The Spiceland Blog

Heidi39s illness

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:29:45 CST

Heidi was sick the past two days. She caught a stomach virus from Tru. She began vomiting Saturday night, and didn't hold anything down from then until Sunday. Eventually, she started refusing her bottle out-right. When 24 hours had passed and she'd only had 2 ounces to drink, I took her to the pediatric ER at Huntsville Hospital. I caught it on Sunday, so we were both sick while we were at the hospital. They gave her some Zofran for nausea, and she was drinking again in about 20 minutes. Hooray for modern medicine! She had about 6 ounces of pedialyte yesterday, and that's all she had to eat. Today, she's eating mostly normally. She's been taking 3-4 ounces of formula in a sitting. She's eating less than her usual 6 ounces, but it's probably just because her stomach shrank from being empty for 2 days.

Anyway, they had the cutest little baby gown for her to wear while she was there! I just had to take a picture of it. There are a couple more here.

Our car got broken into

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 13:39:40 CST

Somebody broke into our car again! About 2 years ago, someone broke into our Accord and stole our portable DVD player out of it. The stupid culprits forgot to steal the screens, so I'm sure they just had to throw the DVD player out. A couple of days ago, my next-door neighbor mentioned her car door was open when she woke up that morning and that she thought someone had been in the car. I went outside, and sure enough, our car door was open, too. Our $350 portable GPS unit was gone. I hate this neighborhood and I can't wait to get out of here!

The Changing Leaves of Fall

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:43:43 CST

Tru, Heidi, and I drove around today hunting for examples of the gorgeous landscape that is the Tennessee Valley in the fall. We found red and gold leaves and also stopped by a local man-made lake to take some pictures. Here are the best from today's photoshoot. They start about halfway down the page, and the first ones are named "tru-with-leaves."

Tru39s Message for Daddy

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:58:31 CST

View video: http://thespicelands.com/cgi-bin/blog/index.cgi?mode=viewone&blog=1226462311

Adventures With Scissors

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:51:02 CST

Tru got ahold of some scissors today and hacked her hair up. She cut it in about 4 different places, but didn't cut it to the scalp, at least. I had to cut 3-6 inches off in different spots, and I may have to do some more shaping tomorrow, depending on how I feel about it in the morning. The pictures are here.

Carter39s Tagless Baby Clothes

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:27:45 CST

Heidi has developed a rash as a result of some of her clothing being outfitted with tagless labels. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission released an advisory related to this, but Heidi seems to be reacting to clothing not included in that avisory, too. I filed a report with the CPSC and with Carter's, since her reaction doesn't exactly fall within the bounds of current reports, but I don't know if they will do much about it. Carter's has offered to take the clothing back and send me a refund. Any of you considering purchasing baby clothes for anyone should be aware of this and specifically look for clothing without stamped, stenciled, or ink labels on them and buy clothes with regular cloth sewn-in tags instead.

New Photos

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:26:21 CST

New photos up! It's so easy to publish photos with our new photo program that I have forgotten I still need to announce them here! Halloween pictures here. Tru was Little Red Riding Hood to Seiko's Hungry Wolf, and Heidi was a baby dinosaur. So cute! Touch-a-Truck pictures here, VeggieTales Live pictures here, and the most recent pictures of the kids, starting at the bottom of that page and continuing into page three of that album.

Live Map of Trip to Maker Faire

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 08:19:32 CST

Keith and I are off to Maker Faire in Austin, TX. As we are traveling, we will have a map that is being updated live as we drive. Click the link below to see our progress. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://spiceland.org/makerfaire.txt NOTE: It may take is a little while into the trip to get it working. If it isn't working yet, try back in a hour.

New Poll on the Right of this Page

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:02:26 CST

The short: vote (on the side) for which photo gallery you like best. (1) our old one (2) new Google Picasa one Now vote on the side. Details: I (Erin) am trying to come up with a way for us to more fluidly be able to manage our photos and share them. Google's Picasa is a great photo management tool, and it can connect to Picasa Web Albums to publish photos to the web. I believe that we will be more likely to share photos more often if we had a one-click approach to uploading such as the one Google provides. Google's Picasa and Picasa Web Albums also allow us to tag images, so you can search for people or keywords. Picasa Web Albums also generates an RSS feed of our gallery, so you can be notified when we upload new pictures. There area few drawbacks, though. The photos would be stored at a maximum of 1600 pixels wide, though, which is only good enough for a 3x5. Of course, this is inconsequential if none of you are planning on ordering prints, and you can always email us to request hi-res versions of any picture you want bigger prints of. Our current photo gallery, on the other hand, allows us to publish full-sized images, although we usually resize them to save space. We can't tag images or notify you when we upload pictures. What do you guys think?

Tru knows phonics She can read

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:07:45 CST

Tru can read! She can actually sound out sounds and make words out of letters. She's not just memorizing, either. We were learning about vowels and consonants yesterday. We were making consonant-vowel-consonant words and sounding them out. We made cat, map, pam, zip, sip, rip, mit, tap, zap, pot, and other similar words. When I stopped working with her, she started making other words, like zop, mip, pes, siz, ter, mot, zom, sit, zot, and other combinations that weren't really words. However, she was sounding them out and reading them without my help! She was so proud of herself, and I am so proud of her, too! She also has a computer game that gives her a picture and three words. She has to click on the word that names the object in the picture. So if the picture is a dog, she has to ignore the words "bottle" and "cat" and click on the word "dog." She's so good at this game, and because of this game, she has memorized some words that she couldn't sound out, like "bottle," "book," and "finish." I have a video of this that I will get Mike to put up later. Our little girl is getting so big and smart!