I read this news article about a guy who calls himself a Guerilla Gardener and I thought it sounded like something a few of you might like the idea of Actually, I even like the idea of the really simple seed dropping attacks. That’s even easy enough for me.

An army of self-styled guerrilla gardeners is growing across the world, fighting to transform urban wastelands into horticultural havens.
They work under the cover of night, armed with seed bombs, chemical weapons and pitchforks. Their tactics are anarchistic, their attitude is revolutionary, their aim is to beautify.

Remember a few weeks ago I asked if anyone else’s kids fiddle with their dummies and tuning it in? I have a little video of Kristian doing it and thanks to flickr’s new video feature, can share it with all of you too

He is mostly only turning it one way in this video but mostly when they do it, it’s a few twists one way then a few back the other. Maybe it wasn’t loud enough or something on this day

Browsing around on YouTube, looking for something interesting to watch. Found this advertisement. OMFG. I totally need some of these. They represent all that is sacred and holy in the world. I must find some.

I’m trying to determine if my children are just really strange, or if this is a normal behaviour.

So I’m asking this of other parents of children who have used a dummy/pacifier/whatever. Do they try to tune it in, or adjust the volume or whatever? What I mean by this is they get the handle and they twist it around once or twice one way and then the other way and maybe back a bit the other way, until it is apparently “just right”. Both Abigail and Kristian do it. So is it a normal thing for children to do with their dummies; or is Abigail a strange freak and Kristian learned it off her; or are they both strange freaks who came upon the habit as a result of genetics? Likely I wouldn’t be able to determine between the two latter options, but you can help me to figure out if it’s the first

Mr Flagrant Disregard, who you may remember from such productions as “FD’s Flickr Toys“, has made a very cool new site: KidsWeatherReport.com/. You put in your location and it shows the weather in a very simple and kid-friendly way. Just the upper and lower temperature and then pictures to indicate the conditions, and also another picture to show whether it’s “warm clothes” or “cool clothes” or “umbrella” kind of weather.

Stephanie is often asking me what the weather is going to be like, so I am going to put this on her computer and hopefully, have peace!

I read this article in the newspaper: Classmates see footage of girl’s sex act which explained how a video circulated around to most of the students at a school, via their mobile phones, of a girl “performing a sex act on a classmate”.

There was a bit at the bottom of the article which really annoyed me though:

Parents said yesterday the incident underlined the dangers of mobile phones in schools.

Sorry? It has NOTHING to do with the “dangers” of mobile phones in schools. Mobile phones are designed for communicating and sharing images, videos and sounds. Kids are designed to gawk and take interest in the personal goings on of other people that are not necessarily any of their business. The video could just have easily been made with a webcam or digital camera and emailed around between all the students, or even posted on the web. And then what would the danger have been? That kids can be exploited online?

It seems that the incident, to me, highlights the dangers of not teaching your kids to respect other people. So that maybe they would think twice about forwarding around such a video which clearly should be a private matter between the girl and boy involved. Or maybe the danger of not educating your kids about what people are really like. For Christ’s sake: if a teenage boy wants to make a video of you giving him a blow job, OF COURSE he’s not going to be able to keep it to himself. So maybe try teaching your daughter DON’T LET ANYONE MAKE VIDEOS OF YOU DOING SEXUAL THINGS. It’s not rocket science, people.

I came across this site called Photojojo’s PhotoTimeCapsule and thought it sounded interesting so I registered to see how it was. What happens is you link up your flickr account and then every two weeks or so they send you a “time capsule” email with a few photos from your photostream dated around a year ago.

Every couple weeks, the Time Capsule looks at your Flickr account for photos you took a year ago. It picks the ones that are most interesting — the ones that got viewed the most, favorited the most, and commented on the most — and sends them to you in email.
That’s it!
You’ll be amazed by how wonderful it is to get a photo blast from the past.

Today I got my first email. It had a picture of Abigail and my mum having a swimming lesson, Stephanie holding a tiny Kristian and a couple of Kristian sleeping by himself looking very cute and very small!

I think I’ll keep it

Kristian Marcus Leth, DO NOT mess with the BIOS settings on your computer!

I joked once or twice when Kristian was a bit younger that since he was growing so fast and Abigail is such a tiny thing that I would soon be able to say that they were twins because he would be the same size as she is. He is quite close in size to her now, he’s only a little bit shorter than she is but he’s a lot chunkier where she is slim and dainty.

One day a week or two ago I was in Spotlight with my mum. It’s a split level store and they have a ramp for prams and wheelchairs to get between the two levels. There were a few women standing talking blocking the way to get onto the ramp and so my mum was waiting there pointedly for them to get out of the way. WHen one of them turned to move she actually did ask “Oh, are they twins?”

They may be the same size and have familial similarity in their features, but they certainly don’t look like twins. She looks like a little girl, and he looks like a baby. He has hardly any hair, and he still has the baby look about his face. To actually think that they were twins would take a monumentally stupid person.

Seriously, WTF?

I got myself into a little bit of trouble at kinder today, sort of.

They have a questionnaire that they ask you to fill in at the start of each year. It’s things about your child.. their favourite activities, what they don’t like, if they have any fears, how they are progressing with toilet training, if they have any special needs like dietary or medical or religious. On the question about what methods or techniques you use when trying to help your child with toilet training, I wrote “Asking nicely. Crossing fingers. Giving encouragement.” Then I was feeling in a silly mood, so after that I wrote “Animal sacrifice.”

When I went in this afternoon to pick Abigail up, the leader in her room said she just had to ask me a question, and got Abigail’s little folio book out and opened up to the page where the questionnaire was and I said “Oh, is that about the animal sacrifice? I was just being silly.” She got such a look of relief on her face. She said she just hadn’t been sure if I was joking or if maybe we had some kind of religious beliefs like that or what and she didn’t know how she should approach it. I assured her that it was just completely a joke. (Which I thought had been quite evident.. are there still people in western culture who practice animal sacrifice??)

Evidently, not as amusing to them as I had found it. At least when I told it all to my mum just now on MSN she was laughing, so I know it wasn’t completely unfunny.

I think she had been quite worried about it. Today Abigail wore underwear all day for the first time ever, and I’d asked her before we left if she wanted to go to the toilet first which she declined. Then when we got to the gate she decided she did want to go, so we went back inside and Jane was in the office telling the other ladies there that it was alright, it was just a joke.