I’ve had the same email address since before Gal Smiley was born, so going on four years now. I’ve used it to sign up for a few trusted websites that I shop at regularly, and I use it for all my personal email. All my friends and family know this address, and people who I haven’t talked to in several years can still get a hold of me at the same old place.

And now…violation! It seems that after all this time, my address has finally been discovered by the internet. Believe it or not, all these years, I have rarely, if ever, gotten a piece of spam. But in the past few weeks, I’ve gotten several virus email attachments, various spam advertisements, and weird emails asking me to click on an internet link of unknown origin. The word is out!

I blame my recent announcement to friends and family of the Wee One’s birth. I think someone out there that I sent the email to had a virus that picks up all the addresses in their inbox, and mails them something. Naturally we remain uninfected, because I am not an idiot, but somehow this other person’s infection has released my private info to the world. Either that, or someone who didn’t know my email before got it from the distlist, and served it up to an outside site, probably for a contest entry. Grrrr!

Sir Monkeypants thinks it was silly of me to send the announcement from my main account (I have a silly gmail address that I use for posting on public message boards and for other public type mailings). But I used my main address for Gal Smiley’s birth announcement, and nothing bad came of it, so I just didn’t think about it.

I must say I feel really upset about this. I’ve tried hard to keep my email address private, in that I don’t share it with public sites or put it on forms or anything like that. I’ll give out my phone number before I’ll give out my email to a stranger. My email provider has very little in the way of spam filtering, so now that the spam has started to seep through, it’ll only get worse from this point on.

I suppose I’ll have to get a new email address, at gmail probably, and find a way to forward from my old one to my new one. But I’ll still be bitter and angry. I hate spam!

Sir Monkeypants and I finally got around to watching the end of Lost this past week — we’d stored up most of the season’s episodes on our PVR. The episodes went unwatched during the spring because we just couldn’t seem to summon up enough enthusasiam for the show, and we even considered dumping it at one point, but then everyone told us that it had gotten significantly fabulous in the latter few episodes, so we decided to catch up and keep it on the playlist for next year. As I expected, once we got going we were quickly sucked back in. Already I can’t wait for its return, which won’t be until next January.

I’m really encouraged by the fact that the show’s creators have announced that Lost will have only three more seasons, and each of the remaining seasons will be short — I think only 11 episodes. They wanted a set end date so they could work on wrapping up the storylines and answering the mysteries; they didn’t want to have pressure from the network to extend the mysteries for an artificially long time, to stretch the show into more seasons than it could sustain, until the point where its viewers were just too frustrated to stick with the show. Sir Monkeypants is not convinced that all our questions will be answered in the end, but I have faith that all the major mysteries will be resolved in some way.

Since the show won’t be returning for several months, I wanted to record a list of my own questions about the show. I’m hoping all of these will be answered over the next three seasons. Next January I plan to return to this post to refresh my memory about what makes the show so darned interesting.

1. What is the mystery disease that infected Rousseau’s group? Is this the same disease that the Dharma people protect themselves from, with injections of the mystery serum? Why aren’t any of the Losties sick, even after visiting the Black Rock?
2. Speaking of the Black Rock, how did a ship end up in the middle of the island?
3. Who put the black smoke monster on the island, and what is its purpose? Why didn’t it kill Locke when it had the chance?
4. And speaking of Locke, what is it about the island that cures people? Is it true that Ben can harness this quality to cure people in the outside world, like Juliet’s sister?
5. Who is Jacob, and why does he need Locke’s help? Why do the Others blindly believe in Jacob and follow Ben, when none of them can see him or hear him?
6. What was the “incident” that the Dharma video mentioned, that caused the button in the original hatch to have to be pushed? What really happened when the counter hit bottom, and Desmond turned the fail safe switch? Did the hatch implode? If so, how did Desmond survive?
7. Who does Naomi work for? Was she telling the truth about the flight having been discovered with all the bodies on board? If so, does that mean the Losties are all actually dead? Does that explain why some of them can see dead people from their past on the island?
8. Why was Libby in the asylum with Hurley?
9. Does Walt have special powers of some sort? Are these related to the island? And does Aaron have the same qualities? Why does Claire have to be the one to raise Aaron?
10. Why were the Others building a runway?

I’m sure I’ll think of more in the months to come. Feel free to post a comment here if you think of anything to add.

In other TV news, Sir Monkeypants has finished watching Sports Night, and now has moved on to The West Wing. It’s very interesting seeing the two Sorkin shows back-to-back like this, because they have a lot in common. Of course they have a similar writing style, but more than that, they are surprisingly thematically the same — Sorkin worked a lot of his political and moral ideas into Sports Night. Also, there are quite a few overlapping cast members in small roles — we spotted Janel Maloney, who plays Donna on The West Wing, in a small role as the sports show assistant wardrobe manager on an episode of Sports Night, and the girl who plays the President’s middle daughter, Ellie, on The West Wing had a small part as a nanny on Sports Night. In any case, they are both great shows, totally involving with sparkling dialogue and great characters, and I hope to see Sorkin working in television again soon.

Today was the premiere of High School Musical 2 on TV, so of course, it was available online for illegal download at least 12 hours before it aired on network television. If you read my blog at all you’ll know that a) my kids and myself ADORE the original, b) we have seen the original at least 30 times and can quote it by heart, AND do all the dance moves, and c) we have listened to the soundtrack about a million times, and know all the words to every song. Also, d), I am conversationally anal retentive and need to constantly organise my thoughts into lists.

So Sir Monkeypants, because he loves us, got a copy of HSM 2 to watch this afternoon and we eagerly sat down to inhale it. I never thought I would say this, ever, but the world has finally made a musical that I thought was kind of stupid. I’m sure the songs will grow on me after the kids have made me listen to them 100 times, but at first listen, they are all kind of similar and unremarkable. The story is forced and silly and full of melodrama. I mean, I can find it in my heart to be moved when Maria teaches the seven Von Trapp children to sing, but it’s too much to ask of me to care when Troy is upset because his girlfriend just doesn’t understand why he had to blow off their lunch date.

Near the end of the movie, Sir Monkeypants started making fun of it, to preserve his sanity. Troy has a big overblown solo number about how he has been a jerk and needs to apologize for the lunch date thing. In the TurtleHead household, you’d have heard this:

Gal Smiley: What is Troy doing?
Me: He’s mad. And now he’s going to sing about it.
Sir Monkeypants: He’s singing mad!
Me: And now he’s dancing mad!
Sir Monkeypants: He’s singing, dancing mad!
Gal Smiley: And he’s twisting mad!
Sir Monkeypants: That’s right! He’s singing, dancing, and twisting mad! And now he’s singing, dancing, twisting, and golfing mad! And now, singing, dancing, twisting, golfing, and walking mad! He’s walking AND running mad!

Around then, milk came out my nose.

I was going to post my comments about last night’s show in response to FameThrowa’s post, but she went to such lovely effort to make her post spoiler-free, and my comments are chock-fulla-spoilers, so I figured I better make a separate post so people can be properly warned and all that. And also, so non-dance lovers can avoid my chit-chat altogether.

Here’s what I wanted to say about the two-hour final-four finale of last night:

• I loved it, but I did think last year’s was stronger — the final four had a better match of skills and better chemistry, so they just worked better together last season.
• My favourite number was the Wade Robson little foxes one, with the two girls, and I think the judges were TOTALLY HIGH in their response to the piece. I watched it three times and almost cried each time. Totally fabulous. It’s one of the few times I have absolutely disagreed with the judges all season.
• I thought Lacey was better last night than she has been all season. She finally managed to relate to her partners and generate some chemistry, she was truly excellent in all her pieces, and her solo finally came together to show us something meaningful (although it still wasn’t spectacular). I hear that she is the favourite to win, and up until now I would have been disappointed with that, feeling that she just coasted in on her brother’s coattails, but now I can feel satisfied that she really is a great dancer.
• I think Neil is the most improved dancer of the season. I actively disliked him for most of the season but he has totally turned me around. Loved all his performances last night.
• Both the lindy hop number and the cha cha number were entertaining, but obviously lacking in the kind of sharp skill that Benji and Heidi had last season, so I was a little disappointed. I wish they had picked styles of dancing that weren’t hard for the sake of being hard, but hard and also well suited to the final dancers’ personal styles. Seeing Sabra and Danny dance jazz, for instance, would have been so mind blowing.
• I honestly have no idea who will win. But I like them all, so I think I’ll be happy no matter what. And that’s a good thing!

What do you do with old greeting cards?

I love paper products in general — books, notebooks, fancy paper, and of course, cards. I love shopping for pretty cards with cute sayings on them for every occasion — birthdays, Christmas, Mother’s Day, and every other holiday in between.

At Christmastime, I take all the cards we receive and I cut the fronts off of them and turn them into tags to use on next years’ gifts.

But I’m not sure what to do with the others. We have a lovely pile of cards congratulating us on the birth of the Wee One, and they are so pretty and cute and made of paper, that I find I just can’t chuck them into the garbage (or worse yet — shred them for recycling). But I don’t have the time or energy to put them into a scrap book for permanent record keeping, and we don’t have the space to keep them just as a pile, forever and ever.

Any ideas? Should I make a collage? Make tags for similar themed (i.e. baby) gifts? Use the paper for thank-you cards, or to write notes on?

Hm.

While the Wee One is sleeping and Gal Smiley and Captain Jelly Belly are watching a movie, I figured I’d make up for a month’s worth of non-posting :).

The Wee One turned one month old on the weekend and it’s crazy how time flies. She is already too long for most of our newborn/0-3 month baby clothes, and I’ve started to pack that stuff up, along with all my maternity wear, to send to my younger sister. I can tell that I’m done having kids because I feel really excited to have this stuff out of my house, even though it is a little bit sad to think that the itty bitty teeny tiny socks won’t be worn again in our household. Actually, I think I will put a pair of the little socks in my kids’ keepsake box just in case I get a little misty-eyed in the future.

The Wee One continues to do great and we really couldn’t ask for better. She is going to bed around 7pm, getting up around 1am to eat, and then going back to bed until 4:30 or 5am. Not too shabby (but, do me a favour and pretend you didn’t just read that, because Sir Monkeypants keeps saying that if we keep telling people about what good sleeping she is doing, we will jinx it). Also, she has started smiling, which is seriously the best thing ever. She smiles freely for me and her dad, and sometimes for the Captain too. It’s exciting and heart warming.

Gal Smiley is doing well, too. We’ve decided to step back from the toilet training, as she continues to really resist it, and we think it’s just too much change at once for her. We will try again this fall. In the meantime we are spending more time with her and she’s happier, plus she has a cute little pixie haircut that I gave her last week that is just adorable.

And the Captain continues to be the rather fanatical head of the Wee One fan club. He gets so excited to see her that he gets right in her face and squeals and says her name over and over. It’s really cute, so we will have to catch it on film so we can play it over and over for him when she does something annoying like take his Lightening McQueen and try to eat it. 🙂

This past weekend we attended a reunion for a math enrichment summer camp I attended 20 years ago, when I was 16. I probably would have skipped it, but it was being held about 10 minutes from our house, so even with the Wee One and the C-section, I didn’t feel like I could get out of it. It was an okay time — about 10 of us came from the original 48, so a small crowd, but most of us have a few kids so it was a full house nonetheless.

It was interesting to see, as my friend and hostess SuperNiceGirl said, the “range of parenting styles.” It’s a group of people who I haven’t seen in at least 10 years, whose kids I have never met before, so I don’t know their backstories or what they are really like or what their kids are really like. So, working only on snap judgments, I saw a wide range of parents, from Super Involved, to Less Involved But With Super Good Kids, to Not At All Involved with Hooligan Kids.

I was going to post a big rant about how I don’t understand how some parents can just let their kids run wild in someone else’s home with an open marker and white furniture (our hosts don’t have any children of their own). But then I realised I have made this exact same post many, many times before, in regards to the park and the hooligans there. So I won’t bore y’all by repeating myself, but I will say I am mildly concerned at how judgmental I am getting, especially when I know that being a parent is really hard work, and that every parent just does the absolute best that they can. And really, I can’t remotely pretend to know how to be a good parent — really we are just flying by the seat of our pants over here, and we hope our kids turn out okay, but if they do, I won’t really know how to explain how that happened.

But I will say, we try hard not to let our kids run around with open markers in houses with white furniture.

Sir Monkeypants and I have been watching a new show called Grand Slam on my favourite TV channel, the Game Show Network. I love all game shows and I watch far, far too much of GSN. One time I read an article about how stay-at-home moms who watch game shows are looking to escape their current life into a fantasy world. To them I say, bite me, and also, you’re just jealous that you don’t have a brand new toaster oven and a chance to trade up for a new car. Na na na na na!

Anyway, Grand Slam is an awesome show, at which my friend SmokingToaster would totally kick ass. There are two players and they stand facing each other on a minimalist stage. They answer questions, and it is timed like a speed chess match — your counter counts down until you answer a question correctly, then your counter stops and the other guy’s counter starts, until he answers a question correctly. They go back and forth until someone is out of time, and the remaining time on the other clock is carried forward into future rounds.

Round 1 is general knowledge and trivia. Round 2 is math and numbers. Round 3, where most of the contestants have trouble and where SmokingToaster would take them down, is word manipulation — jumbles, spelling, finding a hidden word in a nonsense sentence, that sort of thing. Then there is a final round where questions can come from any of the three previous categories.

What makes the show really fabulous is that it is not just for any random two contestants. Instead, they have assembled 16 of the most famous contestants from other game shows, seeded them, and they are playing each other in a round-robin, elimination style, that will pick one eventual winner. Of course Ken Jennings is there, ranked second, and some other famous Jeopardy dudes, as well as Millionaire winners, Weakest Link winners, and various other game show representatives. We saw Ken compete last week and he was great, but not invincible, as opposed to a couple of the other Jeopardy guys who were machines, especially in the math round. It’s really exciting and fast.

Plus, the host is Dennis Miller, who is a really smart guy and quick with the quips. He makes it entertaining in a very highbrow kind of way. If you get GSN, I’d recommend checking it out this summer.

The top of the Wee One’s head smells like Arrowroot cookies.

The Wee One just finished her three week growth spurt and I’m amazed at how much she has grown. She’s already too big for the sleeper she wore home from the hospital, and I notice the difference when I’m holding her for nursing. She’s more alert now, which is fun for the whole family, and she’s sleeping really well, usually for at least 4 or 5 hours at a stretch after she goes to “bed” at around 7 or 7:30pm. Pretty soon we’ll be moving her out of our room into her own room, which will mean three baby monitors creating static and popping noises in our room all night. As Mrs. Carl Sagan says, it’s kind of like sleeping at Norad.

I’m doing great too. Yesterday I drove for the first time and everything was fine, and today I walked all around the block with all three kids, on my own. I’ve been off of pain meds for more than a week and helping with the other kids, dinnertime, and cleanup pretty much like a normal person. I’m still avoiding going up and down the stairs when I can, but I can go up and down them now without too much trouble. Pretty much the final frontier is carrying around Gal Smiley, which she really can’t wait for.

Speaking of her, the transition to having a baby in the house has definitely been the hardest for the Gal. She gets cranky when I can’t play with her because I’m nursing the baby or holding the baby during naptimes (as Sir Monkeypants has already pointed out, the Wee One prefers to sleep in a lap, rather than her bassinet, during the day — a little annoying, but at least I’m almost all the way through Season 2 of So You Think You Can Dance now). Plus we are trying to toilet train Gal Smiley before she starts preschool in September, but she insists that she is a “baby” and wants to wear diapers, so that is causing a lot of butting of heads. I’m sure we will work it all out soon, and at least she doesn’t ever take out her frustration on the Wee One — on the contrary, she loves to help with changing her, bathing her, or “feeding” her (don’t ask).

The Captain is handling things in stride, but he’s always kind of enjoyed playing by himself, and he looooooves having his Dad at home, so it’s kind of like a big party for him, anyway. He is constantly coming up to the Wee One and giving her kisses and telling her that he loves her. Aw. On the other hand, she was really wailing today when I had to put her down for five minutes while I grabbed a pee break and a glass of water, and I returned to find him holding his hand over her mouth. Oops. Guess we will have a talk about that one!

And as for Sir Monkeypants…he is his usual totally awesome self. He’s really doing an incredible job around here, taking care of everyone and reorganizing the office and building new furniture for the Wee One’s room, all at the same time. Plus he remains relatively chipper about the toilet training process. All this on five hours of sleep a night! Amazing!

A couple of nights ago, I was trying to settle the Wee One down for bed, when she had an enormous poop that leaked all over. I brought her into the bathroom to clean up, and just then, Gal Smiley had a big poop, which Sir Monkeypants took the lead on, and then the Captain had to poo, so I talked him through the process of wiping his own bum while I cleaned up the baby. And everyone was stuffed in the bathroom, some were chattering and some were screaming, and in general there was chaos and a ton of noise, and you’d think I would find this situation really stressful. But instead, I felt total…joy. Because our house is now nutty and insane and loud, but it really feels like home. Our family feels complete, and we’re all in this together, and during the three-strikes-of-poo event, Sir Monkeypants and I were laughing, and the kids were all okay, and it was all good. And I was so happy to have such a great family.