The Little Boy Scare Me. 9-15-14

Boop has been very vocal about a new emotion that she can label: scared! This thing and that thing “scare me.” The thing that scares her most, and that has put a kink in walking back and forth to daycare (a mixed blessing), is an inflatable football player in our neighbor’s yard. They inflate him on game days, and he has a rather mean grimace on his face. Granted, they had one at daycare that never seemed to bother her before, but that was last year. And, she’s just now started talking about being scared. I’ve taken her over to the deflated football player in the neighbor’s yard while holding her, but she is still pretty upset and won’t look at him. She talks about ‘the little boy’ a lot at home. In one of her streams of talking, she was saying something about the little boy, and she lifted her leg up in the air. “Like this. On one foot. Like this, Mommy.” Mom started cracking up, but I didn’t see anything unusual. Mom thinks she was trying to show me the football player lining up on the field. She talks non-stop; so it’s sometimes a bit hard to follow her train of thought.

Mom gave me money this weekend to get another inexpensive modem to use for Skype-ing with Boop. This will be my 4th wireless modem since I’ve lived here, I think, and probably since I’ve had Boop. Hopefully, it will arrive soon and last longer than 6 months! Along with my home system, I’m having issues with my 2^nd work computer this year. My last one crapped out in the middle of a heavy grant submission time earlier in the spring. Granted the PC was older, but it was particularly poor timing. And now, I’m in the middle of another heavy grant submission time and having trouble again. The work PC I have now is pretty much top of the line, a Dell XPS. It started about 2 weeks ago, making a never-ending amount of spaces in my documents; then another day, it was tons of A’s; and then when the IT person came last week, it was going crazy with the Tab key, apparently. We’ve tried a new keyboard and mouse. This morning, my keyboard was not working at all. Hopefully, Dell will be able to get me back on track. Is there some message I should be getting here?