baby

Fun Stuff

/ Shane / 4 Comments

It has come to my attention that certain people feel I haven’t been posting enough fun stuff lately, so I guess I need to rectify that.  As such, I have shamelessly stole this video from her.

This is what would happen if business meetings were like Internet forums (including strong language):

And also, now that Meg has visited my new blog, I finally have a dot from outside the U.S. on my Sitemeter!

You know how when you were like 13 you thought your parents were just *so* embarrassing?  Well they probably were.  I mean, if you could peer into our house at any given moment, you would see some pretty embarrassing behavior, such as barking like dogs, doing silly made up dances, making hideous faces and rude noises at Evie; anything for a smile.  I’m sure after a few years of doing that you have no choice but to completely lose your sense of what is embarrassing and what isn’t.  You really couldn’t help it.

Evie is crawling a little bit now.  She says pretty much every sound in the alphabet except for “Ma” which Sara doesn’t take to kindly.  When she is really upset / crying she has started going “nein nein nein” for some reason…must be in her German blood.  And I think she is a little confused because everytime she sees the cat she starts yelling, “Da da!  Da da!”  Also, sometimes she makes this angry really loud breathing noise through her nose like Melissa trying to get Butters to attack her.  I hope Melissa reads this because that would only make sense to her.

My mom is obsessed by the game Scrabble.  I mean, really obsessed.  She even has jewelry made out of scrabble tiles.  She can never get anybody who wants to play with her, so she invented a game called Speed Scrabble (at least I think she did, she could have stole the idea from someone else and passed it off as her own).  Anyway, we have been playing that game since we were little and I have introduced it to many people over the years.  Well, in the tradition of Uno, Skip-bo, etc. someone has taken that game and monetized it into BananaGrams.  Boo!  My mom deserves a check.

I have endorsed ThinkGeek on this blog before and I probably will again.  That is one of the coolest stores online.  But I am not only doing a commercial, I also am a customer!  (You may have seen Evie in an “I TCP/IP but mostly IP” shirt, among other things)  I have even signed up for their mailer, something I would normally NEVER do.  But every time, there are such good things in there that it is worth getting an email about, such as a personal soundtrack shirt with a built in speaker for playing the soundtrack to your life, selected from a remote in your pocket.  Now it turns out it was just an April fools’ joke, but compared to some of their other products it doesn’t seem ridiculous. Well apparently it was not so crazy because they got so many orders and emails that they are now going to produce it!  So anyway, if you are a geek and you like things, then you should check it out.  And while you are there, perhaps you can buy a Defendius Labyrinth Security Lock for your home:

Oh yeah, and Guns and Roses rocks.  FACT.  I just needed that to be down in writing.

Yet another Evie update

/ Shane / Leave a comment

So it was a pretty big weekend in Evie land.  The biggest development is that she finally learned to roll from her front to her back!  Of course all babies in the world learn this first before learning to roll back to front, but I guess she is a little different.  Well, unlike when she learned to roll back to front, once she figured this out she kept with it.  So probably the first day she learned how to do it she did it like 6 times.  Now she can roll back / front / back / front all the way across a room!

She also kind of waved bye-bye.  My mom and sister were leaving and we were all fake grinning and waving and saying “bye bye!” like idiots for about 10 minutes and then all of a sudden Evie waved!  And then we all just looked at each other like, “Did she just do that?” so we all started waving madly again and she did it again.  Of course we have tried a million times since then and I don’t think she really gets it, but hey, it is a start.

Along the same lines, we were trying to test her to see if she knows her name.  In a constant tone of voice we were saying, “Door knob!  Purple Shirt!  Nala!  Evie!” and sure enough she seemed to look only when you said Evie.  Of course, on later trials she responded to Fart Face, so again I’m not really convinced it wasn’t a coincidence.

Update

/ Shane / 1 Comment

And thus fulfills my obligation to make an update.

J/k.  Look, I’m getting sick and tired of you folks (you know who you are) bothering me about an update!  None of you* have a blog and / or a 6 month old baby, so I don’t think you realize how much work it is to keep up such a thing!

*With the exception of InteractiveReader of course, who puts my posting to shame.  However, she is not bothering me for updates, I assume because she knows what a burden constant blogging is!

Evie suddenly decided she wants to roll over and now she can’t be stopped.  She has been able to for awhile, but it took a lot of coaxing.  Now she just automatically does it whenever she is on her back.  She still can only drive in reverse though.

I’m going somewhere this blog doesn’t go very often…economic stimulus packages.  Read this really exceptionally fantastic idea about how they should be implemented.  I personally don’t agree with economic stimulus packages in general, but neither does he.

One final note, Live at Radio City Music Hall by Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds is really good!  Dave and I used to have a pretty good relationship.  We hit a rocky patch during the whole Lillywhite Sessions debacle, but Busted Stuff and Some Devil were better than a dozen roses.  Still, the endless live compilations began to wear on me (see Live Trax vols 1 – 10).  How many CDs can I own with the same songs on them?  Finally, Stand Up did our relationship in.  But here comes Live at Radio City to make me remember all those romantic weekends at Deer Creek.  Of course it is good!  Did we forget that Live at Luther College inspired me to learn how to play the guitar?  And that Tim Reynolds still can play the hell out of a guitar.  Dave’s voice is a little more raspy, the song selection is decidedly spiritual and I’ve never heard acoustic guitar sound so…sinister.  They really work that low E!  But it certainly brings back memories and I’ve spent more than a few trips in the car singing my lungs out.

That is all.

Evie Update

/ Shane / Leave a comment

So I haven’t really had any posts on Evie lately and I thought I should give an update because big things are a foot!

So two days ago we started Evie on her first solid food (rice cereal).  She seems to like it (she was already trying to reach for my oatmeal this morning) but she has no intention of swallowing any of it.  Everything goes out the way it came in!  Oh well, I know that’s the way it is supposed to go at first.

Today she rolled over for the first time (back to tummy).  She has seemed like she has been on the verge of it for *so long* but she never quite did it.  She certainly is capable of it, but she just hasn’t seemed to want to.  So today we put all of these toys just out of reach on her left side so that she would reach for them and then Sara and I were talking and all of a sudden, Evie just rolls over to her right!  There wasn’t a single toy over there or anything.  So much for our motivation.

She sits up very well now and will stay that way for ~20 minutes before getting tired of it.  She will stand if she’s holding on to something (like your hands or the side of the crib) but she doesn’t try to pull herself up or anything.  You have to set her like that.  She crawls decently well, except only backwards!  It is kind of funny because she wants to crawl forward to get a toy but she can only crawl backwards, getting farther and farther away from the toy.  This makes her very frustrated.

Finally, she is only really interested in one thing…the jump-a-roo!  She jumps in that thing forever and just loves it.  If you ever try to hold her all she tries to do is to get you to hold her up under her arms so she can jump.  Jump, jump, jump she never gets tired of it.  And when she goes up in the air in the jump-a-roo she does these funny plies (sp?) with her feet in the air like a ballerina.

So we are currently experiencing a wave of the black plague sweeping through our condo.  Evie was first, culminating on Friday mostly with a really snotty nose and a fever.  Then I got sick Saturday and especially Saturday night.  What a miserable night that was.  Sore throat all day then including a stuffy nose and horrible sinus headache.  I didn’t get much sleep.  Then this morning I felt a little bit better but Sara started to get a little sniffly with a scratchy throat.  So it is pretty snotty around here lately!

Sheva Weva

/ Shane / 2 Comments

So we were talking about Mariah Carey because Evie decided to practice her high pitched shrieking skills all day today.  Sara admitted that she only learned as an adult that the lyrics to Dreamlover are “Won’t you please / come around / ’cause I wanna share forever with you baaaaaby”.  Until that point she thought the lyrics went, “Won’t you please / come around / ’cause I wanna sheva weva with you baaaaaby”.

Now we’ve all gotten song lyrics wrong at some point, so it’s not that funny I guess, but this just really cracked me up!

I asked her, “What did you think sheva weva meant?” and she not only said, “a dance or something” but she actually demonstrated the specific dance that she thought sheva weva referred to!  I mean, sure I can understand not getting the words right, but it is so fantastic that she thought she had the words right and that Mariah just made up a phrase to refer to dancing.  That just slayed me.

So don’t forget to ask Sara to “sheva weva” next time you see her. 🙂