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Buggy January 31, 2005
Sam checking out the Push Around Buggy from Aunt Shawn for her birthday. I think she needs insurance to drive this thing.
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Ger and I have started watching this reality TV show called "Supernanny." Each week the titular nanny shows up, crisp British accent in hand, to give succor to troubled parents. The first quarter of the program is devoted to what horrible little monsters the children are and how the parents have tried nothin' and are all out of ideas. The next part has the parents using new skills to cope with this living hell. Then in the third quarter they utterly screw it up again, and in each episode's finale they get it right. Weepy hugs all around and tune in next week for another spin!
The way I see it, the last three quarters of the show are filler. All anybody really cares about is how horrible the children are, what incompetent boobs the parents are, and how we are not them. Just like how we're smugly aware that we are not that cracked-out, incoherent, deadbeat that they wrestled to the ground midway through every episode of "Cops." I just want to see that even though Sam throws her soybeans on the ground and keeps trying to bitch slap the cat, at least she's not cussing out her mother or trying to attack other children with hammers. Next to these folks, we're the parents of the freaking millennium.
To capitalize on this, I'm going to pitch a new television show where all the parents do yell at their kids, throw empty beer can after empty beer can in their direction, and generally accuse them of mediocrity and failure. The kids, of course, will not be without blame. They'll talk back, set things on fire, and sometimes assault the UPS man in scenes that look like "Dennis the Menace" meets "Apocalypse Now." Nothing will ever get resolved, nobody will ever learn anything, and people will LOVE IT.
Sorry, I'm not really talking about Samantha, am I? Let's see, as I mentioned, Sam turned one year old last week. On the night of her birthday we gave her a few more gifts, including an ulcer and the common cold from GiantMicrobes.com. Nana and Grandpa also kicked in The Jesusmobile, a talking frog, and cold hard cash while Aunt Shawn and Uncle Brent sent the Land Rover of baby toys and Ger's parents sent her a nice start on a savings account. And then on Thursday her pediatrician gave her a belated gift in the form of a tuberculosis skin test, which seemed to be the only one she didn't like. Also, there was more cake and both sets of grandparents called to sing her "Happy Birthday" over the speaker phone, which actually kind of freaked her out.
One thing I've noticed over the last week is that Sam has become increasingly vocal. She points at things constantly and says "DAT? DAT?" as if saying "OH MY GOD! WHAT IS THAT? THAT'S AWESOME!" When she's not pointing, she's babbling to herself or to her stuffed animals. This morning she even responded to a direct question by me. Question: What sound does the cat make? Answer: Rawer-rawer-rawer-rawer! Well, close enough.
And now, pictures:
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It's a good thing that we take so many pictures ourselves, by the way. I've mentioned before how fate seems to conspire against us every time we try to get Sam's picture taken at the Wal-Mart Portrait Studio. But to be fair, our troubles may also be due to it's being the Wal-Mart Portrait Studio. You can buy a 15,000-pack of napkins for forty-three cents, but apparently they don't hire the best and brightest. The first time we went we got a few decent pictures of Sam, but the talented technicians exposed them to light during the development process, which I'm sure is probably covered under Rule #1 of film development: DO NOT EXPOSE TO LIGHT. But Ger got a coupon for a whole pack of photos for like $4, so we went back. This time we got half a dozen great shots of a happy, smiling, and increasingly photogenic Samantha before the employees discovered that the film was jammed and none of them took. So we waited fifteen minutes while Zippy the Wonder Employee futzed with it and the subsequent appointments piled up. Eventually we took a few more shots, but by this time Sam was getting pissed and hungry, so they didn't turn out as well no matter how much I waved her Ulcer around and gibbered like a moron. So we paid for our $4 portraits with a $5 bill and left before we realized that the gal never even gave us our change! We could have bought 30,000 napkins with that! Ugh.
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"You think you can stop me? Go on. Try."
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More of Sam with the WWJD Bug. She actually really likes this thing --more than the fancy pants talking frog that was in the gift box with it. Also, you can kind of see me in the background trying to put another one of her birthday gifts together.
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There's an interesting article on Slate.com about magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and its growing non-medical uses. This is the technology that uses, I think, magnetic waves to create an image of brain activity. It's used for a lot of stuff, but researchers love it because it lets them examine what the brain's doing when subjects go through any number of tasks --doing math, reading, solving puzzles, etc.
Old news, but the article soon points out uncharted territory for MRI, including lie detection, evaluating the effectiveness of marketing (which I've mentioned before), and screening job applicants. To quote:
The last bit about using MRIs to determine political preferences or other taboo topics doesn't worry me. Those aren't just "off-limits in an interview." Laws (at least here in the U.S. and many other places) forbid employment decision-making on the basis of that kind of stuff no matter how you obtain the information. (Though I admit the status of an MRI scan as a medical exam and thus falling under the purview of associated laws is likely to be a thorny issue.)The most complex, fraught, and uncertain aspect of brain imaging being discussed by neuroethicists is the potential these technologies hold for screening job and school applicants. This so far remains more a hypothetical notion than a budding industry, and no company or school has announced plans to scan applicants. Yet many ethicists feel the temptation will be overwhelming. How to resist a screen that can gauge precisely the sorts of traits�persistence, extroversion, the ability to focus or multitask�that make good employees or students?
The legality of such use is unclear. The relevant federal laws, the American With Disabilities Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (which governs privacy of medical information), allow pre-employment medical tests only if they assess abilities relevant to a particular job. An employer couldn't legally scan for depression or incipient Alzheimer's. Yet it's possible an employer could legally use a brain scan to test for traits relevant to a particular job�risk tolerance for a stock-trading job, for instance, or extroversion for a sales position. An additional attraction of brain scanning is that a tester can evaluate these and other traits while an applicant performs nonthreatening, apparently unrelated tasks�like matching labels to pictures. An unscrupulous employer could fashion such tests to covertly explore subjects that would be off-limits in an interview, such as susceptibility to depression, or cultural, sexual, and political preferences.
In fact, this kind of thing really appeals to me on some level. How cool would it be to have Johnny T. Applicant come into a room, see a bright light, then be told he's perfect for the job? It'd be like a frickin' religious experience!
This is mainly because I/O Psychologists like myself have always worked under the burden of imperfect measurement and anything that can give us the kind of precision seen in other sciences is automatically intriguing. Instead of asking someone to describe how they've dealt with stressful situations in the past, you just describe one to him or show him a video of one and watch what happens in his brain. You could probably eliminate (or at least reduce) lying and other biases by asking questions related to personality or values and then looking not for voluntary responses from their lips or pencils, but involuntary brain activity. Neat!
In the end, though, I don't see this as a replacement for all of the tests we currently use. Psychological constructs are, by definition, groups of behaviors that reliably covary. Behaviors --specifically on the job behaviors-- are what we're ultimately interested in, and in many cases it seems like it would be easier and better to just measure them directly. An MRI isn't going to tell you if someone understands the laws around business accounting or if he can lift a 50-pound box over his head. There are also many other relevant issues that an MRI couldn't ever measure, like schedule availability, salary requirements, licensing, and specific job knowledge. Still, it is a fascinating application of a technology when it comes to getting at constructs that are difficult or impossible to reproduce in artificial environments --personality, values, judgment, and decision-making.
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Sam has an ulcer. The common cold, too. These toys from Giant Microbes were her birthday gift from me and Ger. She seems to like the yellow ulcer one in particular.
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My mom threw in this little Volkswagon Bug with the other gifts she and my dad sent Sam for her 1st birthday. It says "Jesus Loves Me" on the doors and "WWJD?" (short for "What Would Jesus Do?") on the top. Apparently if He were in Sam's place, Jesus would crawl around on the floor, point at things, and say "Dat? Dat?" Then He would chew on the remote and look cute.
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You never know what's scary to kids.
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Dear Samantha,
Today you're one year old. Congratulations! I thought I'd take this chance to look back on your road leading up to this milestone. I don't think you can read this yet, but maybe someday you will and there are a number of people out there on the Internet who have been reading about you these last 12+ months (back when people actually used to read the Internet). You are, I think, the best decision that your mother and I have ever made. We waited a while, but eventually decided that there would never be a perfect time and that we should make us one of those babies we kept hearing about. For a while, that was the most enjoyable part. Your mom's pregnancy was blessedly uneventful, with no serious complications and only the unavoidable discomforts like having her left foot swell while her right stayed the same. Thanks for that, by the way. The only ugly spot was when the foul-mouthed Ultrasound technician asked if she had given us "a picture of the baby's twat". Being the overeducated kind of obsessive people we are, we read a ton of books about what you were up to during these months. We learned the lingo, watched the videos, bought the products, and went to the classes. We rolled our eyes when other people didn't know how long breast milk would keep in the freezer or how dilated your mom needed to be before getting an epidural. We even hired men with power tools to build you a place to live.
All that didn't really prepare us when the day finally came. You were a week early, for one thing. I was sitting at the computer early one Saturday morning and looked up to see your Mom in the doorway. When she announced that her water had just broken, I kind of flipped out. But she was calm. We packed, made our way to the hospital, and got the news that we wouldn't be going home until we were a whole family. That took a while, though, because you were reticent to join us outside the uterus. Your mother had to push for six straight hours before you'd had enough. It was like she was frickin' Hercules, if Hercules was a sweaty woman giving birth. We think we narrowly avoided a c-section, but the doctor stuck this sucker thingie on your noggin and pulled you outa there. When I met you, I was amazed and overcome with love.
The thing that really got to me was how human the look on your face was. I expected you to be a little blob, not quite a person yet. But you were wide-eyed, surprised and a little pissed off --with good reason! As I held you, you looked right in my eyes and yelled at me, as if to say "You there! What's is going on here? Put me back at once!" Sam, your first few days were a little rough, with a bout of jaundice and a little trouble with nursing. But your mom, hero that she was, stayed patient and kept at it. For a few days we had to feed you expressed breast milk through a syringe. But you go the hang of it and we all three learned as we went.
Grandma and Grandpa Sommer couldn't wait to visit you, and we made it to Tulsa eventually so you could meet Nana and Grandpa Madigan. I think the only thread of sadness woven through your story so far is that you're so far from the rest of your family, who live halfway across the country. Still, you got to visit most of them several times so far, and we were glad to have the help when we can get it. I think, though, that you've been easy on us. You were fussy initially and we developed a deep bag of tricks to calm you, but the long grind of sleepless nights that we initially braced ourselves for only lasted a few weeks. After we stopped committing the error of waking you up, you actually started sleeping through the night at eight weeks! Getting you to nap during the day, however, was much more of a challenge. That took a lot more patience and a lot more letting you cry it out for a few minutes. Even then, you'd sometimes only sleep for 15 or 20 minutes. The result was that you were cranky early and often. Eventually, though, the work paid off and you were on a regular nap schedule --twice a day for an hour to an hour and a half each time.
In fact, a lot of our energy --yours, mine, and your mom's-- went into getting the basics down. Sleep was important, but you also had to learn how to eat, raise your head up, roll over, calm yourself down when you were upset, and poop. Oh, the poop. It's amazing that such basic abilities have to be learned and developed, but we were totally into it, even the poop. We celebrated every milestone and cheered you along as you explored the world. And we're not about to stop.
Now, Samantha, that's not to say that there haven't been a few inconveniences along the way. We're Baby People now, and that means that we don't see many movies in the theater and sometimes when we would try to go out to eat you'd throw a fit. Every conversation we have with adults eventually turns to babies, and our house has been decorated with safety gates, toys, and baby-related supplies. Somewhere along the way (I think around the time you started napping well), though, you developed a tolerance for our nonsense and started putting up with it. We could do things like take you up to L.A. for visit an amusement park or even fly with you to St. Louis and then drive to Tulsa. A lot of people have commented on how good-natured and mild-tempered you are, and we have to concur. Thank God and thank you.
Eventually we moved on to Life for Advanced Users and you tackled things like solid foods, rolling over, the unfortunate event with the baby sitter, sitting up on your own, cosplay, and even pulling up. Unfortunately you also decided to see what being sick was like, which once resulted in a very awful trip to the Emergency Room. Don't worry, though. You survived.
This is starting to get kind of long, so I'll wrap it up. Sam, when I think back on those first few months with the benefit of hindsight, I realize that it was largely about me. It kind of shames me to say that and I assure you that I loved you and would have died to keep you safe and happy, but in the beginning it was less about you and more about my instincts to be a good father. It was like you were a little game, with the objective being to keep you healthy, happy, and comfortable. Make sure you nursed, make sure you were clean, make sure you got enough sleep, make sure you weren't ill, make sure you weren't too warm, make sure you weren't too cold, make sure you were safe. It was a game I played with all my heart, but I overlooked you as a person and focussed on you as a part of the system and sometimes just saw you as a squirming little game piece on the board of life.
That changed, though. As the weeks and months went by you got the hang of this life thing and I got to know you as a person. We started to gel. You started smiling at me when I came into the room and I started to miss you when I was away. Not the game or the sense of accomplishment that came with playing it well, but you. Lately when I come home from work you've been listening for the sound of the garage door and you're usually at the kitchen gate waiting for me when I come in the door. You smile and maybe laugh, and I do the same. The couple of hours that I get to play with you each night are the best part of my week, eclipsed only by the additional time we get to spend together on the weekends.
Samantha, you have a great life ahead of you, and I'm grateful that I've gotten to hold your hand through this first year of it. You've changed me, challenged me, and won me over. You're awesome. Love, --Dad |
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Today is Samantha's first birthday. See the main blog for details, but here is the cake, digitally preserved for the ages.
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I was in a college fraternity, so I've seen some pretty chaotic parties. I saw a guy get thrown through a sliding glass door while another guy repeatedly leapt, naked, over a roaring bonfire until the smell of singed, Italian hair filled the air. Someone else went temporarily blind from drinking not too much alcohol, but too much milk. Another party had a group of guys use a pickup truck to rip the Mayor McCheese statue from the local McDonald's playground, then drag it up to the frat house roof so they could dance with it. ...And then fall off the roof to the bushes and have the Mayor land on top of them.
Crazy, but none of that compares to having a house full of toddlers in terms of sheer chaos.
Sam's birthday isn't officially for another couple of days, but we had a small party for her on Sunday, to which we invited a few couples with kids of their own. Ages ranged from just a few months to around three years. There were five children and seven adults in attendance. The kids were all well behaved, but I now know that even well-behaved children will, when grouped together, result in chaos and cacophony the likes of which will make you want to go goth. There were toys thrown, a cat molested, fits of chain-reaction crying, cake smeared, and skilled but desperate parents trying to entertain and moniter children while Mommy and Daddy tried to get a bite to eat of their own.
Towards the end of the night we pulled out the BIG GUNS in the form of a Baby Einstein DVD. That worked for a while, but one of the babies eventually saw a toy that was just like the one that she had back home, and we had a total meltdown on our hands. Sam got so messy during the festivities that --I kid you not-- I held her over the sink and jiggled her so that little landslides of cake, carrot, and Jell-O tumbled off her.
It was great.
And like any good party, the guest of honor puked all over the place the morning after. Geralyn went in to get Sam this morning to find that the Birthday Girl had yarked all over her crib. Then she rolled around in it. Too much cake and Jell-O Jigglers, we think, and haven't we all done the same once or twice? Fortunately, we think Sam had just done the deed, as the stuff was still warm and fragrant. Ger wouldn't let me take pictures, though.
Outside of the birthday party, things have been fairly tame. We think Sam may be having some kind of allergy problems, as she'd had a runny nose, watery eyes, and cough but without any fever or sore throat. We had just introduced her to cow's milk when it started, so we're going to remove that from her diet to see if it's a food allergy. Otherwise, it may just be from pollen or something else in the air, and air is is substantially harder to remove from her life.
Compounding this, however, is the emergence of Sam's first tooth. I was sitting with her the other night playing "Beep!" which is a game where I tap her on the nose, say "Beep," and she giggles. Just as my finger was going in for the beep, she lurched forward and bit it like an annoyed chihuahua. There was definitely tooth there, and upon further inspection I found a small white nub working its way up through her gums. So great. Let the teething begin. Bust out the Tylenol and let's get crabby.
And now, a bunch of pictures:
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You'll notice that Sam's favorite new toy is an orange, and we're glad to let her play with it since we don't actually eat the skin. She's also quite infatuated with her new birthday outfit that her mommy bought. On the topic of clothes, though, we discovered that the Baby Clothes Superconglomorate refuses to make sleepers (you know, the one-piece outfits with built-in booties and easy, one-zip operation) for kids over 12-months old. Sam has outgrown most of her older sleepers, so the fact that we have to now buy two-piece pajama sets greatly annoys us. Who doesn't like a nice, comfy, one-piece sleeper? Heck, I wish i had a Jamie-sized one after seeing how comfortable they are for Sam.
Oh, one last piece of housekeeping: I mentioned last week that I was considering doing away with the weekly updates after this one since Sam was turning one year old. But you guys seem to like them, so I'll continue doing them. And it's not really that much of a chore, since I enjoy doing it so much myself. So look for Sam's Story, Vol. II starting next week.
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We had a small birthday party for Sam yesterday. Per sacred tradition, we gave her her first piece of cake. She loved it, but was disappointingly neat in the way she ate it. It barely got in her hair at all. I love, however, the way she licked her lips when we set it in front of her here.
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Sam has taken an interest in our book cases, and we're doing our best to curb it even though they're anchored to the wall. I'm thinking of taking the "smoke this whole pack of ciggarettes until you're sick" approach by having her read all of my Wheel of Time books.
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I'm not sure why this kind of dystopia world gone mad kind of thing appeals to me, but it does. It's like horror or suspense stories on a macro scale.
From Amazon:
Still hoping for the giant bug thing.A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life--including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door--becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.
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Sam's foam bath letters. She's getting quite adept at sticking them on the side of the tub. Last night she spelled out "OMG STFU N00b!"
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Back in graduate school I earned a few bucks on the side as an interviewer for the local phone megalopoly. I and two fellow grad students would gang up on people interviewing for Account Executive positions and take them through a structured panel interview. We all had to take extensive notes so that we could rate the candidate's answers against a set of criteria, a task that required us to remember a fair amount of detail.
The note-taking was usually done by hand, but one day one of our trio brought in a laptop and used it to take notes. She was a fast typist, so in effect she ended up transcribing the candidate's responses, word-for-word. When it came time to make our ratings, she showed us all of her copy and smiled smugly over the mounds of detail that she would have to work with in creating her ultra-hardcore scientific badass ratings.
The funny thing is, though, that I and the other guy who had taken notes longhand finished our ratings in a fraction of the time it took her. We were able to recall all the same information, like how the guy had killed his boss's horse (in response to "Tell me about a time when you were in a stressful situation at work") or dealt with conflict by threatening to urinate on everyone in a meeting (in response to "Tell me about a time when you had to manage conflict with other team members"), and we were able to do it off the top of our heads or just by using our hastily scribbled notes ("conflict resolution --> pee-pee, totally insane"). Apparently the gal with the laptop had been so intent on getting down every word that she hadn't listened to any of them.
This story came to mind when I read this story on CollissionDetection.net. The article is about the decline of proper handwriting and cursive writing in school curriculums, but it also references some research that shows that the more one has to concentrate on the mechanics of writing, the slower he or she goes and the greater the number of errors. Basically, doing the unfamiliar task eats up brain power. I could see extending this reasoning to dictation and including recall as an outcome.
Some folks are bemoaning the loss of cursive handwriting and pointing to this as a reason to make it a bigger part of the public education curriculum. When I write something by hand I usually print in all caps, and I can do it pretty quickly. In fact, I haven't written in cursive in YEARS. I tried to do it just now, and it was a mess. It looks like a retarded monkey had a seizure while holding a pen in its mouth. Still, I don't have any trouble doing printing quickly, and my job still sometimes requires quickly taking copious amounts of notes.
Obviously handwriting should be taught, but I think we should supplement it with note-taking skills that break out of linear prose, like mind mapping, bulleting, shorthand, or even techniques used by professional stenographers. This strikes me as much more useful if the goal is to write quickly, as it almost always is when writing long hand these days. Anything where presentation matters is going to be typed.
Of course, it's only a matter of time before teachers turn to their students and tell them to text-message their papers to the front of the class's wireless server.
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It's another endeavor to break out of the sci-fi/horror/fantasy rut that my reading has fallen into. The Pearl strikes me as one of those books that everyone was forced to read in high school, except that I wasn't. I think we read The Grapes of Wrath instead, because we were all Oakies. I've heard good things about it in the past, though, and there seem to be plenty of online study guides/references for it. I always enjoy consulting that kind of stuff when I'm done with a book just to see what I may have missed.
From Amazon:
Hrm. Including Tuck Everlasting, this makes two books in a row about how something that seems at first to be a great boon can turn out to be a terrible curse.Kino, a poor Mexican pearl fisher, finds a valuable pearl. Yet instead of bringing blessings, the pearl acts as a harbinger of misfortune to Kino and his wife, Juana. Ultimately, it is returned from whence it came. Steinbeck's parable, originally published in 1947, is a well-written retelling of an old Mexican folktale.
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Bath time is one of Sam's favorite times. She often wets herself when we bring her in to take one.
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I took this picture after coming in to get Sam up from her afternoon nap. You can't see it in this pic, but she has developed this habit of throwing all her stuffed animals out of the crib when she's ready to get up. It's almost as if she's saying "Go for help, Lassie! Tell them I'm trapped!"
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We've discovered that Sam loves it when you play "horsey" with her, as Ger is doing here. Unfortunately my legs aren't quite long enough for this game, so that I just sort of end up wiggling Sam back and forth a bit when we try and play.
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From Amazon:
I believe it's a kid's book, but it's short and I snagged the book-on-CD from the library to add some variety to my literary diet.Imagine coming upon a fountain of youth in a forest. To live forever--isn't that everyone's ideal? For the Tuck family, eternal life is a reality, but their reaction to their fate is surprising. Award winner Natalie Babbitt (Knee-Knock Rise, The Search for Delicious) outdoes herself in this sensitive, moving adventure in which 10-year-old Winnie Foster is kidnapped, finds herself helping a murderer out of jail, and is eventually offered the ultimate gift--but doesn't know whether to accept it. Babbitt asks profound questions about the meaning of life and death, and leaves the reader with a greater appreciation for the perfect cycle of nature. Intense and powerful, exciting and poignant, Tuck Everlasting will last forever--in the reader's imagination.
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I've done a lot of focus groups in my past. You know: those meetings when you get a bunch of people in a room and start jotting down their thoughts on a flip chart. It's kind of a poor man's survey, but it can be quite useful if directed, controlled, and otherwise done right. Sometimes these things have a brainstorming vibe to them, and you start writing down everything that people say. This is to encourage the free flow of information, and you can always go back later and separate the wheat from the chaff.
Sometimes, though, some clown will throw out a big chunk of chaff just to be funny and to lighten the tone. He's say something like "Hey! Let's build chemical weapons that magically turn our enemies gay and Irresistible to each other!". And like good note-taker, you'll write that down on the flip chart, IN INK. And then TEN YEARS later it'll all hit the fan as bloggers, messageboard enthusiasts, and more than a few mainstream media outlets assume that it was a serious idea and received forty billion dollars in funding.
So remember: If you're doing a focus group and someone comes up with something so stupid that it makes you go blind for a minute, don't write it down. Just laugh, shake your magic marker at him, and move on.
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Hard to believe this shot was taken in the middle of January, eh? Well, apart from the dead grass and leafless trees...
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Sam discovered another unsecured cabinet, this one filled with fluffy towels.
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As I mentioned in the pic of the day yesterday, Geralyn had two of her wisdom teeth taken out on Friday, leaving me to play the better parts of both parental roles while she recovered. Luckily, the most stressful thing I had to do was take Sam with me to the grocery store to buy Mac 'n Cheese and the ingredients for a fruit smoothie. Sam had a blast at the store, but I very quickly learned to keep a good 12 to 14 inches between her and the goods lining the store shelves, lest there be cleanups on aisles 12, 10, 4, and 12 again (forgot the pickles).
The only other trial was, because of the lingering anesthesia in Ger's system, trying to get Sam to drink last September's breast milk after I resuscitated it from its deep freeze. Apparently, though, breast milk is all about the packaging and Sam would have none of this nonsense. She took one sip, scrunched up her face, and threw the bottle at me. She then demanded that I immediately uncork a nice apple juice, let it breathe for ten minutes, then bring it to her in the red sippy cup. The cup with the kitties, you oaf, not the tacky one one with the airplanes.
The other change we tried to pull on Sam was moving from simple rice cereal to the slightly more processed but probably more filling Cream of Wheat. Unfortunately this ended up being much more of an ordeal for us than her. Preparing rice cereal was easy: cereal and formula in equal proportions. Following the "For Toddlers" directions on the back of the Cream of Wheat box, however, left us completely flummoxed. To prepare the right amount of cereal, we had to solve the following equation:
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Doing so involved plugging in the values for the desired amount of cereal, Sam's birth date, the current barometric pressure, and for some reason the atomic weight of Beryllium (9.0122 in case you were wondering). Then we went through a four-stage cooking process that resulted in a cup of boiling Cream of Wheat that took half a day to cool down to anything close to an edible temperature. All this while a hungry Samantha screamed at us from her high chair. It was delicious --eventually-- but at this point we're considering just making it up a whole box at a time and freezing it into Wheat-Pops for later consumption.
Not many pictures this week, but here's what we've got:
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Sam still isn't walking yet, but man she's close. I think all she needs to do is get the idea that she can stand and move around without leaning against something and then WHAM! I'll be sitting on the couch watching her, and then she'll stand up and walk across the room, down the stairs, out the front door, and over the horizon before I can close my gaping mouth. And that will be bad, because Geralyn will think that I'd lost her and can't find her, just like I lose my wallet every time we're in a hurry to go somewhere. And I'll look in my gym bag, because that's where my wallet usually is, but Sam won't be there. She'll be halfway down the Baja Peninsula by then, never looking back. Go, Sam, go!
Next week will be the 52nd chapter in Sam's Story, marking about one year of this epic, ongoing tale. I'm not sure what I want to do after that. On the one hand I could continue the weekly updates. I can usually find time to do work on them over the weekend, with the worst outcome being that I post half a day late on Monday morning. I like doing them, and I think there are going to be stories to tell for a long, long time. On the other hand, I could stop doing the regular updates and just post little stories about Sam as they happen, letting you get your pics fix through the Photo of the Day which features Sam more often than not. I'm not sure which way i want to go, though. Do any of you readers out there have an opinion on this? Would you miss the regularity of the weekly updates? Please, let me know one way or the other. Now's your chance to de-lurk.
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Caught red-handed (and slack-jawed) going through Daddy's work bag? That's it, no cel phone privileges for a month.
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Geralyn got her wisdom teeth taken out yesterday, and here they are. On the plus side, they're much easier to brush now. Geralyn is fine, but for a while there she and Sam were reduced to the same vocabulary and ate the same kind of food.
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Samantha enjoying her new hippo etch-a-sketch thingamajig, also from Mark and Ricca.
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I have a few self-imposed rules about what I post on this blog. I don't post about politics, I keep the language relatively clean, and I try not to just post a link to something else without providing some kind of commentary of my own. These rules are flexible and I've broken each one once or twice, but there's two I don't ever break: don't write about work and don't write about co-workers unless you have something nice to say.
Why? Well, a lot of it falls under the perview of "don't be a jerk," but it could also get you fired. Much of my work involves confidential or sensitive information that it's obviously wrong to share, but some Brittish guy was fired from his job at a bookstore because of the unflattering comments about the job that he made on his blog. Complaining about this is just stupid, because the guy was obviously making crass, unpleasant remarks about his work and the people there, including his "Evil Boss". Would it have been any different if he had distributed the comments via an ad in the newspaper or handing out pamplets?
This site lists even more examples. I just don't get people like this. That last site even lambasts some employers as "Blogophobic Companies" and has an "International Blogger's Bill of Rights" that says:
- If an employer wishes to discipline an employee because of his/her blog, it must first establish clear-cut blogging policies and distribute these to all of its employees.
- Blogging employees shall be given warning before being disciplined because of their blogs.
- NO ONE shall be fired because of his/her blog, unless the employer can prove that the blogger did intentional damage to said employer through the blog.
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The amazing Galileo Thermometer, given to us by Ger's cousin Mark and his wife Ricca.
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I grabbed this screen capture after my 1337rd post on the QT3 forums. If you don't know why this is funny, then you're not 1337 enough to get the j0k3. You may or may not be happy about this.
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As you may have noticed, I've added categories to this site. This means that each post is categorized into one or more category, categorically. I initially shunned this feature because it so often seems pointless and leads to having a dozen categories, most of which have one or two posts associated with them while the everything else goes into a kind of demilitarized blogging Shangri-la like "General" or "Daily Life" or "Misc." But I wanted a way for people who were only interested in say Samantha to find an archive of stories only related to her while ignoring the rest of my inane ramblings. You can do that now.
Once I decided to do this, though, the main task before me was to define the categories. A cursory glance at my archives showed a fair variety in the subject matter of posts, but an underlying factor structure was not crystal clear. To resolve this, I endeavored to apply my six years of graduate school in psychology and do some kind of scientific data reduction. Specifically, I applied cluster analysis, which is a multivariate statistical procedure that takes a sample of observations about entities and organizes those entities into more homogeneous groups.
To start, I took all the 322 blog posts and had a group of subject matter experts rate each one on a variety of dimensions related to content, tone, voice, subject matter, reading level, word count, and the frequency with which I had used the word "poop." These data were entered into a SAS dataset and analyzed using SAS's PROC CLUSTER procedure. The output provided a wealth of information about the data's possible underlying structure, but of particular interest was the Semipartial R2. Using this statistic for each of the solutions in the last fifteen iterations of the clustering procedure, I created the following Fusion Plot:
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As you can see, there is a sharp dropoff in the Semipartial R2 at around 4 clusters, suggesting that to be an optimal solution to the data. Indeed, the four-cluster model explained over 85% of the variance in the original data, and this hypothesis was further supported by a dendogram that suggests a four to six cluster solution:
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Finally, a plot of the four-cluster solution in multidimensional space using canonical variables pretty strongly suggested four (or possibly five) clusters:
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Given these scientific results, I arrived at the following four categories for my blog: The "General" category could have been further broken down upon rational review of the data, resulting in smaller categories like Gaming, Books, Movies, Family News, and Stupid Observations, but I decided that none of those individual topics would be of interest enough to most visitors to warrant splitting them out.
You guys are totally buying that I did all this work, right? Right? Pffftt.
Anyway, the way Movable Type handles category archives, though, has me pulling my hair out a bit. I want to have date-based archives, too, but I want category-specific archives for the Photo of the Day. But to have that, it kind of messes up the other archives so that you can only browse individual entries (like through a permalink link) within a category and not across categories. It really ticks me off, so if you know of a solution let me know. If I can't figure anything out, I'll probably end up creating a separate blog for the Photo of the Day, output it (and its archives) to a static file, and include it in this main site with server-side includes. What a pain.
Finally, you may also notice that I changed the layout of blog entries. It occurred to me that there were three types of elements to a blog entry: those about the entry (the date, the title, the author), the entry itself, and those related to what you can do in response to the entry (link to it, comment on it, find similar entries). So I separated them. Title and date are at the top (I trimmed author, since I'm the only one on this site), and then put the comment link, the permalink, and the category archive link at the bottom. The latter also makes sense in that you don't force people to scroll back up in order to comment or get a permalink.
So, hope you enjoy the fruits of my labor. There are more tweaks to come, as well as a total redesign if I can get around to it.
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As is so often the case, Sam was fascinated by the simple cardboard box containing our new spare computer table. All I had to do was get things started and she did her best to deconstruct the rest.
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Man, we're getting close to one year old. I don't think I've ever even kept a plant alive for this long. Sam hasn't made any vast developmental strides this week, but she has been a chatterbox. She constantly engages in what childologists call "jargon," which is this babbling kind of pre-language. I liken it to speech without a vocabulary, because she'll look at things and make purposeful sounds (usually "Dis!" or "Dat!"), gesture towards them, and look at us like we're utter morons for not getting her drift.
One big change is that we're no longer taking her into the aptly named "cry room" at church. For the agnostics among us (that is, those who see insufficient evidence to either confirm or deny the existence of cry rooms) these are glass-walled rooms outside the main body of the church where you take babies so that their crying doesn't interrupt God while He's chatting with the rest of the congregation. Thing is, parents tend to take all their troubled children, even older ones that should know how to behave. The result a couple of Sundays ago was complete pandemonium, with screaming children running amuck and scattering Cheerios and Goldfish crumbs everywhere while the parents blithely ignored them. Within an hour, they had established a primitive hunter/gatherer society, killed the fat one, and established some kind of public speaking ritual involving a conch.
So we took Sam into the main church where she did fairly well until this last Sunday when she decided that what the world needed was a more noise. Imagine the priest asking us to pause in respectful silence during prayer:
Priest: ...And the needs that we hold silent in our hearts.
Congregation: [Respectful Silence]
Samantha: Du-da-du-DAAAAAAAHHHHHHIIIIEEEEEE!! [Laughs]
Me: Damnit!
But we're trying. Now, some pictures:
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This is my favorite picture of Sam in quite some time. Geralyn picked up a packet of foam letters from the $1 bin at Target and we dumped them in the bath to make Alphabet-And-Sam Soup. The packaging for the letters was emblazoned with the claim "Educational!" presumably because they're ...letters. Which I guess makes them educational in the same way that a keyboard is educational. But Sam loves them, and we both giggle when I use them to spell out curse words while Mommy is in the other room.
You may also notice Sam sitting in something fancy. This is the shopping cart liner that Geralyn picked up, what I like to call her "cart condom." Studies have shown that shopping carts are home to over twelve trillion different kinds of bacteria, some of them the size of small dogs. So it was important to protect them from Samantha, who can get really dirty.
Sam and Ger have also been keeping up with her Friday playgroup, which is great because it gets them out of the house and lets the both interact with humans other than myself. In fact, Ger found out the other week that there are actually two playgroups in our area. I immediately started laughing at the idea, mainly because I was envisioning the turf war that would happen if they ever happened to both try and meet on the same turf on the same Friday afternoon. It involved that number from West Side Story, finger snapping, and lots of posturing by new moms with babies on their hips. Usually when I start giggling at nothing in particular, it's because I'm thinking about this kind of stuff.
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Sam at the Saint Louis Club on Christmas evening. She was quite resplendent in her purple satin dress and Winnie The Pooh high chair. She was actually quite well behaved for most of the dinner, and when she got listless I cured it by taking her to see the various Christmas decorations.
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This is the back of my computer. As you can see, it's getting pretty bad. I wish they sold 12-inch network cables. With a few of those and a wireless mouse/keyboard, I could tame this jungle somewhat.
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It's 7:04 and you notice that your baby has a dirty diaper. Not just wet, but dirty. Thing is, at 7:15 it's going to be time to take her upstairs and give her a bath anyway.
What do you do? What do you do?
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We sometimes give Sam these little "Veggie Wagon Wheels" as a snack. They're about the size of her fist, and the first thing she always does is cram the whole thing in her mouth.
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Samantha eventually found the one cabinet we hadn't babyproofed. She made the most of it when she did, but fortunately we keep all the katanas and scorpions elsewhere. All she got was a bunch of tupperware, but she had a blast taking them out of the cabinet and banging the hell out of them.
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TiVo occasionally records some really weird stuff for us. The other day Ger was looking through its "TiVo Suggestions" and noticed something called "Go Baby!". It's this little 5-minute mini-show about a little baby and the disembodied hand that raises him. Baby does things that babies do, like going to the beach, playing with a toy drum, and presumably crapping his pants. The show looks like it's done on a double-digit budget using a few stock photographs and the demo version of Macromedia Flash. A typical scene looks like this:
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Sam, of course, loves the show. She's mesmerized by it. I, on the other hand, am totally creeped out by it. First of all, the low-budget, photo-and-Flash look of the thing makes me think that the titular Baby grew up on the wrong side of The Uncanny Valley. He looks human, but the way he moves make me think he's a robot covered in thick latex skin.
The worst part, though, is the voice of the disembodied hand. It's got this weird, overly exact enunciation on every tittering word. It makes me cringe and I'm always expecting its next words to be "It puts the lotion in the basket!"
I don't know. Maybe it's just me. You can see three episodes on Disney's website here.
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This looks like a screenshot from some new ornament hanging game. (Yeah, I know. I already did that joke before.)
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From Amazon:
I seem to be a bit heavy on Sci-Fi at the moment, though. I'll probably have to take a break after this and hit some of the nonfiction books I have lined up, or maybe even dip back into Stephen King.Red Mars opens with a tragic murder, an event that becomes the focal point for the surviving characters and the turning point in a long intrigue that pits idealistic Mars colonists against a desperately overpopulated Earth, radical political groups of all stripes against each other, and the interests of transnational corporations against the dreams of the pioneers.
This is a vast book: a chronicle of the exploration of Mars with some of the most engaging, vivid, and human characters in recent science fiction. Robinson fantasizes brilliantly about the science of terraforming a hostile world, analyzes the socio-economic forces that propel and attempt to control real interplanetary colonization, and imagines the diverse reactions that humanity would have to the dead, red planet.
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Sam's new popup toy thingamadoodle. For some reason, she absolutely hates the dog that pops up out of this thing. She slaps at it and pushes it back down the instant it appears.
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Sometimes, with all the toys in the world, Sam still gets a bit bored and has to wander off.
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Three hundred thirty-nine days. That's how long we were able to keep Samantha from eating cat food.
I actually don't think that's that bad a record. I would have liked to have gone longer, but one day this week we left the kitchen gate open. A few seconds later Sam went quiet. This is always a bad sign, and upon investigating we found Sam sitting on the kitchen tile in front of the cat's food bowl, gumming away on one of the nuggets. Apparently she liked it, because the next day she reached through the bars of the closed safety gate, snagged the cat food again, and tried to pull it through. If the cat liked Cheerios half as much, I'd let them switch. But fair's fair.
For those of you playing Baby Bingo, Sam's new trick for the week is clapping. Every once in a while she'll stop in her tracks, sit up, fling her palms at each other a couple of times, giggle, then go on about what she was doing. It's cute.
This clapping relieves us greatly, as we have a sticker gap we're trying to fill. Allow me to explain. Ger got one of those "Baby's First Year" calendars, which has stickers commemorating milestones like first smile, first solid food, starts crawling, plays patty-cake, starts walking, et cetera. We realized this week that Sam is almost a year old and we still have a LOT of stickers left, each one representing an unattained milestone. For me, it's like finding out that I've missed a bunch of secret areas or unlockable items in my favorite video game. For Geralyn, oddly enough, it's like her baby hasn't hit all the milestones she's supposed to. Unfortunately there is no "Eats Cat Food" sticker, so we often find ourselves down on the floor in Sam's face, clenching a fist full of stickers and shouting "Come on! Play patty-cake! Do it! Patty-cake! COME ON! Come OOOOONNN!"
I'm sure we'll get the sticker, but some day we'll visit Sam in the asylum where she'll be rocking back and forth in the corner, muttering "Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker's man. Bake me a cake as fast as you can. Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker's man..." I blame society for taking God out of public schools.
Here's some pictures:
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There's one thing I wished I could have gotten a picture of, but was never able to. Besides the clapping, Sam's new favorite thing is to shove her face into a mound of soap bubbles when taking a bath. I don't know if she's trying to drink the water or what, but when she comes back up she usually has a full bubble beard and a perplexed look on her face. And we laugh, because we finally get to put the "Eating Soap" sticker on the calendar.
One thing you may notice from those pictures is how freaking big Sam is getting. What's really weird to me is that the growth is so gradual that I don't notice it on a day-to-day basis. It's not like we heard a popping noise in her nursery one morning and went in to find her her current size, but just compare the pictures above with some of her earlier photos and it's amazing nonetheless. One short-lived tradition that I really wish we'd kept up was taking a picture of her next to my stuffed dinosaur week after week after week. The idea was to give a constant reference point for her growth. This is my only New Year's Resolution: starting with her first birthday, I'm going to start doing this again, every week. I think it'll be really fun, and a year-long montage of such photos will make a really neat picture someday.
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Santa and his jingle balls. Bells. Jingle bells.
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Sam enjoyed the paper and boxes that her Christmas presents came in almost as much as the toys themselves.
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This is all that was left of my beautiful block tower after Sam got done with it.
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