friday photos

My mom knitted this amazing 3-piece tweed ensemble for Genghis.




(trying to catch him in his newfound skill of sitting up, but mostly I captured him capsizing)

vote for A

The A sentences for alphAmuse are ready for a vote! Click here to go the alphAmuse blog to vote on which sentence you think best represents the letter A. Remember, the sentence will be illustrated in a children's book. You have until Feb 1 to vote.

Upcoming: The B sentence challenge starts tomorrow.

***If you're interested in following the sentences/voting for alphAmuse, subscribe to the blog by adding http://alpha-musing.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default to your feed reader. Or, you can subscribe via email by entering your email address in the form below and clicking "subscribe".***

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friday photos

The final installment of Christmas-time photos. Over the holidays, Genghis met many relatives for the first time. I did an awful job of documenting these meetings, but do have photos of...

Genghis and Great-Grandma!


Genghis and cousins!

introducing ... alphAmuse!

Abe and I play this incredibly fun game with Genghis where we say a letter of the alphabet over and over again, making all of its sounds ("B. Bee bee bee, buh buh buh, bee, bee, buh. B!"). Then we have to come up with a sentence with that letter. ("Bouncing bears boast boisterously. Bee bee buh buh ... B!"). Genghis often smiles and sometimes laugh. And we have a great time.

We have so much fun, in fact, that we decided to created a blog where anyone can play this game with us. Throughout 2011, we'll go through each letter of the alphabet and anyone can comment with silly sentences based on that letter.

At the end, we'll compile winning sentences from each letter into a fully illustrated book.

So check out "alphAmuse" (click here)! I just put up the first post on the letter "A". Visit the blog and post a comment. Coming up with a sentence that uses words beginning with just one letter is easier and more fun than you think!

Oh, and you can add alphAmuse to your RSS feeds so you can see when each new letter post comes up.


(Here's a video of the game, sort of. Abe got totally stuck on the letter K, so this is more of a bloopers reel. But apparently Genghis finds Klingons amusing.)

friday photos

Still catching up from the holidays.

For his first Christmas, Genghis got to partake in my family's long-standing and ... unique ... tradition of wearing holiday-patterned bibs for Christmas Eve dinner. And when I say long-standing, I mean Abe and I both own our own adult-size bibs for the occasion. My favorite part is always when Mom forgets to take off her bib until she goes to bed that night.


Christmas morning gifts.




I could hardly take this photo, I was laughing so much.


A quiet moment with Grandma.

why isn't it this easy to re-image a baby's hard drive

While I sit here pretending that I haven't spent the last 2.5 hours trying to get Genghis to go to bed, I'll tell you about my new computing power. And I'll hope that by the time I'm done, he'll finally be asleep (My other coping strategy for times when he is senselessly crying is to take a long shower but I've already checked that one off the list. I'm not sure what strategy #3 will be, if needed. It's times like these that I marvel that siblings exist.)

For Christmas, Abe's mom generously gave me her old Dell laptop (perhaps pity after reading my GoldiGong tale?). My brother-in-law tried to free it from the grip of several nasty viruses, but they had a good stranglehold on the operating system. I re-imaged the hard drive and tried to install Windows, but it required getting a special driver from Dell for the laptop to take Vista and there was a strong chance that bulky OS would kill it anyway.

Hello, Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a free, Linux-based, open source operating system. It only took a few hours to wipe the whole computer and start clean with Ubuntu, as well as install some additional software I wanted (R, Inkscape, Google Chrome, more to follow). It's an intuitive system with a strong support community. So far, every search I've done on "How to do X in Ubuntu 10.4" has yielded a useful answer. Here's a screen shot of my desktop.



And so far the laptop has been speedy, reliable, light-weight and battery-charged. It's cooperative and working out well for me.

Which is a lot more than I can say for my child.

friday photos

A lot of catching up to do with photos. Here's a start. Genghis started rice cereal just before Christmas.






I think this one looks like it could be his Senior Photo.