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Author: Dave
Just getting lazy
Watching the cartoons yesterday morning I couldn’t help but feel that Matel was just getting lazy. Their new offering was simply called “2009 Holiday Barbie (wrapped in a pink shiny bow)”. No “santas little helper Barbie” or “Modern Manhattan socialite Barbie”. Just an it’s Christmas and we should have something new for you to buy, but honestly we just can’t be bothered. Now obviously it’s no skin off my nose, as I have no desire or plan to buy a Barbie, let alone a let’s-cash-in-on-Christmas Barbie, but surely the customers who do want one deserve a bit more.
Housemaid
For some reason Charlotte has developed a real fascination with cleaning. She loves pushing the broom around. She loves reaching up and pulling the dish cloth off the bench and then proceeds to wipe down her plate, her table, the kitchen cupboards, the floor, daddy, pretty much anything else she can reach. She even tries her hand at loading and unloading the dishwasher, although we obviously have been trying to discourage this a bit given her perpensity for trying to grab knives out of the cutlery holder by the blades.
Overall we’re not displeased, both being of the opinion that she should do chores when she’s old enough, but we’re a bit mystefied as to where she got this all from since we didn’t teach it to her.
Helpful
This morning Charlotte was feeling a little under the weather, but not so much that she didn’t want to help with making the bed
The toothening
Charlotte appears to be going through another round of teething and has had the last day and a half off daycare being generally grumpy and drooling everywhere. Today she is a bit happier, but no sign of the offending chompers emerging, and ongoing floods of slobber so I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet.
Yesterday she didn’t even want to eat bananas, although she did still want to check how tasty and chewey the gravel outside was, so she can’t be too bad.
Anyway. Between Charlotte and the show day public holiday today I’ve had a pretty easy week. Far cry from the hecticness of the fitlrst half of the year.
Theories of evolution
For as long as there have been archeologists there has been debate about how fire was first created, however watching Charlotte rubbing and banging things together it all seems pretty obvious to me.
Currently she really just starting to get highly mobile and highly curious, and her scientific repertoire of investigative methods currently contains:
1. Lick it or chew on it
2. Shake it vigorously
3. Drop it
4. Rub it againt something else, or try and smack it and something else together.
This last one provides me with amusing parallels to the scientific process in the game evil genius, where your science minions wander around trying to find things that they can combine to make a new thing out of. Although the depicted process is slightly more involved, it still in essence boils down to smack two things together (and shoot them with your giant laser) and see if they make something new.
So I can completely understand how kids could have rubbed two things together and discovered fire, in every aspect apart from their 7 second attention span…
Anomymous Proximity
One of the wierd things I have noticed with facebook is the way you get this “I wonder whether x ran into y” thought when you see that two of your friends are visiting the same place at the same time. For some reason it doesn’t immediately occur to you that just because you are friends with them doesn’t mean that they actually know each other at all, and are essentially just two strangers who are connected solely by two degrees of David Ramsay (with an obvious nod to Kevin Bacon).
Either way I hope they both enjoyed Darwin…
The day three phenomenon
Well I’ve been back at work for three days after our holiday to the Red Centre (more about that later, hopefully with pictures, if I get organised) and I’ve been reminded of how my brain deals with this.
On day 1 the thought process is “Oh no, I am back at work”.
On day 2 it more like “Actually, it’s quite nice to be back at work”
And on day 3 it’s “I wonder how I can arrage it so that I can get paid all the time, but only go to work if I feel like it…”
(Unfortunately flexible work hours don’t work too well with health care…).
Haunting
The other day I came across a story on the internet about a couple of Italian teenagers in the 1950s who used to listen in on the American and Russian space ships as they flew overhead.
They claimed that (among other things) they had heard several unannounced Russian space failures, including one ship that unintentionally left orbit and headed off into space never to return, and a couple where something went wrong and the cosmonauts appeared to perish in orbit.
It was all a little unnerving to think about it too much. Not necessarily unexpected what else we know about the Communist government’s general history and behaviour or the problems with the Russian space program that we do know about.
Overall the story is a good short read though.
Brisbane academy of gastronomic art
In the last week or so Charlotte has latched onto the dual ideas that (1) food can be something to play with, as well as to eat, and (2) this feeding malarkey doesn’t look too hard, and dammit if dad can feed me that I can sure as hell give it a try as well.
The result is that to varying degrees she is not letting us just feed her directly, but rather insisting on picking up the food with her finger, or (more messily, strangely) trying to use the spoon herself. Now given that she’s transitioning into chunky finger food type meals (perhaps unexpectedly she quite likes broccoli) away from “You’d better not ask what’s in that” mush, the potential for food spreadage is theoretically reduced, but not enough that the overall process isn’t creating a fair bit more work for me at the end of every dinner.
So for the next little while at least we get to roll up her sleeves and ours, and spend the evening making enquiries into the canvas properties of high chair trays, the aesthetic qualities of spaghetti and pre-chewed potato, and the role of passing cats as professional art critics (I don’t know art, says Jack, but I know what tastes good when it’s dropped).