The Number Field

We did our best to stretch out Mother's Day into an entire weekend. On Saturday morning I watched Elena while Jenny went for a run and then to some yard sales. In the afternoon Elena and I went out and let Jenny have some time alone at home. We went to the flowers shop for tulips, the grocery store for last-minute dinner items, and the pharmacy for Elena's gift to Jenny: a photo collage of their best together pictures over the past year.

We enjoyed a dinner of shrimp cocktail, pork chops, mashed potatoes, and corn on the cob. Jenny was happy that I made it, and even more happy that I cleaned up afterwards. I followed it up on Sunday morning with a pancake breakfast. In addition to syrup, we had whipped cream and blackberries as special Mother's Day toppings.

I had front-loaded our festivities because we knew that we were going to spend Sunday evening with Jeremy, Amy, Jean, Ben and their families, and Jeremy was planning to fire up the grill for dinner. As usual, the dinner was excellent. I had one last present to give Jenny: when they asked if we wanted to stay and play a game, we said yes and I suggested Yahtzee . It's Jenny's favorite game, but I'm not a fan. In the end, we kept Elena up long past her bedtime, but she was a happy little girl all night long.

I made one observation of Elena's behavior that I'm not quite sure how to interpret. Jeremy and Amy had lots of rose petals around, and two of the big girls (Hailey and Emily) were playing with them. They noticed that when they threw them up in the air, Elena would laugh hysterically. Of course this made them repeat the process so much that Elena turned bright red, but after a few minutes they moved on to something else.

Some time later Elena was walking and playing on her own, unaware even that I had my eye on her. She picked a few of the leftover petals off the floor, then waved her hands up and down as if she was throwing them. She didn't laugh out loud this time, but she did seem amused. Was she remembering and reenacting the earlier scenario? I could be misinterpreting it, but it seemed to signal a level of cognitive development that I hadn't noticed yet. On this Mother's Day, thanks to Jenny for all that she does to raise our happy, active Elena.

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Classes for my spring semester have concluded--all that remains is exams. In keeping with my personal tradition, I brought donuts and cookies for my students on Thursday for our last discussion section. The donuts were for the early morning class, while the cookies were for everyone else. I made the cookies Wednesday evening. I followed the "Cowboy Cookie" recipe passed down from my mother, who got it as a wedding present.

My students said 'thank you,' but I wouldn't have expected anything else. At the end of the day, I had some left over, and as I exited my building some random guy walking by saw me carrying the tub and said "are those cookies?" I said yes and offered him one. He said thanks and grabbed one. After just one bite, he said "Can I have another one? These are awesome!" and then turned to his friend and said "Hey, these cookies are the bomb!" I did think that the cookies had turned out really well, and hearing some random kid confirm that made me feel good.

Now that the semester is over, I have more control over my schedule. There's still lots of work to do, but I no longer have specific obligations that will keep me at school until after six in the evening. I'm going to try to come home earlier to spend more quality time with Jenny and Elena, and maybe try to get back into shape. Just yesterday I took Elena out in the jogging stroller for my first run in several months. We didn't go very far or very fast, but it was good to be out there. Elena did want to get out when we ran by the playground at the park, so I probably need to rethink my route. Aside from that, we had a great time.

Jenny was coming back from her morning run today, and got caught in a traffic jam because of a popular 5k race that went through our neighborhood. She said that she saw lots of kids out there with their parents. Every day Elena gains speed and stability on her feet, so maybe before long she'll be out of the stroller and running alongside, but only if I manage to find an exercise schedule that works for me.

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I haven't mentioned it specifically, but some of the comments on previous posts have alluded to the reason for our trip back East: I had a job interview. I don't want to share too many details, but I think that things went pretty well. One reason that Jenny and Elena joined me was so that they could look at local real estate and get an idea of where we might live if I get the job.

Because of that, Elena had to endure lots of car time, which is not her favorite activity. A few things made it bearable: Grandma Nancy brought tasty treats that she was happy to share with Elena, especially some chocolate chip bunny cracker/cookies. Also, uncle David joined them when he wasn't working. Elena always loves having company in the back seat, and he was an especially good companion. In the end, I think that this advance scouting helped Jenny become more comfortable with the idea of relocating to a new place.

After David and Nancy left, we turned to the other side of the family for help. Jenny and I wanted to attend the temple, but we needed someone to take care of Elena. Originally we asked Gran Ann to help, but then aunt Leisa and uncle Sam joined in. They took Elena down to the National Zoo. Elena liked looking and pointing at all the animals, but her favorites were the red pandas * , which were especially active at the time they visited.

Elena got a special bonus surprise at the zoo. She has been interested in sunglasses for a while, but we haven't given her any. At the zoo, she found a pair of child-sized Hello Kitty sunglasses on the ground. They must have been lost or abandoned by someone else, so the babysitters decided that it would be okay to let Elena keep them. She likes them so much--I hope that there's not some other little girl out there mourning the loss too much. When we met up with them afterwards, we were joined by aunt Laura, who drove over after work with fresh cupcakes.

On Friday evening we had dinner with friends of mine that I hadn't seen in some time. The weather was perfect, dinner was excellent, and we all had a great time. I think that it was our hosts' first cookout of the season, which was very gracious of them. I made the mistake of letting Elena climb up and down the staircase up their wooden deck too much. Even though Jenny warned me, I thought Elena was having a good time. She was, but her legs were pretty scratched up by the next day.

After helping to put in the garden at my parents' house, I coordinated one more project that afternoon. My mom said that all for Mother's day and her birthday (which are very close together), she wanted someone to put together the porch swing she had recently purchased. I recruited my sisters and we took care of it. Elena had a good time sitting in the swing, so Gran insisted that we have to come back often.

* To me they look more like raccoons than pandas.

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Jenny and Elena are back home tonight, asleep in their own beds. I have a few more things to take care of here, but I get to join them tomorrow evening. We've had an extremely pleasant trip, especially because of all the quality time with family and friends. Thanks to all for sharing your time with us!

We learned some things about Elena on the trip. Among the insights:

• Elena loves swimming, which she got to do in the hotel pool. I tried to teach her how to blow bubbles, but she just wanted to drink the water. She'll have a good time at her upcoming swim lessons.
  
• She wants to walk up and down stairs, like a big girl. When I hold her hand, she can make it up several stairs but eventually needs a rest. Going down will take a lot more work.
• Elena had no problem sleeping in a pack-n-play in our hotel room. We rigged a sheet to shield her, and were even able to turn the TV on after putting her to bed.
  
• This little baby loves the dirt. She got to assist as grandpa directed a crew of aunts and uncles putting in the vegetable garden. After some close calls with metal garden implements, she switched to a plastic shovel.
  
• According to Jenny, Elena waved "goodbye" and "hello" to the airports as the planes took off and landed today. It seems that she's getting the hang of air travel.

There's much more to tell, but I don't have time to write about it now. You can guess some of the story by clicking on the pictures to the left, or going directly to my flickr stream .

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I've spent plenty of time taking care of Elena by myself. But yesterday we faced a new kind of situation, with limited space and a need to stay very quiet. Jenny had been asked to give a talk in church, so she got to sit on the podium. Elena and I sat in our normal position, and I hoped that we would be able to make it through the hour without having to go out into the hallway.

Elena did an excellent job of behaving herself. She kept pointing at her toy bag because she wanted to play with them, but I asked her to be patient for just a few more minutes, and we made it until after the sacrament before I got them out. Then she played quietly for most of the time, and didn't bother the people sitting near us too much. When Jenny got up to speak, she waved and tried to say hello, but didn't cry or need to go to her.

Towards the end of the meeting, I could tell she needed something different. I sat her sideways on my lap, then maneuvered her into a lying-down position, so she could look at things upside down. I quietly tickled her tummy and neck, and she giggled a little bit. I saw something I wasn't expecting--four white tooth buds. Her upper teeth still haven't broken through, but it looks like four of them are going to come in at once.

Jenny gets to face a similar, but much more complicated situation with Elena tomorrow. We're flying to the East Coast for the rest of the week, and had to book different flights. Jenny's with Elena, and I'm with the luggage. Depending on how things go, I could get both Elena and the luggage on the return trip. We've loaded Elena's Baby Songs video on the iPod, and hopefully it will induce the same zombie-like state as it does when she watches it on TV. Does anyone have other tips for traveling with a toddler?

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On their way to the gym yesterday morning, Jenny and Elena stopped to get the mail first. While Jenny got out her key to open the mailbox, Elena took a few steps down the sidewalk in the other direction. Jenny only took her eyes off Elena for a second or two, but when she looked back Elena was in the middle of a nosedive.

Elena still doesn't lift her feet very much when she walks, so she probably stumbled on a seam in the concrete sidewalk. Normally she catches herself, but this time that didn't quite work out, and she scraped her nose and chin. The scrape wasn't too bad, so Jenny cleaned it up and they continued on their way to the gym. However, when Jenny checked on her, her hair had gotten stuck in the wound--it was gross, but they cleaned it up again and all was well.

Jenny checked Elena over afterwards to make sure that she hadn't missed anything. She found that Elena has several little bumps and bruises that we hadn't even noticed on her knees and elsewhere. She's a trooper; she hasn't complained about any of them.

Last Sunday I had my own traumatic "I should have been watching better" moment. We were having dinner at our friends' house, and Elena was playing on the stairs. I was right there with her, but she's normally so good on the stairs that I took a moment to look something up on my iPod. That was all it took for her to stand up and do a backdive off the second step, banging her head pretty hard. We treated that injury with an ice pack at the impact site, and ice cream to distract her.

Elena loves to explore and try new things. As she picks up speed, I'm sure she'll get more scrapes and bruises for us to kiss away. For now, she's decided that instead of going to the gym, she should be mommy's personal trainer at home.

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We have noticed that Elena has a penchant for accessories, from head to toe. She loves playing with shoes, both hers and ours, and when it comes time to put them on she's always happy to put out her foot so the task becomes easier. Sometimes she offers to help me put my shoes on too.

Moving on up, purses fascinate her. She frequently gets distracted by Jenny's purse, but we've managed to train her not to dig around in it very often. Her Easter basket doubles as a purse, and it is currently one of the favorite toys in her rotation. Now that she's a walking girl, she likes to practice carrying things. Sometimes she'll load up with as many toys as she can fit in her hands--it's pretty amazing to watch her handle three or more little objects. Other times she'll try to carry as much volume as possible, usually in the form of stuffed animals. As she realizes that a purse can be used to help her carry all of her things, she'll probably come to like them even more.

Her deepest fascination is with necklaces. Since she figured out how to put them on several weeks ago, she's rarely seen without one or two or more around her neck. She got new ones for Easter, in different colors, and we can't be entirely sure, but it seems like she tries to coordinate them.

She's still developing a relationship with headbands. The first time Jenny put one on her, Elena had the biggest smile, and she still likes playing with them. She doesn't yet appreciate their functional value--that if she left one in, it would help keep the hair out of her face. Her hair is still in the intermediate stage where it's long enough to obscure her eyes and even get in her mouth, but too short to tuck behind her ears or pull back in a ponytail. When Jenny puts it up in a top ponytail, Elena's likely to pull out the bow and the rubber band that keep it together. Still, with all of her other accessory-loving tendencies, I'm sure she'll love to have her hair done once she gets the hang of it.

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Elena made a big decision on Sunday, without even telling us. She decided that she is now a walker, not a crawler. The transition was so sudden that there must be some reason for it; she's had all the skills for some time now, so that can't be it. We first noticed at church, so the two most likely explanations are that she really noticed that all the adults and big kids walk, and decided that she wanted to be like them. It could also be that her pretty spring dress made crawling too hard, and she realized that she could just get around better if she walked.

Regardless of the reason, Elena walked all over the church building--up and down hallways, in and out of rooms. She navigated through the crowds and got right back up whenever she fell down. She didn't fall often, even though she did wobble and frequently had to check her balance.

It wasn't just a one day thing. Since then she's been a big walker. When she gets tired or really needs to move fast, she'll go back to crawling, but there's less of that every day. In just a little while, she'll learn a new way of moving--Jenny signed up for "mommy and me" swim classes, starting in June. Elena enjoyed the water last year, so this year we hope to learn some techniques that will move her towards aquatic independence.

P.S. I would like to upload pictures of Elena in her Easter dress, but I have already exceeded my monthly upload quota on flickr. I'm considering other options, but I would like to keep everything consolidated at flickr. A one year upgrade to a pro account, with unlimited uploads, costs $24.95. In the spirit of the NPR fund drive going on at our local station, I'm not above asking for donations. If this blog is valuable to you, and you enjoy seeing pictures of Elena, perhaps you would like to help defray the cost? (Do I hear some grandparents in the audience?) Please get in touch with me if you're interested in helping out.

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Some of you might remember my brooding post from last year about a camping trip with the Boy Scouts. This weekend I went on this year's edition of the same trip and I had a much better time. I think that the same can be said for the boys who participated--they all said it was awesome.

The biggest thing that helped me to relax and enjoy myself was the larger number of people who attended, both Scouts and leaders. Several of the adults have sons that were also present. At one point, I told the fathers that it was really interesting and informative to watch them interact with their sons. I worried that my observations wouldn't help me in my relationship with Elena, but they have daughters too and assured me that anything I picked up would be useful with girls too.

I want to have at least some record of the activities, because I put a lot of thought and work into them and I might come back to them in the future. On Saturday they had a Scout skills competition, and asked us to come up with an activity that would test the various troops' teamwork and knowledge.

We decided to develop a game called Human Minesweeper. We laid out a 6x6 square grid and let the boys walk through it one square at a time. With a map in our hands, at each step we told them how many 'mines' were adjacent to their position, just like in the computer game. If they landed on a mine, we gave them one chance to defuse it by answering a question. If they got the answer wrong, the mine blew up and they had to do penalty pushups. We had three levels, each with an increasing number of mines.

By far the highlight of the trip was the catapult construction contest. Most of the other groups used a simple design and used scouts pulling on a rope for their power. We decided to make a torsion catapult, also known as an onager. We over-engineered and underperformed, but had a great time making it. I'm especially proud of the construction--the scouts worked really hard to make the lashings tight, and our structure held fast even after repeated firing. I'll stop my description there and let the following video tell the tale.

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We're all recovering from a big Easter weekend which took all of us, especially Elena, off our normal schedule. We had a good time, and just one or two days and nights of good sleep and regular naps should make everything better.

Elena got to take part in three Easter egg hunts, but despite our hopes she's not entirely into them. The first was a large community activity in Buda (we were last there for Independence Day) on Saturday morning. Elena really liked her basket, and also wanted to hold onto the eggs. She didn't really have a vision of picking up eggs and putting them into her basket, although when we held them out to her she would sometimes take them from us and put them into the basket.

The event had several other activities that Elena found more interesting. Even though we had to wait line for the petting zoo, it was worth it. Elena's experience with farm animals comes exclusively from books, and even the "touch and feel" variety don't hold a candle to real goats, chicks, and bunnies.

Elena wanted to go in the bouncy castle, but we thought she was too young. She did enjoy the "train" ride, which was an ingenious assembly of fifty-gallon water buckets on wheels, attached to a lawn tractor. We thought about getting her face painted but decided against it because it didn't fit our plans for taking bluebonnet pictures on the way home.

On Sunday morning, we found baskets from the Easter bunny. Mine had two new ties in it, and Elena found some of her favorite things: necklaces and headbands. Jenny and I left her in the front room to play while we worked on breakfast, but after a few minutes passed things got suspiciously quiet in there. We returned to find her sitting with an open easter egg, scooping Reese's pieces into her mouth as quickly as possible. After that, she wanted candy all day long.

At lunchtime, we went to a cookout and easter egg hunt with some friends. I made German potato salad; although Jenny had some doubts, she agreed that it turned out well. Our host grilled up the usual burgers and sausages, but also included sliced beets and sweet potatoes in the mix. They were surprisingly good. Also, we thought that Elena's candy discovery from the morning would inspire her to go after the eggs a little bit more, but it wasn't to be.

We shared Easter dinner at Jenny's brother's house, with lots of kids, including Elena's cousins. Jenny and I fulfilled our longstanding duty of being the egg hiders for the hunt we had there, but even with the advantage of our help, Elena's level of interest stayed the same. Just after the egg hunt was over, we lined all the kids up against the fence so we could take some pictures. Elena lost interest before we were done, and noticed a basket full of eggs that an older girl had set down nearby. She decided to try to abscond with it. We noticed, and thought that this must have been her plan all along: to get the big kids to do the dirty work, then take the candy for herself.

The weather was so nice that we just enjoyed some pleasant time out in the yard. Even though she doesn't try to interact with them too much, Elena loves being around older kids. She had a great time toddling and crawling around, hiding in the playscape, and figuring out how to get into and out of a fun toy car.

On Monday morning we had one more activity that was outside the norm: Elena's appointment with the geneticist. At the present time, I don't want to share too much about the visit. I can confirm that going to the doctor for anything other than a normal checkup gives me a serious case of parentoia * . The doctor described her job as detective work--there are many clues, but few smoking guns.

As part of the visit, the doctor ordered some blood work. By the time they called us back into the exam room Elena was showing signs of being tired and hungry. She had a good time looking out the window until the technicians came in. The primary tech was friendly and extremely competent, but the most amazing thing was that Elena didn't mind the needle stick at all. She sat through it without a peep, as if it was nothing unusual, even though they had to fill up several vials. I could feel my heart pounding as I held her on my lap, so I'm very proud of my little girl.

After that, Jenny dropped me off at school and took Elena home for a good long nap, the first step in getting her back on schedule.

* Whenever I think I've come up with a unique and funny turn of phrase, I look it up on Google and find that someone else has already done it.

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