It certainly seems as though things have been really slow lately, as I haven’t felt like I’ve had anything interesting to write about. We’ve been in a pretty stable routine with both the girls sleeping well. Tara as almost weaned, just in time for Jen’s business trip to Asia which will have me home with the girls for a week.

Tara is still not walking, but she’s very close. She loves to be led around by the hand or to walk around with her walker. She’s also getting a little better at playing with her big sister, and she is beginning to make the transition from baby to toddler; I’m going to miss the baby. It’s really funny to see Anna and Tara playing together, making each other laugh.

Anna has been doing such a good job sleeping that we’ve been considering putting the two girls in the same bedroom. There are some issues to reconcile, as Tara sleeps in darkness and Anna prefers a night light; also Tara is so enamored by Anna that she’d probably stay awake half the night trying to engage her.

I just tried out the face recognition feature on myheritage.com and who do I most resemble in their celebrity database? Action movie star Chow Yun-Fat. Pretty good, eh? Well, I hate to break the news to poor poor Serena Williams that she was second on the list.

Other celebrities who look like me:

• Cameron Crowe. I have to disagree, other than the hair.

• Sean Connery. He’s a good looking guy and all, but this is a complete miss.

• Nelson Mandela. Maybe the nose, but that’s about it.

• Carson Daly. I could see that if I was a pasty white guy.

I’m not really up on the rest of the celebrities they tagged, but I’d have to say Chow Yun-Fat and Carson Daly are the two closest matches.

Lately I’m fascinated by how my girls are imitating us. Anna has always copied our speech patterns and many of our behaviors that you would expect, but some things are striking when you see them mirrored by a child.

I bought Anna a digital camera for her fourth birthday; as far as she knows, all “real” cameras are digital. She gets her camera out every now and then and takes a picture, and there’s nothing particularly notable about her use of it. However, when she was around my “studio equipment” recently, she wanted to take pictures of me with my SLR and strobes, having me pose with different props, making different expressions, and doing the sort of “active” photography that I do when I’m taking set portraits. I found it really unusual–I think it’s a good thing, but for some reason it felt sort of weird too.

Anna has lately been more interested in cooking, which I think will suit her well. She’s a very conscientious kid, so she’ll probably be using the microwave and stove (supervised of course) before too long. Tara, on the other hand, we could probably rent out to a product safety testing lab; you can watch her for any length of time and see that there’s some “MacGyver meets Dennis the Menace” sort of hijinks in her future.

Parenthood, like life, is a continuum of making choices of varying difficulty. At this moment, Jennifer and I are struggling with the problem of Tara’s ear infections. Tara has gone through something like eight rounds of antibiotics for cold-related infections, and although the ear tubes are done something like two million times each year, we can’t help but want to get at the source of the problem. Tara was treated for her first ear infection two weeks after going into day care. We really like our day care, but the fact is that it is full of other germ-laden children. Tara, more so than most children, puts everything in her mouth, which makes her the ultimate germ magnet.

We have considered putting Tara in a situation with less children, but finding a nanny is difficult, expensive, and scary. Also, we’d really hate leaving our current day care because we like our provider and her family a lot; Anna spent three years there. Further, it’s tough to expend the effort and taking the risk of changing things without actually being able to spend more time with Tara. I’ve resisted Jennifer’s notions of nannies and au pairs primarily for this reason, but I’m getting to the point now that I’ve got to entertain the idea because we absolutely have to do something to get Tara more healthy.

We’re investigating a couple more options lately in earnest, and I really hope that a good solution presents itself.

I’m officially going to stop being an Apple apologist. I don’t use anything Apple makes (nor anything Microsoft makes), but I bought Jennifer an iPod nano for her birthday (a month ago) because I thought it would be a no-hassle music solution for her. None of the music-playing widgets around the house belong to Jennifer. Anna has a couple boomboxes, I have my computers any my little MP3 player and the stereo, and Jen really didn’t have anything. I selected the iPod, because in my head, Apple really has this user interface thing down pat. Here would be a widget where user interface matters, and it’s only about doing one thing well. Well, maybe a couple things.

Now here comes the truth: the PC software blows. The added functionality of syncing contacts and whatnot that’s NOT music is just a distraction. Jennifer has spent probably 10 hours fiddling with the thing and I never actually see her listening to it. Two thumbs down for Apple.

Anna’s latest book fad has been reading Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series of books. That is, having the books read to her. Of course, most of the books Anna has are ones that we have picked out for her, or ones that were given to her as gifts. Of these, the ones that Anna really latches on to are books where the main characters are strong girls. First Madeline (”to the tiger in the zoo, Madeline just said, ‘pooh pooh.’”), then Eloise (not so much strong as stubborn), then Pippi, and now Ramona and her sister Beezus. Anna now maintains that she is in fact stronger than Pippi because Pippi can only lift up a horse, but Anna can pick up the whole world (”Where would you stand?” I asked. Answer: “underground”).

Although Ramona and Beezus are the most true-to-life of the characters I mentioned, it is interesting that they take place in much different place and time than today… where a nine-year-old can be sent on an errand to the grocery store, or take her four year old sister to the library. For that matter, a couple of four-year-olds can want to and from kindergarten on their own. Now that I think about it, I walked to kindergarten when I was young… how different the world is today!

Tara, who was already taking Omnicef, got something like her seventh ear infection. This one is pretty bad now, and she’s pretty miserable, with a 102+ degree fever. We’ve upgraded to the next level antibiotic and hopefully we’ll see some results soon.

Update: She’s been pretty miserable all day long, with her fever spiking up near 104 at various times of the day, but when she has our attention she seems to do much better. Go figure.

Update again: Sunday morning Jennifer ended up taking Tara to urgent care because it seemed that her eardrum had ruptured. Turns out that it hadn’t, thankfully. Today Tara has been much more happy, so it seems that the Augmentin is working. It’s been a heck of a weekend. I’m looking forward to leaving the house tomorrow.

As a treat for Anna yesterday, we took her to see Quidam, the new Cirque du Soleil show, or “Circus Olé” as Anna calls it. She was way excited.

The show started off with some rather scary elements–darkness, loud noises, a creepy headless guy –but Anna quickly adjusted an enjoyed the show. In particular, she liked the sequence where four little girls came out with their spools on strings that the spun around and threw high in the air while doing all sorts of tumbling. I may have to see if I can find one online for her… especially if I can find one made of foam rubber or something else that won’t break windows easily.

I was pleasantly surprised that the usual sequence including two large men doing a slow-motion homoerotic ballet was replace by a medium-sized man and a large woman. Still impressive, but slightly less awkward. One part of the show included a man doing various artful feats of strength while hanging from particularly long set of curtains. The man was wearing a tight flesh-colored suit, and it was of course at the quietest part of the performance when Anna called out “IS THAT A NAKED BUTT?” Most people around us were cracking up.

At the intermission we got about $800 worth of popcorn and pretzels and drinks, but we still stopped for dinner afterward at Bread Bites, the Oscar’s knock-off that Anna loves. We planned the day both as a reward for Anna’s good sleep habits of late, and as a special “big girl” activity that she didn’t have to share with Tara. I think it was a real hit.

It’s hard to believe that it was a year ago that Tara was born. Although I cook well enough, I don’t know thing one about baking; still I made what I thought was the same eggless, milkless, butterless, tasteless cake that I made for Anna’s first birthday. In practice, I could have just spread frosting on some of Jen’s hockey pucks–the cake was a rock. Still, Tara didn’t mind. She looked at the cake for about half a second after we set it in front of her, then dug right in to the frosting. Anna tried to help out with a fork, but Tara just grabbed the cake with both hands and started jamming it right into her mouth. We let her have at it for a few minutes before prying it out of her hands. That’s just a ton of sugar for the little tyke.

Tara had an otherwise lousy day between getting some shots at her one-year checkup and having some gnarly diaper rash. At least she is, for the moment, ear- and sinus-infection free. Anna and I have the same chronic cough it seems, luckily there are no other symptoms to go with it.

My brother is in town for a business trip, and came in over the weekend, but was unable to join our little soiree this evening. Hopefully we can work another visit in before he leaves.

I’m not a big fan of photo-only posts (largely because they don’t really work with my theme), but this just speaks for itself. She also did a load of laundry this morning.