EMP in the US

So, Ollie is going through a rapid series of changes at the moment, which is tough on him, and therefore on us!

Firstly he’s now been without his dummy (pacifier) for three nights. We have substituted a Buzz Lightyear flashlight, which he has successfully transferred his addiction to, but he’s not sleeping as long as he used to, probably because he’s unable to settle himself back to sleep in the early morning, so he’s very grumpy and whiny at the moment.

Add to this potty training, which is a great success in one area (the rear if you want to know) but a complete loss in others (the front). I think all these developments are having an affect on his brain and he’s found new things to get upset about. (trouser-legs, colour of bowls, shoes-being-difficult-to-put-on, who gets to turn on light/open the door etc etc.) He even managed to cry about the fact that he couldn’t stop crying.

Anyway, I’m using a potty chart, just to encourage him along a little, as I think he himself would be happy to remain in nappies for the whole of his life, but he is approaching 3 years old, and it’s probably all my fault he’s still so babyish anyway. What did impress me today, as he stuck another sticker on the chart, is that he counted the number of stickers accurately. I know it’s only 5, but he was unprompted, and knew when to stop counting, and didn’t count the same one 6 times, as he’s done before. He then also counted the number of spaces accurately. I’ve told him he’ll get a present when the chart is full. Thomas put the idea in his head that it will be a remote-controlled airplane (which is of course what Thomas wants) so he’s in for a hell of a disappointment when he gets a bargain-bucket Little Einsteins book!

Last week we suffered a bad storm, which actually left us without power for a few hours. Yesterday, I got a chance to go for a walk around the golf course for a bit of “disaster tourism” as we joked at the time.

The fallen trees made a great playground:

And best of all we got to hang out with friends in the sunshine.

Some better photos are here on my friends’ blog:
My friends’ blog

The weather has been totally fantastic this weekend, hard core sunshine. There are just tiny patches of snow left around the house. The Connecticut river is flowing again, but small ponds, and Mascoma lake are still solid (there was still someone ice-fishing on it!).

We decided to try out a trail quest, which is where you have to hunt for a “treasure” which is usually some sort of stamp, so you can at least prove you made it there. We have a whole book of them to work through! We chose one in Enfield, about 15 minutes drive from us. There is a Shaker village there, which I don’t know what is yet, but I’m going to research and find out.

It was a beautiful day:

We had to climb a hill to start with, which Ollie found really tiring in the snow.

But the view was spectacular halfway up:

We found some sort of memorial stone, and took a break:

There were maple sap lines in some of the trees:

David spends qualidy time:

Needless to say, we got lost in some woods, and had to abandon the treasure hunt before the kids dehydrated themselves complaining about their legs and fatigue. We were glad to be able to take a shortcut down the big hill back to the car.

We decided they deserved a chocolate chip pancake each, available at this great diner we had checked out the day before:

I include this picture of the diner, David and the roof of the car because I’ve only just realised we actually drive an SUV. I didn’t know that’s what it was. It’s a Subaru Forester all-wheel-drive. It’s quite old, but has less than 100,000 on the clock. We met someone the other day who had the same car, but it had over 300,000 miles on the clock!

The weekend just got better from there. I got to go for a walk with my friends on the golf course, which is another post, and then our next-door-neighbours had a barbeque, which was just brilliant for me, as I got to sit at their kitchen table for the evening – my favourite place

Nothing too eventful to report this week, except I had a nasty stomach bug on Thursday, which I found out I probably picked up at the childcare centre, where it’s doing the rounds. Thankfully, the boys seem to have missed this one out, unless that’s what made Thomas sick in the car last weekend.

Ollie slept his first night without a dummy last night, and now has a flashlight to hold while falling asleep as a substitute. Unfortunately his decision to accept the flashlight instead of dummy coincided with us having forgotten his puppy (stuffy/cuddly whatever they’re called these days) at the childcare centre. So this morning at 6am he was mourning his dummy AND his puppy, loudly and persistently. I finally gave him my iphone to play with, which shut him up until about 7am. Still this is a step in the right direction towards becoming a 3-year-old. I hope he can manage tonight as well, then it should get easier from then on.

Thomas is also growing-up fast, and has finally begun karate lessons, which we always wanted for him. We hope it will develop some discipline and co-ordination, and maybe even strengthen his muscles a bit. It’s a good program and he seems to enjoy it so far. He has the smallest-size uniform, which looks like it will last him until high school!

David trying to figure out the belt-tying.

Also, please notice the school patch, which I had to painstakingly sew on:

My excitement for the week came in the post when I finally ordered myself a couple of t-shirts from ThinkGeek.com. I’ve wanted one of these for ages, but finally decided I didn’t care how geeky it was:

(There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don’t). I’ve also bought another one which I think just arrived while I’ve been typing saying “<you’re it>”, for all the *ml geeks.

Hasn’t my hair got long!? I’m thinking of getting my spiky style back when I visit the UK in July. It looks nice like this, but also a bit housewifey I think – whaddaya think?

A great thing happened today. Thomas and Ollie had the neighbours’ girls over to play, who are simply great. Thomas observed Alisa copying words from a book, and as soon as she had gone home, he tried it himself. I’d been telling him he should do this for ages, but of course what kid listens to his parents? I am indebted to Alisa for showing Thomas the way!

However, can you spot the difference…?

By the way, the book was a great Christmas gift, which I still haven’t sent a thank you for!

I must also just mention that I heard Thomas telling Ollie what a church is, having pointed one out as we drove past. “Ollie, a church is somewhere you get married and sing songs!”

So, I’ve been trying hard for nearly a week to get this right, (well, in the snippets of time I get to myself during the week!). I’ve finally uploaded it, though only the mp3 version until I’m completely satisfied and have digested some feedback. I’ve been struggling to make the bass heard on my laptop speakers, so I either have to resign myself to the fact that, if people are listening to it on their laptop, they will be missing half the track, or just hope that my little MacBook speakers are worse than most! David suggested I add some bass partials, which did help a bit (I just doubled the bass octave!) so that’s the version submitted for now.

Phew, thankfully this seemed to update ok, and I think everything is working. Let’s hope it keeps the hackers at bay for a while.

Went out to get the post this morning:

After I spent some time clearing the driveway, the snow plough came back…

…and blocked the driveway again!

At this point, I gave up and went in to have lunch. Our very kind neighbours had brought us a fish back from their weekend trip to civillisation (they visited friends in New York) which the boys and I greedily tucked into.

Also this morning, before snow play, we got round to fixing the boys’ stereo. The wretched thing had been playing to around track 4 or 5, then getting stuck and finally stopping and displaying “Er” on the display. Er…? is about right.

Needless to say, I took it apart:

If I’m honest, I probably didn’t really need to do that, but it gave me access to the laser which I cleaned with a bit of alcohol, and removed a very fine hair from the lens unit. It was the sort of hair you would get off a cotton bud, so it could be that I put it there when I cleaned the lens. Either way, taking it apart and putting it back together again made it work. However, instead of the usual extra screw leftover, I actually had one missing. Maybe somewhere in the universe all these extra and missing screws balance out in perfect equilibrium.

Ollie is much better today, in that he’s not burning up, but he’s now a green snot monster, which isn’t better for me. However, at least he’s crying a bit less and laughing a bit more.

Poor old Ollie is suffering this week. What started as a cold has developed into raging fevers. I’ve not had much sleep so forgive me if the post is a bit scattered! Ollie has spent the last two days on the sofa, demanding that I too remain there. We watched Disney’s “Cars” at 3am this morning, in order to distract him from his discomfort. Thankfully my godsend neighbour took Thomas for the entire afternoon, where he got to play and take part in stimulating activities, rather than also stay on the sofa and explode all over the house with unspent energy.

Yesterday I actually made an effort to arrange stimulating activites in the home, like a good mum. We got paints out and learned about primary and secondary colours, and then we made a fun snack, courtesy of Thomas’ Leapster game. (Win a code, go to the website, print). It was called Ants on a Log:

Basically, celery stick spread with peanut butter covered in raisins. Thomas liked it. Ollie wasn’t fooled. “Don’t like celery” he frowned as he picked it out of his teeth. Me neither mate.

The last couple of days, I’ve not been able to post because, we think, someone hacked into my site. Luckily I googled the error and the forums enabled me to fix it, but it is scary. I need to update the version of Wordpress I’m using asap, and maybe even change the theme, as it was one of the theme files that was hacked. Updating can be tricky, so I may be offline, and come back with a much more geeky, sensible-shoes look. I am not doing it right now, as I will need a clearer head. Ollie permitting – maybe tomorrow.

I managed to capture, though very roughly, through a very dirty window, a picture of a bright red bird we get around here. I’m not too interested in birds, unless they have a cool sound, so I didn’t try to find out what it was.

Lastly, I’ve been snatching time over the weekend and the last couple of days to do another remix. I quite like the first 30 seconds, but it all goes downhill from there. I’m now pretty fed up with it, and I can’t wait to get it finished and uploaded so I don’t have to think about it any more. I have arranged with David to be able to work in the evenings sometimes, as waiting 5 days in between sessions isn’t practical – I forget everything I learned in the last sitting for starters!

Anyway, the increased level of activity has led me to resent domestic chores even more as they infringe on my time. I am particularly unimpressed with washing-up at the moment, as I cut my finger quite badly (and stupidly) on the weekend, which meant I had to wear a rubber glove on the subsequent days. When the cut had healed sufficiently that I didn’t need it any more, I hung it up and it just happened to fall into a pose which reflected my feelings towards washing-up in general.

Finally, Thomas and I were walking along hand-in-hand the other day, and I said to him, “I like walking along like this with you, holding hands in the sunshine. It makes me feel happy inside.” He replied, “Yes! Especially when you have lots of pretend friends with you, and especially when some of those pretend friends are superheroes!” Hmph.

Just a quick post, as I haven’t posted for a while.

The reason I haven’t posted is that I made the best of my 2 days of childcare the last two days. I finally made some music. It’s small steps, and I needed some sort of tangible goal. There is a great website called Indaba.com which often holds remix competitions, which allows you to download the stems of a song and then make your own. Then you can upload it and see if anyone else likes it!

I had initially wanted to get it finished in one day, but it took two, along with Thomas coming home early on Friday. He had a bad cold, and was feeling a bit sorry for himself. (He’s fine now!). It was good to go through the various stages of creativity, including the one where you decide it’s a pile of rubbish and you are not going to bother with it any more. Luckily, I was able to pull it back and after the kids were in bed, I spent 3 hours finalizing it and got it uploaded. It is important to get used to being able to make something in a short time. This will hopefully become more efficient as I get better with the software. I’m mostly using Logic Pro 8, and occasionally Ableton Live (which is a total enigma to me still).

I could go on and on about the actual work, and the bits of it that make me cringe, but actually, there’s a Harry Potter on the tele, which I’d like to get back to!

Here it is:

I will post it on Facebook once the voting starts, so it’s fresh in everyone’s mind. I think voting starts on March 9th, but I will be sure to remind you! Hopefully this is the first of many – they make for good exercises.