What pictures does a 3-year old make

Isabel has her own camera now. So if you ever wanted to know what kind of pictures a 3-year old makes, you just have to see Isabel's Flickr page.

Musical heritage

While busy with my annual compilation I came across music I found on musical-heritage.blogspot.com (as always: found through www.weirdomusic.com). It's a great weblog about world music with many downloads. So here you have my tip of the day :)

Pop Music: The Early Years 1890-1950

A few weeks back I had much fun with the 2-disc compilation Pop Music: The Early Years 1890-1950 that I found on Bravo Juju. The title of the compilation pretty much explains it all. Disc 1 starts with the "Washington Post March", which may scare you off because of it's poor recording quality and because, well, it's a march. But stay in there. The second song "King of the Bungaloos" already sounds a lot better.

Other favorites are:

• How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm? - Nora Bayes
• Black and Blue - Ethel Waters
• Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man - Aunt Jemima
• Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition! - Kay Kyser & His Orchestra (who doesn't love a song with a title like that? :) )

Download from Rapidshare:

• Disc 1
• Disc 2
  

I'm back

The last few years I gathered a multitude of accounts on social networks such as blogspot, last.fm, hyves, facebook and even twitter (just to name a few). Because with each social network account comes a blog, I had to a post for each and every social network. What a drag. Now I managed to collate hyves, facebook and twitter to my blog on blogspot.com.

To make a long story short: I saved myself some work so it's fun to start blogging again. I'm going to use my blog to post my latest discoveries in music, so be prepared :)

Shirley Ann Lee

I found a great weblog called World Music (http://musical-heritage.blogspot.com) to find, well, all kinds of world music. There I came across an album called "Local Customs: Downriver revival". On the album I found a few songs of Shirley Ann Lee. It were simple, but beautiful gospel songs. Listen here to There's A Light by Shirley Ann Lee.

There was not much information about this Shirley Ann Lee. The artist page on Last.fm was intriguingly empty. Lucky for me some Michael Goldberg wrote some something about Shirley on his blog. There should be much more songs of Shirley Ann Lee, but have all been forgotten.

Until now. A label called The Numero Group is looking for great stuff to re-release and came across old recordings of a label. So 40 years after Shirley Ann Lee sang her songs in the studio, people come to her door to show her her own music on cd.

Her songs were not only saved from being lost in oblivion, she could also hear her own songs after decades. But they had to listen to it in a car, because she did not have a cd player in her home. It resulted in a cute youtube movie.

You'll probably thinking what's so interesting about it. There is much more in the world than that. Well, this is just a small story, but somehow it's very heart-warming to find that there are people that try to save music from oblivion. And the internet is full of interesting little stories. It's a good that I have children and a job. Otherwise I could easily fill my days with tracking down these little musical pearls and the stories behind it (and blogging about it).

three mattresses and a baby

The extra mattress has arrived! That does not seem like a great deal, but this makes our co-sleeping very official: the whole Bos family sleeps in one great bed and had to buy another mattress since we are now with the four of us.

The extra space is especially handy with Isabel. Often when I wanted to go to bed I found her on my part of the family bed. If not, she would take at least as much width of the bed as possible. But to be frank: I hope they will stay in the family bed for a long time.

For those who are interested (or shocked) by co-sleeping some links from Ester:

• http://www.natuurlijkouderschap.org/wat-zijn-de-effecten-van-samen-slapen-op-de-lange-termijn-voor-mijn-baby/
• http://www.natuurlijkouderschap.org/wat-zijn-de-voordelen-van-samen-slapen-met-de-baby/
• http://www.askdrsears.com/html/7/T071000.asp

Short tongue-tie

We found out that Otis has a short tongue-tie. So we decided to cut it. This will be done tomorrow. Although we had taken a day to think it over and our doctor opposed to it, it wasn't that hard to come to a decision. What would now be a simple cut, would be a operation when Otis would be 11 years old.

Although it wasn't that hard to make a decision it won't be fun for Otis, so it will be a big day for us tomorrow. We hope that he'll be able to drink better after the cut. That would give Ester some more night rest. Although Otis had once slept 5 hours in a row, he didn't repeat that afterwards.