Say What???

It's been a bit quiet in my little blogworld the past week or so because this entire week, we've been sucked into the vortex of VBS. Loads of fun, but exhausting! However, I found it quite humorous that I had two incidents just today noticing the extreme Texan accents that you would think I would be accustomed to by now. Even though I hear them often, that doesn't mean I always understand it clearly. Some accents are so thick that they might as well be speaking a completely foreign language to me. For example, today, I received a phone call from Steven's cell phone, so I picked up and said "Hey!" Then after a sentence or so, I realized I had no idea whatsoever of any single word that sentence contained, so I said "What?" The caller then repeated the sentence over again and I realized that I heard some twang in there and that even though this was my husband's phone, it was not him on the line with me. I then had to request, "I'm sorry, can you say that one more time?" The poor guy on the other end then said very slowly for my benefit, "Ma'am, this is so and so from Barnes and Noble. We found this cell phone on the floor and this was the home number." Ah. Yes. That I understood. The other funny incident was at dinner this evening. As we were finishing up our food at one of the restaurants by our house, the manager was coming around from table to table saying the same thing to each group he approached. It sounded a little something like this: "Howzhyallzmealz?" or perhaps it was more like this: "How zhyallz mealz." This happened to a couple tables before ours, so I had time to interpret before he actually got to our table. Apparently, he just wanted to know if we were liking our food or not. Go figure.

Somebody Stop Them!

Steven has been away at a conference this entire week, so as a fun thing on our last night as 3 bachelorettes, the girls and I went to eat at TGI Friday's. Well, Kyra and I ate, Siana just sat there and grinned at passersby. =) On the way there, I asked Kyra what she was going to eat at Friday's. She thought about it and surprised me by saying Spaghetti, rather than her usual standard of chicken strips. I asked her what she wanted for dessert since this was a special girls night out before Daddy came home. She said we could get Oreo Madness (my favorite). I told her with much regret that someone crazy had decided to discontinue the Oreo Madness and we couldn't get it anymore. She looked confused and said They can't do that!!! I agree with the sentiment, but told her that there wasn't anything we could do to stop them. She then started thinking hard and said, "Well, who can stop them?" I said, "Probably nobody." She replied, "Bad guys?" I just chuckled because I doubt any bad guys would take up our case and stop them from taking our beloved Oreo Madness off the menu.

Kyra Quote of the Day

"I wish my hair was yellow and puffy like Cindewella's"

Favorite Things, Part 2

So I decided to take the same route as Steven did and ask Kyra what she would like to get her Daddy for Father's Day. I once again got comical and unusual responses.

Me: Kyra, what should we get Daddy for Father's Day?
Kyra: Flowers!!!
Me: You want to get Daddy some flowers?
Kyra: Yeah! Flowers!
Me: Ok. What else should we get him for Father's Day?
Kyra: A sticker. Maybe with a monkey on it.
Me: You want to get Daddy a monkey sticker...?
Kyra: Yeah. Or we could get him a sticker with an elephant on it! Maybe they have a sticker with an elephant on it store!

So Mommy gets Wal-Mart and Taco Bueno and Daddy gets Flowers and Stickers. It cracks me up the way her little mind works! But why couldn't I get the flowers???

Technology

I am a technology buff, just like my husband, father, and now daughter. It constantly amazes me how far technology has come since the days of my youth where I played Wheel of Fortune on our old NEC computer in our basement back in the 80's. You know the kind of game with the "melodic beeps" pumping out the theme song and Vanna moving across the screen in exactly the same position but side to side...you know what I'm talking about Ad. =) For those of you who've never seen a game this old and cheesy, I do a mighty fine impression of the stellar graphic movements of Ms. White. haha But back then, we thought it was the coolest thing ever to be able to play Wheel just by putting in a floppy disk the size of your head. We also had Jeopardy and $10,000 Pyramid, which of course had similarly stellar graphics.... Anyway, it's incredible the advancements in technology in the last 20-25 years. I am so thankful for the fact that even though my family now lives 1000+ miles away from my parents, sister, Mammaw, and in-laws, my daughters can see any of these family members any time they want because of the miracle of internet video chatting. Kyra and Siana will never know a time where they can't just hop on the computer when they miss their family and see them and hear their voices. And all this for free even!!! It's not as good as a great big hug, but it certainly shrinks the miles to a manageable size. And Kyra, through instant messaging, is learning to spell all kinds of words. She can carry on a decent typed conversation for a while all on her own through the skills she's learning from this technology. It keeps us connected to family across the country and it's educational at the same time. What more can you ask for? Well, maybe an interactive hug vest, but I'm sure that's not far down the road....

The Hills Are Alive....

with the sound of music coming from our entertainment center day in and day out. The Sound of Music is Kyra's new obsession. She asks to watch it pretty much every day. This is no small feat because the thing is long enough to have an intermission. It's a great movie and we like watching it, but just not every single day. She is quite amusing to watch the movie with as she is a nonstop barrage of questions from the beginning credits to the ending ones. The most common of which is, "Where is the singer? Where is the singer now? Where did the singer go? When is the singer going to come back?" and so on and on and on and on. It also amuses us to hear her rendition of So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye. And so I say to you, in Kyra's own words, so long, farewell, 'it's time to say' goodbye....

The next Bill Gates???

Ok, I've blogged before about Kyra's emerging tech savvy, but she crossed the line of all I've blogged about before over the course of the past week. A couple days ago, she hopped on the computer and after a couple minutes, we heard music playing. We thought she'd opened iTunes by chance and randomly started up a CD. How wrong we were. Mac has a feature accessible from the desktop called Spotlight that is basically a search feature that searches for your keyword throughout your entire computer and pulls up everything with that word in it, whether it be in the middle of a Word document or an email you have in your inbox. Well, we discovered that Kyra had clicked open Spotlight and typed in her name. Spotlight pulled up everything in the entire computer with her name in it and displayed it for her to peruse. So she had quite a few pictures open and was currently watching a movie of the kids that Steven had made, which was where the background music came from. What 3 year old opens up a computer search engine and does a search on herself??? That cracked us up. So today, I was making dinner and Steven was snoozing on the couch after work. I called to them that dinner was ready, and Kyra replies, "Hang on, I'm doing sometin' on here." I chuckled and assumed she had opened up one of her games and was in the middle of playing it. After a couple minutes of nobody making any indication that they were coming to dinner, I went into the living room myself, woke up Steven, and noticed that Kyra was playing a game on the Playhouse Disney website. I smiled and asked Steven, "Did you log onto Disney for her?" He looked at me, still a little groggy, and said no. We both kind of looked at each other for a minute, then looked back at her in amazement. We then set about to figuring out how on earth she got onto the Playhouse Disney website because although she's becoming quite the little typist due to internet chatting with my parents, we both know for a fact she can't spell something as long as 'Playhouse Disney.' I was especially confused because yesterday, I had taken the internet browser icon off her desktop to prevent her from getting on the web unsupervised.... Yeah, that almost worked. I'm going to have to be smarter than my 3-year-old. *sigh* Anyway, we asked her how she got to that website. She goes into this long monologue that went something like this, "Well, I clicked switch user and got onto my account and then I clicked Mini HD (kind of like the PC start menu) and clicked 'Users.' Then I clicked 'Kyra' and then I clicked 'Sites.'" We were doing all of this as she described what she'd done and ended up with a dummy webpage, but it was in a legitimate web browser. She couldn't remember what she did after that, but we surmised that somehow she'd gotten the address bar highlighted and must've clicked the 'D' key, which would pull up past webpages because Disney.com was the first 'D' page to come up. Then all she had to do was hit return and off she went to the Disney site. All of that makes perfect sense, except for the fact that it was done by a 3-year-old!!! Steven and I were just wide-eyed and laughing, but more than a little concerned. She had been surfing the web for at least 1/2 hour without any supervision, which can be a recipe for disaster at any age. I made a joke before about having to get internet parental controls for my preschooler, but now we're actually going to do just that. Holy cow!

On a Schedule

A few days ago, Kyra declared that she was "not feewing vewwy good...I fink I'm a widdle bit sick." (Ended up she was just hungry.) But in response, I told her how sorry I was that she was feeling yucky and said I hoped she felt better very soon. She replied back, "Oh, I will be better soon. I'll be better in June." I chuckled and told her that it was indeed June. "Oh," she says, "well, maybe next January then." Ok. I'll be waiting.