Today is my sister Amanda’s 30th birthday. Woo-hoo!!! That’s a big one, Amanda. Hope you have a good one.

As promised, here is the second installment of our early-morning sing-song recording session. I fear that putting too many of these videos together in the same blog post may very well doom many of my more feeble readers to Death by Cuteness, so here are just a couple more.

This is Emily merrily rowing down the stream. Hopefully her boat doesn’t fall apart as fast as the lyrics to this song did. Melly melly melly…

Here’s Emily venturing into the Hundred Acre Wood.

After the overwhelming response from yesterday’s video of Emily singing the Sesame Street theme song, Emily was inspired to record some new ditties to share with her online fans. So this morning before school, she handed me the camera and told me to just press record and that she’d handle the rest. What followed was GOLD!

I don’t want to ruin it by posting all of what we recorded at once so I’ll just post a couple of songs per day over the next few days. Keep coming back. They keep getting better!

Emily pays homage to the weekly adventures of the Cartwright family.

And this is Emily reciting all of your favorite letters, including “emmalennapee”.

Sometime over the course of the past couple of months, Emily has yet again reached a new level of communication skills. Gone are the days of caveman sentence structures (“That Daddy bike”) and third-person demands (“Emily want some!”). There is a bit more fluidity to her prose and her conversations are now peppered with colorful and fun little additions. True, she still says “What’s this one?” instead of “Who’s this?” and an elephant is still an ephelant, but definite strides are being made. If you don’t speak with her everyday, you might not appreciate these huge leaps, but I must stress that each of the following examples absolutely blew my mind when I heard them.

• We arrived at school the other day and I picked Emily up out of the basket on the front of the bike and placed her on the sidewalk. She took two steps, turned around and said, “Thank you for the ride, daddy”. I had never heard her say anything like that before.
• I asked Emily what that noise was that we had just heard outside and she replied, “Maybe it’s a parrot.”
• Emily’s consistent and correct use of gerunds and indefinite articles never ceases to amaze me. “Daddy, what’s the dog doing?”
• We were riding the elevator this morning when the topic of the weather came up. Emily asked where the umbrella was. I told her it was at home. This prompted the following informational tidbit: “I have an umbrella. Mommy has an umbrella, too. Not two umbrellas. Just one.”
• I went into the kitchen to get myself a drink. When I came back, Emily inquired, “You have some juice, daddy?”. I said yes. She then astutely pointed out, “I have some juice, too. We both have juice!”.
• We walked through the Old Man Square today and Emily climbed up on the bench next to the statue (of the old man sitting down). She gave him a big hug from behind and then proceeded to point out all of his best features. “Here’s his nose. Here’s his ear. He has one, two eyes. He has a beard (pronounced “BEE-word”). And lips.” Then she looked down and affirmed, “I can’t see his bottom”.
• Emily has firmly grasped the concept of the past tense, though she still comes out with corkers like, “There’s a cat outside. I sawed it!”.
• I asked Emily if she was ready to go to bed this evening and she looked around the living and said, “I think we need to tidy up first”.

Emily will gladly sing along with almost any song but it’s rare that she’ll sing on command all on her own. That’s why I’m particularly glad I had my camera at hand the other day to capture this:

Facebook can be a colossal waste of time. Between the bottomless pit of useless groups, trivial Scrabble games, life-affirming vampire bites, and celebrity favorite-color movie compatibility personality tests, it’s a wonder how anyone who uses that site remains a productive member of society. I am addicted.

I made a genius attempt to curb my social network addiction. I resolved to only allow myself to check Facebook if I first did 10 push ups. This worked flawlessly for almost a week. I was ripped.

The thing I like best about the site is when people post photos. Especially old ones. Especially of me. So in an attempt to brighten the days of a few friends, I think I’ll start uploading some old photos. I rooted through my photo albums and decided to start with this one:

These are my cousins (all six are on Facebook) and this photo was taken back in 1996. Kate and Raina were knee-high to a munchkin and they’re both in college now while Jennie is getting married in September (mazel tov!). I was in the middle of college at that point and now I’m a balding middle-aged father of two with a bad back. Good times. I’ll try and post a new way-back photo about once a week. Let’s see if that resolution lasts any longer than the push-ups.

Emily told me that she feels that this blog has changed recently in that the focus no longer appears to to be centered on here. I apologized profusely and promised to write this entry as a peace offering. She tentatively accepted my apology.

I can’t believe it’s only been three months since Emily moved into a big-girl bed. It seems like three years. In the beginning, Emily would wake up in the middle of the night and eventually sneak into our bed. This wouldn’t be a problem if she didn’t insist on sleeping horizontally. Jan’s having a hard enough time sleeping as it is so something had to be done. So I pitched tent in Emily’s room. For the past month, I have been sleeping on a mattress on the floor of Emily’s room. Now, when she wakes up and goes for a walkabout in the middle of the night, I’m there to intercept her and settle her back into bed, leaving Jan undisturbed and capable of getting the much-needed rest she and her little bun need. I must admit that I enjoy the connection with Emily that our new sleeping arrangements have induced, but I wonder how long these sleeping arrangements will last.

I’ve also fully taken on morning duties. I wake up with Emily and get her ready for school – we have breakfast, play some games, and get dressed together – and then I drop her off on my way to work, whereas I used to let Jan handle all that and I’d get some extra sleep in the mornings to help me get through my long work day. Now I have coffee 🙁

Emily likes to draw. She draws airplanes and pussy cats and dinosaurs and snowmen, but you’d have a hard time telling which was which. Well look at this. Emily drew this yesterday and it blew our minds. She has been drawing happy faces for a long time now but this was the first one that actually looked like a happy face:

I try and take Emily to school on a bicing whenever possible. She loves it! There’s no place for a child seat so I just plop her into the bag rack attached to the front of the handlebars (probably a little bit illegal). She sits there facing out with her legs dangling singing songs, pointing to let me know which way to turn, encouraging me to chase cars and motorbikes, and shouting, “Faster! Faster!” Sometimes she reaches around and rings the bell next to the handle. Pedestrians get a real kick out of seeing her glide past them. Instead of the 20 minute walk to school (at her pace), we’re there in under five minutes. Then I cycle the rest of the way to the train station and head to work. I love the fact that she’s a little adrenaline freak and has no fear. How old do you have to be to start snowboarding?

Exactly one week has passed since I asked for your help. And you delivered. Thank you. Here is how things have unfolded.

• I will not be cleansing any time soon. I really did enjoy the other times that I did this, but I am too concerned about my gums receding again. And that’s the only reason. I was actually looking forward to not eating anything for 10 whole days and greeting each morning with a lukewarm saltwater flush. I may still undertake some sort of a raw vegetable diet. I just really miss that cleansed feeling.
• Now that I’ve finished The Sopranos, I have filled my commutes with a combination of The IT Crowd (not as good as the second season, but still good for a laugh), State of Play (very well-made and intense drama), and Stephen Fry in America (it’s refreshing to get an outsider’s view of the country – and an eloquent one at that). Now that I’ve finished The IT Crowd, I’ll soon be picking up Firefly again after only seeing three episodes. So many programs, so few commutes to the office.
• In the end, I whittled my choices for a new camera down to two. The exact models weren’t important – I was choosing between an utlra-compact slip-in-your-jeans-pocket camera and a slightly larger but with a better lens and manual control prosumer camera. After reading countless reviews and forum posts, I found myself choosing between the exquisite Canon PowerShot SD880 IS and the robust Canon PowerShot G10. I struggled with this decision for most of the past week, violently swinging from one camera to the other on a daily basis. Until I read a review by Ken Rockwell that totally convinced me. I’ll be picking up my new SD880 sometime this week.
• Thanks mostly to the expansive reach of Facebook, I received many suggestions regarding a name for our new little boy. They were as follows (in no particular order): Zachary, Juan, Oberon, Wolfgang, Weenis, Pubert, Humphrey, Ricky, Sue, Percivil, Rosa, Barack, Murphy, Matthew, Joseph, Edward, Moon Unit, Elmo, Javier, Jordi, Thomas, Antonio, Pancho, Samuel, Max, Daniel, Issac, Oscar, and Bruno. I am no closer to a decision on this one than I was last week but, after all those suggestions, I will probably start avoiding some of my friends. I want something that’s neither too common nor too off-the-wall. We’re at four weeks and counting so I’d better start cranking out some spreadsheets and fast.

I donated blood at work today. I enjoy donating blood. For purely selfish reasons. It’s the best way I can think of to minimize the life-expectancy gap between the sexes. You know, because of the whole menstruation advantage. Anyway…

They quizzed me, sterilized me, punctured me, and sucked me. Sounds a lot more romantic than it really was. Then I was supposed to apply direct pressure to stop the bleeding. I saw other people do this while I was being sucked dry and it usually took about two or three minutes for the wound to heal and the bleeding to stop. After a few minutes of me holding the gauze on my arm, the doctor came over and removed my hand and then jumped back in surprise when he was met by an aggressive fountain of blood. He quickly covered me back up and told me to hold on for a little longer. Five minutes later the nurse came over to check on me and was met by a similar fate. (‘coagular‘ means ‘to coagulate‘ in Spanish!) Maybe I should raise my arm above my head while I apply pressure. OK. For about eight minutes. Finally the nurse came back over and removed the gauze. The bleeding had stopped. She prodded around for a second and, to nobody’s surprise, Old Faithful erupted once again. “Why did you have to go and poke me?”, I said. “It’s your fault now.” Arm up. Direct pressure – but not so much this time. The nurse went out for a coffee. Ten more minutes. That seemed to do the trick.

Yes, it took me more than 20 minutes to stop bleeding. But I was rewarded with all of the apple juice, cupcakes, Smarties, and sesame seed bars I could eat.

Looks like another cartoon that I worked on has popped up on the interwebs. It’s called Sincopats. I’ve only done a few episodes but there was a lot of interest at the latest international animation festival and it looks like we may be doing a whole season. I did the voice for the guy in the red shirt with spiky hair and the cop.

Respecting the artist’s original intentions and her desire to “keep it real”, I have refrained from color correcting, cropping, or altering in any way the following set of avant-guard “holiday” photographs. Aggressive and unsettling, they speak of the dark secrets that our souls refuse to acknowledge. And of the normalcy we have foolishly convinced ourselves that we maintain. Taken this Christmas amidst the vast hedgeless fields of the fens in Cambridgeshire, England, I present to you the photographic debut of the stoically brilliant Emily Z.

All of the photos in this collection were taken solely by the artist, often unbeknownst to the subjects. Created during a very dark and introspective period of her life, Emily’s magnum opus may be viewed in its breath-taking entirety by clicking on either of the following links:

The awesome full-screen slideshow
The more modest contact sheet view

And here is a special treat for all of you die-hard fans out there. An intimate, behind-the-scenes look at the master at work. A chilling look at a troubled youth (27 months) and how she would stop at nothing to capture the essence of her personal Moby Dick.