The Number Field

Elena slept peacefully through the night last night, which was not the case at this time last week. She has always been exceptionally healthy, and I didn't realize what a blessing that was until she got sick last week. She must have picked up a bug somewhere, because she went through a pretty hard time last weekend, starting on Thursday.

Throughout the ordeal Elena tried her best to be a good sport. She needed some extra cuddling, and didn't fuss too much. We quickly discovered that she gave no advance notice before throwing up. Somehow, Jenny managed to save Elena's favorite blanket from the ill effects several times. I didn't, and every time the blanket became soiled (even in the middle of the night), we had to wash and dry the blanket before we could put Elena back to sleep--she wouldn't go down without it.

By Friday evening, we had a stretch without any incidents and we thought we were through the worst of it when we put Elena to bed. Just when we were about to go to sleep, she awoke with a cry and we had to go rescue her, then watch Pete's Dragon while we did the laundry. That wasn't even the low point of the evening, because Jenny was the next to fall prey to the virus.

After an exhausting night for Jenny, she didn't have much energy the next day, so I was on nurse duty for both her and Elena. Luckily, the bug didn't strike Jenny as hard as it had Elena, and they were both feeling better on Saturday evening. They continued to improve through the weekend, although Elena did have one more incident on Saturday night, just when we thought she was all done.

I managed to escape the worst effects of the illness, although it did strike a glancing blow and I felt pretty puny for a couple of days during the week. But that inspired an April Fool's prank. I was due to teach on April 1, so I recruited a student from each of my classes to be a compatriot. At the beginning of each class, I talked about Elena and Jenny had been sick, and acted not well until I suddenly ran out of the room mid-problem. At that point the chosen student was supposed to get up and take my place in the problem, doing their best impersonation of me.

In two of the classes, the prank worked very well. In the third, the students caught on in advance and double crossed me by leaving the classroom immediately after I did, although they did come back a few minutes later. I think that everyone had a good time. The students did express concern for Elena's help--they were happy to hear that although she had been sick, she was better now.

The famous Texas bluebonnets are in full bloom. Due to the recent weather, the wildflowers are especially beautiful right now, so we knew that we had to find a patch of them and take some pictures. Elena already had a very busy and tiring morning (more about that soon), and we were worried that she would be too tired to smile for more pictures. We drove and drove, looking for a suitable patch, and were just about to abandon our search when we found the perfect spot. When we sat Elena down in the sweet smelling flowers, she perked right up for the pictures, with fantastic results.

For larger versions, click on the flickr sidebar to the right.

For most of the past two years on this blog, I've shared a lot of personal stories and details about myself and my family. It's been pointed out to me that in the future, these private matters might be found and judged harshly by possible employers. Even further out, they might serve as a source of endless embarrassment to Elena.

After serious deliberation, I'm taking the blog in another direction. It's going to be less personal, but hopefully still entertaining and insightful. Starting immediately, this blog will be devoted to the Campaign for Cat Literacy (CfCL). For years, so-called LOLcats have been promoted by misinformed websites like icanhascheezburger.com . It's time for someone to take a stand, and say that cats do know how to spell, and that doesn't make them any less funny. Join me as we take back the internet for all of our well-educated feline friends!

Now that Elena has some teeth, she's starting to wonder about the best way to take care of them. As we were getting ready for church today, Jenny set Elena on the bathroom counter while she brushed her teeth with our electric toothbrush. Although we only have one electric base, Jenny and I each have our own brush that attaches to it. Elena decided to pick up the free brush and imitate Mommy by sticking it in her mouth. She then went one step further and started humming the exact tone that the toothbrush makes when it's turned on.

I remember that I didn't like to brush my teeth when I was a kid. I thought that toothpaste was only good for eating. (It's minty and sweet; what's not to like?) In my adult years, despite reforming myself, I've paid the price (in pain and money) for that lax attitude regarding tooth care. Maybe this is an early sign that Elena will take after Jenny, who has always practiced good oral hygiene habits.

For the past week or two, Elena has been pointing at everything. For instance, at breakfast on Sunday, I was trying to feed her one thing, but she really wanted something else: more pancakes. She made the sign for "more," and I said that I had given her more and she wasn't eating it. She responded by pointing at the pancakes and then making the "more" sign. After that, I couldn't do anything but give her the pancakes.

Jenny told me that this morning she was reading on the couch while Elena played with her toys. When Elena noticed what Jenny was doing, she rambled off to her bedroom and returned with a book. Jenny helped her up onto the couch and Elena settled into a seated position next to her; they both had their books open. After just a moment, Elena started pointing at Jenny's book then back at her own. Jenny thought that Elena wanted to be read to out loud, but Elena didn't seem to want that. Jenny still can't figure out exactly what Elena wanted, but our current best guess is that Elena just wanted to point out the fact that she and mommy were engaged in the same activity. Any thoughts?

This evening Jenny fixed a wonderful dinner with a main course of broiled pork chops. Our small apartment doesn't have the greatest ventilation, but our smoke detectors are top notch. As a result, when the pork chops came out of the oven a smoke detector started beeping, even though there was no visible smoke and almost no smell. We've been through this before, and the quickest solution is to remove smoke detector from the wall and put it on the ground for just a minute until the smoke dissipates.

While the smoke detector was on the ground, Elena crawled right over, picked it up and started to examine it. When she noticed that she had my attention, she started to point at the wall. I asked her to come back to the front room, but she wouldn't budge. I eventually went over to her and she handed it to me. I decided that enough time had passed for the smoke to dissipate, and reattached the detector to its mounting bracket. With that done, Elena happily returned to playing with her toys.

I have no idea why Elena would be so attracted to the smoke detector, or how she knows that it's supposed to go on the wall. I don't think that she saw me take it down. Somehow she knew that something was up, and she wouldn't give it up until I put things back in their rightful state. She's a good little fire marshal, keeping all of us safe.

As we had suspected and hoped, the long awaited day finally arrived on Friday. It was hard to see, but I managed to get my thumb into Elena's mouth to feel her gum line, and felt the sharp little edge of a tooth that has finally broken through. She must have noticed the difference herself, and that may be why she let me feel it, because she usually avoids having fingers stuck in her mouth. She, on the other hand, loves to stick her whole hand into my mouth and examine my teeth.

It has been months since other babies in her cohort started to get their teeth. Every time Elena had a fussy day, we wondered if it was teething pain. It might have been, but the teeth never broke through before. Early on, I was skeptical while Jenny was a tooth believer. More recently Jenny had tooth fatigue and I raised the banner of hope. Now that Elena has a tooth, we're both amazed by how cheerfully she's handling it. She's been exceptionally good this week. When we left for church today, Elena was sending us all her sleepy signals: saying "ni ni," cuddling her blanky and sucking her thumb. At church, she stayed awake and kept herself happy, quiet, and under control the whole time.

I can already see the signs of the next tooth, so it should be here before long. One doctor observed that late teethers often get their teeth rapidly, even in bunches, so we'll see if that holds true for Elena. One tooth isn't good for much, but I think I saw her using it to crunch a graham cracker today.

On a more philosophical note, the tooth saga reminds me that there are many things that I can't control or even influence about Elena's development. When we give her tastes of three or four new kinds of food in one evening, and she eats all of them, it's just because of who she is. I'm pretty proud that we can get her to fold her arms before we say a prayer, but as much as I like to think that we taught her that, I know that it wouldn't have happened without her innate abilities and interests. As with any parent, I'm in danger of projecting my hopes and dreams onto her, but hopefully moments like this will remind me to avoid that.

Somehow or another, I was wasting time on the internet and decided to look for a better answer to the question that many people ask when they hear my last name: am I related to Pittsburgh quarterback Ben? I usually make a dumb joke or point out the slight difference in the spelling of the name. Depending on how captive my audience is, I might then continue with a discussion about the transliteration of dipthongs.

After just a few minutes of searching I discovered several articles about a trip that Big Ben took to Switzerland in 2006, and in one of them I found the name of his ancestral hometown, as well as the approximate year that his ancestors emigrated to America.

My next step was to log into my account at FamilySearch and check my own ancestry. Thanks to hard working people who have done the research and entered all the information, I found my ancestral hometown and the names of my ancestors who emigrated to the States. Then I took a trip over to swissroots and entered my last name into their lookup tool.

I discovered that Ben and I come from different towns. My ancestors lived in Langnau im Emmental and the records I checked show that they were there as far back as the early 1500s. He comes from Lauperswil, which is only a few miles away, so there might have been some connection. But the waters are muddied by this fact: the two families had different coats of arms, so they might have been entirely unrelated. I'll need to do more research to figure out the rest of the story.

I know you might accuse me of burying the lede in that last paragraph, so let me just repeat it here: as part of my investigation, I found my family's official coat of arms. I remember going through a heraldry-geek phase in middle school, and I must not have grow nout of it, because I think that this is unbelievably cool. Whether you agree or not, here it is:

My new goal is to find some way to use this for real. Custom stationery, perhaps?

While playing outside on the patio yesterday, Elena took an interest in a big old C-clamp that I left out there a long time ago. Even though it's pretty heavy, she picked it up and brought it inside, scooting along in the way she does when she's carrying something. I think that was the final sign that we needed to switch out some of Elena's toys. Jenny told me that sometimes Elena would go for days without playing with them.

This is a situation that we were prepared for. There's only room for two shelves of toys in our little apartment, so at any given time most of Elena's are in storage. When we run into a situation like the present, we put most of her current toys away, and bring out a mix of some that she's played with before and some that are entirely new to her. This morning she's enjoying a new push-button phone that talks and makes noises. Last night she started to play with a right-shape-in-the-right-hole set.

Amazingly, Elena never loses interest in her books. They're all on a bookshelf in her bedroom, and she loves to go in there and look at them. She takes good care of books and magazines--it's been months since she ripped any pages out of them. Her favorites do change, but not nearly as often as with toys. Even at church, she loves to go through the pages of the hymnal, and when we let her pick things to play with from her church bag, she always pulls out the books first.

I think that her love of books comes from seeing her mommy read a lot. If that's the case, then from me she only learns a love of computers and loose papers.

Over the past few weeks, Elena has been spending a lot of time with her Colors book. It doesn't have a story, instead each page shows pictures of a bunch of objects that are all the same color. Most of the colors represented are the standard primary and secondary colors: blue, yellow, red, green, purple, and orange. At the end of the book, they go a little crazy and include gray and magenta.

The other day Elena woke up early from a nap--Jenny had hoped to finish the book she was reading before Elena woke up, but didn't quite make it. Instead she hoped Elena would play quietly by herself for just a few minutes so she could finish the book. But even those hopes were dashed, as Elena immediately found her Colors book and clambered up onto the futon next to Jenny, then shoved the book into Jenny's face for some reading time.

Last night, Jenny was in charge of the enrichment activity for Relief Society at the church, and I wasn't able to make it home in time to take care of Elena before the activity started. This wasn't a big problem, because childcare was provided at the event, so Jenny left Elena with the young women in charge of the nursery. I went by there as soon as I could so I could say hi to Jenny and bring Elena home before bedtime. Jenny invited me to have some dinner--the women had already eaten and there were plenty of leftovers.

When we finished, I headed towards the nursery, but before we even got there one of the young women came out and asked "Are you Elena's parents?" She then told us that they had given Elena some Froot Loops, and before she ate them she arranged them by color, all in a row. Aside from some extra yellows, she had two of each color, so she ate the extras first. Then she ate the rest in order, one color at a time. When I got into the nursery, I saw her finish off the last of them, and the other girls corroborated the story. They said that our baby was "beyond smart."

Of course when we got home I tried some administering some color knowledge experiments for her, but they weren't very conclusive. Certainly not as definitive as watching her take the initiative to organize Froot Loops before eating them.

Jenny had a long list of errands to run yesterday. On her way out the door, while Elena was partway into a good long nap, Jenny gave me a suggestion for a photo session when Elena woke up. Elena has many wonderful hand-me-down toys, and one of the largest is a pink car that's just big enough for her to ride in, and she loves it; the photo shoot featured the car.

With the recent good weather (not too cold, not too hot, a rarity around here), Jenny sometimes leaves the screen door open and Elena goes out to play. We leave the pink car on the patio because of its size, so Elena can only play with it when she's out there. Sometimes she brings her other toys outside; she likes to put them in the car's trunk. She also likes to stand up with the car as support. She's tried to get into it on her own, but so far has only managed to climb over it. Yesterday, she and I pushed it back and forth between us, similar to how we roll a ball back and forth.

The real fun starts when we take it off the patio and out to the parking lot of our apartment complex. She likes it so much more than a stroller. That's where Jenny's suggestion came in. We had good light, so I took a bunch of pictures of Elena's first car. I'll have to remember to pull these out when she turns sixteen.

One final note: these may be Elena's final toothless pictures. After months of waiting we think her teeth are really coming in this time. We see definite redness and swelling in her gums, and I have felt a bump that is more than just the gum line--I think it must be an erupting tooth. Every time she has a fussy day, we blame it on teething, but I have greater confidence than ever before that the teeth will show themselves imminently.