I am Over the Cell Phone Shaming

Okay apparently I have more crabbies to get out. This one has been brewing for a while.

So suddenly (well, gradually) everywhere in my life, there are signs prohibiting cell phone use in x or y or z situations. My OB's office has them in the waiting room. So does our pediatrician's office. Actually almost every medical provider I can think of. Also, waiting in line to vote. Restaurants where one might procure takeout, or feel like eating a quiet lunch alone.

And the new director of the girls' preschool requested in her back-to-school letter (yes, months ago, yes I am still annoyed) that parents refrain from cell phone use while we drop off and pick up our kids. Her reason? Not because it slows down pickup/lines (which I could allllmost understand), but because our little ones are excited about their days! And want us to listen to them!

Ummmm y'all, did I just get parenting shamed about my phone? Not cool.

Of course it's nothing new, the whole "dear mom on her iphone at the playground" open letter trope is done and re-done and done again. Phone shaming isn't news. I think I'm just officially... over it.

Look, I get to determine which ways and times are good for ME and MY kid to communicate. MOST people are not ignoring their kids at school pickup to text or tweet (any more than if they are having a real human conversation with a fellow parent or a teacher or flirting it up with the cute dad in the hallway), but if they were, and their kids learn that sometimes mommy is talking to someone else and it'll be their turn in a sec (because OTHER PEOPLE ALSO EXIST), then... that is okay.

Also, if you're the kind of parent who is legitimately ignoring your kid at a time that is legitimately harmful or hurtful to said kid, then that is not a PHONE issue, that is a HUMAN issue, and people blaming the phone is a cop-out.

ALSO. If I am waiting on YOU, I get to use my waiting time how I want. This goes for waiting in preschool pickup times and medical offices alike. I'm sure it would be more CONVENIENT for the doctor if, when he came into the room, I was standing with bated breath, questions at the tip of my tongue, children patiently silently nearby. But, dear physicians of America, YOUR convenience and time is not more important than mine* (it isn't! I promise! it really isn't!) and if I have to wait twenty minutes for my appointment, I will treat that time as MINE. If, after my loooong wait for you, you have to hold on four seconds for me to put my phone away when you come in, YOU WILL SURVIVE.

(Again: having patients who cannot or will not disengage from their phones for a whole appointment, or who miss their name being called when they are distracted, or whatever - those are HUMAN problems, not PHONE problems.)

My friend A'Dell wrote last year that her take is: anywhere it's socially appropriate to read a book or magazine, it should be socially appropriate to use a phone. Lines, waiting rooms, airport lounges, traffic jams, etc.

Actually you should just go read that whole post because I basically agree with every word, and she is such a good ranter. Get on board, folks. The future is now, etc etc.

*No really. It isn't.

Some Other September Things

Here are some other things we did in September (alternate title: let's take a journey through my phone's camera roll) --

One Friday night when Marky was working, the kids and I made popcorn and turned the lights off and snuggled on the couch and watched a movie together. We had never seen Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. It was delightful.

I snuggled with Ali a lot. Because she is also delightful. She's turned into a super happy baby recently. I'll take it.

We took a lot of pictures at the bus stop. Some days, even in non-yellow shorts.

(Anneliese now has a carpool ride two days a week --
they pick her up from N's bus stop!)

Anneliese learned to brush her own hair and suddenly she's a teenager.

Charlotte did her first round of swim lessons. She can't swim on her own yet but she also didn't poop in her swimsuit at all, so that's a hearty win.

Nathan got a bad case of swimmer's ear (seven years! three kids! our first ear infection!) and we barely slept for several nights and he was generally miserable and in pain but it's over now.

I did some more preschool homework FTLOG.

Another Nathan came for a weekend to visit, he and Mark shucked some corn fresh from Minnesota and grilled dinner and we played with the kids and ran errands and it was all right and normal and good, and then we waved bye til next time.

Anneliese and I painted our toes yellow.

We set up Mark's old phone with Nathan's email so he has a way to text/call us (through google hangouts) and we can leave him home alone for an hour or so when we need to. One night he was home doing his homework and practicing, while I hopped over to church for a few minutes for preschool orientation, and Mark had the girls at dance. This is what texting with a seven-year-old looks like:

Anneliese's cutie friend Beatrice has been with us for a few afternoons, and as always, we love having her around. (Especially when she can pull some cheerfulness out of Anneliese these days.) We decided these two are competing for the best-dressed award at the weekday school.

Charlotte got in the habit of wearing a cape to go poop. Like you do.

Nathan graduated out of his first cello (from this eighth-size to a quarter-size, coming soon). He's very excited but I am mostly sad. His first cello! Aw. I will miss this tiny sweet thing.

Some Things I Have Been Mulling

Here are some things I have been mulling in my head this week (brace yourself, this is bound to be profound) (*shakes head no*):

---

I do think overall, I like my iphone better than my android phone, but that is MOSTLY because of imessage. And it isn't that imessage is inherently better than anything else, it's just that everyone else is on it, so it is therefore convenient. Herd mentality something something. And the stream/cloud photo sharing feature is also kind of great. I find myself using that a lot with various people.

BUT I will say these things about the iphone vs my old android:
1. The camera is not better.
2. The battery frankly sucks.
3. The auto-correct on the keyboard thinks it is super smart but it is not as helpful as it could/should be, and not nearly as smart as the android spelling corrector.
4. I am about to have a big ol' fight with my home button, because I have one of those glass screen protectors on it, which means I need a button cover, yet good button covers (which go flush against the curve of the button DO NOT EXIST. Can someone please get on this?
5. Why can you not purchase content from within the kindle app? (Or even link to the mobile site to do it?) (Or purchase downloadable content from the Amazon app?) Stop forcing me into Safari! Just whyyyy?
6. I have this new chevron case for my phone (my other one got dyed blue in my jeans pocket and I keep forgetting to run it through the dishwasher), which is cute but cheap and hmmm I'm still deciding.

---

These are all very first world housewife problems, so I should share here with a pic what I already told facebook: Charlotte dropped a crayon in the potty while she was pooping the other day, in case you think three-year-olds don't have problems too. (Like... nine seconds after I took this pic.)

---

Nathan has been asking a lot of questions about coffee recently. Like, how to make it. And what is that brown dirt stuff in the bag? And then trying to clarify it all -- so, the brown stuff is the coffee, and the water you pour over the brown stuff is just water that tastes like coffee, but that's not the actual coffee, just the coffee you drink? When I told him the coffee itself was actually ground-up beans that had been picked and then cooked, it blew his little mind. We had to look up a YouTube video. Coffee comes from farmers! So does chocolate! It's also beans! And they look very similar as a plant but then they make foods that look very different by the time we eat and drink them, and isn't that cool mom? And sometimes you can put coffee in chocolate! -- so anyway, now he calls it my liquid coffee which isn't actually coffee, just water that tastes like coffee because you poured it over some ground up beans. "Are you going to drink more coffee mom? Like the liquid kind." Yes, sweetie. People know what you mean when you say drink coffee. In related news, BUDDING PEDANT UP FOR GRABS, LOVES WEEKEND VISITS.

---

Also, those look like children who need their own tervises, yes? They want to drink coffee "coffee" like mommy, which is sweet and I will indulge it forever, but maybe I don't want my cups all dirty every day, and maybe we should find some kid-sized ones and splurge, finally? I think I shall procure them for Christmas maybe.

---

Everyone else is using the Timehop app, right? This app really speaks to my soul, since I have basically been my own walking Timehop for years. I've been using it for some time, like (I assumed) everyone else in America. But then I mentioned it to a friend, a very smart friend (who is sometimes admittedly clueless when it comes to the thumb of pop culture) (like, maybe once he asked me who Taylor Swift was? I can't remember the details) (*cough*) and he had never heard of it so maybe other people haven't either?

Anyway. It's a simple premise. It tells you what you were doing x number of years ago today. If you're thinking this is information you might not want or need, let me help you understand something: YOU ARE WRONG. Because of this app, I know that seven years ago today, my current second-grader was exactly a month old, and looks like this:

So. It's an app you need, is what I'm saying.

That's all I got today. I will go have some more liquid coffee now.

Erin's Rules of Cell Phone Use

{Update 5/20: In catching up on blog posts I found this in my draft folder and it has nothing to do with anything; I wrote it a month ago (apparently on my phone, based on all the terrible typos I just corrected) and it amused me, so I'm hitting publish. Hi! You missed me in this corner of the internet, yes?}

With all the crap "old" people like to give "young" people about the "dangers" of cell phones and security and whatnot (all those quotes are because obviously the scolders and scoldees are not always defined by age or generational lines, but by how scared they are themselves of "technology" -- I don't think that word means what most people seem to think it means -- and frequently those people doing the most warning are the ones who least understand what they think they're warning about. Hence, "warning.")

ANYWAY I am here to be the person giving some crap back. Let's talk about current etiquette, because these things change, you know, and I would hate for anyone to be so out of touch that they are rude without intending to be, right? I also have many thoughts on social media (which, yes, is a relevant enough thing now that you do need to learn to do it well) but for now let's talk about phones.

1. Turn your phone noises off. Vibrate is okay, ring noises and notification noises and game beeps and music are not. There are some exceptions (wandering around the mall or the grocery store is... whatever), but for the most part, if you are stationary in a public place -- not only official meetings, but even in restaurants, waiting rooms, etc -- no one wants to hear your phone beep. Be honest, you're already staring at it anyway. You won't miss a notification. Turn it down. (Addendum: if you are too confused by your phone settings to know how to turn it down, you should not have that phone. Get one you can manage kthx.) You have a one-oops grace period on a noisy phone in public before people give you hate stares.

2. Don't call anyone before 10am or after 9pm unless you text and ask first, or have a standing thing, or a phone date, or whatever. (Somewhere my parents are applauding this. Oh how they fought to keep me off the phone after 9. I am with them on it now.) It is invasive and kinda rude. Just ask first. No out of the blue early/late calls.

3. Group texting is ONLY for people who ALL know each other. This is crucial and non-negotiable. I will repeat it: ONLY for people who ALL know each other. Don't loop me into a thread full of people I don't know, telling you something that has nothing to do with me or a group I am part of. Congrats on your baby's cute valentine card or your fancy new car or whatever, but don't tell me about it with a group of other people by text when I don't know them. Then I cannot get out of the thread! No.

3, let's review. I will say it again (in case you missed or think you're a special snowflake with a special snowflake reason to copy a bunch of people into a message who will then be riddled with replies from folks they don't know): group texts are ONLY for people who ALL know each other. No special snowflakes. Okay? Okay.

4. If you need to talk to someone in a public space airport/waiting room/etc, step away. We don't want to hear it. If you're the type of person who does this, I promise you are the type of person who also does it TOO LOUDLY. You are not important or interesting enough that we secretly are curious. Nope. You are who our grandparents warned us about with these newfangled portable phones. Go away.

I'm sure there is more, but that's all I've got for now. Whew. Glad to get that off my chest.

Thumbs Up

I have a million pictures of Anneliese where she looks like she is giving an awkward thumbs up, but it's actually that she's just plucked her thumb from her mouth to grin at the camera, and it's still hanging mid-air.

So there's your random middlest-baby-makes-you-smile anecdote for the day.

(Also let's all take a moment to praise Marky, who, like yours truly, is totally an expert in the selfie art of looking at the dot.)

Seven Quick Takes

It has been kind of a blah week. I have been anxious and tired and and and AND but that's all boring and I am starting to pull out of it, so.

1.) Okay so I've been craving Red Lobster. Not just craving seafood, or even good seafood, but craving the particular brand of junk food trying to be classy that only Red Lobster can provide me. So Mark, because he is a good and kind and indulgent soul (who secretly likes it too) (LOOK MARKY I TOLD THE INTERNET YOUR SECRET SHAME), took me on Monday night for a date. With a babysitter and everything. To Red Lobster. And we ordered heaps of shrimp and fish and traded our plates around and both got exactly what we wanted and we aren't sorry. And it was sleety and gross outside which means we had the whole place basically to ourselves which makes it either way better or way, way worse.

2.) Speaking of the sleet, Nathan got out of school early on Monday because of winter weather (winter! weather! No, March. Just no.) so I took advantage of the free hours to take him for a haircut. (And Starbucks. Because there is no event in my life that doesn't go well with Starbucks.)

And I took this picture, which I can't stop looking at, because he looks so! grown! up! yet also exactly, exactly like he did the day he was born. That little profile. I cannot.

3.) On Tuesday there was no school at all. Total snow day. "Snow day." It was also the first day of spring tee ball. That's good math, right?

(Yes, Anneliese is doing a little tee ball this year too! She asked a thousand times when Nathan played  last year, so we are letting her try it just for a one-month session. She is very excited to be included.)

4.) Through a not-that-long-but-also-not-that-interesting turn of events, I ended up taking the kids to Dunkin Donuts on Tuesday, the last day before Lent, and this is the cup they gave me my coffee in, and I  laughed and laughed and laughed.

5.) At our Ash Wednesday worship yesterday, Nathan got suddenly nervous that the ashes would be hot, so he didn't want them on his forehead, so the pastor put them on his hand instead. This has nothing to do with anything, except it struck me as so very Nathan.

6.) My phone has been very wonky and freezy of late, so I went to Verizon to see about getting a new one or getting it reset or something. They were perfectly willing to let me get a new one (even though I am not eligible for an upgrade til May) but it turns out they aren't honoring old phone plans anymore, for anyone, period, and I guess I am the last one in America to know this because I seem to be the only one outraged. As soon as Mark or I gets a new phone (which will inevitably happen! this is not a special case! everyone needs new phones at some point! it is a part of the Natural Order of Things!) our plan will be significantly more expensive, for significantly less data usage. Y'all. I do not like paying more to get less. So here is where I am: I can't get a working phone with Verizon without our bill going waaaaaay up, but I also can't quit Verizon til May. (Oh and they have cornered the market on secondhand and hand-me-down phones by requiring people to physically trade in their old ones to get reasonable prices on new ones, so craigslist and ebay and imploring friends and family doesn't help either.) Basically my phone doesn't work and I have to live with it. Am super frustrated.

7.) I made these two sets of burp cloths last week for Merritt and Elsha, and they have both been delivered and unwrapped so I can post pics now.

These are my favorite baby gifts to give. Old-school prefold cloth diapers make the best burp cloths (I had a stack that served as my loveys when I was a toddler, I called them nannies) (my nephew Liam does this too, a holdover from what Ashley remembered from our own childhood, and I very much love it), but since everyone in the world has a stack of these white things, we loved our decorated, ribboned, colorful ones best -- easy to stick in a diaper bag for outings and the church nursery, and you know which ones are yours at a glance. We had a few with the big kids that we loved, and then Ashley gave us a big stack of tye-died ones when Charlotte was born which were (are) awesome. I love making them for new baby presents.

Press! Charlotte!

It only took six months from Charlotte being introduced to the inward-facing cell phone camera to become full-on obsessed with taking selfies.

She has become my sweet baby who is pretty much always happy to smile for the phone. It comes out and she says press! press! and then Charlotte! (which she pronounces Shaaaaah-lit, adorably) (but yes if you ask her what her NAME is, she still says Night-night because she likes to make me sigh, apparently) and anyway she grins at herself and points and pushes the button. Press! Charlotte!

And then my camera roll looks like this:

Yes, I said MY camera roll. Because this even happens on MY phone now. MY PHONE. I don't even know who I am anymore.

Not that I am really complaining, I love selfies as much as the next person. (Next person = everyone. Either you love taking selfies or you are a liar.)

A Whole New Internet. Sort Of.

Happy July! (A tiny bit late.)

I am driving down the interstate right now, typing this on my computer. (CHROME BOOK WOO HOOO!) Which is connected to a wifi signal, being broadcast from an app on Mark's phone. My phone is plugged into the chromebook, so that I can upload pictures from my camera roll to this post. Aaaaaaand we are feeling a little techy-smug right about now.

Yay internet!

Okay so I have been wanting to post about all the things that are making my internet feel like a whole new place in the last several weeks. (Even aside from today's episode of insterstate blogging.) Besides the new chromebook, which is proving every bit as awesome as I had hoped (and I will post about that too at some point), look at these other new shiny things!

Feedly. Like everyone else, I went into a mourning state when Google announced they were killing Reader. I definitely cried real tears. Every night for a week. This is not an exaggeration for the purposes of making a point, I ACTUALLY CRIED. (I might have had pms.)

Probably a full 75% of what I read on the internet (news, friends' blogs, churchy articles, comics, recipes, photo streams) came via my Google Reader, and I wasn't sure what would happen to my cherished internet reading habit when it went away. Would whatever I replaced Reader with be as good? Good enough that I would actually use it? I am here to say YES and YES.

Feedly is where it's at, y'all.

Full disclosure about my uninformed opinion: I didn't try any other options. Feedly was the first thing I tried, mostly because the phone app is just beautiful. Yes, I am that person.

See? Beautiful.

So I synced up my Google Reader (this was back when it was still active and I had that option, #RIPgooglereader) and it imported everything I was already following, and grouped it into my same categories. Lovely.

And then I played around with the features, and y'all! It does so much! So many helpful things! It walked me through how to do some "spring cleaning" and remove feeds that don't update any more. I can save display settings for each category (or individual feed) based on the type of content coming through -- to view just a list of titles, or a title with thumbnail, or a few opening sentences, or a grid of large pictures, or the whole post itself. This is a customization feature I didn't know I wanted, and now I love it. Oh and also it has an option to be all Furman purpley in the background. Yes please!

So after playing around with it and using it for several weeks, I kinda think... *whisper* I like it better than Google Reader. (Heretic! Burn me at the stake!)

Screen grab of Feedly. See all those blogs I am fully caught up on? YEAH. THAT.

My one complaint about it so far is that my email button doesn't work on my computer, so if I want to send a post to someone, I have to just open gmail and copy/insert the link to the post itself. Google Reader was way better in that it could send the entirety of the post (with pics) right from where I was reading it. (Feedly does this just fine on my phone and on my chromebook. I'm not sure what's happening on my computer but I'm not ready to blame Feedly for it just yet.)

So, Feedly. If you consume as much internet writing as I do, you want it.

Falcon Pro. Okay if you think I lost my sh!t when they killed Google Reader, you should have seen me the day they killed the TweetDeck phone app. The thing is, I love twitter, and I really love it on my phone. (Tweetdeck still exists as a chrome extension, which I use on both computers as often as I want twitter on a computer, which is... not often.) So to replace Tweetdeck on my phone, I had been through several twitter apps, including Echofon, Hootsuite, and Twitter's own app (which... why so terrible, Twitter?) and I couldn't find one that did everything Tweedeck did for me, and as smoothly.

Here is what I wanted: to be able to control more than one account (and set different notification settings for each of them) mute certain users or hashtags, save lists and hashtags I do want to follow, see full conversations connected to a tweet (including history AND @-replies; so many apps do one but not the other, why why why), and have my own tweets and starred favs no more than a couple taps away. Asking too much? APPARENTLY SO.

(Those of you who aren't on twitter just curled into the fetal position and vommed a little. If you even are still reading, good job.)

So after reading a crap ton of reviews and asking a million people what they used/liked/didn't like, and installing/uninstalling several apps and their various boosters on my phone, I eventually got to Falcon Pro. It has a dumb logo and a dumb name and it seems to have a cult following among people who are, well... odd. And I say that without any judgement because all those odd birds were right: this app is great.

It does all the stuff I said I wanted, plus a few other things I didn't know I wanted but now can't live without -- MOST NOTABLY, it opens its own mini browser when you tap a tweet, so you can read a linked article right there in the app! No more opening other pages to read! THIS INCLUDES INSTAGRAM PICTURES. I would honestly have used it forever ago, just for that mini-browser feature alone. Totally worth the $2 I paid. Or, $1.68 or whatever random price it was. (See? Odd.)

Also, it has a dark screen. Which is a dumb thing, but I liked it about Tweetdeck and I like it here too. It saves battery! And is easier on my eyes when I am lying in the dark trying to twitter myself to drowsiness. Yes, that is a thing. I promise.

Falcon Pro: HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

Oh! And I didn't want this post to be super long or too boring but since I have already failed at the latter I will keep going and risk the former as well, so --

Pocket. My other other new (to me) internet thing is called Pocket, which saves articles or links to be read later. I have a Pocket button in my browser on the computer, and it is listed as one of my "share" options in my phone -- "add to Pocket."

It syncs between devices, so you can save stuff to read from anywhere, and go back and read it from anywhere. Even offline! This has saved me from cluttering my email with links I send to myself to read, which means I can now see my real emails AND REPLY TO THEM, so... that's a win.

In my perfect internet world, I wish Feedly had some sort of Pocket integration so I could get all those things right alongside the sites I already subscribe to, but... that doesn't exist yet. (They didn't ask me.) (They should have. They always should.)

Um okay I think I am finally out of things to say about this. Oh and sorry for all the actual photos of my phone. I don't think there's a way to easily do screen grabs on Androids (if you know, please tell me!)...

*Sigh* ... And right when I was feeling techy-smug.

Baby's First Selfies

Hey remember when I blogged about anything besides sicky stuff? Yeah me neither. But today is the day! I have had two days in a row of improvement instead of worsening, so... hey pleurisy, go suck it. I have cute kid pics to post.

Okay, first. Let me be clear: I don't let my kids play with my phone. Once in a while, I practice with Nathan on how to call people if he ever needed to, but THAT IS IT. (This isn't like the key rule that I got slack on in moments of desperation. The no-phone thing is for realz.) If I were one of those people who put cutesy painted family rules signs in our house, that would be near the top. We don't touch mommy's phone.

Another Nathan, on the other hand, is somewhat indulgent. And now we have photographic evidence: baby's first selfies.

Caught in the act later, you can see it's actually a sweet snuggly thing that kept her quiet and happy (hear me complaining? *crickets*), made even more adorable by the fact that it was on someone else's phone.

(When he has his own kids someday, I fully intend to let Charlotte snuggle them and do the exact same thing. If I don't get to it first.)

I Will Apparently Color Splash Anything

Remember how I fell in love with my new phone and my new Color Splash app last week?  Well you'd think I'd be tired of it (or maybe you wouldn't think that at all) but I totally am not. I am colorsplashing everything in sight (read: in my phone) and despite how the receiving end of my text messages react, I've been feeling shamelessly un-annoying about it.

First I colorsplashed this dinosaur because let's face it, you can't have a dinosaur hatching in a bowl on your counter for four days and not be tempted to colorsplash it. (Sentences I never knew I'd write.)

Then I colorsplashed my daughter. You know, like you do. (Ask me how thrilled Marky was that I un-oranged his beloved tiger paw shirt.) (We do not un-orange the things that are supposed to be orange! We make things orange! All of the things! Orange!)

Then we colorsplashed the other daughter.  She chose a great outfit for the day and her wardrobe choice was only made better by colorsplashing.

Then I colorsplashed Another Nathan.  He had a little acci-doo yesterday (yes he's totally fine and it was just a slick road and slicked up breaks and a small fender bender and we're not even calling it any bad names, basically his car just has a boo boo) and I took a picture of him in the office of a body shop. And colorsplashed it because it was a blue mood.

And then I realized that if I am colorsplashing my best friend's worried moments, I might need to stop colorsplashing.

And that's the story of how I became less un-annoying about my new Color Splash app. Thanks for coming along on this journey with me.

Saturday Miscellany

Some random (loosely related) updates from these parts:

Mark and I both got new phones last week. (That part's a coincidence actually.) They both have inward facing cameras which are probably intended for video chatting ("chatting" *ahem*) but for our purposes it mostly means I am perfecting the art of the cell phone self-pic.

Related warning: the rest of this post will have a few too many cell phone self-pics. Which some of you will like (the naggy types constantly telling me I don't post enough pictures of myself) and some of you will roll your eyes at, because apparently I am fifteen years old.

(Teenagers do that.  In case you didn't get that.)

I also got a haircut this week, but more important than that, I got it colored. It's now been re-brunetted because it had been getting redder and redder and I do not like that and I didn't know how bad it had gotten because some people are too "nice" to tell me, knowing how much I don't love the red, and were full of things like yeah it's a bit red but not too much and it's kind of pretty. Um, no. It wasn't. It was red. Well, ish. But far ish-ier than I wanted. (Stop questioning my use of ish-ier. You know exactly what I mean.)

But, no matter. It is brown now (did you know they put green in hair dye to counteract red? I mean, it makes sense but I never knew that. They call it "ash" but yeah, it's green) and because I am now brilliant at cell phone self-pics, I can show for-real before and after shots. (My mom will hate this because she doesn't love me as a brunette, but I'm into it so it's staying for a while.)

Trust me the before was redder in real life. And someone please tell me to stop taking pictures in my bathrooms. I have a whole house. Why the bathrooms?

We also went to Monkey Joe's this week, which I had never done before. It's a warehouse (well, a retail space) full of inflatable bouncy houses of varying degrees of fanciness. Another Nathan took Anneliese a few months back and she was mostly timid, but this time (after a fit of crying that involved me huffing and sweating my way through an inflatable maze, including hauling myself over slides and crushing Nathan's arm into a plasticky rugburn on one of them) they both were all about it. Anneliese bounced happily but avoided slides and tunnels, and except for the aforementioned slide/mommy rugburn fail, Nathan loved all of it.

remember when we thought his gross motor delays would hold him back?

And today I went to the grand re-opening of my gym which has been under renovation for a while, and after I worked out, I let the kids play in the bouncy house outside in the parking lot.  They were both old pros.

So, yeah. There's been a lot of bouncy houses in our world in the last twenty-four hours.

Which means naptimes have been mostly glorious and there has also been a fair amount of sitting by the pool. Which means I have been getting very freckly.  Which I used to hate (I have this nagging worry it makes me look like I have bad skin) but am starting to embrace as summery. (It took lots of Marky compliments. Fifteen years-ish worth.)

Oh! That reminds me! Kind of related to sitting by the pool, and kind of related to the new phones (see? this post isn't totally random), I have a new app that everyone else probably already knows about called Color Splash which allows you to do very cool things with color and black & white on your pics.

My brother will hate this because he is not into photo editing of any kind. He thinks it's cheating. I think he's boring. Haters gonna hate. (Can I say that? I just tried it out. I'm not sure it works on me.)

Anyway, Color Splash. Look at this pretty one Another Nathan did of me.  And this pretty one I did of him.

Yes, I know the one he did is better. But basically nothing feels more summery than a red and white striped beach towel, so I love this.

And I will stop writing now before I subject you to any more of my cell phone self-pics. Because, oh there are more. (You will stop judging me now.)

Instagrammy Charlotte

I used to (lovingly) (ahem) mock people who were all up in instagram, hipsters and artist wannabes and the like. Oh people. The 1970s are laughing at you, and so am I.

But then my best friend got an iphone, joined the instagram revolution, made pretty pictures of my children, amongst other things, and I am now secretly jealous. (Don't tell the internet.)

Your daily Charlotte

I'm working through my pain by demanding instagram-everything. Including Charlotte. Laugh on, 1970s. But instagram-lashes and instagram-smiles are for sure a win.

I Cringe

So last month, Another Nathan and I switched phones.  Well, kind of. 

Basically he wanted an iPhone but wasn't eligible for an upgrade yet, so we used our upgrade to get an iPhone for Mark's line, then traded Nathan that iPhone for his old (but new to me) touchscreen Droid which we activated on my line, then re-activated Mark's original Droid on his line, which he's content with til the one he really wants goes on sale. At which point we will use Nathan's upgrade to get it.

Clear as mud, right? Don't worry about the details, we all have the phones we want, and the lady in the Verizon store totally loved us (not sarcastic, we make friends wherever we go), so... yeah.

ANYWAY.

All that is just a long way of saying that I ended up with Another Nathan's phone, which somehow retained all his pictures even though we put my sd card in it (and dude is a picture hoarder) and y'all! Look at this vision of heinous I had forgotten about* til I sorted through the masses of pictures on his phone! (I mentioned the hoarder thing already, right? Just making sure.)

If only Charlotte were in here too, it could be an Awkward Sibling Photo of truly epic legend.

In a related story, my children think going to Target with Another Nathan is pretty much the best thing ever. I wonder why.

*repressed. I was there that day but didn't remember this happening til I saw the picture. You know how that goes.