Fun stuff

The other members of our household have been up to some fun stuff, too.

"A Book of Sounds" and "What Did You Find?" kids' books: I found myself inspired to create some kids' books...which led me to a website where you can not only easily create books but also record sounds for each page. (Update: Sadly, this website for creating books, Tikatok, is no more. They closed without much explanation.) Click here to see "A Book of Sounds" to see what having the ability to add sound led me to come up with. Being able to add sound also facilitated some great interactions at a family gathering recently...so I was able to capture lots of great audio...that I'm still in the process of organizing into a book... Fortunately, for the first book I completed, I kept things simple and was inspired by knowing the pictures would be easy to generate...otherwise I'd probably still only be in the process of creating books rather than having two books that are already shareable... This first book is called "What Did You Find?" and you can see it by clicking here.

"Patient zero" blog post: Click here to read about the self-experimentation with "patient zero" that Peter has been doing with inserting DNA into his skin cells. At least two other people have expressed eagerness in being "patient one" after all has gone well with patient zero.

"Fun at camp" video: "Camp" is our euphemism for the place we board Quartz when we travel...at least it's a cage-free environment where he gets to play with other dogs. Click here to see a video of Quartz playing with a dog named Puzzle. The person who filmed the video said that the dogs usually stop playing whenever she gets the camera out, but this time she managed to get quite a bit of good footage.

So that's why my nose runs...

when I am out in the cold...and especially when I come in from the cold.

Recently read in a book a similar explanation as the one you can read here in the Wikipedia entry on mucus. But, it didn't have the part about the mucus thickening and then thawing before the cilia start working again that the Wikipedia entry has.

Hands on

What fun! A place where Joel can play with water where we don't have to be holding him up to the height of the sink! The preschool gallery at the Hands-On Museum had lots of great kid-sized, kid-friendly stuff for Joel to play with.

He seemed quite taken with alternating between dunking and splashing his hands in the water and running his wet hands through his hair.

Here is a picture of the new Engineers on a Roll exhibit that they now have in the preschool gallery.

By looking at this picture you'll see that Joel is not the only one who found this to be a "mouth on" exhibit as well as a hands on exhibit.

This is where Joel was grabbing balls as they came down the track and putting them in his mouth before putting them back into circulation in the assembly line-like exhibit. Perhaps this made it more likely that stomach flu was one of the things we brought home with us from the Hands-On Museum (and that perhaps more other people also brought home with them because Joel was doing this...sorry!!!). :(

When we first started going to a toddler playgroup, catching more things did make me reconsider whether or not I wanted to keep going to the playgroup...but I decided just to go anyway...and then added two classes to the things we regularly go to, too...

This was our first experience with stomach flu, though...which caused me to seek out sites like HealthMap...seems like sites like these will be much more useful if people post more data to it...so I'm planning on contributing mine... But, do I really want to be checking it a lot and deciding whether to go to the Hands-On Museum or not based on it...

95th percentile in height

and 90th percentile in weight and head circumference are the stats that our pediatrician gave us on Wednesday for Joel's dimensions.

Joel just demonstrated what he is now able to do with his 32 inch height. He just opened his bedroom door and escaped! We're in trouble now...

Joel's First Year (video slideshow)

Thank you to Uncle Michael and Aunt Kaiann, for not only maintaining the galleries of photos and videos of Joel and friends (http://joel.wulfenfoo.org) for a whole year now, but also for putting together a real treat for us with the awesome twenty minute video slideshow they made to celebrate his first birthday!!!

Click here to download the video slideshow...the downloaded file will need to be unzipped after you download it...it's filename is JoelYear1.mp4.zip.

Birthday candle

Like I said, he likes pointing at lights. :)

We've been having a lot of fun with "birthday season." Joel had lots of people sing birthday songs to him on Monday. Peter made pumpkin muffins on Tuesday (one of which is pictured above). My parents took Joel to the botanical gardens on Thursday, and a trip to the hands-on museum is next on our list. Good thing he had his birthday now so that it caused us to think of these great places to take him, especially in the wintertime. We'll be frequenting such places much more often!

One year old

Today is Joel's first birthday. We'll be taking him to the botanical gardens soon to celebrate.

Lots of exciting things have been starting to happen in the last few months. Joel started to walk just before Thanksgiving, and he started pointing just before New Year's...lights have been one of his favorite things to point at. His first words were "No, no, no"...he pronounces it more like "Nah, nah, nah"and there's a corresponding hand waving that goes with these words...he often says it while waving at Quartz's dog bowls...in imitation of what we do to tell him not to touch the bowls or the contents of the bowls. (Peter's first words were also used in a dog-related context...in his case it involved a dog that barked a lot who was often told to "Shut up!") Other words he now says are the Chinese words for light 燈 (deng1) and doggie 狗狗 (gou3 gou3), uh-oh, down, and mum mum mum...which is used to talk about eating. He also crows like a rooster (urr-ur-urr-ur-urrrhhhh), and he waves goodbye and to passersby.