The Hedstroms

It had to maybe happen at some point, but Leif and I decided to have kids, and lo and behold, I’m now 3 months pregnant. So far I’m not one of those “OMG OMG OMG OMG I’M PREGNANT AND HAVE TO TELL EVERYBODY I EVEN KNOW A TINY BIT” people, although I have informed most people I want to know through a combination of “seeding” (ie. telling people who will tell everyone else), Facebook, Flickr, and just random IMs and phone calls. I still don’t get the people who post that stuff on message boards where anyone can see it. I mean, yeah it’s cool and all, but honestly if I don’t know you, I really don’t care.

The message boards I read have their purpose though honestly because I’m getting several good ideas of what not to do when the kid is born and some good ideas of what to do. I’ve been mentally gathering a list of things that we will try our darndest not to do. A lot of this stuff is more when they’re older, but you can plant the seeds early on. Well, we can try at least, right? I’ve actually gathered some of this stuff from my own family (not that they necessarily did any of this, but I watched things and just am doing the opposite of some of them).

1) Teach them that they’re not the best at everything, and it’s ok. They just need to accept it, or try harder if they want to get better.

2) On that same note, if they want something they need to work for it. I’m not talking about toys, but I’m talking more like getting better grades and such. Things aren’t just going to be handed to them because they think they’re entitled to it (and honestly, 99% of those situations I’ve seen, they’re not even close to being entitled to getting it). Actually if my kid gets that annoying entitlement attitude I’d slap them upside the head (figuratively!!!)

3) If you do something wrong, take responsibility for it, even if you know you’re going to get into trouble. It’s amazing how many kids I’ll watch do something, and then when you ask them if they did it, they say “no”. HELLO?? I SAW YOU DO IT!! There’s consequences for everything.

4) Much as this will pain us, they need to make their own mistakes in certain things, else they’ll never learn. Conversely, bailing them out of situation after situation will cause them to never learn because that will just teach them mommy and daddy will always make it better.

5) The world does not revolve around you. Maybe when you’re a baby or a toddler it does, but when you’re in your 20’s…it doesn’t. Sorry, that’s life, just deal with it.

6) If we have another kid, and you miss their wedding for some dumbass excuse, and you think they should just “get over it”, and they start forgiving you, but then you never do anything in the subsequent years to even try to repair the relationship you screwed up (especially when you make up lame excuses as to why you can’t visit them even though other relatives living in Europe have visited them several times already), seriously, another slap upside the head is coming your way.

Of course, having never done this before, I should look at this list in 10 years and see how we’re doing, and I might laugh at how naive I was, but you have to start somewhere.

Thor has definitely taken to Loki for everything related to playing. They’re really funny to watch in the backyard. Loki retrieves the ball, brings it back and drops it at my feet. In that split second, Thor casually saunters over, takes the ball, and casually walks away. Loki starts barking at me because he wants me to throw it, so I point out to him that Thor now has it. Loki runs over to Thor and tries to get the ball from him, but since Thor is so small, he can turn in extremely tight circles. The first time he did this we couldn’t stop laughing, but I finally brought out the camera and took some video

We seem to live in an age where people expect instant gratification, meaning they don’t want to have to work for anything (I know several people who have that “sense of entitlement”, even though they did nothing to deserve what they think they’re entitled to). As a result, people seem to have trouble reading something past the first sentence.

See? Even this is too long already.

1) If you’re on an email list which I happen to be an admin for, and you want to unsubscribe, it might be useful to press that nice UNSUBSCRIBE ME link at the bottom of the email, instead of clicking on the first email address you see in the message and asking that person (quite rudely btw) to unsubscribe you.

2) If you’re going to a website, and see “You don’t have permission to view this page, please contact FooBar@foobar.com to get access”, don’t email the mailing list for the entire site asking for access. They’re just going to tell you to talk to Foobar.

I don’t understand why these concepts are honestly so difficult, especially for people who are supposed to be engineers (well, the first one wasn’t an engineer, but the second example is ALWAYS engineers). Sometimes the answer isn’t in the first sentence, and you may be required to read a little ways to get it.

I just finished watching 13 Going on 30 last night with Jennifer Garner. Honestly it wasn’t a half-bad movie. It’s about a 13 year old girl who hates her life and wishes at her 13th birthday party she was 30. The next instant, she is, but it’s not the same concept as Big. Her 13 year old self is implanted 17 years later inside of her 30 year old self. She has none of the memories of the 30 year old, but is able to quickly find out what’s been going on through friends, her job, and her apartment. The movie was kind of cute (and Mark Ruffalo is definitely kind of cute), but while watching it last night, one thing really grated on me.

(Spoilers ahead if you’re ever planning on seeing this)
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At 30, Jenna is a high-profile magazine…something. Not the editor-in-chief, but something important, I can’t remember, at Poise magazine. The competition, Sparkle magazine has been getting Poise’s ideas for the last 7 months and nobody knows who’s doing it. In one key scene, the mean girl (who is now Jenna’s best friend because it turns out Jenna turned into a big ‘ol bitch in high school) is digging through Jenna’s office and finds envelopes from Sparkle magazine, addressed to Jenna, at work. In the envelopes it says something like “thanks for all the ideas, you’ll make a great editor-in-chief here at Sparkle.” Horror of horrors, it’s Jenna who’s been selling out her magazine!

I have 2 problems with this. First, if you’re going to sell out your company, would you really have the rival company you’re working with send you letters AT YOUR JOB, and then have incriminating evidence in them? Second, why would you actually keep those letters in your unlocked desk drawer towards the top where anyone can find them? This is supposed to be 2004 too, and I saw nobody at her company using email for anything - it was all done by snail mail.

The writers obviously needed to tie up the loose ends before getting to the feel-good ending, but I’m thinking they took a major shortcut with this one.

I decided to test out the video option on my camera, and took a decent video of Loki playing with Thor. Although it did take Loki a couple days to get over his “these are MY people” complex, he and Thor are now best buddies. Thor really enjoys the roughhousing with Loki, and then he goes over to Odin, plays nicely with him for a few minutes, and curls up next to him to sleep.

After playing Guitar Hero 2 until I got to the death metal levels, and hating most of the songs in Guitar Hero 3, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Rock Band. I needn’t be worried however, since Rock Band is probably the coolest video game ever. For the uninitiated, it comes (in the special edition), with a guitar (better than the GH guitars), a drum set, and a microphone. You can buy another guitar if you want and have someone playing bass as well as lead. In any case, that’s your band. Leif and I formed our own band with him on guitar and me on drums, and I have to say that I’m having a blast on this. I read somewhere that playing the RB drums is close to playing the real drums (closer than the other instruments get to their counterparts at least), and it’s definitely hard. I’ve been playing on Medium level, except for 1 song (”Wanted Dead or Alive”) which I’m doing on Hard, and it’s so…much….fun. We’ve spent most of the weekend playing, or when Leif got too tired, I started playing in solo mode.

The songs are so much better than what came in GH 2 and 3, that so far I haven’t found one that I haven’t liked.

This is Thor:

As of yesterday, he turned 9 weeks old. We picked him up last week, the day after we got back from Cozumel from Merriman Labradors (Carolyn and George are great btw). Leif for some reason insisted on getting another dog, even though we already have 2. He did make a good point - Loki and Odin are getting old-ish (they’ll be 8 this year), and he wants to get another one while they can still play with him. However, there’s a few things new puppies do which I really didn’t miss. 1) they can’t sleep through the night. Around 3:30am he has to go out, and around 6:30am. 2) they chew on EVERYTHING. 3) they’re not housebroken.

However, even with all of that said, they’re really cute.

When they sleep….

When they play…

And when they snuggle up next to their big brothers…