Posts tagged with keywords "Alice", page 3
“Beep beep” is a surprisingly versatile phrase. My two year old daughter, who is learning to communicate, uses it continuously. Of course it lacks a precise meaning but a lot can be taken from the context she uses it in. I’ve been told that 90% of communication is actually based on body language and not on what we say (warning: this number is a totally made-up).
Additionally she doesn’t pronounce it right yet and it sounds something like “babe”. Problematically, she does pronounce baby the same. Luckly there is a way to tell the difference. For beep-beep, she’ll say “babe” twice.
Here are some examples of her usage of this amazing phrase:
“Get out of my way immediately. I’m pushing my dolls through.”
It should be noted that she can and does say please, pronounced “plzs”, and thank you, pronounced “than-kin”. The use of beep-beep is never preceded by please or followed by thank you. We’re a little surprised at her pronounciation of thank you. It sounds nearly German, which is surprising since her mother is French and I’m Irish.
“Daddy get up. I will direct you to where you should be.”
She will then pull my hand to where she thinks I should be.
“Daddy you are in the wrong chair. You should be in the armchair.”
Yep, apparently I should always be in the armchair and it’s a bad thing to move to the sofa, unless I’m reading her a story or we’re watching monkeys on the TV.
“I’m hungry and require immediate nourishment. I don’t care that my dinner will be in half an hour.”
This is always said within the kitchen.
“I want to go for a walk.”
This is followed by going to the front door and attempting to pull down the coat rack to get her coat. Alternatively, if she finds her hat and scarf first, she’ll put these and then head to the door (without her coat).
“This is fun. Daddy is chasing me.”
This involves running from the front door through the hallway to the living room, saying “boom” and slapping the glass back door and then back to the front door.
“A Car!”
Can be said while in the car and stuck in traffic or walking along a road when a car goes by.
“A Train!”
I think she gets a little confused between cars and trains as she’ll also calls trains “chew-chew”.
We moved on Friday. This should be good news.
Except Alice, our baby girl, got sick. Doctor late on Friday and then on Saturday spending more than a few hours in Crumlin Children’s Hospital. At the same time we’re meant to be unpacking and getting ready to go to France. Another very scary moment on Sunday when her temperature went up, she went pale and wouldn’t stay awake and so we were stuck in the Hospital till three in the morning.
But at least she’s now getting better.
Yet, my palm, my m130, my beloved note take, file carrier, handheld game device, my dairy… has gone belly up. Exposure to the cold and then warmt of the new house did it in.
And now I’m back in work, only to discover that my website was defaced by hackers. Thankfully the redbrick admins are spot on but they had to delete the frontpage and then all my artwork. I have a backup but it is going to be a while before I put them up again.
It doesn’t feel like christmass but it so Seasons Greetings and see you in the new year.
I must apoligise for not providing an update in so long. The last news I gave was well before Alice was born and now Alice is three months old! 
Things are good. Not perfect but who wants perfect?
Alice, our precious little daughter, has got wonderful red-hair, falls asleep when I read her Cat in the Hat before bed and has started to make gurgling sounds. She sleeps like an Angel at night so I guess we’re pretty lucky.
Sophie’s been doing a really good job of providing updates on Alice including tons of photos on her blog (the link is on the right but you can go from here). I’ll put some photos up here once my site is fully working again (just orgainsed “vhosting” so now everything is avaliable @ thedeadone.net).
Alice is now three months old. She keeps her eyes open and smiles, laughs and grins often. She makes the cutest gurgling sounds as if trying to speak. To know that she is also healthy and strong for her little age is blessing.
The biggest complaint we have is that we’ve lost all our spare time, where the feck did it go? We get enough sleep at night but taking care of Alice is tiring after coming home from work and Sophie is worn out from taking care of her during the day. I’ve only started now going back to Karate and gaming again. Which pretty much explains the lack of updates (well plus a three week holiday too).
I did manage to make a new release of rbFriends. Totally revamped from Beta 2 and now Beta 4 has transparent dialogs (which work okay :S). But other then that I’m pretty stretched. I’ve nearly finished Lost Heroes, soon I will be sending it out to be rejected from any publisher I can find.
The big worry on our minds is that we haven’t managed to sell our apparment yet. It’s been on the market a while now and we’ve changed estate agents once already. We’ve had about three offers which have all fallen through for one reason or another.
And on top of that, the struggle to find a decent house in an okay area that is also within our budget is tiring and wearing on both of us. Sophie spends hours on the phone with estate agents orgainsing viewings and driving around during the week with Alice in tow to see possibles when I’m in work.
Anyway, though I don’t get to the cinema anymore, life is good. Not perfect. Just good.
Sorry for the severe lack of updates in the last while. Life has been busy in a slow way.
Its only a week or two to go before Strawberry is here! It’s both exciting and bloodly scary.
While we wait heres some new stuff I’ve uploaded to my little site:
MT-Close2 — a plugin for MovableType.
The End of the World — a new short story taken from Lost Heroes.
And some new pictures…
Yep. Two, peices of news.
The first, lesser, peice of good news is that I had my Shotokan Karate Grading today. I just earned my brown belt!
(For those who don’t know, the brown belt is the last colour before the famous black belt: in reality, I have three more belts to go as there are three “brown” belts or grades).
The second news is that we were told the sex of our, as yet, unborn baby. Strawberry is a …. (follow the “MORE” link)
Read More…
Sorry for the lack of news and updates. There are many reasons.
I could blame Redbrick for moving their web services from Prodigy to Deathray. I use Movable Type for my webpage and I’m using, still, BerkleyDB instead of SQL. This broke, of course, moving from the two different machines. The standard solution from MovableType manual didn’t work. But luckily I found someone else online who had similar pains to me and gave a lovely long description of the problem and how to fix it. Unfortantly it still required admin intervention. But the admins on redbrick eventually fixed it. The stupid thing is… I’m still using BerkleyDB. I should really upgrade to MySQL.
But, oh, my technology worries did not end there! I bought a rather nice piece of kit for my home. It’s a 4 Ethernet Port Router, Wireless Base Station and a ASDL modem in one from NetGear. And all the software is Linux and Opensource to boot. (The model number is DG834G if your googling for solutions). I got it all up and running in moments and was happy as larry.
Then I upgraded the firmware.
It stopped working. I checked the NetGear website, nothing. I emailed them and after 24 hours, got an automated reply. I’m still waiting for an answer. I would have called them except, the support number is UK and a premium rate. It also says on the box 24/7 support (not that I bought it for the support option)! I googled a lot and found that lots of other people had similar issues and that NetGear support was useless.
Luckly I found that NetGear did have solutions, except that most of the time they don’t know they have solutions(?). Some other users have posted the tools and steps to fix it on broadbandreports.com. The thread is here.
Now that all my technical woes are solved, there are other things in the way…
Moving House is a big one. We’ve put down an offer on a place in Lucan but we haven’t sold ours yet. We’re waiting for that buyer so if your looking for a two bed appartment, near town, near the luas… Tramyards 2 bed Appartment, Inchicore isn’t a bad bet!
And because of that, I’ve had to put all my drawing stuff away to hide the clutter so thats why there isn’t any new drawings recently.
We’ve started a new game, which you can read about here, and that webpage has been incredibly busy with comments, posts, writeups and lots of other stuff. If your into rpgs and gaming, check it out. It’s SLA Industries with is a great setting. So thats suckling my energy too.
I’m also busy working on my writing. I may post up some extracts later (after Soph kindly corrects my grammer) but don’t hold your breath I’m afraid. I’m preparing it so I can start sending drafts to publishers. I’m hoping for some interest but I have no idea what my expectations should be.
The final barrier to regular updates then is stress. With Strawberry on the way in less than 3 months, no nursery ready (because we’re moving house), so much stuff to buy (and not enought money)… ’tis a very tiring time.
So take care reader and bare in mind that there is much more to this writer (programmer/husband/father-to-be/gamer/artist/boring sod) than some simple text on a webpage.
Best christmass present…. EVER.
Sophie and myself are expecting a little babog!
Sophie is about four months gone now. We had to keep it under wraps for the first three months (standard practice apparently) but just before christmass we had the first scan and it was cool — you could see him/her moving his tiny (and I mean tiny) head and hands!
We have the next big scan in Feburary so you can expect more pictures.
Oh, we’ve nicknamed him/her “Strawberry” rather then having to call it, It. I wanted to call it “Squirt” but Sophie really doesn’t like that one!
Sophie’s done up a webpage for Strawberry which you can find here.
Of course this completely messes up our lives. No more late night movie marathons or not bothering to clean the dishes for two weeks and then theres the money thing…
Do you know that creches cost upwards of 800 euros a month? Thats about the same as our mortage! Then theres the constant supply of nappies, doctor and hopsital fees, baby stuff (most we’re borrowing from others but there is still stuff we need to buy)… the list only gets longer the older they get!
Anyway, I’m dead excited about the whole thing!