Parentheticals

Sara was extremely fussy last night. She kept waking up and crying. Either she is getting new teeth (which she seems to get in droves (which would explain the amount that she seemed to have been affected by it)), or her mild appearing diaper rash (which doesn't seem that bad) is bothering her. This morning I picked her up and brought her into the bed. Alison talked to her. "Is your bum hurting?" "hurt?" "does your bum say 'ouch'" "ouch?" Sara sat there a while thinking and then said "tombé" (which means 'fallen' in french (and which we use whenever she falls and gets hurt)) in an explanatory sort of voice. She has been so talkative lately. Mostly it is babbling, but she also mimics a lot and says real words too. Rea is also improving her ability to talk. Yesterday Alison was changing Sara's diaper and Rea said "Rea is doing something very kind.  Rea is aiding mommy in dealing with the poopy couche...

This week I have been working on making my dancing robots website easier for first time players. I had a lot of people try the game out, but very few gave me any feedback. I have tried to make the game easier for random people to play. If you have tried the game before, but were scared off by a bad interface, please try it again and tell me if it is any better. The remainder of the blog post was written by Alison (because she was ending her nap and didn't want to get up so I asked her to write something for me.) Sara has rediscovered our doll stroller and is pushing it everywhere.  Today she fell down while pushing it with a load of toothbrushes and started crying.  Mike went to her sympathetically, bent down to cuddle her, and gave her a big zerbert on the armpit.  She laughed and laughed, and when he asked, "Do you feel better?" she answered, "Better!"  So that seems to be the way to cheer her up. Mike gets money from his work if he exercises every day,...

Today marks the fourth birthday of our family. We have celebrated as is fitting by making quesadillas and drinking carbonated apple juice. We also dropped the kids off at the Poulsons house for a romantic overnight getaway. I have made posts about my Dancing robots game on both BoardGameGeek.com and bay12games, and have not really gotten a good response from either. I am apparently not a very good salesman. All I am asking is that some people play the game and tell me how it went. I suppose that it isn't very important in the long run, but it is a bit discouraging. I would honestly prefer people to play the game and tell me that it sucks to not even reading my post. With all of the recent rain mushrooms have been cropping up all over the neighborhood. I found eight or so field mushrooms, multiple rings of scotch bonnets in various yards, dozens of mica caps (even a few in some rock gardens), some inedible shelf mushrooms (which I can't remember the name of, but were in ...

Andrea believes Mickey Mouse to be a bear. We have not disabused her of this notion because it is not really important. It has been raining on and off since last night. There is one tree stump on our road that is infested with some type of mushroom (my initial inspection would seem to indicate that they are the same deliquescent mushrooms that are growing in our front yard (you know, the ones that are impossible to pick at the right time because they become inedible hours after they have sprung up.)) We have been enjoying the rain. If it rained all of the time Utah would be much higher on my list of nicest places to live. Rea has wanted to go to the elementary school playground a lot recently. She loves playing on the play equipment. Alison has decided that Rea needs to make goals for herself, so Rea has decided that she wants to learn how to run all the way to the school before the end of the month. So far she can run about half the way there. We told her that when she met her goa...

This week Alison took the girls to the zoo to visit with grandma Poulson. They stayed for five hours and Sara said a lot of animal names while they were there. Rea overcame some of her fear of talking to complete strangers and asked questions to the zoo attendants about various animals. The elephants were the most popular animal, but the giraffes were a close second. I have recently been thinking about setting up my Dancing Robots website to run on a Windows Azure server. This might allow me to scale it up if the thing ever becomes popular, but I haven't decided for sure if I want to figure it all out. I have been having a lot of people test out my site. I am really feeling like I am getting close to releasing it to the public. All I have to do is to kill down the bugs a bit and hold it stable for a week or so without finding any new bugs. We played a 5 player game on Sunday (which is the max that is playable with a normal deck, but I decided to make the computer play with a ...