Cassandra and the beanstalk

Looking at seed catalogs or web sites is so mouth-watering.
I love their copy writers: delicious and nutrious! touts one. Pretty to look at AND good to eat! entices another.
I'm ready to empty my bank account on seeds.

Garden of Eatin'

Today, we put the tomatoes, jalapenos, basil, cilantro and dill into the ground! I'm especially excited about the tomatoes because I picked out some neat ones (Grape tomatoes, Lemon Boy, Black Prince and a surprise rainbow heirloom tomato -- ooh will it be pink, orange, black, yellow or who knows?!) as well as the regulars (Early Girl, Better Boys and Beef Steak).
We're also going to plant Thai or holy basil, if we can ever locate the plant or seeds.

Whitey white!

Here's Josh's before and after. Didn't work very well but giving him a wife beater cracked me up!

Given the title of this post, I should be running for prez. Eat your heart out, Hil!

Half white

Here's Daisy's Simpson's avatar. My theory seems to be correct so far. Onward to a fully white person!

All look same

I was lamenting to my Asian co-workers/neighbors today how difficult it was to create an Asian avatar. For example, Yahoo avatar only offers one Asian face!
So they created Simpsons avatars of themselves through Simpsonizeme.com and used them as the name plates on their doors. We were all cracking up.
Now that I'm in the comfort of my own home, I decided to load in a picture of myself and create my Simpson avatar. Behold, the before and after pics.
(I chose the skin tone, sex and nerdy style of dress for my avatar.)
As you can see it didn't work very well for me. So I'm going to do Daisy next (half white) and then Josh (fully white) to see how they turn out.

Delay on my monogrammed towels

My towels are back-ordered and not scheduled to arrive until early June. Bummer!!!!

Stuph!!!

We're going to be getting a new camera and computer. Woo hoo!

Happy Birthday Daisy!!!

My little one turned one today!

Today, she took 62 steps before falling! A few days ago, she reached a max of 47 steps and less than a week ago, I counted around 14 steps.

Check this out

The photobook of our Thailand and Hawaii vacations that I've been working on.

Sadie and Dazee

I thought this was a nice picture of the two of them.

Flowers

I think these colorful Rembrandt tulips came out the nicest in the garden. They are tall, dramatic and colorful.

These were interesting purple pastel fringey tulips that my brother sent to my mom for Mother's day.

New hobby du jour

Digital scrapbooking! I'm going to make photobooks to:
a) pass the time
b) find a use for the thousands of pictures that I'm taking of my kids
c) give an outlet to my "creative" energy

I'm going to have to figure out which vendor and which software to use; I will be reviewing them all on the blog. I already started by saying I think the Mypublisher software sucks. But this is because I know how to use PhotoShop. Ideally, I'd like to use something less intense than Photoshop but don't want to use simpleton bloatware.

Crappy software

I'm quite upset over the Mypublisher software. First off, the dang thing makes you install a local application that can easily be web-based. Then it has the nerve to not give you a choice of which directory to install and where to keep the files that it produces. Finally, if you delete unwanted files, it doesn't show up in the program any more but it's still being secretly stored on your hard drive. Making one stinky 50MB photo book costed me at least 600MB of space on my hard drive. I'm supremely pissed.

I'm at the same grammatical level as Mike Tyson

How is it that I skated by over 30 years of life without knowing that CANNOT is ONE word and not two? A co-worker of mine helpfully pointed this out and I'm so grateful. She had courage to tell me the equivalent of you have spinach stuck between your teeth. THANKS JK!!!!

On another note, I checked with my husband and office neighbors, they all knew it was one word too. Josh added, altogether is one word. I knew that. I added ARE NOT are two words. Except I think I said, ARE NOT is two words.

Confession: I nearly failed the test of standard written english (TSWE), a test of grammar that I had to take with my SATs. This is why I'm saying I'm on par with Mike Tyson.

Bummer!

It will be a full month since I placed my monogrammed towels order before I receive them in my greedy little hands.
Stay tuned - when I receive them in little less than two weeks, I will provide a full report with pictures galore.

Because life is so short...

I'm going to pick up my goody goody husband's habits. Last weekend, I decided that I will now garden. Tonight I just got back from exercising with him. I jogged slowly while he power walked and we enjoyed a good conversation.

Dazee walking!

All of a sudden, Dazee can walk many steps. Literally, only yesterday she was falling down the stairs due to intentional parental negligence and last week she fell into a hole we dug. How fast they grow!
She's going to be one in exactly one week!
At the end of the video, you get glimpse of her sister trying to kill her. The loud giggling is my mother. Sadie is saying in Thai - Moo Tong (Dazee's Thai nickname) is walking!

For my dial up customers, the video is 14.5MB so it might be too frustrating for you.

Make work play

For quite some time, I had been struggling when attempting to feed my younger daughter a bottle of milk. She is very clear about her displeasure: her body stiffens, she bucks her head back and forth like an angry bull, pushes away the bottle with much force and screams bloody hell.

There's even a funny story about Josh feeding Daisy. Once, he was asked to feed Daisy and was given information by my mother that she will "act" resistant, but keep persisting and she will take her bottle. He relayed to me that he used all of his force and he could not overcome her resistance. First he started pushing on her and she pushed back. He also tried to force the bottle down in a stealthy way, to which she responded with effective blocking. Can you imagine a 170 lb man taking on a baby?!

Anyway, Daisy's scorn for milk sent me into a tailspin of scientitific and emotional analysis - did she not like the temperature of the millk, was the composition of milk to formula ratio too large or small, did she like to eat upstairs or down, was she pissed at me for going back to work, is she mad about weaning from nursing, etc.? I kept adjusting whatever variables I could think of, hoping to cure her contempt and get the feeding done. These experiments yielded some success (though inconsistent, much like how the primaries are playing out for Mrs. Clinton).
Yesterday, I might have found the silver bullet. Instead of approaching feeding her as something I needed to do, as an end goal, I approached it as a process.

I put her into my lap in the "position", she clearly knew what was going on and started her baby-in-distress routine. But instead of trying to shove the bottle of milk into her mouth, I let her pull off the cap. Then she put it back on. She did this about six times, each time I told her in a high pitched baby voice "open" or "close". This activity was highly amusing to her baby senses. Then in her excitement or lack of dexterity, she drops the cap. So I move it to feed her and she drinks a little milk. After a few sips, she pulls off as if I'm trying to gag her and we play the open and close game again. After a few volleys, she starts to open her mouth wide to "eat" the cap, I take this as an opportunity to pull the cap away and insert the bottle. Success.

I had to approach the feeding as an activity that was an enjoyable activity for both of us. I went from "I must feed her" to "I must trick her" to "I will enjoy her".

My little geisha

This was taken at a Japan fair.

Humiliated!

On Friday, we attended adult Shabbat services. As I walked through the parking lot, I noticed a group of people, all decked out in finery. Men with wool suits and women in fashionable tops and skirts. I had a sinking feeling about my own outfit as well as my daughter's; we were both wearing tight skinny jeans with sneakers.

As it turns out, you're supposed to dress up for Shabbat. My Jewish husband failed to tell us that. I hate violating a dress code or being disrespectful and on top of that, I was actually called to the bima for an aliyah. I wanted to crawl into a hole!

While I was up there, one of the rabbis started rubbing Saydee's sweatshirt and remarked, Oooh what a nice sweatshirt. I don't know if he was trying to be a jerk or was totally clueless but I was humiliated enough without this extra attention.

At the bima, I'm standing next to a women who generally looks like a slob. I barely recognized her with make up and all decked out in a velvet suit. Another woman next to me is wearing couture like clothes - a pleated silk skirt, silver silk sweater top and her neck was accessorized with a diamond vine necklace.

I still feel humiliated!!!