Thing Alphabet

Caleb and I finished a project we've been working on for several weeks. It's a Thing Alphabet...and I think once you see the pictures, that is all the description it needs :)

Funny Things Caleb is Saying These Days...and Annalise too

Caleb has moved way past me being able to identify how many words he knows. It's amazing to me that about a year ago I took a video of him singing Happy Birthday to Rob's dad and all he got out was "Happy...Paw-paw!" And now...the other day in the car he asked "What do [g]overments do?"

Well lately, Caleb's big thing is gender awareness. Not his own, he has no problem with that, he just wants to know everything's gender. He really surprises me in that he almost never gets it wrong on people, but he insists on knowing if trains or balloons or oatmeal or dogs are boys or girls.

He also constantly asks me what words start with, if people eat birds (not chickens, mama, outdoor birds), if snakes can eat people, where the sewer is (that is where peepee goes after you flush), where cars live, and who threw that random piece of garbage on the ground. He is still a little hard to understand for most people, which I find kind of amusing. He asks other adults questions all the time only to get "that's interesting" answers. It's kind of like being fluent in a very obscure foreign language. He'll say something, it will be completely obvious that whoever he's talking to didn't understand at all, but completely clear to me. I haven't done this recently, but once a while back, I purposely talked back to him the way he talks and he couldn't understand me! Ha!


Annalise, well she isn't really talking yet, she is quite a babbler though. But she has started enjoying the attention she gets from people at the grocery store, so instead of looking away in a sob, she's started smiling and laughing which delights our fellow shoppers and is making her come out of her shell.

Things to Do...

Before Leaving Ft. Myers...

1. Clean the oven (ugh ugh, a thousand times ugh)
2. Un-baby proof the house
3. Clean aftershave off of the wall (a bottle burst while we were in Miami for fund drive week)
4. Eat all the food in the house (hey we've got 2 weeks to do it!)
5. Remove every black dog hair (I'm up for a challenge)
6. Go to the beach at least once more...dig for seashells and listen to the kids giggle, stand in the surf and let the water wash the sand away so my feet sink into the ground, and just enjoy how lovely it all is.

Miami Tour

I've been thinking today about things I want to do before we move away from Miami. Granted, we don't know when that will be, just that it's an objective for the near future. Anyway, as much as I'm not especially crazy about living and raising children here, there are a few things I think I'll miss and want to do at least one more time. Like...

1. Ride the Metro Mover
2. Go to Bayside
3. Eat a hotdog from a lunch cart downtown
4. Swim at Matheson Hammocks park
5. Go to Pinecrest Gardens
6. Go to RSMAS
7. Walk around UM and visit the BCM
8. Eat fried plantains
9. Drive or walk down Ocean Drive
10. Wade in the water at Crandon Beach
11. Buy churros from a street vendor
12. Eat roti and drink a Champagne Kola

(Translations - plantains...aren't they getting more "normal"?...well if not, they are like big starchy bananas that you cannot eat raw, more like a potato that way, they can be sweet or salty. When they are sweet they are cut into pieces and are brown on the outside and most people who've never had them, don't want to try them, because they look like....well, poop. BUT THEY ARE DELICIOUS!!! Ok, so churros - sort of like a cinnamon donut, but straight. Roti is Indian food, but here it's Trini food, it's like a square burrito with spiced meat and vegetables inside. Champagne Kola is a Jamaican soda.)

I'm sure there are other things too. Sometimes I look up and realize I haven't left Cutler Ridge/Bay in weeks!

Did you know that in the Ft. Myers area there are a lot of Germans? And we saw an authentic Italian deli, I'm definitely going to have to go there to see if they carry those obscure Italian ingredients Giada de Laurentiis is always calling for. Isn't Florida a diverse place?!

In Miami In Miami In Miami

Soooooo the hurricane that wasn't a hurricane convinced us to travel to Miami. We were only going to stay for the storm, but will stay in town for "radio business" for a few days. It had been that we had so little stuff in Ft. Myers that I was always missing things in Miami, but now we've moved so much over there, I'm missing things here. But not for long because we will be packing up our earthly possessions and bringing them back to Miami the first week in September.

Long term, we are planning to move over to the west coast. Obviously I don't have dates yet, but just so you know - the west coast is a much more desirable vacation destination (assuming you aren't interested in going clubbing, pirate radio, or Cuban cuisine). I know my dad is interested in visiting more often.

And after being out of our house for 5 months, we had NOTHING to eat except a half full box of crackers and some baking chocolate and I've managed to go to the grocery store 3 times in 24 hours. Also being out of my house for 5 months, I've noticed several things I really like about this place...at least by comparison to the place where we're staying in Ft. Myers. For one, our A/C absolutely rocks! I love our brown couch and our dishwasher works. The one big negative is that our washer and dryer are in the garage, which is inconvenient after having in the kitchen.

Sorry for boring no-pictures. I left the camera behind.

Fay on the Way

Just your typical day before the hurricane in Florida...I certainly do not want to be involved in a fender bender with this guy:

A Few Pretty Much Unrelated Pictures

Caleb's secret homemade recipe:


Tiny banana...Big cat


She offers me her mostly eaten food too...


The joy of Christmas morning must be at least 50% in the unwrapping of presents. Sometimes Caleb asks me to wrap up his toys just so he can open them again. I guess I started this when he was fussy one afternoon and I wanted to do something off the wall to change his attitude. He likes for me to wrap all the trains and then he guesses which one is which and opens them to see if he's right.


How precious!


AaaaaahChoooooo!


Under 42 inches, but taller than last year :)


Did you notice that in 3 of 4 pictures, Caleb is wearing a blue striped shirt? This shirt has taken the place of the red striped shirt. He is completely obsessed with it. To avoid a meltdown, I sometimes let him wear it 2 or 3 days in a row if it isn't excessively dirty. I'm sure that is why he wasn't wearing it in the cat picture.

TP Bowling

And Swimming the Half Meter Freestyle...

Since it is so blazing hot and since neither of our kids can swim, I asked Rob to bring our wading pool with him when he made his last trip to Miami.

For some reason I envisioned myself relaxing in a lawn chair, watching my two darlings splash in the water.

Instead, Caleb insists that Annalise never wants to be in the pool (he always seems to know what she wants better than she does, I'm really interested to see how this will change once she starts talking.)

Annalise likes splashing, but is much more interested in all those tasty rocks outside.

And guess who else just insists on coming with us to bark at invisible cats and get his leash line wrapped around the cement flower pot.

Don't get me wrong, it is fun, but it's not relaxing!

Wordless Wednesday

Olympic Inspiration

Well the Olympics have started again. And I probably wouldn't have noticed except that Coca Cola had a whole series of cans gearing up for the Olympics. Actually I only buy them where there is a really good sale, so we only ended up with the Thai and Olympic cans, but it did inspire me to do some thinking.

On the Olympic can it says, "Coca Cola" means "delicious happiness" in Mandarin Chinese. This is what is looks like on the current Chinese can:


This is what it looked like when I went to China (1998 & 2000):

When I was in China, they told me it meant "Happy Mouth" and it isn't so much that Coca Cola means "Happy Mouth" or "Delicious Happiness", but "Kuh Co Kuh Luh" means that. The symbol shaped like a box means mouth. I suppose it might also mean delicious, I think I remember them telling us that, in another context, it could also mean door.

As a literate person, anytime you take a language class, they start with the same sorts of things - basic greetings, survival words, etc., and how to read in that language. But pre-literate children don't learn languages that way. They gravitate to the words that represent the things they like the most - Mama, Dada, baby, ball, coke.

And I find it very interesting that, although I never took a Chinese language course and cannot read Chinese, I know how to read Coca Cola in Chinese. It's interesting because, Caleb has no trouble reading this:


Of course, he also thinks this says "Coca Cola"!

Cute Pictures...Embarrassing Memories

Lately I keep remembering things that happened many moons ago that at the time were very embarrassing. Four incidents in particular. Two were not funny then and are not funny now, but the other two are funny now and were pretty funny at the time too.

The first not funny one is from when I was teaching at the little Christian school in Homestead. I taught 1st grade most of the time, but the first semester I taught middle and high school English and I had never taught before and was always finding things very clear in my head that were completely muddled when I tried to impress them upon my students. One thing was the value of points on tests. My high school had graded things in fractions - 12/20 for example - and this made perfect sense to me. But this school graded everything on a percent scale, which I was always forgetting. So I gave a test to the sophomores and told them in advance that the essay question would be worth ten points - my thought 10 of 20. It just so happened that the principle's son was in that class and he thought 10 of 100, didn't want to write the essay and blew it off figuring he'd get a 90. Oh boy, so after I gave him an F, his mom (the principal) came down to my room. I remember her saying that she needed to take of her principal hat and put on her parent hat, but I can't remember how we resolved the whole issue.

The second not funny one is from when I worked as a legal secretary. Actually the job was for the receptionist, but during my interview, the office manager told me they really needed another secretary and long story short - one of the underling secretaries got de-moted to receptionist and I was not her favorite person. So of course, she quit and I had to be the receptionist until they hired another one. (As a side, it is cruel to have a non-Spanish speaker answer phones in Miami.) One day for whatever reason I called this woman and somehow she was not who I intended to call. She was a super difficult person and I got very flustered and hung up on her without saying where I was calling from - she checked her caller ID and called me back and told me off. Yipee. I figured I would lose my job after that, but when my boss found out, he blew it off because he seemed to think that particular woman was annoying.

Of course the funny ones are from college! Every year our BSU (Baptist Student Union) had a Christmas banquet and everyone dressed up formally for the party. One particular year (either my junior or senior year) everyone seemed to be in an extra festive mood and one of the girls decided to have a party the following weekend - and she said it would also be fancy dress, which my roommate Autumn and friend Dana and I took seriously. Autumn, Dana and I dressed formal dresses and showed up at the party to find...everyone (EVERYONE) else in blue jeans. The best thing about all this was that I was not alone!!! And I think we may have left extraordinarily early. We may have gone back dressed down, but I evidently I blocked that part out!

Finally, this is my favorite, so I hope it makes sense! Our main dining hall on campus was always having special meals and one of the biggest was Mardi Gras. They really went all out. A few weeks after Mardi Gras, someone was looking through the campus newspaper and pointed out some quotes taken from the dining hall comment box. One of them read: "Mardi Gras was one of the greatest experiences of my life!" Which was hilarious until I saw that the person quoted was me! I sooooooo did not write that! No one admitted to signing my name to the card, and the whole thing remains a mystery to this day!