crooked house

Tilt-Shift Van Gogh

Check out these pretty and intriguing tilt-shift images of Van Gogh paintings. Tilt-shift started as a photographic effect that makes real landscapes appear miniature -- here are some good examples of real scenes -- and now it can be applied to all kinds of images. Apparently there's even an Iphone app.

Lauren Child's Secret Garden

Lauren Child designed this gorgeous, gorgeous cover for a special limited edition of The Secret Garden. Unfortunately, it's already completely sold out. (Via Sara, via Nathalie.)

Dalton Ghetti's Pencil Tip Carvings

Click on the image to see the teensy tiny letters carved out of the tips of pencils by artist Dalton Ghetti. If this were a poster I'd buy it in a heartbeat. (Thanks, Nela!)

 

 

Sylvie and the Mud Puddle

It was all fun and games until she wanted me to pick her up and carry her back to the car.

Freud's Couch

Freud's couch. You can see more photos of it and his office at the Freud Museum site.

Embrace Infant Warmer

This is the Embrace, a low-cost, low-tech baby warmer for the developing world, designed by a group of Stanford MBA students. The pocket in front contains a wax-like substance that, once warmed with hot water, will keep a baby at 98.6 degrees for 4-6 hours. It will cost around $25 -- as opposed to the $20, ooo an incubator costs. The group is testing the Embrace in India right now and you can read about it on their blog.

This video features Jane Chen, co-founder and CEO of Embrace, speaking at a TED conference in India. Now there's a job you could feel good about.

You can purchase one of these infant warmers as a gift in a friend or relative's name. I can't think of a better present.

Exercises in Chaos

Luke likes practising his gymnastics moves on this mattress.

It doesn't always go smoothly. On the plus(?) side: from watching her brother, Sylvie has already learned to do a perfect forward somersault.

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I took the kids to get their hair cut today. Ashley, the kind stylist (she has a heart tattooed on her chest -- click the photo for a closer look), graciously allowed Sylvie to play with her mannequin head:

 

I'm not sure what's she doing here -- maybe trying to put the thing out of its misery.

Sylvie likes tomatoes.

She also likes her brother's playmobil castle toys, with which she is not allowed to play. (With which? My brain is fried.) This makes her like them even more. The other day she strolled into the kitchen, rolling something around in her mouth. When I asked her what it was, she happily pulled it out  -- it was a teensy, tiny sword. I had visions of the ER -- and also of a possible career in the circus.

In other news, on this, maybe Luke's fifth or sixth day of school, they had, in his words, " a lockdown drill." In case "a bad guy tried to get us." He was very cheerful about it all, explaining how he hid in a hallway with one of his new friends.

Lately, the days have been whirling past like this, completely out of control -- lots of somersaults and giant half-eaten tomatoes and tiny sharp swords and the big scary world. And I'm the lady who's lost her head. (But my hair doesn't even look that good.)

Polo Is a Sport and Breastfeeding Kittens

A couple of nights ago I had an extremely vivid dream that I couldn't help sharing with Luke at breakfast. "I dreamed I had another baby," I told him, expecting either delight or horror from him, or a mixture of both.

He nodded calmly.

"And the baby had a full head of red hair!" I continued. "Isn't that funny? Both you and Sylvie had hardly any hair when you were born."

He nodded.

"But the funniest part was that he was born able to talk," I said. "The first time Daddy held him, the baby announced, 'Polo is a sport.'"

"What's polo?" asked Luke.

"Uh, it's a game where people ride horses and hit balls with some kind of stick," I said.

"Then polo is not a sport!" he said. 

I refrained from telling him the rest of the dream, in which the baby turned into a kitten and I debated whether or not to breastfeed. "I don't think I'm up for breastfeeding a kitten," I said to David, trying to convince myself it was okay not to.

I was also annoyed that the ultrasound hadn't revealed the fact of my baby's kitten-ness earlier. "Although," I announced to the woman giving birth next to me in the giant gymnasium that served as a communal delivery room for hundreds if not thousands of labouring women, "My first baby was also a kitten. Then I had Luke and Sylvie before this kitten. It happens."

David and I spent hours dealing with the bureaucracy involved in getting special kitten formula, to no avail. Soon it had been so long that my baby/ kitten had gone without sustenance that I feared for his life. So I marched into the laboratory adjoining the gymnasium and started making a scene. All the technicians eyed me suspiciously, muttering to one another that humans never gave birth to kittens and that I was just trying to get attention. I was flabbergasted, hurt, and deeply worried about the kitten's well-being. That's what you get for not breastfeeding.