breakfast first

Baby digs the K&R

For the littest nerd in your life.

(via DaddyTypes)

For the Ava fans in the audience

Friends and family have been asking for more, and more regular, updates on Ava, so I set up a blog for her. It's password protected to keep undesirable elements out. To get in, enter the name of our oldest cat as the user, and the name of the city where Miss J and I first lived after we got married. If you have any trouble, send me an email.

We're going to need more disk space.

Wiggling out of her hat.

T Minus 10

That's right, Miss J is a mere ten days away from her anticipated due date. Since we only moved into  the house recently, we've really had to work hard to get things into a reasonable shape for her arrival. Over  the past week, we've finally started getting things into a workable state. The nursery and the upstairs bed room have finally been cleaned  up and painted (there was a ton of woodwork to do), carpet has been installed in both, and furniture moved into place (what we have of it, anyway).

Off to the side you'll see a before and two after shots of the upstairs bedroom. Although the furniture is a bit random at this point (it's just stuff from our various apartments over the years), I think the room looks a lot more finished now. (As a side note, I used Behr paint, which I found has a nice finish and is easy to work with. However, my experience with their primer was just awful. It clumped up on me in minutes, even under ideal painting conditions, which made it impossible to work with. In the end, two coats of paint on things like the baseboard looked better than paint over primer.) Them ceiling light fixutres gotta go, though.

Much thanks to Ficus for risking life and limb to get our damn near infinitely dense dresser up some difficult stairs, and to Laurens for helping me struggle with not one but two queen mattresses up the same stairs and providing endless amounts of guidance. He's the guy who saved the day by telling us that we could get a split box spring for our queen mattress. I tried to pass that information on to another struggling homeowner, but alas, I was too late.

The baby's room got a similar treatment of paint and carpet, although the wall color is essentially terracotta. I didn't post any pictures of the nursery because, well, there's not much to show you -- we don't really have any furniture. Our main struggle has been with the crib. I'd like something modern and sleek, but almost all cribs look like they've dropped out of the 19th century -- not my taste. Ones that are modern and appeal to me, however, are quite expensive. Spending a good bit of money on a crib is even less appealing since we're going to use a co-sleeper at night for many months. The crib would only be used for daytime naps. (The nursery is on the ground floor.) Another wrinkle is that rather than using a crib as the baby gets older, I'm interested in learning more about the "Montessori child-bed" described in Montessori from the Start. (If anyone has any experience with that approach, please comment!)

We were ill-equipped for the baby in other regards, too, so today we did some serious baby shopping. Among other things, we picked up the stroller (a Peg Perego Pliko P3) and a Pack 'n Play to use in the nursery for naps for now. Glad that's done! Our struggle to prepare for the baby has been made much, much easier thanks to our kind and generous friends who have given us so many gifts, items their children no longer use, and knowledge about what matters and what doesn't. We appreciate it all so very much.

Tomorrow it's back to working on the house, and if the weather is nice, I'll take some length off of doors so they'll swing freely over the new carpet, and paint them. If the weather doesn't agree, there's plenty of other stuff to do around here.

Woah, I just noticed the time. Now we're only nine days away from the big event.

This just in

Miss J had another ultrasound appointment today, where we received the third independent opinion that we're having a girl, so the odds are pretty good. Additionally, we found out the baby already has hair! (Believe it or not, it shows up on the ultrasound.) This isn't surprising -- my mother just sent us photos of my rather hirsute baby self. If our daughter has as much hair as I did, we might be looking at a baby Crystal Gayle.

Miss J is just over thirty weeks, so we're 75% of the way there. Things are really speeding along. Still no name yet, I'd like to point out, although we had a lot of fun trashing various names with Miss V last night. Deciding against names is remarkably easy. There are so many bad ones!

In other news, we closed on the house yesterday, and everything went smoothly. The real action happened last Friday afternoon at the "signing", where you spend two hours signing every page of a huge stack and initialing many paragraphs on the pages you're already signing. (And -- get this -- they make you sign in blue ink. That is so '80s.) We move in later this month.

Television and Children

Growing up, I watched way too much television. Looking back, I really regret it -- I now know all of the wonderful things I could have been doing instead, but missed out on. And the effects are still with me today; I'm still prone to watch too much TV if I don't stop myself. Occassionally, Miss J and I go through periods of no TV or greatly reduced TV, and I find I feel much better during those times.

When we found out about the baby, I resolved to keep TV away from our child as long and as much as possible. Reactions from friends has been varied: some think I'm over-reacting (over even doing a disservice to the child), others think it's absolutely the right thing to do, and finally some think it's the right thing to do, but have found that it's too difficult. (Where do you stand? Leave a comment.) Fortunately I personally know some good role models for people who have successfully kept their children away from television.

I also immediately went to the library and picked up Marie Winn's The Plug-In Drug, a book I'd been meaning to read for many years. It makes a solid case on the ill-effects of TV, and offers a lot of strategies for reducing or eliminating television from your family life. The "case studies" of families who reduced their TV watching is particularly interesting; it seems that limiting TV only to a couple of days a week (most commonly the weekend) -- as opposed to say an hour a day -- had the best outcome; the children ended up disinterested by the time TV-watching days rolled around.

This week I also learned about two new studies on the effects of TV on toddlers, both out of the University of Washington. The first study, by Dimitri Christakis, showed that the risk of children aged 1 to 3 developing attention disorders by age 7 increases 10% with every hour of TV they watch per day. They note that the average one-year old watches about 2 hours per day; the average 3 year old watches 3.6 hours.

The second study, by economist (!) Frederick Zimmerman, showed that the more TV a young child watched, the more like he or she would become a bully when they got older. (Whether or not a child was a bully was determined by survey of the child's mother.) I found this part of the New Scientist's coverage of the study the most interesting:

The study also looked at two other factors thought to decrease the likelihood of bullying - cognitive stimulation and parental emotional support. It found that children whose parents regularly exposed them to ideas - by reading aloud or taking them to museums, for example - were a third less likely to become bullies, as were those whose parents provided them with emotional support - by eating meals together and talking.

"Each of these things has an independent effect," says Zimmerman. "So parents who are not going to read to their children and who put their kids in front of the TV instead [represent] a double whammy" for their children's chances of becoming bullies, he says.

                                            

On a somewhat related note, I also find myself increasingly interested in Montessori's methods, mainly as a result of reading Montessori From the Start. I like and agree with the emphasis on self-reliance, curiosity, and basic, physical, non-technical toys. Some parts of the book are a little more out there, but it's still good food for thought.

Cats and Babies

One of the things I'm very concerned about, with the coming baby, is how our cats will react. Babies seem to have a lot of qualities that cats don't like: they're loud, erratic, and about the size of a predator. Fortunately, when friends with babies have visited, the cats seemed to hide more than be defensive.

Still, we want to do everything we can to smooth the introduction. I've come across a lot of good bits of advice in books, on the internet, and from friends. One of the best sources of information came from a pamphlet from the Humane Society of the United States that Miss J's doctor gave us. (The pamphlet we received was a bit different from the one on the website.)  One suggestion was to play a CD of baby sounds for your pets, to get them used to all of the screaming, wailing, and gurgling in their future. That seemed like a good idea for our noise-averse cats, so I ordered one from Preparing Fido, and it came late last week.

So far, we've only played it twice for about five minutes at a stretch. Both times, the cats stared at the speakers with horrified curiosity and got very nervous and jumpy. (I found it very interesting how strongly they reacted to the baby sounds versus music or sounds from the TV, which they don't seem to care about at all. Why the difference?) In any event, the CD seems to be doing its job -- and since we have about three months before the baby arrives, hopefully the cats will adjust to these strange sounds.

Baby books

The Seattle PI ran an article yesterday on lilaguides, which they describe as a type of Zagat guide for new parents. The lila city guides cover everything from where to shop for maternity clothes to what parks are the best for kids. Since Miss J and I barely know Seattle, this should be very helpful. I'll report back when I pick one up.

May I have the envelope please?

Yesterday afternoon Miss J and I went to the ultrasound office, and while it's not certain, it looks like we're going to have...a daughter! I'm very excited. I had a feeling it was a girl. (The Chinese Calendar concurs.)

Still, it's not certain, since the baby -- either demurely or rebelliously -- kept its legs crossed during the entire exam, only uncrossing them when we weren't looking. Based on the few glimpses the doctor did catch, she reckons it's a girl.

Now the baby name fighting can begin in earnest.