Music To My Eye

Last night, Lucian and I watched another one of Geoff Smith's live performances on UStream. Geoff does one of these concerts every couple of months and Lucian gets really animated so sometimes I record a seesmic video of his reaction to Geoff's music. I thought it would be fun to post the previous videos next to each other because it's still amazing to me how fast my little boy is growing and how much he is learning. He loves making videos, as many kids do. Right now he is starting to engage in pretend play and it always amazes me the things he comes up with. He will take an ordinary object and pretend it is something else. In this case, he took some items out of my jewelry armoire and improvised. A necklace box became a "guitar" and a chain clasp tool became a "trumpet." I think.

I love being able to go back in time and see how much my child has grown and changed. I love finding new ways to document his growth over time.

Speaking of changes, I should give you an update on Lucian's vision problem in case you wonder why he might look a little odd in the videos. Lucian has strabismus in his left eye. He also has an astigmatism which prevents him from focusing clearly. His optometrist recommended he wear corrective glasses to straighten his eye and help him focus. Yesterday was his most recent checkup. Unfortunately, after 8 weeks, he hasn't responded to this treatment alone, so we've now been directed to patch his good eye to help force his bad eye to work properly. Currently, he is only using his right eye and turns his head when confronted with using his left eye. So, I just wanted to let you know about that because sometimes the quality of online video might not show certain details, like the fact that he is wearing a flesh-colored patch over his eye, not that his eye is missing entirely.

Last night was the first night of patching his eye. We were very nervous about it because we weren't sure how he would react. Would he have a major meltdown and begin to hate us? Would he keep ripping it off and refuse to cooperate? All I know is I would be really ticked off if someone patched my good eye so it was not easy doing this to him. For this reason I have to tell you just how thankful I was for Geoff's concert last night. It really helped to smooth out this experience. Lucian was so cooperative. I was shocked that he kept the patch on all evening. The doctor said she would be really happy if we could keep the patch on him for at least two hours per day for the next two months. Well, he kept it on all night last night and he's been wearing it for over two hours with no complaints today. I'm so proud of him!

I really think that by making movies and seeing himself with his eye patch on and having fun helped to make him more confident about wearing it. It certainly didn't impede his ability to have fun and it sure did help to have Geoff's online music show to interact with.

People always tell me to savor these moments because the time goes so fast. Capturing these moments on video helps me do just that but it still blows my mind at just how fast five months has gone by!

Geoff-meet your new band memberhttp://www.ustream.tv/channel/geoffsmith
Hey JudeI think he thinks it's hey Dude tho
hangin with Geoff Smith

If you don't yet know who Geoff Smith is, you should really check him out.

Last night he performed another free UStream concert for close to 300 people who joined as viewers and chatters from all over the world. (I say world because several from Canada were there plus a buddy of mine from Australia checked in too. I know that because I was tweeting it like crazy in case you missed my tweetmeat. I wouldn't call it spam, so I'm calling it meat instead, LOL!)

Last night's performance marked the one year anniversary of his "accidental concert." He doesn't really have a regular performance schedule so you kind of have to catch him. To make that easier — if you already follow me and I know about it, you'll know about it. Even easier yet though would be to follow Geoff Smith for updates.

Thank you Geoff Smith for all the good times so far!

What Do Worms Eat for Lunch?

I found a little inch worm in our kitchen today and thought it might interest Lucian. I brought it out and put it on our front door step along with a small leaf. I took some photos and this little video of him eating his lunch with the little worm. He calls it a "nake" (since he can't quite say "s" yet. He offered it a cracker and I thought that was really awesome that he is learning to share. It's a lesson we're working on right now since he keeps saying everything is "mine! mine! mine!" I'm sure this would be much more interesting if he had a sibling. (We're working on it.)

It was fun to get down on our bellies and study this amazing little creature.




Lunch With A Worm from TheMacMommy on Vimeo.

The S Report

This is Lucian and Mommy reporting to you from Seesmic on The State of the Nap.

It's late.

Tune in next time.

What should we report on next time?

The S ReportLucian came out with 2 megablocks pretending to be a reporter so we decided to have some fun with it

O Yes We Can!

Congratulations, United States of America!

It will take some time, but my bootstraps are thick.
Just a couple more months of that miserable old pric killjoy.

Yes we can.
Yes we did.
Yes we will.

And, Yes — I just did.

Finding Halloween

We had a great Halloween this year with Lucian. He only ate one little lollypop despite the huge "facebucket" of candy he collected. (He carried a little orange jack-o-lantern bucket and because it has a smiley face on it, he called it a facebucket. Sounds like some new social media application, doesn't it?) Aside from a few pieces of chocolate (I'm only human) we'll be donating the rest to Mr. Davis' science class for, um, science, yeah, that's what we'll call it.



Instead of going to the mall or trick-or-treating door to door, we went to something called Trunk 'O Treats which was held at the Picture Rocks Community Center. Several families volunteered to dress up their vehicles stocked with goodies (as well as themselves) to line the perimeter of the parking lot. Picture Rocks Fire Dept., Trico Electric, the A&W Great Root Bear, C4PR and Arizona Youth Partnership were there to support the event. There was a decorated Sheriff's car where a male and female officer handed out badges and coloring books.

Our favorite part was the Picture Rocks Fire Department's firetruck. Lucian and all the other youngsters got to climb up and tour the firetruck. We had to pry Lucian out of it. He really loved sitting inside of it. No surprise as his Great-Grandfather was a Fire Chief once upon a time. (I just know my Grandpop was smiling down on us from Heaven that night with pride. If only he could have met Lucian. I really miss you Grandpop.) The firefighters were so awesome and entertaining. They were always willing to answer any questions. Lucian really loved inspecting a fireman's hat. He couldn't get enough of the flashlight attached to it.


Inside the building they had face painting and coloring supplies for the little ones.
There were also drinks, stickers and cookies for everyone. There were about 10 vehicles all decked out with some amazing decorations, music and special effects like a smoke machine. Everyone was dressed in costume and all the kids were adorable and pleasant.

We met up with some new friends and their two little boys as well as some other parents and their children. It was nice because everyone knew someone there and it felt like a very safe and secure environment. Lucian and his new little buddy held hands as we walked around visiting the different families at their cars. We brought our own bag of goodies and helped replenish a someone else's stock so we could feel like we too were sharing.

After that event, we headed over to Oma and Opa's house to Trick-or-Treat with them and they were very much delighted to spend the holiday for the first time in person with their grandson. Oma took Nemo by his little fin and walked him to a couple of doors around the block to say hello to their new neighbors and show off their little pride and joy. Daddy and I took the opportunity to teach Lucian a lesson in saying thank you and having patience while people answer the door.

I always have mixed feelings about Halloween because it's not the way I remember it and I'm still not certain about what I want my son to experience. I really don't like the idea of kids consuming so much candy. I don't mind the idea of the tradition and celebrating it, but I don't see why it has to be all about candy and unhealthy snacks. When I purchased treats this year, I got pencils, playdoh, bubbles, etc. I didn't go wild on the candy because we never get enough kids to hand it out to and then it sits in our house for us to deal with.

I just re-read my post on this from last year and I still feel the same way.

I wonder what you think about Halloween and how do you explain it to your kids?

I don't know. Maybe I'm the mean mommy and things will change as Lucian gets older and starts hanging with his friends. I don't care for the kind of mixed messages kids get when it comes to this event so that's why I was grateful for the opportunity to go to the Trunk 'O Treats event where Lucian got to meet Police Officers and Firemen. It gave me a chance to start introducing him to these services as part of a broader family emergency plan. Part of an emergency plan is preparing your child by introducing them to things like the sounds and lights of police cars, ambulances and firetrucks and also the people who provide these services so a child knows what the uniforms look like and who they can go to for safety. I got the idea from the Sesame Workshop. This is one treat I hope you'll check out. There are great links on the right side of the site where you can download printable PDFs of some important information to keep handy. There are also tools to help you communicate these concepts with your child. I really like the page that has the large phone keypad on it. I think it's a great tool to help a young child learn his/her phone number. If you click here it will download the PDF so you can see an example of what I mean. (Tip: I had to physically rename the file to add the dot pdf extension on it so my computer would open it.)

From our family to yours, we hope you had a very Happy and safe Halloween!

Grandma.app

Let me elaborate
I finally updated my website so I could integrate my blog into it. Now I can just tell people to go to 'themacmommy.com' and I don't have to worry about whether or not they'll remember the dot blogspot dot com part. The only thing I'll have to worry about is if they remember the 'the' part of the address.
(PITA, but macmommy.com is already registered so I had to put 'the' in front. Just in case you thought I was really that conceited.)

I've tried to lay out my home page as a sort of one-stop virtual business card. (Inspired by Dave Taylor, thank you Darling.) I'm still tweaking the rest of the site and pages, but the bulk of it is done. I'm pretty happy with the layout despite the fact that I barely know anything about building websites and that I made the whole thing in iWeb. On the blog I just kept tweaking numbers and code and previewing it till I figured out what changed what. My OCD must have kicked into overdrive and this probably explains why my eyes are so dry lately. I still wonder sometimes what would have happened had I studied web design in college instead of print graphics and advertising. Oh well. I'm having fun now and that's all that matters, right? There are lots of cool things I'd like my site to do, but this will suffice for now until I learn more. Baby steps. Goo goo ga ga.
(What baby ever says that anyhow? Just wondering.)

<--- You can use the page links on the left hand side of the page to explore other pages on my external website and social network.

It's always a work in progress because I love to tweak. It keeps my mind off of my allergies and gives me something to do (instead of cleaning the house) while potty training my son. (not that it hasn't been just so much fun hanging out stuck in my living room with a nekked kid running around who isn't me) Eventually I want to create a better page on my site to display some of my artwork and creative photography. I just have stupid links there for now. Don't click them. It's more of a reminder or placeholder for myself as to what I'd like to put there. I have all of my older photography all backed up on archive and I just have to dig it out and arrange it better. (An OCD attack for another time perhaps.)

I could never be a good scrapbooker. Thinking about it just makes me twitch.
And it's not like I don't have all the supplies sitting in my closet either just in case all the computers in our house ever break down and I have a nervous breakdown along with it.

I've also added some enhancements to my blog here. I hope you like them. You'll notice there are little icons after outgoing links. If you roll your cursor over those tiny icons, you'll get a preview of what the website looks like without even having to click over and leave the spot where you're currently reading. I find this helpful for those times when I may add a link that points to an image to illustrate some vague concept inside my head. Like this one.

I've also added a new commenting system called Disqus. Now you can leave me text comments as well as video. (go ahead, I double, dog dare ya!) If you don't have a Disqus account, you can still leave comments, but Disqus is pretty cool and free to sign up. So is seesmic. Just sayin. Sometimes it's a bit funky to be able to read everyone else's comments to each other — kinda like you're spying on them and reading their mail — but I suppose you could be all ninja about it and leave yourself annonymous or "unclaimed" somehow so no one would know it was you who talked about your mother-in-law out in the open. I'm looking forward to seeing comments using this new feature. I hope someone leaves me a video comment sometime. That would be a lot of fun. If I could get my friends and family on board with these free services, it would be a really great way to keep in touch through my blog. Ahh, the power of web 2.0 — if only I could get people to use it now! (Hint: the more people who participate with me on my blog, the more examples I'd have to show them.)

Thanks to help from friends on twitter, I FINALLY got the favicon thingee working on everything including my spot on the Alltop Moms page. (Tip: there are lots of awesome blogs on that page, so if you are looking for someone specifically, just press command-F and type in parts of their blog name and Firefox or Safari will highlight the link for you. If you want to search for me, for example, type 'the' 'mac' 'mommy' with spaces and it will take you right to it.) w00t! Thanks for all your help guys! You rawk! (and contribute to my OCD, thankyouverymuch)

The only time the favicon doesn't load is if you type the url into the browser. For example, if you type 'themacmommy.com' and load the pages, then the favicon doesn't load and the url locations don't change either. This has to do with the fact that I'm cheap/poor, take your pick a stubborn frugalista and trying to stretch the outer limits of free content hosting wherever I can. My blog is hosted for free here on Blogger. My website is hosted for free with Cox, my ISP. All of my photo and movie sharing needs are hosted for free with services like Picasa, YouTube and Vimeo. I've taken all of these free services and stitched them all together using a combination of embedded code and links on my blog and website; you know, "internet glue." Google is my favorite type of "internet glue."

So, to professional web designers, I'm sorry if all the under-stitching looks like crap, but the fact is, my 80-year old Nana who lives 3000 miles away — doesn't care. She just likes to click on stuff and I like to imagine the smile that melts across her face when she sees her great grandson in movies and pictures that she doesn't have to fumble with in her mail program. (So long as her Windows box loads the correct plugins - I keep my fingers crossed or walk her through it over the phone.)

I guess you could say that my grandmothers are my driving force when it comes to doing what I do online and how I create content using my Mac. My paternal grandmother, Nana, has a computer and is pretty savvy when it comes to being organized. She knows how to check her email and forward virus hoaxes, because she cares about me, ya know and respond to messages. She can navigate the web. She finds joy in simple things and that really inspires me. My maternal grandmother does not have a computer and is a traditional artist. (She would rather put ink to paper and I don't think she's ever even touched a mouse. She only knows of the mammal kind and would keep it as a pet if she could.) I respect her unwillingness to embrace technology and it challenges me that much more to find simple tools she might possibly consider. I get the creative influence from her. Both grandmothers are in their eighties so anything I create online or offline has to be easy to use.

My sole motivation for learning how to use iMovie is so I can someday create a collection of videos and make a DVD using iDVD to send to my grandmothers so she they watch it on their TVs. Now I just need to get my optical drive fixed and I can move forward with that project.

Every time I sign up for a new social networking service, I have my Nana and other family members in mind. I always wonder if it would be something they could use or would like. Most of the time, sadly, the answer is no for several complex reasons. I continue to look for ways in which families and friends can network and keep in touch using the web. Just a few days ago I walked my Dad through the installation and setup of a Skype account and the result was awesome and we had so much fun. (iChat is fun too, but has been having some quality issues lately.)

Most of my friends and family live on the other side of the country. The distance always keeps me reaching out to them in new ways.

So far, the best way I have found is to try it all out, use it for a while and then incorporate the best parts of it somehow into my online space in such a way that I can just email one simple link to a friend or family member. That's what I'm hoping to achieve with my website and blog and I hope it will inspire others.