and a bit scared about what will happen to that body when it’s back under my total control.
M-Day
Happy Mother’s Day from our bed of revellers to yours!
Baffled by Facebook
I cannot figure out how to make a button to get readers of this blog to “Like” it on Facebook. If you “like” it with or without the quotes in real life, will you please go and “Like” it with quotes over on Facebook?
Thanks.
And if you know how to help me make a fancy button for people to click on and you feel fairly sure that doing so won’t steal the identities or souls of those who click on it, please let me know how.
Click here if you “Like” or like this website and then click on the “Like” button at the top of the page.
With Incredible Power Comes Incredible Responsibility
(Feel free to skip to the bottom for my quick take on the new HTC Droid Incredible.)
I buy capers at Costco. Sure I can only go through a few tablespoons of capers a year but I still buy the Costco-sized bottle of capers. It’s all about value. The little teeny bottle at the regular grocery store costs the same as the ginormous bottle at Costco and I cannot bring myself to buy the itty bitty for the same prices as the Jamie-Oliver-sized jar. (This is conjecture. I have no actual idea how many capers Jamie Oliver goes through in a given 3-month period. I imagine it is more than the 25 that fit into the jar at Safeway.)
Which brings me to a point. The Droid. Or should I say Droids?
In my latest adventure in selfish smartphone testing, I tried out the Motorola Droid. I was hooked almost immediately. It was fast. It was versatile. With an inexpensive app (Touchdown) I was able to sync up all my Outlook calendar and contact information using Exchange. The built-in Exchange support was lacking. It came with access to a plethora of apps that were cool, useful and fun. One of the most amazing things was the speech-to-text capability. You’d speak into the phone and it would transcribe your words into searches, text messages, emails, etc. I kept texting Dan with things like, “I just said that,” and “I’m not typing this either.” It was hot, the phone, not the texts. I loved it.
It was not as cute as the Palm Pre. It didn’t feel as good in my hand. It was not a mobile tethering wireless hotspot but it did everything I needed and more.
But wait. Then I found out that its Costco caper jar equivalent was coming out soon and I just couldn’t be happy with the Motodroid. The HTC Incredible Droid Droid Incredible from HTC Incredi-HTC-ible-McDroidy-Pants was released on April 29th and it has everything that the MotoDroid has plus and plus and plus.
The Incredible has access to the same apps and features as the MotoDroid but it also has a faster processor, more internal storage, an 8 megapixel camera, HTC Sense UI (meaning cool modifications to the Google Android operating system making it more sleek, attractive and functional), a better feel and a partridge in a pear tree.
So I could have been very happy with the MotoDroid but why spend $200 on it when I could spend $200 on the new hotness? The only reason I see to go with the Motorola Droid vs. the HTC Incredible is the slide-out keyboard. If you can’t live without it, then you’d better stick with Moto. I thought I couldn’t live without it but it took me all of a week of abstaining from using the MotoDroid keyboard by choice to convince me that I could live without it. The touch-screen keyboard is actually quite nice.
So I jumped in and bought the new hotness with my own hard-earned cash and we frolicked in the grass and synced up calendars and contacts. I downloaded known apps that were recommended to me by friends and family. I loved the phone and the phone appeared to find joy in me as well, remembering all of my likes and dislikes and allowing me to rearrange its multiple home screens to my liking.
HTC Sense has much better built-in Exchange support than the standard Android 2.1 operating system so after we figured out some weird bugs on our Exchange server, I was really happy with the way everything worked together. My Facebook contacts are now linked with my Google and Outlook contacts so anyone with a profile picture in my Facebook friends now has a photo attached to their contact on my phone and when I look at their contact info, I can see their latest status updates right there.
The first day I had the phone up and running, I took a picture of Wanda eating in a cute bib my friend had given me as a gift. I clicked “share” on the phone and chose “email” from the long list of sharing options. I then selected my friend from my contacts list, typed a one sentence thank-you note and sent it off. The entire process took less than 2 minutes and she was impressed that I’d taken the time to send her a photo thank-you.
The built-in Twitter app is lame but there are others for free in the Market. The Facebook app is alright. The internet speed with the Incredible on Verizon frequently beats my laptop. It’s very very pretty. I can point it at pictures and landmarks and it “scans” them and tells me what they are. It does more things than a phone really should do.
And there’s the hitch.
The joy of my new toy was disrupted last weekend when I was browsing the Android Market for new apps and came across several distasteful and offensive apps in the games section. I do not want to see clothesless women as I’m browsing for solitaire games on my phone. I do not want to see apps for freaky weird creepy guys with specific “interests”. I’m trying to avoid certain key search terms here but you get the picture.
So I figured if they had an app for finding my car in a mall parking lot and an app for people who like to do things to pictures of women, then they certainly had an app that would help me and my family avoid running across that junk while we’re searching for games. They might even have a filter built in so I could just say, “Don’t subject my eyes to these types of apps. I’m not old enough,” or a way to lock access to the Market altogether so my kids don’t accidentally navigate there as they’re playing a Disney Princess game on my phone while I doze next to them on the couch.
Not so much.
I searched and searched and found nothing but references to the fact that people wanted filters, locks and controls for their Android phones but could not find them or were having trouble getting Google to let them create them and add them to the Market. So basically, even though my home internet is filtered, I found myself carrying around unfiltered open season to all the junk the internet has to offer in my diaper bag without much hope of a solution.
Luckily since I’ve been working with PR at Verizon I was able to get into contact with someone at Google who spent some time on the phone with me this afternoon, listening to my concerns and answering some questions.
The short story? They don’t have an app for that… yet. The man I talked to handles among other things “child safety policy and communications” for Google. He pointed out several instances where Google has made strides to make internet usage safer for children and adults like myself who don’t want to deal with filth.
I was unaware that you can now filter your browsing experience using SafeSearch filtering. It’s a setting you can get to from the Google main page. I didn’t know about the new Safety mode on YouTube, a button at the bottom of the page that you can activate and lock to reduce the risk of seeing nastiness on that site. Neither of these are perfect by any means but they’re a good faith effort by Google to offer options for filtering and they’re working to improve them.
My new Google friend was very encouraging. The phones are still fairly new terrain for Google. They’re working on it. They know there’s a demand for this and they’ll follow their model on the web, bringing filtering and locking to their mobile phones.
He said he’d let me know as soon as developments occur. And I’ll let you know as soon as he lets me know. For now, I’ve locked the front screen of my phone so my kids can’t slip it out of my purse and play with it without me. I’ve also set the SafeSearch mode in Google Mobile’s settings to “Strict” although there’s currently no way to lock in this setting but unless the kids figure out how to change it, it should keep me from running into too much junk. However, there will still be garbage on the Android Market and for the time being I will still run into it occasionally.
To avoid it, I’d suggest sticking to the “Top” apps rather than looking at the “Just In” apps because after signing up as a developer with Google, which requires a credit check and access to the developer’s real identity information, a developer can post things to the Market with no sort of vetting process. This allows for the kind of creativity and freedom that has made Google so successful, but again there’s that whole bad-comes-with-the-good thing.
If an app violates Google’s policies by posting anything pornographic or malware or spyware, users can flag it to be taken down. Personally I’d rather not be the one to “discover” malware, spyware or pornography so I’ll stick to the high end of the Market and wait for quality apps to be tested by others and trickle up.
Daring Young Mom Quick Take – The HTC Droid Incredible is an amazing tool with huge possibilities for productivity, fun, creativity and connection. I love all of the great things it can do for me. But, like the internet itself, it’s also got some real hazards built in. I’m so glad Google’s working on them. I can’t wait to pass on the good news that they’ve implemented mobile safety solutions but for now I’d say to proceed with caution.
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Can You Still Feel it?
Over at Parenting today I was talking about how love changes and how you need to focus harder on just enjoying your kids the older they get. It was a pre-Mother’s-Day musing that I hope I keep with me as I continue raising my kids. [read more at Parenting.com]
Also, one of the readers at parenting posted a link to a post she’d written in a similar vein that I really connected with. [read that post here.]
Mother’s Day Gift Book Idea
If you’re still looking for a last minute Cinco de Mayo/ Mother’s Day gift, I just wanted to give a quick shout out to the girls who put together The Mother in Me, a really lovely compilation of poems, essays and reflections by young LDS mothers.
A friend who was part of the project sent it to me for review a year ago while I was pregnant with Wanda. And since I was… well… pregnant with Wanda and barfing constantly I let a lot of things slip and never posted a review.
I’m sure she’s not expecting to hear from me now but I wanted to let you know about it. The writing is beautiful and very real and I think you’ll enjoy it. Heck. It would make a great Mother’s Day present for yourself because chances are you’ll see yourself in the pages you read.
I recognize that most of my readers are not LDS, but some are and the book is quite tender and affirming of the role of mothers in a way that I think crosses religious boundaries.