A pretty good week so far

First, a welcome to anyone who might be reading this through Facebook's Blog Friends application. Be warned, I tend to babble about all sorts of random topics -- hence the name of the blog.

I must admit that this has been a pretty good week so far.

1. I won $56 in this week's football picks pool
2. Democrats won a majority in the Virginia state senate and picked up 3 additional seats in the house -- even though my district's Democratic candidate, Jay Donahue, lost. :(
   
3. My friend's husband (also a Democrat) won the race for Dulles District Supervisor, which is pretty damn cool, even if it's not my district.
   
4. We found out that we will be having a BOY in April! (I guess I never publicly posted that we are expecting, so here's the announcement.)
5. Little Miss went potty FIVE times yesterday. Now we can really work on having her tell us before she needs to go. Hopefully she'll be completely out of diapers before her 3rd birthday in January.
6. We went out for a great meal at Don Pablo's last night (my favorite) with my brother, and Lauren was actually quite well-behaved (once she fully woke up).
7. We leave for Cancun in 11 days!

Hope all is well with you! And if you're on Facebook, add me as a friend!

Little Miss's Mess

Boy, it's been a while, hasn't it? Sucks when you have to go on vacation just to find time to blog! (And sad that I actually took time to blog from Hawaii, but that's another story!)

Anyway, I just had to share this morning's conversation with Little Miss. Lauren's 2 1/2 now (actually, 2 years and 7 months today) and although she's been in a toddler bed for some time now, we just recently moved her out of the nursery and into her new bedroom, where we leave the door open overnight.

This morning when Lauren came into our room, the conversation went something like this:

LM: Daddy, my shirt all wet!
Me: Hmmm. Are your pants all wet too? (Expecting a leaky diaper) Yeah, they are... and sticky too! (pause) Lauren, what did you do?
LM: I brush my teeth all by myself!
Me: Ahhh. And you wiped toothpaste all over your pants?
LM: Yeah!

So I went to investigate the state of the bathroom... and it actually wasn't bad, although I did find a sticky footprint in the hallway.

Then I noticed that Lauren had Dora bandaids on three of her fingers. So I looked in the bandaid box, still sitting exactly where it always sits on the bathroom counter -- and found that Lauren had opened every. single. bandaid. And then stuffed the empty wrappers (and half the bandaids) back in the box (plus a few in the trash can). What could I do but laugh?

Happy Birthday Ranger Rick!

So why have I been so busy at work lately? One of the reasons was launching this great website and video for Ranger Rick!


If you would like to embed this video on your own blog, please don't embed this version. We are putting the finishing touches on a version that will be served from our own site, so please check back here in a few days. For now I'm posting this version for testing purposes and to drive up the views a bit on YouTube.

To blog or not to blog, that is the question

Yes, I admit it. I am a blog abandonner. I didn't think anyone would notice, but apparently my two loyal readers both did! (Thank you to Liz and Jamie for checking in! It's good to know people do actually stop by now and then!)

So what happened? Well, lots of things...

Reason #1: I was liveblogging American Idol fairly regularly, but then
a) Idol went down the toilet with the whole Sanjaya thing
b) I tried adding Technorati tags to my posts and found that Technorati isn't spidering my blog, even when I ping it! (Any technorati users out there, please help!)
c) Idol is on from 8-9, and my daughter's bath time is typically 8:30, so my "liveblogging" was typically delayed while I paused the DVR to give her a bath. Plus it's hard to blog (let alone actually LISTEN to the contestants) with a 2-year-old running around.

Reason #2: When I started blogging, I was working on a government contract that didn't keep me busy, so I had plenty of time to blog during the day. Now that I work at National Wildlife Federation, I have more to do than I could ever get done. I've been here a year now, and this past April was the busiest I had ever been since starting. In fact it's probably the busiest I've ever been at any job.

Reason #3: My mom doesn't read my blog. Is that bad? Well here's the deal... a few months ago I decided that I was going to start using this blog for posting more stories about Lauren and then send my mom and dad here for the latest updates. So my mom asked me how her granddaughter was doing and I said "you can read all about her in my blog! Let me give you the address." To which she says, "I don't want to read your blahg! I have better things to do with my time than read someone's boring ramblings." Gee, thanks Mom! I'm not just "someone", I'm your SON, and these aren't boring ramblings (except for this one), they're posts about your granddaughter!

The funny thing is, some people here at NWF have embraced the "Web 2.0" buzzword and think we need to spend more time blogging, building social networks, etc. But our typical member is women over 55 -- just a few years younger than my mom. So if my mom is saying that she doesn't read blogs (even her own son's), is Web 2.0 something we really want to invest a lot of time in?

So anyway, that's why my blog has more or less died. But I would like to revive it and see if I can post at least weekly, so I hope you will stop back. And maybe if I get some more posts up about Lauren, my mom will actually read my blog!

Lauren tells her first joke!

Tonight at dinner, I heard Lauren mumble to herself, "Knock knock. Who's there? Ach." It took me a second to realize what she had just said! I'm sure she doesn't really realize what she said, but it was quite remarkable to Jen and I, and by the end of the night I could get her to say the whole joke, properly alternating lines with me. :) Knock knock. Who's there? Ach. Ach who? Bless you daddy!

Latest udates on Little Miss

OK, I guess I should take a minute to update everyone on what's new with Lauren these days! (Oh and btw, I'm giving up on the whole anonymity thing...) L.M. turned two last month and is growing up faster than I can believe. It seems like she changes so much in just a week!

So anyway, Jan. 22nd was Lauren's 2nd birthday. Jen's parents came down to celebrate but unfortunately my parents were in Florida. Jen's aunt was also supposed to fly up for the weekend from Atlanta but totalled her car Friday morning when a woman lost control of her car and came across the median on the interstate. Luckily Jen's aunt wasn't seriously hurt, just bruised and very sore, but she wasn't able to make the trip.

For Lauren's birthday, I baked a Blue's Clues cake with a pan I had gotten from Freecycle more than a year ago. I spent about THREE HOURS decorating it with hundreds of tiny stars. (I'll post pictures when I get a chance.) For my first attempt at cake decorating, it actually came out pretty good, but I seriously doubt I will ever attempt something like that again! If I do make that cake again, the colors will simply be filled in with a flat ribbon tip, not done with stars!

Anyway, after all that effort I was a bit disappointed by the response I got from Lauren. Maybe the candles scared her. And even though she knew it was Blue, she didn't seem to excited or make a big deal out of it. But her excitement actually grew over the next few days, as "birthday cake" quickly became her favorite word! Like father like daughter!

Little Miss was lucky enough to get to celebrate her birthday a second time when my parents stopped in on their way back from Florida to Pennsylvania two weeks later. Of course we had to have more cake, knowing how much Lauren loved it, but this time I went the store-bought route. Once again she had a blast, and then proceeded to ask for "boiday cake!" every night for the next two weeks.

This week Lauren finally had her two-year checkup. She's 90-95th percentile for height, weight, and head size, which is what we expected considering she towers over everyone in the twos class at daycare and many of the three-year-olds too. Like I said, she seems to change every week. Here are a few of her favorite things.

Favorite foods: pizza, broccoli (seriously!), chocolate, lollipops, and of course birthday cake

Favorite expressions: "Perfect", "Dat goes here", "Dat one", and "Oh no!" (complete with "Home Alone" face slap)

Favorite songs: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and Mahna Mahna.

Favorite toys: stuffed animals, wooden puzzles, and her AquaDoodle.

Other items of note: she counts to 14 consistently, then typically jumping around from there.... 17 actually seems to be her favorite number to say. She always wants to put things back where they came from, whch is great when it's time to clean up the toys! And she's been sleeping in a toddler bed for the last few weeks now.

It's still amazing that we hardly ever have to fight with her to get her to go to bed. But it is clear that she's two -- she wants to do more and more things herself (like get dressed), and she'll throw tantrums if she doesn't get her way, or even for what seems like no particular reason at all. But all in all, I don't think I could ask for a better-behaved little girl!

Little Miss the rebel

We have a kids' CD in the car, to keep L.M. entertained. One of the songs on it is The Hustle. (Yeah, I know, some of the songs really don't make any sense... like Pick Up The Pieces by AWB.) Anyway, you may recall that the song is mostly instrumental, but starts with the ladies singing "Do it!" Much to our surprise, Little Miss responded from the back seat with a resounding "NO!"

PBS Kids' Show Host Fired for Video

I can't believe that neither Corndog nor MysteryMommy have posted this yet, but if you and your toddler watch PBS Sprout and night and you've been wondering what happened to Melanie, here's the answer.

Apparently late last week, Melanie Martinez, the host of "The Good Night Show" on Sprout, was fired due to a video she had done about seven years ago. (Note #1: SHE brought the video to PBS's attention. I'm not sure why she waited till the second year of her contract, but kudos to her for voluntarily making them aware of it.) You can
read the article on MSN and also read PBS's official statement. Then you can watch the video here (probably not the kind of thing you want to watch at work, however).

Now at first glance I guess I can see where PBS is coming from. The material certainly isn't appropriate for children... but kids shouldn't be watching this sort of video in the first place! (And if they are, their parents need to be more vigilant about their children's web surfing!) Then my wife forwarded me an email talking about other kids TV stars with risque shows/films in their bio, and one name that jumped out at me was George Carlin. Wait a second! Isn't George Carlin the narrator in some of the Thomas the Tank Engine episodes, a show that plays a VERY prominent role in Sprout's "Good Night Show" programming? Is PBS now going to pull all Thomas episodes where Carlin is the narrator? And if they do, I'd argue that all of Alec Baldwin's episodes need to be pulled too, as he has certainly played roles more risque than Melanie's 30-second PSA spoof.