Put the camera away Dad

It used to be so easy to take pictures of Dalton. All good things won't last forever I suppose. Not only has he replaced the natual smile with the forced "cheese" but he often doesn't want his picture taken. Here we have a "train" or a set of benches that sit next to where the train goes by. I'm not sure. It seemed to keep changing.

Note the lack of pants which is the status quo around here. Today we actually have long pants and no shirt going. He's been in the mood to kick boxes around so perhaps it is his karate outfit. I suppose it makes a good balance to yesterday (Talk Like a Pirate Day).

We are having a good weekend here. Yesterday was the "Daniel Boone ripped us off" festival in downtown Christiansburg. It was bigger than in past years which was nice to see. Regardless, it didn't impact our Saturday all that much. We did our normal coffee shop then library morning. Dalton didn't express an interest in the blow up bouncy room or the pony rides at the festival and we weren't going out of our way to get him on them. He'll actually get a chance at the blow up bouncy room this Friday at Roanoke College.

Dalty spent much of yesterday putting together a new Lego house with Mom. Cathy caught the Lego Green Grocer on sale and sent me a frantic email to order it for her for Christmas. I think it sat in the house for a whole 18 hours before being opened. It's partly my fault. I unpacked it because I wanted the shipping box for cardboard recycling. Once it was visible, it became unresistable (to Cathy).

No Nap Dalton

For the last two or three weeks, Dalton has gone to 90% no nap. It's been a long time since he has napped reliably at home, however, he used to get a regular nap at school. He minimally has to lie quietly for 45 minutes there and he's decided that the minimum is his best available option.

The new schedule has some benefits. He generally goes to bed sometime between 7 and 8 pm. This allows Cathy and I some adult time to play computer games or board games or maybe even very occasionally to clean the house.

One less optimal effect of a paucity of nap is that he starts getting crazy around 6 pm. Sometimes it is aggressive crazy with throwing things and hitting. Sometimes it is cranky crazy and meltdowns occur. Sometimes it is silly crazy or staggery crazy. Tonight it was jump on (or off) the furniture crazy.

Dalton started by jumping off his stool (about 6 inches high). I had to jump off it too as part of the game. He then moved up to jumping off of his crib (does it count as a crib if he's never slept in it?). He wanted me to jump off this too, but I declined on grounds I was too heavy and the crib is too cheap. I suggested that maybe we would want to jump off the coffee/game/craft table (shown in Figure 1) in the playroom. We jumped off this a few times with Dalton upping the ante by requiring spins in the air. Then he discovered that he could leap from the coffee table to the couch. We had about 15 minutes of this with him even timing his leaps so I could get some action shots. Go go flying toddler!

3 Johann's looking photogenic

I was setting up the digital picture frame in my office today and I came across this picture. It's really a great one of my parents with Dalton. This is frankly amazing when you think about it. Johann's are notorious for taking bad pictures. I have two wedding albums to prove it.

I generally have 5 pictures taken of me for any occasion in hopes that one will be acceptable.

Dalton used to have these perfectly natural smiles whenever he realized that we were taking his picture. Somewhere in his twos, genetics took over and they became the forced rictus that we Johanns are well known for.

To emphasize the improbability of this picture, lets do some math.

Assume that there is a 20% chance (overestimated I assure you) that any given Johann will have a moderately natural facial expression in a given picture.

If you have three Johanns in a picture then your odds of everyone looking natural are...

20% x 20% x 20% = 0.8%

So, if you want a good picture of 3 Johanns, you should plan to take over 100 shots to get it. Of course, one of us is likely to go berserk around shot 12.

Bon Appetit

We were eating dinner last night and Dalton took a fancy to my wine glass. I can't remember how he asked. It was probably somewhere between, "May I have water in a glass like yours?" and "I want that glass now!" (accompanied by the throwing of objects and turning lobster red).

The title reminded me that they do a blessing song before eating at school. I think it goes as follows.

"Oh, the Lord is good to me. I thank him for the sun (Son?) and the rain and the apple tree. Oh, the Lord is good to me."

I'm not sure that Dalton understands "the Lord" part of the blessing. He says something more like "Gamore" which I'm pretty sure is a villain monster in one of the old Godzilla movies. Given that interpretation, it might still be an accurate blessing.

I've been trying to get him to replace the blessing with "Ruba dub dub. Let's eat some grub." He insists that we do not eat "grubs". Apparently they are something a kin to tomatoes and peppers in his world.

The Upper Limit of My Artistic Abilities

The snow was sticky enough that I could actually do arms. Dalton demanded snow bears. These are on the opposite side of the house from the snowmen so we have to walk from one side to the other to look out the windows at the snow things outside.

Dalton's First Snowmen

So we had some snow fall today. It was five or so inches and right around freezing which made it perfect for making snowmen. Both Dalton and Cathy hadn't had the experience of making snowmen before and a good time was had by all. I personally had remembered snow being heavier. I haven't been working out so it's not that I'm pumped up.

Sorry for the radio silence on the blogs. I was emailing with a friend (Kris) earlier in the year lamenting the fact that I wasn't feeling creative enough to get the family letter out for Christmas. He said I should just update the blog more often. I decided to compromise and not do either. Go figure.

Loooong week

This has been one of those weeks that wouldn't end. It was the first week of classes, so I had students piling into my office to discuss the schedule changes I'd hoped they'd make over break at the start of the week, a new course and a course with a new book to prep for, meeting back to back MWF, an AI case (academic integrity - never fun), and on Thursday, my pre-tenure review dossier was due. It came in at 199 pages. That's NOT to say that I wrote 199 pages all at once, since quite a bit of it was just compiling stuff I had, but still. On Tuesday, I discovered that somehow about half (i.e. 100 pages) of it was having some weird template issue, and so about every third line was either a different size or a different font. Which doesn't sound like it'd be hard to fix, until you understand that the packet included things like exams with funky characters and stuff, so it wasn't like I could just select all and set it all to the same font and size. Thank Dog I had a back-up from Friday. Ultimately, it was a big cut-and-paste extravaganza, as I debated whether or not to fix the content or to fix the formatting.

Yes, I know Word has a "compare" function that would have made it easy to find two days of changes. Unfortunately, Word won't compare master documents. I could have compared subdocuments, but only about 20% of my text was actually in subdocuments. Note to self: either (a) never use subdocuments again (thus not having a master), or (b) keep absolutely all of the text within the subdocuments.

Anyway, I got it done, I got it printed, I got it hole punched, collated, typed tabs and got them into dividers, and dropped it on my chair's chair at 6pm on Thursday (no one having said anything about WHEN on Thursday it was due), with some pithy note about leaving her a little light reading...

The only thing that I don't like about the finished document is that I accidentally set the margins to mirror, thinking I was going to print it 2-sided, and then I decided that might annoy the promotion committee, so I didn't, but it means my left margin is different on half of the pages. It's only a 1/4 inch, and we just got a department-wide email asking us to reduce copying, so I just left it.

I should have given back some graded pharm chem homeworks today, but I told them that I'd had a 200 page (ok, I exaggerated) document due the day before, and that they'd just have to understand. Now I have two sets of pharm chem and a set of organic chem homework to grade this weekend. At least its the first week, so my lab section hasn't turned in any work, or else I'd have even more work piled up.

Pharm chem seems to be going well - I'm enjoying having a class full of people who are (at least mostly) there specifically because they thought it might be interesting.

We went for dinner on campus tonight. Dalton ate ice cream and part of an apple, and two bites of potato-cheese soup. (Actually, I'm not sure it was two bites - it might have been one.) There's a reason we don't go there very often - ever since he figured out they have ice cream and that you can just walk up to the freezer and get it, it's been all over.