Old Stuff Part I

I'm going to try posting some old stuff about once every few days. These are all from when Adam was 5 months old.

pals

or maybe not. My kid's a brute.

Adam and Uncle Chi

at Uncle Steve and Auntie Loo Sean's wedding.

at Uncle Steve and Auntie Loo Sean's wedding.

The blog leave continues ....

I'm just in for a brief visit.

Adam - so cute I could almost cry. Actually, I almost did. As I was feeding Adam his solids this evening, I was opening my mouth wide for each spoonful to encourage him to do the same. As usual, he had a spoon or two in his own hands. One time, as he opened up for a spoonful, he started feeding me! He did this several times with varying degrees of success with getting the spoon into my mouth. Sometimes it was the wrong end of the spoon or just some sticky fingers. Naturally, I chimed in with the due yummy noises. The humour of all this was not lost on Adam. Oh, the giggles!

blog leave of absence

Hi faithful and sporadic readers!

I am taking a leave of absence from the blog and picasaweb. Perhaps Dion will take it up but don't hold your breath. I'll probably come back to it, like I did when I took a year off ultimate. I'm out of love with the blog. Besides my previously blogged issues surrounding content and audience, there is a pita factor. There's always something I'd rather be doing with the little free time I have.

I used to think, "Oooh, I want to blog this." Now I think, "Ugh. I should blog this." I've had many entry ideas over the past several weeks, e.g., Hallowe'en, Bunnanza (yes, BUNNanza), and the run-of-the-mill developmental stuff for Adam (solids, sleep, blah blah blah) but never a moment where the urge struck me to post.

Those of you who responded to my previous post will get emails if and when the blog resumes. In the mean time you can remove Lew Family Blog from your bookmarks. I feel like I should apologise but I'm tired of "should."

over and out,
Karen

Who are you and how often do you read my blog?

If you're reading this, I mean you. Yes, you.

Please answer in a comment to this post. If you don't have a blogger/gmail account, you can sign in as anonymous but leave your name in the body of the comment.

6-month check up

Another clean bill of health and growth on Friday.

age	WEIGHT			HEIGHT
mos	lb,oz	%ile		in	%ile
0	7,1	25		20.5	75
1	9,11	50
2	13,4	84		24	85
3
4	17,12	93		27	95+
5
6	20,4	90		28.7	95+*

*28.1 is 95th. http://www.mybirthcare.com/favorites/babygrowthchart.asp doesn't specify percentile above 95.

Plus, Adam is cruising now. He can pretty consistently stand at the couch and transfer to the "coffee chest." He's also working on shimmying on foot along the wall. He's gone back to one-foot-one-knee crawling. It's much faster. He uses the knee for stability and the foot for thrust. Unfortunately, for a few days there, he thought his crib was a jungle gym. There were hour-long pull-up workouts interspersed with head-whacks. Maybe I'll put the bumpers (SIDS hazard) back in. Dr. Lindzon rather equivocally said, "no soft bedding until one year. " But that was the "doctor answer." The parent answer ....

But he's not much of a babbler - still cooing and grunting, mostly vowel sounds. Although, I think he thinks he's singing. I've taken to babbling at him. Lots of "blllblllblllblll," which Adam thinks is hilarious.

We're a couple of weeks into rice cereal. Unfortunately, Adam insists on "helping." At least as much cereal ends up on him - and us! - as in him. As if cereal weren't enough to make diaper changes less pleasant, Adam now thinks that the change table is a wrestling mat.

Stephen and Loo Sean's wedding

I took lots of photos and posted them in print quality at http://picasaweb.google.com/dion.lew in their own album.

The service was really beautiful but the thing that made it so special for me was the music. All of it was performed by their friends and loved ones. There was even a song written for them.

Here are a few of my favourite shots. I haven't had a chance to tweak the colour and lighting yet. I need to get me an indoor portrait flash. I struggled a little because I had to keep switching between my longer lens for shooting the wedding party and my shorter lens for shooting the adorable babies nearby. Excuses, excuses.... Luckily for me, the supremely lovely subjects made up for the shabby photographer - who blames both her tools and herself.

"Hey, Adam."

"Hey, Jarret."

pals ...

or maybe not. My kid's a brute.

with a capital T, that rhymes with B, and that stands for Baby!

"Who me? Trouble?"

"Never!"

I stole the title from another blog, BabySquared.

Anyway, there has been all sorts of potential trouble around here.

The crawling is undisputable. There've been several bumps when he got excited and toppled over but nothing traumatic. For a couple of weeks Adam was experimenting with different styles. Most of this past week was a strange technique using the left knee but the right foot. Then Saturday, he finally settled into the classic double-knee. Mind you he is still doing most of the heavy work with his hands. I'm sure he'll figure that out too.

There's getting into stuff. Here's a play-by-play. I happened to have my camera out.

"I know where all the books and toys are."

"If I brace myself with my right hand, I ought to be able to pull out ALL the toys."


"Scary! Oops. Pulled too hard."


"Woohoo! I got'em ALL."


"Ehn. Who needs toys?"


"When there's garbage!"


"We gotta get organised around here. Let's start with this binder."

There's getting under stuff.

"Anything under here?"


"How about under the rug? Mom is vacuuming twice a week but..."


"No, I don't approve."

There's pulling up.

"Surprise! Look what I can do."


"What a view!"

Dad's solution for the trouble: find a good babysitter.

We've also now lowered the mattress in his crib and gone to Canadian Tire and Babies'R'Us for bumpers and locks and such.

more photos

He's got a bit of the Gerber Baby thing happening here.

"Why, mom, why?
Not why must I be naked. I'm down with that. Why must we photograph it?"

The great outdoors were a little chilly last Saturday for TUC Wednesday playoffs. Thank goodness for the sweater cousin Sandra made!
photo credit: Rebecca Ho

Here he had just woken up from a nap. In fact, I had been photographing the nap. Maybe the camera woke him up.

I don't know why I love this missed shot so much.


Again, for eye colour. Still pretty light brown. Click to enlarge

Someday, I'll get around to posting print quality versions at http://picasaweb.google.com/dion.lew.

Friday Curling

Anyone wanna curl with me, Steve, Ann, and Derek some Friday nights? The season runs mid-October to early April. Half our games would be at 7:00, half at 9:00 at the Royals, which is just North of Queen and Broadview. We're looking for someone who wants to play all the games or two someones who each want to play half the games. No experience necessary. Must be willing to lose a lot of games and feel good about it.

snap shots

Uh oh. There's been a lot of this lately.

On your marks!


Get set!










Where's "GO!"?

That hasn't happened yet. Luckily, he's not too bright. He keeps trying to move both knees as the same time. Here's hoping it's a while still. It's SO much easier when they stay where you left them. At least he can't escape the Bumbo.

While I endorse the choice of reading material, we will need to find a new storage place for it.

Dion's sense of humour. I assume it was Dion.

Adam doesn't want to recline in the stroller any more. I wonder if this will mean less sleeping in the stroller. I actually find strapping him in so that he can sit fully upright a little cumbersome.

They grow up so fast.

There are recent print-quality posts to http://picasaweb.google.com/dion.lew.

OMG, I reflected again.

Dion gave me the afternoon "off" to get some work done and to get away from a very crabby Adam. I am giving Dion the evening off to raid to his heart's content.

At the end of my afternoon's work, it occured to me that it is very important to me that my students do some meta-learning, that is, figure out how they learn best. I've often made reflection a formal part of my lesson-planning. Today, I made up a drill sheet of questions involving arithmetic operations with integers. They'll do two minutes with and two minutes without a calculator. They're easy questions. All answers are integer; every question has an operand between -4 and 4; and every operand is between -12 and 12. But I also made a pre- and post-drill reflection sheet. The true/false questions are about their results, areas for improvement, and most importantly their confidence. There is one open-ended question, i.e., what else did you learn about your skills?

The following are the my reasons for this exercise. I'm pretty much trying to convince them to put down the calculator - at least for the easy stuff. We'll work on recognising "easy stuff" later. I think that many students cling unnecessarily and counter-productively to the calculator. I think that the calculator gives them a false sense of security, because they are even more likely to make a mistake operating the calculator as to make a mistake with mental arithmetic. I think they work much faster with their brains than fingers. I expect that weak students will be somewhat better without the calculator but strong students will be vastly better without the calculator. Trust me, I will go over the numbers to see if my predictions are correct. OMG, this is action research. You can take the girl out of OISE.... I'm so ashamed.

My one data point so far is Dion. Of course, it is ridiculous to compare Grade 9's to a Descartes first runner-up but here it is anyway. With a calculator, 80 seconds gets him 16/16. Without a calculator, 80 seconds get him 58/60 and the sense that he's made a mistake somewhere.

BTW, until proficiency with mental arithmetic is in the secondary expectations, I will never deny a student a calculator or even deliberately make them feel badly about using one. Why shouldn't students have a security blanket? Don't students have too many insecurities about Mathematics already?

ding! gratz!

First, Adam learned to put his hand in his mouth. then put a toy in his mouth. then put his hand in my mouth. then today to put a toy in my mouth.

Also, Adam's hair is now coming in a little coarser. It's also coming in faster than it is falling out. Boy, do I wish I could say the same thing about my hair? Yesterday, Adam and I were people watching at our favourite spot when three nice men accosted us. They just wanted to ooh and aah over the baby. They even took pictures with him. The biggest ooher and aaher, Anthony, also happened to be a hair dresser. He complimented Adam's hair and mine indirectly - "It's coming in lovely and thick, just like yours." Whatever. He hasn't met the king of thick hair, Dion. And while my hair is technically speaking thick (as opposed to thin), it is also very fine (as opposed to coarse). Anthony also told me to massage my scalp, that my current practice of using oodles of conditioner is ill-advised, and that there are good but expensive products for post-partum shedding at Shopper's Drugmart. He also offered Adam free haircuts for life. He wants to open a salon in The Village but, in the mean time, unfortunately, he works in Burlington.

school start up

School has started up blissfully uneventfully. My classes are all cooperative but not very energetic. I need to work on that.

visitors

I got to catch up a bit with Janelle this afternoon. She's beautiful as always, no? Ryan looks a lot like her, no? Ryan's 16 weeks old today and posing with the Team Canada onesie I found for him. As soon as I saw it, I knew Janelle had to have it. Dion wanted it for Adam. He knows where they are to be found in the Path; he can go get one himself.

Adam has been wearing the pictured froggie romper since he was 6 weeks old or so. I don't know why I have so few photos of him wearing it before this - maybe none. I like it for hot weather.

some randomness

I think there's a bunch of stuff I've been meaning to 'blog but I can't think of them right now.

When I got home from school (just setting up - no classes) on Monday, I found Dion and Adam like this:

print quality at http://picasaweb.google.com/dion.lew

Adam finds our dining room table just the thing for teething pain. In this photo, he's sitting on a Bumbo that was given to us by Anthony, an acquaintance of Dion's. We were chatting with Anthony at his wife's restaurant, where they had one for use as a booster seat. I mentioned that I've been looking for a second-hand Bumbo. He said, "You wanna Bumbo? Here have this one." Hey thanks.

I had lunch today with yingy and then we spent the remainder of the afternoon at a Second Cup while she was on-call. She's doing a fellowship in paediatric plastics at Sick Kids. She did eventually get called in. And today was a such a beautiful day that I didn't want to go home. So, we went to my currently favourite people watching spot, the NW corner of Alexander and Church, where I read and Adam slept in his stroller.

If you want to have some fun with Dion, say something to him like: "So, I hear you were hoarding salary cap room in your hockey league draft." And by "have some fun with" I mean rile up.

I'm kinda looking forward to school starting on Tuesday.