Since Anna spends a lot of time away from us, we frequently discover some talent she as acquired without our help. Recently, the new skill was the use of scissors. At our most recent parent-teacher conference, Anna’s teacher remarked on how well Anna was able to cut paper.

Tonight, Anna set up at the kitchen table and proceeded to cut neat spirals out of each piece of paper. Wow, we thought, she knows how to cut spirals. That is, until she showed us a one inch circle of paper, which is actually what she meant to cut out. The spiral was only a by-product of the process of cutting out the middlemost patch of each 8×11 sheet of construction paper. She did this several more times, each time showing us proudly a small circle of paper, and tossing the other 99% of each sheet.

After tinkering with the SanDisk MP3 player a little more, I decided that the voice recording functionality is nearly useless, and I put it up on eBay. However, I discovered the Neuros Audio II, which is a bit large for a flash-based MP3 player, but it has terrific recording capability (up to 160 kbps MP3 or 48 kHz WAV), and it should be more than adequate for my purposes. It will also take an external mic.

Why all the fuss about mobile recording? There are a lot of instances where I would like to capture audio, most of them involving the things Anna says. Mind you, a lot of the things she says are things Jennifer and I say, but things like “How about a big bowl of nothing?” or “Tick-tock, sister, move it along” are much cuter when a three-year-old says them. I try very hard to capture precious moments in still images, but even I have to face the fact that life is a multimedia experience.

It’s Monday morning and there’s still no baby, because somebody wants to keep the suspense up. Anna was three and a half weeks early, so we were all prepared for the early baby. This one is trying to lull us into unpreparedness.

Last night our family achieved a record 31.5 hours of sleep. We went to the Container Store and Ikea, and Mom and I were both completely wiped out when we got back. All three of us went to bed at the same time. I think Anna went through the whole night without waking up, but she could have demolished and rebuilt the house and I don’t think I would have noticed until morning.

Saturday some other stuff happened. We had originally planned on getting together with K. and M., since she had a rare evening off, but M. wasn’t going to be done with work until seven, which is when we’re putting Anna to bed (especially with the cold she has now). Right after we got off the phone with M., we got a call from B. and Z., who did a pre-announced pop-in. We all went down to the greenbelt and all attempted to tire each other out. Anna won, of course. Do not compete with a three-year-old when it comes to having an abundance of energy.

Two cans white spray primer: $8
Two cans Berry Pink high-gloss spray paint: $6
Helping pass on a family heirloom: priceless

Jennifer’s grandfather made this desk for her when she was just a little ‘un. It’s been sitting in our garage for a few years, and we finally got around to having the paint tested for lead, then repainting it and putting it in Anna’s room.

Specifically on mommy-blogs, but it does a good job at getting at the heart of why bloggers blog about their kids and parenting.

Mommy and me, via the New York Times

I just finished reading this book to Anna before nap, and there are definitely some things I do not like about it as a book for children. It’s certainly no worse than your average Disney movie, but here is my synopsis of what happens:

A young, fatherless elephant flees to the city after his mother is killed by hunters. The elephant meets up with a sugar mama who gets him all bling’d out and uses him as arm-candy at her high-society soirées. The brainwashed elephant then returns to his home, assumes the throne of the dead king, marries his cousin, and gives a cabinet position to the elephant responsible for his coronation.

Ok, where’s Goodnight Moon again?

I’m up watching bad TV and surfing because I can’t sleep, and Jennifer has just come downstairs to inform me that she can’t sleep either because she’s having fairly regular contractions. How’s Jan. 27 for a birthday?

7:33am update: some sleep seems to have slowed things down.

8:01 update: hmmm, everything seems to be back to normal now.

8:25 update: still normal, but my grandmother just called and said that she couldn’t sleep at 2am (12am our time) because she thought someone needed her to wake up and pray.

I just got a new gadget which is in theory an MP3 player, the Sandisk MP3 256MB. I say in theory, because my intended use is the voice recording function. It can record 17 hours of audio (though I’m sure the battery will die long before that) to its internal memory from an onboard microphone. Unfortunately, most reviews of MP3 players don’t cover the voice recorder functionality, so I had to buy this without having heard the quality, which it turns out mostly stinks. Oh well, it’s good enough to get the gist of things, and with some postprocessing, it’s listenable. Here’s the catch. I’m going to be postprocessing to OGG format, which I don’t think Windows will play right out of the box. Why OGG? because it’s a open format that I will be able to read years down the line, and it sounds much better when you’re starting with the junky 4-bit 8khz audio from the MP3 player. I now have the recorder at my bedside, so hopefully I’ll remember to record some typical morning behavior. It’s pretty amusing, sometimes I think a Starbucks opened in her closet.

Anna has a cold today. Jennifer pegged it yesterday, but I didn’t really think it was going to turn out to be much. I was wrong. We drugged her up pretty good, but she’s still pretty miserable at the moment; we’ll see how the rest of this night ends up.

We’ve been fairly cold-free for a good long time, especially of the kind that has her miserable in the middle of the night. It was nice. Alas, all things must pass.

Jennifer is in with her now, trying to get her settled up. Hopefully the meds will kick in, and she’ll get a good night’s sleep.

The Baby Alert Terror level is now mint green.

I’ve fixed up the design of the blog a little bit. I believe it looks better in Internet Explorer, as well as being a somewhat cleaner design. IE is broken in so many different ways, but next to security, the most broken area is CSS support. CSS is the mechanism this blog (and most other fancy web sites) use to specify the look and feel of a web page. Thankfully, many people have set up web sites dedicated to the atrocities of IE, and I was able to things straightened out. Please let me know if anything looks weird on design of the site.