Madeline was reported to have taken five full baby steps while standing on Tuesday night. Word travelled fast about it through the parent network such that I didn't need to tell either pair of parents about it before they knew. I didn't even have to write about it. Since I was unable to see this first hand and I was interested in capturing some first steps video I tried multiple times to coach Madeline to reproduce the feat. My attempts were failures because the likelyhood of her taking a step on cue while the camera is set-up and she is coached to standing is about one in five thousand, or about the same as peeling back the prize on a McDonalds cup and winning something significant like a happy meal. I also don't have a video camera. I was trying to use my old Canon Powershot and it is becoming slowly more and more unreliable. She did take a couple of steps for me while the camera wasn't rolling so I can confirm Sarah's assertion that she is starting to walk.

Yesterday amidst the shuffle of the afternoon while Sarah was on a cell phone call in the living room and I was staring at the ceiling in Madeline's bedroom Madeline discovered that the coffee table is also a dangerous object. She lost her balance and landed with her lip on the table. So the next thing I knew I was helping Sarah to clean blood coming out of her lip and pressing ice in a paper towel onto it. I was also the guy calling the pediatrician's office to ask the question of whether she needed to have stitches or not and getting pushed to an answering machine. It was a messy scene but the end result was that Maddie didn't need stitches but does have a gross looking fat lip.

The night didn't go as well as normal. Madeline awoke at about midnight and wouldn't return to sleep. I tried bringing her into the bedroom and she felt that it was playtime in the bed. Then Sarah and I each tried a turn at rocking her to sleep in her room but whenever either of us loaded her into the crib she awoke. We then returned her into the bed where she continued to try to play and make dinosaur noises. Next we tried sleeping on the floor with her in her room or at least sleeping while she played with the toys, stood-up, and made Godzilla noises and motions including banging stacking cups. Finally she went to sleep for about an hour and Sarah moved to the bed while I slept on the floor but she awoke again and I brought her back to the bed where she nursed to sleep. It felt like a pretty long night and I am sure we lost some key sleeping hours. It was the kind of night where Sarah was wondering how or why two children are possible for anyone.

BUT she is walking, falling, and partying all night long.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to complain about the Baby Wordsworth product that I purchased as a component of a box set. The problem that I have with it is the long trailer that has been inserted into the video for the "Little Einsteins" television show, the upcoming Disney Channel version of it, and the web site. I purchased these products as a way to educate my child and to expose her to positive learning experiences and this two minute long trailer is entirely inappropriate within this product. It is highly commercial, can't be fast forwarded, not relevant to an 11 month old, and prevents me from immediately playing the DVD that is appropriate for my daughter. I hope that Mrs. Clark recalls the fun of having an infant and the short bits of time available for doing something like starting a video while preparing for a day.

My recommendation to both the Disney Corporation and to the specific Baby Einstein corporation is to remove such trailers in the DVDs as well as to shorten the sequence from loading the DVD to when the actual DVD starts. Otherwise in the future people like us will recommend products that do so instead of these to our many friends who are about to be first time parents.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was thinking of the problems that the airlines are having with screening luggage now that people are putting larger bags and more bags through due to increased security restrictions. When I thought back to our trip to California my general take was that baggage as a whole is a major pain in the butt. You have to get to the airport early because of it then you have to wait longer afterwards because of it. I heard on the report that some people have started to Fed-Ex their luggage to their destination in advance. This makes a lot of sense and could be taken to an extreme for an airline such that it covered "No baggage" flights as a specialty and re-routed all luggage through a non-carrier route including delivery to and from the doorstep of the passenger's leaving location and destination. That way when I got to my arrival city I would just need transportation to my hotel and my luggage would already be there when I arrived. If there wasn't any luggage on planes then they could board and leave faster with less time to turn them around, have less security issues with the baggage, reduce overhead related to handling the baggage in expensive airport locations and with large numbers of staff. Maybe the planes themselves could be re-engineered to hold more people or provide better and more comfortable seating on the plane because there wasn't any baggage on it.

Even if it doesn't happen... it would be a pretty cool concept.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At dinner tonight we were having a blast with Madeline playing the "Where is the" game. We added the feedback of clapping and massive approbation whenever Madeline figured out the item that we were asking her to find. She would clap along with us and had a grin on her face a mile wide.

Posted by Dan Housman at 01:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As often happens when I try to use my computer as a television I ran into a glitch tonight. I was looking to watch an episode of an HBO television show on my PC. I opened the file in Windows Media Player and it was incredibly choppy whenever I increased the size to "Full Screen". So Sarah and I watched at the smaller window size and got stiff necks trying to stretch into a position where we could see the little TV box on the monitor. I tried solutions like increasing the priority of Windows Media Player in the task manager and killing processes that didn't look useful and stopping those things like Skype that always start on the boot but had no luck in resolving the problem.

So I got up in the middle of the night thinking maybe a defragmentation would resolve the problem. I went to defragment and since it is a Windows 2000 Pro box with 80 Gig of disk space I had a lot of time on my hands. So I looked around for how to stop things from starting-up. The best solution is the tool called System Configuration Utility. It doesn't come with Windows 2000 but seems compatible. I downloaded a version of msconfig.exe and used it to uncheck / disable all of the pesky things that boot with the computer including a couple that looked like they had malware objectives. I rebooted and checked the file that was choppy in Windows Media Player and lo and behold it wasn't choppy. So hopefully it is resolved for now and I don't need to rebuild the whole PC just to watch a TV show on it.

Posted by Dan Housman at 01:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People are always fascinated with red headed people. If a child has red hair then people are likely to ask them the question “Where did you get that red hair?” A neighbor of ours mentioned that one red headed child in their family was coached to reply: “That was all they had left.”

Madeline has been providing some interesting advances in her quest to evolve into a fully functioning human being. The first thing that I found was when I asked her what sound the sheep made she said “Bah Bah Bah”. She doesn’t have a need for much more than one consonant at time given that her vocabulary for speaking is about two words even if I include the “bah bah” as being the sound a sheep makes rather than a random coincidence. Most of what she says is a consonant followed by “Ah”. So she can say lah, lah, lah or nah, nah, nah (which we believe means hungry OR banana). The one exception is the word for cat which is just KKKKCHHHHCHHH. I was hoping to teach her to combine the word for cat with her la la stuff to say challah but upon asking her on a following day what sound a sheep made she looked at me with a blank stare.

The more important thing isn’t that she can speak some incomprehensible babble but that she can demonstrate basic comprehension of what we are saying and the world around her. Sarah showed this to me last night when she offered me the treat of watching the game – find that word. So Sarah would say – “Where is the fish” and Madeline would reach among the objects in her tray and grab a goldfish cracker. Then she would say “Where are your shoes?” and she would look down at her shoes. Or best of all “Where is daddy?” and she would look at me and smile.

Madeline also made the sign for a duck when looking at a duck picture. So we need to stop swearing and start realizing that our daughter is no longer likely to be even in a competition with a slime mold with regards to listening comprehension. It’s another exciting time. Everything in Madeline’s development is not going linear but instead going exponential right now. She is about to walk. She can express things. She can learn things. It’s just awesome.

We also bought a laser pointer for the cat who is unable to determine that it is an inanimate object. I can trick her into believing that the laser dot is hiding under the bed. This is probably the point in evolution where the baby starts to get payback for such slow development over the kitten and can become the master of her little world.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Among the most cost-efficient toys with regards to entertainment hours per dollar, other than the free ones like an old box, has been the cat’s mouse on a fishing rod toy. Both Annabelle and Madeline enjoy the toy. Madeline is able to hold the rod in her hand and give Annabelle the required motion to the mouse from atop her high chair. On Friday morning I was watching Madeline on the floor and she grabbed the yellow rod in one hand and the attached mouse in the other hand then stood up and held both above her head with the distinct expression of triumph. This was one of the first few times that Madeline has ever stood without holding onto a table, chair, or cat litter box so it was a very impressive feat to me.

Annabelle wasn’t quite as impressed as I was. The basic response she seems to have to Madeline being able to stand is that Madeline is now a perceived threat that needs to be neutralized. The standing posture with arms wide for a cat is an aggressive one. So when I was looking away from the two of them I looked back to find Annabelle actively boxing Madeline with her paws and scaring Madeline into a crying fit. So now we need to be even more vigilant than before. We need to watch the baby but also make sure that we don’t have a small scale Roy incident. I am not sure of how big the cat that mauled Roy was but Madeline is quite small so I don’t want anything bad to happen between her and our kitten. So I’ve been trying to split them up if I can’t monitor them directly. Madeline still isn’t afraid of Annabelle and they have also been feuding over her pink Madeline monogrammed chair. The chair seats either one baby or one cat but the most common scenarios that I have seen is that Madeline goes to sit in the chair and Annabelle immediately decides to join her in the seat or Annabelle sits in the chair and defends it appropriately from any advances from unwanted babies. Maybe we need a second chair.

The babysitter search has generated some results although we still don’t have a very stable plan. So far we have a babysitter on Tuesday and Thursday with my mom doing the babysitting on Wednesday. On Monday and Friday we aren’t sure what we are doing. Sarah became quite interested in the idea of day care when my mom suggested that Madeline might be cranky at the end of the day because she is bored due to a lack of interaction with other kids her age. So we are in a search for a good local day care to fill in a couple of days per week. The problem is that on Friday none of them called Sarah back and Madeline has been standing and waiting for a solution whenever she gets a chance.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Someone asked me to link to the birds central site from this blog. While I saw no relevance to what I generally care about I did notice that they had a section for discussing pigeon racing. I then linked on to the American Racing Pigeon Union which begins with the question....

"Do you fit the profile? We find that this hobby has a great appeal to those who enjoy working with animals, to those who appreciate athleticism, to those who like friendly, wholesome competition. If you find yourself in one or more of these descriptions....be careful, you may discover that the allure of these amazingly athletic birds is overpowering. You can seek out your own comfort level with the birds.

If you desire a lower-key approach, with only a handful of homing pigeons for the family to enjoy, that's certainly an attractive approach for many. The spectrum also includes those who are deeply committed to racing. Races range in distance from 100 miles to 600 miles, with 300 miles being among the most popular distances.
"

Maybe I should try racing pigeons although I should probably go with the lower key approach of having only a handful of homing pigeons for our family to enjoy. Sounds like fun, right?

Posted by Dan Housman at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night I had trouble sleeping. It was probably some residual jet lag. I passed the time in the middle of the night by reading A Man in Full. The chapters were both stressful because I had gotten to the point in the book when everyone's life is falling apart. One guy had a bad day where he got towed and ended up killing someone in the towing lot because he was so frustrated. When I finally got back to sleep I had a dream where I was looking at a lake and I noticed that at night a large dog looking like a dalmation was sleeping at the top of the water a few inches beneath the surface. I wondered how this made sense and then saw other dogs sleeping beneath the surface. The next morning in the dream I went back to look at the lake and could see through the port hole clearly down to the bottom. The dogs were diving down to where other intact animals like cows, pigs, and horses were corpses at the base of the lake and the dogs feeding off of them throughout the day. I then looked to the edge of the lake where I saw a gigantic snapping turtle that was beyond dinosaur scale. It had a long neck about four feet in diameter and rather than having one oval plate it had a series of them fused together to form six figure eight like indentations in a giant shell. The snapping turtle was reaching its long neck into the water to eat the carcasses at the bottom of the lake.

It also reminded me of a dream that I had a few days ago. I was with Madeline and her adopted brother at a playground. I looked away for a moment and both of them were missing. I looked throughout the area and couldn't find them. When I asked people if they had seen either they said they had but not recently. I awoke in a sweat with a giant adrenaline rush when I realized that they must have been abducted.

These dreams seem to be new and possibly related to the rewiring of becoming a parent. One more obvious in its relationship than the other.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)