Monday, March 24, 2008

Is this a trick Question?

Sophie and Will are getting more interested in our family history and life before them in general.
Yesterday's classic question:

"Daddy how old were you when you were my age?"


I've posted some more old videos from last year. I've been bad about moving them from the camcorder to YouTube. But there are a couple new (old) ones up there.

Our Videos

Friday, March 21, 2008

Sophie Sings and Signs

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Kids' Expressions

These are here mostly to assist my feeble memory. But you might find them amusing. As good parents we do use proper English around our kids when we think about it. (Swearing while driving excepted). But, we haven't gone to great lengths to discourage these expressions.

Abley = Able
Hostible = Hospital
Lasterday = Some time in the past (I really like this word actually).
Amilal = Animal
Storpielle = ???? (First I thought it was scorpion, then spiral, now I am not at all sure what it is. Though the kids do ask me to draw them on occasion).

p.s. I broke out my set of legos tonight. I figure they will be necessity get less use once baby three shows up, so I might as well show them to the kids now. They were interested, but like the trains, and blocks, and marbles, I ended up doing pretty much all the work (not that I mind, I love legos).

Thursday, March 06, 2008

And the winner is..

For the strangest misspelling seen multiple times this year...


"Wheather"!

Mixing up "whether" and "weather" is pretty common. Spell checking software is likely to miss it. And heck, if you didn't know that they were different words, one sounds as good as the other.

But "wheather" is sort of a hybrid. Perhaps these three students knew that it wasn't "weather", but couldn't couldn't bring themselves to write "whether" (always the misspelled word). I kind of like it. It is has a sort of woody feel to it, conjuring images of the heath.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Giants of the Earth



Most anyone who reads this site probably knows that Gary Gygax died today, and who Gary Gygax was. I remember thinking of him as this egotistical monomaniacal loon that clung to his creation with kind of pitiable stubborness. We were already flexing our wings and rewriting his rules by the time he told us we weren't playing "Real D&D." His later works did little to inspire me, though I was glad to see he was welcomed back to the D&D fold in the last few years, at least in Dragon Magazine (while it still existed).
A few years later (okay like 25 years later) my feelings are a little different. I don't want to overstate this, but this "little game" as Gygax was fond to call it, had a pretty big impact in my life. It was an outlet for my creativity, a refuge from adolescent abuse, an alternative to the other temptations of youth, a secret signal to future life long friends, and the 'flavor text' of my life. Gygax was not solely responsible for that, but he had a big role in it.
Just looking at the cover of that blue book was like one of those moments where a smell takes you back to the kitchen of your youth. Mmmm smell that blue book.