Flying

When we first saw our house, there were several major factors that made me want it - a large yard and a kitchen I didn't hate, for instance. I could very easily explain why I wanted those, although in retrospect my ideas about the benefits of a large yard might, just might, have been based on wildly optimistic assumptions.

There were some other things I liked, but couldn't easily explain. For example, the living room has 2 doorways, so that it's possible to walk from the living room to the kitchen to the dining room to the hallway and into the living room again, counterclockwise. I knew I liked this feature, but wasn't exactly sure what practical benefits it might offer.

Recently we've found one.

Annika learned about the game of "flying" - being held horizontally, arms outstretched Superman-style, with me running her around the house this way. It's especially fun to chase something, be it a cat or Daddy. Much better to run circles around downstairs than to be confined to one room at a time!

Now if only I was willing and able to "fwy" her as much as she wanted... alas, mama gets tired after a couple of rounds of this. Then there are many requests of "fwy? fwy? mama! fwy! mamamama!" and usually it all ends in tears. But only a little bit of tears, then she's distracted by something shiny.

That, I think, pretty much sums up the joy and pain of life with a toddler. Within the span of 15 minutes, you get a nice little tour of human emotion starting at baseline mood, onward to ecstatic giggling, to frustrated foot-stomping, to tears of bitter anguish, and back to baseline.

Words

Annika now has about 50 words she can say. Here's a not-necessarily-comprehensive list, in approximate chronological order. Notice that "mommy" and "daddy" were not anywhere near the top of the list.


kitty (kih-yee)
cat
no
uh-oh
bye-bye
go
boom boom - used for any loud noise
head (heh)
nose (no)
mouth (mouw)
ear
eye
beep beep - the noise the microwave makes
hot (hah)
tree
sky
down (dow)
peepee
hi
bath (bah)
shoe
green (gree)
light (lie)
daddy (dah-ee)
hello? (he'o) to "answer" a cell phone
peas (pee)
moss (maw)
shirt (sher)
hat (haa)
mom
acorn (ee-cor)
flower (fow)
meow (meeow)
hug (huh)
up
door (doh)
spoon (poon)
book (buh)
vroom vroom - to describe the sound of a car or motorcyle. she likes motorcycles, god help us.
crayon (cra'n)
teeth (tee)
corn (cor)
cup (cuh)
food (foo)
car (cah)
plane (pain)
foot (fuh)
hand (hah)
broccoli (bah-ee)
belly
Barkley (baw-ee) the name of her toy puppy
hair
ball (baw)
night-night (nie nie)

Book quote

Favorite quote from a book I recently read:

"How do you measure love? Quantify it? It's not something you can put on a scale or pour into a beaker to examine its volume and viscosity."

- Sirantha Jax in "Wanderlust", a sci-fi/romance novel by Ann Aguirre

The Ethics of Modern Agriculture

http://www.springerlink.com/content/l12858476u034458/fulltext.pdf

I thought this paper was thought-provoking.

One sentence summary: compared to either pre-industrial agriculture or organic farming, modern agriculture is better for people, better for the environment, worse for farm animals.

Discuss (but only if you actually read the paper - it's only 5 pages long).

Moss snob

"The work of moss gardening has an elitist quality that I must admit I find appealing. Every John and Jane grows grass. Only Nature's chosen grow moss."

- George Schenk, author of "Moss Gardening: Including Lichens, Liverworts and Other Miniatures"

I'm infatuated with moss lately, and having stumbled across this quote at Each Little World blog, I am amused that this apparently makes me elitist. And among Nature's chosen!

I've started removing grass in some already mossy patches of our yard, mainly around trees where the roots make it difficult or impossible to mow. There's something very Zen about both the process and the result.

I've also collected some mosses to try to grow in a shallow dish indoors... sort of like a bonsai garden. Er, without any trees. Just the moss. Hard to tell if any of them are actually growing, though.

What you wish for

Since we moved back East, we have been complaining to each other that the summer storms here are weak and disappointing compared to those of Kansas. They're also less likely to remove our roof, but that's besides the point.

Yesterday as I was driving home... after a weekend of hard work on gardening projects (more details to follow when I can post photos), the wind kicked up, a torrential downpour became more of a horizontal-pour, the lightning stabbed down, and it HAILED. Pea-sized up to nickel-sized balls of ice. Now that's what I call a storm!

There's a price for such entertainment, though. My Cherokee Purple tomato plant fell over, and although the stem appears to be intact, I'm not yet certain whether it will survive. Same with the cute little Patio Tomato, a bushy thing designed to be grown in a container. The basil plants had some stems broken off, but nothing they can't grow back - and the "harvest" made a tasty addition to the stir fry we had for dinner. The new shrubs I planted had some of their leaves chewed up by the hail, but no major damage as far as I can tell. My poor hostas, though... the ones not protected by trees overhead really took a beating.

Annika thought the hailstones were interesting, but at this age she doesn't understand where they came from, or even that it's odd to have little balls of ice on the ground in June. What she really enjoyed was splashing in a puddle left on our driveway after the storm.

Predictable

I ran across a piece in the NYTimes about iPhone applications that are geared towards kids of various ages, for purposes of education or entertainment. The first line line of the article posed the question "Say you were faced with a 3-year-old child on the verge of full meltdown — which iPhone apps would distract and delight him enough to avoid mayhem?"

Predictably, when I skimmed the comments to see what apps people had found besides the ones mentioned in the article, I found the following comment:

Pathetic. Parents are so helpless in how to handle their kids that they have to resort to this?
Somehow we’ve managed to raise kids for thousands of years without iPhone applications. Sometimes we’ve even done the strange thing called “interacting” with them.Oh, and occasionally saying “no” to tantrum throwing 3 year olds and leaving whatever place they’re throwing the tantrum in!— Library Lady

I wonder, has Library Lady ever been on a long plane flight with a toddler? This sounds to me like exactly the kind of comment made by people who don't have kids of their own, but are nonetheless experts on parenting. Or conversely, someone who raised their own kids long ago... long enough to forget their own troubles and shortcomings, and bemoan those of the newer generation of parents. Someone who, when faced with their own tantrum-throwing 3 year old all those years ago, would probably have killed for a device that could magically bring peace and quiet.

Personally, I plan to use my iPhone with Annika - to entertain, amuse, soothe, stimulate, teach, and whatever else I find it can do. I'm not the least bit worried that if I do so, I'll be depriving her of human interaction or somehow severing her from the "real world." The more puzzling question for me, is at what point it might be reasonable to get a kid their own iPhone. Not anytime soon, certainly. She'll have her own camera long before she has her own phone!