Steelykid!
drorzel | September 13, 2008Well, I'm back...
I was away for SteelyKid's 5-week birthday, but Kate was good enough to get the bison picture for the week. I got in late last night, and only got a bleary half-hour of baby-calming in at 2:30am, but even that was enough to reconfirm that she's the cutest baby in the universe.
While I was away, Kate and my parents (who came up to help with SteelyKid-- the canonization paperwork is in the mail) purchased a couple of crib mirrors, and she has apparently decided that these are the most fascinating thing in the entire world. I can't wait to see it.
I'll have a lot to say about…
drorzel | September 10, 2008I'm having a great time at this week's conference, but I still find myself missing SteelyKid. Which is kind of amazing, really, as she's only been around for five weeks, and she's mostly just slept, cried, eaten, and soiled an astonishing number of diapers. And yet, how can I not miss this:
Really, if babies weren't so darn cute, the species never would've survived long enough to learn to use tools, let alone invent blogs...
drorzel | September 6, 2008We went down to visit Kate's parents on Wednesday, so I wasn't able to post the weekly bison-for-scale picture. I did get one, though, so here it is a few days late:
This also gives us a chance to show off her "Smart Cookie" onesie, which I picked up because it's a nice break from the frilly pink princessy crap that dominates the girl-baby clothing market. SteelyKid is adorably cute, to be sure, but that's not all she has to offer.
A different sense-of-scale option is below the fold:
This is the "airplane" carrying configuration, which sometimes helps quiet her down when she's a little…
drorzel | September 3, 2008We're taking SteelyKid on her first road trip today, down to Boston to visit Kate's parents for a few days. This ought to be interesting, as the drive is approximately as long as her longest naps.
The disruption in her normal routine may or may not lead to an increased need for baby-calming, so this seems like an opportune moment to invite readers to suggest their favorite baby-calming tricks:
If you have a fussy infant to deal with, what do you do to quiet her down?
I've got a small repertoire of tricks that usually work:
Gentle Agitation: I hold her against my chest, and bounce her up and…
drorzel | September 3, 2008What's this graph?
The cosmic microwave background? Preliminary results from the LHC? No, it's SteelyKid's feeding schedule. The horizontal axis is in days since we brought her home, the vertical axis is time of day on a 24-hour scale (in half-hour bins), and the color scale indicates the duration of the feeding in minutes.
If you can spot any clear pattern in this, you're doing better than I am. There may be a hint of a developing pattern toward the end (she's eaten at 1am, 8am, 1:30 pm, and 5pm each of the last four days), but there's still a lot of scatter. There were some points in the…
drorzel | August 29, 2008As anybody who has studied Quantum Optics knows, correlation functions play a very large role in our understanding of the behavior of light. Roughly speaking, the correlation function tells you how likely you are to detect a second photon some short time after detecting one photon from some source. This shows up in the famous Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment, and definitive proof of the existence of photons was provided in 1977 when Kimble, Dagenais and Mandel demonstrated photon anti-bunching, where the correlation function goes to zero for short times.
Correlation functions are a powerful…
drorzel | August 28, 2008Here's your scaled baby picture for the week:
OK, "scaled" isn't entirely appropriate, as I haven't bothered to keep Appa a constant size in these, but it is the weekly picture of SteelyKid with her standard reference bison.
She continues to grow at an impressive rate, thanks to inheriting her father's appetite. Kate's been making a point to be extra careful about seeing that she doesn't swallow air, and burping her during and after feedings, so we've avoided any colicky outbursts for three nights running, hallelujah!
She did fuss a little at the 3 am feeding last night, perhaps out of…
drorzel | August 24, 2008Total strangers keep congratulating me on the birth of SteelyKid. No, not people on the Internet, people in real life.
We have a standard dog-walking route that we take Emmy on every night, and Kate and I usually do the evening walk together. Of course, Kate's not coming along on those now, and now people along the route keep saying "Hey, did your wife have the baby? Congratulations!"
In a sense, they're not really strangers-- after all, I know where they live. But I really don't know anything meaningful about them, and tend to identify them sort of like Curious George characters-- The Woman…
drorzel | August 24, 2008Curious Baby says "I wonder what happens when I press this?"
She's going to end up a scientist, like her old man...
drorzel | August 23, 2008
"I think so, SteelyKid, but what if the rhinoceros doesn't want to be milked?"
drorzel | August 21, 2008We had a pediatrician appointment yesterday, at which it was declared that SteelyKid is in excellent health. She gained 8 ounces in the last week, or 1/16th of her weight (she was 8lbs even last week, and 8lbs 8oz this week). To put that in perspective, for me to make an equivalent change, I would need to gain more than 15 lbs in one week.
Here's this week's picture with Appa for scale (for the record, Appa is 23 inches from nose to tail):
We had put her in the "Smart Cookie" onesie that I picked up as a counter to all the frilly pink things we've been sent, but she spit up on it before I…
drorzel | August 19, 2008I'm at the computer, typing, when SteelyKid starts fussing in the porta-crib in the living room. "Oh, why are you crying?" I say, as I cross the room. This is the fifth outbreak of fussiness today. "What am I going to do with you?"
"We could eat it!" the dog says, from her pillow next to the crib.
"You're not helping."
"I'm just sayin', dude. If the noise is getting to you, it's not that big. We could totally eat it."
"We are not going to eat SteelyKid. She's a baby, not a snack." I get to the crib, and start trying to calm her. "And she's just as cute as you are."
The dog looks indignant. "…
drorzel | August 17, 2008OK, I know, I said I was going to stop posting SteelyKid pictures every day, but, ummmm.... She made me do it! She's an evil genius, I tell you!
Can't you just hear her saying "Eeeeexcellent..... Everything is unfolding according to my plan for household domination..."?
Stewie Griffin, watch your back.
drorzel | August 15, 2008I did a bit of running around yesterday, including one stop to drop off a rather large check to secure a day care spot for SteelyKid starting in January (Kate's taking a bunch of time off, obviously, and I was able to arrange my teaching schedule so I have no classes in the fall term, so I can spend most of my time home helping with SteelyKid). It occurred to me that SteelyKid is going to end up with a weirdly diverse background, at least in racial/ cultural terms: she's half Korean, half Polish/ Irish/ German; I'm a scientist and academic, Kate's a lawyer; my family is Catholic, Kate and I…
drorzel | August 14, 2008SteelyKid is home from the hospital now, and settling in to her new environment. She had a pediatrician appointment yesterday, and all is well.
Of course, the more difficult adjustment is for me and Kate, trying to learn to speak Infant while also maintaining a semblance of a normal life. And, of course, freaking out at every slightly unusual thing SteelyKid does.
Happily, my parents have come up to stay with us for a few days, to help keep everyone sane. They've done a ton of stuff around the house, and have also occasionally agreed to take on the onerous baby-calming duties:
Seriously, we…
drorzel | August 13, 2008Kate and I have been watching DVD's of the show Avatar: The Last Airbender via Netflix for a while now. Around the originally predicted due date for SteelyKid (that is, a week and a half before she actually arrived), we were joking about what she could possibly be waiting for. During one episode, she squirmed really impressively during a scene featuring Appa the sky bison, and I suggested that she was holding out for a bison of her own.
I made a sweep through local toy stores, but failed to locate a bison. Of course, they do sell plush bison on the Internet, so I ordered a "sixteen-inch"…
drorzel | August 12, 2008The dog sniffs gently at the baby in my lap. "So, what the heck is this?"
"This is SteelyKid. Be nice to her."
"But, I mean, what is it? It's not a bunny, is it?" She sniffs some more, just to be sure.
"What do you mean? Of course she's not a bunny. She doesn't look anything like a bunny."
"Well, she could be, like, a bunny in disguise. Like, a bunny Terminator, from the future. They're very wily, you know." She looks concerned.
"You're being ridiculous. She's not a bunny, she's a baby."
"A baby?"
"It's like a puppy, only human. A human puppy."
"Ohhhhh... So where's the rest of the litter…
drorzel | August 11, 2008A few weeks back, I started a betting pool, inviting people to guess the birth date and sex of FutureBaby (now SteelyKid). Looking back over the entries, the winner was Kylinn, who correctly guessed August 7th and female.
Kylinn wins, according to the original wager:
The winner gets bragging rights, plus their choice of something small and tacky from Japan, or the right to dictate one post topic for the blog (that is, you name the topic, I'll write about it, while sleep-deprived from having a new baby in the house. Fun for the whole family!).
If you're Kylinn, email me with your choice. If…
drorzel | August 9, 2008SteelyKid was born in a small local hospital specializing in maternity care, with maybe 40-50 beds in the whole place. It's insanely crowded right now, with most of their patients doubled up in rooms that are often private, and one of the nurses said that they had 24 babies in the nursery last night, including at least two of the four sets of twins born in the last week.
There are only two possible explanations for this: babies are obviously bosons, so we could just be seeing baby bunching, in a sort of obstetric version of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment. Or it could be that other…