Attract Mode

Does click-through even work on wordpress?

Excerpts and a blast from the past beyond– click on any picture to be taken to more photos at the album.

Also, picture meme from Gayle (Rules:
* take a picture of yourself right now.
* don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair… just take a picture.
* post that picture with NO editing.
* post these instructions with your picture.):

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I am behind on everything and increasingly depressed about it.

Robin is still cute, and still considers crawling the height of movement. He’s getting over the most major illness of his very short life (a particularly snotty cold + diaper disasters). He shouts but does not talk.

I lost the charger to my camera again, so I can’t offload pictures.

I can’t offload pictures because the battery died. The battery died because I left the camera pluggin in from 5:30 am until noon the other day.

I plugged in my camera at 5:30 am to show Kevin a picture of his eyeball. Which I took at 5:15 AM. Because he made me. Because he didn’t believe me when I told him he’d scratched his eyeball and didn’t have a hair stuck in it.

Please, don’t ask why we were up until 5:30 am. I honestly can’t remember.

But there was some story about Robin I was going to tell. Has he been cute lately? I’m sure he must have been. Well, an update, anyhow, while I try to remember.

He prefers to spend as much of his time as possible crawling around. He crawls between the living room and the great room, over and over again. Or up and down the yard on the side of our house. and every so often he crawls over to me, pulls himself into my lap if I’m within reach, and clings to my legs and whines if I’m not. He gets a hug, and then he’s off again.

He likes to throw toys for Dante to chase. He’s remarkably tolerant about being tumbled about by Dante’s clumsiness. He gets thrilled everytime he sees the kitties, but the kitties only tolerate him. 

He waves, and claps his hands when he’s proud of himself, but he hasn’t learned any of the signs I’ve tried teaching him. I have videos from youtube assembled into a playlist, and some Signing Time DVDs checked out from the library– but they’re targeted at older children, I think, and he barely pays attention to them. In fact, I haven’t been able to get him interested in television at all. I suspect it isn’t interactive enough for him (and he doesn’t understand how his V.Smile console interacts yet). I put them on in the background sometimes, and I play with the V.Smile while he’s around because he inevitably wants to play with whatever I play with. I think I may need a new cartridge soon, because the one that came with the console is slightly less interesting than Jello for me.

(Jello! I should make and feed Robin Jello!)

All of his ‘play’ so far consists of exploration, which means he causes lots of trouble! He wants to poke, prod, taste, chew on and make react all sorts of things. ‘Making something react’ is his favorite activity. Push Button! Like, he doesn’t make a noise when he claps his hands because he doesn’t do it quite right. But we adults do, so he loves to take my hands and move them through the clapping motion. He can be kept entertained for at least 5 solid minutes by watching som rhythmic clapping.

Okay, two cute images for you.

First: we have several apple trees in the backyard. The more striking one produces little red apples– kind of like Red Delicious, but much smaller and also, eventually, a bit sweeter. They’ve been falling from the tree since early August and I haven’t been able to find the time to do anything with them. I let Robin tool around out there last weekend and discovered a couple of interesting things. Those apples are perfectly sized for baby hands. And Robin loves whole uncut apples. He loves to sink his teeth into them, and I already knew he liked apple chunks. With his 7 front teeth (in varying stages of development) he can’t really handle the skin, so he takes a bite, chews it up and then spits the skin out. The first day he ate small bites of several apples, before I collected all the best and brought them in and washed them and stored them. A few days later, he had another one, which he ate maybe a quarter of before he started trying to share it with Dante. Yesterday, he ate 3/4 of one apple, practically down to the core, and then later that evening cried when I showed the core to Kevin, until I gave him another one.

Baby. Eating baby apple. I’ll try to get a picture. For now, imagine it.

Second cute image: The other day Robin was just in his diaper. I was patting his belly, because he loves a.) having his back patted and b.) the sound of clapping, which bellies also make. He played with my hands for a moment, looked at them, did a doubletake, and stared. Then he pushed my hands aside and started poking his belly. He tugged at his skin, prodded it, and then… he discovered HIS BELLY BUTTON! A button! On him! But no matter how much he poked it, nothing happened.

I’ve been reading about entropy and the laws of thermodynamics again. I can’t help myself! I have questions and ideas, and no physicist handy. I have to stop now, though, because my eyes are bleeding, even though I’m ignoring all the formulae and everything.

You know how when you read or say a word over and over again, it becomes divorced from its meaning and you can appreciate just how weird a sound/shape it is? My bleeding eyes have reached that point with The Laws and their extrapolated consequences.   The heat death of the universe is just… stupid. And entropy? It’s the plot hole of thermodynamics.

Every magical universe I invent is significantly less bizarre than this one.

Sadly, even with Wordpress Turbo enabled and the new Google Chrome browser, the Wordpress post-new page takes too long to load.

Hi guys! Happy September!

This month I’m really going to finish the novel. I have a secret weapon.

Robin and I went to the neighborhood park today, using the stroller. Hannah and Dante both flipped out when they realized what I was doing. I could still hear Hannah howling in misery as I was leaving the court, but I think Dante had stopped scrabbling at the window by then and was just whining a counterpoint to Hannah.

It’s a wonderful park. It’s very small, barely larger than a large backyard. In the front half, a paved path curves under shady trees to an old basketball hoop before looping up a hill to a swingset and horseshoe area. Beyond the basketball court, a slope dips down into a bowl-shaped area, almost entirely carpeted with lush green grass. Giant old trees grow on the perimeter of the bowl, except for the far edge, where a fence prevents the unambitious from wandering into the gully of Maple Creek. It’s almost always cool and shady in the bowl, with the sound of running water from the creek. There’s a big wooden and metal play structure on a bed of rounded gravel, and some large lumps of wood that I imagine kids must climb all over.

Last time we came there was almost two months ago. Robin mostly sat on the grass around the basketball court, pushed a ball around, and tried to eat immature maple seeds. He hadn’t really mastered crawling then, of course.

Today, we went down into the bowl. I put Robin in the grass and went to sit on one of the benches. He complained to himself a bit and then hustled over to me. On the way there, he noticed The Structure.

OK, I lie. He actually noticed The Gravel. He climbed up into it. He found a stick and stuck one end in his mouth for a fraction of a second before rejecting it with a scowl. He reached down and dug his fingers into the stones. And then he spent the next half an hour trying to empty the bed. Dig hand into gravel. Fling hand out. Gravel flies out of bed onto grass. He especially liked it when he found a storm grate in the grass that the gravel clattered against when he tossed it. Judging from the amount of gravel around the bed, he’s not the only child who’s engaged in this effort, either.

Right before we went to the park, I tried to feed him a snack. But all day, he’s been throwing his food on the floor. And all week, he’s been throwing his toys out of his crib (or sometimes back in, when he’s outside). So maybe he had something to work out of his system.

He was very intense about it, in any case. There were few smiles. For a while we had a little competition, seeing if he could throw gravel out faster than I could throw it in. If anything, this made him more driven. However, he did seem to appreciate my attempt to show him how to not throw like a baby. And he kept occasionally clapping his hands while holding rocks.

But the gravel playdate came to an end when Maximum Baby Troublemaking went head-to-head with Mommy Eyes In Back Of Head. He scurried away from me and when I caught up with him he gave me a big, closed-mouth grin. Uh-huh. After I fished the rock out of his mouth, we went and sat on the bench, and shared my (his) water.

It started with me offering him the Camelbak, as usual. He had some. Then I had some. Then he grabbed the bottle and had some more. Then he pushed it at me. I had some. He grabbed it back, had some more. Then he shoved the straw in my mouth, staring at me intently. I’m afraid I giggled at him, and he took the bottle back, sipped, forced it back on me. This little game ended when he started dribbling water out of mouth in his efforts to make sure I had some. We had to save some for the walk home, anyhow.

Finally, I climbed the hill of the bowl and sat at the rim, and encouraged him to crawl up it to me. And he found out just how hard it is to balance on a slope when you’ve never done it before. He got a third of the way up, decided to take a break, sat up, and half fell over. Sat up. Fell over the other direction. Finally managed to find his balance, pulled up some grass, and then hustled up the rest of the hill to me.

Then we went home and I had to push him up hills. He liked that.

At work, people look at pictures of Robin and then say to Kevin, “How the hell did you get such a cute kid?”

Anyhow, Robin pulled the driver out of his super shapes-and-sounds truck and lay on his back going ‘rrrrrrr. rrrrr. rrrrr.’ at it, which is very much like the sound his favorite button on the truck makes.

He played with his xylophone while his baby laptop was singing to him, as if he was trying to play along.

He also totally climbed on the guest bed without any assistance at all, not even somebody being on the bed. Then he lay on it giggling and kicking. Unfortunately, he still tries to get off things head first, and there’s a nasty ledge on the bedframe which is useful for climbing but painful for hitting on the way down. I hope he works out the safe way to get down soon.

I played WoW this evening at the table in his room while he played on the floor around me. We both really enjoyed it. He spent ten minutes flipping through my knitting book and while he bent some pages, nothing got torn. I was impressed, especially since my favorite of his board books has been chewed apart.

I’m constantly amazed at how confident and aggressive and determined he is. How proud he seems when he achieves something he’s been trying to do, how well he communicates despite having no words and little formal body language. I laugh because he never goes around obstacles– he either pushes them aside, or goes over them. Headfirst, always headfirst.

I took him to the park yesterday and put him on the grass. He sat still, looking around, for some time. Then he set off across the yellow-green grass, crawling between clumps of dandelions and pulling off the deadheads. He crawled quite a long distance before getting tired, more than three times the length of our house. Then he pulled himself up on me and I picked him up and we went home, and he crawled some more.

The cats love Robin’s room, even if they only tolerate Robin. Actually, maybe Demon loves Robin, too. It’s hard to tell with Demon. But he lets Robin lay on him, which seems like a good sign.

Yesterday, Raven was in Robin’s room with Robin, and the childgate was up. Raven is lazy and fat. He wouldn’t jump the gate to escape, even though he wasn’t really pleased with the way Robin barrelled over to him giggling every few minutes. Raven squeezed under the guest bed, which must have been a tight fit for him, and he could have hidden there all day. But instead he had to keep coming over to sit next to the gate. Robin would grab him and hug him. Raven would squeak and slink away.

Later, I lifted Robin over the gate and brought him into the office with me, because he’s a whiny kid sometimes. I shut the office door and let him tool around on the newly clean floor. Next door, I heard a thump.

“Ah,” I thought. “Raven just needed a run-up.”

A moment later, I started hearing this ‘boing… boingboingboing’, over and over again. When I investigated, I saw that Raven was still stuck in Robin’s room, and the gate was still up. And downstairs, in the foyer, Dante was repeatedly dropping a light-up bouncy ball– some old loot from my IT days– that he’d stolen from Robin’s room. He looked up at me. He kind of pushed the ball away, lay down and put his head on his paws. It wasn’t lighting up when he dropped it, anyhow.

He hasn’t given up, though. I found it downstairs again, that evening.

PS. I eventually let Raven out.

Robin has learned ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’.

Explicitly, he’s learned that when we tell him ‘Say mama!’ or ‘Say dada!’ that it’s his job to blow a raspberry. He really believes that those instructions mean ‘blow a raspberry’. He’s very consistent.

Kevin started the raspberry exchange game. Pbbbt, went Kevin. Pbbbbt, went Robin. Pbbbt, went Kevin. Pbbbbbbbt, went Robin, and grinned like a crazy thing. Pbbbt, went I. After a startled look, Pbbbt went Robin.

From there, it was ‘hey, he’s in a mimicking mood, let’s see if he’ll say mama or dada!’. No. He learned that ‘mama’ and ‘dada’ are words for ‘raspberry’.

The other day, Michelle was teaching him to say ‘watch’ because he was playing with her watch. He made a spirited effort: ‘tch. tch.’ Later, Kevin observed that nobody Robin lives with actually wears a watch. That’s okay. I’m telling him my pedometer’s a watch.

The most talking-like event so far has been the dog situation. He has two dogs, plus a book about dogs. Cathy and I were reading it to him and he kept looking at Dante and then saying ‘do’ as we pointed at the book. Of course, ‘dadadadadadadadadadaadadadadada’ is his most common vocalization so it took a keen ear to pick out that this time, ‘do’ had meaning behind it. Kevin says it doesn’t count unless he says it without prompting, or manages the g-sound at the end.

When he’s wailing, he’s managed to sound like he’s screaming ‘mamamamama’ but that’s been true for a long time– I think it’s an artifact of wailing through tears. Recently it also sounded like ‘nonononono’ but since he seems to have only a shaky grasp of ‘no’ in other situations I doubt it was intended.

Just now he started crying because he couldn’t get into his crib to take a nap. My child is weird.

• Take pictures of overgrown backyard before the cleanup crew Cathy hired show up even though it hasn’t stopped raining since she left
• Color with Robin
• Put away laundry
• Edit 10 pages
• Eat something despite lack of appetite
• Figure out loresheet requests for Ptolus
• Write blog post