life, love & laundry
Do you ever have a day…(18/30)
…where you look back and wonder what in the world you actually DID all day? That’s my day today. I sat down to blog and realized I could not really think of how I spent my day.
I guess I did little bits of this and that…some work/calls, I worked on my studio site a little, I swam. Where did my day go?
Oh I know — it probably was spent fighting my husband on his new plot to move us to Santa Clara (yes, California, where it costs a bajillion dollars to breathe). It isn’t going to happen but I give him kuddos for effort. Every few hours I’ll get an email with a new house he’s scoped out or a breakdown of the annual temps or some other thing he’s designed to sway me. But I’m unswayable. I know where I want to move: Washington DC. I know if I had to move but could not move to DC that there are a few other places (NC, Denver) that I’d consider. California isn’t on my short list. Or my long list.
So quite the productive use of time, right?
On another note, to answer a few repeated questions I’ve had in the comments:
Camera: my point & shoot is a Canon S3 IS – it is old and falling apart and sometimes stops working entirely. It eats through batteries like crazy and I can’t afford to replace them. BUT! It is a great camera and I’d recommend it to anyone who wanted a nice nice P&S close to a dSLR but without the down sides (expensive lenses, heavy weight, etc). I love it because it has crazy zoom (won’t get that with a dSLR), a built-in video camera, crazy macro (again, won’t get that with a dSLR without the very expensive macro lens) and it also has a few lenses that can be purchased to extend its use. The newer version is the S1 and it rocks with it’s 20x optical zoom. That is just insane to me. If you get the telephoto lens (and the P&S lenses are crazy cheap – all under $150 each) you increase that to 30x! I can’t even imagine. And if you get the macro lens, you can sit 16″ away from an object and zoom in 20x to shoot. Can you imagine?!?!? There is a reason that learning to love my dSLR was a gradual thing. I really truly do love this P&S. But not like my other camera. sniff.
Noah trick: A few of you asked what the trick was that helped Noah learn to hold his pencil. It isn’t a big secret or anything. I am just not sure how to translate it into an explanation. As it is, it took me 7 years to visually figure it out. I will tell you, though, that all I have to tell him is “bend your thumb” and it completely changes his grip. And today? Significantly better than yesterday in reading, writing, and drawing. And yesterday was pretty awesome. Today he even read the direction on one of the pages of homeschooling work, of his own volition. This is a pretty big deal as until then, he viewed reading as something he HAD to do, with no practical application at all. No amount of reminding him to read when it was practical had ever successfully inspired him to do it on his own. But today I told him to hold on a second so I could finish something up and by the time I was ready he had read the directions and gone on to do the work because, he said, he didn’t feel like waiting for me. This is super big for him! I’m so proud of my boy!
Today’s 3 things:
1) Noah’s continued major progress, of course. Leaps and bounds from yesterday.
2) Addy’s silly age. I know I say this all the time and eventually it has to change but I just love this age. I love how cerebral it is. Addy is just desperate to be a big kid. She has to copy every.single.thing Noah does and says, with her own little spin. We had this conversation the other day:
Noah: Hey Mom, guess what?
Addy: Hey mom, guess what?
Me: Yes Noah?
Noah: Sea Turtles can get just a little bit larger than our van! Isn’t that amazing?
Me: Yes! What did you want to say Addy?
Addy: Um…Sea Turtles jump into the water just like people!
Everything is competitive. A few days ago I caught Addy doing this and thought it was so hysterical. She totally thinks this is the coolest, most scary thing EVER but hasn’t a clue what to do after the first two lines:
Translation: it was a dark and stormy night. It was a dark and scary night….
3) NO BIRDS! First there was Arrow the wayward fledgling blue jay. Then there was the not-so-wayward but equally annoying fledgling cardinal. Then there was the incessant alarm clock on the side of my house known as a woodpecker that sounded like a machine gun going off right outside my bedroom window every morning. But today I beat ‘em all! I woke up approximately 20 seconds BEFORE the woodpecker scared the heck out of me! Yessss!
Lest you think I exaggerate about the annoyance that are these birds, here’s a little video clip I took one day during Arrow’s visits. Let me warn you before you watch that if you have cats or dogs, you might want to take them out of the room. My cats were SURE they had finally managed to corner the bird on my desk while I played this clip. My dog just looked dumbly (or not?) between my computer screen and the back door trying to figure out where the bird was hiding. You’ve been warned…
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Hee hee. I called Little over to show him the bird, and he kept nosing the computer monitor. Am I mean?
Wow, Santa Clara…very different from DC, NC, or CO. We *are* actually thinking of moving to CA but it’s definitely something that you only do if you feel like trying it out…cause it’s really expensive!! And a huge culture adjustment in a lot of ways! :)
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Hee hee…love the video of Addy. Amelia has stolen Addy’s “I have a blanket on my head and I’m a ghost” bit from her and now chases me around the house pretending to be said scary ghost. She’s also gotten into this phase where she walks around making up stories “once upon a time…” and then tells me I have to finish the story…all while she interjects the plot or tells me to make plot changes!
We’ve missed you guys. Hope things get better soon!
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My dog is a basset so he’s all about the nose. When he heard the bird he opened his eyes, twitched his nose a few times and then gave me a look as if to say, “nice try, this nose wasn’t born yesterday.”
Love the ghost story. My almost 3 year old does a similar thing with ‘knock-knock’ jokes.
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Addy LOVES knock-knock jokes! She totally doesn’t get the joke part but thinks she’s very hilarious.
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