Disney On Ice

Last Thursday (March 1st) was my daughter's fourth birthday and it just so happened that Disney On Ice came to town. So about 3 months ago we bought rink side seats for the performance. The theme of the event was 'Mickey & Minnie's Vacation' - where those two along with Donald and Daisy Duck and Goofy would come out between elaborate musical numbers from various Disney movies.

To say that Maya had an incredible time would be understating it. I think she would have sat there all day if they let her. The whole time she had a huge smile on her face and clapped enthusiastically whenever something exciting happened. We also took Elliot. he was stunned for the first half - I'm not sure he blinked at all the whole time. The second half he got a little fussy, but overall I think he handled it well.

It started with 'The Lion King'. This was my favourite part of the performance. They played three songs from the movie. The highlight was a performance with Simba (the male lion) and Nala (the lioness) doing all sorts of ice dance type moves which are really quite impressive when done a couple of feet in front of your eyes. One thing I found a little odd was when they had a huge choreographed routine with all the skaters dressed as monkeys. The skaters were wearing skin tight monkey suits (literally) which had skin coloured chests with nipples painted on them, so it caused me to take more than a few double takes.

After the Lion King, they transitioned to a 101 Dalmations routine. It was OK, but to get 101 of them each skater had either 2 or 4 'dummy' dogs attached to them via a harness. The 'fake' dogs looked a little weird when you were close up.

After the 101 Dalmations, the skaters started doing some routines to songs from the Little Mermaid. This was Maya's favourite part by far. She loves mermaids and the Little Mermaid is her favourite doll right now. She knows a lot of the words to the songs from a CD we have (and listen to far too often).

Then they had a short intermission, which was followed by routines from Peter Pan and Lilo and Stitch. I didn't see much of the second half because Elliot was overwhelmed at this point - he hadn't blinked in about an hour and was getting pretty fussy. So we went out to the lobby. We did see Captain Hook and a bunch of pirates out there - because they enter the ice from the lobby. Captain Hook was really nice and tried to make Elliot smile by playing peek-a-boo with him and tickling him with the hook. It was a nice personal touch that he definitely didn't have to do.

All in all the whole family had a wonderful time and it was money (and time) well spent.

Carnivorous Clownfish

Nemo attacking Elliot

Bathroom Shenanigans

This morning my daughter left the breakfast table saying she needed to go to the bathroom. However, after a few minutes I went up to check on her and the door was closed - which is unusual. I knocked and she said: "Just a minute, I can do it myself." A few minutes later I hear the flush of the toilet and her washing her hands. She came out and proudly said "look at the toilet paper". She had used the last piece and wanted to show off the empty roll. Unfortunately - that roll wasn't close to empty before she started. She had placed about a half a roll of toilet paper in the bowl...what a mess!

Then I realized why she had done it. Last weekend when we had guests over she went to the bathroom and used the last piece of toilet paper (because the roll was very close to empty). When she came back downstairs she announced that fact to us and our guests which elicited a big laugh. So Maya had associated using the last of the toilet paper with doing something funny.

I guess it just shows you, that you have to be careful in how you react to the strange things kids sometimes say.

Allergies and Sensitivities

Earlier I posted about a potential allergy our son may have to cow milk proteins. We've received a lot of conflicting advice from the Health Unit, a dietitian, and our family doctor. Ranging from give up breast feeding in favour of Soy formula, to avoid all formula and solely breast feed.

Kelly has been doing an amazing job of feeding Elliot exclusively by breast (still 7-9 times a day), but even with that his weight gain has not been great recently. He's six months now, which is when we're supposed to introduce rice cereal (pretty much the most bland tasting mush you can make). We started using a Nestle product that you can mix with breast milk which we tried - Elliot got diarrhea with it, but Kelly was on an antibiotic at the time so we weren't sure whether it was the cereal or if it was the drug getting through the breast milk.

So we waited a few days and tried a different brand (from Heinz) that didn't have any milk proteins and contained a lot fewer additives than the Nestle version. Again we were mixing with breast milk and thought everything was going well (no upset tummy, no red cheeks) - but today (day #3 on the cereal) he had 7(!!!) dirty diapers and now the poop is green and chunky - yuch.

We're not sure what's going on...but we're going to try a couple more days since he doesn't seem dehydrated (yet) and he has a Doctor's appointment on Tuesday morning.

We never had these problems with Maya - I didn't realize how easy it was back then.

Mother

Recently I've been looking into TV ratings and parental control features for TVs and digital set top boxes. Not because, I want to censor what my kids watch - they are too young to be interested in anything worth censoring at this point - but for work reasons.

When watching TV you've probably noticed at the beginning of the show (and sometimes coming back from a commercial) an icon that provides some sort of 'rating' indication. It looks a little like this or this depending if you are in Canada or the USA (other countries may have something similar - I'm not sure). Since 2001, all TVs with a diagonal screen size of 13 inches or greater must be able to set rating limits based on these rating indications and if set, block the content from view until a PIN is entered. All this functionality is based on the v-chip technology

The Rating Systems
In North America there are four rating systems in effect that can be used to block TV content:

• The MPAA system we are all familiar with from movies (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17, Not Rated)
• The US TV system (None, TV-Y, TV-Y7, TV-G, TV-PG, TV-14, TV-MA) which has additional letter descriptions (FV - Fantasy Violence, V -Violence, S - Sexual Situations, L - Adult Language, D - Sexually Suggestive Dialogue)
• The English Canadian TV System (E(xempt), C, C8+, G, PG, 14+, 18+)
• The French Canadian TV System (E, G, 8ans+, 13ans+, 16ans+, 18ans+)

In Canada, a lot of programming is exempt from these ratings because of freedom of speech concerns including news programs, sports, documentaries, talk shows, informational programming, and music videos (!)

How Does the TV Know the Rating
The TV can't 'read' the screen to see the rating of the current program, instead it reads data from the VBI (a vertical blanking interval) where other information like closed captioning data is stored. If you have a really old TV where there is a knob to adjust the vertical sync of the picture you can turn it and see a black band instead of video. This black band actually contains data including the rating information for the program. Maybe a later post will explain VBI and all the information that can be pulled out of it.

Why Do I Care About This?
Well, I find it fascinating that the Cable TV industry puts such a high importance on parental controls yet often leaves the implementation of it as an afterthought. At work we often talk about 'little Timmy' seeing naughty video' when discussing potential optimizations to tune times. Nothing we do to improve the performance is acceptable if little Timmy could see or hear a flash of restricted content. But the enforcement and setting of parental controls in OCAP was omitted from the first version (added later as ECR778).

We support more advanced parental control features than just rating in our software as do most electronic program guide providers (block by channel, by title, by time of day as well as by rating) - yet currently there is no way to harmonize parental control settings set for VBI/V-CHIP ratings on your TV and the parental controls set via the guide UI you might be using for digital TV.

I'm thinking about ways to harmonize the two now so 'little Timmy' can't bypass the parental controls set in one system by starting to use the other system.

Atom Heart Mother part b: Breast Milky

Yesterday we discovered that our 5 month old son has a sensitivity to cow's milk. A few weeks ago we started giving him some rice cereal which we mixed with water to supplement the breast milk he's been having exclusively up to that point.

We didn't notice at first but after about 7 days we realized that he had been a lot crankier than normal, not sleeping as well and had very red cheeks. Kelly did a little research in one of her many baby books and found that it these were all typical symptoms of a food sensitivity or allergy. We thought that maybe we had started to give him cereal too young (the health unit now recommends six months, but we had given our daughter rice cereal at four months without any problems) and his digestive system maybe couldn't handle it.

Everything was OK, but then we noticed that he hadn't gained any weight in a couple of weeks, so our doctor suggested that maybe it was a breast milk supply problem and that we should supplement with formula after each feed. We tried that and he started to get the same red cheeks and fussiness that we previously saw with the rice cereal.

We mentioned it to our doctor again who came to the conclusion that it was probably a sensitivity or allergy to the cow milk proteins in the formula and in the rice cereal. He then suggested we start on a soy based formula instead.

So out came the baby books again and we read that about 40% of kids who have an allergy or sensitivity to cow milk proteins will also have the same reaction to soy. So we called the health unit who basically suggested that we just stick with breast milk until he is 8 months old when we can introduce some solid foods. So now we are debating whether to try the soy formula, or just stick exclusively with breast milk. We will probably go with the formula after about a week when he's over the current reaction because he is just having a mild reaction and Kelly is pretty exhausted from all the feeding (7-9 times a day with 1-2 wakings in the night).

Some other things I learned about allergies in the past couple days:

• any allergy, not just food allergies, in a parent (including things like hay fever) is an indicator for potential food allergies in children. I always thought that food allergies were completely different from environmental allergies.
• 1 in 3 children that exhibit eczema as a sensitivity reaction to a food prior to six months of age (which my son did) will develop asthma or some other allergy by age 3.
  

Speak To Me

My daughter is three years old, and, among other things, we're trying to teach her to say nice things about people (i.e. compliment them). When I watch her, I can see her decide to say something nice normally something like "I like your hat" or "Your teeth are shiny". But it doesn't always come out right.

The funniest occurence was when she saw my wife getting ready to breast feed our son. She pointed to my wife's breasts and said, very seriously, "I like those!"

The Great Gig In The Sky

Over the weekend I found out that a co-worker's baby passed away. The baby was born with a genetic disorder that 'was not compatible with life'. He was expected to live a week or two, but actually lived for just over 3 months.

The obituary mentioned simple joys like seeing him smile, watching trees and birds with him and just spending precious moments together, knowing that they wouldn't last long.

Angel's death has touched me more than any other in my life, even though I never met him. I can't imagine what his parents are going through and how they can cope right now. I just know that I wasn't able to go to the funeral because of the emotions I felt - I would have lost it.

Since reading the obituary I've cried at least twice a day thinking about him and his parents. I have hugged my kids more, told them that I love them more often, and enjoyed my time with them more in the past three days thanks to Angel.

Because of his death, I will not take for granted how lucky I am to have my family. And I will be giving to the trisomy foundation in Angel's memory.