Lately we have been getting Emma into a bedtime routine.  Ostensibly, this is to teach (condition?) her into going to sleep easily at night, provided the routine is observed.  In actuality, she doesn’t go to sleep much more consistently than before the routine.  But that’s not really what I came here to write about.  Part of Emma’s bedtime routine is for daddy to read her a story.  (Literacy for the win!)  Tonight I tackled Horton Hears A Who, one of her two Dr. Seuss books (which are by far her longest bedtime stories).  I noticed while reading the book that Dr. Seuss must have pronounced “mayor” as a one-syllable word, a homophone to “mare,” whereas I pronounce it as two syllables, rhyming with “conveyor.”  I’m not sure if I pronounce it differently because I live in a different region, or because the pronunciation has shifted since the book was written in 1954, or both.  (Contrary to what your grade school teachers probably tried to burn into your head, English is a constantly evolving language, and the accepted pronunciation and even meaning of words varies by region and changes over time.)

Here is an example of what I’m talking about from Horton Hears A Who:

There aren’t any Whos!  And they don’t have a Mayor!
And we’re going to stop all this nonsense!  So there!

And here is one more example, which is even odder to my ear:

“So, Horton, please!” pleaded that voice of the Mayor’s
“Will you stick by us Whos while we’re making repairs?”

It is weird to read because “mayor” is used for a rhyme several times in the book, and if I read it so that it doesn’t rhyme it sounds really weird.  In fact, I tend to pronounce the word that is rhymed with mayor (i.e. “there”) as two syllables.

I guess I’m not really going anywhere with this, it was just something I noticed and thought I’d point out.  Other than mayor/mare thing, I didn’t notice any other rhyming problems.  In one place, I think “grocery” must be pronounced as a three-syllable word in order to have the intended rhythm, although I (and most people I know) typically pronounce “grocery” as something like “groshry.”  Oh well, people still consider Shakespeare great poetry, even though many of his rhymes no longer rhyme, so I guess it doesn’t necessarily spell doom.

So today is an interesting day in the wonderful world of motherhood.  Both Emma and I are sick with colds.  So I’m learning very quickly that I have to put how feel on the back burner to take care of her, instead of only feeling icky myself.  What is really interesting, Emma doesn’t even act all that sick.  She is still happy when she sleeps enough, and cries when she is hungry or sleepy.  She just sneezes more, and has a runny nose.  She might feel as bad as I do, but I have no way of knowing that as she has yet to master the art of speech.  She is however really good at making lots of different sounds, to include the “mmmmmmmmmm” sound.  This could mean that she will say “Mama” first instead of “Dada”.  She is ever growing and changing.  We now let her sleep on her tummy, and she is growing like a weed.  At her last check-up she measured in at 13 pounds 11 ounces and 25 inches long.  I’ll try and keep you updated on other mommy moments.

Last night I added a bunch of pictures from last week’s beach trip.  I also added a set of miscellaneous pictures which I titled “Emma in June.”  (The first three pictures in that set were moved from the “Emma continues to grow” set, but the rest are new.)

Some interesting tidbits-

• Emma did not care for the ocean (compare and contrast her facial expressions before and after touching the water).

• Emma’s second-cousin Clara, who is five and a half weeks her elder, was at the beach too.  At one point, Kaylor (Clara’s mother, who is my cousin) was holding Clara, and Scott (my brother) was with them, while some Asian family with a screaming baby was nearby (they were at a restaurant at the time).  Some moron—who must not have looked closely enough at Clara to realize Scott was definitely not the father—said to Kaylor, “That’s what this country needs: more good, white babies.”  Of course, Clara is only half white.  I think the guy just walked away after that (I wasn’t there).  Like I’ve said before on this blog, I’m always surprised that there are still truly racist people out there who are under the age of seventy.  I mean, if you were, let’s say, over 25 years old in 1960, maybe you were already set in your ways before we as a society figured out that racism is a Bad Thing, so you’ve at least got a bad excuse for your behavior.  For anyone younger than that:  really? seriously? there are still people that ignorant?  (Also, I can assure this guy that white babies are quite capable of screaming very loudly.)

• Emma likes riding on my shoulders.  But I think this is mainly because she likes running her hands through my hair.

For the first time in Vacant Nebula history, I have retracted a blog post.  Upon further consideration (and a little pleading from Stephanie), I realized that the post might cause this website to show up as a result for certain search queries.  Let’s just say, Dateline might have been interested in anyone who came to the site and was disappointed that the link did not, in fact, point to the type of content that was claimed.  In addition, I do not want to attract that kind of attention to a website that has pictures of my daughter.

Fortunately, no one has yet arrived at my site by means of such queries.  For anyone interested, here are the top 20 search engine queries that brought visitors to this website in May, 2008:

That last one is a little weird though.  Yikes!

A few days ago I was talking to Stephanie and somehow the subject of ear-piercing came up.  Stephanie said she was seven when she first got her ears pierced, which seemed young to me.  I thought most parents didn’t let their girls get their ears pierced till they were thirteen or so.  She said no—for most parents who make their girls wait till they are a certain age, that age is nine or ten.

Afterwards I was thinking about it, wondering why I had an age of thirteen in mind.  I never had sisters, so it’s not like it was a rule I learned from my parents.  All of my friends were boys, and although some had sisters, I never really saw the parenting process per se.  The closest would have been some of my cousins, but even then I don’t recall ear-piercing being discussed.

Then I remembered that episode of Full House where Stephanie wants to get her ears pierced but her dad says she needs to wait until she is in Jr. High (i.e. about 13 years old), because that’s when D.J. got her ears pierced.  All of a sudden it occurred to me: everything I think I know about how to raise a girl I learned from watching Full House.

That’s a little scary.

Over the weekend (Saturday in fact!) yours truly completed his twenty-sixth lap around the sun.  The only thing I know of that changes on your twenty-sixth birthday is that you can no longer be drafted.  Of course, they aren’t drafting anyone nowadays, but if they started doing it again I’d be safe.  Unless of course Congress changed the rules, which I believe they are perfectly capable of doing.  In any case, I’m continuing to get older.  Somehow on this year’s birthday I actually felt more than a day older.  It seems absolutely impossible that a full year has passed since I passed the quarter-century mark.  And it’s not that I haven’t done anything all year.  I guess it’s that I have done a lot of “grown-up” stuff in the last year.  I bought a house, for example.  I went on a business trip.  I started making mortgage payments.  I filed my own taxes.  And the big one, of course, is that I’m going to be a father in four months.  A dad.  This guy is going to be responsible for the life of another human being.  I mean, we are talking about a person who not only created a drawing of a guy in a giant toilet riding a turd, but he posted said turd cowboy onto the various internets.  That’s just craziness.

Maybe, just maybe—with the help of her seemingly sane mother—my daughter will turn out to be more than a demented sociopath.

Yee-Ha!

I meant to say more in my last post but I got distracted because I couldn’t upload the picture (I have an admin page I use to upload pictures to go along with blog posts, so that I can do it on a machine with no FTP client, or where port 20 is blocked, but it wasn’t working yesterday).  By the time I walked Stephanie through doing it on the phone, I didn’t feel like writing much post to go along with it.

Some additional thoughts/comments:

• They can’t determine the baby’s gender yet; it will be about two months before we know that.

• The baby is about 2 cm long right now.  That’s less than an inch!

• We could see the heart beating on the screen, at around 170 beats per minute.  That sounds like the baby’s about to have a heart attack, but they said that is a normal rate at this stage.

• It may have been hard to tell from the picture, but the baby’s head is on the bottom-left, and is almost the same size as the rest of the baby.

• Although we didn’t want to tell everyone at the time, this was the main reason Stephanie quit her job working as a pharmaceutical tester.  Not exactly the safest environment to be pregnant in.

• “Morning sickness” is a misnomer, it can occur at any time of the day; Stephanie gets it mostly at night, and it seems like every time we mention this to someone they say that they had worse morning sickness at night too.

I guess that’s all the additional information I have to share.  So, umm.. peace out y’all.

Bill Cosby has shown conclusively that kids say funny things.  But if you’re not convinced, here is further proof..  A few months ago we had some friends over, and they had their kids with them: Julia, going on 3 at the time, and Ethan, about 5 and a half years old.  When the kids got bored (very shortly after they arrived), they began looking for things to do.  Ethan very quickly found our DVD/video game rack.  He started looking through our games, with no regards to alphabetical order.  I suppose the fact that he can barely read at this point makes alphabetizing difficult, and it also makes identifying the game from the binder side nearly impossible.  He was drawn to the robot/cyborg looking character on the cover of the Metroid Prime 2 box, and asked to play that.  I thought the controls for a console first-person-shooter would be a little complicated for a five year old, but we let him try any way (sorry ESRB, I know you rated the game “T for Teen”).  I was surprised when he managed to pull off a screw attack, one of the harder things to do in that game.  He could have just gotten lucky with the timing while mashing the B button repeatedly, but I saw him do it more than once.

He ran around for a while, shooting stuff and turning into the morph ball and back, but he didn’t really know what he was supposed to be doing so he got tired of the game and went back to the rack.  Then I heard him say “Mario Paint Cleaner!”  By which he meant, of course, Super Mario Sunshine, which involves cleaning graffiti off of walls.  This was a game he had played before, but I was nonetheless impressed by this five-year-old’s skillz.  I saw him jump on a tight-rope, then jump off of it and use the hover nozzle in mid-air in order to reach another rope.  Not too shabby for a five-year-old.

Of course, I refuse to play him in Smash Brothers.  I don’t need to risk being humiliated by someone who was still in diapers when I started playing the game.

Last week we went to visit Stephanie’s older sister Emily and her family, including our seven-month-old niece, in Tampa, Florida.  A few things to mention:

Riley loves the ukulele!  She was completely fascinated by it.  She would just stare at it when I played, looking back and forth trying to figure out which hand she wanted to look at.  I tried to let her play, and she would kind of strum, but she mainly wanted to grab the strings and pull on them.  Fortunately this was a ukulele, which has nylon strings, so she can’t really hurt herself doing that.  If it were a guitar, I’d be afraid she’d cut her hands pulling like that on the smaller strings.

We went to Busch Gardens, where we rode The Sheikra.  I’ve built this type of roller coaster in Roller Coaster Tycoon, but I had never been to a real park that had one until this weekend.  This has to be one of the coolest rides I’ve ever ridden.  At the top of that hill they stop the car, facing nearly straight down.  Then you drop on the track that is straight down.  It was the most intense feeling I’ve ever felt on a roller coaster.  Later on there is another hill like that, although it’s not as tall and they don’t bring you to a complete stop before dropping you.  I would highly recommend this ride to anyone who likes roller coasters.

I put up a collection of photos from our trip, if you’re interested.