We probably get that comment half the time we are out and about with our children. I’m just not sure how to interpret the comment. If they were my biological children, I guess they’re saying, “Nice choice of a mate, your genes really work well together.” But what’s the point in telling me I have beautiful children; I had very little to do with it (except maybe the hair styling and Susan picked out the clothes). Maybe I’m not obsessed with beauty enough (although I know they are beautiful). Maybe I’m self-consciously worried the commenters are racist and saying “Your children are so beautiful….for black people” since more often than not it’s a white woman saying it. Perhaps I’m just conscious of the fact that they are adopted and I’m afraid they’re saying, “Well, you lucked out in the adoption lottery.”

I don’t know, but in case you hadn’t guessed by now, it kind of bugs me.  But alas, I just reply, “Thank you,” and move on.

Stepping down.

I’m trying to create a new header for the blog. I really like this font:

But I can’t figure out what it is. Anyone have any clue? Anyone have any other suggestions on a similar font (I like how to Th and Fl stick together)?

In case your thinking, “then how did you paste it in there?” It’s from the dashboard of wordpress and I took a snapshot of the screen. I tried to copy and paste the text into MS Word, but it guessed it was Lucida Grande, which it’s not. I can even copy/paste it into this post:

On The Fly

But the only HTML tag (when I switch to the HTML editor) is H1, which isn’t very useful, now is it. <EDIT> and when I now look at the post, it’s not there. But it’s still on the editor, honest.  If you don’t believe me, highlight the blank area above.

Perhaps if you figure it out for me, I’ll make you a badge that you can put on your blog (right after I make the new header).

We went to our first birthday party this weekend.  What’s the protocol for 4 year-olds birthdays?  We brought the whole family and stayed the entire time (but ate our own food).  As was expected, Estifanos only interacted with the birthday party about half of the time.  It’s pretty clear that 4 year-olds don’t get much out of having their friends at birthday parties, so we’re sticking to our plan of having a family only party for E. next month.

Things I learned this weekend as a (rather new) parent:

1. Crayons melt at a temperature between 128-147 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Southern California Santa Annas can cause enough warmth to heat up a car to that temperature, even in October.  Anyone have suggestions on how to get it out of the door handle hole?
3. Chuck E. Cheese is not nearly as obnoxious as I thought.  I’m guessing this has a lot to due to my very low expectations going into the party.  It’s a little overpriced and we’re probably not going to go there very often, but I was remembering a lot of annoying animated characters playing bad music and it turns out that Charles’ band has gotten a lot better.  They mostly played cover tunes which sounded identical to the original artists, so it was not nearly as annoying as I expected.
4. 4 year-olds are scared of the live version of the over-sized mouse.  The whole table freaked out (tears and all) when he came out to wish the birthday girl a happy birthday (good thing we stayed).

Top 5 things categories (because I ended up with too many and couldn’t figure out which ones to delete) I found on the web that I thought you should see:

Sustainability:

• Cool house in the middle of a hill (Hat tip Path to Freedom) – don’t think Susan would let me live in something like this.

Adoption:

• Adoption is coming to Sesame Street Nov 6-7 (Hat tip Birth/First Parent Blog).
• Avery reposts his WIBMAID (Well Intentioned But Misinformed Adoption Ignorance Disorder) post; still funny the second time
• Melisa Fay Greene on NPR’s All Things Considered talks about Madona’s adoption.

Blogging:

• In the spirit of my obsession with my stats, here’s how to get the most out of your digg traffic  (note Digg=reddit for techies)

Halloween:

• Carve a pumpkin on-line (Hat tip Rocks in my dryer)
• LAPD respond to halloween display thinking it’s a real plane crash (pic) (reddit)

Fun with javascript:

• OK, last one, this is really cool. Go to a web page with a lot of images on the screen (Like here if you can’t think of anywhere). Then copy and paste this into the address bar (these guys showed me how):

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName(“img”); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position=’absolute’; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+”px”; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+”px”}R++}setInterval(‘A()’,5); void(0);

It was a rough night. Really, it started when we put the kids to bed. Yordie has been having trouble going to sleep for a couple of weeks now.  I don’t know if it’s that she is getting too much sleep at daycare or what, but more nights than not, she’ll cry as soon as you leave the room.  If you stay in the room, she’ll be quiet, but she’ll just play in her crib and not go to sleep.

So, last night was no exception, except that she was keeping up Estifanos, who normally will fall asleep fairly quickly and sleep through anything.  So we just got her out of her crib and let her hang out with us until she was tired.  Which, of course, caused Estifanos to complain that he couldn’t stay up.  After convincing him (again), that he was a big boy and needed to sleep (and switching him from the top to the bottom bunk), the 3 of us settled in to watch Jericho, now half taped on the DRV.  5 minutes later, Estifanos is up, complaining again.  So Susan goes in and lays down with both of them.  30 minutes later, everyone is finally asleep and we can finish the show.

Fast forward to 5:00 am (I think, or maybe it was 3 or 4…hey, wait, that’s a song), anyway, Yordie gets up, which has been happening 2-3 times a week.  I can’t really settle her down, so I put her in our bed and she settles right down into my spot, while I go to the bathroom (while I’m up).  After getting her moved over, I settle in for the rest of my sleep.  Some time later (now I’m sure this was around 5:00, but I’m not sure how long I’ve slept, thus the uncertainty earlier), Estifanos climbs in bed.  While he’s settling down, he states, “I’m hungry”.  Now I’m a good parent and want to fulfill all my child’s needs, but I would really like my last 36 minutes of sleep thankyouverymuch, and thankfully he took, “it’s night time, we’ll get you breakfast in the morning” for an answer.

So now we’ve got 2 kids, 120 pounds of dog (between the two of them) and the two of us in the bed while I try and get my last little bit of sleep.  So I have to ask, “Do they make double-King beds?”

The Google toolbar works for me:
Now you’re thinking, “my webbrowser already has a search engine built into the toolbar; maybe it even searches Google.” Well this is way more than a search bar. There are so many great things about this add-on but here’s my top few:

• The search engine area guesses what you want as you type (great for people who can’t spell and to add words that might trigger a better search)
• There’s a spell checker (great for people who can’t spell) which allows you to spell check stuff you write on the web (comments, posts to yahoo groups, etc)
• The auto link will find addresses on the web page you’re looking at and make them links to maps (no more copy and paste into google maps in a new tab/browser)
• Highlight search terms – ever do a search, go to a web page, and then are unable to find the information on the web page? This allows you to quickly search the webpage to find the word you used in the search.
• Warns you when you’re about to go to a phishing site (OK, I’ve never actually used this feature since I’m not stupid enough to follow those links, but in case I have a brain fart, it’s there protecting me in the background)

There’s a bunch of other potentially useful stuff, but that’s about all I use it for. It’s available for Internet explorer or Firefox. It works for me.

Susan pointed out that I have no pictures on here and some college friends asked us to e-mail them some, so I’m killing two requests at once. Here they are in no particular order.

In the pool:

Story time:

Yordie’s first night home (don’t worry, we have beds for everyone (actually we have one extra) and they get used almost every night:

Yordie and Nana:

Yes, that’s mom in the back getting squished:

Estifanos and Yordanos helping with the laundry:

This one is kind of old (notice how short Meron’s hair was when she first came home), but I still really like it:

Like father like daughter:

All together:

Next up: Adding an avatar to my profile.  I just need to find the perfect picture…..

Tuesdays seem like as good a day as any to rant, so here it goes:

We moved from the main church to the crying room (a room to the side of the alter with plexiglass between us and “them”) when Yordie started babbling uncontrollably. Actually I’m sure she could control it, she just doesn’t quite understand the request, “Be quiet”, and does it at the most inopportune times. But I digress…

Now, just because the priest and most of the members of the congregation can’t hear you, doesn’t give you the right to let your children do whatever they want. You’re still in church for heaven’s sake! There’s still adults around you trying to listen to the sermon. If your baby starts to cry, take them outside. And, perhaps most important, you can’t let your older kid just play uncontrollably.  If they can’t/won’t pay attention to the priest, have them sit quietly.  Read a book, color, anything but driving a Thomas the Train all over the pew.  Please remember that your seat back is also our kneeler and it’s a little hard for me to convince my kids to pay attention in church when your son is driving his train right past their faces yelling, “It’s mine, don’t touch it, you can’t have it”.

Stepping down now.

Feel free to tell me I’m full of it, or that you agree, just please, say something (comment), so that I know you’re there.

You may have too much stuff from Ikea when you go to put the hex wrench they give you in your tool box and you find a drawer full of them.  But Meron has a nice new desk….which already has crayon writing on it; perhaps white wasn’t the best color to choose, although it does look good with the rest of the furniture in her room.

We went to Sea World on Saturday.  It’s great having annual passes because you can stay for just  a few hours and not feel like you wasted money by not staying from opening to closing.  Plus you don’t end up with overly cranky tired children.

When we decided to become parents, I don’t think I was prepared for this: Children can be so childish.  We had 3 meltdowns before breakfast on Saturday.  I don’t even remember what they were all about (because they were so childish).  I guess this is something you just get used to?  I’ve been trying to see it though their eyes, which helps a little, but sometimes I just want to shout, “GROW UP!!”

I owlhavened myself by submitting one of my posts on reddit.  It caused quite a few hits (even more than Mary mentioning me):

The interesting thing is that I submitted it on 10/21, but got most of my hits on 10/22…actually, that probably has to do with the time frame they use; I think it’s GMT for the stats.  It even caused me to get onto the growing blogs page (scroll to 67), which got me one extra hit.

I’m still getting hits from it, which kind of surprised me since I never got off the new part of reddit (because I didn’t get many votes).  Apparently people look really far down on the new list (there’s been 900+ things submitted since I put my post on there).  I only got 7 votes (4 up and 3 down) which I’m kind of surprised about; I vote up or down for about 50% of the things I read on reddit.  Feel free to go vote for it if you’d like (you’ll have to register, but it’s painless, I don’t think they even ask for an e-mail).

Not sure if people stayed and looked around or just went back to reddit.  I guess we’ll see if the stats keep up.

I assume it’s normal to be obsessed with stats when you start a blog?