Xiaoniu 小妞

We’re finally going on a vacation. It’s been four years since we’ve been on a real vacation. I don’t count our honeymoon and the longest we’ve been away from home was two days. This will be our first vacation in four years and Emelia’s first vacation ever. I’m really looking forward to getting away.

What are we going to do? We’ll be heading out to the cape for a week. We’re renting a house that is about 1/3 mile from the ocean and we plan to hit the beaches, rest and relax, and if we are lucky make a trip to various parts of the cape. Sue and I like Provincetown, but due to our deciding to go away later than most folks there were no places in Provincetown that we would be willing to rent. So, we’ll settle for a visit.

Emelia is getting a bit demanding while riding in my truck these days. Sue put together a mix of Chinese kids’ songs (with a Japanese song thrown in for fun) and the little one just loves it. We’ve been listening to it a lot lately. The songs are catchy and I’ve caught myself listening to them even when Emelia is not in the truck.

By demanding I mean that when we get in the truck to go to daycare or when we are going home she starts pointing at the radio and grunting. That’s her indication that she wants to hear her songs and not what is on the radio at the moment. While listening to the CD she’ll again point at the radio and whine until I change the song. The tricky part is figuring out which of the 18 songs on the disc she wants to hear. Luckily, I’ve learned her favorites. Oddly enough the one Japanese song on the disc is one of our favorites.

In addition to her love for music Xuemei has started to show interest in dancing. She’s always loved stepping on my feet while I hold her hands and try to walk and dance her around. It’s a shame that she isn’t good enough on her feet to do it for long or very often.

She is able to dance on her own now. She and the other kids in her room dance and have fun with some songs on the radio. I don’t know what songs they dance to, but it is usually something that the people that work at the daycare like. Emelia isn’t picky though. She’s likely to start dancing to the TV commercial music.

I’m not sure if I mentioned it before, but Xuemei isn’t loving her high-chair anymore. We still eat dinner in the dining room, but nowadays she wants to sit in the big chair like us. She’ll throw a fit unless because she wants to sit in the big chair, but sometimes we can entertain her enough to keep her in her high-chair. It’s just easier cleanup and she sits still better (when strapped to the chair .

Is it odd that I know the words to more Chinese kids’ songs than I do English language songs? I remember at least parts of some American kids’ songs, but not enough to actually sing it. When it comes to singing Emelia a Chinese song and I can usually whip out at least five of them and can sing & hum along to at least a few more. It’s a great learning tool, but I’ll be honest that I know all of the words, but I don’t know what each word means. I at least know what the song is about, but that’s where it ends. I believe that learning songs is a great way to learn a language.

Work has been crazy as ever lately. We’ve been up to our ears in Java land for a couple years now and even now I learn something new and exciting just about every day. There is so much to learn and so many great tools out there that it seems like you could learn this stuff for a lifetime. I will say one that I wish I had gotten past my phobia over Maven and pushed to learn it earlier. If you’re a Java developer and don’t know about and love Maven then you’re missing out. If I get a chance I may just have to post something about the stuff we’ve been delving into lately. Geek talk.

If you haven’t downloaded and installed Firefox 3 then you’re missing out. I’ve been using it since RC and haven’t regretted the upgrade yet. The “awesome bar” took some getting used to, but once you get the hang of what it can do it’ll save you some time and save you some typing. The smaller memory footprint and faster JavaScript execution are the best features. I can’t believe that we had to deal with the poor memory issues of FF2 for so long. Better late than never I guess.

Last, but not least mom and dad finally closed on their new house. It’s been many months since they started the transition to move and it’s all coming to a close. There is still plenty of work left to do with moving into a house, but they are now back to living in their own place and living by their own rules. I can only imagine what it was like. No offense, but after living on my own for so many years I’m not too eager to move in with somebody else. I’m too stuck in my ways for that to be anything but a recipe for disaster.