mathmom's blog

My brother used to call my sister and me "the grils " when he was a toddler. I wonder what Luke will call his sisters. I was just looking at my post subjects, and I noticed I had 10 posts about Amanda, 10 about Eleanor, and 28 about Luke. I do apologize for not writing more about the girls, but frankly I'm not likely to write tons about them any time soon, for some good or bad reasons: Luke actually takes up much more of my attention. Eleanor is at school, Amanda is remarkably self sufficient, but Luke needs constant watching. Since I watch him more, I see more of what he is doing. Luke changes visibly every day. Just today, as I was dropping him off at church, he clung to me tightly instead of going to play happily---that was new as of today. Eleanor and Amanda are changing, but much more slowly and less obviously. Luke is much cuter than his sisters are right now. His changes are almost all pleasant and interesting, while Eleanor and Amanda are in the process of ...

In addition to his new clapping trick, Luke has started trying to write. He'll grab anything shaped remotely like a pencil or crayon, put one end on the table (or floor, or roundhouse, or paper if I'm lucky) and scribble madly. The look on his face is priceless: a mix between intense joy and concentration. Luckily for me, Eleanor has started bringing him paper when he gets hold of a crayon. I suppose it is easier than making sure your crayons stay off the floor... This gets added to his sets of "grown-up" type activities. He's figured out that you eat with a spoon, so when he finds a spoon, he tries to eat with it. He knows that when someone has a cup, you put it up to your mouth. When the cup is empty he tips it back. When the cup is full, I am usually holding on to it. He will put his lips to the rim and suck madly, thinking "I know Mama likes this, although I don't know why. If I keep trying, I'll figure it out, I know!" Then he tri...

Here are a few traditions, old and new. Tree: We usually cut down a tree at one of the tree farms around here: it's cheaper, and you have more of a sense that this tree was actually growing somewhere before you decided to decorate your house with it. We were getting sick on and off, so we decided to send the girls and daddy out to buy a tree. They got a nice small one (so they could decorate more of it, they said). My mom used to buy a new ornament for each of the kids when we were growing up and then gave them to us when we got our own houses. We used those as well as a few the kids made and some I have gotten for them. We don't have a garland, but we have some fancy red and gold ribbon. We don't have a tree topper---nothing can hold a candle to the fiber-optic star my family had when we were growing up, in my opinion. This year we cut stars out of yellow tag board and let the girls decorate them with glitter glue. It is very festive! Gingerbread house: So we did...

Luke is doing more and more things (I know I start all posts about Luke this way. I don't think I will have to come up with a new beginning for Luke for a few years.) He still puts everything in his mouth, but now he has a new game. He'll put something in his mouth, I'll say "Luke! What do you have in your mouth?" and he will look at me, grin with his mouth closed, and start crawling away. He clearly wants me to chase him, since he will look back at me to make sure I'm following. He giggles when I catch him. He has discovered that he can open the toilet lid. This was never a problem for Eleanor: we could leave the bathroom door open and the lid up, and she was frankly never interested. Amanda was more interested, but she got the message that it was not ok to play with the toilet and moved on. Luke, however, is fascinated. Distracting him is not enough, and now closing the lid is not enough. I apologize to all parents I secretly made fun of for buying to...

We went to the playground yesterday. I've already written elsewhere about Eleanor organizing kids into games---she did it again yesterday. She had a 6 year old girl playing very elaborate chase games. They went better when the rules were established (like freeze tag) than when the rules were made up on the fly (like being chased by the daddy wolf who was in a cage, but could come out of the cage once a day... you get the idea). The other girl was an organizer as well. Amanda has learned some things from her sister, and she is changing as well. In school they have noticed that she is starting to move beyond the "play alongside" stage, and into the "play with" stage. Yesterday she was playing in a little house at the park, and another girl came briefly into the house. Amanda clearly wanted to play with her, and ended up following her around the park, carrying a bucket of sand. However, the other girl was clearly too busy to play with Amanda, Amanda was too...

Michael has finally been able to set up the play structure he built. It consists (so far) of a platform about 4 feet off the ground, a black board underneath in the back, and a slide. Michael did a great job of over-engineering, thus making it very very sturdy and suitable for rough play. It is also beautiful, with rounded edges on all the 2 by 4s. It is painted dark green (like a forest, says Eleanor) and varnished, so it is nice to touch. It also turned out much larger than we expected. You would think that a math and CS geek together could figure out how much space it would take up in the room, but apparently not---you have to walk around the slide to get into the main part of the room. It does fit in perfectly with our haphazard decorating style. The slide is very fast. Michael ended up varnishing the slide surface, and since it is fairly steep, you just zoom down. I think that Amanda might be slightly afraid of it, we'll have to work on that. Eleanor likes lying down...

I haven't updated y'all on the aquarium for quite some time. It is doing pretty well. Plant wise, we have learned that violets, while pretty, don't really do well in such a wet environment. I got a palm plant which is doing quite well and a peperomia which is either doing well or badly, I can't tell. It really likes the florescent light and responds by growing florescent green leaves. It has taken over the top plant area, but its leaves are spread out and flopping all over the place. The Baby's Tears I got at the beginning did really amazingly well at first, but then slowly died. We are now down to 3 neon tetras (one died as soon as we brought it home) and 2 zebra danios. After Fred died, one died more recently and ended up on the pump intake, and the other has simply disappeared. Amanda claims that it is in the center pool, hiding in the rocks. I can't see it, but perhaps she knows something I don't. I am certain it has passed away, wherever it is...

"Axial tilt is the reason for the season." (Picture a globe with the northern hemisphere tilted away from the sun...) I believe this is meant to be an anti-theist slogan, although I would point out that I believe there is a reason for the axial tilt. This is a runner up to my favorite true science picture, the "Gravity Forecast." I linked to this when I was a graduate student, but the site is long since down. Picture a weather forecast graphic, but instead of clouds and temperatures, the 5-day forecast predicts 9.8 m/s^2 down. Even the idea still makes me laugh, perhaps I will reproduce it someday. Luke cut his 4th tooth today (Finally!). So far they haven't caused us too much trouble. We'll see what happens when he gets his canines.

Three children are impossible to keep track of with only one Mama. (OK, any number of children can get into trouble in any amount of time...) 1. Today we got a box containing wrapped Christmas presents. Amanda started to pull off the tape for the box, so I opened it and explained that they were Christmas presents, for Christmas. I then tried to put one of the presents up on the high shelf where they await Christmas day, and by the time I got back, Amanda had unwrapped the other present... She didn't see what was in the box, I think, and it was a present for her. However, I think there is a disconnect between what I thought I was telling her and what she understood. 2. While I was trying to put Luke down for a nap this afternoon (he didn't go to sleep, but he did take a 2.5 hour nap this morning) Eleanor got something sticky in her hair. I still don't know what was in her hair, but she fixed it by taking the scissors and cutting out a hunk of bangs. I came down and ...

Amanda's stuffed animal is named " Baaa ." She named it herself when she was about 9 months old and baa was one of the few sounds she could make. I encouraged this name, since the name that was on the tag, " Fluffles ," was clearly not something I would call anything, much less a poor defenseless stuffed animal. Plus, you can sing, "Baa Baa Baa, Baaa Baa the Lamb" (to the tune of Barbara Ann). We got two lambs, since this it is generally a good idea to get a potential replacement for anything that is irreplaceable . Recently Amanda found both of them, and she has taken to carrying both of them around and sleeping with both of them. One was called "Baa" and the other is " Baa's mother." Michael suggested that we call the second one " Maa ." Amanda has never heard of calling one's mother Ma, so she immediately associated it with the kids TV show Arthur when Yo Yo Ma and Joshua Redman guest star. She started...

This just in: in a study of one baby at one meal, babies prefer french fries to baby food. (This reminds me of the real study the mother of one of my brother's friends did. There is an older study (from the 1930s, I think) that shows that children will naturally choose to eat a balanced diet when given choices of what to eat. My brother's friend's mother (a nutritionist at U of MN) showed that when the choices include junk food, the junk food wins every time. Thus proving that parents are still necessary.) In other fast breaking news, mothers prefer to waste time blogging rather than clean up the kitchen.

Today the family got out into the backyard and raked. We have a significant number of trees around, so we saw immediate results, both on the now clear lawn and on a huge leaf pile (although not equal to the leaf pile of my youth when we jumped from the shed roof into the pile... remind me not to tell Eleanor about this). It was an unseasonably warm day, so there were other families out doing yard work as well. At one point I looked around for Eleanor and discovered that she had taken herself over to the neighbor's yard and was chatting with their 3 year old daughter. They live kiddy-corner to us, so we don't see them all that often, and I hadn't even noticed that they were out. But Eleanor noticed, and therefore Eleanor had to go right over there and talk to the girl, her 2 year old brother and the father. She explained why we were out, asked what they were doing, asked if the little girl could come over to our yard, volunteered to make cookies for their family, and so...

Well, Amanda finally had an allergic reaction at school. Yesterday one of the "sensory experiences" set up for the kids was a flour table (wheat flour, of course). Amanda was so interested that she went over there even before she had washed her hands and got completely covered. There was no immediate reaction, but she was completely covered in it. She started itching (I don't know if she had any hives, I don't think so) so the teachers gave her Benadryl, washed her off and eventually changed clothes. If we had been really concerned about exposure to wheat, we could have asked that the classroom be a wheat free zone (just like it is a "nut free zone") with no playdough and no wheat snacks. If we were extremely worried, we could keep Amanda home and have Eleanor take a shower and change clothes when she gets home from school (I know some people do this). The truth of the matter is that Amanda just isn't that allergic to wheat, if at all. The risks ...

I got to talk to Jack Pearson today! For those of you have never heard of him, he's Mr. Song- Strummin ' Story-man, a folk singer who visits schools to sing and tell stories (his website is here ). I had called the phone number on his website to order some CDs for presents. Can you imagine how tickled I was to hear a very familiar voice on the other end of the line saying "Hello, this is Jack." I was very surprised, to say the least. We have had his CDs in our car for months. I think I've probably heard them more than he has! The thing I like best about them is that they do not get old. There are many types of songs, from new compositions to folk songs, stories and instrumentals. The favorite is probably " Eekebee ", a retelling of the fable of the lion and the mouse. As the lion says, "Even a mouse can do great things, if he is brave." My favorite is probably the story "Freedom Bird" from a Thai folk tale. I got to tell h...

We lost our favorite gymnastics teacher yesterday---she went from working part time at the gym to another full time job. To tell the truth, last year at this time I had no idea that I would ever have a favorite gymnastics teacher. Miss Q, who teaches the 3 and 4 year olds , is great, but her job is more herding cats with a little bit of gymnastics thrown in. When Eleanor was ready to move to Miss J's class after she turned 5, we were warned that "Miss J is strict!". I was worried, since Eleanor is not typically well behaved (one of the cattiest of the 4 year olds. =) However, while you might call Miss J strict, a better description would be having high expectations. She did not accept some of the shenanigans of the little girls, and so they stopped misbehaving. Eleanor had been prone to drastic mood swings about gymnastics, from overconfidence to despair when she couldn't do something right away. Eleanor tended to do something carelessly when she didn't like...

A friend just had a post about her son's desire to have a pink bejewled play phone (she and the people who comment have great things to say: here it is so you can read it). Thinking about her post made me very glad that for girls 5 and under (which is all I have experienced lately) there is no toy that is off limits as far as I can tell. Amanda's favorite toys are trains (although she doesn't play with them the way some of her boy friends do. I think Chanson's kids would play well with her version of trains). Her favorite movie is Cars. Her favorite TV show is Bob the Builder. No one in her life (relatives, friends, teachers) tells her that she can't enjoy all of these things. On the other hand, she likes to play with all these things while she is dressed as a princess... In Eleanor's class, everyone's favorite thing to do is woodworking, both girls and boys. The only mathematicians she knows are women, so she expects to do well in math as well...