…its the journey.

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It’s my impression that by the time Lennie was Finn’s age, she was already speaking a ton of words, mostly the names of animals from an animal book we’ve also shared with Finn (though probably less often — having two kids is harder than having one, and you wind up short-changing both in lots of ways that make you feel really bad). Finn is turning out to be a little more sluggish with words (it’s pretty common for boys, I believe), but he’s finally started to show an interest in words and other linguistic feats. For example, he’s pretty good for saying “dog” now. He routinely says “mama,” but he tends to use it in a pretty general sense, usually barking it whenever he wants something. After some work with the animal book, he’ll volunteer “neeee” if you ask him what a horse says, and with a little prompting, he’ll do a chicken sound. The most impressive thing at the moment is that he’s picked up “bite, please,” which is what we croon at him when he’s insisting “maMA” and reaching for food. He’s not terribly consistent about it yet, but it’s not uncommon for him to say “bite, please” when he wants food or drink, though it comes out more like “Bobby” with a big pause in the middle.

Not to be outdone by her little brother, Lennie has started reading and writing on a limited basis. She’s been increasingly curious about letters, and we’ve been helping her learn their sounds and doing the old “duh, ahh, guh” drill to show her how to string them together to make words. The other morning, she had written “cat,” and neither of us had explicitly drilled her on that one. When we asked her how she had come up with it, she said that she had just worked it out based on the sounds. I’m not entirely sure I believe her, but it’s certainly not beyond the realm of what’s possible.

She continues to be a good little artist as well, picking up things like perspective without any prompting. The other day, she drew one fish at sort of an angle and some other fish from the side; the sideways ones had only one eye (they were not flounder). This sounds lame and obvious if you don’t have small children, but it’s a pretty neat thing to watch happen.

I absolutely love Denis Leary. I think he’s one of the funniest, sexiest guys on the planet. Well, last night he actually appeared in my dream! I was out and about in Knoxville late one night, when I just happened to see him. I introduced myself and told him what a huge fan I am. The next thing I knew, he was asking me out! I told him that I needed to go home and change clothes, and then I’d meet him. I rushed home, shaved my legs, put on the perfect outfit, and then rushed back out to meet him. I can’t really remember much else, so I’ll let my imagination take over from there.

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Just once I’d like a Monday to start off with something that doesn’t look like this:

An error occured while Parsing an XML document.
Content is not allowed in prolog.

Update: The XML file had been corrupted on uploading it to the production server. Uploading a zip file and extracting it on the server solved the problem. Also added trim() to make sure there was no extraneous whitespace.

I just heard the most awful screaming outside like cats fighting buy only different. A quick glance to the couch assured me the dogs were inside, safe and not causing problems. I bolted outside but didn’t make it one step beyond the threshold of the front door for staring at me was a raccoon! As a leaves and a flower floated down from the tree above, I shot quick looks for the cat because sure the cat and raccoon were having a territorial issue. No, she sat calmly on the brick end of the wall where her food bowl stays out of the dogs’ reach. She stared at the ‘coon as if to voice, "what’s your problem?" The raccoon was stunned and so was I. Before I could pull my senses together enough to take a picture, since it was only 5 feet away from me, the raccoon waddled off. I looked up and there in the tree were two other raccoons looking down. Obviously they had a disagreement and this one was either pushed for fell 50 or 60 feet to the ground. Wonder if it is hurt. These must be the family of 5 cute babies that used to raid our garbage so long ago. They have grown into plump adults. I bet the clan is down to three (or maybe two now).

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Student: I don’t want to.
Master: You must.