Steelykid!
drorzel | September 17, 2011Those of you who follow me on Twitter/ Facebook have been getting the occasional snippet of cute dialogue from SteelyKid over there. This one's a little too long for breaking into 140-character blocks, so while I wait for her to come downstairs so we can make pancakes, a cute SteelyKid story:
We play a surprising number of games whose goal is to convince her that I'm an imbecile, one of which is me "misremembering" the lyrics of songs like "The Wheels on the Bus." One day last week, we had the following exchange (more or less) in the car:
Me: So, the wheels on the bus go up and down, right?…
drorzel | September 15, 2011The current quasi-hiatus has the goal of preserving my sanity through reducing stress. Somewhat surprisingly, Thursday Toddler Blogging has actually been fairly stressful lately, because SteelyKid is mostly in a "no pictures" phase, which makes getting a usable shot of her a huge hassle. Which is why there was no toddler blogging photo last week.
This week, though, I got this shot which is well worth sharing:
The notable thing here is not just the cute toddler, but the figure in the sand at her feet, which you can just make out. This is a self-portrait of sorts, drawn on the sand playground…
drorzel | September 4, 2011Twinkle, twinkle
Have you any wool?
H I J K
L-M-N-O-P
Up above the world so high
One for the little boy who lives down the lane
Now I know my A-B-C's
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full
Baa, baa black sheep
E F G
How I wonder what you are
Q R S
One for the dame
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle, twinkle, little star
Next time won't you sing with me?
A B C D
Little star
Yes sir, yes sir,three bags full
One for the master
T U V W X Y and Z
Baa, baa black sheep,
Have you any wool?
How I wonder what you are.
drorzel | September 1, 2011Our next-door neighbors are awesomely nice, and helped Kate move all the breakable stuff in the back yard out of harm's way before the big storm this past weekend (since I left town before it was clear that Albany would get hit). as a thank-you, Kate and SteelyKid baked cookies for them. But you don't have to just watch-- you can help, too:
(Seriously, that's what she's saying, here: "You can help, too, Daddy.")
A couple more pictures showing the mixing process are below the fold. Kate measured everything out, and controlled the mixer, but SteelyKid was in charge of carefully adding…
drorzel | August 25, 2011SteelyKid has recently discovered the game hide-and-seek. Shhh! She's hiding right now. Can you guess where she is?
You can't tell from the picture, of course, but just in case it wasn't obvious where she's hiding, she usually calls out when you get kind of close. Or even jumps out of her hiding place yelling "Ta-da!"
She's got a ways to go before she's ready for the Olympics. the important thing is to have fun, though:
This is from an extended period of "hiding" with Kate under the green blanket, then pulling the blanket down and laughing uproariously. It was the funniest thing in the…
drorzel | August 18, 2011For this week's Toddler Blogging, here's a dad's eye view of one of today's playground activities: walking the 4x4 border on the sand playground as if it was a balance beam.
She doesn't actually need to hold my hand to walk this, but it makes her happier.
I snapped that with my phone, expecting her to still be in "No Pictures" mode at home. Surprisingly, though, she agreed to have her picture taking reading books with Mommy:
That's the sea turtle book that Grandma and Grandpa gave her (after a trip to the Virgin Islands where they saw turtles while snorkeling, I believe). She spread a huge…
drorzel | August 11, 2011It was another "no pictures" day today, so this shot is from earlier in the week, when SteelyKid got some birthday presents from my Aunt Norma and Uncle Dan:
This shows her playing with the I Spy Preschool Game, which involves matching cards containing pictures of complicated collections of objects with other cards containing objects to be found in those pictures.
I like this because she's sporting the "Future Physicist" shirt I bought her at DAMOP, which is kind of appropriate, really. After all, physics is all about finding and matching patterns in the universe around us.
You can see Emmy…
drorzel | August 8, 2011SteelyKid has used a pacifier from very shortly after she was born. We've been slowly working her off it-- she's stopped taking it to day care, or using it other than at bedtime or in the car-- but she's resisted giving it up entirely.
since she's now a great big three-year old, we decided it was time to ditch the pacifier completely. For help in this, we turned to her favorite tv show: MythBusters:
In that clip, Adam and Jamie investigate how difficult it is to take candy from a baby. This, predictably enough, results in a bunch of unhappy babies. SteelyKid has watched this clip a lot, so…
drorzel | August 7, 2011Well, you're right. The cutest toddler in the universe turns three today:
Happy birthday, SteelyKid!
drorzel | August 4, 2011As she never tires of telling us, SteelyKid keeps getting bigger and bigger. How big? She can touch the ceiling!
OK, she has to be on my shoulders to do it, but the distance between her head and the ceiling has gotten really small. She's huge!
the picture above was taken by Kate standing a few steps up on the stairs. For the ground-level effect (more or less), click through below the fold.
She wouldn't allow a picture tonight, which is a shame, because we spent at least half an hour playing the world's most ridiculous game of hide-and-seek. But these, from last night, were too good not to…
drorzel | August 3, 2011Several weeks ago, now, SteelyKid flipped out at bedtime. We had told her that the episode of MythBusters playing on the DVR was the last one for the night, but when it ended, she demanded more. When we said no, she went into a full-on toddler freakout, screaming, crying, kicking the floor. I eventually carried her upstairs, put her on her bed, and waited until she could get herself under control enough to talk in a halfway normal voice.
Once she did, we negotiated a compromise. We wouldn't put MythBusters back on tv, but we would go back downstairs and watch three short videos on my…
drorzel | July 28, 2011Shhh! There's an Artist at work:
That's SteelyKid hard at work on something. I think she was writing my name, though it might've been writing Emmy's name. It's a little tough to tell from the photographs.
Of course, the real purpose of making art is to be able to discuss it:
This led to my new favorite SteelyKid conversation:
SteelyKid: That's a car.
Kate: Is the car going somewhere?
SteelyKid: No. It just stays on the paper.
She went on to explain that the car had been inside the marker, but then she took the top off the marker, and put it on the paper, and the car came out. Which is…
drorzel | July 25, 2011Here is a very significant picture:
"What's significant about that?" you ask. "It's slightly out of focus and oddly framed. Why should I care?"
You should care because of the photographer:
That's right, SteelyKid has a camera now-- we gave her my old Canon A95. She was playing with Kate's smaller point-and-shoot camera (I forget the model) yesterday, and having a little trouble because it's so small her fingers kept getting in the way. The A95 is a little bigger, and while it's on the heavy side, it fits her hand reasonably well. And she took right to using it.
And, because the laws of the…
drorzel | July 25, 2011I've got a ton of stuff to do this morning that will keep me from more substantive blogging, so here's a cute toddler picture:
This is SteelyKid playing with the giant magnet in the MRI exhibit at the Schenectady Museum, trying to see how big a tower she could make out of steel washers and hex nuts (answer: 11 hex nuts before it fell over). She also greatly enjoyed tossing washers at the magnet and seeing them snap to it (I was more interested in tossing them so they got deflected but missed the magnet body, and shot off into the wider room. I doubt the other patrons would've guessed…
drorzel | July 21, 2011SteelyKid's "no pictures" phase continues, meaning that I have to do things like snapping low-light pictures of her after she falls asleep:
I used a really wide aperture lens for this-- waking her up with the flash would be the end of the world-- and had to process the hell out of it to get the colors to look remotely right. I could probably do a little better with more work, but we'll leave it like this as a reminder of how difficult it was to get any pictures for Toddler Blogging
drorzel | July 15, 2011Yesterday's foray into procrastination by mathematical modeling forced me to shift some actual work into the evening hours, which meant that I completely forgot about Toddler Blogging. Which is fine, because lately SteelyKid has been reacting to cameras in approximately the same way as the reclusive celebrity of your choice, so all my pictures of he tend to look like this:
Just after this shot, she heard the shutter sound, turned around, and fled crying. So, you know, I feel like a wonderful person.
anyway, sorry for the delay, but at least it gave me something to post this morning. We're…
drorzel | July 11, 2011We took SteelyKid to the playground at one of the local elementary schools on Sunday morning. this one includes an odd sort of slide, made of dozens of rollers that are 1-2 inches in diameter (they're all the same size-- the range is just because I didn't measure them carefully). They're on really good bearings, and while it's kind of noisy, it's a reasonably smooth ride.
There is, however, one slightly mysterious aspect to this slide, clearly visible in this video that Kate was good enough to shoot for me:
SteelyKid takes something like 6 seconds to go down the slide, while it only takes me…
drorzel | July 7, 2011This week's Toddler Blogging is a cell-phone picture in slightly dim light, but it's too cute not to use:
This is particularly noteworthy because the fire truck was bought by Grandma and Grandpa last year, while the fire hat was bought by Grandma and Grandpa before they were grandparents. In 1974 or thereabouts, I would guess, because it was originally mine, when I was little.
And that's really all I've got today, as I'm still tired from travel.
drorzel | July 3, 2011Between the holiday weekend and finally getting to concentrate on book edits, there hasn't been much time for blogging recently. So here's another SteelyKid-at-the-Bronx-Zoo picture for filler:
As I said when I posted this to google+, this practically demands a caption. Unfortunately, I haven't come up with anything better than "...same thing we do every night, Pinky: Try to take over the ZOO!" But I'm sure somebody reading this can do better in the comments. (Please keep in mind, though, that this is my daughter we're talking about. Anything excessively crass is subject to summary deletion.)
drorzel | June 30, 2011SteelyKid's away at Grammy and Grampy's this week, so I can't take a Toddler Blogging photo for this week. I do, however, have this random artsy shot from last Saturday's trip to the Bronx Zoo:
This is from the Children's Zoo section. She's going up the stairs to the upper platform, where there's a twisty slide inside a fake tree trunk. As you can tell, this is Serious Business.
And there's your cute toddler fix for the week. Enjoy.