February 2006 Archives

It's funny how Magda seemingly doesn't change for a while and then she appears to make a sudden leap in development. This last week has been one of those.

She'd been getting ready to walk for a while and took her first steps a few weeks ago. Slowly she started practicing her new skill but stuck to crawling as her prefered mode of travel. This week her walking has accelerated and now she prefers to walk when she tries to get some place. She still falls back on crawling if there are steps or a slope involved or if she's getting tired, but she's now on her feet most of the time. Today we had the McHargs over for the Dancing with the Stars finale, and she ended up turning around in a circle standing on her feet (she likes doing it sitting down, too). I think she's going to be a dancer like her mom.

Her speaking has blossomed, too. She now answers "yes" or "no" in addition to nodding or shaking her head. She's getting good a signing "please" and "thank you" - I usually have to ask her to be polite, but sometimes she does so unsolicited. And at times she vocally tries to get your attention so that she can sign "thanks". I've also noticed her forming a sentence today. She used her "eat" sign (and said "T") and followed it with her sign for "apple". Pretty cool!

She's also quite fascinated with letters. She's got a bunch of alphabet-based books and blocks and magnets and what-not. She knows some of them, like "O", but I think it's mostly just interesting shapes to her. Today we were walking by a store with huge capital letters on the bottom of their store-front and she just couldn't get fast enough to them to point them out.

She likes being read to, and can occasionally spend several minutes looking at one of her books on her own while spouting gibberish. The book may be upside-down or she may be looking at random pages, but she doesn't care.

Rose loves her frisbees. Here favorite is the Life is Good Rocket Launcher. Every morning during her walk, she just can hardly wait untill we get to the spot in the park where I throw her a frisbee. And she's sorely disappointed if our evening walk is late and it's too dark for me to see the disks in the dusk -- although she doesn't seem to have any problems catching them in darkness.

I took these pictures a while ago in our back yard. The light was a bit harsh and I would love to have been able to shoot pictures faster. Maybe I can borrow Rita's Canon 20D next time she's in town.

Magda is getting chattier and chattier. She's really enjoying words with the [aɪ] sound in them: "Hi!", "Bye", and now also "eye". She'll walk up to you, point at (or poke in) your eye ball and proudly proclaims "eye"!

She also does a good [oʊ] when she talks about Rose or Homer or about your nose. But by far, her bye-byes are the best.

Whenever Archie and Jessica are over, Eamon and Magda invariably end up in her house shaped toybox; crammed together and peeking out through the roof. Well that tiny thing just won't do for my daughter, will it? Luckily, when we got a new refrigerator last summer, I had the foresight to keep the box (which, as luck would have it, the delivery guys kept in once piece), thinking that some day I'd make a toy house out of it. A couple of weeks ago I did a small scale mockup to get an idea of how to make the whole thing fit together.

So during the Superbowl weekend, when Jfer was out of town, I started my architectural project. I converted the box into the basic house shape with a 45° roof gable. Unfortunatelly I ended up with a building that's maybe a foot taller than it should be -- I guess Magda isn't as tall as I thought she was.

The following week I painted the walls with the paint we recently used on our house -- it did an excelent job using a single coat and ended up looking a bit like stucco. A few days later I did the roof with the red paint we used on our door -- which kind of sucked, since it didn't fully cover even after two coats.

Today I cut out the doors and windows and scored the hinges for the doors and shutters. Magda got to test drive it for the first time. At first she was afraid of the house but was eager to join in when Jfer crawled inside.

I still have lots of work to do: tape over the hinges, paint the door, shutters and trim dark green, and maybe buy some more paint and give the roof another coat or two. And then I'll need to add velcro in strategic places to make the house a little more secure and to be able to keep the shutters in an open position.

Last weekend I wanted to practice the sweet bread they presented in the King Arthur baking class, so I baked a couple of loaves and used a cool poppy filling I found and World Market. It seems like noone here is really into poppy, so it was mostly me eating the bread.

Well, on Friday evening, while Jfer was babysitting, Rose managed to pull the last half loaf off the counter and devour it before I noticed. I checked online and discovered that poppy is one of the foods that's poisonous to dogs -- it wasn't clear whether it's the plant or the seeds.

So I called the emergency clinic and asked whether I should be worried about my dog having eaten so much of it. After being put on hold, the lady came back and told me that "unless Rose is going to be drug tested some time soon, she should be just fine."

And fine she was -- it didn't affect here one way or another. And I know that at least one other member of the household loves my poppy bread.

Well, I got tired of dealing with comment spam using MT-Blacklist and decided it was time to upgrade MovableType. I can't believe they're at version 3.2 (I'd still been running 2.6.something).

I had a bunch of customized templates, and their template structure changed significantly. So I decided to go to their basic templates, select a nifty style and then gradually add some of my old stuff.

BTW, the MT 3.2 GUI is pretty slick. I like their AJAX based install/upgrade. I don't require TypeKey registration, but I hope that even so they'll block more of the comment-spam without me having to do as much work.

Magda started standing up on her own and taking her first solo steps last week. She thinks of it as fun and whenever she plops down -- front or back -- she just starts laughing. I'm glad she's viewing it as a game and doesn't get frustrated.

Jennifer and the girl went to Ft. Worth over the weekend, so it was just me and the dogs. I was pretty productive, getting a lot of work done on they toy house I'm building for Magda - plus I saw a movie, did some baking and took the dogs for an extended hike.

When I saw them on Monday, Magda seemed initally a little shy around me -- she was much more excited to see the dogs. But she quickly warmed up again and showed off the impressive progress in her walking skills. She can now stand for longer periods of time and sometimes walks a dozen of steps before gravity takes over. It's fun watching her focusing on the task -- in a few weeks all of us will have forgotten that crawling is how you're supposed to be getting around.

Jennifer reminded me that today is our dogs' appointed birthday. Since both are strays we figured that February 1st would be as good a day as any -- and probably within a month or so of their real birthdays, too.

So Homer's five years old today. He's a much more relaxed dog then in his youth, but still a bit on the jumpy side. He's finally getting used to Magda, even giving her the occasional friendly lick. But most of the time he stays out of her way -- except when she's eating in her high chair, of course.

Rose has her first birthday. She is really turning into a beautiful and wonderful dog. Magda enjoys playing with her and except when she's in her puppy mode, Rose is the epitome of laid back mellowness. She doesn't mind getting kisses, having her tail messed with or being humped (!) by Magda. And while she and Homer can get quite rough wrestling around, she's very gentle when Magda is playing tug of war with her.