This weekend Dan and I watched Justin Bieber: Never Say Never for our hot date night. I pitched it to him as “a chance to let the magic of documentary film transport us into the world of a strange and interesting new culture.”

Also, he would get to sit really close to me for two hours. Also, he would get to see Jaden Smith perform his first live rap solo at Madison Square Garden. Most people don’t get to perform their first live rap solo at Madison Square Garden but. He’s. That. Good. So there’s that.

I was mostly watching it because a friend dropped it off and told me I had to, because it was directed by Jon M. Chu of Step Up 2: “The Streets” and Step Up 3: “The D” fame, and because of purple.

I won’t bore you with all the details and doubtless you’ve all seen it already.

*cough* American Classic *cough*

I will say that tears were shed as we watched it. To protect the privacy of those involved, I will not tell you by whom the tears were shed or what type of emotions were behind them. I will tell you that the movie makes me question my fashion choices. There’s just something about those bedazzled hoodies… like baby, baby, baby, ooooooh.

They’ll train us!!!??? This awesome sign appeared yesterday at a major intersection just outside of town. I saw the guy placing it there. I’d say mid-twenties, shortish, dark hair, possibly hispanic. I wasn’t paying too much attention to him. Then today when we drove by and actually read the sign, I wished I had.

Why do they want mixed martial arts fighters? What kind of training do they provide? How big of a piece of their action would I get if I signed up? I am over 21 and I do have a yellow belt in Kenpo Karate. I think I will call and see what their deal is, in honor of POTUS Day tomorrow.

Every night when we head to bed, we turn the TV to channel 9 so that when the kids wake up at zero o’clock in the morning to watch cartoons, they will find Arthur and Sid and Dragon Tales on PBS.

As I reach channel 9 late at night, I am often sucked in to the droning convention center hubbub that is Antiques Roadshow. I’m drawn in by the people and their stories.

“This was my great grand-daddy’s Civil War drum.”

“My mammy made this quilt for me out of shards of canvas that she says were ripped up pieces of a Picasso painting.”

“Sometimes I just go online and buy ornamental snuff boxes and hope they’re worth something someday. Of course I’d never sell any of them but I dressed up in my finest jeans to come down to this sound stage and find out what they’re worth for no apparent reason whatsoever but it sure is fun to be on the TEE-vee.”

There’s always the bustle of people wandering around in the background, shuffling in their jeans. Everyone wears jeans but the experts. They are the only ones allowed to wear professional attire.

Watching tonight, I couldn’t help but wonder how awesome it would be if it were suddenly exposed that Antiques Road Show was entirely staged, like The Bachelor. They’re all actors. None of the artifacts are real. It really is just a bunch of random junk from garage sales that the producers dig up, bring into the event hall and assign to the various actors.

The more personal/incredible/inane the story, the more money the actor gets paid to tell it. If they let the hair and makeup people give them an eighties perm, they earn an extra $200.

I would love to be an extra on Antiques Roadshow. You wouldn’t get real face time in the two-shot in front of the camera, with the deer-in-the-headlights look of confusion mixed with anticipation, but you could stand in line behind them and try to get in the shot, staring creepily off into the distance, clutching your circa 1860 Pez Dispenser.

No, I don’t think it’s a staged hoax. At least I’m not willing to investigate it at this time. I don’t think the world’s ready for the truth.

Wanda yells… a lot. And when she does, she sounds quite a bit like Dr. Horrible practicing his evil laugh. We captured a bit of that as we recorded some of her first clapping. She is the cutest baby. There is no other.

(Feel free to skip to the bottom for my quick take on the new HTC Droid Incredible.)

I buy capers at Costco. Sure I can only go through a few tablespoons of capers a year but I still buy the Costco-sized bottle of capers. It’s all about value. The little teeny bottle at the regular grocery store costs the same as the ginormous bottle at Costco and I cannot bring myself to buy the itty bitty for the same prices as the Jamie-Oliver-sized jar. (This is conjecture. I have no actual idea how many capers Jamie Oliver goes through in a given 3-month period. I imagine it is more than the 25 that fit into the jar at Safeway.)

Which brings me to a point. The Droid. Or should I say Droids?

In my latest adventure in selfish smartphone testing, I tried out the Motorola Droid. I was hooked almost immediately. It was fast. It was versatile. With an inexpensive app (Touchdown) I was able to sync up all my Outlook calendar and contact information using Exchange. The built-in Exchange support was lacking. It came with access to a plethora of apps that were cool, useful and fun. One of the most amazing things was the speech-to-text capability. You’d speak into the phone and it would transcribe your words into searches, text messages, emails, etc. I kept texting Dan with things like, “I just said that,” and “I’m not typing this either.” It was hot, the phone, not the texts. I loved it.

It was not as cute as the Palm Pre. It didn’t feel as good in my hand. It was not a mobile tethering wireless hotspot but it did everything I needed and more.

But wait. Then I found out that its Costco caper jar equivalent was coming out soon and I just couldn’t be happy with the Motodroid. The HTC Incredible Droid Droid Incredible from HTC Incredi-HTC-ible-McDroidy-Pants was released on April 29th and it has everything that the MotoDroid has plus and plus and plus.

The Incredible has access to the same apps and features as the MotoDroid but it also has a faster processor, more internal storage, an 8 megapixel camera, HTC Sense UI (meaning cool modifications to the Google Android operating system making it more sleek, attractive and functional), a better feel and a partridge in a pear tree.

So I could have been very happy with the MotoDroid but why spend $200 on it when I could spend $200 on the new hotness? The only reason I see to go with the Motorola Droid vs. the HTC Incredible is the slide-out keyboard. If you can’t live without it, then you’d better stick with Moto. I thought I couldn’t live without it but it took me all of a week of abstaining from using the MotoDroid keyboard by choice to convince me that I could live without it. The touch-screen keyboard is actually quite nice.

So I jumped in and bought the new hotness with my own hard-earned cash and we frolicked in the grass and synced up calendars and contacts. I downloaded known apps that were recommended to me by friends and family. I loved the phone and the phone appeared to find joy in me as well, remembering all of my likes and dislikes and allowing me to rearrange its multiple home screens to my liking.

HTC Sense has much better built-in Exchange support than the standard Android 2.1 operating system so after we figured out some weird bugs on our Exchange server, I was really happy with the way everything worked together. My Facebook contacts are now linked with my Google and Outlook contacts so anyone with a profile picture in my Facebook friends now has a photo attached to their contact on my phone and when I look at their contact info, I can see their latest status updates right there.

The first day I had the phone up and running, I took a picture of Wanda eating in a cute bib my friend had given me as a gift. I clicked “share” on the phone and chose “email” from the long list of sharing options. I then selected my friend from my contacts list, typed a one sentence thank-you note and sent it off. The entire process took less than 2 minutes and she was impressed that I’d taken the time to send her a photo thank-you.

The built-in Twitter app is lame but there are others for free in the Market. The Facebook app is alright. The internet speed with the Incredible on Verizon frequently beats my laptop. It’s very very pretty. I can point it at pictures and landmarks and it “scans” them and tells me what they are. It does more things than a phone really should do.

And there’s the hitch.

The joy of my new toy was disrupted last weekend when I was browsing the Android Market for new apps and came across several distasteful and offensive apps in the games section. I do not want to see clothesless women as I’m browsing for solitaire games on my phone. I do not want to see apps for freaky weird creepy guys with specific “interests”. I’m trying to avoid certain key search terms here but you get the picture.

So I figured if they had an app for finding my car in a mall parking lot and an app for people who like to do things to pictures of women, then they certainly had an app that would help me and my family avoid running across that junk while we’re searching for games. They might even have a filter built in so I could just say, “Don’t subject my eyes to these types of apps. I’m not old enough,” or a way to lock access to the Market altogether so my kids don’t accidentally navigate there as they’re playing a Disney Princess game on my phone while I doze next to them on the couch.

Not so much.

I searched and searched and found nothing but references to the fact that people wanted filters, locks and controls for their Android phones but could not find them or were having trouble getting Google to let them create them and add them to the Market. So basically, even though my home internet is filtered, I found myself carrying around unfiltered open season to all the junk the internet has to offer in my diaper bag without much hope of a solution.

Luckily since I’ve been working with PR at Verizon I was able to get into contact with someone at Google who spent some time on the phone with me this afternoon, listening to my concerns and answering some questions.

The short story? They don’t have an app for that… yet. The man I talked to handles among other things “child safety policy and communications” for Google. He pointed out several instances where Google has made strides to make internet usage safer for children and adults like myself who don’t want to deal with filth.

I was unaware that you can now filter your browsing experience using SafeSearch filtering. It’s a setting you can get to from the Google main page. I didn’t know about the new Safety mode on YouTube, a button at the bottom of the page that you can activate and lock to reduce the risk of seeing nastiness on that site. Neither of these are perfect by any means but they’re a good faith effort by Google to offer options for filtering and they’re working to improve them.

My new Google friend was very encouraging. The phones are still fairly new terrain for Google. They’re working on it. They know there’s a demand for this and they’ll follow their model on the web, bringing filtering and locking to their mobile phones.

He said he’d let me know as soon as developments occur. And I’ll let you know as soon as he lets me know. For now, I’ve locked the front screen of my phone so my kids can’t slip it out of my purse and play with it without me. I’ve also set the SafeSearch mode in Google Mobile’s settings to “Strict” although there’s currently no way to lock in this setting but unless the kids figure out how to change it, it should keep me from running into too much junk. However, there will still be garbage on the Android Market and for the time being I will still run into it occasionally.

To avoid it, I’d suggest sticking to the “Top” apps rather than looking at the “Just In” apps because after signing up as a developer with Google, which requires a credit check and access to the developer’s real identity information, a developer can post things to the Market with no sort of vetting process. This allows for the kind of creativity and freedom that has made Google so successful, but again there’s that whole bad-comes-with-the-good thing.

If an app violates Google’s policies by posting anything pornographic or malware or spyware, users can flag it to be taken down. Personally I’d rather not be the one to “discover” malware, spyware or pornography so I’ll stick to the high end of the Market and wait for quality apps to be tested by others and trickle up.

Daring Young Mom Quick Take – The HTC Droid Incredible is an amazing tool with huge possibilities for productivity, fun, creativity and connection. I love all of the great things it can do for me. But, like the internet itself, it’s also got some real hazards built in. I’m so glad Google’s working on them. I can’t wait to pass on the good news that they’ve implemented mobile safety solutions but for now I’d say to proceed with caution.

Click to Read My Product Review Policy

Today was May Day. It was also Saturday. Saturday is a day to rejoice.

Magoo is only allowed to play video games on Saturdays. He loves them so much that he refers to Saturday only as “My Lot of Game Day.” I’m not honestly sure if he even remembers what it’s actually called.

The other night he was getting into bed on a not-Saturday night and he said, “Mom? Do you wanna know something magical?”

“What?” I asked.

Sheepishly he pulled my Nintendo DS out from behind his pillow. “Look what I found,” he grinned. “It just appeared… under my pillow… like magic.”

Now he knows he’s not supposed to be playing and he knows he’s not supposed to take the DS without asking. He knows a lot of things but I looked at that magical muffin-head and wondered what I was supposed to do.

“Did you take it from my room?”

“No. It was magic… Yes.”

There’s sort of a parental gray area where misbehavior and honesty are concerned. On the one hand, you want to give your kids credit for telling you the truth and admitting when they do something wrong. You want them to keep confiding in you so you don’t want to come down too hard on them when they tell the truth.

At the same time, you don’t want them to think it’s okay to become a heroine dealer, sleep around, and kidnap other people’s pet gerbils as long as they fess up quickly after the fact. It’s a tightrope we walk, balancing the olive branch of honesty in one hand and the hammer of “YOU DID WHAT?” in the other.

In general, my balancing act looks something like this:

Notice that as the child increases in foreknowledge that what they are doing is wrong, the seriousness of the consequences increases. Also, if the child confesses quickly, the consequences will be less severe than if, for example, they reach a 10 on the graph which involves lying repeatedly, blaming a sibling for the wrongdoing and possibly swearing a blood oath of innocence before finally confessing to the misdeed after hours of intense interrogation, including but not limited to, denying the child food while eating Mike and Ikes 3 inches from his face.

All that being said, I think any child should receive one get-out-of-jail-free card the first time he uses Magic as an excuse, but only if he does it with a huge grin on his face.

If you look up the word “harrowing” in the dictionary, you will likely find a detailed description of Wanda’s epic journey across our living room yesterday evening.

Three days ago, she had no idea that combining multiple rolls could move her towards a destination. Now she knows the possibilities and she’s SO enraged that she can’t navigate as precisely as she wishes.

She lay there on her tummy with a toy a few inches from her grasp. She rolled to one side, tried to reach it, failed and let loose a barbaric yop. She rolled to the other side, still couldn’t reach it, longer, more fearsome YOP!

She continued her journey, rolling from side to side, front to back, a 50-point asterisk turn around the living room. Great was her angst. Intense was her fury. The glow worm taunted her with its deliciously chubby plastic cheeks.

At last, after much wailing, groaning, grunting and turning, I scooted the worm one inch closer and victory was achieved.

Look at her face full of exhaustion and relief.

Harrowing.

Truly.

But she’s getting better. Today I put her on the floor at one end of the room and went to work pumping milk and checking email. When I looked up 5 minutes later, she had silently made the journey all the way across the room, where she had come upon a jackpot of card games left out by Laylee and Magoo. Uno and Rook blended together in a veritable feast of gaming victuals. Luckily when I looked up, the only casualty was a Yellow 7, which she had partially ingested.

I guess from now on we’ll always know who has the Yellow 7 when we play Rook. Wanda the Triumphant has left her mark… er… taken her chunk.

Magoo recently told me that he wants to be Batman when he grows up. I can only assume he means Lego Batman because that’s the only version of the super hero he’s really been exposed to. He was real coy and shy about it. He said he wants to save people.

“When Bad Guys go into their houses at night, I’ll just go in there and say, ‘Wake up Bad Guys! I’m gonna take yeh to jail.’”

So, I guess the Bad Guys just go into people’s houses at night to find a place to sleep but since they are BGs and also trespassers, that earns them a trip to the joint.

I decided to use a teaching moment and explain that what I like about Batman is the fact that he doesn’t hurt good people and he doesn’t even kill bad people most of the time. He wants to help so he just ties the bad guys up and lets the police deal with them.

“Yeah,” Magoo replied looking thoughtful, “But I don’t even have a hat yet.”

Lesson learned.

We were sitting in the Safeway food court the other afternoon slamming some corn dogs when Magoo noticed some slightly-swarthy farmer-types sitting at a table next to us. He eyed them suspiciously.

“Are there any bad guys in Our City?” he asked, never taking his eyes off the farmers.

“Yeah,” I replied honestly, “There probably are.”

“No,” he said simply, “Bad Guys are only in Bad Guy Town.”

I might add that they are also made of Lego.

Dear Parents and Leprechauns of the World,
Stop the madness! Today I am begging you, BEGGING. YOU. To stop this senseless St. Patty’s escalation and let the rest of us get back to our old traditions of making green pancakes and wearing a button that says, “Kiss Me! I’m Irish!”

Why are you all making it so hard for me to live up to the expectations of Leprechaun Mania? So a couple of years ago they turned the milk green. Now they’re leaving gifts, candy, new green clothes, actual pots of GOLD for the children???? When will it end?

Laylee comes home and tells me about all the insane gifts being enjoyed by her other friends on this day of days and wonders why the Leprechauns hate our family so much. Maybe it’s because I refuse to create one more holiday of needless, money-wasting, gift-giving insanity. Maybe it’s because I’m heartless. (I think it’s the first reason.)

I mean, come on. Pretty soon we’re gonna be doing scavenger hunts on Flag day where you have the chance of finding A NEW CAR – compliments of the flag fairy or kids will be expecting money under their pillows left on President’s Day Eve by the ghosts of their favorite dead presidents. If Benjamin Franklin thinks you’ve been good this year, you get a hundred. (Okay Rebecca! He wasn’t a president but he’s on money and I’m Canadian so what’re you gonna do?)

COME ON! Join me today in a holiday non-proliferation agreement. Do we need a magical gift-bearing mascot for every blinking day of the year? What about the Solstice Gnome or the Green Earth Day Gomer? Make it stop. Only you can help prevent my daughter bawling her brains out because even though she left out a long note and a monetary offering to the leprechauns, they left her nothing but some green milk in the fridge and today sucks – it sucks and it “doesn’t even feel like St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Maybe we need to make our own magic,” I suggested.

She’s not buying it… because all the other kids are going to show up to school with heavy-laden pack mules bearing their bounteous leprechaun harvest and I’m the one who pays the price.

Love, Sincerely,
-Kathryn
The Grinch Who Stole St. Patrick’s Day and is Proud of It

My house is filled with books. Like Elizabeth Bennet fictionally before me, I do not consider myself a “great reader.” I just love books. I love to buy them, check them out from the library, smell them, attempt to write them, touch them, look at them and occasionally dive in and read them. My house is filled with books.

My house is filled with books and there are over a hundred I have yet to read. I will find myself at a bookstore, online, at a garage sale, in the grocery store, staring at a book and it will pull me in with its tractor beam of knowledge. “I will be so much smarter, more interesting, happier, taller if I own that book,” my self says to myself. I then purchase the book and hold it and pet it and love it and put it on the shelf or in a pile by my bed where books go to die. My house is filled with books.

My house is filled with books and every so often I think it’s time to part ways with a few of them. Some have been sent to me to review and once I started to skim them, I realized that I was not interested in reading them. I don’t feel right selling a book that was sent to me for a review but went unreviewed because I did not think it would interest my readers. I don’t want to make money on that kind of booty so I keep the books. Some I think might be interesting to someone, somewhere, sometime and deep down in my heart I want to be the one to provide that perfect book to the person who wants it. In my pre-child bearing life I was a librarian. My house is filled with books.

My house is filled with books and I have truly convinced myself that I need to keep the collection going so that in post-apocalyptic Washington, my house can become the town library. I will sort and label and catalog all the books, even the ones I don’t like, because others on my street might like them. Should I keep the book on animal anatomy? Well. There’s a vet on my street and he might be post-apocalyptically interested in my animal anatomy book, especially if his books are all destroyed in the blast. My house is filled with books.

Today I made a decision.

Any book that I am only keeping around IN CASE I find myself in the position of being The Librarian of the Apocalypse is no longer welcome in my home. Today my house became filled with about 60 fewer books. When the apocalypse comes, you’d better have your own copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting because mine’s heading out the door. And also, what you can actually expect when you’re expecting during the apocalypse will probably not be covered in the edition I currently have on tap.