miscellaneous

Because I said I would: The rest of the Las Vegas trip was fine. We went to a children's museum that was raved about online, but getting there was an adventure... parts of Las Vegas are pretty sketchy, let's leave it at that. Upon arriving, figuring we'd at least take a cab back, we were informed by the nice folks at the desk that when they've tried calling cabs for people in the past, they never show up. So we had about 20 minutes at the (small, underwhelming) museum before we had to hoof it back to the bus depot. Friends of ours came from LA to see us (yay Brett and Val!) so we had a very nice time hanging out with them, generally one of us while the other was presenting/schmoozing at the conference. On the last night, we went out to one of the fabled casino buffets with J's lab and both kids... Sam had only adjusted a little bit to the 3-hour time difference, so as we stood in line at 7:45PM he was fading fast. At one point as he was eating I glanced at him to see him nodding off, eyes closed, while still chewing. I made sure he stayed awake to finish the mouthful, then hefted him onto my lap, where he sprawled, sound asleep, through the rest of dinner. Meanwhile, Bean jumped and socialized enthusiastically in the laps of various people around the table, being traded off while folks went back for seconds (and thirds) of ok-but-why-do-people-rave-about-this food. I never thought I'd say this, but I feel like I'd go back to Vegas again, given the chance (i.e. another conference there), just to have the grown-up version of the experience for a night or two... Cirque du Soleil show, nice dinner out, Bellagio fountains viewed not just from the cab window while driving by, etc. Eh, maybe someday.

Kid update: Bean is in full-on stranger-charming thousand-watt smile mode-- when I took her for a passport photo recently (upcoming conference in Montreal) she lay calmly on the white piece of cardstock they lay on the carpet for baby photos and beamed, until the Passport Photo Dude said she could come back any time. Her 6-month ped. appointment is this week, so we'll have an update on her stats. Sam, meanwhile, is full of clever, creative word usages, and is still notably sweet and affectionate. For the past couple of weeks, he has told me occasionally to guess how much he loves me, and then he'll answer extravagantly. Recently: "I love you as much as all the love in the world, AND all the love in your imagination, AND a truck full, AND a container full."

In the car, he'll announce, "An idea just flew into my head!" (And then expound at length on said idea.)

He asks about the meanings of words a lot. Recent curiousities: marvelous (from Big Bird's singing of abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz), and convenient. When I explained the meaning of convenient, Sam thought for a moment, then wanted to know why it existed when we already have the word handy.

He's also very sweet with Frida... he loves to entertain her, as shown in the previous post, but he also tries to help her out if she's unhappy (unless she's doing her patented Car Freak Out, in which case he zones out... there really is no other way to deal). A few days ago, he held out his hand to her, saying apologetically, "All I have for you is a handful of love!" Here he is entertaining her in a monster get-up. (Completed mid-way through with a John Deere cap.)




Sam's also loving his eurhythmics class, which seems much better suited to his temperament than the group piano lesson he was taking in the fall/winter... more movement and creativity, less sitting and attending.

I put together the crib this weekend (J. was gone, and I got tired of looking at the parts, brought up from the basement two weeks ago... and was pretty pleased with my solo Ikea-assembly prowess, I have to admit, aided only by Sam helping find the right hardware bits from the plastic baggy). So now Bean can turn over in her sleep-- that is, when she's not in our bed.

videos

More re. Vegas later. For now, two little videos. First: Bean thinks her brother is the coolest thing ever. Also the most entertaining:

And then, the bookstore Sam made with Stephanie (our nanny) today, complete with signs:


Hope you are all well and warm.

Vegas, (with) baby (and kid)

It's funny explaining to a 4-year-old what gambling is.
me: "People spend a lot of money playing games with a chance to win a lot more money"
Sam: "That sounds great! then you can buy a lot of expensive things!"
me: "Well, but most people don't win, so they just lose a lot of money trying."
Sam: "So why do they do it then?"
me: "Well, some people think it's fun."

After spending the morning covering his ears against the onslaught of noise while trying to win tickets at the arcade at Circus Circus (made even worse by the fact that loud noises and flashing lights happened in response to the very acts that won tickets), Sam just nibbled a bit at lunch. We hung out in the hotel room for a while after that, "resting", and then J. joined us for the afternoon-- took a cab to see the Shark Reef, then another cab to go to an outdoor playground (best thing we did all day). (Hadn't realized that this is such a car-centered town! we should have rented a car. Oh well.) We had dinner there after Sam ran around for a bit, but he was uninterested even in the dumplings we got (!!). Then after 3 bites of pizza he barfed copiously all over himself and the seat. We cleaned him up in the bathroom, boxed up the rest of dinner, left a big tip, and made a quick exit. On the cab ride back (with plastic bag at the ready), we at least got to see the Strip all lit up. He seems better now, crashed out on the pull-out couch. Poor exhausted little guy. Let's hope it's just exhaustion and not a bug-- fingers crossed.

Bean is in much better shape, but then jetlag and long trip mean a lot less when you just sleep and eat and poop wherever and whenever, and weird hyperstimulating surroundings are not so bad when you see them snuggled against all the sensory familiarity of mom or dad. We'll see how she does tomorrow with J. (and bottles), since I'll be at the conference for a few 2 or 3-hour chunks.

signs, maps, caterpillars

Sam's chart phase extended into signs. See if you can figure this one out:



Got it? "No feet on the grass." There have been DOZENS of signs.

Yesterday he got all self-referential:



("No do-not-allowed signs allowed!")

And the other charts, diagrams, and illustrations continue. Can you guess this one?



It's the digestive system! It was featured in a recently-Netflix'd The Magic Schoolbus (GREAT show, for anyone else with science-minded kids). Those gray things are teeth; the mouth leads to the esophagus and the stomach, with food and stomach acid, then the small and large intestines, and then Sam wrote "no" to indicate that the Magic Schoolbus and its passengers did NOT get released into the toilet.

This next one is a map of our house. Not to scale (those little gray and yellow boxes in the upper left are our respective bedrooms), but all the rooms are on there in their approximate locations.



a geyser:



Recently a periscope caterpillar visited our house:



And this evening after dinner the caterpillar came back, sans periscope, to examine the Bean:



She was delighted to make its acquaintance (as she is generally delighted to make anyone's acquaintance):



Bean's rolling and (assisted, of course) jumping continue. And she gets bored, now, just watching the world go by, so all of the old baby toys, and a handful of new ones, are up from the basement/unpacked/out:



(She can be very serious when she's playing.)

She and the nanny go for a walk at least once a day, and then they take the bus across town to go get Sam. It all seems to work very well (and it's so nice to come home to happy, engaged kids).

Frida had pumpkin for the first time this past week (and several times since), and likes it best mashed into her rice cereal. Banana was not a hit.

We're heading to Las Vegas for the second half of this week-- J. and I are both presenting at a conference, and figured we'd bring the kids. It should be some combination of fun and horrifying (but I think that would be true of Las Vegas with or without kids). Fortunately our presentations are not at the same time. Also, we were alerted to the presence of bedbugs in some LV hotels by a savvy postdoc of J's, so we switched hotels after finding a couple of reports of bugs in the one we'd originally reserved. [shudder] Wish us luck!

Two final notes of the crafty/home-y variety: First, I was inspired by this post on one of my favorite-ever blogs to start baking bread, and have done so twice (two batches, so far 5 loaves with one final loaf's worth of dough in the fridge). It's FANTASTIC. I think I am now officially a regular bread baker. Had never made it before, and despite being left out to rest an hour too long twice, it's been very good each time. (I used a mix of 2/3 white and 1/3 wheat flour, with wheat germ and ground flax seed, and leaving out the vinegar since none of us really likes sourdough.)

And second, I have no idea where I got in my head that I wanted to make felt balls (not from that blog, which I only found after searching for instructions), but I did, and was obsessed for a week, until my supplies arrived in the mail. It was a good intuition, though-- I love them. Have made a few; will post pics in a bit.

So, things have gotten extra crunchy around here-- flax seed in bread and wool felt in balls. (And a sorry, sorry election result, but I won't get into that here. Sigh.)

Sam doesn't usually fall asleep with a stuffed animal, but Boo has made a resurgence recently, and one night when I went in to turn off Sam's light, I found this:



(Boo's full name is Deshaboo Hallay. Boo for short. I thought I'd blogged about this when he was first named (by Sam, in case that's not obvious), but I can't find the post, so maybe it was never written.)

stuff in the world

This past weekend we went to the Peabody Essex Museum for their Oshogatsu (Japanese New Year's Day) festival (Japan celebrates on January 1st, for those of you who don't know, but the PEM had their festival a bit late). Sam drew this afterwards so he could remember to tell Daddy everything he'd seen:



(There are lines connecting each illustration with numbers designating the order in which we saw them, but it's easier to explain starting at the top left and going clockwise: we saw paintings; we made a wood-block print of a tiger head; we watched a professional Japanese calligrapher; we painted a papier-mache daruma; we watched taiko drumming; and (in the center), we saw a very cool exhibit of animals made out of trash.)

Sam is very into cataloguing things with illustrations these days. Here's one showing a list of ways houses can catch on fire (among other things: lightning; a match; leaving the oven door open):



He also likes to document events, like this morning when he and I bumped heads and hurt my ear (that's me frowning and him looking serious, as he explained it):



The other night in the car on the way to meeting Uncle Dan and Aunt Sara for dinner, Sam was musing at length on what it will be like when he grows up. He thought that maybe he'll get married some day, and will have a baby. "If you want to, that will be nice," I said, and he replied, "No it won't! We'll have to have a construction site so we can build a new house, and we'll have to find a babysitter,..." I pointed out that they can live in a house that is already built, and then he said maybe he would like to live in an apartment building. And that he would like to live in New York City (not that he has been there, but ok). "Will you come visit me and Daddy?" I asked, and he said, "Of course!" "Oh good," I said, "I will like that." And he said, "I will visit lots! But not when you are very very old." "Really? Why not then?" I asked, and he didn't answer, and I said that then I would miss him, but he said that he would visit when we get sick, just like in Love You Forever, which I guess they'd read at school at some point recently (I frankly find this book weird, though I generally like Robert Munsch a lot). Ah, so that explains it. Anyway.

Bean is rolling very determinedly-- she traverses surprising stretches of floor, albeit not altogether intentionally, by rolling back and forth, flipping over and back and ending up spun 180 degrees and several feet from where she started. She sleeps on her tummy all the time now (like the rest of the family, for that matter) but we can't leave her on our bed because she even rolls in her sleep; time to switch out the cosleeper for the crib. She is also getting more and more interactive with the physical world. The other day she was hanging out in her bouncy seat in the kitchen while I was cooking dinner, and the big bouncy ball happened to be near her. She discovered to her chortling delight that it would roll back when she pushed it away, and spent quite some minutes engaged in pushing it and gleefully watching it roll back:



She adores Sam, lighting up and laughing aloud whenever he comes to entertain her, which is often. (He also likes to pick her up, and it's hard to explain to him why he can't do this without an adult spotting him-- which we do, obviously.) She's bonding well with our nanny, though she still only takes as much milk from bottles as she needs to in order to not be too hungry (just like her brother did at this age).

We added this monstrosity to our home last night, courtesy of Craig's List, where it will return the first moment she tires of it. (Why oh why must baby gear be so eye-stabbingly ugly? and this is with the light-blinking, music-playing toy on the front removed.) In the meantime, she is just barely figuring out how to jump in it, but I think once she catches on she will looooove it. As it is, she spends many happy minutes hanging out with her toes on the ground and various of her toys hooked onto the front:



And to end: the sign Sam made tonight to clarify his feelings about bedtime. With two exclamation points, because when I read the first one with just some emphasis he apparently decided it wasn't exclamatory enough:

animacy intuitions

One of the things I study is how we perceive other minds, including in things that don't actually have them (more generally, how we attribute/project features of human minds to things that aren't human, or in other words anthropomorphizing). A related question is what we think of as alive; for example, the research of a friend and colleague has shown that kids (and sometimes even adults) make errors in deciding that things that move themselves (like clouds and fire) are alive (and conversely, are less likely to think of trees and bushes as alive than animals). So I was especially interested this afternoon, as we left a playdate, to hear Sam ask, "Mommy, are robots alive?" "What do you think?" I asked, perfectly casual, and he considered just a moment before saying "No. They sometimes move, though. But cars move, and cars aren't alive, right?" Heh.

It has been a day of much conflict, between Sam and various friends (we had friends with a younger kid over for brunch, and then in the afternoon had a playdate with a former preschool classmate); between a friend and the friend's brother while Sam was playing with (or, at least, near) both of them; between Sam and me; and even between Bean and me, in that she has taken to biting me hard with her gums while nursing, and I haven't figured out how to stop her (when I say, firmly, "no biting" she thinks it's a great game). I am very glad that both children are asleep, dishes are done, meals for the week are planned, and all I have left to do for today is go through a foot-high stack of non-critical but non-junk mail, and then pack my spanky new backpack for tomorrow's spanky new return to work. (Let the twice-daily pumping begin in earnest...)

rice cereal

Frida had some rice cereal (mixed with breast milk) yesterday for the first time. She was skeptical.



She was more into it today:



(Sam thinks the cereal is nasty-- he seriously runs from the room gagging when I mix it up.)