Friday, August 31, 2007

Margaret bonding with her sibling


We're heading up to Philly tomorrow to spend the Labor Day weekend with the cousins, but in the meantime, Margaret paid some attention to her sibling even though s/he is still pretty quiet at this point. (Abby told me not to post pics of her with her big belly, but these are just too cute to pass up.)

Saturday, August 25, 2007

A new toy

We went to Baltimore today to hit the aquarium there. (Maggie and I went to the DC aquarium in the basement of the Dept of Commerce a week or so ago. Frankly, it was a huge disappointment for me. Too small, no really big or interesting fish, etc. But we were warned by all of the guidebooks which say: "Go to the aquarium in Baltimore since the one in DC is a letdown." Margaret did have fun in the DC aquarium, running around and pointing at all of the interesting sights, but I was bored.) We thought that a trip to Baltimore was a good idea since it was high time we went to that city to see the "rebirth" of the inner harbor area and, more importantly, to beat the heat since it was horribly hot and humid in DC.

Unfortunately, lots of other people had the same idea, so we would have had to wait for a substantial amount of time to get in unless we were willing to fork over a substantial sum to become members. Tempting as that was, we decided that the aquarium wasn't in the cards for the day. Which led to some fussing about having driven so far, getting stuck in traffic and so on without doing anything in the end except standing in the heat in Baltimore harbor. Margaret and Abby, on the other hand, were handling things pretty well.

While looking for parking after arriving in Baltimore, we spotted something called Port Discovery, the kids museum of Baltimore. A fortuitous sighting since we headed there after deciding not to wait for the aquarium. And, boy oh boy, did Maggie have a blast. She walked in and froze, apparently stunned by the chaos that she was witnessing. Port Discovery is a three story museum in an old warehouse with a big netted climbing thing in the center. Margaret was too young for that, but it looked right up the alley of the Philly cousins (although I had to wonder how often kids got stuck and started panicking in certain parts of the netting - I'm sure the people working there have some unbelievable stories.) But other parts of the museum were great for her. And kids of all ages everywhere! Running, yelling and fiddling with everything while parents followed close behind admonishing them to behave, watch out for the baby, slow down, etc. Margaret conked out almost immediately after we left, completely exhausted by all of the stimulation. Our introduction to kids' museums which, I have to say, appear to be pretty cool since you don't have to worry about social graces at all. My kid's nose is all snotty? That's ok, so is yours. My kid is yelling? Someone else will surely be louder. (We tried to hit the kids' museum in DC a month or so ago which ended with Maggie and me wandering around a somewhat sketchy neighborhood north of Union Station in the heat ago only to discover that the kids' museum here is closed until 2008.)

By the way, I heard calls to at least one Maggie and one Margaret while we were there so our old-fashioned name might be catching on.

But the key piece of entertainment for this post is the following movie. We got a new toy from our relatives in Shaker Heights after their college visit to Abby's alma mater, Dartmouth. Both Maggie and Maddie think that it's a blast. You really need to pay attention at the end of this video when Maggie starts to dance. Alas, I started to laugh and had to stop filming, so I didn't capture all of her cavorting. Abby has harangued me repeatedly for my failure as a filmmaker, but it's still pretty funny.



(Here's the attempt to upload the same video directly to Blogger. We'll see whether this works better than YouTube.)

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Our budding teenager

First, a soundtrack. For those of you who are older or feel like listening to something that is completely silly:

But for those looking for the real deal:


Margaret has not had a haircut yet. We've put that event off to make sure that we eventually avoid issues of gender confusion that appear to be inevitable with infants. Even when Maggie is dressed head to toe in pink, people often ask "How old is he?" The lack of a haircut has led to two developments regarding her hair. First, curls in the back and sides. We're not sure about the genetic source of her curls as both Abby and I have really straight hair. (My brother, Dan, did have curls in the back when he had his wicked soccer mullet, so there is some precendent in the family.) Second, her hair in the front has started to fall into her eyes. This gives her a pretty hip, almost Beatlesque, look. Something that teenagers really work to develop, I'd wager (although my sense of what the kids find hip these days is lacking.) When will she get her first haircut? I dunno, but rest assured the readers of this blog will hear ALL about it.

Her further teenage tendencies are as follows. (1) She likes to bellow when we try to keep her away from her pacifier. They don't use it in the toddler room, and she seems fine with that, but put her in the stroller and it's a litany of loud demands for her nuk-nuk. Can't have what you want? Object vociferously! A teenage tendency if I've ever seen one. (2) She's developed a persistent "smoker's cough" (as the people at the dog park call it), probably due to her exposure to lots of great new germs in the toddler room. (3) She wears jeans a lot since Papa has been dressing her lately in the morning. Tends to look fairly grubby leading Mama to question Papa's sense of style. (4) She's becoming oh so independent, something that the toddler room teachers, for better or worse, like to encourage.

My feeling is that this just foreshadows our experience 15 or so years from now. But I do know that her curfew will never be later than midnight since, as my maternal grandfather has always said, nothing good happens after midnight. Oh, the battles we'll have....

Saturday, August 18, 2007

The itsy bitsy spider...


Apparently, Margaret has been learning some songs at day care. She hasn't "transitioned" to the toddler room yet since we were told that she was "emotionally unprepared" to do so. We weren't sure what that meant - could our exceptional child be falling behind in some way? Especially troubling was the fact that Sean appears to be spending a lot of time in the toddler room. Now, Sean is a nice, very good humored kid. But he's a month younger than Margaret. And does he know the names of all of his classmates?!? Can he holler (somewhat nonsensical) orders to his caretakers?!? Do all of the caretakers rave about how "smart" he is?!?!? "Margaret is a genius!," I've heard Ms. LaDonya say a number of times. Do they also say that about Sean? I think not!

But after calming down a little bit, it turns out that Margaret is having some separation problems associated with the caretakers from the infant room. When one of them accompanies her to the toddler room, she's fine and starts playing with the other kids. But when she's on her own, she's unhappy. In the last week, however, she appears to be doing better in the toddler room, so it should just be matter of time before she's there for good.

But, to get back to the initial topic of this post, she seems to have learned some songs during her time in the toddler room. They've written notes on the reports that we take home about how Margaret has learned a new song, but I wasn't quite sure what that meant. Until she started babbling in a sing-song way while putting her thumb and forefinger together. The itsy-bitsy spider climbing the water spout, I realized. She especially likes to sing in the stroller - I'll hear a quiet lilting sound which, why you really listen to it, is quite clearly a rendition of the itsy bitsy spider. You do have to be fairly liberal in your interpretation of her vocalizing, but she's clearly singing and, given her superior intellectual skills, which obviously warrant a place of honor in the toddler room, there's no doubt that she's singing a specific song, namely the itsy bitsy spider.

(She also yelled - and I mean YELLED - "hiiii" and "bye bye" to numerous random people during an early morning trip to Safeway. It was cute until I realized that we were passing the same people again and again, and in any event, everyone within three aisles could hear her so she wasn't really making new friends with her enthusiastic vocalizing.)

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Galavanting around the country

While I've noted the absence of baby and mom, I haven't posted much about where they've gone. It turns out that our little Maggie has been quite the little traveller this summer.

First, she went to Abby's ancestral homeland, Washington, IL, where everyone apparently was quite taken with her.



Abby and the kid spent the weekend hanging out with Abby's high school friends. Central Illinois doesn't appeal to me too much (row after row of corn!) so Maddie and I spent that weekend backpacking through western VA. We learned that all of my backpacking stuff is way too geared for long trips which aren't in our future anytime soon. And we also learned that we're both getting older (and, as a result, can be pretty darn sore after a day of backpacking.)

Then, there was the trip to Green Lake, MN which I documented earlier. Again, Maddie and I didn't tag along since we sat at home and dealt with technological issues. But Margaret and Abby appear to have had a great time, although the kid was suffering from an ear infection which made her pretty fussy at certain times of the day. Apparently, the Green Lake crowd was NOT as wowed by lil' Margaret since she can bellow up a storm when she's not happy.



This past weekend, we went to the Delaware shore with the Philadelphia cousins. Just as I'm not a central IL fan nor am I a MN lake fan, I'm not much of a beach fan. Lots of sitting around accompanied by occasional bouncing in the water and lots of sand that gets into everything. But we had a pretty fun time. I liked the sea kayaks, Abby appeared to get some quality reading time in (starting the newest Harry Potter book - which required some notification to avoid spoilers from the other Harry Potter fans), and Maggie seemed to find her cousins just as entertaining as she has in the past. The kid did holler some this morning at around 5:30 AM (raising concerns that the neighbors would complain leading to the dreaded "loss of the security deposit" as threatened on notices throughout the house), but I don't think that the Philly relatives, with three kids of their own, can be scammed by the generally sweet baby since they know, as do Abby and I, that a little terror dwells just under the surface. We did hire Alex, the eldest cousin, to monitor Margaret for Saturday night. $3 was my offer (Alex held out for $5) with a $1 deduction for every incident involving blood. Luckily, no such events occurred as Alex was incredibly attentive of her little cousin. More, I think, than she often is with her own siblings. Perhaps, however, her parents haven't given her the appropriate incentives. Although monitoring Andrew would probably require a payment greater than $5 (at least, it would for me.)

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Technology issues redux

While the ladies of the household have been loitering by a lake in Minnesota, it's been a trying day here on the homefront for Maddie and me, dealing with various technological issues. (For those who are interested, I've taken advantage of my unlimited posting on Flickr to update and expand some earlier photos. So go back to May or so and check out the Cloud Peak and Cascades photos.)

First, when I woke up at 9:00 (really woke up again after my inital awakening at 6:30 AM - no kid so I can go back to sleep! whoo hoo!), I thought that it seemed a bit warm. Turns out that the compressor of our AC wasn't turning. We've had this problem before and had to call a repairman to come fix it, but my hope was that the AC may have been overworked by the heat wave that we've experienced lately. So I crossed my fingers, turned off the AC, and went grocery shopping. When I turned it back on after my return, it worked so now I'm crossing my fingers that we'll get through the summer and can worry about the AC when next summer rolls around.

Then I started getting the blue screen of death on my laptop. My laptop has been running slowly for a while, so I figured that I should just reinstall Windows. But before doing so and reformatting the hard drive, I wanted to get the stuff off the laptop's hard drive. Couldn't boot into Windows at all, so I used a trick involving a Linux boot disk to see if I could recover the data on the laptop before reformatting it. Eventually, I couldn't access the hard drive at all. Instead, I started getting a clicking sound which a Google search and our family tech guy in PA confirmed was the click of death indicating that my hard drive was fried. Result is that I've completely lost everything on that hard drive and have ordered a new one. Luckily, I didn't store much on that computer (yikes if I'd lost all the baby photos!), but I currently backing up all of the stuff from our desktop onto CDs.

A boring post, I'll admit. But I would also urge everyone to back up their stuff before their hard drive crashes. This is the second hard drive issue we've encountered over the last 6 months, and while we've been lucky not to lose anything, we're pushing it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But we've managed to escape unscathed. Still, I'm not going to push my luck any further.

Now, can I find a picture to sate those looking for kid-related material? Hmmmm... in honor of Green Lake, MN, we have:



Friday, August 3, 2007

Technological issues

Margaret and Mama are in Minnesota for the weekend, so Maddie and I have plenty of free time to screw around online after midnight. One thing that we've discovered is that our previous favorite picture hosting site, PictureTrail, has fairly draconian restrictions on the number of photos that they can store for you without a fee. Those of you who are big fans of the blog (sic) and like to look back through the archives (sic, seriously) may have noticed that the PictureTrail components of certain entries have lost some photos. This occurred when I tried to delete some photos to make room for new ones.

Looking around online for other picture hosts, I found a link that noted how to post slideshows from Flickr. If you feel inclined to look back through previous posts (check out the post just before this one, for example), you'll see that I've replaced some PictureTrail stuff with Flickr slideshows. Better resolution, I think, but without the neato effects that PictureTrail offered. I also think that if you, the reader, click on photos in the Flickr slideshow, it's easier for you to actually order those photos, if you're so inclined.

At first, I thought that I'd figured it out. Until I realized that Flickr also limited the number of slideshows that I could post on their site (and, hence, link to on the blog.) In the end, I had to buy a membership to Flickr to enable sufficient room for the various baby photos that MUST be posted here.

So my question is: Was my $25 wisely spent? Is the quality of the Flickr slideshows sufficiently better than the PictureTrail stuff to justify the cost? What about the ability to buy photos? Ah, the difficulties of technology. Lord knows, however, that once I've paid for UNLIMITED photo posting, I'll certainly take advantage of it. So look forward to UNLIMITED baby photos in the future!