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Not June Cleaver
Not June Cleaver: age 45
Ward Cleaver: age 44
Simon: ds age 11
Alvin: ds age 10
Theodore: ds age 8
Jerry: Betta fish, age unknown
Albert (as in Gator mascot): hermit crab, age unknown
Tiger (as in Tiger Woods): hermit crab, age unknown
I'm not atheist. I'm not agnostic. If you figure out what I am, please tell me. Be nice.
Read more about me here.* * * * *
These Go To Eleven
NIGEL: All the way up. You’re on ten on your guitar, where can you go from there? Where?
MARTY: I don’t know.
NIGEL: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
MARTY: Put it up to eleven.
NIGEL: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
MARTY: Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
NIGEL: These go to eleven.Curious about the title of this blog? Here's a link to a video clip of one of my favorite scenes in "This Is Spinal Tap"
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Recent Comments
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laren me how to fit nitrous in rimot car
I had to extract myself from Facebook long enough to look at my stats and laugh my head off at one of my recent search hits:
laren me how to fit nitrous in rimot car
This is by far my best search hit yet. It comes from Google India and I must applaud this person for his/her efforts. In case you couldn’t figure it out, here is my English translation:
teach me how to put nitrous in my remote controlled car
I hope he finds what he was looking for. What I don’t understand is how on earth this hit brought him to my blog??? I wonder how many new hits I’ll get based on my translation?
4th Picture Folder, 4th Photo
Colleen at The New Unschooler tagged me for the 4th Picture Folder, 4th Photo meme and it seemed so easy, I couldn’t ignore it (not that I would have ignored it if hadn’t been so easy — or would I have?)…
Here are the rules:
1. Go to the 4th picture folder on your computer.
2. Post the 4th picture in that folder.
3. Explain the picture.
4. Tag 4 more bloggers.
My folders are dated, so since I got my first digital camera in early 2001, the fourth folder was 2001-06. I knew right away the photo was going to be one of Theodore since he was born that year. What fun it was to find the 4th photo!! It really brought back memories.
Regular readers of my blog may recall that my youngest son is a competitive gymnast. He’s really good (if I do say so myself!). Seeing this photo again reminded me of a bunch of other photos similar to this one that I took in June and July of 2001 when he was 5 and 6 months old. The kid had amazing control of and awareness of his body.
I called this photo “Strength Training for the Great Crib Escape”:
I swear he was trying to do a forward roll here:
He never did anything the easy way:
So it was no surprise at all to me when he foiled the barricade and climbed the stairs at 6 months:
And just look where it has taken him:
I’m now tagging (gosh it was hard to select only 4, but nice not to have to select a lot or I would have just let people select themselves):
Anyone Else Notice the Similarity?
“An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox. “ ~Lao Tzu
Anyone else notice the similarity?
Maybe there was a Jumbotron in the grass by the sidewalk.
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I Triple Dog Dare You!
A scene from one of my favorite movies of all times comes true!
Stick Boy
I was tagging photos today and I found this funny stick figure picture taken on the driveway in January 2005. I wish I knew which kid drew it. They all deny it.
No doubt this is a stick boy. Don’t you just love the front and rear views? Too funny.
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Changes
What I really want to know is how this:
Became this:
And how I ever survived those days when I had 3 in diapers.
My baby turned 8 on Wednesday. It hardly seems possible.
New Year’s Day
Nothing says Happy New Year like a big dinner with family.
I make no resolutions nor promises, but I do want to try to blog more this year. I have a lot to say and not enough time to figure out how to say it in an interesting way. Perfectionism sucks.
Happy New Year!
Recess
Just in case your playground is too dark (saw this in front of me at the Taco Bell drive thru lane recently):
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Not Dead (yet), just stuck in Facebook
Nope. Still alive and kicking.
I recently joined Facebook after someone started a group for my old high school (which doesn’t exist anymore as of like the mid-1980s, so it is a little different than just any old reunion group). It just adds one more wasteful thing to my already busy list of way more important things to do.
So, in Facebook, you suddenly get reconnected with all sorts of people you probably didn’t really want to reconnect with. You also get to find people you really wanted to find but never could. It’s a tradeoff of sorts. Sometimes you even find that the world is really really small and one of your blog buddies from Illinois is friends with your Virginia coworker from 1991. That was sort of eerie in a Six Degrees sort of way.
As I was poking around on Facebook, I had an interesting thought (interesting to me anyway). People are pulling out various and sundry photos from the past and posting them. They are few and far between. There’s a little implied blackmail thing going on, in a fun sort of way, of course.
So the revelation for me was how different my childrens’ lives will be in the future. There will be photos of every waking moment of their lives. We got our first digital camera in 2001. Simon was 4, Alvin was not quite 2, and Theodore had just been born. We have TONS of film photos of the older 2 (well, more truthfully, the oldest), but since the moment we got a digital camera, I have taken kept (let me go check my Photoshop catalog….) 25,513 photos!. I have tagged about 70% of them (I’ve been really good in the last year about tagging as I import them to the catalog).
Every.single.milestone in their lives has been captured in a photo. Will anyone give a crap later on? Who is going to look at these photos? We certainly aren’t going to force people to sit through slideshows! Oh wait. We already do that.
I have noticed that kids today also document their own worlds. My kids are no exception. They have digital cameras and a digital video camera. This could definitely come back to haunt them or their families sometime (an example would be the Facebook and MySpace pages of 4 local teens killed in a tragic highway accident showing pictures of themselves drinking, etc.). We used to protect our privacy, but now we advertise our lives on the web via blogs and personal pages. Isn’t that weird?
In their free time, they do school
So, parents of schooled kids wonder what schooled kids do in their free time. They play video games, of course.
My kids? Well, in their free time, they do school.
I’m being completely serious.
Alasandra just linked to a relatively positive article about homeschooling in Illinios. The article just made me think about how we homeschool. People are positive when they think you are doing school at home. You know — the way they imagine school should be. That has to be better than school, right? It’s one-on-one and individualized to the learner. But what about people who don’t do school at home? What about those of us who completely buck the system? Are they so congratulatory then? Probably not. It doesn’t fit into their educational paradigm.
Tonight, we visited News Channel 8 studios. The kids actually got to be on live TV (that was a surprise to all). When we got home, they got out their video camera (we got them a cheap digitial videocam last year) and pretended to do newscasts. I was chuckling over things I heard them say like, “Back to you, Phil,” and “We’ll be live in 5-4-3-2-1…”
You may have already read my recent post about how Simon has decided to become a writer. He has continued to write about 2 pages every day (handwritten). He is choosing this as a fun thing to do. I’m so happy! He only does this at night though, after a good long day of video gaming!
Nighttime around here is filled with educational activities. Their days are spent on the computer playing games — which, by the way, include an amazing amount of learning about economics, math, and social interactions/getting along with others/cooperation. I’m not ready to argue that computer time is a positive thing, but I’m beginning to believe that it is.
At night we do our AVKO Sequential Spelling tests (all three boys do it together at the same level). They complain and laugh and try to get out of it, but we do it anyway. They know that spelling is important. That is really the only non-unschool thing we do. We have math books that we work through, but not consistently. They are great with math, all of them, but in different ways. I truly believe that when they are ready, they will learn it.
So, the big difference I see with homeschooled and schooled kids is how they spend their free time. Do you see that too?
