narrating kayoz

"I wuv you."

"I wuv you." Yesterday was the first time Mikaela said that to me (or anybody). And she quickly followed it with "No, I wuv you too," when I said I loved her too. It was very cute. And she seemed very proud to get the words out.

She says it with a slight hesitation between each word - which is how she says all new sentences. She can say quite long ones now (by which I mean five or six words), but she's by no means fluent even with shorter sentences. She often seems to really think about which word to use next.

I was getting her ready for her nap and picked her up for a cuddle before nursing like I always do when she said it the first time. Which makes sense because I often say I love her then. She hasn't said it spontaneously like that again - without me saying it first. But she still seems very proud today of her ability to say it at all. She's definitely enjoying her language development as much as we are.

Work is fun

Sometimes two & a half days at work is just not enough. And sometimes two & a half days at home with the kids (not counting weekends) is not enough. I think I've made this comment before - as have many. It's a difficult juggle, and sometimes it feels like everything loses.

But overall I do think it's pretty great. And I feel lucky, although we did plan it this way. Chris and I joined the public service mostly because we knew kids were on the horizon and we wanted jobs with more security, more money, and especially the option to work part-time. Also, for my part, I just wanted to try to figure out what it was they were doing inside all those huge public service occupied buildings here in Canberra. I'd lived here most of my life and still didn't know how they worked or what they could possibly find to do.*

At the moment I'm working in a job where I sometimes feel in over my head and sometimes feel pretty competent. It's not much writing or editing, so that's different for me, but it's a lot of web stuff, so that's familiar - except it's more technical than most of the work I've done before.** In fact, most of my real experience for this job is from my play time, rather than my work time.

So it's challenging, and at the same time I feel like I am formalising and filling out some skills that I've been working on for a while, so that's really nice. And just lately there's even been discussion of Web 2.0 technologies (yo, blogging!), which of course is a particular area of interest for me, even if here (as almost everywhere) my ability to keep up with has been seriously crimped since the birth of Liam.

This week I was flat out at work. Today I arrived at 7:30, left at 5:00 and worked right through lunch. I wouldn't want every week to be like this, but sometimes - well, this may sound odd, but it's invigorating. Of course, the caffeinated coffee and chocolate I finally had at afternoon tea time might have helped with that too...
__________
*The answer, by the way, is plenty - and then some. But I'm still not clear on what a lot of it is.

**Which isn't to imply that it's terribly technical or anything. Not by the standards of the rest of my team anyway.

Yes we can!

Yes we can.

Yes
We
Can.

I'm really bummed about Prop 8 though (though there's still a slim hope, I think).

And because I just I love it, here's the song again:

I lost all my email

I reformated a hard drive thinking I'd taken everything off it that I needed.

I hadn't.

I accidentally deleted all my kayoz email. I practically never clean my email out (though I do use filters) so I had emails going back - well all the years I've had the kayoz domain, so I guess that would be going on for nine years. All my passwords, all your email addresses, everything. Damn.

And now I need to remember my password for that account so I can set it up to download again.

Damn damn damn.

Vegies.

Until recently Mikaela hated mushrooms. She's okay with vegies generally - just so long as they are served separately. She doesn't like the 'all in one pot' style of cooking Chris and I prefer. She likes to be able to identify each item on her plate, and prefers not to have too many choices. She'd rather focus her efforts on one or two types of food - maybe chicken pieces and sliced tomato, or steamed carrots and broccoli. If you give her all four options, she'll just eat all of one (probably the carrot) and then ask for more of that.

But until recently she despised mushrooms and zuchinni. Zuchinni is still not on her list of favourite foods (and she definitely doesn't like it raw), but she will eat it now. But mushrooms. Yum! As long as they are sauted moreorless on their own. So that's what she's having for lunch. a bowl of sauted mushrooms (with basil). I steamed some broccoli too, which she usually likes, but she's leaving that to one side. Maybe she'll eat it when the mushrooms are all gone, maybe she won't. She's a funny thing.