Posted by Misty on May 13th, 2008 at 8:42 PM
Mumsy bought Eli Hungry, Hungry Hippos while she was visiting this last week because he said he wanted that game specifically. After I assembled it and played a couple of rounds with him, I took a break and Mumsy took my place.
“Is that all there is to this game?!?!” she asked after she played.
“Yep, that’s it. That’s four-year-old game play for you.”
A few days pass.
More hippos are hungry and are frenetically fed.
One afternoon Eli’s door is accidentally left open. Liza zips in and when Mom and I find her she is clutching hippo marbles in both hands. She takes one from her mouth and passes it happily to Mom.
We are one marble short from the full 20.
The next two hours are full of us dumping out every bucket in Eli’s room. Every item is picked up and shaken. Every container is opened and peered into. Every cover is shaken out. Eli is questioned and questioned again about the possible location of the missing marble.
I looked up object swallowing on the internet. I felt better after I read that once the object is down, if it’s down, then you should only worry if it’s pointed or acidic, like a battery.
Mumsy was frantically tossing Eli’s room like a burglar looking for jewelry. I took pity on her and called the doctor so she could hear that there was nothing to do for now but wait.
The next morning found us sifting through Liza’s diapers looking for the missing marble. Too bad I haven’t been able to provide as much attention to posting here lately as I’ve given to looking through Liza’s diaper for that marble.
Sometime after lunch the next day, Eli pulls out his scooper truck to play with. I hear his shout of discovery from three rooms away:
“Mumsy! I found the marble!!”
This is the part of the story where I hang my head in shame since tiny things have been “lost” in the scooper before and I forgot to check there when we were going over Eli’s room with the proverbial fine-tooth comb the day before.
For once the giant sigh of relief came from someone besides Stephen or me. Mumsy collapsed on the couch and declared it Happy Hour.
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Posted by Stephen on May 12th, 2008 at 10:33 PM
And tomorrow, and the day after, and, in fact, yesterday, too, so instead of content, have a link to Michelle Sagara talking about how being a mother is like being a writer.
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Posted by Stephen on May 10th, 2008 at 1:20 PM
Happy birthday, Liza!
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Posted by Stephen on May 9th, 2008 at 9:36 AM
I ranted about politics a lot yesterday. Let’s balance that with some science!
(Say it with me: Science!)
Did you know the Earth might once have had multiple moons? The theory is that, when the Moon was created by the Earth being hit by something the size of Mars, a bunch of other chunks got blasted off, like blood spatter from a GTA4 pedestrian. Some of those chunks could have ended up in the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, areas where the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Moon are balanced. Some Lagrange points are stable — think of a marble inside a bowl. Small perturbations won’t knock the marble out of the bowl. The same goes for Earth chunks that might have ended up in some of the Lagrange points.
If that’s too abstract for you, here, have a Flash app that shows the Solar System. You can see the planets and large asteroids orbiting the sun, and the moons that are orbiting various planets. For fun, take a look at Jupiter and its umpty-ump moons. It’s hypnotic.
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Posted by Stephen on May 8th, 2008 at 9:22 PM
Dear Hillary Clinton,
I’ve had a lot of sympathy for you. You had name recognition and a commanding lead in the polls before actual voting and caucusing began, and were making history as the first woman to run for President on a major party ticket, and yet you were never able to deliver the knock-out punch you and your gifted chief strategist were hoping for. The presidential nomination that you thought was yours moved ever further away from you.
You were the first student to give the commencement speech during your graduation from Wellesley and were a graduate of Yale Law, working-class roots that are so solid I was surprised to see you drinking beer and taking a shot of whiskey to play up those roots. I winced as your husband blundered about like a Bill in a china shop, afraid that his antics would damage your reputation.
But it wasn’t until you started playing up your gas tax holiday plan — or, rather, your echo of John McCain’s plan — that I started losing that sympathy. “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists”? Really? The economists’ analysis of your gas tax holiday plan is an example of “elitist opinion”? Color me stupid, but I’d like the President to take advice from people who know what the hell they’re talking about instead of going with their gut.
But now? Now you’ve squandered any sympathy I might have had for you.
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she went on to say. No kidding. That pattern is you and your campaign moving slowly from insinuating that Obama is just a black candidate to decrying his playing the “race card” to out-and-out saying that whites won’t vote for him because he’s black.
It turns out that when you were running on your establishment credentials against Obama’s message of change, you were hearkening back to the 48th governor of my state.
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Posted by Stephen on May 8th, 2008 at 12:27 PM
Thanks to the Patriot Act’s expansion of investigative powers, for years the FBI has been using National Security Letters to gather information about US citizens. Now the Internet Archive, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the ACLU managed to get the FBI to rescind one such request and make some details public.
National Security Letters are particularly dangerous because there’s no judicial approval or oversight, and they come with a nasty gag order that prevents you from talking to anyone about it other than your attorney. Imagine trying to fight an NSL in court, unable to tell your friends or family why you’re going to court — remember, you can’t even admit that you’ve been served with an NSL! While the FBI claims that NSLs can only be used in cases relevant to an authorized FBI national security investigation, they’ve instead used it to skirt the laws restricting domestic surveillance. And for such a powerful tool, the FBI is remarkably lax in keeping track of NSLs, telling Congress they can only estimate how many NSLs they’ve issued. Worse, they have consistently underestimated the number to Congress.
The need for secrecy leads to the desire for secrecy regardless of need. Without oversight, review or appeal, secrecy feeds on itself, and government agents turn to it because it makes their investigations easier. It’s good to see a case where that unneeded secrecy is publicly challenged and stopped.
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Posted by Stephen on May 5th, 2008 at 12:46 PM
Before Eli was born, I looked at how much we were spending and how much Eli was likely to cost us. I then took a moment to breathe slowly and deeply into a paper bag while red numbers danced in my vision. It’s a natural reaction, and I always figured most parents-to-be experienced it regardless of how much they made.
It looks like I was right, if this post is any indication. The would-be parents are making $200,000 in Silicon Valley, and aren’t sure how to make ends meet. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the readers to determine how reasonable the poster’s proposed budget is. Note that he’s in the top 5 percent of US earners, views his monthly budget as “austere,” and has come up with similar budgets for living somewhere other than Silicon Valley.
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Posted by Misty on May 2nd, 2008 at 10:36 AM
Summer shouldn’t need a schedule. It should be days of waking up and deciding if we’re going to get motivated enough to go to the pool or just play in the water sprinkler in the yard.
It should not require a shared Google calendar to pull off. And yet for the second time in about three weeks, Stephen and I have had our wires so crossed that we didn’t know what we were doing.
So now our family has a giant Google calendar. Everyone has their own color and every event is now being meticulously added for the greater good. Greater good in this case is marital harmony.
May is full of family visits to celebrate Liza’s birthday. June is full of Eli’s camps. He’s taking swimming lessons for two weeks and then going to soccer camp for a week. July is shaping up to be our trip to Japan. August will bring the school schedule with it.
I’m already exhausted and school isn’t even out for summer yet. But better this schedule than the one from last year! This time last year I was beginning my two weeks of off and on labor before Liza’s birth. Let’s just say I’m looking forward to the 20 hours of flying to Japan way more than the 20+ hours of labor.
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Posted by Stephen on May 1st, 2008 at 8:29 AM
Five years ago, President Bush gave a speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, where he spoke in front of a giant MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner. Yesterday, White House press secretary Dana Perino explained that the banner needed to be more specific.
“President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission,” White House press secretary Dana Perino told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.”
She went on to say that President of the United States Who Has A Record Low 22% Approval Rating Bush would strive to be more exact in the future.
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