Little on the Market
Little bit map it
Alan socket,
Yellow cards and light;
Ireland in the spider
Batman forever
And write it was not back away.

Can you guess what that one was?

I’ve been working ALOT the past week and a half while I covered for a very important vacationing coworker. And my arms and wrists are starting to ache. Imagine my relief when I accidentally discovered that Vista has built in speech recognition software! And my surprise when, at least according to the tutorial, it worked quite well!

After inviting my kids to come witness my first attempts at having the computer type whatever I wanted to say, I quickly discovered the tutorial was a total sham; I should have taken a clue from the fact that it had a hard time understanding me when I said “Next” or “OKAYYYY!!”

But the rest of the text SEEMED so amazingly accurate! At least compared to the time we had Grandpa B try Dragon Naturally Speaking a decade ago. As I recall, the only thing it recorded accurately were his curses of frustration. He didn’t think it was nearly as funny as we did.

Anyway, I was amazed at the progress made in speech recognition over the past ten years, till I realized the tutorial knew exactly what I was going to say. I mean, it TOLD me what to say. Then it just typed what it expected to make itself look smart, or maybe to make me look stupid when I tried to wow the kids.

But that’s not to say it was a total waste of an evening. The kids and I decided to try its skills against Mother Goose. And here’s what turned out..

Continual Battle
Nobel! The tart and it all,
That are jumped over the Moon;
The little dart last
To the docs sports,
And the DS ran away with this bill.

Donald Byrd in its Ruling
That unless we’re in a tree,
Townsend and see what might be.
One foresaw a row
Super joint
Three were girl
Work for a blade;
The silver
Exportable
Don Boris secret
That never been told

But I’d Like Steve
I’m not black sea,
Annual anymore?
Dexter, the answer,
Three banks will:

One woman master,
One woman team,
One of the little boy
Liz Donnelly

Littler Rule
Little Whitman, and will your horn;
The sheets and meadow, the council are worn.
Where will the way to look back and see?
In the event that, that that we.

Put the paparazzi that
But the bat was that when an event?
I’ve been to lending some of the queen.
20 that, but that, what you there?
I’ve written a little now under the care.

Say what?
Whoever guesses all these first should get a prize. Because as Vista would put it, “Vulcan fortunes, and I’m looking man, corn with these Poland’s back together again.”

The kids were being so silly that spring, I’d taken to carrying a notebook with me so I could write everything down. And then I dumped my favorites here.

(3/27/06) Mary’s comment on spring allergies: “HELP! My nose is going PEE-PEE!”

(3/26/06) Mary ‘winging it’ for the first time in her prayer Sunday night:
Ethan used to always pray that Grandpa Behunin and Lily won’t die. I’ve talked to him about this several times and now he’s changed his phrasing to ‘please put Grandpa Behunin and Lily back together again’ or something like that. But Mary apparently remembered the first phrasing in her thoughtful prayer.
“Please bless Grandpa Behunin and Lily — and mommy’s phone — that they won’t die..”

She also learned about Jonah in her class and to my surprise recited the entire tale! What a smart chica! Then we talked about missionary work on the way home. I asked them what we should do to be missionaries and they both said we should be extra nice to everyone.

(3/18/06) Mary drew a couple of lovely pictures. Her answer to my compliments: “Yeah… I do my best! ”

Both kids have been using funny language with each other, like, “Get it?” “Deal? — Deal.” etc. I wasn’t too tickled about Mary calling Ethan a “Baskert” though :-0 Baskert has been added to the bad-word list of things we don’t call each other.

Ethan still does alot of very cute things but he’s getting to the point where he really doesn’t make any of those off-the-wall mis-heard things, etc. He’s growing up on me! We do get to grin about the story he wrote, phonetically spelled exactly as Ethan would say things, “VE AND!” (for the end!). Also he filled out one of those silly-survey emails and had some awfully cute replies in there. Perhaps the best was about his favorite food:

“You know what else I like to eat? COOKIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And press ten eskimo-mation points to that.. or like twenty, or like thirty or something… okay ten more.”

He’s beat all the bad-guys in Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine all the way up to Level 10. If I’m playing and he goes, “AWE MOM!!! You could have had a ‘yahoo’ if you put the red one here instead of there!” and I say, “Ethan, I don’t need you to yell at me while I’m playing this…” he goes, “Oh yeah. Sorry. Gooo Mamma! goooo Mamma!”

Last night he scratched my back and talked to me about alot of things – meanings of words, families, following the prophet. When I said, “Well I’ve got to go to bed now, sweetie” he said, “It was really fun talking to you, mom, we should do that more often!” Sweet.

He also read the scripture in Primary this past week (on 3/26). He started to pull his paper out of his pocket to read it and the primary leader had him put it away saying, “You can read this one.” (on a poster). He read it, stumbling on ‘revealeth’ and ‘servants’ but I think she thought he’d only memorized it. She said, “Now say ‘please repeat!’ and then picked up the poster to show the primary. Ethan just stood there – he no longer had the scripture to read. Another leader hurried up to me and said, “I didn’t know he was five already .. do we have him in the right class? I didn’t know he was in kindergarten..” hehe. I said, “He’ll be five in May. He learned the reading from the Nintendo”

But really that’s a partial truth. Ethan is my energizer bunny when it comes to reading scriptures. It can be midnight and he’ll say, “But we’ve got to read our scriptures first!” He also enjoys learning parts-of-speech from School House Rock. His favorite song: “Interjections!”

Last but not least. Speaking of bunnies. The kids have somehow picked up “like/as a bunny-rabbit” as a favorite simile. Things are not only ‘fast like a bunny-rabbit’ but also can be cold or hot like a bunny-rabbit, or sad like a bunny-rabbit for that matter. And, if you hadn’t heard any knock-knock jokes recently they all.. ALL include ‘Orange you glad I —’ like the ‘orange you glad I didn’t say banana?’ punchline. At least they’re no longer saying, “Don’t Cry…” in every joke

Actually of course she can’t eat a sock if one’s not available in the first place. But anytime Ethan gets home he sheds his shoes and socks immediately and in the most random places. And the moment he does, Mary’s got one in her mouth and is scampering around the apartment so as to keep me from taking it from her.

So I finally decided to take a few pictures. Doesn’t she look like a puppy?

Mary eating a sock

I hate to eat and run...

Sit and Beg! Good puppy. Really she was just trying to grab the camera..