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| - Basil just told me a story he made up in which Diego rescues the Little Einsteins, bless, his first crossover fanfic, I'm so proud! - Last night he and Papa had a serious conversation over who should have right of way, fire engines, or reindeer? - I'm really proud of XPFC right now, and missing those guys. I should try to keep up better with fb maybe. - And any of you friends of my hub on fb heard this one already, but the other night Bas was having a bath, and for the 3rd bathtime in a row had turned the bathroom floor into a lake. I asked DH if I was paying the price for his own wild childhood, because honestly, my boys are nothing like how I was as a child. We got into a discussion about it, using the word 'karma' and Basil got irritated, and roared at us, "I am not a karma!" - Sam loves to feed himself with a bowl and spoon, he loves the independence, even if he is still learning and very messy. He eats well now. hub has taken him for 3 nights in a row and last night he managed SIX hrs without a boobie. I nursed Bas to sleep last night with the resultant surplus milk, boobie win! - Lastly, a quick grammar qu, if anyone has time. Should the title of a relative be capitalized? I know it should if you are addressing the relative, like Basil said, "Hello Mama!" what about, "Donna loved her Grandfather." The mothers were in the kitchen, the fathers were in the den watching TV." ?? | ||||||||
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telemicus
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December 2nd, 2009
November 25th, 2009
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| Pacifier addiction aside, we are having a great time with Basil these days. He's logical, has a good memory, thinks things through before speaking, understands and covers all the bases. He's good at playing the Memory card game. Sam doesn't keep socks or shoes on for long, but he is interested in them and if you bring him a sock or shoe he holds his foot up for you to put it on and tries to put it on himself. I don't know why but something about the way he holds his foot out seems very advanced. He lost one sock at Shaila's baby class this week and I could see him scanning behind him where he had been crawling to try to see where it had gone. Just since yesterday really he has been walking everywhere, unless he really wants to book it, then he speed crawls!  | ||||||||||
| comments: 1 comment or you can talk to me |
![[mood icon]](http://telemicus.icons.ljtoys.org.uk/mi/dot.gif){kind=icon}
fullNovember 23rd, 2009
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| Basil passes gas as he's in the middle of a long stream of talking, then he pauses and giggles, saying, "my fart is talking to you, Mama!" Mama: "Oh yeah, what does it say?" Basil turns around and shakes his booty at me as he answers, "My fart says: I LOVE YOU, MAMA!" | ||||||||||||
| comments: 9 comments or you can talk to me |
November 4th, 2009
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| ( Pic Spam ) | ||||||||||
| comments: 5 comments or you can talk to me |
October 30th, 2009
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| Photos from FIL from last week ( click here ) | ||||||||||||
| comments: 3 comments or you can talk to me |
October 21st, 2009
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| BabySam was 1 on Tuesday. (No, I don't know how that happened either!) I will write about him for his birthday, I guess I will just do that here, stream of consciousness, because it may be that or nothing, my computer time is so limited. He is not yet walking but that is just fine with me, I'm not ready for his babyhood to end. He took his first steps between Papa and I on Tuesday. He has been fixed on me as his primary ever since hub went back to work a few months ago. He is most easily comforted by me, and if I pick him up after I haven't seen him for a few hours then he cries if I even think about setting him down again. He is insanely beautiful. His brown eyes have the most gorgeous shape. When he smiles everyone in the room turns into a puddle of goo. He still smiles and giggles easily although he is definitely experiencing normal stranger and separation anxiety. He loves his brother but his love is violent sometimes and Basil gets slapped, headbutted, bit and kicked quite a bit and is very saddened by this, even though they are literally all efforts to connect and be close to his big brother on Sam's part. He is strong and confident, and he LOVES music :D He has great rhythm. He loves to try to feed himself and others with his utensils. He is now preferring to jam bigger pieces of food into his mouth rather than tiny bits. He has 8 teeth. He eats things he can put in his mouth himself, recently loving grapes and artichokes. He likes chicken, corn and Papa's beef pie. But he still doesn't eat enough, because he won't let us just spoon lots of mush into him. He eats plain yogurt too, and makes a terrible face as he does, but then will more readily eat other mush like green beans. When he is not interested he shakes his head very emphatically, it's adorable! He will place a block on another to make a tower. He loves his little baby car. He climbs stairs with speed and abandon, and we have to keep doors closed all the time or he would take off. He is just starting to point with one finger, and has been gesturing towards things that interest him with his outstretched hand for a while now. He knows what he wants. To get him to sleep Papa rocks him in the chair, having to hold him firmly. He cries to sleep most times, no matter how exhausted he is, but he is at least in the arms of those who love him, and it doesn't take too long, maybe 5-10 mins. He is not ready to have only one nap but when he gets 2 naps he won't sleep for the night before 11pm so it is better for everyone to just let him be tired all morning and then nap around 12, so we can get him to sleep by 9pm. He sleeps fitfully, nursing throughout the night. I love cosleeping with him, even if I don't get great sleep. He is very cuddly and loving. He does well with sitters Marias and Ana, falling to sleep on their chest with singing and little crying. He says Mama and Papa, and something that sounds like "right there" (more like "ite der") when he is gesturing to something. He laughs and laughs when riding on his Grampa's back, and he loves throwing a ball back and forth with Grandma. Like Basil, he's got a great throwing arm! He loves to sit on my knee and engage in simple games. He is just learning to make noises, like the dinosaur in the bath says roar and cars say brrm. He adores Basil still, but always wants whatever toy Basil is holding, or to climb all over Bas. In general he smiles and laughs easily, but can be shy and tire of strangers. I love how he will spend some time at baby class just sitting on my knee, or hanging on to the back of my backjack floor seat. He also does his share of working the room and socializing. We love him so much. I really really love having two. That feels like we beat some kind of odds. I am so thankful that despite everything that happened during my pregnancy, Sam appears completely normal, and very smart. He is tall and strong. | ||||||||||||
| comments: 6 comments or you can talk to me |
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| Some of my old lab mates are getting some well-deserved press for their education research. Their message that students should be challenged is good and very worth reading and taking to heart. But I would argue that their study doesn't support their claims that errors are not harmful. Specifically, I think if you delayed the test phase then the initially generated error would trump the later-learned correct answer. (As would be predicted by the NToD dynamics, and even Jost: the guessed-answer gets a bigger initial RS and SS boost from the potency of guessing, and it came first.) So, as per the UCPD training I used to do, you give the trainee a chance to guess but if they are about to produce an error, you step in with the correct information. Also, their baseline comparison is off - sure generation produces better recall than passively provided answers, but how would it fare against the generation of correct vs incorrect information? Note to self, what would Catherine Fritz think? | ||||||||||||
| comments: talk to me |
October 17th, 2009
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| We had a playdate today with one of the Mommies from erstwhile Parenting class. Her 1yr old just got shots. Hepatitis, MMR, Chicken Pox, AND a flu shot, even though he is currently being treated for a bad ear infection. ::facepalm:: so now they don't know if the awful blotchy rash covering him from head to toe that developed the next day is due to the antibiotics or one of the 5 vaccines :_( F*cking stupid doctors, it should be illegal. If they lived somewhere smarter, where medicine is more evidence based, then it would be. Don't get me wrong, I am pro-vaccinations, my boys are immunized. But I am hugely thankful that we discovered Dr. Sears Alternative vaccine schedule for baby Sam. He has had none of the adverse reactions (like fevers and vomiting) that poor Bas went through when he would get up to 4 shots at once until I wised up. | ||||||||||||
| comments: 7 comments or you can talk to me |
October 14th, 2009
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| ( Dr Sears on healthy eating for teens ) | ||||||||||||
| comments: 1 comment or you can talk to me |
September 18th, 2009
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| "Evolutionary psychology ridicules the notion that the brain could have evolved to be an all-purpose fitness-maximizing mechanism," says Hill. "But that's exactly what we keep finding." Behavioral Ecology | ||||||||||
| comments: talk to me |
September 15th, 2009
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| As part of trying to shoehorn quality husband and wife time into our schedules, DH and I have been watching season 4 Doctor Who. I am happy to report that he's now into it too :) He did the long-suffering thing through the cheesy monsters and low budget melodrama, but by Midnight and Turn Left he was totally hooked, and finally now that we are watching Journey's End he is mentioning that actually, Catherine Tate is kinda pretty. Heee! | ||||||||||
| comments: 5 comments or you can talk to me |
September 9th, 2009
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| Hubby did a continuing education class yesterday on advanced burns treatment, and, despite being the lowest medically qualified person there, beat everyone in the class on the test, including the trauma surgeon, the ICU Department Head, and all the burn nurses! ION I'm writing fic right now squuuueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee | ||||||||||||
| comments: 4 comments or you can talk to me |
August 27th, 2009
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| I have a writing deadline overdue. So instead I procrastinate on LJ. I haven't been around here much, and it worries me that I am going too long between updates on the boys, given my terrible memory. ( update on the boys under the cut, click here ) | ||||||||||
| comments: 1 comment or you can talk to me |
August 3rd, 2009
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| Just a little update from the middle of nowhere in Maryland. I love it! It is so beautiful! SO GREEN. People are v. friendly and laid back. Extremely rural here. They promise me they have all four seasons! Rental property is cheaper than I had first thought. Going to the college tomorrow, to meet people etc. It is really really far from DC though :/ Close to PA border. Amazingly smooth traveling to get here too. Missing all my boys and feeling strange to be alone without hubby, but it is good to clear my head for sure, I barely even know what to do it is so quiet and I can string more than one thought together at once! ::squishes MD:: Please pray or send good thoughts, tomorrow I need to decide if we all move out here or stay in SoCal with hubby's work. And please pray for him at home with the boys, Bas is sick and they are both pretty fussy right now, but I'm so glad he is there with them, even though we are risking him losing the movie. I'm so excited to meet Jodi tomorrow, for the first time after being friends for I think almost 15 yrs online!! Wheeeeee! | ||||||||||||||
| comments: 6 comments or you can talk to me |
August 1st, 2009
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| cut ( 3 hair pics under a cut ) | ||||||||||||
| comments: 10 comments or you can talk to me |
July 12th, 2009
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| Hey Guys, So I have an interview coming up on Friday, it is just a community college job, but hey, it is 70 miles from DC and it is full time, so it is a start. I really need your help. I'm trying to answer this question for their pre-interview writing that they want from me: "5. Describe your approach to creating a learning environment that acknowledges and values the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of students." and part of my answer is this paragraph: "Many times the value of students’ varied backgrounds enlivened otherwise dry statistical analysis classes. The pedagogical experience was enriched when students would design research questions around testing folklore from different cultures, in order to contrast different research methodologies. Sample imagined experiments set up hypotheses to test: Are bread crusts really healthier than the inside of the bread? Will walking under a ladder give you bad luck? Can you tell the sex of an unborn child by the appearance of the mother’s abdomen?" Here is the problem: I did do this with my students but for the life of me I can't remember any of the culturally foreign myths (or folklore or superstitions) that we talked about. So all my examples are US or UK folklore, hence undercutting my point that yay I'm so multicultural! Can you think of anything that fits the bill?? | ||||||||
| comments: 12 comments or you can talk to me |
June 30th, 2009
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| "That juice, it has some stuff in it that makes my tonguie laugh!" -Basil on his first taste of effervescent juice (watered down Airborne!) Sam is saying a noise that sounds like Pa Pa so we are trying to reinforce it like we did with Mah Mah (Which now seems to mean "feed me!") He half-pulled himself up on the outside of his walker, he got to his knees before it rolled away from him. | ||||||||
| comments: 2 comments or you can talk to me |
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Spoon feeding fail ( click here for even more photos ) | ||||||||||||
| comments: 3 comments or you can talk to me |
June 24th, 2009
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| ( part 2 of 2, click here ) | ||||||||
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| Also, new little videos up at http://www.youtube.com/user/wasselworf Granda (my Dad)  Kodak Easyshare gallery chewed up the nice chronological order of the hundreds of photos I uploaded there (just let me know if you want the link to the rest, there are sheep!) so in no particular order, here are photos from our ( Easter (click here) ) | ||||||||
| comments: 4 comments or you can talk to me |
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| mini update on the boys under cut ( click here ) | ||||||||||||
| comments: talk to me |
June 22nd, 2009
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Baby laughing at twirling Mama and big brother.
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| comments: 1 comment or you can talk to me |
June 16th, 2009
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| Just for me to remember, from my mommy&me class teacher at http://www.whatwomenwanttoknow.com/ "As the boys got older, we also developed a routine where everyone chooses a meal once a week, and sometimes helps to shop for and prepare the meals as well." | ||||||||
| comments: 4 comments or you can talk to me |
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| Hey Guys, Want to help a soldier in Iraq? My friend, who has more superfluous degrees than even me :) has some down time while stationed in Iraq for the next yr. He asked me if I could recommend some books/shows along these lines: "Books for thinking about conflict management and arbitration, cross-cultural skills, negotiation, persuasion, and reconciliation. Also: group level persuasion and the long term management thereof (e.g., cults and communes, changing societal mores)." So I made an Amazon list for him. I kinda changed his request to include any book/movie/entity that has taught me how to understand people with aims to negotiation/conflict resolution/etc. to make the world a better place. So if you have a few moments, think of anything like that in your life, and let me know so I can add it to the list for him. Thanks! Note about the list: They may not be the most academic of books because sometimes the most I have learned comes from either fiction or a case study type book. And as I don't have downtime, and haven't for many years, many of these I haven't read myself yet, and these are marked "speculative" because they have been recommended to me, but I cannot personally vouch for them. | ||||||||
| comments: 4 comments or you can talk to me |
June 14th, 2009
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| (Things to bear in mind: he won't have to always go to bed alone, he'll be spending probably at least the next decade sharing his room with at least one brother, so this is a temporary problem until Sam is old enough to safely share a room. Also, any routine that works now will be horribly disrupted by a house move in a few months time, when I will go back to co-sleeping with him to help with the trauma that follows another house move.) I am really interested in opinions regardless of whether we agree on sleep issues and whether you have children or not. Your 3 yr old is not able to get to sleep one night, after a fairly successful few months of being able to fall asleep on his own with music and a lighted mobile. (But a few times/wk he falls asleep with you lying beside him, and he likes that better.) You lose sight of him on the video monitor, but he is quiet. You go into the room and he is completely enveloped in a blanket in the middle of the bed. The blanket is moving up and down like he is panting. This continues for a few minutes - he doesn't appear to know you are there. Eventually you lift the blanket and are greeted with surprise and happiness to see you. He is alert, surrounded by stuffed animals, and he says, "Momma! I was hiding with all my animals from the monster. We are in a rock. The monster can't get us! I was scared. Scared of the monster, so I was hiding." Poll #1415737 overprotective mom or negligent mom? Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 6 What do you do?
View Answers Admonish him for playing instead of lying down to sleep. Dismantle the cave and lay him back down on the pillows. Feed into the fantasy by talking with him about the monster and his cave in order to encourage his use of fantasy play to help him cope with scary situations. Feel like a terrible parent for leaving him alone to be scared of monsters. How do you end the interaction?
View Answers Say goodnight and leave him alone again with the cave. Tuck him into bed, say goodnight and leave him alone again, no cave. Tuck him into bed, say goodnight and leave him alone again, with a warning not to rebuild the cave because it is sleepy time not play time. Stay with him until he falls asleep. | ||||||||
| comments: 10 comments or you can talk to me |
3 (50.0%)June 10th, 2009
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| Sam now has a tooth on his lower left, and coming in upper right. Papa has converted his pram to an umbrella stroller and lifted the baby walker up a notch in height. My baby is growing up and it makes me so sad! He's the baby, that is his role in the family, if he grows up like this there will be no baby anymore, wah! He scoots around the kitchen in his walker (or baby car as Basil calls it) but is not quite crawling. Basil is at an interesting linguistic stage, kind of a crash of abstracted grammar learning. So in order he learned: "I fall" "I falled" "I fell" and now: "I felled" which may seem like a step back but I think it is more that he has passed the rote copying stage ("I fell") and is now trying to incorporate it with the rules of the past tense. It is interesting. He is less likely to parrot repeat a corrected word if it violates the general rule he has learned. He has a singsong phrasing of sentences like "Whooooo wants a cracker?" that he uses in his classroom when playing with his friends. He has learned that you can indicate agency linguistically by adding an 'er' to the verb, like a driver drives and a dryer dries. Combined with his love of tools and construction (he loves hammers and nails etc) he tends to take D's tools/hammers/nails etc (that he isn't supposed to be playing with) and run through the house teasing us saying "who wants a hammer?" All well and good but one of DH's tools in frequent use around here is a hook that screws into the wall like a nail. Basil knows the verb hook, but in making a noun per his newly acquired rules of lingusitics he now runs around the house every time he gets ahold of one the wall hooks yelling "Whooooo wants a hooker? Who wants a HOOKER?"   | ||||||||||
| comments: talk to me |
June 4th, 2009
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| Passing this along: "I'd be delighted if you passed this information on to anyone you think would be interested. Informed Consent and Refusal in Maternity Care ( Free Web Seminar ) | ||||||||
| comments: talk to me |
June 3rd, 2009
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| PSA soap box Keep your toddler in a rear-facing car seat until age 2 (not 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRP7ynNI "Although the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and most other car seat safety advocates already recommend keeping baby rear-facing until he or she reaches the limits of the car seat, AAP may soon upgrade their minimum "1 year and 20 pounds" recommendation to two full years of rear-facing if possible. A recent AAP News release preps parents for the potential change, which is based on new research that shows toddlers are more than five times safer if they remain rear-facing until age two." http://babyproducts.about.com/od/carsea Also from the American Academy of Pediatrics: http://aapnews.aappublications.org/c | ||||||||
| comments: 4 comments or you can talk to me |
June 1st, 2009
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| Sam At 7 months: is 20 pounds, and that is at the 66th percentile for weight. is 29 inches, and that is at the 92th percentile for height. has a head circumference of 18 inches, and that is at the 80th percentile for head circumference. At 3 years and 3 months: Basil is 35 pounds, and that is at the 72nd percentile for weight. Basil is 39.75 inches, and that is at the 82nd percentile for height. ac. to http://pediatrics.about.com/cs/usefultoo  lots of photos of the boys from DH's facebook ( pics under cut ) | ||||||||||||
| comments: 9 comments or you can talk to me |
May 20th, 2009
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| Just some observations on my sons these days, under an attempted DW cut: ( cut here ) | ||||||||||
| comments: talk to me |
telemicus
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