The Opposite of Sleepwalking

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Since the moment Evie was born, we have struggled to get her to sleep. This has been a long term, large scale war, not a single battle. Sometimes we’ll do something to get the upper hand, but something else always eventually comes up, putting us back to square one. Currently we are in the middle of just such an uprising. After a long lull, Evie has been getting up multiple times per night, either to get a drink of water, or to go to the bathroom.

This is usually just after she goes to bed or right before she is supposed to get up. She gets lonely and wants a little human contact, and she has realized that saying she has a potty emergency is an irrefutable excuse to get up. The problem is that Evie’s middle name is “you-give-me-an-inch-I’ll-take-a-mile”. After letting her go to the potty for a few days, it started to be more and more frequent, and earlier and earlier in the morning. So she would start waking up at 5, going potty, and then staying up singing at the top of her lungs until it is time to get up. I was starting to go crazy.

We re-instituted the potty tickets, which worked for a second or so, but then she quickly went back to her old ways. She would use the potty ticket the first time she wanted to get up (usually 10 seconds after going to bed), but then she would get up later saying she had to go again. The problem is, how do you not let her go to the potty? She always goes when you take her to the potty. She really does have to go. The only quibble is how bad she actually has to go. This is a nuance that cannot be explained to a 3 year old. “But daddy, I went pee pee and poo poo!” To her, that’s the end of it; she said she had to go, and she did. And quite frankly, if she says she has to go and then she does in fact go, who am I to say whether it was an emergency or not?

We even tried bribing her. For every night that she doesn’t use her potty ticket, she can have a dime towards her book orders (the big reward du jour). “I’ll get it tomorrow,” she says, handing me her ticket. If she could at least go by herself, she would lose interest in it, but she won’t go by herself. And it’s a little hard to avoid her when she comes in to go while I’m taking a shower in the morning.

The thing is, I know she doesn’t really need to go. Until recently she went all night, no problem, and didn’t even have to go first thing in the morning. So how do I let her go when she has to go, but somehow not “reward” her by giving her attention, to the point where she drops this and moves on?

The only other idea we have is to get out her old potty and leave it in her room, so she can go if she needs to, but doesn’t get to wake everybody up, etc. Maybe we’ll give that a try.

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Sara and I were looking for something to do after the kids went to bed. We had suspended our Netflix account for a couple of months, so we decided to reactivate it, thinking we could stream a movie. However, after many tries on different browsers, we discovered that it apparently it takes a little time for things to work through the system, and we weren’t going to be able to stream a movie. It was a little disappointing, because at that point I really had my mind set on a movie. There was nothing on the Tivo, and nothing on tv. There was really only one option left to us:

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

If you recall, I was pretty excited about this movie. First off, the title is Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. So you have my attention right off the bat. Second off, it stars the Renegade himself, Mr. Lorenzo Lamas. Finally, the preview featured a shark eating an airplane, as well as the golden gate bridge. Basically, how could you lose?

Well, apparently you CAN lose. You will be very surprised to hear that MS vs. GO was, in fact, not a very good movie.

When I think of this movie, two movies come to mind: Snakes on a Plane, due to the title and pre-release hype similarities, and Biker Zombies from Detroit, due to the extremely low budget, plot and acting. Strangely, MS vs. GO was sort of the worst of both worlds.

They just forgot that they weren’t supposed to take themselves too seriously. Instead of being campy and intentionally over the top, it was like they were trying to make a real movie, and failing miserably. Say what you want about Snakes on a Plane, but that title made some promises, and the movie delivered. MS vs. GO’s best scenes were in the trailer. The two giant animals only really fight twice, and they must have been low on budget, because the animation was the same, up to and including the shark biting an arm off of the octopus. Let me repeat that, they animated a fight sequence, and then they played it back later as a different fight sequence (though they did have the decency to flip it, so it was a mirror image of the first fight sequence).

I know it seems silly to criticize a movie about a giant shark fighting a giant octopus, but if I’m sitting down to watch it, then I am willing to accept the premise that a giant shark and octopus could somehow be frozen, only to awaken and terrorize the world. So that part doesn’t bother me. However, there are so many little things that didn’t make sense, but so easily could have, that I feel like they weren’t even trying.

Why did the Navy fire above surface guns in a random direction, rather than even remotely aiming at the shark? Why did everybody on the Japanese submarine speak English? Why were schools of Hammerhead sharks and other tropical fish swimming around in the arctic? How did a sub leaving from Tokyo meet up with a sub leaving from San Francisco in like 20 minutes? Why would a submarine full of Navy crewmen just let the scientist take over as the pilot? (Although, in his defense, the guy in charge did say, “You got this?” so I guess that’s standard procedure.) Why did torpedoes and missiles somehow not affect the animals in any way, leaving them completely unharmed? Was I supposed to believe the ridiculous colored-test-tube-montages were supposed to be “science”? Did you really think anybody was going to buy the ridiculous love story??

Now, in all fairness, this probably would have been more fun with a different crowd (I’d venture to say Sara wasn’t that into it). But it just felt like a big disappointment; lots of promise but it failed to deliver. Even for a low budget movie, it had terrible writing (and believe me, I’ve seen a bazillion of these movies, even low budget movies can do better). Even after watching the entire movie, I still don’t even know how the animals were released in the first place. Was it global warming? Was it related to the illegal sonic transmitter thing that the helicopter dropped, but seemed to never come up again?

WHAT WAS WITH THE CONSTANT BLINDING-FLASH SCENE CHANGES? It was like they were testing the audience to find out who had epilepsy!

::sigh::

Well, needless to say, I won’t be rushing out to see the sequel, Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus. Wait a tick, what’s that? The sequel stars Jaleel White, a.k.a Steve Urkel? Damn you Mega Shark franchise! You’ve done it again!!

Quote Monday pretends to pretend

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Me: “We should get rid of the George Foreman.”
Evie, distraught: “But, then how would we make bacon??”

Evie: “Can you keep reading from your brain?” – In other words, “Can you keep telling me a story?”

Evie: “I wonder what Uncle Nathan is doing right now? Probably boasting that the Packers won the big game.”

Evie: “She lived long ago, back when pretend things lived, like fairies and dragons.” – She understands that pretend means they don’t exist. At least not now. Maybe she’s not so clear on the definition of pretend after all. Oh well, I’d rather live in a world where fairies and dragons at least used to exist.

Evie: “I wonder what it looked like!”
Sara, not paying attention: “Mmm hmm, me too.”
Evie: “No you don’t.”

Touché.

Cutting Back

/ Shane / 1 Comment

When I first started getting in the game of writing, I was always looking for writing advice. I loved reading author blogs; finding out what their process was and getting a glimpse into the publishing world. So every time I heard about another good author blog, I added it to my RSS feed.

Lately I have removed every last one of them.

There were many reasons for this. The main thing was that I had so many author blogs to read, I never quite found time to write. The problem with authors is that they like to write. Some of these blogs were updated multiple times a day, every day. I was having trouble keeping up. And the vast majority of the updates weren’t related to writing (not that I blame them for that, that would be a little pot-calling-the-kettle-black-ish, considering my own nonsense I spew all over the Internet).

The second problem was that I wasn’t really learning anything new. Most of the blogs just repeat the same advice over and over again. And most of the advice wasn’t really relevant to me (e-books, agents, insider publishing discussion, etc.). It can be debated whether learning about writing is useful or not compared to actually writing, but it is certainly true that NOT learning about writing is a little counter-productive.

So, since the #1 piece of advice that writer blogs offer is to write, write, write, I think they would all be happy with my decision to stop following them. I think that I have a lot more free time already. Now I just have to make sure I spend that time productively, and not just watching t.v.!

Should I be worried about this?

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Evie spent almost two hours yesterday making up a story about the Little Mermaid. This is pretty standard around here. The problem is, this story entirely centered around patricide.

The main part of the story involved Ariel first stuffing Triton in a hole, then tearing him apart with her bare hands, then putting the pieces into a gun and shooting them, and then collecting the pieces, cooking them, and serving them to her sisters. Not satisfied with this, Ariel proceeds to go on a psychopathic rampage, applying for new daddies and killing and eating them one by one. Finally, Ariel decides to keep one of the new fathers, and is forced to calm her bloodthirsty sisters who are clamoring for his death (and his flesh).

Of course I summarized it into a paragraph, but her rendition involved great detail and storytelling craft. The daddies weren’t just “cooked”. There were recipes (One daddy was served with pumpkin pancakes, a daddy recipe to be sure. Oh the irony!). There were discussions with the chef. There were details, like which sister helped Ariel lift the pot. There were descriptions of the sound it made as Triton “sizzled” in the pan.

I didn’t try to dissuade her from talking about these things. I’m not worried about it in the sense that I know all kids go through phases like this, and it’s not personal. Still, after hours of hearing the gory details of how and why Ariel killed her daddy (“he was mean and he did mean things to Ariel”), and given the fact that she makes me pretend to be Triton pretty much every day, I couldn’t help but take it a little personally. The story was pretty specific and very…thorough.

I think I’ll be sleeping with one eye open from now on.