Golden Age of Baby

Katherine is truly in the Golden Age of Baby. She's sleeping better, loves her mushy baby food, and has a huge smile that she employs very frequently to woo everyone around her. She makes cute cooing noises and likes to grab toys and shake them. She likes to sit and watch Owen as he runs around wrecking things and is more likely to laugh in response to his mayhem than anything else. She is also learning to creep. She doesn't go anywhere quickly, but she definitely gets to her destination. She'll start of playing on her quilt and a minute later is belly-crawling into the kitchen to check out the action.

Right now the destination seems to be the refrigerator...

Who knew that the refrigerator could be so interesting. She just had a long conversation with the fridge and gave it a few hits with her tiny (but mighty). fist.

Numbers don't lie, but they can tell stories

From Pollster.com, "Same data, two charts, two different impressions, both fundamentally true yet also fundamentally misleading in opposite ways." A clear, accessible and thoughtful discussion. (Hat tip to Chris.)

Avatar

Just to repeat what everyone else has said about it, Avatar is stunning, and if you have any interest in it at all, you should see it on the big screen. I have to think the IMAX would be nice, but we couldn't go there because the theater was closed due to the threat of the building collapsing under accumulated snow (or so the sign taped to the door indicated). We did see it in 3D. The 3D was more subtle than other 3D movies I've seen. I think it generally gave the visuals a certain richness, though I felt like there was a certain blurriness at times towards the edge of the screen. I'd like to watch parts in 2D to compare.

Getcher math on

The New York Times has started a series of columns on math, "from pre-school to grad school", written by Steven Strogatz, a Cornell professor. It starts with the basics - in this case, counting, featuring a clip from Sesame Street. Looks promising.

Unappetizing

Katherine had prunes today - her first fruit - so you might think this is going to be a gross baby food story, but no. She loved the prunes far too much to squander their yumminess on mess-making.

This story is about buying flounder stuffed with crab meat from Trader Joe's. (A 6-ounce serving for $2.99. Such a deal, right?) I explained to Owen that "stuffed" meant that there was one food inside another. In this case, there was crab inside the flounder. First he wanted to see the crab. "Well, we can't see it now. We'll see it once we've cooked it and cut into the fish."

"Crab have claws?" "Yes, but they take off the claws before they stuff the crab in the fish."

"Mommy and baby crab inside." Umm...

"Daddy crab talking. Crab have mouths."

Thankfully, by this point we were ready to check out, which provided a helpful distraction. If he'd kept going, describing how much the crabs were looking forward to their family vacation to North Carolina*, I might have had to put it back.

* North Carolina is Owen's go-to spot these days. When a spaceship blasts off, it's almost always going to North Carolina. When Owen crawls underneath Katherine's crib or a blanket, he will declare himself to be in a cave in North Carolina.