For all the new guys (and some of you who’ve been around too)

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I’ve added a new page under the “About Me” section over there on the right called “About this Blog“. This page describes sort of the nitty gritty details of how the blog works, and how you can navigate around. This page will stay around for informational purposes, but I will display the text below. Let me know if I’ve missed anything, or if there are any questions you’ve had that I left unanswered. Even if you’ve been reading the blog for a while, there might be some tips and tricks you didn’t know about!

Thanks,

The Management

The Basics:

This blog is published 5 days a week, Monday through Friday, around 7 p.m. Central time. Regular features include “Quote Monday“, which is a list of funny things the kids have said, usually collected during the previous weekend.

Older posts can be retrieved from the archives by using the calendar in the right hand column, or the “Older Posts” drop-down below it to select a month and a year.

To search the blog, enter text into the box in the upper right hand corner and press “Search Results”.

General purpose links, such as links to other blogs I read, can be found at the top of the right hand column, under the search box.

To join in the discussion, see the Recent Comments section on the right. This will show you who has commented recently and which post they commented on. Click on the hyperlink next to their name to see their comment.

Advanced Navigation:

Categories:

Posts fall into a few categories, such as “From the Mouths of Babes” or “My So Called Life“. All posts in a category are related in some way. For example, the Quote Monday posts are all under “From the Mouths of Babes“, and posts about my day-to-day life are located under “My So Called Life“. To see all the posts in a particular category, scroll down until you see the “Categories” drop-down in the right hand column. Selecting a category from the drop-down list will display all of the posts in that category (don’t forget to hit “Older Entries” at the bottom of the page to see more posts).

Tags:

In addition to being categorized, each post is also tagged. Tags are sort of short descriptions of what type of things you might find in a post. For example, a post about eating bacon while holed up during the zombie apocalypse might be tagged “bacon“, “zombies” and “zombie apocalypse”.

These tags are used by search engines, but they are more than just informational. If a tag sounds interesting to you, you can see all posts I’ve made that have been tagged the same. There are a few different ways to do this.

One way to sort by tags is to scroll down until you see the “Tags” section in the right hand column. This is called a “tag cloud”, in which my most commonly used tags show up. The larger the font, the more often the tag has been used. Clicking on a tag will bring up all the posts with that tag attached to them. For example, the tag “baby” has been used a lot, and is quite large. Clicking on that link will bring up all the posts I’ve written and tagged “baby“.

Another way is to click on the tags in the header of a post. So if you are reading a post about a topic, and you want to know what else I had to say on that topic, look for a sentence like, “Posted in [Category] with tags [Tags]“. For example, you might see something like, “This entry was posted on August 24, 2009 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Evie Update with tags , , , .” You can see that both the categories and the tags are hyperlinks, which you can click on to find other posts.

NOTE that clicking on these links doesn’t do what you think it should do!! These links will show you all posts on WORDPRESS.COM that have this tag, not only on my blog. If you look in the url field of your browser, you will see something like http://en.wordpress.com/tag/pirates/. To search only on my blog, change the url to something like https://erith1.wordpress.com/tag/pirates/. I don’t like that the provided links go to all of wordpress, but I don’t know how to fix it, so we have to live with it. Sorry!

This does, however, bring up a third way for you to search for tags on my blog: just type “https://erith1.wordpress.com/tag/” into the address bar, followed by a word. If I have any posts tagged with that word, they will show up.

RSS Feed:

This blog publishes two RSS feeds, one for posts, and one for comments. If you use an RSS reader (I use Google Reader), you can add these urls to follow the posts or comments (or both). The advantage of this is that you will see every new post or comment as they go up, without having to check back to blog homepage. This is especially useful for the comments, because people sometimes post comments on old posts.

First Day Flying Solo

/ Shane / 2 Comments

I haven’t spent much time alone watching the kids. Or really any time whatsoever. So as last Friday approached, I began to get a little nervous.

I wasn’t completely nervous. I remember being a lot more nervous about the first day I spent alone with Evie, back when she was a baby. I was so afraid I would forget to feed her or change her diaper that I kept meticulous notes, with times down to the minute, that I could refer to. But that ultimately worked out okay, and became second nature before too long, so I was a little more confident with that experience under my belt. I should also mention that Sara manages the two of them all the time, every day, so obviously I knew it was theoretically possible to deal with the two of them with only one parent.

So this time around I wasn’t worried about that sort of thing, but I was still worried about being able to take care of Ollie with the distraction of Evie. The main thing I was worried about though was not being able to calm Ollie down if he got upset.

With Evie I was pretty good at soothing her. I had all the skills down, and I knew what to do in certain circumstances. I knew what she would respond to. I realized that I didn’t have the same set of skills with Oliver. The things that worked for Evie don’t necessarily work for him.

The problem is that we tend to pair off; it is usually easier for Sara to take Oliver and for me to take Evie. As we started to do this more and more it sort of reinforced itself, because all the extra practice meant that Sara got better at dealing with Oliver, and I got better at dealing with Evie. Which meant that it became even more obvious for Sara to take Oliver and me to take Evie, etc.

Sometimes in the evening I would take care of Oliver while Sara made supper, and those times often did NOT go well. Sometimes he would sob the entire time until she was ready to take him back.

So basically, I was a little nervous about not having good Oliver-skillz, but I was also confident that I would develop them in time. It’s just that the first few weeks could be sort of disastrous until this happened.

So Thursday morning Sara was out for about 2 hours, so I had a bit of a trial run. It went more or less okay, but there was a little bit of a rough patch for about 1/2 an hour. Oliver was laying in the gym and smiling. Whenever he would turn his head and look at me, he would get this terrible, sad, pouty look on his face and start quietly sobbing to himself. Then he would turn his head away and look at something else and be all smiles again for a while. This wasn’t sobbing cries, he just looked very, very sad. It was like looking at me reminded him that his momma wasn’t home, and he missed her. This did eventually devolve into sobs that I had a lot of trouble getting rid of, which was more or less what I had experienced in the evenings.

So this trial run didn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence going into the first full day. However, I am happy to report, the day actually went great!

We had a play date in the morning (with someone I had never met no less!) but that went really good and helped break up the day some. Sara is of the opinion that the kids are easier to manage out of the house than in, and I am inclined to agree. Oliver was all smiles all day. He didn’t really sleep hardly at all, but despite that, he was still in a good mood when Sara got home.

So all of my worries were for nothing! I’m sure we will still have some bad days, but the more good days we have, the easier it will be to get through the bad days.

Quote Monday – Panhandling Edition

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Evie: “Can we go to the dollar store? I want to buy  a dollar to put in my piggy bank to save for ice cream!”

Evie likes to find pennies and other coins on the ground and put them in her piggy bank. Because of a book we have, when we asked her what she was saving her money for, she said ice cream.

She doesn’t have a real handle on how much money is worth. One penny is equivalent to one quarter. Each is “one money”. We’ve tried to explain to her things like, “This one is worth 5 of that one,” or showing her 10 pennies in one hand and a dime in the other hand. She doesn’t get it. She tried to exchange one money (a penny in this case) for a book at the store.

::Evie opening birthday cards::
“More money! I’m going to save all of my money for college!”

However, all money isn’t created equal. For some reason she has it in her head that coins are money. Paper money isn’t real money. You save paper money for college, you save real money for ice cream. In fact, when Orlan tried to give Evie a dollar bill, she looked at it suspiciously, but she refused to take it. She wanted ice cream money.

Because Evie gets such joy from change, and change costs relatively little, people started giving it to her all the time. If you can make a child happy for the price of one penny, that’s money well spent. The problem is, it has turned her into quite the panhandler.

Evie, holding out her hand: “Do you have any money? Does anyone have any money?”

The sad thing is, this tactic has been working like gangbusters everywhere she goes. Nobody can resist emptying their pockets to her. She earned something like $40 on the trip (granted, most of that was birthday money)(for college of course).

When panhandling wasn’t enough, she turned to other skills, like pick-pocketing. She actually reached into Lisa’s pocket and pulled out some change. Then she turned to straight up house robbing.

Evie, holding up a penny: “Look what I found!”
Me: “Where did you get that from?”
Evie: “Uncle Ben’s room”

Unfortunately, the money is easy come, easy go. She was losing it all over the place. I guess I wouldn’t be too careful with it either if people were willing to just hand it over whenever I wanted some. Finally, Lisa bought her a “sock purse” which is just a sock with a clasp on top. Evie takes it everywhere.

Since she was so excited for it, we wanted her to buy some ice cream. However, most of the time Sara and I want ice cream too. So it didn’t seem fair to make her buy ice cream at a time when we would normally have bought it for her, and it didn’t seem fair for Sara and I to have to go without. Finally she got a chance at the camp store. She enjoyed the ice cream thoroughly, and, rather than putting an end to all the panhandling, it’s only encouraged her to try to weasel even more money out of people.

Ice cream costs about “7 monies” in case you were wondering.

Who needs a gnome?

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Lloyd the gnome is currently guarding our garden, and doing a decent job at it. So far this year, no poachers. However, I think Lloyd is about to be superseded. Gnomes aren’t really that scary. But zombies are.

That’s right, a garden zombie from (who else?) ThinkGeek. It’s a little pricey at $90, but who hasn’t wanted to have their own garden zombie?

Yeesh, never mind, that thing’s too scary.

Le sigh

/ Shane / 1 Comment

After I put Evie to bed, I remembered there was some stuff in the laundry that should go in the dryer. Except when I was putting things in the dryer, I saw the dehumidifier needed to be emptied. Except when I was emptying the dehumidifier, I saw the cat litter needed changing. Except when I was taking out the garbage with the cat litter in it, I saw that we forgot to clean up after supper. Ah, finally sitting down to relax…except it’s Thursday night, so when I saw the computer, I remembered I should be working…