Twins reducing media exposure

I'm supposed to blog about my media exposure each week. This week, my media exposure has been reduced a lot. Why? Because grandparents' (our parents) support (them living here helping) has ended and our twins and 17 month old are doing a wonderful job keeping us busy. 

Our son almost never sleeps without being snuggled against someone, and has almost always been acting ferociously hungry whenever he's awake. He also startles very easily, and often wakes up when someone else cries. Our twin daughter is much more laid back generally speaking, but wakes up and cries very easily when anyone else cries (hopefully that means she'll be very sympathetic/empathetic). A bit like her brother, she also is often hungry when she's awake, but she at least also spends a somewhat significant amount of time awake without fussing. It seems more recently, her brother is rubbing off on her on how fussy she is (“making her” much more fussy), and she is perhaps rubbing off slightly on how fussy he is (“making him” slightly less fussy).

Between the two of them, one of them is almost always awake needing active attention. When we finally get both of them sleeping without having to hold them (happens about twice a day), our 17 month old often “decides” she's going to fuss/cry about something, and her crying causes our twin daughter to awake and cry, making two babies crying, and both babies crying causes our twin son to awake and start crying. So when we think we've finally made it to that one time in the day when they'll give us a break to shower or eat or something, we momentarily feel relieved and start to do whatever, and then our 17 month old fusses about something and changes the “break” to all 3 babies crying and wanting attention. Talk about discouraging for my wife.

Yay, finally, a break; the twins are asleep; I'll go take a shower; got off the couch, made it out of the room, almost got to my dresser, all 3 babies suddenly crying and there goes the break; nope, “never getting a break” today; no shower, hardly time to eat anything, the house is messier (further behind on laundry, dishes, ect.) than yesterday, and basically no progress on my schoolwork again.

Since the twins were born, I believe my average time to go to bed to even start getting sleep is after 4:00 am (usually about 4, 6 or 8 am), and then, after repeatedly interrupted sleep through the night to get up and take care of the twins, I finally get up and it's somewhere around 2 pm or so, or perhaps as early as around noon, unless I get up earlier for class or church. I've been blessed so far to be able to run reasonably well on only a few hours of sleep per day (less than 4 hours of sleep is common), but my mental ability to work on schoolwork seems to be suffering quite significantly. There is still so, so much to do for my big research paper for the class. I intend to get a babysitter to help free me up on Monday and Tuesday to work on it, but even with that, I'm pretty worried.

Anyway, I need to be done here. There; that's a blog for ya. Rambled through and not really proofread, but a blog. :)

It's 4:44 am in the morning.  Goodnight. (I hope...)

Paper pokes

Not a whole lot of media exposure this week. Mostly (in regards to media use) been trying to help with the poster and work on the paper for the class. So difficult to get much done.

For other media exposure this week: Some email checking. Some phone calls for home teaching stuff. Daily scripture reading. A little Mighty Quest of Epic Loot (an online video game) watching replays of other people attacking my castle to help me wake up or stay awake during the night, while feeding the twins. General Women's Meeting in the background while I tried to keep my wife's hands free, though she was falling asleep (or asleep) for most of it. A hymn on CD for Family Home Evening. 

That fairly well covers my media for the week.

Name Your Own Price experience (Priceline.com)

So, in a previous blog, I mentioned priceline's Name Your Own Price option for flights. I did a little research and eventually decided to try it. It is risky. Technically speaking, once you make “a bid,” you have given them the power. If you make “a bid” and they get a flight ticket that meets your “bid,” then they buy the ticket for you and charge you, and there's no going back. Once you make “a bid,” they might get you a ticket right away, or they technically could wait until the day before your flight or even just an hour before your flight (so there's no way you could make it) and still charge you. They hopefully never do that to people, but technically speaking, that power is in their hands, at least as I understand the Terms of Use and such. Also, once you make “a bid,” you have no power to cancel it.

Now, it may seem a lot like gambling, but I see a difference in the Name Your Own Price option. In gambling, one of you wins at the cost of the other, and the odds are very rarely in your favor. In the Name Your Own Price option, you both can win, and not at the cost of each other. That makes it significantly different, in my current opinion, if you have enough to take the risk and be ok if it fails.

So, I ended up deciding to try out the Name Your Own Price option. They're sneaking in that if they don't like your offer, they make it appear like it wasn't submitted, and give you the option to change it, but you can't change only the price; each time you change the price, you have to either add another day that they can choose from, or allow red-eye flights, or something out of a few other options; if they decide they like the offer enough that you gave, they can freeze your offer, meaning you can't change it anymore, and you just have to wait and keep checking on the status. I believe they will almost always either get you a ticket or consider the “bid” closed/declined (a “no go”) within a day or few, but technically speaking, they don't have to. After my offer had become “frozen,” (in the manner I described earlier) I kept checking my emails and didn't see any from them, but after a day or few, I found out how to check the status on their site and there I found out that my offer had been declined. I also called to confirm that, which turned out to be easy to do.  They apparently don't send you an email like I expected to inform you of their decision, at least in the case of declining your offer”bid.”

So in summary, using priceline's Name Your Own Price option is probably pretty safe, in that they probably will make their decision within a day or so, but you have no guarantee, and the “probably” here is based on just my experience and the experience of someone's report I read about when I tried researching the issue. That's a very small sample size to go off of.

My mother's ipad

My mother is up with us for two weeks, ending Tuesday. She has an ipad that my father got for free from work in some drawing thing they did for their employee's. My 17 month old daughter has been quite entertained using it. She “constantly” is jumping around through apps and scarcely stays on one app. My mother kept trying to keep her on a fish game, and she did sorta got the gist of it when she would actually “cooperate” and not try to leave the app.

It was kinda fun to use the ipad to read scriptures, but I currently still much prefer a hardcopy of the scriptures. For example, when trying to be on the scriptures at church, our 17 month old daughter kept touching the ipad, leaving the app and going wherever on the ipad, making staying on the scriptures pretty hopeless. Letting a baby have access to an ipad takes constant close babysitting, making sure she doesn't start doing anything that would cause a problem. With a hardcopy, generally staying “on the page” is usually much easier, and if difficult, we can easily have an extra copy to give her (thankfully, we have little worry of our daughter ripping pages so far). I also like to not be reliant on electricity to be able to read scriptures. Call me paranoid if you like, but if the world goes crazy and we lose electricity, I still want to have access to my scriptures.

And just to try to be clear; I am not saying I think ipad's are bad. Anyways, later. :)

The Secret World of Arrietty

I watched the movie, The Secret World of Arrietty. It's a Japanese anime that Disney distributed in North America after modifying it for the English language. It's existence was a secret to me until it came up in our list of movies to watch for our group project.

The movie is based on the book, The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. The “borrowers” are little people (looked like about 3 or 4 inches tall) that secretly live beneath floorboards and in the walls of human homes, and they “borrow” (take) things from humans that they need and humans won't miss.

It was interesting and fun, but wasn't nearly as much of a happy ending wrap up as most Disney movies are; I guess they wanted to keep it pretty realistic, or were following the book which kept it pretty realistic.

The Princess and the Frog

I watched The Princess and the Frog this week. It was entertaining and had a nice, fun little twist on the traditional princess and the frog fairytale. It seemed like it generally shared good messages. “It doesn't matter what you look like,” you have to work hard to make your dreams come true, trying to mess with bad, dark, shadow magic (through “friends on the other side”) gets you into trouble, dreams can come true, love is more important than anything else, etc. (Or as kids-in-mind.com put it, “Love can overcome all odds.”) I didn't quite like that it made it look like seeking “good” voodoo magic is good, but I think that to be a minor concern, because it can be mostly resolved by discussing it with children who watch the movie.

In general, it was a good, fun, Disney movie. It did a pretty good job a creating a good princess character for children to identify with, and I like it.

Priceline.com & Name Your Own Price Question

Been using priceline.com and finally bought a one-way ticket for my mother to come up here from Florida. (Her huge Christmas gift from us was to pay for a flight for her to be able to come up here sometime, and that time is arriving.) It's sad in a way, in that the first day I looked at prices (about 3 weeks ago), a round trip was only $262. Since that day, the price has been around $400 plus (I've checked the prices on most days since). I got the one way because a flight that was a little bit cheaper (~$20) finally came up, and I decided that was probably the best I could get. With the return trip two weeks later, I have a little more time to look for a dip in prices for her return flight.

Priceline.com has a Name Your Own Price option. Does anyone have any experience with it? It appears very risky to me. No way to cancel or change anything; seems like they might not buy a ticket (with our money) until an hour before a flight, with no time to get there to use the ticket! Or they won't buy a ticket at all, and I'll have to pay the inflated price of a quick ticket. Or if I were to think they weren't going to get one, and I buy one, they then buy one afterwards, and we get stuck with 2 one way tickets, going the same way, for my mother.

Anyone with experience with the Name Your Own Price option for flights, please speak up.

Dieing Yahoo Mail Functionality

My primary mail has been through Yahoo for a long time. I would have switched to another provider long ago, if I could automatically forward emails without paying money, but Yahoo hasn't allowed that. However, recently, Yahoo seems to be broken at varying levels of severity. It's often been very slow, freezing up, unable to send emails, unable to forward an email as is (it removed graphics and links), and unable to figure out how to view just my starred emails (or to put them at the top of my emails). It's been so bad I've hardly done anything with my emails this year. I frequently have gone 4 plus days without checking it at all, and when I check it, I check near bare minimums (pretty much just check for class emails).

I pretty sure I'm about to finally make the switch. Looks like to Gmail. I spent several hours this week researching how gmail works, and figuring out what to expect when I switch. I'll have to still check my Yahoo mail for awhile, but will attempt to get people to mail me at my Gmail account instead. So far, I'm really hopeful on this Gmail stuff. I hope it works smoothly. :)