Category: Family

As of earlier this evening, Alex’s web pages are now closed off from public access. We’ve had too many incidents of people grabbing pictures of Alex from the site and using them elsewhere. We were also noticing an increase in the amount of people being sent to Alex’s pages from search engines (Google and Yahoo in particular) based on bizarre and sometimes creepy search queries.

(No, I’m not going to say what the search phrases are, because then my pages will end up indexed under those words instead.)

Rather than hack together a bunch of code to do the password-protection myself, I decided to move Alex’s site out of Movable Type and into phpBB. phpBB is a bulletin board tool rather than a blogging tool. But the purpose of Alex’s pages is to keep our friends and family up to date with what’s going on in his life. A bulletin board allows us to publish stories and pictures just as effectively as a blog does. And by going with phpBB, I didn’t have to spend hours/days implementing a custom user management system.

(Top programming tip: wherever possible, avoid writing your own code.)

Anyway, it’s up and running now at last. The only problem is that our ISP’s mail servers are being overwhelmed by spam attacks (so they say), and all of our incoming mail is being delayed by up to twelve hours. I can see that several people have already registered themselves (including two complete strangers, who came in via AOL and Google), but I haven’t received the activation emails yet. I can approve accounts without the activation emails, but that results in the user in question not getting an email to confirm that they have been activated. So if you’re waiting to get in…sorry! It may take a little while…

When playing video games with Alex around, I’ve got in the habit of saying “Oh no! Dada’s rubbish!” whenever I make a silly mistake. Alex has picked up on this, and he usually chimes in with a “Dada ubbsh” of his own.

Yesterday afternoon, we were playing Metroid Fusion. It took me a while of getting hammered by Baby Sheegoths before I got the hang of jumping around them. When I did, defeating them was a great triumph. “Yay!” I said. “Dada rocks!”

“Dada wock!” Alex exclaimed. “Yay! Dada wocks!”

That was cool. A little later on, when we turned off the game, Alex grabbed me by the hand, looked up at me, and said again “Dada wocks!” I thought he meant walk, because “walk” is one of the words he knows well. (Along with “doodles” for “shoulders”, and “push” for “pushchair”, these are phrases we use all the time when we’re out and about.)

He led me out of the living room, and to our front door, which he made me open. With another emphatic “Dada wocks,” he clambered down the step, and toddled over to our driveway. He reached down, picked up a handful of gravel, and took it back over to me. He held up his hands and urged me to take the stones.

“Dada rocks!”

Thanks, Alex. 🙂

It was Abi’s birthday today. I was making breakfast in the kitchen, and Alex was playing quietly in the living room. I had left him sitting at my desk, playing with my wallet. (He usually takes all the coins from the coin pouch and arranges them all over my keyboard.)

I was just putting a pat of butter in the bottom of a pan for the scrambled eggs, when Alex wanders through to see me. He had an uncapped purple marker pen in his right hand (the one we use to write on CDs), and was holding the palm of his left hand out to me.

“Mess!” he said. “Mess!”

I took a closer look at his hand, and saw that it had a few lines on it. “Oh yes,” I said, taking away the pen. I was relieved to see that he hadn’t drawn all the way up his sleeve. “Mess. Let’s clean it up, shall we?” Then he took me by the hand, and led me through to the living room, where he showed me the sofa.

“Mess!” he repeated, pointing at the swirly patterns he’d drawn in the centre of each sofa cushion. “Mess!”

I didn’t get angry. I was too surprised and bemused to be angry. But I do think I must have said something like, “Oh Alex, that’s a really bad mess!” in a fairly stern voice, because Alex then turned around and wrapped his arms around my legs and started sobbing miserably. He knew he’d done something wrong. I picked him up and tried to reassure him that it was all okay, while at the same time wondering how to get the stains out–and how to break the news to Abi.

Fortunately, the ink in the pen turned out to be water-soluble, and a cycle through through the washing machine has got them clean again. But I now think that it is in every toddler’s destiny at some point to take a permanent marker pen to some piece of household furniture.

My grandmother was taken in to hospital earlier today. She slipped and fell while she was out shopping, and has fractured her cheekbone, and a bone in her upper arm. My parents are up in Aberdeen with her now, and they’ve reported that despite the injuries, she’s in good spirits and bearing up well. Still, it was a shock for all of us. And for grandma, too, of course 😉

This means we’ll be postponing our weekend away at Rufflets, and going up to see Grandma instead. (We don’t know if she’ll still be in hospital by then. If she’s out, she may be going to stay with my parents for a while.) Family comes first.

Get well soon, Grandma. We love you.