Discovering First Person

Over the past few weeks Holly has started speaking in "first person". It has been interesting watching Holly's developing language skills. When she first started talking she referred to herself as "baby". Then she started saying "Holly" to mean herself. More recently she had been referring to herself in the second person. When she wanted to use a spoon she would say "feed yourself", meaning herself. I guess its because she spends so much time with me talking to her and asking her questions. She often says things in question form. She would finish her bottle of milk and say "Are you finished little milky, OK".

But just this past week she's started using "my", "mine" and "I". Now she says "I am finished little milky".

I can't believe how quickly she is growing up.

More Accidental Photography

The new ipod has both a rear-facing and forward-facing camera. Now Holly can accidentally take photos of her face and feet.

What a week!

Wow, things have crazy busy in the last week. We had our good friend Rob visiting from California and staying with us. It was great to spend time with him, but it meant more time partying and less time working on things I needed to get done, like the major project of the course I'm doing right now. The project was already hampered by the fact that my class partner was a lovely, but severely English-deprived, woman. There is a prereq for the class of English 12 at at a C+ level or higher, but it's pretty much on the honour system that your English is at that level. Anyway, I did manage to get the first draft of my project in, though two days late.

Besides making it to the club the weekend before last, we finally held our first big party at our new place; the long awaited "Jaime's 30th". It was a great turn out and everyone seemed to have fun, but alas I failed by eating nothing before the party, drinking a few cocktails a little too quickly and then spending the later parts of the evening on the bathroom floor of our ensuite (thank god we have two bathrooms in our new apartment). The next day I spent dying a thousand deaths and swearing off alcohol forever.

I have managed to get in a few hours of work in here and there, but no where as many as I mean too. I am hoping for a big push in hours next month, but who am I kidding, it's Christmas.

Holly's Accidental Photography

Holly loves my ipod touch. I have a wary eye towards children and too much media, but I accept that the ipod has been a godsend in certain circumstances. A 15 hour flight back to Vancouver, dinner in a nice restaurant and the occasional ten minutes of peace are valid reasons to give Holly the ipod. And there are some great educational apps. The Intro to Math by Montessorium is great, though a little above Holly's abilities right now. And a lot of the words games are great. However, it's certainly something she would spend far too much time using if I let her use "mummy's phone" as she calls it. She also has an annoying habit of deleting all my apps :(

But the funniest by-products of her use of the phone are the photos she accidentally takes using the built in camera. She usually just repeatedly hits the camera button to hear the sound it makes, but then we end up with a series of photos of Holly's knees and feet.

And...we're back

So it turns out that in order to be a writer all you have to do is put letters on paper (or screen) in an order that pleases people. Having neglected this blog for too long, I have decided to resurrect it just at a time when I should be doing something else. I have recently begun a Certificate of Technical Writing at BCIT, in an attempt to carve out a career for this post-archaeology me. I have homework to do! The old me would have used her stock-standard procrastination tool of solitair, tetris or bejewelled. But the new me will waste time by using my writing skills to create prose that will earn me no money, gain me no grades and generally be read by no one.

I used to have a blog call Shanathalas, which was pretty much my musings and a place for me to broadcast the amusing things I found on the internet. But now we have facebook, and twitter...and stumbleupon and last.fm..whatever the hell that is. So I started another blog about life as a parent and pretty much what the three of us are up these days. And I was pretty lame at keeping up at that. So in the spirit of renewal I hereby rename this blog "Noisy Penguins" in honour of Holly's regular and insistent request to see this video.

Now I know, blogs aren't cool anymore. Generally words aren't hip unless they utilize less than four letters, 50% of which must be "fail", "win" or "bieber". But I need to get into a habit of writing on a regular basis, and as I gave up my Nanowrimo attempt on November 2nd having written exactly zero words of my magnum opus, a blog is probably just my pace.

So in summation (see that? technical writing :) my blog will have updates on the family, recipes, general musings, and more crap I find on the internet. And there may be some fail and win and cute kitties.