Charge!

It's a cloudy morning in ABQ, a rare sight (although I must say a sort of welcome one), and Anika is doing her morning thing and playing in the living room with her toys, which have now spilled completely over the capacity of her toy box and are permanently left on the floor for lack of a place to put them.  She likes to go around and turn on all of the toys that sing, talk, or otherwise make a loud, obnoxious noise, then sit back and bask in the cacophony.  Currently, the laughing lion is doing battle with Lulu the spinning alphabet spider, the bear who sings "A tisket a tasket," and the mail box with the operatic voice.

This week, we've gone to the zoo, survived several playdates and muddy fall explorations at the park, and we've learned how to take a few more steps (while still holding onto something) as well as mastered the fun of climbing into and out of the tox box.  I have some adorable pictures.  Sadly, my computer battery has decided to go kaput, and Mando and I are trying to decide whether we should fork over for the ridiculously overpriced battery or just get a new computer, which is what they want you to do anyway.  So no pictures for now, as I'm typing on Armando's spare laptop which is outfitted for making web sites and contains programs I've honestly never seen before, but which take up so much space he's had to delete things like iPhoto.

(Incidentally, I wonder how that sentence will sound to Anika in 30 years.  We watched Raid on Entebbe last night -- streamed via Netflix on the Blu-Ray, which I'm sure will sound ancient, like, next week -- and I realized that around the time that I was born, technology was still so new that computers were the size of Volkswagens and phones had really long, thick cords and there was something that I'm sure seemed high tech at the time but is simply a loud, clacking mix between a telegram and a fax.  30 years, people, that's all it took...well, ok, 32 and 2/3 but who's counting?)

For now, however, we are still slaves to batteries that need to be plugged into wall sockets to charge and that die on us every once in awhile.

Speaking of charging batteries, is it me or do kid's toys deplete batteries faster than you can say, hey, I just replaced those?!