Over Thanksgiving weekend I had the opportunity to learn two new parenting tips. First: if kids want you to read them a story and you don’t have a book handy, just make one up. Second: kids have no idea when you’re plagiarizing.

I shared a story with Emma and her cousins that went something like this:

Once upon a time there were three astronauts who wanted to go to the moon. But when they went to the doctor, he told one of them “you can’t go to the moon because you’re getting sick!” And he said “no way!” but it didn’t matter, so they had to get another guy to go to the moon with them. Then when they got halfway to the moon part of their ship blew up and they were like “oh no!” and they got on the phone and said “Houston we have a problem.”

I’ve never thought deeply about this topic before I had a child in the process of acquiring this mangled mess of words we call The English Language... but pronouns are hard you guys!

We sometimes ask Emma who different people in pictures are, so that she can remember the names of those family members she doesn’t see every day. When we get to a picture of Emma, we’ll say “Emma, who’s that?”

“Baby,” she’ll reply.

Then we will say “Emma, that’s you!”

At least, that’s what used to happen. After doing that for some time, if we ask Emma who is in a picture of Emma, she’ll now respond “you!!” And really, that’s our own fault. We told her that it was a picture of You, and so she learned who You was. Apparently You is a baby who looks suspiciously like Emma.

We could try to correct her by telling her it’s “me,” but won’t that get confusing when she actually does learn pronouns? She’ll wonder, “Why did mommy and daddy say that picture of me was a picture of them?” So I guess for now we’ll have to teach her “that’s Emma.” We’re also working on the whole you/me thing with finger pointing, but I’m not sure if it’s too advanced for a twenty-two month old.

Or maybe I could just try explaining that my “you” is your “me” and your “you” is my “me.” There’s nothing confusing about that, right?

Emma is just growing and growing!  I guess that is what babies do.  To think that in just over a month she will be one year old.  My little baby won’t be a baby much longer!  I just thought that I would take a moment to update everyone on all the amazing things Emma can do now.

Watching Little Einsteins
Almost everyday since Emma was around four or five months, we would watch Little Einsteins on the Disney channel.  At the beginning of every episode, the characters on the show pat their laps to help Rocket blast off.  Today was the first time that Emma patted along with them!!  It was so exciting to see her patting along and then saying a word after they said “Blast off”!  She’s been clapping at the end of the episodes during the curtain call for about a month, but it was really exciting to see her patting with the team.

Sign Language
Kip and I have been trying to teach Emma how to communicate with us using sign language.  She is really good at “good job” which is clapping her hands.  But lately she has also picked up “all done” when she is finished eating and every now and then she’ll sign “please” when she wants you to pick her up.  (More often though she raises her arms and looks up at you when she wants to be picked up.)  She also will wave “hi” sometimes when you say hi to her.  She waves to herself for “hi” and sometimes away from herself for “bye”.  Kip also taught her how to give “high five”.  I mean, who doesn’t want a ten month old giving them five.  Next we’re going to work on “pound it” (the fist bump).

Story Time
Every night Kip reads Emma her bed time stories, and he always ends with “Good Night Moon”.  When he goes through the story and the picture is the full room view, he always points at the things that the bunny is saying good night to.  Emma has picked up that habit as well.  She always points to the red balloon first and the picture of the cow jumping over the moon second.  Then she will point at random things in the room, but it is still really cute.

Fuzz on the Floor
Emma is a pro at finding any and everything that is on the floor.  I can vacuum the living room, and within five minutes of her being back in the room she can find a single piece of fuzz that might have been missed by the vacuum.  She used to immediately stick the fuzz in her mouth, but I have been trying to teach her to bring it to me instead.  This way she learns to pick up and bring things to mommy.  It is very helpful.  We do still have to have the occational mouth check to make sure she isn’t chewing on something she should not be chewing on.

Walking?
Emma has mastered crawling and is well on her way to understanding the mechanics of walking upright.  She has actually already learned how to climb the stairs.  I found her up three steps one day when I was headed back downstairs from taking something up to her room!  Of course, we’re making sure she doesn’t get near the stairs again, they’re just too dangerous for her right now.  She can walk around all the furniture in the house and pull herself up on just about anything, including the smooth walls.  She loves to play “chase me around the house”.  We’re trying to reset her boundaries.  She likes to hold onto your hands and walk around the house.  That lets her have more freedom than being confined to the furniture and the walls, but she still isn’t motivated enough to try taking a few steps on her own.  I’m not sure if I’m ready for my baby to walk away from me yet.

Shutting Doors
Emma has also learned that the doors are a lot of fun to play with.  You can bang on them, swing them back and forth, and push them closed.  She especially likes to shut the doors on you while you are doing something in the room.  Then she realizes that she can’t play with the door anymore and gets upset.  It is really funny when she crawls around the room and goes to the laundry room door and bangs on it while saying, “dadadada”.

So those are the really big accomplishments we’ve made in the last few months.  I’m sure we’ll let everybody know how her first birthday goes.  Be sure and check out the pictures (there aren’t new ones, but the old ones are still super cute)!

Just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday here are a few more videos of Emma for everyone to enjoy.  On November 13, exactly two weeks before Thanksgiving, we had started to notice how close Emma was to being able to crawl.  She had learned to get on hands and knees, and she could kind of rock forward and backward.  I predicted that she would be fully mobile by Thanksgiving.  Prediction confirmed.  You can see the progress she made in just eight days in the video below.

And second, we have a rather long video of Emma and yours truly “playing football.”  Which causes her to giggle uncontrollably.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

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!