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Sunday, August 31st, 2003
Speaking of "firsts", here is Sylvia's first knock-knock joke (Composed this morning after Ellen told her the knock-knock joke whose punch-line is, "Can't elope without a boy!"): Knock-knock!
Who's there?
Watermelon.
Watermelon who?
Watermelon... Watermelon... Boy!
[general laughter]
posted morning of August 31st, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, August 28th, 2003
This is Sylvia's first composition: One little one goes in the room and turn, turn, turn
Two little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
Three little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
Four little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
Five little ones go in the room and turn, turn, turn
The melody is about what you'd expect it to be, sort of a take-off on "Ten little monkeys jumpin' on the bed".
posted evening of August 28th, 2003: Respond
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Last night we made a bit of progress in our quest to get Sylvia listening to real music (as opposed to the weak, silly jingles on the "children's music" CD's people give us...) Sylvia asked to listen to one of these; but I sought to redirect her attention to the "Janis's band music" mix discs that Doug recorded for us. She was pretty interested by the fact that each disc had a different color box, and asked to listen to "the green one" (disc 4). So we listened to a couple of Animals tunes before she lost interest in that and asked for "the blue one" (disc 5) -- which is alright by me, it is my favorite of them. And wow! I popped it in the stereo, skipped past "Moondance" and "Wild Thing" and started right in with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Sylvia went wild! She started dancing right away, with a big grin. The mood lasted for nearly half an hour, about six songs or so. She started to fade on "The Wait", song #3, but Ellen brought her back by clapping to the rhythm, and then she heard the chorus -- "Take a load off, Annie" -- and started singing along. We all danced together in a circle for a couple of tunes, and then hit "Honky Tonk Hardwood Floor" which was the high point of the evening for jumping around and laughing. "Ugly and Slouchy", which came on next, was apparently a riding song; after a few bars Sylvia got on her rocking horse and stayed there through the song -- nice because it gave Mom and Dad an opportunity to retire to the armchair and rocking chair. By then it was about time for bed and Sylvia's energy level began to fade, so we headed upstairs for the night. I'm looking forward to playing that disc some more, and maybe find some more rockabilly to listen to together. We had some luck with Buddy Holly a few months ago until Sylvia lost interest -- I think if we have several records to listen to she will not get bored as fast though.
posted morning of August 28th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, July 28th, 2003
More work on the window seat tonight, cutting out pieces for the rear half of the frame. I got a little worried when I was cutting the verticals, whether my planned seat height of 16" was adequate. Someone from WoodCentral thought it should be higher; and Bill from CJWA advised me to make the seat level with the window sill -- at 16" it is several inches below the window sill. I went back upstairs and looked at the space again, and decided to stay with the planned height. Two free-standing chairs that are in the bay window now are 16" high, and it is very comfortable to sit on them. It also simplifies things a great deal not to have to worry about the window sill. Before dinner, Sylvia was helping me in the wood shop. When I started sawing wood, I offered her to sit on a stool by the bench and watch, but she was not into it. "Can I have a little saw?" caught me a bit off guard -- I generally give her a small, non-dangerous copy of whatever tool I am using; but up till now that has not included tools with sharp edges. Looked around for a bit and then I realized, a mill file is exactly right: it has serrations, makes a rasping noise when you draw it across wood, and is not going to draw blood if you hold it wrong. So I gave it to Sylvia, and she had a good time sawing wood with it until we went up for supper.
posted evening of July 28th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, July 14th, 2003
A milestone of sorts at dinner today; Sylvia figured out her first spelled-out word (i.e. one whose meaning Ellen and I are trying to keep from her by spelling it out). I served the corn and Ellen asked if she could please have a little pat of B U T T E R -- this going on the assumption, as we have for a while, that hearing the word "butter" while at the dinner table is a bad combination for Sylvia -- it drives her into a butter-eating frenzy that does not seem to be provoked by the mere sight of the comestible. But I digress -- Sylvia asked, "What['s] B R?"* So I gave her a little help -- passed the substance over to Ellen and said "Here you go Mommy, here's your B U T T E R." Now Sylvia, "I like some B R too!" So we talked about it in spelled-out form throughout the meal; by the end of dinner Sylvia was calling it B R T R, reminding me of the "Frances" books. ... In other Sylvia news, I was glad to read a book with her today (Dan and Dan, about a boy and his grandfather) and have her do almost all the reading -- she said about 12 sentences out of the book's 15 or so. She has taken to calling Lola "Mr. Dog"; and yesterday on the front lawn she wrapped a flag around her like a toga and said, "I'm Mr. Flag!" ----- * A note on punctuation -- when I use square brackets quoting Sylvia, it is something I think she said but I may have just filled in for her out of habit of listening to her learn to talk.
posted evening of July 14th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, July 9th, 2003
Following up on the spelling post below -- I wonder what Sylvia's understanding of "spelling" a word is... My impulse is almost to think that it is purely a collection of sounds, poetry without meaning. I mean, let's say she knows how to say "N O spells No" -- I am pretty sure that started out as just a sound pattern. But let's say she later puts the "N" and "O" magnets next to each other on the refrigerator door, points at it and says, "spells No!" This happened sometime last week, and at this point I think it is pretty clear that the sentence "N O spells No" is a fully fledged semantic unit for Sylvia. Where does recitation shade over into meaning? Update: Rereading this post, particularly the last sentence, I think it could easily lead in to a discussion of language along the lines of Jaynes in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". I have no clear ideas at the moment of how to move the discussion in that direction; but if you have any such I would most appreciate if you could share them with me.
posted morning of July 9th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, July 8th, 2003
The latest step in Sylvia's language acquisition, is spelling. She has known the letters of the alphabet pretty well for close to a year now (I think, or maybe half a year) and has associated each with a word that begins with that letter; S="Me!", D="You, da-da!", C="Clifford!",... A few weeks ago she started saying "N O spells No!" which we assume she picked up in nursery school; and at around the same time we started trying to teach her to spell her name. She's just about got her name down (long and difficult though it be) and is starting to get some other words, too. When I got home this evening she told me "P R A spells Monkey!" -- she said this several times, I don't know its genesis or if she was just riffing on the notion of spelling words... Eventually I told her, "M O N K E Y spells Monkey," and she got a big grin -- for the next 10 minutes or so she would ask me to "spell word —" (mostly animal species) and I would do so, then I thought I would try to pull the game back into pedagogical territory and asked if she knew how to spell Mom. "...help." "M O M." "No, no, you forgot the A! M A M A M A M A..." Turns out Ellen had been practicing spelling Mama with her earlier.
posted evening of July 8th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, June 12th, 2003
Scott Martens wrote a fine post last night laying bare the inputs and parameters of his life; and inspired me to do likewise. I've had a vague, gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction [all my life and particularly] these past few months and I think I'd like to make a stab at figuring out where it's coming from. Three questions are principally interesting to me here, viz.: "Where am I?"; "How did I get Here?"; "What do I Think About It?" I know the answers to all of these im ganzen und großen, particularly the first two but the third also; however I have not yet formulated these answers word by word. I think that doing so will give me insight that is not available while the answers are bouncing around my head. I believe the most natural order to answer them in is the order in which I've asked them here, and will do so in this post and two more. Note however, the questions all deal with similar subject matter so there will likely be some overlap between what I am saying in these three entries; I am not going to interfere unduly with the natural order of my thoughts to satisfy strictures of the rubric I have asserted. Happy reading! And drop me a line to let me know what you think about it. So, My Circumstances I live in South Orange, New Jersey (USA, North America, Earth, Solar System, Galaxy, Universe, Mind of God), in a lovely old Victorian house, with my wife Ellen and daughter Sylvia. I am thirty-three; Ellen is older than me and Sylvia is younger. Our dog Lola is an 8-year-old Shih-tzu who has been with us through four residences. Sylvia, 2 1/2, has been with us for only two. (This house is however the third place she has lived; the first year of her life was spent at the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute.) I commute to Manhattan, where I work for Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), writing code to support a statistical arbitrage trading strategy. My "daily grind" consists of: Catch NJTransit train at 6:35. The station is just across the street from my house, about 2 minutes from walking out the door to being on the platform. Sometimes I will take the 6:50 train instead. Ride to Hoboken. Catch the PATH train at 7:05 or, mutatis mutandis, 7:20, and ride to 33rd Street. My office is at 43rd and Lexington; if the weather is nice I will walk, otherwise take my third and fourth trains of the day, the "F" and the #7. I like to buy a cup of coffee from Oren's Daily Roast in Grand Central Station (brewed coffee that is — I have never been very partial to pressed). Depending on a number of variables I arrive at the office sometime between 7:40 and 8:10. Work lasts until around 4:45 — sometimes later but rarely later than 5. Occasionally I leave at 4:30. Reverse the commute and I am generally back home at 6:00, where I have dinner, spend some time with Sylvia, and put her to bed. So that is how I spend the great majority of my waking time. Things I like to do with the remainder are, work on my house and yard, build furniture, and play rural blues guitar. The work on house and yard is in some sense an outgrowth of my interest in woodworking — I mean to say, woodworking has gotten me interested in using tools and fixing things, which extends nicely to the duties of home ownership ("duties" read expansively, I guess). I am since January the secretary of the Central Jersey Woodworkers' Association, the first club in which I have participated actively since college. (I realize as I write that that I was active in the Long Island Woodworkers' Club when we lived in Queens; but not to anything like the same degree. And before that, nothing since back to college.) I have some friends in town; through Sylvia, I know the parents of many of her coevals, and get along with just about all of them. Just tonight, I had a nice conversation with her friend Natalie's father Norman, whom I had not met before. And through my neighbor Jim, I know several disreputable types, old hippies, from the area. Some of us (Jim, Bob, Janis, Doug and I) get together on Saturdays to play non-purist blues, the genre my former guitar teacher described as "folk and dead". — All of us play guitar except for Doug, who plays bass; Janis often plays banjo or bass; Jim occasionally plays violin or bass and I occasionally play concertina or violin. And what else? I like food, pretty enthusiastic about it, tending especially towards barbecue these days, and good beer... That pretty much describes it. I would like to say something about my workout regimen; but alas, anything I said in that regard would be a lie.
posted evening of June 12th, 2003: 4 responses
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Sylvia's last day of school is today, which is generating some grief for her -- we have not been able adequately to convince her that she will be going back there in a few weeks for summer camp. Today she and Ellen came upstairs to wake me up (I'm sleeping upstairs while Ellen has a cold), and we chatted about the day to come. I said, "Will you be going to school today?" and she thought it over for a minute before answering with a question: "Tomorrow?" "No, tomorrow's Friday, you don't go to school on Friday." This provoked an extended outburst, she was crying and repeating "Tomorrow, school tomorrow"... Ellen and I talked to her about how she would have a short vacation and then go back, but I'm not sure how much of it sank in. I like how she is using "tomorrow" now. It is the first sign I have really seen (or at least, understood) of her thinking about the future. Ellen bought some supplies for her birthday party (not for a few more months, but there was a big sale on Clifford paraphenalia) and now she points to the Clifford piñata and says we will play with it tomorrow.
posted morning of June 12th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, May 29th, 2003
Tonight I screwed together one wall of the sandbox and planed it fairly smooth. On the way home I had an idea for how I could avoid needing to worry about the squareness of the through holes (see below); I would re-mark those holes on the bottom of each board and drill from the bottom. As it turned out this seemed like too much work so I just drilled from the marks I made yesterday; and it seemed to work fine. My idea for planing was that since I am not particularly worried about straightness, I could go straight to the smooth plane. I tried this out and it seemed to work pretty well. The douglas fir planes pretty easily except where there are knots; and my ECE smoother can handle the knots. I got one section of really bad tearout when I was starting out; but it is on the inside of the sandbox toward the bottom (where it will be quite covered with sand), so I am going to leave it and figure noone will ever know. I will need about 12 cubic feet of sand for this, which it looks like will weigh ½ ton. I am thinking I will get the sand in two trips but I will contact dad to check if that is a necessary precaution. Update: Yep, Dad thinks it would be a good idea to take two trips.
posted evening of May 29th, 2003: Respond
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