A White Christmas

This year we were lucky enough to go to Utah to be with our families for Christmas. The day we left Austin, the high was forecasted to be 77 degrees. We got to Utah and it was freezing cold and snowing like crazy. We were excited though - it would have been a little disappointing to travel a thousand miles for a gray and dead Christmas. White and sparkly is much prettier. After rounding up some snow clothes for Emily we took her out for her first snow day and she loved it!
We had to poke and nudge Emily a little to get her up on time on Christmas morning, but she ended up having a good time. She's still a little sleep-dazed in this first picture. I guess Joseph is too.
That little yellow book she's clutching is pretty awesome. You should check it out if you haven't seen it already.Here's Emily giving Nancy some help opening a present. She made a lot of progress this year with her present-opening skills and was happy to help out where needed.After we got home we gave Emily a couple more presents. Her favorite was the stroller. Can you just see the joy in those mad eyes of hers?














She loves pushing the doll that Grandma gave her around in the stroller, but she's not very good at handling the baby with care. It's a good thing she's getting some practice before the real baby comes along!

The choir master

Yesterday was our ward's Christmas program. It was a little bit early because we live in a student ward so about half the ward is leaving (mostly for Utah) this week. Joseph is the choir director so he had a big part in it and it went surprisingly well... not that I doubt his abilities. It was just sort of a major production that the music chairperson had organized and we'd never run through it before. But the six choir numbers and five solos and four congregational hymns and narration all sounded great, if a little bit long. Emily was good through the program, being watched by various young women and families with kids and better food and toys than us. We did get a couple of comments though, about how people love her because she is "definitely the most vocal baby in the ward." I'm not sure that's such a good thing, but I guess it keeps people entertained.
After we got home from church Emily was totally out, so we took the opportunity to teach her what that other bed in her room is for. Hopefully eventually she'll realize that it's hers and will relinquish the major attachment she has for her crib.
Joseph's parents sent us a package a couple of days ago that had some necklaces for our dress up box. Emily has been carrying them around for a while now and is becoming quite the diva.Here is a picture of how big I am getting. I still feel fine, I am just expanding. Only 9 weeks to go! This pregnancy has been super fast.
And here is a picture of Joseph, the absent-minded professor-to-be. He came home from school the other day wearing kind of a bizarre outfit. I asked him about the brown hiking shoes/black slacks combination, and he said he just was thinking about other things when he chose his shoes. He has the makings of a real professor already!
We are leaving for Utah this Thursday and are excited to spend Christmas with our families and to hopefully introduce Emily to snow.

A World to Play In

As part of my research and my graphics class, I put together a program that lets me build things and then simulate them. Most things I do with the mouse or keyboard; however, the lab I work in has a 3D motion capture system. I attached my simulated world to the motion capture and was then able to use a glove to point to things and move them around. The motion capture works by tracking blinking lights. That means that I could effectively use the lights on the glove as buttons as well as pointers. I would point with two of the lights and then cover up a third light in order to grab something. When I uncovered the light, the program let go of whatever I grabbed. This was a lot of fun to build.

Ringleader of the Bad Kids

This post will be yet another hodge-podge of pictures (at the request of my mother).
Today was Sunday and it was really long. We left our apartment for church around 10:30 am and didn't get back until 5:00, thanks to choir practice and tithing settlement. While at church Emily was getting tireder and tireder and loopier and loopier. I have nicknamed her the "Ringleader of the Bad Kids" because she is always the first to do something bad (like shrieking or running up and down the aisles) and the other kids will try to follow suit. Basically, even if she doesn't have any bad kid followers, she turns the good kids into bad kids and causes much chaos.
Here she is exerting her influence on a couple of impressionable kids during play time.
And here she is totally wasted after a hard day's work of turning good kids bad:
She may get her influence from this friendly looking guy:
Most of you have probably noticed that the Christmas season is upon us. Emily is dressing for the occasion and even making her own list for Santa:I noticed the other day that even though we have been listening to Christmas music non stop for a couple of weeks now and we have our Christmas tree up, the weather does not feel Christmassy. I was especially struck the other day by the juxtaposition of our festive Christmas tree and the beautiful autumn leaves outside the window.
We've been having really nice weather lately. I can't really complain about it, aside from the fact that it does not really put me in the Christmas spirit.

Books.

I tend to do things obsessively until I burn out, and lately my obsession has been reading. This subject is a little bit different from what I normally talk about (Emily) but I just found some gems that were too good to keep to myself.

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
This book is very well known, so a lot of you have probably already read it, but I hadn't until last month. I don't know why I put it off for so long. It didn't take very long to read - I think I finished it in a day and a half and that was going at a leisurely pace. For those who aren't familiar with it, it's basically a collection of letters between a young demon, Wormwood, and his higher-ranked uncle Screwtape. The letters discuss the easiest way to tempt a man and lead him astray. It really made me think a lot about my habits and the fickleness of man.





The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
This book has gotten a lot of hype lately so I finally got it from the library and sat down with it. It's about a young German girl living during WWII who is taken to live with foster parents when she is nine. It follows her as she sees her brother die, builds a new life with new friends, learns to love books, and develops her own ideas and opinions concerning the war, Hitler, and the Jews. I didn't have very high expectations because the subject matter is so serious and the cover is kind of boring, but it was amazing. Everyone should read this.




The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
I loved this book. It might be because the author was a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor and reminded me a lot of Joseph, but I loved it. This book records the words of a father of three young children diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given about six months to live. The thoughts and stories are entertaining, inspiring, and thoughtful. I found myself reading chapters aloud to Joseph just because I couldn't resist, and he enjoyed it as much as I did. He's next in line to read it.





The Underneath by Kathi Appelt
This is a children's book that I only checked out because the children's literature book club in my ward chose it. I never would have been interested in a book about a hound and a couple of cats on my own. But it was amazing! I don't really know how to make this sound interesting without typing something really long, so you might just have to take my word for it. I loved one of the reviews though, that said "Kathi Appelt's novel, The Underneath, reads like a ballad sung." It is poetic and magical and really worth reading.

I know I'm not very good at reviewing books. It's way harder than it looks to make a book sound good in a couple of sentences so you should probably go to Amazon and read the real review. But I've read a lot of books in the last couple of months and these ones really stood out. I know I'm always on the lookout for a new good book to read, so hopefully someone reading this will remember the next time they're in search of a good book and give one of these a try!

Milk

I think this comic was written about Joseph, lover of milk and bargains

An Awkward Situation

Emily came crying out of her bedroom while I was setting the table this evening.She was obviously experiencing some discomfort, which was only exacerbated by my slowness to help and my quickness to pull out the camera.
I couldn't get a clear shot because she got so mad when I started taking pictures and threw herself on the floor - classic baby tantrum style. This tantrum may have been for a good reason though.

'Tis the Season

Joseph, Emily and I set up our Christmas tree the other night and it was totally an ordeal. We had to rearrange our whole apartment and I am still working to clear up the mess. It mostly ended up in Emily's room because there's always space for more stuff in there... at least in my head there always is.
When we finally had enough space to actually put the tree up Emily helped put up a few ornaments before she went to bed. Of the three she handled, she broke two.
She's pretty proud of herself. She held this pose for like thirty seconds until I finally took the picture.Taking time out to read a book.
And this is a picture of Emily yesterday morning in a kimono coat and a dragon hat clutching the powerful queen of spades.