Play date?

I don't think anyone is in the area (Laura, sometimes?) but just in case: we're having a long weekend trip with Lucy to S. Cal. this coming weekend...any bloggy buddies nearby and want to play? We'll be in Laguna Niguel. I have no idea where that is.

Smile

Lucy & Melissa 8.23.09

(post by Matthew) (Hi! How are you?)

Sleep is not much better. But let's not dwell on it.

On the bright side, I offer you this: relief from the insipid kids music we all suffer through in the car. Oh my god, before Lulu began to broaden her musical horizons, the Dora, the Dora, the endless Dora, almost drove us insane (ha, a pun!). No, seriously. Friggin' insane.

Then we discovered and grew to like Barenaked Ladies "Snacktime." Really good stuff -- good for the kid, amusing to the parent. I bet even older kids will like it. Here's one of our favorites, the "ribbit song" (Pollywog in a Bog).



Or this, "Nine" to us (789):



We also really like They Might Be Giants' "No" -- especially "balloon" (Where Do They Make Balloons?):



Try it -- you'll like it.

Here we are, again.

Damn it.

We're back in the bad sleep cycle, and it's hurting us, badly. The transition to the big girl bed has been tough, and never really had a chance to even out -- we did it, then she got horribly sick, then she got better, then she left on a vacation for 9 nights...now she's back and I hope we can beat this thing, but so far...not so much. She's figured out how to open the door to her bedroom, so at some point every night -- and on bad nights, at 4 or 5 points every night -- she comes out and wanders around. If we're in the guest bedroom near hers, she comes in and wants to climb into bed. If we're not nearby, she goes to the baby gate in the hallway and hollers and rattles the gate like she's in The Shawshank Redemption.

We don't know how to beat this. I'm not afraid (ok, I'm a little afraid -- you internets can be rough!) to say we did ultimately do modified "cry it out" when she was in her crib a few years ago, and it worked well for us. But you can't do that when they're free to roam about, I think -- she could hurt herself. It sucks.

In happier news, though, I found a new program that will let us print and bind blog into hardcover books. In the past the only software out there was incompatible with Blogger so I would have had to convert my blog to Wordpress which I'm still willing to do, but for some reason the formatting gets all screwed up (I lose paragraph breaks -- anyone know how to deal with that aside from re-inserting them all manually?). But now there's Blog2Print, which I'm very excited about. I can either use their formats and have them make the book, or I can get it as a PDF and send elsewhere if I want a fancier (like, cloth) cover. Nice! Anyone aware of other programs out there that work with Blogger?

So that's it, in a nutshell. Friggin exhausted, but able to print the blog. So...

unpacking

I recently moved offices at work and ended up unpacking a box I'd packed for the prior move, two years ago, that had stayed packed and gathering dust in the corner of my old office since then. Mostly, as you would expect, crap. Dusty crap.

But I did find two of my favorite New Yorker cartoons, and although pretty much no one in the world finds these as amusing as I do except the creator and the cartoon editor, I still thought I'd share. They're on my bulletin board by my desk; I still giggle when I look at them every day.

(In case you can't read it, the caption is: "I have an imaginary friend. He's a real person -- he just isn't really my friend.")

(It occurs to me this may be inappropriate in some way to post these cartoons? I'm no IP expert...sorry, New Yorker -- you know I love you!)