mental models

A fellow student in my Honour's Specialist Physics course online quoted Edward F. Redish with:

"Mental models tend to minimize expenditure of mental energy. People will
often do extra physical activities -- sometimes very time-consuming and difficult -- in
order to avoid a little bit of serious thinking."

Sooooo true. It may frustrate me that my students refuse to THINK about their answers, the lab, my question, and so on but I can be equally guilty - in my lesson planning (not much, I hope!) and every day life: cooking, filing ....

Bath Time

The photo above had a little nip and tuck. The following are originals.

Grace Tsang's 1st Birthday party

Jesse, Grace, Nathan, and Pam

Music Appreciation and Performance

Adam knows a lot of song lyrics. And now he can "sing" some of them rather than just do the gestures. He puts do's in the right spot in "do-re-mi" and the w (often doh-doh-ooh) in the alphabet song and tonight we had some fun with the Kink's "Lola."

First it was the misheard lyrics. I started singing "Lola", quite out of the blue, and Adam made a beeline to the piano keyboard, played at the LOWer end while looking for approval. We cracked up. We had in the past few weeks been playing looooooow...... high on the piano, ala neeeeeeear...... far of Grover. Then as we sang "Lola", Adam started singing along with approximately correct phrasing, some pitch and lola-like sounds. Loooooooow- WAH! Most previous singing attempts have been more spoken word-like.

Quite some time ago, there were some more misheard "lyrics." Adam was being pretty pouty and miserable and one of us asked him, "What is this all about?" At which point, he started clapping and spinning. "That's what it's all ABOUT!"

recent photos

Here are some of the cute recent shots.

I'm too sexy for my hat,
too sexy for my hat,
whatcha think about that?!


Adam is well on his way to mastering the zipper. When I got him out of bed this morning, he had almost gotten his entire body out of his sleepbag. grrrrr.....

How did it only occur to me today to put his highchair at the piano? Also, it's just far enough that he can't drool on the keys. There's been a lot of drool lately.

LOL

Cameraphilia
Adam still wants the camera whenever he sees it but I won't let him touch it. And so, we're still getting a lot of photos like this:



and this:

and this:


and this:


Playground Fun
Most days, Adam gets two trips to a playground: one with Poh-Poh/Gung-Gung and one with mom. We're lucky to have lots of play areas within easy stroller distance. On rainy days, we'll go to the Bay/Bloor Indigo to play with the trains and other toddlers. The Ontario Early Years Centre that Adam attends in the mornings with Poh-Poh or Gung-Gung has a playground out back. I take him there in the morning on weekends. We un/fortunately usually have the place to ourselves. After his/our daily nap (usually 2+ hours!!!) we go to the playground at our local K-6, Church Street Public School, which has three slides. We meet lots of moms and kids there and the occasional dad, too. Yesterday, Adam played with a kid I'd guess is in grade 2 or grade 3. The big kid's friends had just left and Adam started begging for the kid's ball. So the two of them passed the ball to each other and played peek-a-boo for almost half an hour.

These are from Church Street today.

at the top of the slide.

at the bottom of the slide

Climbing on-and-off the slide is a favourite pass-time.
As is trying to climb up the slide.

It's hard to tell from this photo but I got my hair cut Thursday. Birthday present to myself, I guess. I was in the middle of another errand and just popped into one of the umpteen nail/nail-and-hair places along Yonge. I'm happy with the cut but I'll never go back. The fumes from the nails were suffocating. But "interestingly", for the first time in my life, I was accused of having curl in my hair. I've had hairdressers blow my hair smoother with a brush and dryer now and then but my hair's so straight that I hardly had curl when I got one of those spiral perms in Grade 7. This hairdresser actually used a flat iron on my hair. no kidding. Aren't you all glad you know so much about my hair?

12-month check in/up

Recent (last twoish months) interests and likes:
- hiding and finding things and people
- opening and closing things
- holding hands under the coffee "chest"
- looking at things between his knees with his head upside down, being upside down in general
- Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb
- keys ("ghieeess")
- Shreddies and cheese ("zheeess"), which he asks for by name pretty much every meal
- teeth ("dzees") and tongues ("dhuuuh")
- Mega Blocks
- zippers
- vehicle noises (we have a little book of them)
- clapping
- going for the mail
- following birds around the playground
- slides
- spinning on the recliner
- magnets
- other children and babies
- flushing the toilet
- The Hokey Pokey

Recent (last twoish months) dislikes and waning interests:
- Dr. Lindzon, evil needle man
- door springs
- hats (sun hats are even more annoying than toques as they obstruct the view)
- egg yolk
- rattles
- spoon feeding
- bananas

Adam is really understanding a lot, like instructions to "sit" and how to use the phone - you press the buttons and then put it up against the head of someone who knows how to talk. He'll also choose books or particular pages for reading (usually "your giggles... and cries!" from I Love You Through and Through or the nursery rhyme Old King Cole). Today, he suddenly got up from my lap, walked across the room to retrieve a sock I had left on the floor, returned, and set it atop my foot.

Plus, another clean bill of health, growth, and development today.

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+*
7
8
9	22,12	82		30	94
10
11
12	23,12	65		31.5	92

Percentiles from http://www.mybirthcare.com/favorites/babygrowthchart.asp. I guess he's getting slimmer. As evidenced ...


This is the first time I've really lost my head when shopping for Adam. All last week I had this nagging feeling that Adam had to have new clothes for his birthday. And newly purchased, too. It's not like I didn't stock up on stacks of clothes for him to grow into in the after Christmas clearance sales (Sears! really cheap!). So Thursday night, I went to Winners for a new outfit. And not just any outfit, the most expensive one they had. I tell myself he might get two or more years out of it. I had to safety pin the shorts to keep them on. When I ran into Kevin and Su on the way home, Kevin declared that the outfit is more a present for Dion than from Adam. probably true.

Here he is in his real birthday suit, Gina. Whaddya think? Was this worth $40? Yes, those are matching Nike socks.



FCBarcelona for the uninitiated amongst you, I mean us.

Keep scrolling if you haven't checked in in a while. There's been a flurry of posts.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to our friend, Kevin, and the rest of his quartet, Chameleon, for winning the right to represent the Ontario district of the Barbershop Harmony Society at the International Convention Quartet Contest in Nashville this coming July.

Yesterday's Festivities

Birthday Poses

these photos and MANY more unscreened for quality and in print quality at http://picasaweb.google.com/dion.lew

I Love You Through and Through*

I love you through and through.

I love your top side.

I love your bottom side.



I love your inside and outside.



I love your happy side,



your sad side,



your silly side,



your MAD side.



I love your fingers,



and toes,



your ears, and nose.



I love your hair and eyes,



your giggles,



and cries.



I love you running and walking,



silent,



and talking.


I love you through and through,

yesterday, today, and tomorrow, too.

I've been meaning to make this post for a long time. I just imagined that I'd be taking photos from the whole year. These are all from when Adam was 11 months old (or just a couple days shy thereof.) Believe it or not, I had several more 11-month photos that "deserved" to be published but didn't make the cut. Mostly, they were attractive photos but didn't fit the poem very well.

*Poem by Bernadette Rossetti-Shustak

365.25 days

Okay so April 18th is Adam's date of birth but it is now very close to 365.25 days (one astronomical year) after he was born. (His first year had a leap in it.)

Eye Colour 11 months. Click the image to enlarge.

a new rule

"No standing in the tub" is not the only rule for Adam's bath time. I had to create and enforce a new bath time rule today. "No sleeping in the tub." Hear that, Ian?

Earth Hour

Power (MW) versus Time of Day (h)

Red is last Saturday's power consumption in Ontario. Green was yesterday's. I had to tweak in Paint to make the axes true.

I created this graph-like thing from data and images from the ieso. I was really surprised that I didn't see any comments on their front page about Earth hour. It must have made their scheduling nightmarish. How does one predict the effect of Earth hour?