Mass Destruction

This is what happens when our darling girl gets angry. She may be little, but she can sure create a lot of chaos when she has a mind to.

Uh oh...

This is Emily's latest trick. She can't actually crawl yet, but she has been getting up on her hands and knees for the last couple of weeks, with increasing ease and frequency. This may mark the beginning of a new era in our household. I suppose we'll have to be careful to make our new apartment as safe and baby-proof as possible.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Yesterday was Valentine's Day, as most of your probably know. Joseph and I saw each other briefly in the morning before he went to school, and briefly in the evening before I went to work. It was not the best of Valentine's days. Then this morning when I got home, the apartment was dark. Joseph flipped on the lights and said, "Happy Valentine's day!" and this is what I saw:
He had also made some Valentine's cookies for me. He said they were supposed to be frosted, but he didn't have cream cheese or butter and I had the car with me. It'll be a good family activity for us to do tonight.
I love the giant cookie man's starry eyes and pot belly.He had put lots of hearts on the walls for me. Most were cute with nice things written on them like the top heart. Some were wacky like the other two, but that's just how Joseph is. It's part of what makes him my wonderful husband.
Here is a picture of the Valentine Emily made for me with her unmatched origami skills.

It was a wonderful day-after-Valentine's-day. I was so surprised and happy! Joseph is always so good at doing something way better than just buying everything from the store to surprise me with. I'll have to be sure and think of something awesome for him next year.

Color illusion

I'm taking a computer vision/object recognition course. We read a paper that was attempting to classify what "color-word" a human would use to label specific pixels in an image. As I read the paper, I was reminded of some color-based optical illusions I had seen before. I decided to create some of my own using Emily's colorful teething ring. You can see the result in the image below.It doesn't look all that remarkable (perhaps a bit Andy Warhol-esque) unless you know what you're looking for. One of the bead colors in each image, is actually not a color at all. It's gray. Perhaps the strongest effect is the yellow beads with the dark blue background. My eyes definitely see yellow, but your computer will definitely tell you that all the pixels in that bead are completely gray. I took the image and used Gimp (my preferred, free, image editing software) to select all pixels of approximately the same color (I just clicked on one of the gray beads). I then colored those pixels white. The result is below.
One of the "green" beads had too much shadow on it to be included completely in the "similar color selection". The point is that the color we perceive is different from the color that arrives at our eyes. It depends on other colors around the image and our perception of lighting and structure of the scene. The question, I guess, is, "How do you teach a computer to do that?"

Ticklish

Until just recently, Emily would just look at us funny if we tried to tickle her. Today, we discovered that this is no longer the case.

Juggling

With Amanda working nights now, she needs sleep when she gets back home. That means that Daddy needs to step up and fill a few more responsibilities to keep things running smoothly. Sometimes I do better than others. Emily and I washed the laundry while Amanda slept today and then she helped me fold the clothes. She eventually lost interest in the onesie she was trying to eat and wanted to play with the glowing ducks my mum sent for her half-birthday. Those things are awesome.

Different Climates

Back in Utah, my family reported about 12 inches of snow just today and a quite a bit more over the past few weeks. After clearing the walks, my brothers engaged in some snow sculpting. I thought this snow throne was pretty amazing. My last few winters in Utah were pretty weak. Not much snow at all to speak of. I remember playing in this sort of snow when I was little though and I have to say that I'm a little bit envious.
I don't miss the unpleasant driving, bitter cold, and expensive heating bills. While my brothers were shoveling, we went outside for a walk in shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops. We have the windows open and fans running. It's amazing how different our climates are.

I had recently awakened from a Sunday afternoon nap here. We just introduced Emily to Socrates. She thinks he's fantastic. She seemed surprised to see him moving and squeaking and laughed a lot. In a few months we'll introduce her to Lumber Louie. I expect she'll like him too.

Crawling, Emily Style

These pictures were all taken over a period of about two minutes. She'll get the crawling thing one day.

Goodbye to a Prophet

One of my heroes passed away this last weekend. President Gordon B. Hinckley has been the prophet of the Church since I was ten years old. I know he will always hold a special place in my heart, as I received much guidance and inspiration from his messages as I went through my teen years and made many important life decisions. Upon hearing the news from my husband, I couldn't help but feel more grateful and happy for our prophet than anything else. Yes, I will miss his sense of humor and optimism, but I am glad that he has been reunited with his wife after their four year separation. And he did seem very tired towards the end of his life, didn't he. After accomplishing so much throughout his time as president of the Church, I would think that he had good reason to be tired and very much deserves to finally rest.

Here is a link to my favorite tribute to President Hinckley that I have seen so far. It is addressed to BYU students, but I think everyone can get something out of it.

Outtakes

People always ask us how we can possibly have such a cute baby. Well... maybe they don't always ask, but as her proud parents, we can see it in their eyes. Genetically speaking, one needs only to look at Amanda and it's clear that we can expect her to only get cuter. However, she did get some silly genes from her father. Here are a few of our outtakes.