the first christmas with a baby around in quite a while.
If this is a planned baby, shouldn't you call her Feature instead of Bug?
Darin and I drove up to San Francisco on the 23rd to spend the day (and night) with my sister, brother-in-law Greg (not to be confused with Greg Marriott), and teeny niece Madeline. It was a lot of fun--playing with Madeline, who giggles at everything and likes bouncing up and down (especially when someone else is doing the work of the bouncing). She was so excited to have new people around to obey her every whim she stayed up much later than she normally would have.
We had the big Christmas festivities at my sister's house on Christmas Eve, because they were flying to see my brother-in-law's family for Christmas. ("Madeline has her own seat," my sister told me. More than once, I think. I guess 5 hours on the red-eye with a baby on your lap is not a happy prospect.)
The first order of the day was Baby Wrangling 101: How To Get A Picture Of Madeline By The Tree. Pretty much my sister and Darin took various pictures of Madeline, while I, with all the grace of your average water buffalo, hopped around in an attempt to get and keep Madeline's attention so that she would a)remain upright and b)smile. Eventually, I just gave her a present:
Darin and I went to pick up my parents around noon and Mitch showed up right around the same time. After settling in with drinks and hors d'oeuvres, the assembled party got down to the business of opening presents. See those presents behind Madeline? There are more behind her; they're just hidden by the specially-designed Baby Throne (also known as a sheet-covered Boppy). There were a lot of presents. Deirdre and I have fond memories of Christmases with tons of presents, but this one completely outstripped any haul we could remember.
The reason, of course, was the latest addition to the family. There were so many for Her Highness that, for the first round of opening presents, everybody opened one of Madeline's presents. Well, except Madeline, who spent most of her time trying to nibble on wrapping paper.
The big present was for my parents: Darin and I gave them an iMac and Deirdre and Greg gave them a color printer. My parents couldn't get on the Internet with the computer setup they had (an ancient Performa), and getting on the Internet is going to be a very high priority in the next couple of months: they can go see Madeline any time they want, but most of the time they're going to have to get on the Web to see Bug.
As I put it to Darin, "It's the world's most expensive phone."
My mother, during her many visits to babysit Madeline, also got into the habit of using my sister's computer setup to get on the Web and visit the websites for her favorite TV shows, such as the various criminal justice programs of Court TV or NBC's Dateline. My mother the Web cruiser.
After opening the metric ton of presents, we cleaned up the place and got ready for a great Christmas Eve dinner prepared by my sister. Madeline sat in her high chair and snacked on a Zwieback, which alternatively went into her stomach and all over the chair.
Darin drove my parents and the iMac back to their house while Mitch got volunteered (by me, basically) to take all of our stuff back to his condo. When Darin returned, we loaded up our car with Deirdre and Greg's stuff for their trip before taking them to the airport.
We returned to Mitch's for the night. And in the morning went back to the City to visit with my parents. Well, visit with my parents and get their new computer set up.
Darin actually handled most of the transfer from the Performa to the iMac (involving copying everything onto a SCSI Zip drive and from there onto my Powerbook and from there via Ethernet to the iMac). We were worried that my father, who's been using Macintosh for years, might be a little disconcerted at the lack of a floppy drive, but it turns out he hasn't been using it for a while--he gets everything on CDs now. (Now we have to talk him into getting a USB Zip drive so that he'll back up frequently.)
One nice thing about System 9.0 is the multiple log-in feature. This was real important with my parents, because each of them hates it when they have something set up just the way they want and the other messes it up. You can see how this might be bad with a computer.
We also wanted to make it real simple for my mom, who hasn't been using a computer every day, like my dad has. We asked her what she'd be doing with the computer, and it pretty much came down to a)the Internet and b)her art software. So we set up the computer such that my parents wouldn't even use the same copy of AOL when they logged on to their own accounts, so that AOL would come up with the right username.
Then we set about teaching Mom something about AOL. And I discovered something I hadn't known before, because I'm an experienced user. Seeing it through the eyes of a new user was eye-opening.
AOL is a nightmare for the naive user.
This is how most people get on the Internet?
Good God. AOL is not easy, it's confusing. Explaining the address book (what a terrible interface that has!) was a nightmare. There's no differentiation between what's on AOL and what's on the web, which I'm sure is intentional but is an awful interface. And the whole "favorites" thing--oy.
We showed Mom how to send and receive mail and how to look at stuff on the web. (And then watched as she tried it for herself--very important when teaching someone something: make them do it.)
I told her to try something new every day, so as to get used to using it. "You can't hurt it," I told her. I also told her to send me mail every day.
We then sat down with Dad and went through what his setup had. He's pretty comfortable with using a Mac, although he was a little overwhelmed by this new power tool. Both of them were overwhelmed, I guess. As Darin put it, we don't know of many people my parents' age who would be very comfortable with new technology like this, so I'm pretty proud of them for taking to it as much as they have.
My mom told me she was somewhat intimidated by how comfortable Darin was with this. "He's been doing this for 20 years, it'd be surprising if he weren't," I told her. "I can't sew, but you've spent so many years sewing that you make it look really easy. But you weren't born sewing."
"I feel as though I were," she said.
Both of them were so excited about being able to get on the Internet I think they'll get over the whole shock soon enough.
I'm not as likely to take up sewing.
We drove back down to Cupertino after we were done with the computer. We decided to try to see Galaxy Quest but quickly discovered something I had not already known, being the good Catholic girl I am: Christmas night is a very popular night for going to see a movie, and not just for Jews. Everything was sold out for hours.
So we decided to go get some Chinese food (that being the other half of the equation for "What to do on Christmas night: Chinese food and a movie"). And I was surprised to find that most Chinese restaurants were closed. We found one of the best, Hunan Home's [sic] in Mountain View, was not only open but hopping. We managed to get seated quickly though, and we had some spectacular Chinese food.
That's one thing I miss down in LA: there just isn't very good Chinese food down there for the most part. You either have to go to Chinatown or to Gourmet 88 in Burbank and that's about it. And half the places in Chinatown aren't particularly good either. (By "good" I mean both "tasty" and willing to make things "spicy" when they're supposed to be spicy. Diners apparently have very bland palates in LA.)
We overate and went home to sleep.
 |
 |
 |
 |
Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com