To former colleague Elio Fernandes.
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Eating At The Table
As mentioned previously, Henry has joined us at the table, and after about a week it seems to have stuck. In fact, he thought it was high time. It’s as if he’s always sat there.
It’s a little crowded, and tricky when the girls are eating something he can’t have, but we’ve done pretty well.
It’s astonishing just how much he loves chili, which in the last incarnations doesn’t seem to have bothered him at all. Other than spices and maybe brown sugar, that’s not a surprise, and any problem should have been modest anyway. More concerning is that one of us touched him without washing peanut butter off our hands and he got temporary, fairly dramatic hives where the presumed skin contact with peanut butter happened.
He has tried dried papaya with no apparent problem. Forget what else there’s been new. He thinks pasta is the greatest, even plain. Oh, he’s been eating a lot of homemade applesauce and some slivers of peeled Macintosh apple. Gave him slivers of raw carrot the other day. If I buy hot dogs (decent all beef ones, checking ingredients), he eats an entire one as part of a meal now.
We had an excess chicken breast thawed the other day, so I boiled it to make chicken salad the next day. Since he can’t have mayonaise, I made him some with canola oil, plus celery salt, garlic powder and poultry seasoning, which I also used in the other batch. He demolished a thick half-sandwich and it was sad I’d not saved him extra. I’ll have to try the oil trick with tuna, if there’s a sale and I can restock it. Looks like it’s one of those foods that’s gone up lately. The amount of oil is enough to moisten and make it act like it would with mayo binding it, but not enough to make it seem oily. Like an invisible binder.
More pictures sometime today, probably. Need to do stuff. It’s a weird day because I had a not-interview at 4:30 AM. That is, it was a see the operation and if you’re not scared then come apply for this part time, wee hours distribution center job. I napped subsequently, but not well. When Deb gets home, I’ll run down and apply, then it’s a background check, interview some morning at 2 AM, and presumably starting after that. Time to feed the kids, start a pot roast for supper in the crockpot, and do some other things that’ll feel useful.
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Happy Birthday
To blogger Eric.
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Happy Birthday
To Alexandria “Lexi” Thomas, who is 3 today.
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Test
This is a test post using BlogDesk.
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Happy Birthday
To former blogger MedicMom.
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Happy Birthday
To blogger Anita Pomerantz.
I scanned in two of Sadie’s latest drawings…
The top one is me handing her a lollipop.
The second one started as a blank on which I had written “Henry” and drawn a circle, before whatever interrupted my session with him. Starting with the circle, Sadie drew, left to right, herself with a pink sippy cup with a pink lid, Valerie with a pink cup with a purple lid, Henry with a blue cup with purple lid, Deb with a blue cup and me with a yellow cup. She drew the grass and our blue house, sun and blue sky, and, having seen me draw “m” birds exactly once when I’d have told you she was paying no attention, a bunch of birds. I think the rest was practice making letters, the extent of which I’d not noticed until I scanned it.
She’s done some cool stuff on the computer, more patterns and shades and stuff than identifiably drawn items, but mostly that gets blown away without being saved. I made her copies of these and put them on their computer (we have them sharing a single one now, rather than the overkill of three or even two, after Henry killed Sadie’s and Valerie’s started dying a natural death) so if she wants she can modify them there, or be inspired by them. She’s excited. I suspect Santa has in mind the possibility of a kid’s easel kind of thing for her this year, but we’ll have to see.
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Happy Birthday
To Lyle Reid, who is 34 today.
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Happy Birthday
To blogger Julie the Irish Lass.
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I Guess Well
I have no idea how I scored so high. Did I really read that much Calvin & Hobbes?
Your result for How good of a Calvinball player are you?…
Your Grade= A+ Good knowledge and excellent strategy!
63% Game_Knowledge and 84% Game_Skill!
Amazing. You are part of the 4.3% of the population that landed in this category.* You know the game and its history well, and you did amazingly well when it came to playing Calvinball strategically.
This suggests that you probably have a natural talent in Calvinball. You have learned that the trick to doing well in Calvinball is not brute strength, but quick wit. With your natural ability you could go far.
You are definitely already talented enough to beat Calvin. A match versus the quick-witted tiger would be close. I’m going to give you the edge, but his superior knowledge of the game might propel him to victory.
* This is a made up number.
Take How good of a Calvinball player are you? at HelloQuizzy
Via Leslie
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Happy Birthday
To blogger Laurence Simon.
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Happy Birthday
To Phillip Zannini, AKA @phillymac, who is 48 today.
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Happy Birthday
To Joe Lore, my favorite computer parts sales guy.
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The Little Ones
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Being Four
I’ll be interested to see how much it sticks, but last night I taught Sadie about digits, how every number is made up of 0 through 9, how to count to 100, and about using fingers as a math aid. She was fascinated.
So I get up today from a night at the bladder races and find that the rotating links ads at one of our sites are broken after recent hosting changes. Looks like probably it’s a matter of a change to php.ini that bars includes, on which the ads depend or they just display as errors.
I’m here troubleshooting that, because it’s urgent not to lose the revenue that specifically pays most of our electric arrears each month and, when that’s paid off, will nicely cover something else. Aside from being my primary machine, oldest or not (well, not the oldest, but the oldest that started out as a home machine and has not already been retired or reassigned), the one I used for troubleshooting conveniently has all my info and saved logins and such on it, so I gravitate there. Only to have it repeatedly turn itself off.
It used to do that while I used Google Earth, so I removed that. I was suspicious it might be specific web code, and maybe it still is, since it only happens when I am on the web, but then if the monitor is on and I am using the machine (which generally stays of 7×24), I usually am on the web. It is interesting that it never seems to turn itself off while it’s on and nothing is running overnight.
It did that three times close together this morning, so I’ve decided it probably needs a power supply. Sadly, I no longer have an excess of those around, but I should be able to grab an old one from a machine that isn’t actively beinbg used. Meanwhile, I e-mailed support from this machine, since Google tells me probably the web host needs to fix the setting. It’s the same account where Deb’s blog disappeared as an add-on domain after they changed things, so not a surprise for more to be wrong.
Hopefully the PHP thing will be fixed soon, and I needed to do hardware work anyway. I’ll probably feed the kids lunch first, then clear off the table, retest my niece’s machine, order parts for it, then work on my machine. Saving the old power supply in case it is software causing the shut-offs. Or other hardware, since it could be the motherboard. I joked that maybe it was tin whiskers.
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Happy Birthday
To former colleague Dave McNeill.
Henry officially ate at the table with us for the first time tonight. He did great! That means he also had a plate, just like the girls, and a spork.
Basically we got the “duh, what were you waiting for” reaction from him.
He’s using the booster, which we took out a few weeks ago in anticipation. When it’s not being used as such, they use it as a tiny chair or stepstool. It’s a squeeze, but we managed to get all three kids along one side of the table, so it needn’t pull out from the wall. He sits between me and Sadie. She’s so excited to have him there, it doesn’t matter that she’s in the middle.
So now we’ll clean up the high chair, hang onto it a few days or so in case, then it’ll be up for grabs or off to the dump (it’s seen better days, having been a hand-me-down even for Sadie, though still functions). That’ll free up a spot for some other furniture, like the utility table we used to put there. Not that it has much utility until they are all old enough to allow the storage baskets under the table to be used, but hey. We’ll gain a ton of storage space in a couple years, maybe less.
He’s also dead set on using the potty sooner rather than later. The girls were never as aggressive about it, as far as I can recall.
Next thing you know he’ll be sleeping in the bedroom with the other kids. He’s borderline ready for being able to wake and wander out of the room without it being a big deal. It’s more of a problem that he’s an agent of chaos if, say, he joins them for bedtime stories. That still keeps everyone awake longer. He’ll get there though. The three of them make a great team. In separate rooms they all woke up around the same time today, and when Sadie was sad and cold, he leaned against me and put on a show to make her laugh. You could see him studying her reaction, processing the feedback and adjusting what he did accordingly.
I’m probably forgetting some benchmarks, and didn’t even bother to get into the current food and medical stuff. He went nuts for lima beans tonight, and thinks graham crackers are one of the best things ever, for instance. He seems to be able to eat canned peaches in heavy syrup safely. Eating several peeled green seedless grapes bothered him a bit, but not so much that he can’t have a couple grapes like that if the girls are eating them. Last week he thought the beefy chili I made was awesome, and he seemed to tolerate it well in modest amounts, but I think there was a delayed reaction to the spices and it’s one of the things that in the past week have had him a bit on the red-faced side more than I’d prefer to see. Overall, he’s already grown less sensitive. If it weren’t for the emergency room visit for the eggs, we’d almost be downright relaxed about food issues. Too bad about the eggs though.
That second picture made me think of my paternal grandfather so strongly I went and found one to include here (no larger one, had to size up as it was).
