Jefflog

Well, well, if it isn’t my old friend the weblog. I typically don’t have much time to write these days, but Maggie is taking a nap, Oliver is busy chomping on the teat, and I’m too tired to get any work done, which makes this a rare opportunity to post an update.

Oliver is doing much better lately. Some of it has been due to a thoughtful friend buying us the book The Happiest Baby on the Block, which is full of good advice to soothe a fussy baby. The other part has been due to Hong cutting out dairy from her diet, which we strongly suspect causes a lot of intestinal grief for him. (Did you know that some 90% of Chinese people are lactose intolerant? Neither did we until recently.)

Maggie’s also been behaving more like a two-year old lately. Four or five weeks ago, we started letting her sleep on the big bed. She hadn’t yet started to climb out of her crib, but we had let her take her naps on the big bed for a while and she always slept just fine. And even though she could have gotten out at any time, usually she’d just wait for us to get her after she wakes up. She was so easy to deal with.

Then about two weeks ago, I guess we waited too long to fetch her because she figured out that she could get out of bed by herself, anytime she wanted to. This includes immediately after we tuck her in and leave the room. Now bedtime and naptime have become a power struggle, with her wanting to get out of bed unless she’s drop-dead tired. It was really bad for the first week, often requiring a couple of trips taking her back to bed, but last night she didn’t leave the bed when we left, being content to pout while staying on the bed. Before long, I imagine, the crying will dry up, too.

Actually, Maggie’s grandmother just sent over some little stuffed animals and a Noah’s ark pillow that we can bribe Maggie with. Every day she goes to bed without crying, she gets an animal to put in the ark. We’ll see how well that works.

Meanwhile, she still gets out of bed when she wakes up in the morning, which is fine by me. She quietly opens her door, softly knocks on our bedroom door, and waits for us to open it. I don’t know where she learned that she should knock on our door before coming in. We didn’t teach her, or at least we can’t remember teaching her. I guess some parts of raising children turn out to be easier than they could be.

I’ve always known that I was sensitive to high-pitched sounds. In particular, I can always tell when the TV is on even when it’s muted, because it makes this high-pitched whine. Hong can’t hear this whine, and I’m guessing a lot of other people don’t hear it as well.

Maybe you’ve read about The Mosquito, a device which is supposed to emit a high-pitched noise that teenagers can hear but adults cannot. The only problem is that I’m 32 and I can hear the noise loud and clear. (Too loud, really.)

To further aid in sound tests, Ochen K. put up a number of MP3’s at different oscillations so you can test your own hearing. I can hear up the 18,000 Khz level, but 19,000 is silent to me. Hong only hears up to 14,000 Khz.

I’m looking forward to the day that I get old and can’t hear the whine of the TV set anymore.

If I had more time, I would be solving the weekly picture logic puzzles available on-line from Conceptis. Alas, I don’t have the time now, so the best I can do is download the PDFs for another day.

During the weekend before this previous one, we had the chance to take Maggie out to see a public fireworks display. This involved taking her out way past her bedtime, since things don’t get dark here until 10pm now that Indiana has adopted Daylight Saving Time, but it was a one-time thing and we thought she would really enjoy them.

She hated them. More accurately, she was scared of them. She put her hands over her ears and complained of them being “too loud”. I don’t think she was impressed by them at all. We drove home long before the display could finish.

Actually, it must have made an impression on her, because she kept talking about “fireworks” all week long. Not really talking about them, mosting just saying the word “fireworks” in her typical non sequitur monologues. I thought that since the noise was what bothered her the most, we could go buy some fireworks that didn’t make noise and she would enjoy those. We set them off on Saturday night.

Wrong again. When the fireworks started flying, shooting sparks up a few feet into the air, she cried and ran away. We tried several other similar ones to no avail. Even if she was watching from the safety of indoors, she would run and cry as soon as the sparks started flying. We’ve got this on video, maybe I’ll post it up here later.

This event just caused her to talk about fireworks more. She seemed to speak as if she liked them, saying “fireworks pretty” and “Daddy light fireworks outside”, although she would also add “too loud” and, just to be consistent, “too pretty”. She’d talk about fireworks morning, noon, and night. We still had plenty of fireworks left over from our aborted display from Saturday, so we decided that I would light some more for her for July 4th.

You can figure out how well that went over.