Language Skilz

So I'm gonna brag here for a second or three, so move on if that will induce nausea. Insert standard disclaimer: All parents believe their offspring are above average in looks, smarts, and personality, no matter how derranged the poor thing really is. Those rose-colored glasses are standard issue.

So we're sitting there at Fazoli's, and suddenly David says, "That's like Paris." Huh???
"That's like Paris?"
"Yeah."
"Um....WHAT'S like Paris?"
"The music."

Well, there's muzak being piped in. It's supposed to be Italian music, obviously, and has a sort of accordian flavor to it. I'm not paying attention to it, but after listening, yeah, I see his point. The accordions lend that kind of sound to it.

"Oh, I see. Yeah, you're right. I think it's supposed to be Italian, though."
He shakes his head.
"It's France."
He dives back into his spaghetti, and then comes back up and says, "The Eiffel Tower's in France. In Paris. Like Ratatoullie. HE was in Paris, and they had music like that."

Hmmmm...what a lovely application of music, film and geography. Apparently he's learning to pick up certain pieces and connect them, whether or not those connections have been specifically pointed out to him. To me, this is learning HOW to think. Good stuff. And it has a certain useful appeal as well...

...David is over with his friend who lives just two doors down, having more than just a groovy time. He is, in fact, having a blast. The friend has a set of walkie-talkies, and the boys are employing them to their fullest. All too soon it's time to go home. The kids are sad, it's hard to pull everyone away, but off we go. I'm doing icky housework stuff and pass by David's room, where he's whining in frustration. "What's wrong?"
"I can't get the channel to change on my walkie-talkie," he says. I see where he's going with this, but can't imagine it will work. I push the most obvious button and there's no effect. "That's more of a Daddy question," I tell him. "That's the best I can do for you. Sorry."

So I'm off doing dishes now, and David pads into the kitchen, extends his hand with the walkie-talkie towards me and says that his friend's mom "...wants to talk to you." Sure enough, she's there.
"Did he come up with this on his OWN? Over." she demands.
Well...technically, yes. He did. He grabbed his own walkie-talkie, turned it on and remembered the correct channel to contact his friend. He asked his dad how to switch the channel, (my attempt just ran the numbers up the scale over and over, in a loop) then hit the signal button and it actually connected to the friend's handset.

Again, it's evidence that he's taking separate pieces of information (gee, my friend's handsets work on Channel 4), and applying that knowledge to a new set of conditions and challenges (I wonder if MY handset will talk to HIS handset on Channel 4, too).

And did I mention that Lauren is suddenly writing letters out of the blue? She's professed to do his a lot, and it's always just wavy lines, so I don't pay much attention. But today she said "I want to write my name," and said she'd put down an L and asked what came next. I said A, she asked about the next letter, and I looked over and there's a perfectly formed L and A, side by side. Could've knocked me down with a feather. Tonight I pointed to a sign and asked if she knew what the word was and she said "/h/. /t/. HOT!"

Can you read that?!?!

She grins and nods proudly.

Are you READING? And WRITING? At four? And who's teaching you, 'cause it isn't me!

(Hopefully) Lead-Free Toys

Now here's a good idea...these folks have gotten together and made a website showcasing US-made toys just in time for Christmas.

Toys Made in the USA (www.onlyustoys.com)

Happy shopping, everyone.

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Fire!

Or perhaps that ought to be titled "Fire Station!"

We did our obligatory visit to the local Fire Protection District for the Cub Scouts this week. David thought it was awfully interesting, although I think he was more excited to see the other kids than anything else.

At the conclusion of the meeting, and while the Den Leader is passing out beads, David comes to me and says, "When can we have a Den Meeting at OUR house?" This is a truly terrifying request, but I'm quite brave, and I say to him, "Why don't you ask Mr. Smith?" So he approaches the Den Leader and asks, and the response is nothing short of exuberant. "We've been LOOKING for a volunteer for the December meeting!" he says. "I think we could hold the very next Den Meeting at your place, if you think that's OK." Of course now it's David's turn to be exuberant.

Yeah, well...you see...the trick is that not only do you host 10 wild little boys, and provide snacks for them...but you also have to come up with one activity to do with them. There's a theme, which you may or may not choose to follow. They haven't let me know what this is, but according to the various websites, it'll probably be Celebrations Around the World, which gags me. It's a look at the various holidays and customs that go on in December around the world, which means that most of them will be hyped on Christmas, and if I'm quite lucky we can get labeled as the "token diversity family." There's one in every organization, the one who's Odd Man Out, the weird specimen held up for curious inspection and subject to morbid and intense questioning. This is not a road that I'm comfortable going down.

So I'm trying to think of something else. It'll be cold, and winter, but it won't have the decency to snow. So I thought perhaps we could make those little craft snowmen I have all the stuff for, you know, with the cute hats and--

...uh...

Oh, I'm an idiot.

This violates several basic Boy Rules. It's a craft, and it's cute. From a great website on Scouting:

Generally speaking, boys like certain kinds of projects. Here are some basic rules to help you choose projects that will go over well and contribute to their growth:

What will it do? Boys like to make things that do something. Pinewood derby cars, boats, kites and catapults do things. They run, fly, throw things or explode. Girls, at this age, are already aware of form and beauty - boys usually don't care. Watch boys build things. They spend most of their time playing with a half finished model, visualizing what it will do. What it looks like is low priority.

What is it made of? Wood is good. Large is better. Collect large cartons, scrap wood and other similar stuff. He needs to learn to manipulate material. Start thinking of the help you will need to handle all this - let parents know you will need them.

What is the process? Using tools is usually popular. Do things that are as messy as you can stand. Big painting projects, papier mache and cooking all fit this category. Dainty and cute are not going to make it here.

At this age, building projects help a boy in several ways: it stimulates his imagination, it develops hand-eye coordination, it enhances his ability to go from a mind’s eye view to a physical creation. Use projects to build den game equipment, scenery and costumes for skits, camping gear and den snacks.

Projects are activities where Cub Scouts make things that are useful: that is, the things fly, make a lot of noise, explode or help the Cubs do other neat things.

Do not confuse Projects with craft: making things that are pretty or cute.

Cub Scouts are not into pretty or cute.

OK, OK, scrap the snowmen idea. What else could we do? Something that GOES. That DOES.

Oh! I know! (**waves hand in the air wildly**) Build catapults to launch snowballs?

Does anyone have any idea how hard it is to find plans to do just that?

I mean...I can find plans on how to make tiny catapults (or trebuchets, if you'd rather use that term) out of clothespins. And I can find YouTube footage of bored Army artillery men using shoulder-fired bazookas and...gasoline? Propane?...to launch a snowball 500 feet at 140 mph. But that's a tad much for a bunch of Cub Scouts, don't you think? (blink, blink.)

So. I don't know what else to do. My other options revolve around rockets, and most specifically, Alka-Seltzer tablets and film canisters.

Sigh. I REALLY want to do snowball trebuchets.

Tech Heads and Slick Heads

It's been another insidiously long week.

Not the least of my problems has been...gasp!...my Mac! How COULD it be so?? Well...

They have a new operating system out now, and I've been jazzed about this thing for months. Really. And part of what I love about it is the way it browses files...you literally flip through them as though they were printed sheets of paper. You see previews of them. That's worth the price of admission right there, because when I have a huge list of files named things like LogoA, LogoB, and LogoC, I can't recall which one I named which after a good six weeks. So.

I was one of the first in line to get the new OS when it came out. I had Leopard. Life was good.

I installed it. And it was still good.

And then came disappointment #1: It refused to open InDesign. That's a fairly big deal...I work a great deal with InDesign, I NEED that program! Oh, but, surely they'll come out with a patch for that, right? I'll just wait a week or so, and all will be well. I checked lots of the online forums and such, and apparently I'm not the only one with this issue. LOTS of designers were caught off-guard by this, and while a few managed to overcome it, there were others who were staring at hard deadlines with no software to run. Bad.

Disappointment #2, it wouldn't preview InDesign documents in the nice visual way I was looking for, nor would it preview .eps files. Another big hit. But at least it read the others, the other programs were working OK.

Then it wouldn't allow me to post to Blogger, which seemed just plain stupid. How could it possibly interfere with THAT?

In desperation, and per the advice of much of the Mac community and my own dear prof, I decided to ... gulp ... erase the entire laptop (AIEEEE!), do a clean install of the OS (instead of just an upgrade) and reinstall the software. So I blew away the whole thing, did the clean install, only to find that NONE of the specialized software I have would run!! Doug was sure he could fix that, it would just be a few days away, and I continued to plug away at it, slowly restoring my data from the network.

The final, fatal blow came when I tried to download the synch software for the Treo 650. (I am not yet lucky or rich enough to have an iPhone, you see.) There isn't a version for Leopard. I do a few searches. And souls more brave than I are reporting that if you attempt to synch using the previous version (which was my next move), the OS tended to happily blow away all your data off the phone for you. Possibly porting it into the Calendar application, but if you synch again, it blows it away from both the phone and the machine. Lost. Gone. Forever.

Well, that's it. No software, no blog, no contacts, no events. That pretty much boils my machine down to an internet/email machine, and while that's all good and fine, it isn't very productive.

In retrospect, I gotta say that the new OS is great...the previews are wonderful, my Unix-guru spouse says that the underpinnings of the software are SO MUCH stronger and better than the previous version, it's just simply that either the OS isn't ready for prime time, or the rest of the world hasn't caught up with it yet.

So I spent the evening yet again blowing away the hard drive, and installing the old OS all over again. Hooking up the mail settings, getting it to connect to the wireless. Doug will have to put it back on the network, I don't know the admin crap to do all that. I still have the disk, obviously, and I think we're going to install it on the Mini and use that as a test machine, and wait another 4-6 months until the right number of patches come out to make this work well. I just caught it on the bleeding edge.

So those are my woes for the computer. I also see that the hard drive failure for these particular machines is horribly high...the read/write head tends to come off and carve deep gouges into the HD plate, and there's a real data loss risk. Backups now go from a nice idea to an absolute necessity. The company will take care of the machine if it crashes and dies, but they can't restore your data if it isn't backed up. Joy.

Let's see...what else did we do? We went to Frontiers and learned a lot about bats. Both kids had a cold at the time, but they fared alright. We went to a park and tasted some things that bats pollinate for us (guava juice, papayas, bananas, cashews, etc.), we read the book Stellaluna, we answered lots of true-or-false questions about bats (like they are NOT dirty and they're way too smart to get caught in your hair), we made some paper bats, we nailed together wooden bat houses, we learned that mommy bats find their baby bats by smell. They had a neat exercise where there was a plate full of cottonballs soaked with different scents/perfumes. You picked one and sniffed it and then went to a big basket FULL of cottonballs and sniffed each one to try and find a match, so you were "finding your baby bat." And we rented a zoocase from the zoo all about bats, too.

We went to our Den Meeting tonight, and apparently the theme was Indian Nation, so the boys made "vests" out of grocery bags which they crumpled, cut and drew on, and they made feather headdresses. They talked about what the plains indians in particular lived in, what they hunted, how they hunted. They had a set of deer antlers that they clacked together, and explained that Native Americans used to bring a set of antlers out with them and clack them together like that to simulate the sound of deer fighting in order to attract a buck to their hiding place. (And news to me, but female deer are apparently called "slick heads" in hunting parlance.) And the Den Leader who is the hunter brought out a first-grader-sized long bow and set of arrows. To say that the boys were excited is a complete understatement. They were nuts. So they took turns taking the kids out, and they shot the arrows at a cardboard box "target" in the yard, and after everyone had gone, they brought them inside around the table and said, "OK, so now you guys have gone out hunting with the bows and arrows, and you shot the deer, so now you're sitting around the teepee getting ready to eat." At which point one of our Den Leaders pulls out a bag of DEER JERKY. (Uh....let's see, cloven hoof, chews its cud...yes, deer are kosher. Eat up.) I didn't know if David was going to come unglued or not. He sort of has a "thing" for deer. And strangely enough, we talked the other day about how deer were probably kosher and we could eat them...it's just that it was kind of unusual to do so, and not many people did, but that it was acceptable. He shook his head and didn't like the idea much and I shrugged. So I wondered what he would do. All the boys were yelling, "Is this REAL? Is that REAL?"
"Yes, it's real deer meat."
"For REAL?"
"Yes, for real. That's really deer."
David took a piece and examined it. It didn't have antlers or soft, dewy eyes, so he took a tentative bite. His eyebrows went up. He took another bite.
He ended up eating the whole thing.
My favorite part was the fact that they passed out Capri Sun fruit juice, deer jerky and Cheez-Its.

*** ROTFLOL!!! ***

Deer and Cheez-Its!!! HA! Authentic Native American cuisine! HA HA HA HA!!!!

*sniff!* *wheeze!* Oh, my. I know, I'm just spoiled because of the buffalo stew they used to give us for Day on the Prairie and such.

I've been giggling all night over this. I poked Doug in the ribs and said, "HA! That sounds like a bunch of men, doesn't it? 'Man, I'm sure glad my wife is back. Been livin' on deer, Cheez-Its and beer for a week now!'"
"And Oreos," he said. "Don't forget Oreos."
"Mmmm. Dunked in beer. Aren't those the four food groups?"
"Oh, of course!"
"No, wait! The four food groups are deer, beer, Cheez-Its and Twinkies!"
"TWINKIES! Oh, that's even better than the Oreos!"

Ah, and for a grand finale, one of the Leaders ("against his better judgement") pulled out several segments of PVC pipe, gave one to each boy, and then they talked about hunting even smaller animals, and how you couldn't use a bow and arrow. With a small bag of mini marshmallows in hand, he then proceeded to introduce the concept of a blow gun to the boys. Have you ever been in a room of 10 little boys with hollow plastic pipes and marshmallow ammunition? They even had a target set up inside, and they had a GREAT time! They ended the meeting, and even did another round of arrow shooting for whoever wanted to go again. David thought this was SO fun, and he was really glad to get to do it again. "Last time I shot the arrow at the ground," he said rather sadly. But with LOTS of help from the Den Leader (these guys are SO patient!) he landed the arrow into the target with a loud "THWACK!" and the other Leader dropped down to his knees and shouted "All RIGHT, David, gimme five!" He did, too, and you could see him just about to burst with pride. (So...who wants to take bets on the appearance of a future post in regard to long bows and David's dad? Anyone?)

Oh yeah! And the Den Leader has a dog...a HUGE dog. David saw a segment on Ruff Ruffman (television show for kids) which showed dog sledding, and this sent him off on a tangent about wanting a "Husky dog" ever since. Well. The Den Leader HAS a giant HUSKY. David was estatic. "Mom! A Husky dog!"