to persevere: parenting stories and other geekery

did we buy a house with a tree in the front?

That’s right, you guessed it… roots in the drain pipe… nasty.

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My iBook’s battery is recalled. Again. They were previously recalled when I first got the iBook, and now they are recalled again with the whole Sony battery fiasco.

Well, it’s not a fiasco, really. Batteries and laptops have a history of violence. Namely, bursting into flames.

Apple, for their part, is usually very good at recalls, and they take responsibility for problems, even if they aren’t responsible for the manufacture of the defective part. One tends to think of Apple as the manufacturer of their computers, but in reality, they are made from parts sourced from the same suppliers and manufacturers that everyone else has to deal with. In fact, the new MacBook is “made” by Asustek.

Tom’s thoughts this past weekend about excuses came to mind. Apple gets to shift the blame from itself to the third party manufacturer, in this case, Sony. Some self reflection reveals that I am a hugh procrastinator (no secret) and that I often shift the blame off of myself on to, well, anything or anyone else, really.

The following, from a late 80’s Apple ad, is so me:

This has worked for me for 2 decades… why change now?

Well, no more. I’m a gonna change my cheatin’ ways…

And it’s time for the reveal. If you made it this far, you get to find out what “twopuffsofair” means. I went to Australia in 1995 with CTI for two months, and one of the songs we sang was “There’s not a crown without a cross” as recorded by Michael English. One of the lines of the song is “to persevere to the end”… but his delivery is kinda mumbly, and it sounded like “two puffs of air”. It was kind of our team’s inside joke.

So there you have it. No more procrastination. Persevere to the end.

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Tasha’s up to 5 word sentences now… careful what you say around her, she’ll say it right back! She’s in that “mode”… soaking up new words and we’ve noticed an increased attention span for books that wasn’t there before. She used to get only halfway thru a little book and then push it away, eager to explore something else. She’s a physical sensory tactile type of kid. But now she’ll bring you a book to read, and usually get through the whole thing. Her favourite is Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss. Her favourite page is “FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER That one is my other brother!”

Anyway, this book thing is great, because Jackie loves to recite her books to Tasha, and they keep each other occupied while we sneak off and watch a movie, um, I mean, while we clean up and get dinner ready… yeah… that’s right…

technorati tags:kids, language, reading

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Today (Wed) Jackie was tall enough to go into Smaland at the Etobicoke IKEA (they only require a height of 37″, whereas the other IKEA requires 39″). It was a momentous day. She’s been waiting to be tall enough to go to this play area, and we checked today and she was just over the 37 mark. She was so excited.

So what I hadn’t really clued in on was the fact that you DROP YOUR KIDS OFF at this thing. That meant we were down a kid, and we could shop with only one instead of two. Woo hoo!

I must admit I felt a twinge of emotion, probably what you feel when your kid goes off to school for the first time, but decreased by a factor of 10… It was strange, and I hadn’t expected it. It was like, wow, she’s growing up. She’s going into this thing, by herself. Part of me wanted to go with her, just to, you know, be there in case she needed anything… but she was fine. She was more than fine. She was raring to go, and she had a blast. And we had an hour of free child care!

I’ve been thinking about milestones lately. How we measure our lives. In the first weeks and months of our lives, the markers come fast and furious. As they get to 2 and 3, it starts to be more spread apart. I think today was one of those milestones for Jackie. And for her dad.

technorati tags:IKEA, milestone, smaland, growing

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http://daringfireball.net/2006/08/curious_case

technorati tags:geek, daringfireball, shoddy, reporting

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