House on Red Corner

EJ wore her fancy red petticoat. Sometimes a girl just has to be fancy. She loves the way it twirls.

this morning, TheBubster and i were settling into our early day routine of consuming information when The Mommy popped out of the bedroom all dressed and combed, bubbly announcing “Let’s go to the zoo!” so we had to get dressed and go on adventure. this required a ride on the T, and then a hike through a park to get to the zoo. there will be video to post later,l once it clears the editing suite. then afterwards we walked the entire five and a half miles home and for most of that trip our little bug slept in the stroller, so now that we are all exhausted and stuff, she is ready to play and climb all over us.

the weather has turned to beautiful here- you know the traditional sunny, warm definition of beautiful weather- so TheBubster and I have taken to going outside inthe afternoon. it’s really all a part of my devious plan to get her to fall asleep at night, but more on that at a later date. yesterday’s adventure tok us along the path off the CharlesRiver where people were lying all over teh docks burning their flesh with the powerful microwaves of the sun’s radiation.after an hour or so of fighting to keep the child from falling/jumping into the river, i managed to turn us into the city of Boston. Yup that’s right, we turned into an entire city! but only for a second or two and then we returned to our normal forms.

we made our way to the BostonCommon were it appeared that half of teh city was sitting onthe grass. we saw several college classes which had moved outside, including one in particular which attracted teh eye of our undaunted heroine. from fifty yards away, TheBubster had spotted a dance class. how do i know that it was the dance class she spotted? because she started walking with intention in a straight line all the way to the group, right up to the point that she was standing in the middle of them as they did drills. i held her back so that she would not get trampled by the young adults as they leapt and pranced, then let her go as teh last of the dances made their crosses. naturally, our tiny little ham lept and pranced across teh green to join them, and of course the entire class gave her a thunderous ovation. she then made the natural assumptioon that she belonged with them and as they were picking up their bags and stuff, she made preparations to leave me and join the dance troupe. so it looks like this little girl wants dance lessons. i think we can do that.

on Sunday, i rented a truck and we bagged everything that we have with us into trash bags and i shuttled it all across town to a new temporary apartment. don’t bother asking for he address cause we are not going to be here very long, which is a relief and disheartening at the same time. the apartment is nice enough, open and luxurious and all that- but certainly not home and we are not really going to bother unpacking anything, two weeks of just having piles of stuff on the floor.

we spent the day yesterday both relaxing and me catching up on a couple of assignments for school which had slipped because of the move. yesterday, was also Patriot’s Day, big holiday here, you know some silversmith and two of his buddies made a trip to warn some outspoken people that the authorities were coming to arrest them- which has some how been romanticized by poetic license into Paul Revere’s ride to warn of a British Invasion- that version sort of overlooks the fact that the British were already here, but none the less, the Bostonians and Lexingtonians all have a great celebration of the day; the Boston marathon was run yesterday, but we only walked to the grocery store.

now, its more of our daily existence, just in a new place.

i am doing more work in the Second Life Metaverse as well as my school work, this allows me to do a couple different things- more education as well as some important functions that i need- while remaining watchful over TheBubster. ask me about it if you would like to know more.

TheBubster is throughly addicted to television and I have attempted to leverage that against her in numerous ways. Turning it off is punishment for wetting pants, turning it on is reward for completing assigned tasks. I know it may not be the most effective manner-pedagogically speaking but we have learned all the letters of the alphabet and numbers up to 20. Now that NaNa has given her a dryerase tablet for learning letters, shapes and arithmetic, we are leveraging telly against her in a new manner. No telly until she traces the dotted line path for the entire alphabet. I have been doing this for just a couple days and already she has the confidence to start and finish A a by herself and she attempts B b but erases it immediately.

This exercise also helps me to practice my patience because it has taken an hour to an hour and a half each time to even get her to sit down with me and quit whinging for the telly to be on, and even then I have to write the entire set myself before she’ll even touch the pen. Once she gets through the first two letters, she falters and refuses to go on by herself, so we do it together. That’s the completion of our exercise and she gets her telly. As time progresses, there will be more requirements to do the list more than once, and it will also be necessary to write her name as well, and that is what we are ultimately heading for innit!?

We all woke up this morning. The weather was sort of grey and rainy. It was a stay at home in our jammies sort of day, but Mommy had to go to work and Daddy had to work on Code for school. But Bubby, TheBubster extraordinaire, got to turn three years old today. Yup she did. There were no great plans for celebration but we did have a freezer full of pizza and thing of cupcakes on the kitchen counter.

“I love Pizza!” She exclaimed at lunch time. Her eyes exploded the first time I handed her a cupcake and said, “Happy Birthday.”

She played with her new Dora doll, watched telly and played blocks all morning. Then after lunch, she got to sit on Mommy and Daddy’s bed, while Daddy wrote more code. Five minutes later, the nap hit hard and it kept hitting for several hours.

Mommy came home while she was watching The Jungle Book.

There were phone calls from family members, she loved that, she tried to read a book to Granddad over the computer (we didn’t have the webcam up tonight). Then she had a bath, brushed her teeth

yesterday the UPS guy came by to visit our door step. he left a box of things that TheBubster opened up last night. inside all the things were Dora the Explorer . but the best thing was the dry-erase tablet that has letters, shapes, numbers and other learning things on it. she really loves to draw and this morning rather than allowing her to turn the telly on right after brekkie, she had to go through the alphabet and write her name once.

now, don’t get ahead of yourselves, she did not do this alone, or even quite well. i had to hold her had and do most of the movements, but she was ready to follow and learn. we are really grateful for the pressies from Nana, and soon enough she’ll be able to write the alphabet and her name.

So it’s very early days, 12 weeks in, and things are going quite well. The wife is convinced that we will be having a boy this time and she has been concentrating her research efforts to generate lists of interesting boy’s names. Our general guidelines are:
the name can not have that trendy suburban sound to it, thus no carters, taylors or tylers(apologies to anyone who has used those names, we don’t like them).
the name can not be shared by anyone alive who is related to us or close friends with us.
the name must have some flow that fits with the last name; so that when they are in trouble I can sound quite ominous when using their full name.

since the wife does research really well, her way, i have decided to throw my methods into the search- i like to farm it out to other people and then decide. so if you have any ideas for names, leave them in the comments.

Daughter decided to dress today is a red, flouncy petticoat over khaki sweat pants. She chose one pink and one green sock with desert boots. She topped it off with a pink Yankees windbreaker. Husband had added to word “suck” to its design, so it now reads “Yankees Suck.”

Once she was dressed we did the laundry together. She counted out the quarters, poured the detergent, threw the clothes in with a ‘whoo!’ at each item, and closed the lid. She is a great help. And she has inspired me to go to Goodwill and buy some ball dresses to lie around in.

Hooray!