Toes are awesome

It's been a long time since I have blogged..since May in fact.  Luckily, John has been keeping up with posts recently, but I would like to get better at it since it's proving to be important for documenting Davis' development and sheer awesomeness.  So here's a small warmup to get me back in the swing of blogging. 


I don't think I've mentioned it here, but after I defended in May (and officially graduated in June), I began work as a postdoc, joint with my Ph.D. lab and a new lab.  I'm still working out what it all means with regards to where I am and when, but it's awfully comfy to stick around my old stomping grounds and work with the same people I have been working with for years.  The biggest change in my postdoc is that I am now doing biological experiments and very little computation.  It's been quite the change and an eye-opening experience.  I've been completely overwhelmed and it's been pretty hard to go from feeling like you know something to feeling like you know nothing.  I'm blessed with great colleagues who are happy to help me through the learning curve of experiments (and enough of them I can spread out the wealth of my ignorance among them all, decreasing the burden on any one of them, although some still get a pretty heavy dose of me).  I think I enjoy it.  In contrast to when I was doing fabrication, the experiments I'm doing go fast enough to keep me excited about them.  Fabrication work left me pretty unexcited about getting back into the lab, but it's proving to be a completely different mode and timescale (for reference, it was typically 6 months to a year of fabrication before you ever even got to sit down with a device to see if it did what you hoped it would).  One of the hardest transitions to this new way of life is scheduling my day.  I'm eating lunch at 2:30 in the afternoon, missing the gym, and coming home exhausted after a full day of standing and running between labs.  I think as time goes on and I get the hang of things, it will get better.


Davis is growing and changing by the day.  It's cliched, but.. It sure is amazing to see the world through the eyes of a newborn/baby/toddler.  For example, Davis loves the toe song.  You know the one that goes "This little piggy went to the market, this little piggy stayed home..."  When we take off his shoes and socks he looks at his feet and points and I sing the song.  He laughs in delight when the last little piggy runs home.  He usually points again and we sing again..then one more time usually, perhaps a few more times.


John and I are amazed by his capacity to pick new things up and even extend them.  For example, when we went to the water park, he picked up a stick.  When he saw other kids putting things like buckets in the water stream to catch water, he put his stick in it.  Then when a little girl showed him how to catch water with a bucket, he tried it.  The first time we went to the water park he splashed in the puddles on the perimeter.  The second time, he was running through the center where the water was pouring down.  Who knows what he will do next time.


Davis is certainly like his dad was, a "me do it meself" kind of guy.  He gets upset at mealtimes if we try and give him finger food a little at a time.  This morning breakfast went much better when we handed him the entire plate of eggs and toast along with a fork.  He's doing wonderful at feeding himself with a spoon and fork.  We just have to be on the watch for when he finishes in order to catch the plate before it hits the ground.   


We hoped to go camping this weekend, Davis even has his own sleeping bag!  (Davis fell asleep on my sleeping bag on the last trip and I was freezing all night long).  Unfortunately, it looks like thunderstorms will prevent our trip from happening this weekend.