American Girl dolls are all the rage in our area. Although they're expensive, they are the wholesome antithesis of Barbie, correctly proportioned, fully clothed, and age appropriate. Every doll comes with a back story. Julie is from San Francisco in the 70's. Kit grew up in the Great Depression to become a journalist. All of that appeals to the story tellers in both me and Savannah.

I refused to buy her one a year ago, so she saved her birthday/Christmas/grandma money to buy one herself. (In the last year, she has also bought Ruthie.) She has saved for a few of the accessories also. But when our neighbor invited Savannah to her American Girl sleepover birthday party, I was happy to buy pink polka dot pajamas, for her and the doll! Wondering about the precedent I was setting, the girl in me was tickled for her. It would be here in plenty of time for the sleepover.

She wore the pjs for three nights before she got a black stain on the bodice, actually that's not bad on a kid's timeline. It didn't come out in the wash. The dry cleaners could have it ready on the day of the sleepover! We went together to pick them up, only to find the one button had broken in the cleaning process and two had fallen off! The cleaner's supplied six new buttons. I'd have to replace them, and this couldn't have happened on a busier Saturday! I noticed the new buttons were shaped slightly different than the three remaining but figured Savannah wouldn't notice. On the way back to the car, she said "You are gonna replace them all, right?" I asked why? She said, "Because the new buttons are different." It was more work for me, but I was happy she noticed.

While we were out, she remembered that she'd never gotten the birthday magazine I'd promised from Safeway. And there was Safeway right next to the cleaners. On our detour she held up a girl's magazine, with girls on the cover just a bit older. (I remember always aspiring to be the girls two and three years older than I was.) I scanned the headlines for dating and kissing, but it had phrases like "Cliques, good or bad?" and How to have the best sleepover ever.... I approved it. Then Spongebob caught her eye. I watched her looking between a girl/growing up magazine and a funny cartoon. Hmm, growing up or staying young. I made it clear it was her choice but asked which magazine would she get the most use out of. She chose Spongebob. When I asked why, she said, "Because it has comics." :-) Even my mother loves Spongebob.

Savannah knows she's pretty. It's nothing she's said out loud. But I can see it in the way she presents herself. This school year she's been brushing her teeth and hair every morning without being told. She just started wearing perfume. Although Daddy and I had to teach her how little she really needs.

I've told her she looks pretty, which is not quite the same as saying "You're pretty." It's a hard thing for me to say to her. I need to be level headed for her, not too vain. I've found it easier to tell Arwen she's adorable, but at 4 1/2 she is still hanging on to her babyhood with her round face and dimpled knuckles. In the long run, I don't think it's best for either of them to hear it too much.

I'm looking for the balance on that fine line of passing on confidence or vanity. I was raised with a "Pretty is as pretty does" mentality. And her example of pretty comes from my behavior more than my words, no? I was never told I was pretty. The single mother who raised me, the woman who cut bad sycamore limbs with a chain saw, chopped fire wood and poisoned wasp nests even though she was near hysterically afraid of them, well, she wanted me to go into science. She liked hearing me play Fur Elise or Floyd Cramer's Last Date on the piano. You can't put looks in a cash register, my dad liked to say. Their generation, and mine too I think, didn't have the audience that this new one has. Pretty was something we were just supposed to know, our ranking in the world's gauge of who's handsome and who's not.

What if I'd had a mother who tried building my confidence with compliments? Would I have been more assertive in junior high? happier? What if it had gone to my head? What if it had ruined me?

Now I'm a fairly secure person. I like my green eyes and ski-slope nose and I've even grown to like my natural hair color. But when I hear someone say that so and so (insert celebrity name here) is beautiful, my next, most natural thought is, "What do you think of me?" With a beauty compliment dropped, there is an invisible notion left hanging, the notion of ugliness. So I find it no easier in saying "She's beautiful." than "She's ugly." However, if we're going to hear we're beautiful, it should be from someone who knows us.

I'm still figuring out the gender difference, but I've had no problem telling Seth he's handsome.

"Gimme a rest!" comes from Give it a rest and Gimme a break.

And for some reason he says, "Kill me I must be dreaming!" instead of "pinch me."

Just like his Daddy has done for a long time, Seth just started using his vocal chords to yawn. Kids have all kinds of quirks that come out in different phases, talking loudly while breathing in; that's a lovely one, especially right in your ear. Yawning with a voiceover isn't so bad. Even when he (1) does it in public. There are far more disruptive things a five year old boy could do.

I don't imagine Seth ever had a moment where he thought, "Hey, I like the noise Daddy makes when he yawns. I'll start that." But it's at this age that boys have really begun to identify with their fathers. (The process of pulling away from the mother can start at about 18 months.) I think even this goofy, subconscious adopting of a trait seals the deal. We are destined to become our same sex parent, no?

Naturally, there are little troubles and stress (2) that you learn to let go of with each child. It may be the best reason to have three children. As Daddy has yawned loudly through our years together, I've learned to transpose annoyances into amusements. And there is the secret to a happy marriage!

~
1) Seth, not Daddy
2) As little as they are, they step on my feet and I still holler "Feeet."

Seth and Arwen have been wearing their new bike helmets, the trendy round kind. Seth organizes astronaut games, usually involving the helmets, our good climbing tree, and dismantling the wagon. They're playing astronaut this morning.

Arwen is our slow child. It's a good, dreamy kind of slow. She's as sharp as the other two, but there's little to hurry her when she's not compliant.

When Seth and Arwen came in for "space gear" which involved Arwen's getting into her bathing suit, Seth got tired of waiting on her dilly dallying and shouted, "I'm blasting off without you!"

Did you know you can assign a keyboard shortcut that invokes any browser bookmark you’ve created? For example, I have a bookmarklet for sharing a link on FriendFeed.com. I’d like to run that bookmarklet on the active page using Ctrl+Cmd+F. To do this, I can create a keyboard menu shortcut for OS X:

Creating the shortcut is easy: open your System Preferences and go to the “Keyboard & Mouse” preferences, then click on the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab. Click the “+” button below the shortcut listing. Set the shortcut to apply to “Safari” (or “Firefox”) in the Application list, then type in the name of your bookmark (exactly as it is labelled in your bookmarks), and set a keyboard shortcut.

After you do this, you may have to restart your browser to try it out. I’ve also noticed that these shortcuts are not always recognized right away, due to the way the menu options for bookmarks are lazily loading until it is needed (Safari and Firefox both behave this way). Just click on the “Bookmarks” menu option if your shortcut isn’t already working; you only need to do that once after the browser has loaded.

I love this tip because it makes bookmarklets so much easier to invoke, and it doesn’t involve using any weird third-party software hacks to do it.

I have found a pattern in my party planning. When I'm shopping for my children at their birthdays or December, I'm conservative in my buying. Savannah always gets one or two things on her list, which is always 5 times that long. When she shows me her list and talks about it, I can see two things; one, she knows she won't get everything on the list, and two, this year there were subtleties in her approach. She's conscious of appearing greedy.

I love that. I want to reach out and hug her for it. She's thoughtful of her place in the world, and I'm happy to see that so far she has not fallen for the notion of entitlement that so many children of this generation and in our location on the map seem to have fallen for.

It must mean I'm correct in my conservative shopping. But then I wrap the gifts. It's almost always the night before the friends come for games and cake, and every time I panic a little. I'm sad that I didn't give her just one or two more things on her list. Then I wonder if I'll have time to pick up High School Musical 2 or one of those American Girl movies tomorrow before the party. (I won't.)

Her main present is an American Girl accessory. (She owns two American Girl dolls which she paid for herself with allowance and birthday/grandma money.) Before wrapping the box, I saw the catalogue in it. I've thrown several away before she ever even saw them. I know, aren't I cruel? ;-) But some I give to her. Tonight, the catalogue reminded me how I felt when I was young and looked at wish books. I knew I couldn't have _any_thing in them. That doesn't bother me now, seeing things I can't have, but it was very sad when I was young. I hope it's not like that for her. I don't think it is. I believe she has more ambition than I did, more knowledge than I had that she can work toward something.

On her card I drew a picture of nine individual candles, some with little polka dots, some with big, some with stripes, one a flower collar and the last, the ninth, large wings and a smile on the flame. The front of the card quotes Helen Keller. "Life is either a daring adventure, or it is nothing at all."

At Starbucks this morning before going to the free movie, Arwen said, "This place smells like sugar."

This may be the last week I have to use this clunky 1st generation iPhone. I’ve been anticipating the 2nd gen model since June 30, and the original doesn’t hold a candle to my expectations for iPhone 2.

Yesterday I rolled Arwen's window down so she could say goodbye to a little friend, and her purple balloon got sucked out the window! If you've ever witnessed this, it is a true heartbreak for a child. Their tears are genuine.

Trying to put a good spin on her tragedy I said, "But he's free now! He got his freedom!"

I expected more tears, but she said, "You mean she."

Seth teased me by pretending to eat a big slice of apple, as opposed to the small bite that he knows I prefer. I ignored it.

"Seth, they say that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. What do you think that means?"

My interesting tone took his attention away from The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, and he said, "Doctors don't like apples?"

She climbed into bed with us this morning, as she does every morning, and we oohed and aahed about her being 4! But she says, "But I'm not big." I know what she means. She's been babied. She is the baby, and she still looks like a baby. Her face is still round; her hands are still dimpled. Arwen is a peanut. All the strangers at Trader Joe's seem surprised when she tells them she's turning 4, not 3.

Highlights: chocolate muffins, a tea party board game and cheeseburgers with her family. The big party with all her little girlfriends is still 10 days away.

Lets talk about a variety of Mac OS X software called Input Managers.

In brief, an Input Manager is software that can affect other running applications. The original intent of Input Managers was to provide a means for customizing the operation of the keyboard and/or mouse to support things like locale-specific input behavior (treating keyboard input differently for different languages or regions) and software that aids handicapped individuals. The name “Input Manager” is thus appropriate for these intended uses. (Read more about Text Input Management.)

However, it wasn’t long before Mac developers found this to be a useful way to graft additional functionality into other applications. There are several OS X software products out there that are input managers which have little to do with input management (Inquisitor, 1Password, Chax are three that I use today). These products are typically unstable in nature, since they often times rely on undocumented aspects of the “host” application. But when they work, they can add real useful functionality to other programs.

The downside to Input Managers is that it is a tempting means for rogue software to exploit. One such example is the “Oompa-Loompa” trojan which surfaced about two years ago. This was a download that supposedly contained pre-release screen shots of OS X 10.5. It masqueraded the installation program as an image file, and when the unsuspecting user tries to view the file, it installs itself into the user’s “Input Managers” folder. It then can access any application that is run and affects iChat in particular, so that it tries to spread to others in your iChat contact list.

One of the changes in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was in how OS X dealt with Input Managers. The early rumors were that Leopard wouldn’t permit them to run at all. But after release, Leopard did run Input Managers, but only those that are installed in the system-wide “/Library/InputManagers” folder.

The distinction is this: before Leopard, if a user runs software that tries to install an Input Manager, there is nothing to stop it from installing one that is local to that user’s account (installing it to the “/Users/username/Library/InputManagers” folder). With Leopard, installation of an Input Manager requires system-administration rights (so the user is prompted to authenticate to permit the installation), and the Input Manager is installed to the “/Library/InputManagers” folder.

The authentication requirement is the key and is a welcome change. There should be some kind of barrier to install software of this nature. BUT, it is wrong for Input Managers to only be installable in a system-wide fashion.

Before Leopard, I always— always— installed Input Managers for my own account only. By doing so, I could always login as another user to disable them. Remember— by their nature, they are less stable, and can cause applications to crash. A common request of developers when reporting bugs in their programs is to disable any third-party Input Manager software to see if it resolves the problem at hand. I could do that by logging in under a different account before Leopard, but now I cannot.

Personally, I would have preferred that user-specific Input Managers were still supported, but also require an administrator’s password to install. So, you would have a path, perhaps like “/Library/InputManagers/Users/username”, which may even be symlinked to “/Users/username/Library/InputManagers”. I think this is a better option, than requiring Input Managers to be activated for all users of that machine.

Hopefully a later update or release of OS X will address this and restore the option of user-level Input Managers.

Seth's big field trip was a bus ride to the museum. An odd choice I think for rowdy 5 year old children, mostly boys. Running my errands, I drove past his class all crowded around the bus stop. I'd assumed they'd rent a yellow bus, and sure enough, when Seth got home, the only thing he had to say about it was his disappointment in not getting to ride a yellow school bus. He'd ridden the public transit bus, The Number 10.

So now we see The Number 10 bus all over town, and Seth yells from the back seat, his little barbaric challenges, like, "I hate you, Number 10!" or "Oh, no! Not again!" or "I'll get you for this Number 10!"

I Savannah declare:

- Stay up later
- Have a raise in my allowence
- Have the computer in my room
- More sleepovers and playdates
- Science stuff
- Science posters

Sighnd,
Savannah (in very curly cursive)

Netflix.com has this option to watch a selection of their movies through your browser. Assuming your browser is running on Windows, as they require Windows Media DRM to play it.

But their promotional graphic (pictured here) shows it running on a black MacBook (Update: apparently, I’m jumping to conclusions — see comments below).

They doctored the thing of course, placing a still frame over the display, covering the portion that has the built-in camera and all evidence of the ‘MacBook’ imprinted at the bottom of the display. But you can make out the key layout, the size of the trackpad, and even the infrared receiver on the front-right side. It’s definitely a MacBook.

Now, it’s not impossible to get those videos on a MacBook. You can do it if you’re running Windows under Parallels or VM Fusion. Performance is fine, even at full resolution. But I seriously doubt they expect their average customer to do that!