What Are You Doing?

I'll apologize in advance to the people who mainly come here to see Sydney pictures. There are no new Sydney pictures in this post. But if you continue reading I promise you won't be disappointed.

On Tuesday last week (the day of my last post) it started innocently enough. A couple times during the morning Sydney asked me what I was doing. By the next morning it had become a full-blown epidemic.

Whatchu doing, Daddy?

What you doing, Mommy?

What are day doing?

Where day go?

What happened?

What's dat?

And various versions of those question get asked repeatedly throughout the day. She's hit the question stage and I love every second of it.

My favorite question version:

Whatchu doing, Daddy? (Doesn't give me more than a second to answer.) Whatchu doing? (About a half second this time.) Daddy, whatchu doing?

I've had that go on for six or seven questions before she'll give me a chance to answer her. She doesn't realize that sometimes I have to figure out how to tell her what I'm doing in a way she will understand.

Sydney still likes her pillow. It hasn't caused any problems for her and has pointed at it several times and made sure I knew it was her pillow.

In other news, I got a new cell phone a month or so ago. I don't know if I mentioned it before or not, but it doesn't really matter since I'm mentioning it now.

It has video capabilities. That really isn't new since my old phone did, too. But my new phone can use the videos for the phone's wallpaper where my old phone couldn't. Right now I have a video set as my wallpaper of Sydney taking a bite out of a grilled cheese sandwich.

Every time I flip open the phone and Sydney is there she says, "I wanna see girl". So I usually end up holding up my phone for her to see the video.

Saturday we went to a large park over in Liberty Lake, WA. There's a small playground area where Sydney played for a little bit. There's a pavilion near that where they apparently have concerts in the summer. A small hill spreads out in front of the pavilion. Up the hill the park opens into a very large field. In this field there was a group of about thirty seagulls sitting around.

Sydney saw them and got quite excited. She apparently thought the seagulls would want to play with her so off she ran.

While she was chasing seagulls and I was following close behind (in case she actually got close to a seagull - which didn't happen) I decided to pull out my phone. I figured a quick video would be a good test to see what I could do with getting the videos off the phone.

So I shot it, got it off the phone and onto our computer and uploaded it to YouTube. It's not the most exciting video, but it was a good test to see what I could do. It's only 24 seconds, so hopefully won't cause too many problems for the bandwidth-impaired that want to watch it. And here it is:



If you're wondering why I took that video instead of using the video of Sydney eating a grilled cheese sandwich. The short answer is that the grilled cheese video is saved in the phone's memory. The park video was saved to the memory card (purchased after the grilled cheese video). Since I have the grilled cheese video set as my wallpaper I didn't want mess with the phone by transferring it to the card. Especially since I wasn't 100% sure I would be able to upload the video. (The videos on my old phone were some weird video format that didn't seem to be compatible with anything but the phone.)

And last but not least, Marta, Anne's sister, will soon be a published author. (She's a newspaper journalist, so is frequently published in the paper, but this is in a book.) She wrote a short story that is going to be published in collection of ghost stories.

The book is called Legends of the Mountain State: Ghostly Tales from the State of West Virginia. You can also pre-order the book from that link. (If you are a close friend or family member to me and would have reason to expect a Christmas present from us you may not want to pre-order that. Or at least check to see if you should pre-order it first.)