Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Swabbing the Neck

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Although she’s been known to ingest her fair share of playing cards in her day, Wanda has discerning tastes when it comes to real food. She likes her rice cereal done just so and only sometimes. She enjoys fruits and occasionally tolerates vegetables if the moon is in the proper phase.

Wanda begins each meal with her jaw clamped tightly shut. You can press the spoon against the thin line of her lips. Nothing. Na-da. She will not budge. If you happen to squish in a small amount of food, she will savor it thoughtfully and if she finds it a worthy specimen, she will open her mouth and give it entrance into her digestive system.

Wanda likes the taste of food better after it has been spat out 2-3 times. The yummy food goes in and then – SQUERCH – she spits it through an amazingly small opening in her lips with incredible speed and distance. I scoop it up off her bib, the tray, my bib, the wall and stick it back in her mouth. When the food is eventually seasoned to her liking, Wanda humors me by swallowing a bite and we proceed to the next.

I think the truth is, she believes in quality family time around the dinner table. Why rush through a meal when you can spend a nice evening with your peeps, eating and re-eating and re-eating your dinner one. bite. at. a. time?

The hardest part of dinner with Babida Bubbida Boe is swabbing the neck. It’s nearly impossible to find the neck and once you do, you have to pull back so much “skin” to clean it that the grand finale of most meals is a big fat scream fest. And I just have to say in my sweetsiest voice, “But Wanda, I love you too much to let food rot in your neck folds.” Tough love – it’s a choice I make every day of my life.

Harrowing

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If you look up the word “harrowing” in the dictionary, you will likely find a detailed description of Wanda’s epic journey across our living room yesterday evening.

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Three days ago, she had no idea that combining multiple rolls could move her towards a destination. Now she knows the possibilities and she’s SO enraged that she can’t navigate as precisely as she wishes.

She lay there on her tummy with a toy a few inches from her grasp. She rolled to one side, tried to reach it, failed and let loose a barbaric yop. She rolled to the other side, still couldn’t reach it, longer, more fearsome YOP!

She continued her journey, rolling from side to side, front to back, a 50-point asterisk turn around the living room. Great was her angst. Intense was her fury. The glow worm taunted her with its deliciously chubby plastic cheeks.

At last, after much wailing, groaning, grunting and turning, I scooted the worm one inch closer and victory was achieved.

Look at her face full of exhaustion and relief.

Harrowing.

Truly.

But she’s getting better. Today I put her on the floor at one end of the room and went to work pumping milk and checking email. When I looked up 5 minutes later, she had silently made the journey all the way across the room, where she had come upon a jackpot of card games left out by Laylee and Magoo. Uno and Rook blended together in a veritable feast of gaming victuals. Luckily when I looked up, the only casualty was a Yellow 7, which she had partially ingested.
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I guess from now on we’ll always know who has the Yellow 7 when we play Rook. Wanda the Triumphant has left her mark… er… taken her chunk.

Lego Batman – The Career Path

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Magoo recently told me that he wants to be Batman when he grows up. I can only assume he means Lego Batman because that’s the only version of the super hero he’s really been exposed to. He was real coy and shy about it. He said he wants to save people.

“When Bad Guys go into their houses at night, I’ll just go in there and say, ‘Wake up Bad Guys! I’m gonna take yeh to jail.’”

So, I guess the Bad Guys just go into people’s houses at night to find a place to sleep but since they are BGs and also trespassers, that earns them a trip to the joint.

I decided to use a teaching moment and explain that what I like about Batman is the fact that he doesn’t hurt good people and he doesn’t even kill bad people most of the time. He wants to help so he just ties the bad guys up and lets the police deal with them.

“Yeah,” Magoo replied looking thoughtful, “But I don’t even have a hat yet.”

Lesson learned.

We were sitting in the Safeway food court the other afternoon slamming some corn dogs when Magoo noticed some slightly-swarthy farmer-types sitting at a table next to us. He eyed them suspiciously.

“Are there any bad guys in Our City?” he asked, never taking his eyes off the farmers.

“Yeah,” I replied honestly, “There probably are.”

“No,” he said simply, “Bad Guys are only in Bad Guy Town.”

I might add that they are also made of Lego.

Palm Pre Plus – Too Soft For This Goldilocks

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Almost everything about the Palm Pre Plus is cooler than my previous phone, the HTC Touch Pro running Windows Mobile. I thought my phone was the hotness. I thought my phone was the greatest thing ever. The Pre is hotter. The Pre is the greaterest thing ever.
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The hardware design is sleek and lovely. The OS looks and feels fabulous. After a brief learning curve I was able to pick up all the gestures and navigational tricks and I grew to really enjoy the interface. It can do cool things like navigate with Google Maps and it can act as a mobile WiFi hotspot, serving up to 5 other devices with wireless internet – very cool for a long roadtrip.

pre 051 (2)The problem is that although it’s cuter, prettier and faster than my stolen phone, it just doesn’t do everything I’ve come to expect. While I was trying it out, I kept saying, “But it’s so cute. Why can’t it do X?” or, “I want this to be my phone if only it could…”

The Pre works with Microsoft Exchange so it syncs my calendars and contacts, which is great. However, the calendar functionality is limited. There are little things that have come to be very important to me that you cannot do on a Pre calendar. The most critical problem for me is that I can’t add attendees to a calendar appointment. Whenever I’m out and about and make a new appointment, I add Dan as an attendee and the event goes to all of our phones and calendars within minutes. This makes family planning (not that kind) very easy and I feel like I need it, although “need” is a funny word.
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Another downside to the Pre is that there is currently no way to edit documents. It comes with a document viewer installed and on the Dataviz website, there’s a page saying that a fully functional document editor will be released early in 2010. But it’s April and that’s a deal breaker for me.

pre 055 (2)Dataviz has document editing apps for every other phone and its dog but not for the Pre. And therein lies the rub. Not many people are designing apps for the Pre. Palm is up for sale so its future is uncertain. I’m sure developers don’t want to pour resources into creating apps for an OS that may be off the market shortly. They’re putting their eggs into the basket of Apple and Google and hopefully Microsoft when their new (supposedly groundbreaking) Windows Phone 7 gets released later this year.

Because we’re so entangled with Microsoft, I was hoping my previous phone would get me through until the release of The Windows Phone Hotness but with my phone gone, I need to get something now.

I wanted it to be Palm. I loved the Pre. But this Goldilocks, like my burglarific predecessor, has very specific needs and is moving on to the next bowl of porridge.

If you’re looking for a smart phone that’s beautiful, sleek, easy to use and well-designed that doesn’t have a lot of gadgets and apps but has great web-browsing and simple personal calendaring, take the Pre out for a spin.

This week I’m exploring the world of <DROID>. The <> around DROID indicates that I’m saying it like a robot. Say it with me. It’s fun.

Click to Read My Product Review Policy

In this case, I’m borrowing phones to try out and then I plan to purchase the one I like best.

A New Profile Picture for Belle Babe deBoe

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Little Wanda, AKA Belle Babe deBoe, AKA her real name is getting older and cuter and possibly just a teensy bit squishier. It’s time to update her profile picture on the sidebar and I’d love your input. Here are a few pictures my sister took when we were visiting last week. Which one should I crop to a head shot and use on the sidebar?

(Mouse over the picture you like and it should tell you the number.)

The notable feature of this one is the hair. It’s like a dip cone mohawk. I’ve actually started to crave DQ ice cream while holding her and staring at it:

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And, sneer:

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Don’t let this one fool you. She’s about 30 seconds away from being able to crawl and subsequently lay waste to everything in her known universe:

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And those pursed lips say, “WHAT!?”

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A nice feature to have in a baby dress. If she’s ever stranded somewhere far away from my mammaries, she can stuff this bad boy down her pie hole and have all the sustenance she needs:

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No matter how tempting she may appear, this baby should not be eaten:

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Not even her feets:

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Ask me if I’m worried about failure to thrive:

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When people say that someone looks “too innocent” they’re talking about this picture but she’s IV REAL yo:

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And she carries the family genetic long-tongue disorder. We try not to hold it against her:

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And one last piece of evidence that we really do need to feed her more:

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What do you think?

April Fools

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My kids like April Fools’ Day. It’s a festive time when they spend every waking minute lying their faces off and then saying, “Just KIDDING! April Fools!” Laylee said the best trick she played all day was to tell one friend that our grandma had died. I told Laylee that might be a mean trick and she said, “No it wasn’t. She wasn’t sad. She doesn’t even know our grandma.”

Magoo came up with the best trick ever. He used it all day long and I fell for it every single time. Here’s how it went:

Magoo: Hey Mom?
Me: Yeah Buddy?
Magoo: Just KIDDING! I didn’t really need anything. April FOOLS!

10 minutes later:

Magoo: Mom! Hey Mom? Excuse me Mom!
Me: What do you need?
Magoo: NU-THING! April Fools!

20 minutes after that:

Magoo: Mom? You know what?
Me: I don’t know. What?
Me: April FOOLS! I wasn’t gonna say anything. HA HA HA HA!

He spent all day changing it up, finding new ways to trick me with the same joke, which was basically my name. It was sweet. I mostly laughed but on April 2nd I stomped all over his fun. “It’s not April Fools’ Day today. That doesn’t work anymore.”

I’m not sure what “That doesn’t work anymore” really means. I think it means something like, “For real. If you keep doing that I will go mental and then you won’t be allowed to eat sugar ever ever again and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t your plan so it probably won’t work for you to keep saying it.”

Command Center Breach

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While we were on vacation in Utah my cell phone disappeared. “Oh,” you might think, “That’s a shame. Good thing it was just a cell phone.” The problem is it was not just a cell phone. That little black brick was our family’s Mobile Command Center. Since 2006 I’ve used it and its older brother before it to keep track of and control nearly every aspect of our family’s lives.

I’m currently using my sister’s old Razor and although it’s very cute and I’m really grateful to borrow it, it’s missing a few of the things that I’ve come to feel are necessary in a Mobile Family Command Center. Here is a partial list:

-Auto-sync calendaring connecting my phone calendar with my home calendar and Dan’s work, phone and home calendars

-A complete list of every contact I may ever need with their phone numbers and addresses included that auto-syncs over the air waves as soon as I update it

-Documents and spreadsheets of just about any piece of information I could want

-Full-text scriptures

-Internet access

-All kinds of applications that do all kinds of things I don’t really need but have learned to depend on.

-Email

-Cool personal ringtones for all my family members and friends

-A slide-out qwerty keyboard for text messaging

-Navigation

-Digital UNO

Don’t forget the fact that I feel kind of violated that someone is walking around with pictures and video of my kids I don’t have backups for, all of my recipes, emails and a lot of personal information.

When we realized it was really gone, like gone gone, like obvious-someone-had-pocketed-it gone, Dan sent out a command to do a remote wipe of all my data from the phone. We got a message back saying the wipe was successful when someone turned the phone on at about 4:30am the morning after it disappeared so that gives me comfort.

Now I’ve got my Razor and a paper calendar that I’m madly filling in with all my info from outlook and I feel so old-school. Remember this? At that point I had just begun my dive into techno-mom-dom. I’m really quite dependent now and I’m actively seeking a new phone.

The PR people from Verizon asked me a while ago if I wanted to try out a few of their smart phones and possibly review them. Now that I’m actually considering which phone to buy I think that’s a great idea so for the next several weeks I’ll be trying out some cool new devices and if I find anything worth telling, I’ll let you know.

My breached Command Center was an HTC Touch Pro from Verizon running Windows Mobile. In our area we get much better reception with Verizon than our friends who have other providers. The customer service has always been decent and most of our family members use Verizon so calls to them are free.

I have to say I was not uber impressed with the customer service we got when I lost my phone. For one thing, they could not perform a remote data wipe or track the phone’s GPS. For another, the guy at the call center told me that if the phone were turned in, they had no system in place for finding me and returning it based on the phone’s serial number. Through further investigation I found out that this was false. A kid named Dean in the West Valley store told me that they always do their best to get returned phones back to their rightful owners.

They were also unable to reactivate my service to my new/used phone until the following day because we had already deactivated, reactivated and deactivated the stolen phone that day and there is a hard-coded limit on the number of times you can do that. Apparently no supervisor has the power to override this so I was phoneless on vacation for a full day. I know, WAAAH, right? Still, it seemed strange to me and no one could give a good explanation as to why the policy was in place.

Still, we’re fairly loyal to Verizon and to phones that can play nice with Outlook. So, I’m on the hunt. Any suggestions?