The Number Field

I am afraid that Roman has become a victim, at least in terms of blog attention, of the cruel realities of birth order, with circumstances exacerbated by overly adventurous parents. When Elena was this age, I reported on and analyzed each and every new development; for Roman, the aging list of most recent posts bear record to my deficiency. New capabilities appear quickly, then become old news as he learns another new trick, and seem hardly worth writing about because I see him every day, but I forget that there are grandparents (and others) who rely on this blog for updates, now more than ever.

For instance, today I set Roman down on his feet in the middle of our living room, and he stood there for more than a minute. I was impressed and called Jenny in, but she thought it was no big deal, nothing she hadn't seen before. He's still unsteady--he looked like a novice surfer or skateboarder trying to maintain balance, but it won't take much more practice before he's rock solid, and pretty soon he'll be taking his first steps.

Roman's baby babbling is evolving through a proto-language stage. He has some favorite phrases, but it's hard to know how much meaning he attaches to them. The first one we noticed, which is still by far the most common, sounds a lot like "good job." He often says it in between bouts of clapping. He's probably just parroting something that he hears us say, but even in that case I feel pretty good, because it means that he hears us say affirming words on a regular basis. More recently I noticed a new addition to his lexicon. Roman loves to laugh, and that means that he loves being tickled. After a solid bout of tickle time, as soon as his laughter subsides, he sometimes asks "tickle, tickle" because he wants more. In this case, he has me and Elena as examples, because we both say that when we tickle him.

Despite those examples, most of what Roman says is still intelligible only to him, and maybe the birds that he talks to while out walking. We'll never know what he's thinking about and saying; by the time he can actually talk his thoughts will have been changed by the very mental processes that enable his speech. The loss makes me sad, because his voice is already filled with emotion and expression.

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A lot has happened since the last time that I wrote, so I'll just get to the point. We're in England, and will be here for six months on another work assignment. Everything was in storage already from our west coast adventure, so it wasn't too hard to repack our bags and get on the plane to come over here. We did leave behind some of the extra toys that Elena and Roman had acquired in our travels.

Since arriving on Friday, we've walked around town several times, gone to church, made friends, and found a place to stay long-term. We'll move there from our short-term accommodations on Saturday; then we'll just have to furnish the place. That shouldn't be hard, as it's a small two-bedroom apartment. We've spent a lot of time outside to make the most of the blue skies and sunshine, unusual for this region, because sunlight is supposed to make it easier to overcome jet lag. All the walking tires Elena far past the point of whininess, but that has probably also helped her sleep at night.

Our trip over here was a true adventure, deserving a separate recounting, which I'll try to get to soon. I should be spending less time commuting, so I hope to post more regularly and even write about the backlog of events from the month we were living with my parents.

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The toys could hardly wait for Roman, Elena and Jenny to come back.

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We were at the store and Elena was whining about being thirsty. After a few minutes it became clear that she wouldn't be distracted. I took her to the water fountain on the condition that she would also try to use the restroom. It was there that she noticed something shiny on top of the toilet paper holder: a dime, or as she knows it, some money. Since she found it, I told her that she could have it. This may be the first time that she has ever had money of her own, no matter how little.

She realized that she wouldn't be able to hold the money in her fist until she was able to use it to buy something, so it ended up in my pocket. But now she knows that she has some money. She also knows that we use money to buy things. When we don't have something she will frequently say "it's okay, we can get another one at the store," especially when she's the cause of the loss. We also talk to her about how we use money to buy things, so it seems like she might be ready to learn more about money through experience.

I had an idea which has been rejected by Jenny and universally by everyone else I've discussed it with. However, if I wrote only about my good ideas, this blog would probably continue to be updated as rarely as it recently has been, so here it is: I wanted to find something that Elena would want and be able to buy with her ten cents. At the very least, implementation would be difficult, because almost nothing costs that little. Even the superball vending machine at the front of the store requires at least a quarter, and it's rare to find someplace that sells an individual piece of candy anymore.

That isn't the main case against the utility of my proposal. Instead, the argument is that Elena is too young to have any sense of scale regarding the transaction, that the main benefit of the experience will be for her to personally experience participation in the economy even if the thing she spends her money on costs more than what she has. Even if we tell her that we've also contributed to the purchase, she's unlikely to comprehend that some things cost more than others.

They are certainly right about why my idea is overkill. Elena's dime is now safe in a coin purse in my backpack. She knows that I have it, but doesn't think about it often. The teachable moment of the found money, if it was ever there, may have passed. For me the learning is just starting--I think that Jenny and I have a solid working understanding of and healthy relationship with money, but I clearly don't know how to pass that along to Elena and Roman in a way that is age-appropriate and accurate.

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We've been back on the east coast for almost a week, overcoming jet lag and otherwise readjusting to life here. The memories of our big northwest adventure are still fresh, since we closed out the trip with a bang. After saying tearful goodbyes to friends and family, we headed out for a few vacation days before our flight. We went towards Portland but made a few stops along the way--first at Maryhill Stonehenge , a full-sized Stonehenge replica overlooking the Columbia River that was built as a World War I memorial, then at Multnomah Falls . The weather was clear when we stretched our legs at Stonehenge, but turned rainy as we started to drive through the Columbia River Gorge. By the time we reached the Falls, rain was coming down hard and Jenny had to abandon her long-held hope of hiking up to the top. Not only would it have been too hard on Roman, but the trail was closed due to a mudslide. Sadly, this was not the only time our hiking ambitions were stymied. Still, the falls were beautiful in the rain and Elena enjoyed the exhibition center and gift shop.

When in Portland, we tried to do as Portlanders--dinner at a restaurant that promised locally-grown ingredients, then a walk through the cavernous stacks at Powell's books the first evening. The next morning, after taking the MAX Light Rail from our hotel to downtown, we rented a pedal-powered surrey and went for a five mile ride along the riverfront. Elena loved it, especially the bumpy parts, but Roman was not quite as happy. For me the most exciting part was seeing a drawbridge lift up just moments after we rode over it. The weather was still grey, so we took our picnic lunch to the mall's food court, where Elena was happy to find out that I had some pennies for her to throw into the water feature.

Our post-lunch plans called for a visit to the International Rose Test Garden inside of Washington park, which we decided to walk to instead of waiting thirty minutes for a bus. Had we known how big the hill was, we might have reconsidered that decision. However, the walk allowed us a chance to see a historic residential neighborhood with beautiful houses and lovely spring flowers in bloom. Sadly, roses are not spring flowers--we probably should have thought of that beforehand--so we just got to see lots of rose bushes. The varieties were all labeled with interesting names, but we didn't get to debate whether the names fit the flowers. Luckily, we weren't the only ones in the garden; along with some other tourists, we met some bold squirrels and overheard a few serious skateboarders talk about the best routes through the garden.

I don't intend to say much about our accommodations, but I would like to know how families with small children handle sharing a hotel room. It was so hard to get Elena and Roman to go down when we were right there next to them that we didn't want to risk turning on the lights or television once they were asleep. As a result, we caught up on The Amazing Race on my laptop, using headphones, while huddled in the alcove next to the entrance, and did a lot of quiet fumbling around in the dark.

I had really talked up our main event for the next day to Elena--a hike at the Grove of the Patriarchs in Mount Rainier National Park. Imagine our disappointment when, after taking a circuitous route through the mountains, we finally arrived at the park gate and found it closed. Apparently many of the park entrances don't even open until the first of May. Somehow, none of the people we had told about these plans ever mentioned that danger. Still, we got to see some great views of the mountain as we drove around it. Defeated, we tried to find someplace where we could spread out our lunch, but there was a herd of elk taking naps at the only public picnic tables we could find in the nearest town. We retreated even further, to a highway rest stop, which was fenced in--perhaps to keep out passive-aggressive elk.

Elena fell asleep in the car after lunch and woke up only when we got close to Tacoma, where we were stopping at the Brown and Haley factory store, where Jenny knew we could get good deals on Almond Roca and other tasty treats. Despite the prospect of candy, Elena just wanted to know when and where we could go for a hike. She was so insistent about it that I looked up a hike we could go on near our hotel after dinner. We offered her a choice between that hike and some time in the hotel pool. Like almost any child would, she chose the pool.

We had an unpleasant surprise the next morning, when I discovered that our car's window had been smashed and the GPS taken. Luckily, we were close to the car rental facility and the agents there facilitated such a quick switch to another car that we were only twenty minutes late to church. We attended church and spent the day in West Seattle with Stephanie, one of Jenny's college roommates. Because it was such a sunny day, we went for a walk along Alki beach, along with what appeared to be the rest of West Seattle. Roman and Elena both received several unsolicited compliments on their cuteness and clothes--Elena's zebra print dress is always a hit, even when not paired with my zebra print tie.

That evening we returned to our Seattle home base at Matt and Carrie's house. It was great to see them one last time before we left; we all have fun together. On Monday afternoon, Jenny and Carrie took a tour of the Theo Chocolate factory while I tried to provide a calming influence for all four kids at home. We played house--I chose to be the baby, and pretended to take a nap. Jenny and Carrie tried lots of samples during their tour, and brought back some fancy treats to share. In the evening we finally fulfilled Elena's desire to go for a hike, as Matt and Carrie took us to a great park in their community where a little waterfall was just down the trail. The kids did just what we expected: splashed in the stream and found lots of sticks to play with.

With that, the fun portion of our trip concluded. Jenny and I spent the rest of the evening packing our bags, and the next day our flights were mostly uneventful. Now we're here for just a few weeks before we jet off on a new adventure, but I'll write more about that soon. I recommend that you visit my flickr page to see the photos from the trip that didn't fit into this post.

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Roman has started to show the first signs of communication, more than smiling when he's happy and crying when something is amiss. He gets upset when we tell him no in stern voices--usually when he crawls to forbidden territory. The other night, when he was the other side of the room I called to him: "Hey Roman, come see me," and he did!

We're trying to understand what he's trying to tell us, but it isn't entirely easy. Our first goal is to teach him basic baby signs, starting with more , which is made by touching the fingers together. For a baby, this is very similar to something else he's learning: how to clap. As a result when we get to the end of a mealtime and pause to ask if he wants more, it's hard to know whether he's asking for more or just clapping because he's happy to have so much yummy food in his tummy.

Elena has also suddenly demonstrated a new skill that we don't entirely understand. Grandma, who still regularly brings out new things for Elena to play with, opened up some jigsaw puzzles. Elena rather quickly figured out how to put them together with very little assistance. While helping her put one together I observed carefully, hoping to figure out her puzzle solving cues and algorithms. Did she use the pictures or the puzzle shapes? Did she work from the middle out, or from the borders in (as most of us do)?

I couldn't figure it out. Her piece selection seemed also random, but somehow the puzzle came together quickly. She had put this one together several times before, and that meant that she put on a show for me, pretending to put pieces where they obviously didn't belong, obfuscating her general strategy. But Jenny's been watching too, and she can't figure it out either. Maybe we need to challenge her more--these puzzles only have about 25 pieces--in order to learn her secrets.

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Easter weekend brought us the first truly warm days of the year, and just in time, because we had big plans. Saturday morning started with an egg hunt, after which we took cousin Sam on a mini-golf outing. After lunch we enjoyed a private egg hunt at home, laid out carefully by the grandparents. Elena quickly became an expert egg finder, but with some help Roman managed to snag a few of his own before she got to them. A careful post-hunt count revealed that there may still be one undiscovered egg. Maybe it will take root and grow into a chocolate egg tree.

In the evening we hosted a cookout for our friends--mostly people Jenny's known since high school. We were especially thankful for the not-too-cool evening and large backyard, because the kids all had energy to burn. They claimed the gazebo so the adults were able to enjoy dinner and conversation near the picnic tables. People complimented me for managing the grill, but Jenny deserves all the credit because she planned and prepared the whole event with almost no assistance from me.

Our Easter Sunday, by comparison, was quiet and contemplative. We went to church in the morning, took naps in the afternoon, had Easter dinner with family in the rarely-used formal dining room, and made our usual Sunday evening visit to the cousins. Jenny commented on how nice it was to separate the commercial and secular aspects from the spiritual and religious aspects of the holiday.

Jenny makes a good point, in particular because we are still establishing traditions for Elena and Roman to grow into. For now they don't have the capacity to focus on candy, Jesus, or anything else for very long. In establishing Easter traditions and following them year after year, I hope that we will be able to feel the strength of the traditions in reverse by always capturing the child-like joy that I saw in Elena and Roman this year. Among all Christ's teachings, I am struck by His exhortation for all of us to become as little children. I observe my little children on a regular basis, and I know that they enjoy simple pleasures like hide and seek and special sweet treats. That's why I don't see anything sinister or harmful in Easter egg hunts and a surplus of candy, even on Easter Sunday.

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During the 2003-2004 school year, I worked as a Lab Instructor and Assistant Network Administrator at an elementary school. It was lots of fun--coaching a Lego Robotics team, producing the weekly news show, and advising video contest teams in addition to the normal schedule of teaching fifth and sixth grade classes while doing IT support for the teachers (and my supervisor). I have fond memories of many of the units we taught in the lab, but one of them recently came to mind.

At about this time of year as winter turned to spring, we were finishing up the stock market game. One of the teachers had added it to his math curriculum several years prior as a way of adding some real world relevance to adding fractions. Back then, each student started with $10,000 in 'play money' and could choose how to allocate it. The teacher would bring in the newspaper every day, the students would look up their chosen stocks (which had prices given with fractions), and practice arithmetic by trying to figure out how much they had gained or lost. They did this for about two months and declared a winner at the end.

By the time I got involved, the unit's goals had evolved. Instead of adding fractions, we were trying to teach the students to work in teams, use spreadsheets, do good internet research, and make rational arguments about their decisions to buy and sell. Of course, there's never a good rational argument for short-term stock trading, but I think we brought in a financial advisor from a local bank to talk about the differences between the game and investing for real.

At the time, I didn't know much more about money than the students. Still, I decided to create a simple portfolio of my own and play along, although I didn't intend to make any trades. I don't think we were charging commissions, but I had some vague idea that 'buy and hold' was a good strategy. Besides, most of my time in class would be taken up with helping the students and brokering their trades.

I chose just two stocks and split my money evenly. They both belonged to companies that I believed in, whose products I used; I was following the adage 'buy what you know.' The companies were AAPL and SIRI . That's right, I bought Apple with play money in early 2004. At the time, the stock was trading at about $11 per share. By the time the game was over it had gone up a little bit, maybe a few dollars. I remember that I did well when compared against the students.

Here's the funny thing: at the time I had some money that I was trying to figure out how to invest. I probably could have invested in that portfolio at that time with real money (in about the same quantity). If I had done so, and had the patience and resolve to hold on, those Apple shares would be worth 100 times more now than they were then, i.e. that $5000 investment would be worth half a million dollars.

It's fun to think about what might have been, but I didn't invest that way. I ended up putting my money into broad, market-tracking mutual funds. When I learned more, I switched to true index funds with rock bottom expense ratios. Even though I have less money than I would have, I know I made the right decision. For one thing, there were a lot of ifs in my hypothetical path to riches. For another, it's easy to confuse strategy with outcome but that's a terrible idea. Apple's meteoric rise was extremely rare, and there was no way of predicting its meteoric rise back then. If there had been, it would have been priced into the stock already. If I had bought it, I might be tempted even now to think I'm much better at picking stocks than I actually am, which could have led to a distorted appetite for risk. After all, look at the other half of my dynamic duo of stocks: Sirius/XM radio still trades at about $2 per share, about the same as nine years ago.

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Roman loves his pacifiers. He still uses the newborn Soothie , a one-piece silicone model which appears to be injection molded. Due to the fact that all of the pacifier's surfaces have a consistent hardness and texture, he is able to experiment with different ways of putting it in his mouth. In addition to the standard way, he has the inside out , the hockey puck , the buck tooth , the vampire , and the all in .

We think that the times when he really explores his pacifier, jamming it into his mouth as much as he can, are the times when his teeth are hurting him. The abundant drool that appears at these times tends to corroborate that hypothesis. Much like his sister, he's a late teether--nothing shows signs of poking through anytime soon, and he's already seven months old. We hope the teeth don't cause him too much pain, but it's so hard to know.

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Although it is already the second day of spring, there was a fresh coat of snow covering the ground on my long drive to work this morning. Winter hasn't been harsh here, but it seems determined to hold on for a little longer. It won't last forever--beautiful purple and white croci have already been blooming for days in the flower beds at Grandma and Grandpa's house, and the daffodils are coming on strong. The sun melted away the snow by the late morning, and it turned into a beautiful, early spring day.

Like the flowers, each member of our family is growing and developing in new ways.

• Roman is crawling for real; he almost never goes back to the army crawl, and is picking up speed as he learns to coordinate his limbs better. He has also learned how to pull himself to a standing position using the nearest chair or person or whatever is the right height.
• Elena is learning the alphabet. Aunt Veronica showed Jenny some interesting and fun ways to practice letters. One exercise involves drawing the letter on a little chalkboard, then erasing it with a wet cloth, then erasing it again with a dry towel. The other method involves putting together letters out of their component straight lines and curves; Veronica loaned us wooden pieces of the appropriate shapes and sizes. Not surprisingly, Elena's favorite letter so far is E .
• Jenny has a new look. While in Seattle, she trusted Carrie's highly-praised hair stylist not only to give her a haircut, but also to give her a new hair perspective. She looks great!
• My recent accomplishments are less visible than the others. I'm proud of the fact that I recently finished Book One of Gogol's Dead Souls . My memories of the story and characters were badly faded and in need of a new coat of paint. I need to read more books, and less of the internet.

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