Apparently I have two weird sleepers.

Breanna has an entire crib to herself (well, mostly – she does share it with Elmo, a glo-worm, a Boobah, and a bunny), yet she is somehow most comfortable if she’s completely squashed into a corner.

And then there’s Hayley who decides that she doesn’t want to bother with pajamas at night, but she would enjoy sleeping in her bathrobe. With the hood up.

I don’t know.

I think the re-design is all done. Phew.

This was the sort of thing that was much easier to do pre-kids.

Please excuse any mess you might come across while I tinker with my design. Having two young kids means sporadic chances to fix stuff but I’ll do my best.

1. Hayley decided she wanted to watch “A Bug’s Life” yesterday so we put it on for her. As we were eating supper, she offered up some words of wisdom.

Hayley: You know why the grasshoppers are mean and take all the food from the ants?
Sherry: Why?
Hayley: Because they’re ASSHOLES.
*Sherry and George look at each other, working very hard to keep from laughing*
Sherry: Well, yes. But when we talk about that with people, we’ll use the word “bullies” okay?
Hayley: Okay.

2. George came home from our friend’s house last night.

George: Tonight Perry played me that Rage Against the Machine song, “Fuck You, I Won’t Do What You Told Me”. What a great song!
Sherry: I know, I always loved that song. It was always a big hit on the dance floor at the bars I used to go to.
George: Rmember those guys that used to come to the studio that were sort of like that? Now I understand where they were coming from.
Sherry: I know! Remember? I even said that they reminded me of Rage Against the Machine. Didn’t I say that?
George: Yes, I remember.
*Sherry goes and finds mp3 on her hard drive and starts playing said song at a moderate volume, since it was almost midnight.*
Sherry: It really is a good song.
George: But you can’t appreciate it properly until you hear it really blasting.
Sherry: PLEASE. I danced on top of the speaker that it was blaring from, I’ve HEARD it loud.
George: Oh my god. *eye roll*

I always roll pairs of socks into balls when I do the laundry. Breanna always finds George’s socks, the small ones that he wears in his running shoes when he’s wearing shorts. For some reason, they entertain her beyond belief. She’ll wave them over her head, pound the floor with them, and occasionally sit and chew happily on them, probably thinking deep thoughts about how to achieve peace in the Middle East as she does. She’ll sit and play with a pair of his socks while surrounded by actual toys, oblivious to their presence.

When she grows up, if she ever writes a memoir or becomes famous enough for an autobiography, I hope that she’ll call it My Daddy’s Socks.

Remember when I posted that video of David Hasslehoff? It seems it may not be the weirdest thing you can find on YouTube. However, the big difference is that this video is awesome. If you ever find yourself with eight treadmills and you’re co-ordinated, maybe you can chorepgraph something this cool too.

So, like, for a camera phone, the pictures are surprisingly good! You need decent light but I’m happy with it so far.

Tonight we went down after supper to wait for George to bring me a bag of chips, and I took these:

That’s not lipstick, she just had a popsicle after supper.

Breanna is not particularly impressed to be downstairs when she would rather be sleeping.

“Where IS he?!”

Needless to say, I’m enjoying this phone tremendously thus far for all the extras. I also just transferred “Sympathy For The Devil” so I can hear a bit of Rolling Stones on it later, and I’m currently charging up my bluetooth earpiece to try it out tomorrow after the phone is activated.

I am such a geek.

So far the only complaints I have are minor. For instance, the one thing really lacking is a faceplate. If it was a flip phone it would be a little better because it would help to protect the ginormous LCD on the front. I’m so afraid of it scratching, I have to see if I can find my old phone case and hopefully it will fit. On the other hand, the camera has a sliding cover so at least the lens in protected.

Okay, time to tackle that bag of chips.

About a week and a half ago, I got an email from Yvonne, from a company called Matchstick, an innovative “buzz marketing” company. Essentially, rather than using the traditional forms of advertising, they rely on creating a buzz about a product through word of mouth. Yvonne offered me a free cell phone in exchange to nothing more complicated than promising to use it and to maybe write about it.

Honestly? I thought it was a scam. I asked for more info, but considering the incredible amount of offers I get to enlarge my penis or to access a widow’s fortune in Zimbabwe, I wasn’t particularly convinced. However, she pointed me to Kelly of marmalade.ca and I saw she had gotten the same deal and it was as good as it sounded.

I sent Yvonne my number, she called me, and we discussed the requirements. Basically, they’re handing out brand new Nokia 6682 phones to people living in Toronto, Montreal (that would be me), Vancouver, and Calgary who keep regularly updated blogs. You have to be someone who uses photos and video on your blog, have approximately 400+ visits per day, and be between the ages of 22 and 35. The biggest thing was you also have to use Rogers for your provider. I fit everything they needed; I explained though, that I didn’t have a cell phone plan at the moment but that I was about to go and activate an old phone for a pay as you go account so that I can have a phone when I’m out alone with the girls. I said I would be interested as long as I could go pay as you go since I neither need nor have a steady income to pay for a monthly plan. That was not an issue at all, so my phone was shipped out.

I had no obligations. I didn’t have to use the phone for a specific amount of time if I didn’t want to. I didn’t have to buy a particular plan. I also didn’t have to be positive in my reviews. I can be honest and if I hate the phone altogether, I can say that.

Someone from Matchstick told me it shipped out yesterday and I could expect it next week. Imagine my surprise (and mild horror) when I had to hastily throw on a robe over my pajamas to let Fed Ex in at 9 this morning. Oops! And by the way, props to Fed Ex. My apartment number was missing on the address and our building doesn’t have names on the doorbells. They managed to track me down by ringing up the janitor and asking him if he knew which apartment was mine. Good detective work on their part – I would have been bummed if I had missed it!

I was a little, er, overwhelmed by the stuff they sent me.

It included the phone (duh), a SIM card, the standard 64mb memory card and earphones, an extra pair of earphones, a 512mb memory card, bluetooth connection, USB cable, charger, and something that I think syncs it up to other phones. Crazy!

The phone is also a 1.3 mp camera, which is as high quality as my first digital camera and thus very impressive for a phone, it take video with sound, has voice command dialing, plays mp3s and videos, and probably controls the space station if you press the right sequence of numbers.

So far the quality of the images is great in daytime light, the video is nifty, and the phone is pretty easy to use. I’ve already added stuff to my calendar, written a to-do list, and I nearly exploded in geeky joy over the fact that I have a conversion tool. The irony is that I won’t be getting my phone activated until tomorrow so I won’t know how the quality is until then, but
i have read good things from others.

I love playing with new toys and if they’re no charge to me, even better. I plan to have a lot of fun with it. Later I’ll hook up the USB to share some of the pictures and to put some mp3s on my phone.

If you’re a Canadian weblogger who fits the criteria (or close enough to give it a shot anyway), let me know and I’ll send you the contact info.

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This is what Breanna’s been practicing lately.

In case it’s not totally clear, that would be my eight-month-old BABY standing. Unassisted. And she’s good at it. See?

The hand in the background is not hanging onto George at all. That hand is actually blurry because while she was standing ALL ALONE she was also waving her hand around, trying to grab George’s Freezie.

What is with all these crazy over-achiever babies? It’s like they read the books and see the average age for a skill is X months old and they take it as a personal challenge. “Oh yeah?! Pffft, I’ll do that by the end of the day!”

Yeesh.

Oh, and yeah. She got that Freezie too.

Luckily I didn’t have any work to do last night since I had finished up the work on a client’s site as much as I could until I hear back from her. This was good since I wouldn’t have been able to get anything done because of the weather. I had gotten Breanna to sleep but Hayley was still tossing and turning when the wind abruptly picked up to very fast gusts, rattling windows and doors. Then the lightning started up. The wind woke Breanna up and I was just soothing her back to sleep when a few loud cracks of thunder sent Hayley running into the bedroom.

Since Hayley was scared and Breanna had been startled back to being awake by Hayley’s screeching, I brought them both out to the living room and pulled the hide-a-bed out. I figured the best cure for Hayley’s fears was exposure, so I turned out all but one lamp in the living room and opened the blinds, and we watched the storm together. In fact, I have a few awesome video clips of the flashing and occasional forked lightning (I’m not completely insane – I shot the video through the window, not standing out on the balcony). Eventually I hope to get them up on YouTube but I was hoping someone could suggest a very simple video editing program. I don’t want to do anything fancy, I just want to be able to cut it so that I only have the first five seconds of a 29-second clip. And when I say simple, I really mean “DUDE this is so easy a newborn could do it.” Anyone?

When the thunder finally stopped (though the lightning flashed like a strobe light for a good hour afterward), I got Hayley back in bed and she fell asleep within five minutes. Breanna was harder. She was wired so she crawled around the living room for another 45 minutets before she was finally ready for bed.

It was fun though. I love a good storm and last night nature put on one hell of a show. At one point the flashing was so spectacular and blue that it reminded me of seeing the Northern Lights. I’m glad I was able to get Hayley past her fears so I could get her to enjoy it asd much as I do.