Time Marches On

Lately not much has been happening, so I haven't had anything to blog about. Here are a few of our day-to-day adventures.
Emily has recently discovered the piano and has been spending a lot of time "practicing," dividing her time between the big electric keyboard and her little red piano. Each has its advantages. I love that she always makes sure she has music there to play out of.

I think I've mentioned before the difficulty I've had in finding church clothes for Caleb. I've had some success scouring the thrift shops and have to say he looks downright sharp on Sundays.





















I love seeing the changes in Emily as she gets older! Recently she has started to enjoy dressing up more. She also loves to change her doll's diaper (she frequently comes to tell us matter-of-factly that her doll has "pooped"), she's started playing with other children, and she occasionally will listen to a story told by Joseph or myself. The middle picture is of Emily pushing around a few of her treasures which, at that time, consisted of a careful selection of my kitchen gadgets.

I have no strings to hold me down

An update on some of my latest research and work: This video shows what I see inside my head-mounted display. The room has cameras that track the lights on my outfit (yes, I am, in fact, wearing spandex covered in lights; it's becoming trendy here in Texas). My software recognizes a few gestures that let me interact with a simulated environment.

Some of you may remember that a quite a while ago, I was working on a project to teach a simulated person to balance. That project did not work out super well. There are just too many variables involved if you try to account for every joint that can possibly move. Moving your left wrist does not help you balance much; so you can safely ignore it and focus more on your legs and torso. Unfortunately, the simulation does not have any way of knowing which joints are important without exploring all of them and all their combinations, but even the simplest jointed creature is too complex to thoroughly explore all combinations of movements and actions.

So... how did Emily learn to balance and walk? I wish I knew. I do know, however, that she had examples to follow and we helped her balance at first. So I've tried to make it so that I can enter the same world as my blockman and help him balance and walk. No learning is going on right now; the blockman is a perfectly floppy rag-doll. The ability to interact with it is in place and it's pretty fun, but now comes the hard part.

Teeth

Today I found Caleb's first tooth. I felt it first, then took a peek, and saw its neighbor poking up as well. It just makes our 4-1/2 month old seem so much older!

This is what big sister has been up to today. It seems like all the kids around here that are her age are boys, hence the circle of boys around the mud puddle. She started the mud-stomping, all the rest were eager to follow her example.

A Good Workout

Caleb and Emily had a joint doctor's appointment today. It was Caleb's late four-month check up and Emily's early two-year check up. They both did super well with the vaccinations - Emily didn't even cry. They are both very healthy as well. A little too healthy for my poor arms, in fact. Emily is 30 lbs. even (80th percentile) and Caleb is 17 lb. 10 oz. (92nd percentile). That is a combined weight of almost 50 pounds for when I'm carrying both of them, which happens more often than I thought it would. I guess it's worth it for having healthy kids. They are growing so quickly and getting to be such good buddies. I feel very blessed.

Girl Power

After grabbing a bib blindly and putting it on Caleb last night, this is what he ended up eating dinner in:
Can you tell he's a second child? I would NEVER have allowed Emily to wear anything remotely boyish, especially something extolling the superiority of the opposite gender.
Ah, well. Such is life as the younger sibling. Always eclipsed by the elder.

Even when he's in the foreground the camera focuses on Emily.
Cute picture though, right?

Out of the mouth of babes

Ha! She's finally old enough to say funny things (that we can understand):

I was walking along in the hot sun with Emily and she kept jabbing at her forehead with her index finger saying, "a cry! a cry!" It took me a minute to figure out that she was showing me that her head was crying (sweating).

Angry at us for no more milk, Emily racked her brain for the word sad and ended up improvising: "Emily happy no!"

The other day at the library I found I couldn't stay serious after reprimanding her and having her answer so somberly, "Yes, Daddy."

Yesterday at lunch time:
Me: Okay Em, let's wipe your face.
[She lights up after a second like she had been thinking and just solved a difficult problem. Then she points at her cheek]
Em: There it is!!

Another Kind of Baby

I have taken running up again since having Caleb. Really, I am in the limbo between walking and running - I pass walkers, but runners pass me. The other day I was jogging along the trail and heard the two women behind me gushing over how cute a puppy on the side of the trail up ahead was. When they reached that point, they actually stopped jogging and said to the owner, "Oh, can we stop and see your puppy?" This was followed by much cooing and exclamation of preciousness. These two joggers honestly were reacting exactly how normal people react to newborn babies.
Also, since moving to Austin I have noticed a strange new trend:
Huh? Is that a $200 stroller I see, made specifically for dogs? I have seen several of these on the trail that I jog along and always think it's crazy. But I guess in today's day and age, pet dogs are becoming a replacement for children. Elder Oaks even commented on this in the last general conference:
"One of our family members recently overheard a young couple on an airline flight explaining that they chose to have a dog instead of children. 'Dogs are less trouble,' they declared. 'Dogs don’t talk back, and we never have to ground them.'" (Unselfish Service, Ensign, May 2009).
Dogs do have many advantages. You can put them outside or in a cage when you get sick of entertaining them, you can go out to dinner whenever you want without having to hire a babysitter, and you don't have the nightmare first couple of months where you sit up all night every night with them because they won't sleep.

But really, could you give this up for a puppy and feel completely fulfilled and satisfied?

What a Champ!

Update on the boy:
Last night he went to bed at 6:30 pm, woke up and cried when we put Emily to bed at 7:30, but then slept all the way until 6:00 am! No night feedings! And, it gets better - I fed him in the morning and put him back in bed so I could go running (expecting Joseph to get him up), and he went back to sleep until 9:30! He might be sleeping so much because he is going through a growth spurt, but I am very encouraged by the 12 hour stretch between feedings.

This might be related, but he just started eating solids. Well, baby food solids. I was pretty determined to hold off until around 6 months, but he seemed so interested and eager whenever we ate that I gave it a try. He loved it. It was a totally different experience from when we tried it with Emily as a baby - she never took to pre-prepared baby foods. The first food she really ate was mashed potatoes. Caleb, on the other hand, loves rice cereal, bananas, and carrots. And that's all we've tried so far.

Happy Fourth, Austin Style!

There's nothing like celebrating your country's independence with some of her most choice citizens - the drunkards. Emily got to experience this first-hand on Saturday evening. We headed out to Auditorium Shores/the Palmer Events Center around 8 pm on Saturday (past both Caleb and Emily's bedtimes - poor little things) and walked around listening to the Austin Symphony play patriotic music and just looking around. We didn't take many pictures, but hopefully these will give you a feel for what it was like.

We headed back before the fireworks started but got caught on the pedestrian bridge going over the river on the way home. It is not where we would have chosen to watch the fireworks, but the bridge was too crowded to walk any further, especially with a double stroller. Poor Emily had been scared out of her wits a little earlier by some very nearby cannon blasts (accompanying the 1812 overture) and was on the verge of a panic attack when these fireworks started. She calmed down once Joseph picked her up and pointed out what was going on. We were standing between two separate parties of very intoxicated men and women who were yelling stupid things back and forth that they seemed to think were very witty and clever. I remember one very confused man looking around the bridge wondering where the symphony was because he'd heard the fireworks were supposed to be set off to music. We were also standing behind and downwind from a man with a fancy camera and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. The fireworks display was fantastic though and the jog back home was invigorating... until we got home and went inside and realized how hot it had been outside. I had really been thinking the weather was almost downright cool before I went inside and froze. Then I went outside again and thought, "this is not okay. How were we jogging and pushing a big stroller in this weather?" I checked the internet and it was still 94 degrees at 11 pm with forty-something percent humidity. Ugh.


It was a fun experience to be downtown and to hear the music and see the fireworks though. And Emily's almost two - about time for her to experience a drunken party, right?

My (Incontinent) Teenage Toddler

Today Emily, Caleb, and I went to the store. Emily ran off and after five minutes of searching (during which time I grew increasingly panicked) I found her looking like this except for happier.
I shouldn't have worried. She was just getting some of her own shopping done.

In other news, this girl NEEDS to be potty-trained. I am going through so many diapers (and so much money) changing her several times a day because she cannot tolerate being wet any more. She has gone in the potty a couple of times, but doesn't really seem to get it. Since I have no idea how to even start this process, I've checked a book out and have been grilling neighbors on the topic. She's still really young, so we'll see what happens.