3.28.10 ~ March Catch-Up

I apologize for the long pause in updates. I’ve been spending all of my time on my dissertation proposal lately. My proposal hearing is coming up in April, and a draft was due to my advisor this past week. I expect that things will remain pretty busy through April. But I’ll try and sneak in a little blog update now and again so that I don’t have to do another one of these long catch-up posts.

Liam has also been really busy. Although I think he’s been having a lot more fun with his busy schedule than I have with mine. Here’s a quick rundown of what Liam has been up to:

It was almost a month ago now that we met up with Sarah, Jorge (and their bun in the oven!!!!!), Shannon , Mike, Kim, Greg, and Ethan out in Suffern. We spent the day playing with Ethan at Kim’s and then went out to dinner with everyone before heading back to the City. Liam and Ethan were definitely interacting while they were playing – though I’m not sure that Liam stealing toys from Ethan counts as ‘playing together’. The concept of sharing is still a foreign one to Liam; which is very age appropriate. But, still, it makes it a little embarrassing when he plows over a kid like Ethan, who’s quite a bit younger than him, to get to a ball. Luckily Ethan is a pretty tough kid and put up with it really well. When Liam stole his toys or pushed him out of the way, he looked a little puzzled but moved onto something new quickly. It’ll be cute to watch them when they’re older and really playing together. Hopefully by then Liam will have ditched the thieving....and Ethan can get revenge!

Two weeks later Liam and I packed our bags and headed to Baltimore for a long weekend. I was presenting a poster at the International Conference for Infant Studies in Baltimore and Liam was going to spend some QT with his grandparents. Liam spent Thursday with his Granddad, Friday with his Nana and Grampa, and Saturday with my parents, who we refer to as Grandma and Klaus (“Daus”) now.

Here are a few cell phone pics of Liam in Baltimore:

Liam loves his carseat....

....but not as much as this seat!

He also saw and sat on his first real tractor!

On Sunday we took the train back to New York with Carol and Tim.

They had planned a little, four-day, New York vacation in order to take care of Liam during his spring break from school so that I could write my proposal. I think they had a lot of fun with Liam – but it was hardly a vacation. They spent the night at a nearby hotel and showed up at our apartment at 7:30 every morning to play with Liam while Jason and I got ready to leave. They trekked all over the city with Liam – to museums, playgrounds, stores, and the zoo to keep him entertained. Carol cooked for us all and Tim did repair work around our apartment. One evening they stuck around while Liam slept so that Jason and I could go out on a little date. They must have gone home needing a vacation after their “vacation”. But I know they enjoyed the time with Liam and he certainly enjoyed the time with them. He learned a lot of new things from his grandparents: how to sing Ba Ba Black Sheep (Ba Ba Batchee”), say “pewwwww” to a stinky diaper, and how to make money sounds (“ooh ooh aah aah”).

Here are some pictures that Carol and Tim took at the Zoo. Apparently he referred to each animal there as either a dog or a duck:

The next weekend Liam again found himself on an Amtrak train headed back to Baltimore. Carol and Tim left on Thursday evening and on Friday morning I realized I still had so much writing to do that I would need two full days over the weekend to get it done. So, Jason decided to take Liam to Baltimore to hang out with some of his friends and give me the apartment to myself to get my work done. It was a fun trip for them and a very productive weekend for me.

Here’s a picture of Liam and Patrick together:

And here are a few more random but cute pictures of Liam from the past few weeks:

And lastly, February pictures from Liam’s school:

3.28.10 ~ Reblog: "How May Dimensions?"

I'm reblogging this from my Dad's blog. I love it for obvious reasons.

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14 March 2010
String theory adds up to six dimensions to our usual set of three giving room for theoretical physicists and science fictionists alike to speculate about parallel universes which might be folded into our known one like Russian dolls or less convincingly, might coexist outside ours.We humans don’t usually need quantum scales in our daily life, we nevertheless live in several universes and times at the same moment without all too much thought. I was reminded of this today when I observed Liam and Nina interact, the mother infant universe with a sun and a planet, a complete system the child revolving around the mother, in a stable attraction and on a fairly predictable trajectory, and the mother giving all the warmth and love as well as the gravitas to keep it that way. Concurrent I saw the parallel universe of Nina in Liam’s age with her mother, whom Nina resembles strikingly. Although Liam is quite the boy his demeanor and charme remind me a lot of his mother’s as an infant and when I hold Liam echoes from Nina’s past reverberate through my senses and memories.Fainter and still discernible are weak reverberations of my own past as a child, the time when my mother was my sun and my life rotated around her. She, still alive and Liams’ great grandmother, now in the late chapter of her life, her own warmth diminishing and she herself in need of the glow of her offspring. These three universes were all real at the same time just as the big bang is still around in the form of background radiation. We process all these dimensions, times and layers usually flawlessly and in split-seconds. No hourglass shows up on our retina to show overload, if the vibrations get too strong we feel saturated with feeling, sentiment, sorrow, hope and inspiration. This makes us superior to computers and, in spite of our size our brain might match the complexity of the electrons, quarks and gluons, their uncertainties and jitters and quantum entanglements. Liam can safely sleep in his mother’s orbit on 72nd Street in Manhattan but he also is still here, I encounter his sounds, his expressions and his words at all the places he had just filled with his joy and it is as if they were still warm from the vibrations of life. Nothing better represents life than the young child expressing, exploring and discovering it. Nine dimensions might not even be enough to describe it all.

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3.5.10 ~ Art Show

Today, after being postponed from last week because of snow, Liam's school hosted an art show to exhibit the kids' work. It was really well done and really adorable.

And here a few more recent pics:

Liam's new favorite place to play is on the windowsill where he can keep an eye on the world outside.

3.3.10 ~ Liam's Vocabulary, Fifth Edition

"Huss" (Horse)
"Piddow" or Piwow" (Pillow)
"Ni-Ni" (Night Night)
"Pidah" (Diaper - it's basically the same word with the 'p' and 'd' switched)
"Melk" (Milk)
"Nunch" (Lunch)
"Dight" (Light)
"Bus" (Bus)
"Vodka" (Vodka - don't ask)
"Putchuh" (Picture)
"Shree" (Three; We say "One...two...." and Liam says "Shree!")
"Puts" (Spot; As in Spot the dog in one of his books. Also some letters switched around there)

He also has a crazy word for wheel that never gets said just once ("whida whida whida"). Anything with wheels is really exciting to him. And somehow, even though he can't actually see them (because they are below the platform), he knows that the subway rides on wheels. When the train pulls into the station Liam starts turning his hands and saying "whida whida whida".

By the way, I'm still only counting words he can come up with on his own in the right context. There are lots more he repeats if prompted (boot, boat, snack, and jacket, just to name a few).

Also, he can correctly identify his head, eyes, belly button, teeth, and feet now. Although sometimes he gets his eyes mixed up with his nose and ears.