Including this
Month: April 2007
Outing
Last Saturday (21 April) the folks and I took J, K, and L on an outing to the old homestead.
(The somewhat cheesy music is Brian Eno, surprisingly enough. I used it because of the title: “Deep Blue Day.”)
My New Hero
How easily are people manipulated? How quickly can someone change a complete stranger’s will? Just how fragile are we, mentally speaking? A few videos from skeptic Derren Brown shows just how easily someone with skills can manipulate people.
- Cold Reading/Predictability
- Instant Conversion Part I
- Instant Conversion Part II
- Russian Scam
- How mediums work
- Voodoo
But by far, the best (a tie):
The Laugh
It’s something every parent eagerly awaits, I suppose — early laughs. Unlike early “smiles,” which are often the result of baby’s gas, laughs come from a sense of humor, and not a pressurized digestive system.
L has been laughing here and there, but only for a few moments, and then it’s just smiles. Recently, however, she has begun laughing for extended periods of time. Not extended enough for all of us huddled around her, but more than a few isolated seconds.
Sort of… (Redux)
Not only did I not provide the link to the video the first time. It turned out that the video hadn’t even uploaded properly.
Chinese Math
America, in general, is lagging far behind a lot of the world regarding education, and this is particularly true with science and math.
Who’s ahead of us? It might be easier to ask who isn’t ahead of us.
Not surprisingly, the Chinese, in their quest for world domination (Mwa-ha-ha!), not only have cheap labor on their side; they also have a higher level of mathematics achievement, I’d venture.
The BBC recently put up two questions from two tests: one, a test intended for first-year university students in English schools; the other, a question from a Chinese pre-entrance exam.
Here’s the English problem:
That’s pretty simple. Even I, having used no geometry for close to twenty years now, can do that with no problems.
Here’s the Chinese problem:
Sort of…
There’s a definite developmental order almost all infants follow. Sitting comes before standing. Crawling comes before walking. Babbling comes before talking. Liquids come before solids. It’s all very regimented in the child’s development.
Or so I thought.
L has been challenging that preconception, though. Now, the Girl absolutely and very resolutely does not want to sit. She wants to stand. Sort of. We’ve been burping her simply by setting her on bottom and letting the pressure that exerts on her belly (when she leans over slightly) force out all the offending air. Now, she simply extends her feet when we move her from a horizontal to vertical position, and it’s virtually impossible to get her simply to sit.
Sitting is one thing. This is quite another.
Update I somehow didn’t provide the link to the video. That’s been corrected.
Homestead
Over the weekend, my folks and I took K and J on a quick tour of Bristol — my hometown. As Steve Earle sing’s, “Ain’t nothin’ brings ya down like your hometown.” Talk about making someone feel old. The realization that what happened at that street corner or in that church building was not merely a couple of years ago but more like fifteen or twenty plants my feet solidly in my mid-thirties.
We began the weekend with a trip to Natural Tunnel.
Then it was off to Bristol, stopping at South Holston Dam first:
By the time we got to Bristol, we simply decided to stay in the car and show J downtown (such as it is — though much more lively than when I lived there) and the old house.
“Background Check? We don’t need no stinkin’ background check”
Cho Seung-hui went through the mandatory background check before buying the guns he used in his rampage. No criminal record, no problem.
Yet…
- He’d been admitted to a mental health care unit within the last eighteen months.
- Teachers and students alike commented on his disturbing behavior.
- Complaints had been made about his behavior.
- A professor had raised concerns about the content of his writing.
But what kind of a background check could have discovered all this?
If if someone has recently received significant mental health care in the same state he’s trying to buy a gun, it’s conceivable that that information could be available. But since there’s no national database of such information, all one would have to do is cross the state line.
Do we want a national database to record that kind of information? I don’t think I do.
Do we want to have background checks that include interviews with former educators? Is that even feasible?
Just what kind of background check can stop someone like this from getting a gun? The only solutions I can think of involve national databases and inquiries into very personal information.
Note to Self
The Girl has a tendency to pee right after her diaper has been taken off. Perhaps it’s the freedom of being diaper-less; perhaps it’s the air on her bare bottom; perhaps it’s just a sense of the theoretically forbidden; perhaps it’s simply chance. Nonetheless, the Girl likes to pee diaper-less.
And so, what to do? If you’re lucky, you catch it all in the diaper you just put off. In case that doesn’t work out, there’s the hope that you remembered to put a cloth diaper just under the Girl’s bottom to catch accidents. But if both plans fail, there’s only one alternative: put her on the bed briefly while you pull the cloth liner off the changing pad.
Here, a question arises: why? Rather, why now? Because we don’t want the Girl to lie in her mess? Well, she does that until we change the diaper anyway. Really, it doesn’t make sense.
And here’s why: What if the Girl, while lying bare-bottomed on bed, decides, “Now is a good time for a BM”?
For the Grandparents
Nana finally got to hold the Girl for an extended period of time — a genuine miracle when Pa-Paw is around.
Wednesday Afternoon Hands
The Girl is getting control of her hands. They’re still jerky, and this is a cause of great frustration. “Get used to it,” I say. “Not being able to get your hands to do exactly as you wish is something that plagues us for our entire lives.”
But she has, I think, finally realized that those things sticking out from her shoulders are hers and under her control. So she’s reaching for things. She’s holding things. She’s flinging things, though somewhat accidentally.
And once a little almost-four-month-old gets that ability, where does everything go? Straight to the mouth.
Tricks
The Girl has been learning how to grab things with her hands and then actually do something more — move it, hold it, bring it towards her mouth. Lately, I’ve been putting a clean cloth diaper over her head and seeing if she can pull it off. If I leave some wrinkles for her to grab, she usually does.
Tonight, however, she used her head — but not literally.
Irony
A woman spends a fair amount of time at Ingles wiping off the handle of the shopping cart and anything near it, and then goes in and buys seemingly countless amounts of soda…
Roll
Lots of rolls — bank-and-roll, dinner rolls, credit roll, drum roll, sausage roll, Charles Rolls, bank roll, spring roll, barrel roll, Swiss Cake rolls, fat rolls, egg roll, shake-rattle-and-rolls, rock-and-roll,
But none of them can compare to this roll.
In the Dark
For the first time in ages, K and I slept in the dark last night.
No, not the “first time in ages.” The first time in almost four months.
Since L’s birth, we’ve kept a small red light on beside the bed. You never know when the girl’s going to wake up in a pacifier panic, or spit up and need emergency cleaning, or any number of other horrid, life-threatening things.
But last night, K thought we should do an experiment — open the blind to the window on her side of the bed and see if that provides enough light. And it did.
And so for the first time in weeks and weeks, I lay there in the dark, no red light filling the room with an oddly calm-yet-angry glow (red light is just really not all that pleasant at all), and it honestly felt as if it was the firs time in my life that I’d slept in the dark. It felt like going to bed without brushing my teeth, or coming home without hugging, kissing, and playing with the girl, or eating cereal with skim milk — it just felt unnatural.
Next step — get the girl to stay in her crib all night, even in the midst of needing a 1:00 a.m. feeding…
New Toy
When I got a new toy as a kid, the hardest thing to do was to leave it at home every morning when I left for school. When I got back, I was so excited to be able to play with it again.
With L, it’s the same, only the feelings are more intense, not to mention more significant.
The best part of it is the smile and the giggles I now get when I return home from work.
Unless she’s sleeping.
The Visit
Oh, that Papa is sly. A planned Easter visit across the mountain can be turned around (Let someone else do the driving for once!) by simply throwing one’s back out. Then the parents can bring the granddaughter to the grandparents!
I’ll have to remember that.
Of course, the one who spent the most time with the Girl was the old man…
If it weren’t for the fact that Nana is so sensible, that girl would be so spoiled that she’d stink worst than durian.
The Mobile
Now playing at a YouTube near you: The Mobile.
A stirring drama about a little girl, a mobile, and the bond between them. With an all-star cast and a classic sound track, it’s sure to become a classic.