Tonight, before bed, my daughter asked me if she could have some cheese.  I said okay and got out some co-jack (the usual kind she eats).  When she saw it, she got upset and said, “No.  Cookie.”

After a bit of confusion, almost leading to tears, she said “Cookie cheese.”

I then realized that she wanted some “monster” cheese … as in muenster.   Once I got her a piece of “monster” cheese she was happy and we all had a big laugh as she pretended to be cookie monster gobbling her food. 

Just a cute photo of my daughter that I thought I’d share:

Today while I’m making dinner a UPS van pulls up in front of the house and Joe opens up the door to wait for the delivery man to come to the door. While he’s waiting he starts this conversation:

Joe: “What did you buy now?

Me: “I’m not expecting anything.”

Joe: “What do you mean?”

Me: “I mean I haven’t bought anything.”

The delivery man hands Joe the box and he sees the label on the outside says “Bonsai.”

Joe: You bought a bonsai!?

Me: Bonsai!? What?

I stop making dinner and walk over to get a look at the package. I immediately think there has been some mistake. Yes, I’ve been wanting to get back into bonsai, but I didn’t expect one to just show up on my front porch.

Then I realized it had to be because I had mentioned it on my blog, but still I’m a little confused, probably from the shock of it.

I open it up and the note reads: “Happy Mother’s Day Love Kelly, Grandma, and Grandpa”

Now I understand. It’s from my daughter and my in-laws! Thanks guys! I actually should have known immediately who it was from b/c my father-in-law was just talking to me about my interest in bonsai.

Anyway, here’s a photo of it (It’s right out of the box):

So, now I have an azalea with which to try bonsai again. It is of the Satsuki variety, which is supposed to be one of the best azalea for bonsai, so that’s pretty cool. I’m looking forward to working with it and finding out what color flowers it will produce. They apparently can have red, pink, or white flowers, or a combo of all three.

Again… Kelly, “Grandma and Grandpa”… Thank you. It was a very nice surprise.

I’ve never viewed myself as a feminist, but this morning when I read Larry Lehmer’s blog post “Think it’s a man’s world? Think again,” I was immediately annoyed by his ending statement:

A world without men will do much more than upset the genealogical order of mankind. Car oil will go unchanged, bugs will go unkilled, sports will go unwatched and Viagra will go untaken.

As if women can’t be mechanics, touch insects, or be athletes. (I’ll ignore the Viagra comment.)

Then I thought about it some more. Playing the Devil’s advocate, and agreeing with him that women can’t do any of those things…

If those are the only things we lose if men weren’t around: non-electric cars, a world where insects are killed just for living near us, and where regularly scheduled programs are preempted in order to view people kicking/hitting/throwing a ball/puck around (okay, so I am one of those women who think sports are highly overrated), then I can’t say we do need men around.

On a different, but slightly related, note…

I’ve been reading some of Richard Scarry’s stories to my daughter recently, and I noticed a character named Frances. She is a female rabbit that is the town’s mechanic, fixing everyone else’s broken items. I keep waiting for a comedic point in the story that shows she isn’t as capable as we thought she was, and she needs a “man’s” help, but that never happens (at least in the stories I’ve read). That’s nice. It’s not often that I see a children’s book with a female character doing a “man’s job” and being successful. Especially when that book was written when I was a child.

I haven’t posted anything for a while, but not for a lack of doing anything. I’m currently writing a pretty big blog post that I will post on Thursday and I’m getting dangerously behind on my genealogy book (what’s new?), so I’ve been working my butt off to get it back on track. Hopefully I can get at least three more chapters completely finished by the end of this weekend. They are on track to be finished, but the way things are going, something will likely pop up.

Also, many other personal and family things have happened recently and I’m just a little overwhelmed at the moment. I don’t want to go into details, but these things might change my whole outlook on life (in a good way), and thereby change the frequency of my blog posting. When I started this blog I hoped to post something at least every other day, but right now, I’m thinking that I will be happy if I end up posting something once a week.

Miscellaneous things:

We all went outside today and while daughter played in the yard, Joe and I did some much needed landscaping. I fought with a bunch of grape vines that were trying to kill our dogwood tree. I’ve cut down those damn vines every year, but they still keep coming back. And they grow so fast. The tree has already lost a pretty significant limb from the vine’s strangle hold. We also removed 5 (or 6?) pine trees from the edge of our property. They were getting way too big and invading our neighbor’s yard. I’m surprised no one had complained about them yet. We still have a couple more trees that need removed. One, a mulberry, is actually starting to grow around the neighbor’s fence. Tomorrow’s task will be bundling the branches to go out with the trash. That’s not gonna be fun.

I think our daughter is having a growth spurt. The past few days she’s actually eating (she’s really picky about her food) and sleeping about 16 hours each day. Normally she only sleeps 10-13 hours each day.

I just know there’s more I want to say, but I probably won’t remember it until I post this. It always happens like that, right?

Oh yeah… I’ve been trying to pare down my Hiveminder tasks for a long time now and nothing has really worked, but tonight I think I really did some good work on that front. Very few of my tasks have set due dates so I wasn’t putting anything in the due date field, but I think without the due date field filled in it really limits the site’s usage. I also don’t think I was using the “hide until” field properly either, but now I think I should only have 5 or so tasks popping up instead of the 1-2 pages of stuff like before. There’s nothing so frustrating as something I have to organize everyday that is supposed to help me stay organized. We’ll see in the next few days if I’ve fixed it.

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Update:

ALL my time spent on Hiveminder last night might have been for naught.  I forgot to change the “heads up” entry to 0 instead of 1, so I still have quite a few items on my to-do list that I don’t want to see yet.  Now I need to go back in at some point and change them all to 0.  Boo. 

Yesterday I took my daughter to the Akron zoo, our first zoo trip of 2008. It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos to show, because I left our camera at home.

In some cases I was quite shocked at what she was, or was not, interested in. Other times, I completely understood.

The first animals we saw were Humboldt penguins. The last time we went to the Akron zoo, and when we went to the Boston aquarium, her favorites were the penguins. But not this time. She watched them for a bit, but was quickly eager to get going.

Next we saw some Ring-tailed lemurs and another type of lemur (I forget what type they were; possibly Black-and-white Ruffed lemurs). They were quite active, jumping around the “rocks” and climbing on the “vines.” Kelly loved them, although she thought they were monkeys.

We saw some Snow Leopards next. When she saw them she started meowing, which was cute, but other than that she didn’t seem all that interested. The leopard seemed interested in her though. He came over to the window and sat down right in front of her. He pushed his back up to the glass and turned his head around to look at her. Still, it didn’t get much interest from Kelly.

I thought she would like to see the lions and the sun bears, but she didn’t really seem to care that much. She is very vocal about lions and bears at home, so I thought she would be more interested, but she wasn’t. I can sort of understand regarding the lion because he was just laying there (though he did yawn a couple times), but the bears were pacing the cage right in front of the glass, but Kelly found the other little girl watching the bears more interesting.

After lunch we stopped by the White-naped Crane exhibit. I’m actually a bit surprised that the zoo allows the birds such close access to the visitors and vice versa. If I were a keeper, I’d be concerned about people feeding them stuff, and (being the insanely overprotective mom that I am) I’m pretty sure that if one of the cranes had wanted too, s/he could have reached over and pecked Kelly’s eyes out. Instead it just looked at us and made a few calls. It was a very interesting animal. So prehistoric looking. It was, in all actuality, quite nice to be able to get so close. You could make out such amazing detail around the eyes and beak.

Next were the Galapagos tortoises. They are, in my opinion, one of the most boring creatures at a zoo because they generally don’t do anything but sit there. But Kelly really liked watching them, I’m guessing because they were eating and not just sitting there looking like big rocks. After a few minutes of watching them crop the spring grass, I tried to leave, but Kelly was determined to stay. I kept asking her if she was ready to go, but she wasn’t. I bet we stood there for a good five minutes before she was ready.

The last animals we saw were the Chilean Flamingos. In general, I’ve always been one to pass by the flamingo exhibit. They never seem to be too exciting to watch, but I knew Kelly would appreciate them, if only because of her fascination with birds. I was completely wrong about them being uninteresting to watch. Not only was Kelly enthralled by them, so was I. The reason: mating season. They were displaying almost every (if not every) aspect of their courtship right in front of us. First they did some ‘head flagging,’ quickly turning their heads from side to side with their necks stretched high. Then a few did a bit of ‘wing saluting,’ spreading their wings for a few seconds. After standing there for a little bit, (they may have been ‘twist preening’ at the time and I just didn’t notice because I’m guessing it’s the most subtle part of their courtship) they started ‘marching,’ all running in one direction. I would, however, like to suggest the renaming of their ‘marching’ to ’stampeding’ because quite a few juvenile birds had to run for their lives. That and the fact that they decided to come straight towards the two of us before veering off suddenly.

All in all, it was a great trip. It was nice to get out of the house on a nice spring day and I loved being able to re-introduce my daughter to the wonders of the zoo.

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P.S. We did see many other animals, I just didn’t write about all of them.

My husband and I got our new Flip video camera today and I tried it out when I took our daughter out to the local park:

I really like it. It may not be the best video or audio quality, but I’ve never been able to edit video on this computer from any of our other cameras, yet with this camera I was able to edit this video and upload it to Viddler in less than 10 minutes. Awesome!