Artificial Intelligence

I feel a little silly writing about this, but I love my new toy phone. In the last couple of weeks since I got this marvel of web-enabled technology, here are my "where have these things been all my life" moments:

- pandora on the go: I exercise in the mornings with a group of people in our church gym. One morning, no batteries for the CD player - enter my phone with pandora, and we all got to sweat to my Gwen Stefani mix.

- google sky: point the phone at the sky and learn the names of constellations, stars, and locations of planets. I even found the polar star for the first time ever. I'm a geek, but I'm okay with it.

- live navigation: the woman who tells me when to turn has saved my skin more than once.

- gps: okay, this is silly, but I'm totally obsessed with the geocaching thing. I'm trying to talk random people into playing with me now - since I've already exhaustively nagged my friends and family to go find stuff in the woods.

- email in the park: I think the grandparents have gotten more pictures of the kids in the last few weeks than all of last year. "Click, send, I'm in contention for daughter(& -in-law) of the year"

- mickey mouse clubhouse (or anything YouTube): the kids think it's amazing that mickey can sing to them while we are waiting in line for something.

I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to be talked into this thing - Red really had to go the extra persuasion mile. I'm slow to adopt new technology. I won't even tell you how long it took me to start paying bills online. The only drawback is that I spend most of the day trying to convince myself that it's me that's getting smarter, and not the phone.

The High Price of Not Paying Attention

AAAAAHHHH! Surely this has happened to everyone at one point or another, but I opened the credit card bill today and practically had a heart attack. This doesn't happen very often, we have a pretty good budgeting system in place - we log all our purchases on Google docs and keep a running tally of what we have spent for the month. And usually, we do a good job of watching and paying attention. Apparently, not this month. We didn't do anything exotic, exciting, or extraordinary - just everyday life - and the money just trickled out. To the tune of twice our usual monthly expenditures. Twice!?! Yikes. Guess we'll pay better attention this month.

Have you ever paid the price for not paying attention?

Siblings of Summer

As we enter our second week of summer vacation here, and realize that Pink and Blue will be spending more time together than they have for a while, it is my fervent hope that they will choose to get along more than they choose to hit/bite/yell at/torment each other.

I caught them in a rare moment of quiet peace in Blue's bed.


Maybe what they really need is to share a room...

Dear burglars, don't bother.

When we bought our house, I was grateful to see the little box on the wall near the door indicating that a security system is installed. Little did I know, that the box and the little beep-beep noise that happens every time a window opens and closes in no way compares to the burglar proofing provided by two children and a dog. Let's face it, if you were looking to steal something, and saw this, you wouldn't dare break and enter. And risk breaking an ankle? Not worth it.

And not only would you have a broken ankle, you'd be stuck on the floor, likely to be the slobber victim of an 80 pound Labrador who wasn't loved enough as a puppy. Of course, if you were a smart burglar, you would realize that anything of value that we might once have owned has long since been spit on, colored on, mangled, or just lost.

You might consider the house across the street - it's a nice childless couple with a very small dog.

Geocaching!

Geocaching: A nice tromp through the woods, or yet another reason I love my new cell phone (even though I have yet to figure out how to actually make a call on the thing).

Have you tried geocaching? I hadn't, until I saw a little description on Wendy's blog (sorry, she's private, or I'd link), and curiosity got the better of me. I looked up the geocaching website during dinner, signed up, and convinced the kids that this was a good use of our evening - with a little help from this video:




So, we looked up our closest cache, put the dog on a leash, and went on a treasure hunt with a GPS-enabled cell phone. Lo and behold, we found it (see Pink with the container under her arm?)!



In retrospect, the 95 degree temperatures, mosquitoes, and black-panting-dog-who-hates-heat should have been a little bit of a deterrent, but what's a little suffering in the name of treasure hunting fun?

There are over a million geocaches out there, and I can't wait to find some more. Long live technology!

Vacation, all I ever wanted.

We travel. Not extensively or fabulously, but we have no qualms about strapping our kids in a car/plane/train/boat and heading out somewhere to see something new. In the few years we have been doing this, I have discovered a few things for keeping my kids (and therefore the adults) happy in-transit. I hope you have some tips too, and will share them as we enter the summer travel season.

* Rest stops are not for resting, they are for running around like mad. Resting is done when strapped into a seat with nowhere to go.

* Stopping to eat is futile. Kids who have been strapped in need to move. Feed them while they are strapped in. Eating kills time, and keeps tired parents awake while driving. Don't ask what my upholstery looks like.

* Strange amusements. I found these wax sticks in the dollar bin at my local craft store. They provided 2 full hours of entertainment on a recent plane ride. Better than the game system, far quieter, and lighter too.

* Leave early, stay late. If you can manage it, travel while the kids are supposed to be sleeping. They might sleep in the car/plane/train/boat.

* New toys. They don't have to be fancy or flashy, but something small and interesting, preferably in a difficult-to-open package will buy a lot of mileage.

* Don't forget the lovey. Whatever my kids love (we call them snuggle kitty and new bear), they travel with us. We're down to just one snuggle kitty because we lost one in the Honolulu airport, so they now travel exclusively inside suitcases, but when we get where we're going, the kitty and bear are there.

* Hotel pool (thanks to my friend Charlotte at Memories for Later for this one). The hotel pool will tire out a small child so much that they will sleep no matter how unusual their surroundings - and it might be their favorite part of the vacation anyway.

* Dishsoap-soaked paper towels. This one sounds odd, but before we leave, I drizzle a little dishsoap (we've already established that I like Dawn) on some paper towels and let them dry for a day, then fold them and put them in a Ziploc bag in my luggage. They go through security because they are not "wet", and it lets me do some dishes - like reusable water bottles and sippy cups at any hotel sink.

Bon Voyage!

What is an oil spill, Mommy?

One of my jobs as mom is to try to explain the world in language that a 4-yr-old can understand. When I got the question, "What is an oil spill?", I tried an explanation of drilling, pumping, leaky pipes, and environmental catastrophe, but eventually had to go with a demonstration.

We started with a bowl of clean water:

Added a few drops of sesame oil (it was the darkest oil I had, and also the smelliest):
Swirled the oil around a little, and found out that even though there wasn't very much of it, it stuck to our fingers when we put them in the water:

Then we tried to clean the water. We added Dawn detergent, and it certainly moved the surface oil out of the center, but there was really no place for it to go:

Finally, we stirred the detergent in, and ended up with an evenly dispersed, foamy mess:

I don't know how much of this Blue and Pink understood, but they got that adding oil to the water meant that 1) we didn't want to drink that water or swim in it and 2) we had a hard time getting it cleaned up. My heart aches to think about the disaster in the gulf right now, and I hope that somehow the health of that area will someday be restored.