Welcoming Anne

Anne joined our family on 10/22/09 @ 1:27 AM Pacific, about 30 minutes after we checked into the hospital. Once the time came to be born, she was in a hurry.

Anne @ Almost One Day Old

All are well and at home as Anne approaches one week old. 2½ year old big sister Katie has reacted predictably to this addition, with equal measures of cuteness and chaos.

Whereas shock and life-changing awe was the initial reaction to Katie's arrival back in 2007, Anne's arrival has been one juxtaposition after another:

It's the stark contrast between the needs of a newborn and the needs of a preschooler.

It's remembering how nervous we were when Katie wouldn't sleep or eat or was fussy versus our expectation now that these situations will pass, then return, only to pass again.

It's the suburban California setting that Anne has entered compared to the urban New York world that first greeted Katie.

The things that haven't changed?

Yep, we're still naming our daughters as if we have the full expectation that they may need to someday serve as the Queen of England (Anne Charlotte, meet Catherine Emily. I assure you that, should we someday have a boy, Æthelred is definitely a strong candidate for his name).

Yep, the flood of emotion at greeting a new life is unchanged. In addition to in love, in awe, overjoyed, enamored, and profoundly satisfied, I propose we coin a term to describe the emotional state of the parent of a newborn — Darwinish. "Oh very little one, I long to take care of you so that you might grow, thrive, and – should you so choose – someday pass on your (and my) heritable traits."

Yep, some part of me is still shocked that the 80+% of the human population that reproduces is largely able to cope with the demands of these little things. Looking at a newborn, you're immediately reminded of the frailty of human life. Looking at all the former newborns walking around you each day, you're constantly reminded that we are a resilient species.

Turn Yourself Around

Now that Katie is about 2½, we've been singing a lot of the Hokey Pokey lately. Although some version of this song has been around since the mid-19th century, I was aware that the version of the song you and I recognize was not some traditional version, but rather a chart topper from the early 1950's recorded by bandleader Ray Anthony.

Amused that a song with all the complexity of a nursery rhyme could attain national popularity, I took a look at the list of mid-century chart toppers to get an idea of how many goofball songs made their way to the top of the list.

Although the Macarena, which surged to the top of the global charts in 1995 and 1996, proves that novelty songs can still sit at #1 inside and outside the U.S., the occasional rise of a goofball single over the past couple decades pales in comparison to the number of novelty songs that sat atop the U.S. Best Sellers in Stores charts during the late 40's and early 50's:

Song	First Week @ #1	Weeks @ #1
Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!	January 26, 1946	5 weeks
Open the Door, Richard	February 22, 1947	1
Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)	August 9, 1947	6
I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover	February 21, 1948	3
Woody Woodpecker	July 3, 1948	6
All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth	January 8, 1949	1
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer	January 7, 1950	1
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus	December 27, 1952	2
(How Much is) That Doggie in the Window?	March 21, 1953	8

After this flurry of Christmas-themed #1 hits, no holiday songs have returned to the #1 perch.

The dawn of rock and roll largely kept novelty songs away from the #1 spot until the mid-1970's when Kung Fu Fighting and Disco Duck (Part 1) each found their way to #1 in 1974 and 1976, respectively. Of course, these tunes were just paving the way for the Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band by Meco, a disco version of the movie's theme that topped the charts for two weeks starting on October 1, 1978.

Skype: Connecting Robots With Robot Grandparents Since 2009

When Katie was 2 months old, I marveled on this site at Skype's video conferencing software, software allowed us to stay in close visual touch with relatives thousands of miles away.

I'm happy to report that now, as Katie is about 2½ years old, Skype's video conferencing abilities have expanded beyond what they were in 2007. If you look in the bottom left corner of the laptop screen, you'll notice a robot (one wearing a diaper box and a bowl as a "robot hat"). Yep, Skype circa 2009 allows robots to connect with robot grandparents across the miles.

Katie Discovers a Windows Feature — dıןɟ uǝǝɹɔs

While we were banging our hands on the keyboard, watching a web video of a piano virtuoso playing Flight of the Bumblebee, Katie unintentionally discovered a Windows feature that all should know.

If you are using a Windows machine, hit the following key combination:

Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow

---

ʍoɹɹɐ dn + ʇןɐ + ןɹʇɔ

:uoıʇɐuıqɯoɔ ʎǝʞ sıɥʇ ʇıɥ 'pıp ʇsnɾ noʎ ʇɐɥʍ opun oʇ

Armed with this knowledge, my unsuspecting coworkers will soon know my upside down terror! Mwahahahaha!

Update (6/11): Unfortunately, it appears that the availability of the screen flip feature appears to depend on the video driver for your particular Windows system. Although the feature worked on my old Dell Latitude D610, it does not work on our systems at work. Curses!

Gadget Girl's Self-Portraiture

Katie was born into a wired world, and I find her ability to interact with gadgets a little dazzling.

Whereas I was probably fumbling with a rotary telephone dial when I was her age back in 1978, Katie knows how to turn on an iPhone, pressing the button at the bottom of the device and then sliding the virtual slider that appears on the screen. She can scroll through the application trays on the device, flicking her finger laterally until she finds the bubble wrap application or Brian Eno's Bloom application, or some other program she likes.

She's also something of a photo buff. A few months back, she learned that a digital camera displays the captured image on an LCD screen on the back. Now she says "See dat. See dat." in a patient monotone after you've taken her picture, kindly requesting to stare at the small version of herself on the camera's back.

We hit a new gadget milestone this weekend, when she obtained our friend's camera and proceeded to turn the camera towards herself, saying "cheese!" and taking her own portrait:

Toddler Audibles

Every Saturday and Sunday during the fall and winter, American TV sets feature quarterbacks changing the play at the line of scrimmage. "Blue 42!" or something similar, they bark out, changing the play for their teammates.

I'm reminded of this phenomenon when I hear Katie learning to count out loud. As she reaches the limit of what she remembers, she gets creative.

"Five . . . Six . . . Yellow. . ."

Oktoberfest Parenting FAIL

Sauntering field operative Johnrob reports from Munich, where Oktoberfest is still in full swing:

My buddies and I were enjoying our umpteenth liter at Oktoberfest when an attractive young hat saleswoman approached our table. After some humorous banter, the young lady claimed that she could pound an entire liter of beer — because she was, you see, a real Bavarian woman. Sadly, she could not demonstrate while on the job, so we had to settle for her word.

Later that afternoon, we arrived at our reserved table a little early. While waiting for the previous seating to clear out, we saw just how these Bavarian women hone their drinking skills...

My Little Dermatologist

Katie, what's this? Nose. (in truth, she says noe.)
Katie, what's this? Teeth. (tee)
What's this? Eyebrow. (eye-bow)
What's this? Mole. (moe)

Yes, somewhere down the line my 19-month old daughter learned to identify moles on necks and faces. This perceptive ability has yet to offend anyone who holds her, but I suspect that her observations and someone's sensibilities will collide sometime soon.

Great Moments in Toddler Language

To Katie, fruits are either blueberries (actually blueberries), pronounced "baa", bananas (actually bananas), pronounced "na-na", or apples (everything but blueberries and bananas), pronounced "app-ah".

This morning Katie pointed to this picture in a book, looked at me, and said "Mama":

I'm working on "Dada":

What I'll Miss About New York: #15 — City Kid

Steph and I joke that in 2020, our then 13-year old daughter Kate will attempt to pass herself off to her friends as some kind of sophisticate. "You know, I was born in New York City. That's why I have such a good sense of style," she'll say, ignoring the fact that she moved from New York when she was 18 months old.

Once we found out that we'd be having a child during our time in New York, I suspected that we'd want to race out of the city. I thought that the oddities of Manhattan life – the expense, the carlessness, the feeling that you lack room to move – would propel us away. I was wrong.

Sending Kate to daycare for the past year has meant that we've met the parents of her classmates. These families are similarly situated to us, with similar experiences and jobs — and they're not leaving New York any time soon. Moreover, we've met the families that live in our building, with children now heading to college who have lived their whole lives here on 89^th street. They're not racing to get out of the city.

All of this is not to say that it's easy to raise kids in Manhattan. You need only look at the expense of Manhattan living to grasp the challenge of raising a family here. Money magazine's online cost of living calculator indicates that someone earning $50,000 in Hastings, Nebraska (just down the road from my hometown), would need to make $119,397.45 to maintain the same standard of living if they settled on the island of Manhattan.

Some examples will help illustrate why my gut thinks the Manhattan number above is on the low side, at least for our neighborhood. First, the annualized cost for Kate's daycare is on par with what my parents paid to send me to Stanford in 1995 (we paid 3x what our friends in Dallas, Texas paid for comparable care). Second, as we look to rent a home in the SF Bay Area (where Money says you must earn $94,771.31 to approximate that Nebraskan $50k), we find that the same price we currently pay for a 1-bedroom apartment in Manhattan gets you a 3-bedroom house in the nicer parts of Silicon Valley.

Despite the expense, despite the concrete and the pace, despite the pollution and the claustrophobia of being in a city without owning a getaway car, we could live here. We could stay. Kate could grow up here. Granted, we'd probably move to Park Slope in Brooklyn, participating in a yuppie migration as predictable as a seasonal bird migration, but we'd still be in New York City.

But we're not staying here. We're leaving New York. It's impossible to know what the future holds, but it looks like Kate's not going to grow up here. She's not going to grow up as a city kid.

And that makes me a little sad.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

What I'll Miss About New York: #16 — The Urban Life

At the risk of sounding like a complete Scaredy Cat, I have to confess that I did not ride the subway the first time I visited New York in 2003. I was a mere babe of 27 at the time.

I knew that New York had experienced a stunning decrease in crime during the Giuliani and Bloomberg eras. Only a year later, in 2004, New York would be named the safest large city in the United States. Still, the subway seemed dangerous to me during that first visit. Some irrational part of me suspected at the time that stepping underground meant that I'd be easy prey for dangers lurking around every darkened corner. I'd be as good as dead.

At Steph's insistence (and mild taunting), I succumbed to reason on Visit to New York #2 and discovered by personal experience that entering the New York subway system did not mean certain death. Indeed, I soon learned that nearly 7 million people survive the subway system each workday. 9-year olds even manage to survive it on their own. Since that first courageous day, I bet I've survived the trip 800 times.

Having moved here from the SF Bay Area, I'd lived in a major metropolitan area before; however, I'd never experienced anything like what it means to live in New York. Attending Stanford and living in the surrounding communities thereafter meant living in a socio-economically segregated setting — a state of affairs that is not unique to the Bay Area, but miles away from life in New York City.

Changing coasts and moving to the most populous city in the country combined my fear of the unknown with my unease with urban poverty. It's easy to have a noblesse oblige attitude about social class when you can remain safely ensconced in the familiar and safe, yet moving to New York reminds you that whatever fear you have of urban violence is built on a foundation of fear about poverty and the fruit of desperation.

The daily demands of living here quickly started the process of exposing and eroding defenses that I didn't know I had, yet this process continues as Katie's dad. Toddlers reach out to people, and people reach back. On a recent trip on the subway, Katie wouldn't stop staring at the brightly dressed person on the other side of the car. Clad from head-to-toe in black & gold, the guy was obviously a member or aficionado of the Latin Kings. No matter for Katie — she had soon melted him into making faces across the subway car in an attempt to make her laugh.

Of course, this brief time in New York has not inoculated me from a fear of the dark or the unknown, but I like to think that this experience has helped me acknowledge some of the roots of whatever unease I feel when faced with a landscape far removed from the Nebraska of my youth. Next month, I'll start a chapter of my life that's much more white picket fence than these past three years have been. Here's hoping that the lessons of New York's urban life are lasting ones.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

Goodnight nobody Goodnight mush

I think it's my current familiarity with the original that makes this parody seem so entertaining. There's a look-inside preview of the book on the site and they've done a good job of copying the meter and the imagery of the children's classic.

This book appears to skirt the unprotected realm of satire, and I'm not sure that a suit on the book would come out differently than Dr. Seuss Enterprises v. Penguin Books, 109 F.3d 1394 (9th Cir. 1997), where the court found that a book using the imagery of Dr. Seuss to riff on the O.J. Simpson trial constituted copyright and trademark infringement. Alternatively, a court might find the send-up of Goodnight Moon to be direct enough to qualify as a fair use parody under U.S. copyright laws.

If there were a lawsuit pitting the owners of Goodnight Moon against Goodnight Bush, it wouldn't be the first time that disharmony visited the Goodnight brand. The most recent scrape occurred in 2005, when HarperCollins faced a minor bookseller revolt after the 60^th anniversary edition of the book included an image of illustrator Clement Hurd on the book jacket with a cigarette airbrushed out of his hand.

Almost Walking Unaided. Almost Typing Unintentionally.

According to my rough estimate, someone in my family is about 1" away from becoming a contributor to this blog.

Note the tip-toes. Good effort, Katie!

Happy New Year 2008

After a number of attempts...



Katie wishes you all a happy new year.



Reprising her role from last year, Maggie the Beagle joins in the well-wishing.



(Molly the Beagle would join in the fun, but there aren't enough treats in the world to get her to wear those glasses long enough for a photograph to be taken.)

Update (12/31): A photograph of the elusive Molly the New Year's Beagle has been obtained.

Let's Teach Them the Strangest Songs First

It will come as no surprise to those of you who know me that I've heard and sang more nursery rhymes in the past 10 months of dadhood than in the previous 25 years of non-dadhood. Living with a toddler means singing songs that are so ancient in your memory that they practically come out with cobwebs.

Now, I knew that one nursery rhyme – Ring Around the Rosie – had an alleged connection to the Great Plague of London, and that another nursery rhyme – Pop Goes the Weasel – was a drinking song in Cockney rhyming slang, but I'd never really paid much attention to the marvel that is I've Been Working on the Railroad.

Railroad is a musical oddity. It has a verse (I've been working on the railroad...), a chorus (Dynah won't you blow...), and a bridge section that is repeated (Someone's in the kitchen with Dynah... & Singing fee-fi-fiddily-i-oh...). In short, there's a lot going on.

The origin of this nursery room musical hodge-podge? Yep, you guessed it — it's two racially-charged folk songs smashed together.

Popular culture, your strangeness never fails to impress and confuse.

Do You Have Any Jodie Foster From Taxi Driver Costumes?

Disclaimer: In this post, I reveal that I have not seriously shopped for a Halloween costume in over a decade. I also foreshadow the crotchety old father I'll be when my daughter is a preteen.

Comedian Jim Gaffigan likes to opine that he enjoys Halloween for a lot of reasons, "not just because of the candy or that women use Halloween as an excuse to dress up like prostitutes." Of course, Gaffigan's not saying anything original with the prostitute bit. You'd have to live on the moon to avoid noticing that people have started turning to Halloween more and more as a means of expressing or releasing their Ids. This trend doesn't bother me in the least — in my view, a little catharsis can be a good thing.

At least that was the attitude I had when I found myself in the Halloween store on Broadway. Our daycare has a Wizard of Oz theme for Halloween this year, and on a lark we were checking to see if infant wigs exist, and if they do, if a Dorothy infant wig is to be had. (Now, with the benefit of the internet, I learn that yes, there are infant wigs. Sadly, it appears that Dorothy wigs may only be on offer for older children.)

En route to the baby costumes (Man, are there some super baby costumes out there. Want a rhino?), I passed by a Geisha costume... for a 12-year old.

That's right, a Geisha costume.

For a 12-year old.

Let's review:

• (Modern) Geishas are not (really) prostitutes.
  
  Want to know more? The discussion page for the Wikipedia entry on Geishas will tell you everything you need to know. (A Wikipedia discussion page is where people debate what content is worthy of inclusion on the site. These people have the time and the inclination talk a topic to death, trust me.)


• Almost ALL Westerners who have ever heard of Geishas think that they're prostitutes.

So, in summary, your child is not dressing as a prostitute for Halloween. Your child is dressing as a cultural figure that will be almost universally confused for a prostitute by the set of folks who know what a "Geisha" is when your child tells them that's what she's going to be for Halloween.

I see a slim opportunity for cultural exchange here. But mostly I see a chance for other parents to think that your parental judgment is not quite up to snuff.

Sidewalks Are For Schlepping, Dining, and Baby SUVs

I moved to Manhattan 850 days ago. Should you eventually follow in my footsteps, permit me to be the first to welcome you to the sidewalk. It's going to be like your second home.

Unless you're one of the happy few for whom a $700-per-month parking garage bill is no problem, moving to Manhattan entails giving up your wheels. Manhattan might be interlaced with roads, but 99.9% of the time you (and everyone else you know) have no use for them. Your life is lived on the sidewalk.

Carless, you quickly learn that although schlep might be a Yiddish word, schlep is above all else a New York-living word. The kind of hoofing you do in Manhattan, where owning a car is perceived in some circles as a Gatsby-esque luxury, is so different than the normal walking burden experienced elsewhere that it really merits a separate word. You do not "carry your stuff around." You schlep.

Schlepping about town, you quickly learn that you can never really buy more than about $40 of groceries — since any more than that results in the kind of backbreaking load that keeps chiropractors in business. You must schlep wisely.

Schlepping, New Yorkers develop relationships with their bags that are barely distinguishable from the relationships that drivers elsewhere have with their autos. Your day is in your bag. Or, if you're my wife, several days are in your bag. And a little bag is in there, too. Kind of like the tiny car that gets pulled behind the motor home.

Now that I push a stroller about the streets rather frequently, I realize that a stroller is not a stroller when you're pushing it around New York.

It's a sidewalk SUV.

Yes, I will jam the net beneath the stroller to the breaking point with items. This is my SUV, and I will buy $80 worth of groceries, even if that means that the frame is visibly sagging and junior appears at risk.

When not schlepping around the sidewalks, New Yorkers are eating upon them. I'd add my two bits on the phenomenon that is New York sidewalk eating, but this Sunday's New York Times is running a wonderful piece that saves me the trouble.

"Curbside, We'll Never Have Paris" is one of those wonderful We're-New-Yorkers-and-We're-All-Nuts pieces that details the differences between the sidewalk cafés of Europe and New York. I highly encourage you to read it. Every word of it is truth, and it further illuminates this strange relationship between New Yorkers and the raised concrete dividing the buildings from the cabs.

If you move here and stay for a little while, mark my words: you'll come to appreciate that sidewalk in ways you never did when you were walking about the provinces. And you'll come to embrace it as part of your lot, however filthy and frantic it might be.

Ogden's Ode to the Boys I Loathe

You're able to quote copyrighted works
without being dragged into court,
but it's hard to legally quote a poem
because a poem is short.

I quote the passage that comes below
not to take away this poet's money.
I quote the poem that follows below,
because it is true, and funny.

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
Contrariwise, my blood runs cold
When little boys go by.
For little boys as little boys,
No special hate I carry,
But now and then they grow to men,
And when they do, they marry.
No matter how they tarry,
Eventually they marry.
And, swine among the pearls,
They marry little girls.

from Song To Be Sung by the Father of Infant Female Children by Ogden Nash

Although I link to the full poem, it – like other poems similarly situated (published before 1978 with copyright notice, renewed with the copyright office, etc.) – is covered by U.S. copyright for 95 years from the point of publication.

Katie Explores Central Park

One of the many pleasures of working as a summer associate at a law firm is that the summer program tends to end long before law school begins. In my case, I have a month to play stay-at-home dad with Katie before classes start after Labor Day.

Today might be the most beautiful day of the year, and we took the opportunity to explore Central Park.

Skype Video: Enabling Full-Color Lullabies from 1,000 Miles Away

When I became a dad, some aspects of my previous life came to a screeching halt. Some continued unabated. Still others mutated into a strange and heretofore unknown form. My fascination with technology & gear falls into this last category.

Sure, I still go gaa-gaa over the newest gadgets and grown-up toys, but suddenly I find myself having strong opinions about an entirely different set of gadgets:

• I suddenly have strong feelings about a certain type of swaddling blanket that I consider to be superior.
• If left unchecked, I will ramble on at length about why today's cradle toys put the toys of my youth to shame.
• I gaze in wide-eyed wonder at the incredible absorption qualities of the modern diaper and its awesome next-generation Velcro straps.

I have become a gear-obsessed dad.

My appreciation for most of this stuff doesn't rise to the level of wanting to blog about it, but there is one technology whose utility rises above the rest from this parent's perspective: Skype Video. Instead of blathering on about how great Skype is, I'll permit the picture below to provide the bulk of the explanation:


Yes, that's an actual picture of four generations of my family on one screen during a video conference earlier this evening.

Yes, that's a technology built from the ground up to handle video conferencing (as opposed to other services that include video conferencing as an afterthought).

Yes, that's a service that is 100% free.

According to Google Maps, my hometown is a short 1,385 mile drive from where I currently live, so suffice it to say that I've become accustomed to not seeing my family every weekend. Skype has shortened this distance for my family, letting my parents, my grandparents, my brother, and Steph's family (a short 2,936 mile drive away) interact with Katie in a way that just blows my mind.

Katie already responds to the screen, staring at the faces, reacting to their speech (and their occasional singing). I feel so fortunate that we've found this way of sharing her growth with my far-away family. I can't wait to see where we go from here.

(Incidentally, the camera that took that great screen capture is our new Fujifilm FinePix F30. Very affordable and I've never seen a point-and-shoot digital camera work so well in low light conditions.)