Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Victoria

  • Events for Adopting Families

    We adopted Victoria with the help of the Gladney Center for Adoption. We were quite happy with Gladney and we are obviously very happy with Victoria.

    Gladney has all these post adoption events. We get emails from them every month. So families can get together and discuss issues with adoption, meet other families, random parties, etc.

    Is it odd that we have no interest in any of these?

    First of all, we’re not that social. But mainly I think it’s because adopting Victoria was so easy. Well, not the adoption process itself, that was a pain. But once we got Tori, it’s been totally smooth. No issues, no unusual adjustments, we’re just a family.

    Perhaps it’s easier because Victoria looks close enough to Danielle and no one thinks she’s adopted. We don’t hide the fact that she’s adopted, but it’s not like you meet someone and say, "This is Danielle and this is Victoria – she’s adopted". It usually doesn’t come up. We aren’t likely to get the "what’s adopted mean?" question any time soon, since she never hears the word.

    I suppose we are going to have to work on our explanation of the whole adoption thing. But we aren’t going to any adopting parents event for advice on that front. We’ll figure it out…

  • Vacation Blog

    This may be the longest it’s taken me to post a blog about our vacation. We’re busy at Origami and I came back refreshed and recharged.

    The vacation was fantastic. Though for the most part, you can read last year’s post or the one before. Same great beach, great weather, hermit crabs, minnows, boogie boards, bike riding, mini-golf, low tide where you walk a mile straight out and one great sunset after another.

    One amusing story happened the very first day. This beach house has three bedrooms on the first floor. Then there’s a spiral staircase to the upstairs where there are two more. You go up the stairs and one bedroom is to the left, then there’s a bathroom and to get to the back bedroom you have to go through the bathroom (one of those two door bathrooms). The whole upstairs has the slanted ceiling thing going on which  makes it seem kind of like a clubhouse, so Danielle decided she wanted to sleep up there. Of course that means Tori does as well.

    So Danielle gets all her stuff up in the back bedroom. She wants to set up everything just right. When she’s done she calls me up to check it out. Meanwhile Tori is just exploring upstairs. As Danielle is showing me how she set up her room, Tori comes into the back bedroom and shuts the door (the one from the bathroom, the only door).

    I tell her not to close that door and go to open it. Locked.

    Normally that would be a pretty bad thing, but my wife is downstairs and I have my phone with me. So I call her and ask her to let us out. She comes upstairs. Then I hear her calling to me from farther away than I would expect. She calls me back and says, "how am I supposed to open the door?"

    "um, twist the knob?"

    "but it’s locked"

    At this point we realize that Tori locked both bathroom doors prior to locking us in the back bedroom. OK, that’s not good. My wife is locked out on her side and we’re locked in on our side.

    I get truly mad at Tori, but then Danielle starts to panic so I go into reassurance mode. These are those simple push button bathroom locks, so you can usually pop them with a coat hanger or something. Except we’re locked in a bedroom of a rental place. It’s totally bare. So Danielle is getting more worried. But I point out to Danielle that worst case I could climb out the window so she calms down. Tori is just sitting on the bed, totally quiet. While this is very out of character for her, I don’t really notice because being quiet and out of the way is fairly helpful at this point.

    So I’m on the phone with my wife, explaining to her what sorts of things will work to pop the lock from her side. It takes a while, but she ends up with a bobby pin from downstairs and I ultimately manage to talk her through popping the lock.

    So Danielle is fine and now I truly notice that Tori is just sitting there silent. The combination of knowing she did something wrong and being scared really got to her.

    Danielle decided she’d rather use the downstairs bedroom. And Tori pretty much didn’t go upstairs the rest of the vacation.

    And we made sure that bobby pin stayed in the back bedroom for the rest of the vacation…

  • Cape Cod

    I’ll have a full post in a day or two, but this is clearly the coolest picture from the trip.

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    Victoria is 3 1/2 and Danielle is now 7 1/2.

  • Tori’s First Hit

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    Her first time batting really…

  • More Lemonade

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    Danielle loves to do lemonade stands. It’s amazing how many people just give them money…

  • Could it be?

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    Have we reached the point where we can have adult evenings with our kids present? Is it finally getting easy?

    Tonight my wife and a three of her friends decided they needed drinks. Working for Marsh will do that to you. It was a beautiful day so they decided that our roof deck was a perfect destination.

    I get the word around 5:45. They show up around 6:30. These are the kind of friends that you don’t need to clean up for and they know our kids. So that part is easy. So we get some wine, some glasses, some music and some snacks for the kids and we head to the roof.

    And it was easy. Our kids just hung out. Sure, they wanted me to flip them upside down and other similar things, but they didn’t just hang on me. They hung out with everyone. Of course I let them play with my phone (Tori is still into that stupid Gummy Bear song on YouTube) but entertaining them wasn’t an effort. There was even limbo.

    It was a gorgeous night. We drank wine, we ordered pizza, the kids played and everyone had fun.

    Maybe it was a fluke, but I’m getting the idea that adult evenings may start happening again…

  • Memorial Day’s Weekend in the City

    Our typical plan for Memorial Day’s weekend is to go to my wife’s sisters place in Wappinger’s Falls near Poughkeepsie. They have a big backyard and we grill and it’s all good.

    But this year my wife’s younger nephew had something like 57 soccer games over the holiday weekend (I exaggerate perhaps, but not by much) so since we would be able to just hang out in the backyard, we decided to just stay in Brooklyn.

    The nice thing about the city on a holiday weekend is that it’s unusually quiet. But what to do with the kids for three days?

    Saturday: 

    Danielle normally has a swim class on Saturday, but obviously it was cancelled. Victoria suffers from classic second child syndrome. She wants to go with Danny for swimming, but she’s too young (except to watch – we want to put her in classes in the fall).

    The previous Saturday, Danielle had a birthday party with her best friend that included a sleepover, so I had quality time with Tori. So I took her swimming at our local YMCA, which has a nice pool and family swim on Saturdays. So Danielle decided she wanted to swim with Tori this Saturday. For the record, Danielle is mostly a very good big sister.

    So Saturday was a busy day. Swimming, McDonald’s, then our favorite park. That was with me solo while my wife did other errands. Then she met us and we went to the new Shrek movie.

    This is kind of funny because Tori loves Shrek. Danielle does not. This is a source of conflict when Tori wants to watch Shrek, which is pretty much always. So Danielle begrudgingly agreed to see this movie (largely because she’s get popcorn, candy and Diet Coke).

    If you haven’t seen the latest Shrek, it is not really a movie for 3 year olds. It’s a bit scary at first. The premise is that Shrek is now married with kids and starting to get tired of no longer being a scary ogre. So he’s tricked by Rumpletilskin to give away one day of his life in the past to get one day where everyone is afraid of him in exchange for a random day from his past. Of course Rumplestilskin tricks him and the random day is the day that Shrek was born.

    So it turns out that Shrek was never born so he never saved Fiona and apparently that causes her parents to sign over their kingdom to Rumpletilskin (because he tricks them). So you end up with the kingdom gone, Rumplestilskin in charge with witches helping him, rounding up ogres and overall a very scary place. Again, this is not a young kids movie. At the beginning Danielle wanted to go home (but for the record, she hates conflict in pretty much all movies).

    So the movie is amusing in that Shrek meets Donkey who has never met him before in a world that is totally messed up. But this is not amusing to a three year old. Of course everything works out at the end, but at the end I had Danielle liking Shrek and Tori not liking Shrek. So if you have young kids, be careful with this movie.

    After that we went out to an early dinner at my wife’s favorite Brooklyn sushi joint (my wife eats the best Manhattan sushi, so this means something).

    Sunday:

    Sunday, we wanted to mix it up a bit. The forecast was for hot so we looked for Manhattan parks with sprinklers. Not that the Brooklyn parks aren’t good, but we go there all the time. So online I found the #2 most recommended "park to travel to" in Timeout New York. This turned out great. It was a very nice park. Danielle made a friend and played with her all day. Tori is so crazy independent that she just went out and played and had a great time. We followed it up with a trip to our favorite local Mexican joint for dinner.

    Monday:

    Monday the girls weren’t pushing to get out of the apartment but as they got a bit snippy with each other I grabbed them and took them back to our favorite Brooklyn park in the morning. Sometimes you just have to get outside. We always have fun at the park.

    There’s a New Orleans style restaurant two doors down from us that just remodeled and changed their name so we’d been thinking about going there. So my wife grabbed the ideal widow table and I brought the gang to meet her. We all ate, my wife and I drank and a very good time was had.

    Then the girls wanted to swim again, so again we went to  the YMCA. After that we finally ate a dinner at home and the weekend was done.

    Frankly, I was exhausted, but it was a good weekend.

  • Snow Cone

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    About 20 minutes later most of that would be on Tori’s shirt…

  • More Incredible

    OK, I’ve had the HTC Incredible for over a week now, so I can talk about it a bit more.

    Camera: I hadn’t really used it after two days. Now I’ve used it a bit more, though still not a lot. Overall, at 8 megapixels I’d say that this phone can easily be your general day to day camera. I’ve never considered a camera a big part of the phone, but perhaps that’s because I’ve never had a good camera in my phone. Some shots of the girls on a chilly Mother’s Day:

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    Video: Quite good, though you need the proper lighting. The interesting thing about trying video on your phone is that you naturally just pivot the phone landscape or portrait depending on what looks better. But it’s not as easy to rotate a video.

    Here are two videos taken from my phone. The one of Tori dancing to The Wiggles in her PJs was taken portrait, downloaded to my PC and rotated via some freeware. The one of Danielle flipping was uploaded directly to YouTube from my phone, and is thus sideways. But the light was better.

    Google Map Navigation: This was called the "killer app" of the Nexus One when it first came out. It may kill Garmin. Especially for someone like me who uses ZipCar  and therefore doesn’t want to install a real GPS system, this is ideal. The turn by turn directions were as good as the GPS on my old Acura. It’s a battery killer, so you definitely need a car charger, but this app is truly great.

    Games: Still way too early to tell, but my phone can keep either daughter entertained and I have yet to pay for a game. That was my basic success criteria, so all good there.

    Battery Life: If I really use this phone a lot, I can blow through the battery in less than a day. On a regular day’s usage the battery seems to last fine. They are already selling more powerful replacement batteries for the Incredible. I’ll wait on that. I do make sure to turn WiFi and GPS off when I’m not using them. But I’m still leaving the Live Wallpaper on. Silly as it is, I like getting a sunset every day on my phone. If it’s raining, when I turn on my phone a windshield wiper pops up and "clears" the rain off my screen. Yes, I know, totally silly.

    Apps: Right now there isn’t anything I can think of  that I need. Yes, I’d like ZipCar to release an Android app. FreshDirect has an iPhone app though I always order food from my laptop so I’m not sure I’d use a phone app. But I’m seeing a rapid move towards Android development (Twitter released their Android app before an iPhone app). So I’m not worried that I won’t have apps that I need.

    There are some usability things that I would quibble with. I’m using a different SMS client which I like, but now I’m getting notifications from both the new client and the default SMS client when I get a new text. Haven’t figured out how to turn that off. The behavior when I connect to my computer seems inconsistent. Sometimes I just get my SD card as a hard drive, sometimes I get the phone memory as one drive and the SD card as another.

    The biggest negative I have found is that it’s pretty much impossible to download any paid video to this phone. If I buy video on iTunes it is copyright protected and I can’t watch it on my phone. If I use Amazon I get a Windows Media Player file, which my phone doesn’t play (need to look for an app for that, I guess). That’s not something I care a lot about, but if you did care about that, an iPhone is clearly your best bet.

    My overall impression remains the same. This is a tremendous phone.

  • Ringling Bros 2010

    It’s that time of year. The circus is in town. Going to the circus has been an annual tradition with Danielle and this year Victoria was old enough to appreciate it. So today was Tori’s first circus.

    There is still something magic about watching the circus through a three year old’s eyes. When you’ve seen the circus a bunch of times, you get numb to the spectacle of it all. But if you take a three year old, you just watch the mesmerized look on their face.

    Tori was mainly enthralled by the elephants, but she loved the whole thing.  And of course there were the obligatory treats. First she shared a snow cone with Danielle.

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    Ringling Brothers always sells the cotton candy with the big hat so they can charge $12.

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    What Tori looked like for most of the show.

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    And of course, a good time was had by all at the Greatest Show on Earth…

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