Dancing is a BIG thing at daycare. Often when I drop Tau off or Dave picks him up, the music is cranked, the kids are tricked out in floppy hats, sunglasses and all kinds of dress-up gear, and they are getting down! A big favorite is Disney Radio’s Move It! CD, especially the Cha-Cha Slide song (check out the sound clips on the Amazon page).
That my 22-month-old knows what a cha cha is (well, sort of) blows my mind.
Tau’s teachers have tried to catch “cha cha” on camera for us a couple times but no luck. As soon as the boy sees the camera, he loses interest. The one clip we did get included a couple of the other kids and I don’t feel cool posting movies of other peoples’ kids without their permission.
Yesterday evening, after a very short (45 min.) nap, which came after a very long afternoon of trying to coax him to sleep (just too hot in our place), he asked Dave for music to “dahse.” Since the laptop was on, Dave fired up Cha-Cha Slide on YouTube.
Apologies for the bad light and quality of the clip. And the wobbles and general goofiness are due to the fact that he’d just woken up, still tired, after resisting sleep all afternoon!
Yes, he does get lots of “good” music at home too — whatever that is! One of the new favorite words is “jazz.”
We recently moved all of our old Yahoo! Photo albums over to Flickr. The albums transferred nicely as sets though I had to go in and mark all of the pics public and do a bit of clean up.
I also herded some of the sets into two collections, one for recent travel photos and another for pictures of Tau.
We are not that big on lavish birthday gifts and such. Tend to buy what we need as we need it. And we both hate getting gifts that are not quite right or, worse yet, downright awful. Money and gift certificates are our best thing.
So a week or two ago I said to Dave, “Haven’t got anything for your birthday yet. Is there something you’re crying on your pillow over?”
I love the resemblance between this picture and this naughty one of Tau at about 10 months.
And here is the life-sized birthday card we made for him — note the outline of the little guy’s bod! Tau and his buddies at daycare decorated it with Crayola markers and a whole lot of frenetic toddler glee.
What did the birthday boy do on his day? He took the day off to do some chilling and cycling, and then last night we all went over to friends Gerhard and Evi’s for a wonderful dinner!
So it seems picking away at my air guitar over here in my little corner of the Internet is paying off, because while I was out taking a bloggy vacation last week, Aimee over at the stunningly redesigned Greeblemonkey bestowed on me the Rockin’ Girl Blogger award.
Ahem! (In my best California-Peace-Rocker Chick-ese)
“I’d like to thank my agent … and my mom and dad … and the fans … worldwide … and my wonderful support crew over at WordPress Studios. And of course my baby-child and my husband-and-partner-in-this-glorious-journey-called-life Dave, who gives me the daily strength to go on — LOVE YOU HONEY! Sniff! Excuse me — I don’t often break down like this. And who else? Oh! I should thank the critics, like The Bullog, who after a rocky start seems to be putting his blog to good journalistic use addressing pertinent topics instead of giving bloggers a hard time. This one’s for you, Mr. Bullard, and all the other newbies who stumble, fumbling and strumming their newly found Stratocasters into this fabulous arena. Consider yourself awarded with a Rockin’ Girl …”
Yes, I get to pass on this lovely award to others and since the bloggers I read are either way up there in the rarefied reaches of the blogosphere and therefore a bit above the grassrootsiness of this award or already recipients of a Rockin’ Girl, I’m going to tag some other folks you might not know.
Hey! We’d love your feedback.
So if nothing else, skim down to the indented bullet point below.
Well, dear readers, this is blog post number 101 over here at nobaddays. Can you believe it?
Those who know and love me will tell you what a Luddite I am. I carry the cheapest pay-as-you-go brick of a phone, have a cassette player (you know, with the stretchy tapes that melt in the sun?) in my car, and still haven’t found a good enough reason to sign up for cable.
So, as with many things in my life, I came to blogging late. The first blogs I ever saw were those of my technologically astute friends Erika and Declan. And I remember thinking, “Why mess with all this complicated on-the-fly stuff when you can make a simple HTML page and update it by hand?” Embarrassing, I know.
On the morning of July 4th, Dave was busy cycling the Scripps Ranch Old Pros 50-mile road ride. By 9:30 a.m. the house was hot and getting hotter, so Tau and I headed out to Birch Aquarium at La Jolla for the first time.
What a fun morning! This small interpretive aquarium is perfect for toddlers. The Hall of Fishes is cool and dark, the walls of the luminous tanks wide and tall enough for Tau to stand tippy-toes and look in. He had an absolute blast running from tank to tank — “Mama, Mama! Fsses!” His favorites? The upside-down jellyfish!
The 70,000-gallon kelp forest tank at Birch Aquarium is pretty spectacular — a floor-to-ceiling undersea wonderland with a carpeted ledge kids can climb up on to get a better look. Here is a video of Tau pointing out the species in the kelp forest to some poor unsuspecting little girl.
The outdoor tide pools were a bit lost on him as he couldn’t really see what the guides were pointing out, so we headed back in and toured the fsses again and then went on to see the sea dragons and sharks. Here is an cute video of Tau checking out the shark tank.
Before heading home, we had a picnic lunch together outside the aquarium. Highlight of the day was when a huge seagull landed on the table right next to us. Oh, and then the next highlight of the day (two mintues later) was when a paraglider swooped right over the aquarium turned and swooped the other way. What can I say? Having a kid teaches you to live in the moment!
As coincidence would have it, Tau came home this week with an “aquarium” he’d made at daycare — a Ziploc bag filled with blue hair gel (nice!) and all kinds of glittery foil shells and fishes.
I am too close to this to blog objectively. One TN visa, two H1-Bs and six years later, we are still playing the Green Card waiting game.
And trust me, more than most I know that this is a complex issue. But this news is so big and feels so very surreal for folks like us (especially seeing that we moved here from British Columbia) that I couldn’t not touch on it.
“Microsoft Corp. today announced that it intends to expand its presence in Canada by opening a new software development center in the greater Vancouver, British Columbia, area. The Microsoft Canada Development Centre will open in the fall of 2007 and will be home to software developers from around the world.”
Bill Gates and Co. have long been lobbying government to make things more viable for the thousands of technical professionals working and living in the US on H1-B visas or standing in that ever-so-long line for a Green Card. I guess they know nothing’s going to change soon.
“The company has long been pressuring U.S. immigration officials to increase the number of foreign workers it can employ in the United States. The U.S. government typically issues about 85,000 visas annually to foreign workers with specialized skills and warned in April there would be a shortage this year. Canada, meanwhile, does not impose similar quotas.
Microsoft and other companies have been saying for a long time, ‘If you make it so difficult for U.S. companies to bring in talented foreign nationals that they need, companies are going to fill those positions abroad’ said Ted Ruthizer of U.S. law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis and Frankel.
‘This is just the fulfillment of this promise,’ said Mr. Ruthizer, who runs [Microsoft's] business-immigration practice.”
Thank you. You said what I wanted to say but didn’t feel up to saying.
Just that morning I’d been listening to NPR in the car and caught the tail end of a discussion on the reluctance many Americans feel to speak out for fear of seeming unpatriotic. Fear of pointing out that the emperor is butt nekkid when everyone else is wrapping him in the flag.
As someone still standing in line for permanent residency, I feel it even more keenly — the reluctance to say too much, for fear of seeming ungrateful or rude.
My fourth of July post? I made two of those cartoons. One with a regular flag and one with a flag that had a peace sign where the stars should be. But then the whole Scooter Libby thing just wiped me out — I felt frozen by the audacity of it and exhausted by the sheer arrogance. When stuff like this happens, I often say to Dave, “Why aren’t people rioting in the freaking streets!?”
And so I posted the safe one and hoped you’d all notice the weary look in my cartoon eye.
So Sue had been bugging me to cut the dead flower stalk off one of our aloes for some time. Didn’t bug me but the untidiness of it was getting to her, so last night after weeks of asking (begging … nagging?), she sauntered into the garage and came out with the shears.
I’m in the kitchen and I hear snip, then “Hey! Help!”
The half-severed branch had hit Sue’s head and the dried flower husks stuck to her hair like velcro. Yes, the whole aloe plant was stuck to her head.
The more she called for help, the more I laughed and then ran for the camera! To make amends, I came home from my trip to the hardware store today with DQ Blizzards.
Note from Sue: Uh huh. The only picture he’s taken in the last ten years (I kid you not) is when my head is stuck to a plant. In my swimsuit. With hair scraggly from being in the pool. All sweaty and hot. Nice one, honey. The Oreo Blizzard did make up for it though. He knows how to get me. And by the way, the garden is his thing — dead aloe stalks aside, I don’t touch it.
In other news, we had a great weekend. H-O-T here — upper 80s F (30 C) today. We went to the pool three times this weekend, Tau overcame his beginning-of-summer “what the heck is this pool thing?” fear, and we had a picnic dinner tonight on Moonlight Beach. Yay! Summer is here!
"We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained."
