I have a few ideas about what happened in the meantime:

1) I had to recuperate from the Geek cruise I went on in November 2008. I had land sickness for nearly 2 weeks. At the time, I swore I would never go on another cruise, but I’ve already signed up for MacMania 10 in 2010.

2) I hosted my first ever Thanksgiving dinner. The Aunt House turns out to be a good place for having 15 people, if you can wrangle the tables and chairs. I just agreed to host it again.

(I highly recommend Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner, an ebook in a series of otherwise Mac-related topics. The geek guide to getting ready for Thanksgiving…)

3) In April, I adopted a dog. I’ve wanted to for a long time. My wish list in life has been “a dog, a cat and a piano.” So now I can check one thing off.

My sister Peg (she of the Incredible family) encouraged me with the promise of dog-sitting readily available. “I don’t want to get a dog right now,” she said. “I want to be the aunt of a dog.” Everyone wants to be an aunt.

I found Dixie at a small animal adoption center in Portland called The Pixie Project. Before agreeing to adopt her, I took Violet and Dash over to meet her. My number one requirement in a dog was that it had to like children. Dixie stepped right up to the plate. We took her for a walk and we were all in love with her.

The kids helped to name her as well. Jack-Jack repeatedly suggested “Underdog,” but Dash suggested “Winn-Dixie,” inspired by the popular children’s book. Because I actually worked at a Winn-Dixie Kwik-Chek as a teenager, there was no way I could name her that, but just “Dixie” seemed like the perfect name for her.

I could start a whole nother blog devoted to the ups and downs of bringing a dog into your life. I might still do that. But suffice to say, having Dixie has taken a big chunk of my free time.

4) I had a car accident in June. A woman slammed into the rear of my car while I was stopped at a light. I really think she must have been texting. According to the doctor, she had to be going at least 30 mph. to cause the bruises I had.

(This woman caused damage to 4 other cars. I was the first to be hit, and that pushed me into the Mercedes in front of me. See photo.)

Nothing was broken, except the car–my poor VW bug–which was totaled. But everything was out of whack. I’ve had to do a lot of chiropractic and massage and other treatments just to get back to normal. I’m almost there.

I could hardly sit at the computer for the first month, and have been gradually more able to work. Fewer hours of work + many hours of medical appointments = low motivation for blogging.

5) The kids are growing up. It feels more complicated to blog about being the aunt. They have more activities, so I spend less time with them.

6) The Favorite Aunt competition (no, it’s not really a competition) is heating up. Uncle Bob, secure in his lifetime favorite uncle status, got married last month. My new sister-in-law is wonderful. The kids love her. A lot. She better watch her back. Now she is fair game for the blog. More about Aunt Natasha later.

7) It takes a lot of time to blog! I’m attending the Blogworld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas (not as The Favorite Aunt, but for my real job). I just thought I’d do a quick update in case I mentioned this blog to anyone here. Now it’s an hour later. I could go on… but not right now!

OMG, it’s great! You can take a photo with the iPhone and turn it into a little comic with speech balloons, thought bubbles, and captions that look like real comic book stuff. I created the little one below with a photo from Camp Jean in about two minutes–without having to read a manual.

You can also use photos from your iPhoto library. Special effects are available. Best of all: you can email the finished product in a couple of taps! I wish I had this while we were on the trip–I could have sent some funny stuff back to my sister and brother-in-law.

As a geek, I’m excited by this glimpse of how cool the iPhone can be. As an aunt, I know this is going to earn me lots of cool aunt points!

Comic Touch is $4.99 at the iTunes App Store.

As this summer approached, I wanted to do something similar. There was talk that the Incredible Family might be moving back east, and I thought it would be a nice idea to have some bonding time with the kids. So I booked accommodations on the Oregon Coast and made plans. Besides Violet (age 9 1/2) and Dash (age 8), I also planned to bring Jack-Jack, who is 3 1/2.

(My sister and brother-in-law asked me at least ten times, “Are you sure you want to bring Jack-Jack?”)

In the meantime, Grandpa Bob (or, as I call him, “Daddy”) was planning to come out from Miami, so he was added to the Camp Jean contingent. As was my brother, aka Uncle Bob.

We spent three nights in Twin Rocks at the Ocean Rogue Inn. It’s a great place to bring kids. The ocean is right there. They have a play structure, horseshoes, buckets and shovels. There are picnic tables and grills, too. We had the one unit with 3 bedrooms, kitchen and dining room (#7).

I took lots of video, and will edit that into something later this week. I took all of these photos with my iPhone.

Per Uncle Bob’s request, we visited the Tillamook Air Museum and saw lots of cool planes housed in a World War II blimp hangar, the largest wooden structure in the world. (photo from their website)

For the next two nights, we drove down to Newport so that we could make a visit to the amazing Oregon Coast Aquarium. This is where Keiko, the “Free Willy” whale, was housed before being returned to Iceland. The tank where Keiko lived has been turned into a walk-through aquarium featuring LOTS OF SHARKS and other fish. (photo from their website) You can also see otters, seals and sea lions (Jack-Jack’s favorite) in their outdoor ponds. The kids were fascinated with everything for at least an hour and a half, which I considered good!

We came back by way of Corvallis, which gave us an opportunity to visit with niece-equivalent Anne (that’s her photo at the top of this blog) who leaves today for a whole year (gasp!) in Thailand on a Rotary International exchange program.

We got back to Portland late Saturday afternoon. Grandpa Bob and I went in search of some at least moderately healthy food, and ended up at Old Wives Tales. I went to bed and slept soundly until 10 a.m., which is highly unusual for me.

I think Camp Jean was a success, although not as educational (and certainly not as healthy) as Camp Judy. Of course, it’s not a competition.

I’ve got a lot of ideas for next year, what works and what doesn’t work. I will post more specific tips and advice in a series of posts on traveling with the niece/nephews.

Aunt hack ratings:

Age group: 3 and up. I wouldn’t have wanted to take Jack-Jack any younger.

Duration of activity:Six days/five nights (and 6 hours and 53 minutes…)

Cost: Lodging: $803; Gas: about $70; Food: about $350; Air Museum: $7 for kids (children under 6: free!); Oregon Coast Aquarium: $8.75 for kids (children under 3: free — I think the lady at the cash register was trying to give me the chance to say that Jack-Jack wasn’t 3 yet, but I can’t lie in front of the kids! I’d say he got $8.75 worth of entertainment, though.)

Child/aunt fun ratio: 60/40. It’s not always fun to ride herd on three kids of varying ages/interests/food dislikes/moods, but it was still a great trip. I was tempted to go for a 65/35 child/aunt fun ratio here, but on reflection, I’m sure there were definitely moments when the kids were not having fun either.

So I was curious to see how they would approach a program specifically targeted at children.

I put my testing panel (Violet, Dash and Jack-Jack) to work. They love trying out new software. Also, it was TV Turn-Off Week, and they may have been a little starved for any kind of screentime. My sister Peg (aka Elastigirl) said it would be OK if it was something educational.

Doozla is a drawing program with four options: freehand drawing, coloring pages, backgrounds you can draw on, and webcam snapshots for drawing. The choices are presented in a very clean and simple way. Violet and Dash (who are 9 and 8 years old) had no problem navigating to what they wanted to do. They played a bit with the coloring pages, but found them too easy. What really sparked their interest was the webcam option. Provided you have a built-in camera, Doozla will snap a photo which you can then decorate with the drawing tools.

Jack-Jack, who is 3 1/2 years old, was more interested in the coloring pages and backgrounds, but he doesn’t have the mousing ability to actually use the tools. At first, I was disappointed, because I thought it would be so much fun for him. But then I realized that he found it very entertaining to watch me do the coloring according to his instructions. (His personality has become a bit imperious of late…) We also took a web cam shot, and I colored him in as I prompted him, “What color do you want your eyes to be? Do you want a blue beard? etc.” So Doozla will keep a toddler entertained, with the caveat that you might have to be part of the entertainment.

The tools are very easy to use and there are a lot of fun elements, as befits a product from plasq. When you click on a tool or a color, a little voice says the name with a kind of squeal that is hilarious. We clicked numerous times on “bright yellow” just to hear it. I really like that they’ve included semi-transparent colors, which makes it more fun to draw on the web cam pictures. There’s a control panel so you can prevent kids from printing (boy, would that cost you a lot of ink!) or quitting without you entering a password.

By default, Doozla opens in full-screen mode, which means that kids would not be able to move out of Doozla and into, say, an internet browser. A password could prevent them from quitting the program, so in theory you wouldn’t have to worry about them using other programs or accessing other files. But the full-screen mode can be toggled on and off without a password, which would circumvent that protection. An option to prevent kids from leaving full-screen mode would be a great enhancement.

The little ones, like Jack-Jack, are going to need your help anyway, so its unlikely that you’d be leaving them alone. A 4- or 5-year-old could probably entertain themselves with Doozla. At first I thought the older kids would not be interested, but the next time I came by the house, Violet showed me several more drawings she’d made in the meantime. It’s fascinating to watch her learn the program, and then learn its limitations. She started thinking of things she’d like to do, like patterns and copying, that are beyond Doozla. I’m going to get her copy of Photoshop Elements soon. I think she and Dash are ready for the challenge.

Doozla is a great introduction to computer use for the toddler/preschool set. They’ll learn basic drawing concepts (color selection, line tool, paintbucket, etc) and develop mousing skills in an easy and fun virtual environment. And with a developer like plasq, you can be sure that it will be interesting to watch this software evolve from its v.1 state.

Aunt hack ratings:

Age group: 3-7; older kids will play with it, but not for long

Duration of activity: 30 minutes

Cost: $24.95 (Download and buy at plasq’s site.)

Child/aunt fun ratio: 60/40. It was fun to color in Jack-Jack’s web cam photo.

Macs come with an application from Apple called Photo Booth. Using the iSight camera in your Mac, you can take little snapshots that can be emailed or used as profile icons. I just discovered this 4-up “burst” mode that will take four shots in rapid succession. When I say “rapid”, I mean it. The shots are taken just a second or so apart. A real photo booth gives you time to prep for each shot, but with Photo Booth, you have to be fast.

In Seattle, I challenged Charlotte (11) to a face-making race. “Straight, sad, happy, mad,” I said. It’s really hard to do when the camera is going off so quickly. We probably did 20 takes before we got the one on the right that was satisfactory, with much hilarity. When Emily (18) and I got back to Portland yesterday, we played the same game with the same hilarious results.

Aunt hack ratings:
Age group: 7-18
Duration of activity: 30-45 minutes
Cost: none (if you have a Mac)
Child/aunt fun ratio: 50/50

I apologize to the non-Mac-owning aunts–I couldn’t come up with any Windows equivalent for Photo Booth. If you know of one, please share in the comments!