Ah, yes...the blog

I have neglected you, dear blog, for some time. As you are a blog about my life with Emmett, a recent lack of Emmett has been much of the reason. Last weekend was the first night's separation between Emmett and myself (two in a row, in fact) as Andrea and E headed to the Pacific Northwest to visit Angela, Scott, and Tyler. It sounds like they had a great visit and Tyler, now 15 months rather than the 12 when he last saw Emmett, is learning to treat Emmett with care and a light touch. Andrea was raving about how good Tyler was with Emmett, with the former showing the latter how to operate toys, etc. But, alas, I missed it all as I was in the city.

So, this is part of the reason for blog negligence. The other part is the fact that I have been working toward the last day at the office, which has kept me mighty busy, and today was said final day. The original plan was that today was going to be my REAL last day, but now I am going to be staying on through the end of September so that I can attend a conference and will be working from home here and there with a couple of trips to the lab thrown in every once-in-a-while. Should be a smooth transition, hopefully, to what will happen at the end of September which is always-at-home for me with some consulting work taking place from home.

So what does that mean for Emmett and I? The picture at the left tells the tale, and as Emmett will soon learn: it is always 5 o'clock somewhere. Andrea will be starting work in a week's time (we have a week's vacation before then), and then it will be party time for the boys.

The nice thing about being slow with the blog (which is all going to change when I start doing the stay-at-home-thing, I swear) is that each new post has Emmett leaping forward in his abilities. I came home this evening and Emmett was in the Plastic Monstrosity(tm) or whatever it is called turning himself around and playing with all of the toys. I found myself quite surprised at how much more advanced he seemed (the advances have seemed big to me, too, as during the week i am only seeing him about an hour or so a day and I lost all of last weekend to the Portland trip). Anyway, I uploaded a quick video I took of the kid playing in the thing (the seat is filled with blankets as he is not to the official size/weight to play in the plastic machine---doesn't stop mom). The video shows that he is picking up some arm control, but it isn't always there as though he is able to get the flag into his mouth once, the hands make a big swing-and-a-miss later. Not a very exciting video, I know.



The head turn at the end of the video is the new thing for him. In the last week he has found that he has little interest in what is in front of him as he has discovered behind him. If he is sitting in his bouncy chair (still a 7 sock-monkey item) he will suddenly start leaning forward and turning his head around to see what is taking place behind the chair. This is a cute trick but has made the elimination communication stuff a little difficult as the normal Emmett's-back-to-my-front puts me behind E so when I start with the ssssss he just turns his head and checks out the source of the noise rather than peeing. We had lost some ground on the whole EC thing with travels and such, but we are getting it back. He has gotten so he can hold his pee for quite some time now and leaves a pretty good puddle in the bottom of the baby bjorn potty when the time comes.

Right now E is asleep, and we have on loan a video monitor from a friend. Tonight was the first trial of it and it is pretty neat as we can see exactly what Emmett is doing as he sleeps (shown to left). It is a two channel deal (for those with two kids, I suppose), and while we were sitting in the front room watching Emmett I changed the channel to learn that not only can we watch Emmett, but we can also watch some neighbor girl sleep. The funny part is that we have no idea who in the near houses has a ~18 month old. Anyway, we get the chance to be entertained by a neighbor's sleeping baby, too (at right). Life is too good.

owie weenie

Finally getting caught up on the blog a little bit. This past weekend was a celebration of our friends Bobby and Miyuki's wedding (they got married in Japan already, but this was a celebration with their friends from this side of the Pacific. It was a really beautiful day up in Tilden Park (above Berkeley) and Emmett was a pretty good sport for the whole thing---with the exception of the drive...he still doesn't seem to love the car. Emmett also got to play frisbee, sort of. I had to give it another shot as the only other frisbee experience he has had resulted in him getting hit in the head (an errant frisbee while he was getting his diaper changed...he wasn't ready for it). This time I wore him in the Ergo and only threw forehands which meant very little shaking for Emmett who napped the whole time (about 1.5 hours). Unfortunately, though, he has ended up with what looks to be a blister on the end of his penis and I am worried that all of that bouncing around in the Ergo chaffed the end of it. I am back into bad father territory (the day before Father's day I do this, no less). Andrea called the doctor and she said to just keep an eye on it and if gets worth to give her a call in the morning. We are at three months and a week or so and we have only made two calls to the doctor, at least we have that going for us.

Sunday we had big plans to go to garage sales. Andrea got a list of the ones we were going to hit and at about 8:30 she said "OK, let's get ready to go." We were all ready to go except our shoes and we decided to let Emmett take a little nap. Three hours later Emmett woke up with the interim being filled by us hoping he would wake, still waiting, shoes in hand. We ended up only going to our friends' garage sale where we scored a small cooler to transport breast milk to NYC (liquids bad, breast milk OK? Our dumb rules). A bunch of friends came over to hang out, too, so that was pretty good.

Today I finally got around to setting a date for my leaving the lab. I had mentioned that I was going to be calling it quits to take care of Emmett/explore other options, but was countered with an offer of a half-time position. I countered back with a half-time position where I am at the lab one day a week and home the rest, so the ball is in their court and we will see what happens. Anyway, it looks like there will be a change 8/14 where I will go to stay-at-home dad. We haven't really broken the news to Emmett--he is getting used to this mom/foodsource being around all of the time, so I am not sure how he is going to take it. At least he and I have frisbee.

Hard data

Physicists seem to like data, so since I am still one I thought I would make two plots of the audience demographics of the last talk presented at the conference before lunch. I have never made a pie chart before---hopefully it is clear (click on image to view in full).

Tahoe fun

We are now on day three of my conference at Lake Tahoe. The conference has been a dud for me as the focus is on things that aren’t very closely related to what I do, but it has been really nice to be up here with the Andrea and Emmett as I have been getting to see to see them at lunch every day and the hours of the conference are shorter than work hours. We didn’t bring the cord for the camera so the fun picture for the day is some ion beam analysis picture from the conference. I felt is wasn’t fair to get to see all of these fun pictures all day long and not share (fun, fun, fun!)

We are staying in a huge house that is about ½ mile from the lake and about 5 miles from the conference. I have been mostly riding my little folding bike to and from the conference site which only takes about 20 minutes, but wears me out pretty good as riding hills at over 6000 feet altitude is pretty rough when one spends every day at 100 feet altitude. It is really beautiful up here and it hasn’t been crowded as it is the in-between season (and during the week). The air feels really fresh, the water tastes good, the stars are beautiful at night, there are trees everywhere, and the weather has been really nice. If is too bad that darn conference has to go and spoil everything.

The other good thing has been that we are closer than normal to grandparents. We have seen Andrea’s parents who stayed with us our first night here and we saw my mom last night in traveling to Reno. Between the trip to Reno and the trip up here we have reached a whole series of Emmett firsts: first visit to another state (NV), first time in the car after dark, first time at an altitude of 7000+ feet, first visit to P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, etc. Oh, and he had his first two-month birthday. There is something really nice about being just a few months old as nearly everything one does will be a first.

The other big news is that he has semi-located his right hand. He holds it up in a fist and stares at it with his mouth wide open, willing the fist to enter his mouth. Things very often look promising as his hand slowly makes its way to the waiting cave, but every time it gains too much speed and strikes him in the eye or the forehead. It really makes me realize how easy we have it that when things seem tough we can easily put our fists in our own mouths. Babies have it rough.