Who's watching the watcher

I just wanted to clarify that the "Art of the YouTube resonse video" post below was erroneously posted by Oliver under my name. I would almost certainly never write, "Who's watching the watcher?" Almost.

~

kid quotes

Home for the holidays and hanging out with my niece (4) and nephew (6), the following interesting phrases have come up:

While eating ice cream -
Marisa: "Ow, that nut just hurt the special part of my mouth."
Jacob: "Oh yeah. You mean by where the spitmaker is."

After spending 15 minutes outside re-wiring the Christmas lights on his own, crying due to coooold hands -
Jacob: "I had to stick my hands in the snow to touch the power strip."

And the best ever, while riding to school with his mom at 8:30 in the morning -
Jacob: "So Mom, did you know that people were trying to kill Jesus?"

Chomsky would love this stuff.

Settling in?

So perchance we are finally settling in. We made a trip to the Encants outdoor market that's open on the weekends in search of a few items to warm up our emptyish apartment. We found a nice blue wooden chair for Lily there. Later at IKEA, we found a mismatched table and red chair to go with the initial find, a felt mobile of bunnies and sheep, and a rug with roads and castles on it. So, all-in-all, Lil has had a pretty cool learning area added to her now-much-cooler play area. In the street the next night, we found a cool worn blue wooden table which is playing the role of end table for the time being.

The little table and chairs have helped focus Lily's oft bountiful energy such that we can actually get her to sit and talk ABCs and animals for 10 minutes or so at a time. She has also taken a great interest in writing in the last weeks. Grasping her fat crayons like pencils, placing her elbows firmly on the table and hunching over her paper so that her nose is only an inch from it, she spends long periods making wispy strings of pretend cursive. She also reads nonsense stories to us in a garbled Lily language, running her finger over the words on the pages of books or backs of DVD boxes. And finally, she loves listening to nursery rhymes, and I quite enjoy watching her drag the big nursery rhyme book from the coffee table to our bedroom at bedtime.

Lily home video

Poor Elmer

Today Lily was doing really well with her diaper off, running over to the potty a few times during the morning to do pees.

Later I went to make a cup of tea, leaving her playing in the family room. After a minute, she started shouting and crying, so I went to go see what was wrong. I was completely shocked to find Lily had shat on her toy elephant, I think by accident. This however, was not the source of her stress. The shit on her hand was.

It will be a while before I recover from the sight of that turd on poor Elmer the Elephant’s hind wheel, and I don’t know if Elmer will ever be the same.

Art of the YouTube response video

Watch our friend Dave's Art of a Bike Messenger video, filmed on the streets of Chicago:




And our response video of Lily watching his video:



I would like this post to initiate a discussion of the implications of this revolutionary type of response video and leave you wondering: Who's watching the watcher?