Martha

A couple of months ago my son and I happened across the kids show, "Martha Speaks" on PBS. If you haven't seen it, or heard of it, the story line is about a dog who eats alphabet soup and instead of the letters going to her belly, they go to her brain. And she gains the ability to speak. It's a terrific show, very funny and focuses on increasing kids vocabulary. So on Friday when we were at the library I saw the original book of Martha Speaks on display. Quite excited, Riley chose to take it home and when we sat down to read it I realized it was first published in 1992. Seventeen years ago! A little thing that seemed to have slipped through my earlier radar, but I'm glad to have found it. And we roared with laughter reading it. Personally, I could hear the dog character speaking the lines in the book and maybe Riley was laughing because I was laughing so genuinely and so hard. Either way, it made for a terrific end of the day.

After a somewhat disastrous "playdate" (I have such a strong aversion to that word that I can't even type it without cringing) this morning, Riley and I spent some rather frustrating time in our art studio this afternoon. I picked away at my chickens, which left me totally unsatisfied. He tried to do so many different things, tried to give me the little time I had asked for but computers went awry, printers went squirrely and we tossed in the towel and settled for some TV, but not until after I snapped a few shots of us in the bathroom mirror. This one is OK, I managed to get both of our heads in the frame and I love Riley's expression. I'm still figuring out my new camera and couldn't easily see how to change the mode back to taking pictures without looking in the viewfinder. Alas, a techie I'm not. I'm taking my first digital photography course in February, after using digital cameras for almost two years now. I'm hoping to be able to be a lot more creative with the medium...well...let's just say...one of these days.