Disneyland 2010

I thought if I included "2010," maybe we'd go back sometime...

We had a ton of fun going to Disneyland together! We went 2 1/2 years ago, right around Christmastime, and honestly, Isaac had a blast! Jeremiah was terrified of ALL rides he went on (Dumbo, the carousel...that's about it) and Leora was barely a year old and didn't really care.

So, this time, we went on one of the last summer days that the ark closed at 8. It was a great choice. Hardly any lines, and we could do everything we wanted to! Yippee!

Mostly the next few posts will just have pictures. Because my favorite father mentioned that wehaven't posted here recently. And I don't really have the time/current desire to write a ton. Since we're moving currently. We'll be in Wisconsin in 6 days! Which means moving out of our apartment and having everything packed and shipped and cleaned within the next 4 days...

The boys on the teacups.

Leora and John on the teacups.

Isaac hanging out in jail in ToonTown.

Alison, Jeremiah and Leora sitting on a bench on the carousel.

Leora consulting the Disneyland map. :)

Our family! At Disneyland!

Jeremiah and Isaac with Disney souvenirs!

Leora with HER souvenir. We went into the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, and I fgured we'd get her a beautiful princess tiara or purse and gloves...but no. We found the best swords and shields ever!

Good-bye Disneyland!

Halloween!!!

This week leading up to Halloween has been a blast! My mom came out to play with us, which added to the excitement. :) We made Jeremiah a wolf suit like Max, from Where the Wild Things Are, and created bat wings to go with Isaac's ninja costume (um, he decided he wanted to be a "bat-ninja"?--apparently they sneak up to people and pull down others' pants, but we vetoed that action), and decorated Danielle's turtle shell, for her "little bitty ninja turtle" costume. We carved pumpkins and turned them into jack-o-lanterns, for the first time! We've decorated pumpkins and painted them before, but not carved. The kids were ecstatic to look at their jack-o-lanterns at night, all lit up. The boys had a kindergarten Halloween party and costume parade on Friday, and we went trick-or-treating and had carnival games and dinner at our church tonight. We've had a lot of fun!

And now....for pictures!


Three sweet children looking longingly into the flames of their jack-o-lanterns...

Ninja-Bat with his creation.

Max, making a scary face like his SCARY jack-o-lantern. :)

And, a Little Bitty Ninja Turtle with her very happy pumpkin!


More, perhaps better, views of their cute costumes. (Have I mentioned that I LOVE that these kids like to play together??)


At our church's Halloween party, while waiting on Daddy to serve us dinner. (If you really think staying with three kids while the other parent is getting dinner is the better half of the deal, you might want to think again!)


Jeremiah with his Sunbeams teacher! She's so great!

Ooohh! A ScArY math test! Run away! (John has wanted to be a math test for Halloween for years. :) He finally got a chance!)


Supermom! Here to save the day!

Dragon Naturally Speaking

dear intrepid readers,

So I got a new toy at work. It's pretty interesting, it's Dragon NaturallySpeaking, speech recognition software for the PC. So the idea is that if I'm sitting at my desk, and I'm trying to compose an e-mail, I can simply speak into my software and it types for me. Unfortunately the reason I need Dragon NaturallySpeaking to type is that my writing tends to be a little convoluted and not necessarily the easy to understand or straight forward ( and it takes me forever to write these things because I way over think it). So, these possible potential hopeful solution is that I can speak into the software and then my writing is easier to understand and makes more sense and ends up not being so dense. It definitely makes typing fun! I had to try Captains log start eight (i.e. StarDate) 286 -- three but unfortunately the software doesn't seem to recognize StarDate so it doesn't end up being as cool as I'd hoped.

the other cool thing you can do with it is a dictate keyboard keys to press and it will type for you, so for example alt tab or control F or things like that can be run with my voice. But I would really like to do is have it jump directly to a location on a webpage after I say text, right now they are are a few more steps than just that so all work on streamlining it. In any case, I definitely remember as a child seeing the captain of the Battlestar Galactica and Capt. Jean-Luc Picard speaking into their typing computers and thinking wow the future is going to be so cool. It's here and it kind of is.

Birthday Cake

Today was John's birthday! Happy birthday, honey! (I thought I'd mention that even though the rest of this isn't about him.)

Danielle was so sad in her crib tonight. I guess she'd been crying for a while before I came home, so about ten minutes after I'd been home I retrieved her from her crib (standing with tears streaming down her cheeks) and started walking around our house to figure out if there was something specific she wanted. When she saw John she gave him the evil eye and didn't want to be within a few feet of him. Then I wandered into our kitchen. And the reaching and grunting/whining started.

There was a frosted cake on the counter and Danielle wanted some. She helped me make it this afternoon. I think she was extremely upset that she was put to bed without getting any cake! She was also thirsty and some family was over watching the last songs of American Idol, but I really think it was the cake.

Feed the Head

Okay. I know it sounds a bit creepy. But, really... It's not! A little strange, maybe, but fun. Give it a whirl! Feedthehead.net
(John found it first, not me!)

tag

5 things I was doing ten years ago:

1. Debating as a four-person team in the Wisconsin state debate tournament (we took second place!)
2. I was stamping out foam math manipulatives for first and second graders with friends (Eagle Scout Project)
3. I was playing guitar for the (lower level) Jazz band, guitar for the (lower level) show choir, cello for the orchestra (last chair), and French Horn for the (higher level) band (first chair)
4. I was playing Necromunda (fun tabletop game with little painted sci-fi gang members) at next generation listening to Daft Punk - Discovery.
5. I was getting in one of at least three unreported car accidents (the at least is, three I remember)

5 things I will do now:

1. Get by Dental Abscess fixed (most likely by getting my tooth pulled :( )
2. Work on my puddle (see previous post)
3. Fill out 1099s, 1096s, W2s, W3s, and a myriad of other forms after an hour commute to Black River Falls, Wisconsin
4. Learn International Finance (I have a week before I teach it)
5. Make a smart whiteboard out of my laptop using a Wiimote

5 things I'll be doing 10 years from now:

1. Installing printable solar panels on my roof
2. Wait, in 10 years I'm going to be 38. This list is stupid.
3. But I can't stop: I'll be up in the middle of the night talking to my team in Mumbai about development on the new game.
4. From my libertarian base of operations in Antarctica... or space. I can't decide.
5. Reading Jay's novel.

5 favorite toys I have:

1. Alison's Tupperware spatula: it is just so cool in many and multiple ways.
2. Kongregate.com
3. FlashDevelop
4. news.ycombinator.com
5. My pinewood derby car (it's got a real, working, LED light-up propeller)

5 favorite toys I want:

1. Wiimote
2. RepRap
3. BugLabs
4. Anybots
5. Electric Car

5 people to tag

1. Todd
2. John
3. Thomas
4. Lawson
5. John

Relaxing Game

I wanted something relatively brainless to do before I went to bed (for relaxation/destressing/whatever), and this is what John came up with.

Happy, Cuddly, and Cute

Obviously (from the pictures) this entry is about John.

jk

I put new pajamas on Danielle last night, and she was just so cuddly and soft. I wanted to snuggle with her in the rocking chair all night long, but after about ten minutes I resigned myself to sleeping in our respective beds.

So, here she is this morning with her daddy, with her "morning hair." She's just so happy!

"The Race"

Alison: Hey John, are we "slow and steady wins the race" kind of people?

Pause.

John: Are we "hold still when the gun goes off and hope the race goes away" kind of people?

A Brief History of our Marriage

John's Aligning

So, I like to help John with his work. We sit on the couch and cuddle and look through lists and lists of state standards and check the box for the ones that match the textbook question.

Kansas has the most ridiculous standards. The most ridiculous one, though, is the following.

Understands that when he or she is playing a sport outside that sun screen should be applied to the shin.

We were so confused. Why the shin? Not the face or neck or ears or knuckles?

I just figured it out--it's a typo.

"Sun screen should be applied to the...skin."

Crossword puzzles

John and I were in two different places at the same time. (I know it's not as hard as me being in two different places at the same time, but it was fun to write!) We did a crossword puzzle together. It was fun; they have a chat that we used at first, but it was really slow, so we used out google chat instead. The sad part was that the answers were sometimes too obvious--"able to be repaired" was "reparable." But it was fun. You can "invite" someone to do a crossword with you, and it sends them an email with a link to the site.

Danielle's Finger Trick

Yesterday John discovered a trick that Danielle does, and shared it with our entire branch one family at a time. To his credit, she did it faster for people than for the camera.

After-Dinner Conversation

Alison: What's it called when my head says "eat more food" but my stomach says "don't"?

John: Being full.

pause...

Alison: What's it called if I listen to my head?

John (distracted): Willpower.

Alison: Uhhh...

(written as I'm eating my third bbq pork sandwich)

Eating Toes

John was holding Danielle, and put her little foot in her mouth. She looked a little surprised and pleased, and started gnawing on it. John mentioned how easily her foot reached her mouth.

"Like it's hard," I said. He didn't think I could do it. But I did. I put my toes in my mouth (but I didn't close my mouth--I know where my feet have been).

Isaac walked in the room. "Hey, Isaac!...Oh. Never mind." He bites his nails. All of them.

John can't put his foot in his mouth. He can only get it up to his knee when he's sitting. He demonstrated this to me. I thought it was ridiculous, though he's shown me his inflexibility before.

I just checked. Jeremiah can put his foot into his mouth. Unlike Isaac, he doesn't think that toes are a food group.

5th Anniversary

5 years, 4 dwellings, 3 kids, 2 degrees (and a third on the way), 1 really big argument (and a handful of smaller ones).

Yesterday was our anniversary. John spent most of the day working. I showed up at 11:30 with IBC root beer and a key lime pie to commemorate the occasion. It was fun to remember and share stories from our marriage. We've been pretty happy.

Palm fist ninja strike... of Doom!

So I was eating a piece of cake (Sarah's graduation picture cake sans paper picture) and Alison wanders over to the table. She suddenly stared intently at a spot right above my right eye socket. Her lips curled into a sneer, her brow furrowed with intent, and then she sprang. Rotating from the hip, with her fingers curled and palm up, she executed a surprisingly forceful palm strike to my skull. Stunned (and somewhat concussed) I turned to her with a look that I'm sure was something like cross-eyed bewilderment.

Mission accomplished, she stated tersely, "mosquito."

Nudist Colony

Yes. It's true. We have a secret nudist colony surfacing over here now that summer is upon us. It appears to be growing, as well.

A relative (who will remain unnamed) stopped by at an unreasonably early hour (around 8 a.m.) a few days ago, and let herself in. Which would have been fine had we been a normal family and awake. But, we weren't. I awoke to somebody opening our front door and made John put some clothes on (no, neither of us were actually naked, just inappropriately dressed to have company--but appropriately dressed for sleeping on a hot summer's night).

Rather embarrassing.

Jeremiah has a notion to become a stripper. This morning as I changed his diaper, he kept saying, "No die, no die." (As in "diaper," not death. Duh.) But I put it on anyway. Only to find him completely naked 5 minutes later. I let him be in his heroic altogether for quite a while before I dressed him again. (And yes, "heroic altogether" was my favorite term from Humanities 202. It cracks me up. Actually, our textbook was rather entertaining and well-written, which happens to be completely off-topic.) Jeremiah stayed dressed for an hour or so...

But as I was saying: a nudist colony. Call before you come over. Unless you like surprises...

Desktop Tower Defense

John taught me how to manipulate time, or to be more accurate, the perception of time. It's pretty simple. You just visit the website handdrawngames.com/desktoptd. After I start playing, my accuracy in time estimation goes out the window. It's great. And, if you want to join our high scores list or see our strategies for playing, you can look up our group, under maskedmallard, used without the permission of the Masked Mallard.

A Romantic Evening

Alison and I had a date night tonight (and I mean night; it started after I had fallen asleep at around midnight). We ate way too much chocolate, had a salad to make up for it, and made this
The programming "language" we used is called scratch designed by educators at MIT to teach programming. I put language in quotes because you don't actually type any words, all the coding is done with colorful lego blocks that say "if touches " and "change direction".
So we made a fun game for our date night; sharing the mouse pad on the laptop was the best part ;)