twdf.net

Mom sent along our nephew Michael's Sunshine Symphony now that he has outgrown it. Angela likes it because it plays a lot of nifty songs, and is soft to touch, and I like it because thank goodness they have finally invented something that doesn't hurt the ears of poor parents! It plays snippets of Peter and the Wolf, Haendel, and a couple of other tunes with full orchestration.

The bad news was a few days ago the batteries went dead. We have plenty of batteries but we couldn't find a phillips screwdriver anywhere, and Anita, the maid who comes in, forgot to bring us one. We didn't think much of it because we figured we would get it fixed in a day or two. But Angela was having none of this - after a few hours she started slapping at it to try to get it to sing something and then finally she started making a bunch of noises while hitting it -- like she was trying to get it kick-started by reminding the sunshine how to sing.

So we had a rough few hours until Stephan, one of our apartment mates, suggested that we try using the tip of the vegetable peeler to try to open it, which eventually worked. It was probably the eleventh or twelfth utensil that we tried.

Of course, Stephan and Marina actually *use* these kitchen utensils much more often than we do.